Looking Back Through Ash - Wade Ebeling Page 0,135
one of the shelving units. Finally, and most importantly to Daniel at this particular moment, that there were two large sky-lights on the roof, covered over by heavy tarps and chunks of broken concrete. Jason had said that they tended to leak, even during the slightest of rainfalls, and even after Jason had haphazardly sloshed tar around them. A rust-orange metal ladder led to a roof access hatch in the far corner. Once he got out on the white rubber roof, Daniel pulled the weighted-down tarps aside and climbed back down the ladder, leaving the hatch open for additional light and ventilation.
The dust-speckled streams of light did not help raise Daniel’s spirit. They only showed how completely disgusting the building’s interior actually was. Daniel stood looking over the filth for several minutes, watching dust motes circle lazily, not knowing where to start. He searched along the shelves for cleaning supplies, thinking it was pointless to attempt anything else first. It could have been worse; he at least found an unopened case of six bleach bottles and a stack of paper ‘yard waste’ bags. A never used, hard-bristled push broom and short-handled flat shovel, found behind the ladder, would help speed up his recovery efforts on the building.
The worn, crusted, and stained chair that Jason lived and died in got pulled outside first. Daniel dragged it over to a pile of garbage, which used to be where Jason would dump his waste, until finally giving up on all attempts to keep his living area clean. Stacks of empty white pails, previously full of freeze-dried food, made up the bulk of the pile. The next, and most unwelcomed, task was to clean out Jason’s makeshift corner refuse bin. Four yard waste bags got shoveled full to brimming and tossed outside. The smell that came to life when he started plunging the shovel into the pile was unbearable. Daniel had to wrap a bleach-dampened t-shirt around his face to continue; effectively exchanging one eye-watering stench for another.
The bulk of his day went to clearing off the shelves and dusting off any of the contents that appeared to be still salvageable. While Daniel went through the contents of the shelves, he kept muttering things like, “Oh, here are all of the can openers.”, “I never got any of these nice buckets full of ready-made meals.”, and “Wouldn’t want to make my life too easy, would you, Dad?” Just counting the pre-packaged meals, all in well-described white pails that had the amount of days’ worth of food printed right on them, Daniel could live for almost two years eating three meals a day. Looking over the consolidated food did not feel as comforting as it should have. There would be no way that Daniel would allow the fate that befell Jason to become his own.
Once he swept the remaining debris into manageable piles and scooped them into bags, Daniel diluted some more bleach and dumped it all over the parts of the concrete floor that he had exposed. The building, with its lack of widows and the cooling effect of being surrounded on three sides by settled piles of concrete, gave the impression of being underground. It took him a full hour of racing out the door, into blasts of intense heat and sunshine, scrambling for breathable air, to finish the scrubbing of the floors and the bottom halves of the block walls.
The lingering remnants of the bleach’s conquest clung to the insides of Daniel’s nose and burned his eyes. Inside the relatively clean building, grabbing his rifle and binoculars, Daniel decided to go look at what lay around this foreign, closed-in area. Sounds of life coming from outside the entombing concrete piles sometimes bounced and echoed their way in. A child screaming defiantly, or the banging of a hammer, assured that life still went on. The true direction from which the reverberant noises came from could not be pin-pointed while inside the mountainous ring. That did not matter; there was only one place that they could have formed, and that was from the field of destroyed R.V.’s. The group that Daniel had seen living there, on his way in along the train tracks, was certain to be the sound’s headwaters.
Daniel followed the scrub-filled, winding pathway back to the two towering piles that acted as the entrance pillars for the crushing plant. Not wanting to chance getting too close, he scurried up the backside of the left mound. The heat of the day was finally