[Original Novella] The Beautiful Ones, Part 9 (the finale!)

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Previous Parts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8}

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By day three, the water was out and the food supply dwindling. There was serious talk about recycling urine. Melissa began crying, which only intensified with their hardships. Morale seemed on the verge of implosion when they finally arrived at a cavern of some sort. Andrew shined his light about.

The cavern was littered with skeletons. Some adult, some children. In one corner, a throne made from tied together bones with a skeleton sitting atop it, wearing a bone crown. Above it in chalk was written “Empire of the dead”. Its arms clutched a faded tome, seemingly made from aging spiral notebooks bound together with twist ties.

The beginning looked to be an account of their own first days in the PriceCo. Nothing Andrew didn’t already know, so he skipped to the end. “This is it. Our ‘Great Reward’. All my dreams of emerging onto sun kissed green hills now seem so foolish, so bittersweet. Our great faith, founded to preserve the hope of escape, is now revealed for what it is.

The Great Reward. Tears confound my efforts to write this, falling on the page and smearing the ink. We’ve eaten the children. The one thing that, even in our final days, we swore that we’d never do. I can still taste Kimberly. There can be no forgiveness for me, I’m resigned to that. Not that the others could restrain themselves either. That damnable hunger.

We might still go back. Those few of us left alive, bellies full of meat. Full of our sins. But what is there to return to? We left in the first place because we’d exhausted the food. A madman burnt the crops. Perhaps knowing something then about how things would turn out that we weren’t ready to accept.

Henry keeps at it with the hammer. The fool. There’s only a tunnel because the countless groups before us carved it out, bit by bit. It never actually led anywhere. The illusion of hope, tantalizing carrot dangled in front of a pack of jackasses. Desperate to believe it wasn’t all in vain.

So now it ends. We’ve made our own reward here, a cathedral of corpses. The next group will find nothing left of us but bones, just as we found the last. Maria keeps marking the passage of days, as though time has any meaning to the dead. Even now, I hold fast to the hope that little Jessica made it out through that vent. If all I could do was to save her, it will be enough for my spirit to rest.”

Andrew shone the light around the walls and ceiling, revealing endless rows of vertical lines meant to indicate the passage of days. At the end of it, a collapsed skeleton clothed in dusty rags, still holding the chalk. The rest passed the journal around, eyes widening as they came to understand the meaning of their surroundings.

“No” whispered Ernesto. Andrew sought to calm him down, but it was futile. “NO! NOOOOOO!!!” He found the skeleton holding the sledgehammer, wrenched it from the bony claws, then set to hammering at the furthest point of the cavern. “Ernesto, it’s no use.” Deaf to the pleas, tears of rage in his eyes, he kept hammering.

“Put it down, Ernesto. They tried. Hundreds before us. Maybe thousands. There’s nothing. There’s...nothing.” He slowed his swinging, then finally collapsed to his knees and wept openly.

The rest were coping no better, holding one another as the grim reality sunk in. Ernesto cried out in anguish, stood up again, then gave one last swing against the far wall as his final gesture of defiance.

Dust and some debris fell from the ceiling, and a thin ray of light shone through a crack in the wall. Everyone fell silent. It couldn’t be. Could it? Ernesto wiped the tears from his eyes, grinned, then burst into joyous laughter as he resumed hammering. Sure enough the hole widened, sorely needed light pouring through the growing aperture. Andrew looked around one last time at the piles of skeletons. They’d been so close. If only…

Ernesto finished widening the hole enough to climb through. One by one, the weary travelers, who’d until now believed their lives were at an end, pulled themselves through the opening. Into what, when their eyes adjusted, was revealed to be another PriceCo.

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