Civilization's Ruins

458 words

CIVILIZATION'S RUINS

Footfalls ceased, suddenly and unexpectedly, a half step remaining as the hiker' s eyes signaled the brain to order his feet to stop. Halkon gaped awestruck at the first civilization's remnant he had seen crossing the Great Desert. Towers, arches, strange pillars resembling obelisks, scattered on both sides of his directionless trek. From this distance, could it be a heat mirage?

Halkon had spotted nothing living, no abandoned or destroyed buildings even, since he had climbed back out of New Mexico's Carlsbad Caverns last month (as he estimated time, without a working watch or cell phone and the Sun overwhelmed by the never-ending dusty haze) .

Jeremiah Halkon had escaped in May from a prison transport crossing the Sierra Nevada mountain range. A native of Hawaii, he had been an avid caver all his life. When the prison van wrecked in a flash flood and he realized the driver and guard were either unconscious or dead, Halkon shot out the back door lock with the guard's gun, leaving two other prisoners, one likely dead and one injured and moaning. He stayed away from civilization, sleeping in caves and hunting rabbits and the occasional coyote. When he reached the Carlsbad system, he elected to remain for a time. But finally the silence and isolation rubbed at his nerves, and he decided to move on.

Emerging at night from the Caverns, he intended to be careful to avoid tourists, sightseers, and park rangers. But he found nothing, no humans, no boats for the cave explorers, not even the Visitors Center. Halkon' s plan had been to cross-country hike to Wyoming' s Yellowstone Park, where he could find caves aplenty and wildlife. But on this fateful apparent night, he found nothing, an environment completely devoid, as if the Caverns stay had transported him to a prehistoric era.

Chuckling in a whistling-past-the-graveyard fashion, Jeremiah Halkon wondered if he would encounter a woolly mammoth, or perhaps a saber-tooth tiger. But there was nothing: no wildlife, no humans, no buildings or factories, no houses, libraries, or police stations. He occasionally happened upon a trickling stream, and kept filled a capped 16-ounce plastic water bottle he had found empty in a trash can behind the Visitors Center when he first arrived, at night, at Carlsbad.

Other than that, nothing, only a vast desert where previously extended mountains, forests, and of course, humanity's grossly overextended civilization. Now this, these odd abandoned ruins, senseless: stone or perhaps marble pillars that might have been Greek, carved obelisks that resembled those of ancient Egypt, but with designs that were of no hieroglyphics known to man. Whatever they signified, Whoever designed and constructed them, would forever remain a mystery, as former prison transport escapee Jeremiah Halkon gazed on, uncomprehending.