Battery Low

Flash fiction: post-apocalyptic tearjerker. 580 words.

Welcome to The Story Scrapbook, a fiction newsletter by E.B. Howard. If you’re new in town, check out my Fiction Directory for navigation.

Many years ago, I got myself into a debate about whether physical or digital media are a better archival solution. I’ve been wanting to write this ever since. It’s a downer. You’ve been warned.

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The warning had begun to come a little earlier each evening: rust spreading up from the horizon, devouring the sky’s bright orange bite by bite. As the light dimmed, the pace-setters would slow, the scouts’ range narrow. It was no longer
feasible for the women to travel a reasonable distance and finish making camp before dark, but the danger of pushing on too far loomed ever larger before. The tips of distant metal husks were just visible against the sunset’s rage, a constant temptation to attempt just one more mile.

Several among the council had seen what happened to groups that kept going into the darkness. In the event that dissent bubbled up, they slipped through the slowly contracting herd and quelled it with tales of rape, and rapine, and rad-bleached bones. When the first scout returned with a handful of grass and a bottle of water, even though there was plenty of light remaining, the group turned and followed without complaint.

Sarah walked near the back, as she had always preferred. Mothers with children travelled in the center, and if she walked behind them, the little voices were harder to hear. No males ten or older were allowed in camp, so they were almost all girl children. That helped somewhat. It was still a relief to reach the shadows of the ravine ahead, where the youngest and oldest flocked to tonight’s patchy creekside oasis while she hung back, taking up a station on the chain handing supplies across the rocks and down into safety.

There was always more work than hands—was it a law of the universe? It had been like that before, or felt like that, even though the work had been little more than telling machines what to do. Before, Sarah had never had to shred kindling or repair shoes. The dishwasher had come with its own app. Their last fight had been over who should pick up dinner. The stars were blurs dancing across a slice of the void when she crawled under her side of the lean-to and pulled her phone from an inner pocket.

Five days after, she had used the last wisp of network connection the world might ever see to fix the smartphone’s startup settings. It would play a voice clip as it powered on. Then, to conserve battery, it would do absolutely nothing else. Every night, she turned the phone on—Hi, you’ve reached Alex’s voicemail. Leave your name and number at the tone and I’ll get back to you—and counted slowly to ten as she stared at the screen, the homepage cleared off to show nothing but the photo she’d set as wallpaper. Night by night, she was trying to burn his face into her memory. Her husband, smiling, with the two little boys in his arms. Lost in a flash. Gone forever. Recorded, for all she knew, only in her own memory and in the pixels locked behind glass, bewitched into circuits she could never untangle.

After ten seconds, she would turn the phone off again. She had no other use for it.

Sarah positioned the screen above her face and held down the power button, waiting for its dull black face to come alive, the familiar Hi, you’ve reached…

The screen flashed once—a skeletal white icon, a string of words—and then returned to deathful sleep.

She tried again, and it flashed again. Battery low.

Battery low.

Battery low…

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