Bleaker

drunk than when he was. He doused his coffee with bourbon. The day his world came crashing down and reality set in, wasn’t from hitting rock bottom, it was from fear of Finch.
Curt had slept in. It was the morning of a test flight in which he was flying with Finch. He had stayed on base, woken still intoxicated from the night before, and in a rush made his way down to the testing area.
Once he took his seat in the test craft, Finch knew.
“Are you drunk?” Finch asked.
Apparently, he reeked of alcohol. And Curt had to own up that he wasn’t sober.
Finch lost it. He could have had Curt’s job, but instead he told headquarters that Curt was ill. He followed up telling Curt that if he ever found him drinking behind the controls of any moving vehicle, he would beat him.
That was what Finch said.
Beat him.
For two years Curt didn’t drink a drop. Nothing.
Stone-cold sober.
Then the world started falling apart and Curt didn’t care anymore. He drank again, but he controlled it. During the fall-apart years, Curt regularly graced magazine covers. He was praised as a hero because he seemed to always be in the right place at the right time. He’d earned the name The Clutch for grasping someone and saving them seconds from death.
None of that mattered to Finch. To Finch Curt was a drunk, whether he was a sober hero or not.
In essence Finch was right.
Curt wasn’t a hero. In his mind he was a coward because he didn’t want to face a dying world without a bottle in hand.
Yet, there he stood, looking at the remains of a once glorious city with an empty bottle in hand, and if it had something in it, Curt probably would have drunk it.
It was a reminder that no matter how many years they skipped, Curt wasn’t getting away from any of it.
Ben Vonn, Engineer
“Seriously?” Ben shifted his eyes to the bottle that Curt held in his hand. “All this and you lift a bottle.”
“I was just…I mean look at it,” Curt said. “It’s absolutely beautiful.”
“Yeah, I guess so,” Ben replied.
While not many knew of Curt’s problem, Ben did. And it angered him. Curt took for granted everything. He would have given anything to have been Curt for one moment.
To be able to clutch someone from death.
Ben would have chosen the moment that his house was swallowed by a sink hole. When Ben held on to the banister of his home and watched his sons fall over him into the pit below.
Ben reached for them, but he wasn’t fast enough.
He wasn’t Curt.
He wished he were.
Maybe it was for the better.
Which son would he have grabbed?
He lost them both that day.
Now the decay of the city was nothing to Ben. It held almost an odd beauty. He watched Curt drop the bottle and move ahead.
They were all moving, just walking. Nowhere in particular. No direction. They had just emerged from the former bed of the Potomac river which was probably where Curt found that bottle.
When they were flying overhead, Ben recalled thinking D.C. looked like some sort of lost city in a forest, with the Washington Monument being the beacon flagpole. But once they moved closer, the foliage wasn’t as thick as he thought it would be.
Emerging from the riverbed, so much came into view. The buildings were mostly still intact. Some showed signs of being weather worn, some of earthquake damage. But every one of them was still recognizable.
At least to Ben.
A whole new generation would never know the city.
He thought of his own sons and their trip to the nation’s capital.
His sons, or rather the loss of them, was the reason Ben had joined the mission. Though he never said it, Ben had plans of his own. Once they arrived on the new planet, he was going to stay. Even if he had to sneak off and disappear, that was his plan. He’d had no intention of returning to their Earth. No intention of going back to the place that caused him so much pain. Yet, there he was. There was no escape from any of it.
None at all.
Reyanne Harper, Teacher
She stood in awe of him, just the same as she did when she saw the Lincoln Memorial for the first time in fourth grade.
He was larger than life to her, and despite the century that had passed, the wrath of nature that befell Washington, D.C., the statue of Lincoln sitting in that chair was still precious to her.
As an educator, she adored him. She loved history and had studied Lincoln.
It meant a lot to be standing there.
With everything that had happened, some things remained.
The face of the monument hadn’t worn, and she stared at him. Rey could hear his voice, or at least the voice she had given him in her mind. A deep, resonating voice telling his people, “You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.”
That was always one of her favorite Lincoln quotes. She knew in her time they’d done all they could to fix ‘tomorrow,’ but she wondered if the generations before her, if they’d known, would they have done something? If so, would she be standing there in the pits of a dystopian world?
Was there anything that could be done? After all, a rogue planet caused it to all unfold.
The questions slipped from her mouth, not intentionally, but as if she were secretly talking to President Lincoln. “Would anybody be able to stop it? Would it be worth trying?”
Rey was staring so intently she never noticed Finch approach. He did a sideways lean into her and whispered, “I don’t think he’ll answer you.”
Startled, Rey jumped a little with an “Oh.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No, that’s okay,” she said. “I was just…thinking out loud, literally.”
“About?” Finch asked.
“Stopping all this.
“Stopping…all this?” Finch repeated.
“Could they?”
“Who knows.” Finch shrugged. “I mean when we left, we had no idea it was a planet causing it. Maybe if they’d known a hundred years earlier…maybe science could have come