The Writer (Seeking Salvation in Doom)

This is a short story I wrote one afternoon. I think it’s worth the time it takes you to read it.

The writer pulled up to the hotel and checked in. The signs of age and wear on the grizzled face of the inn’s proprietor told the writer this was the right hotel in the right town — he wouldn’t have known otherwise as all the signs along the highway had been shot out and the road itself looked like it hadn’t been used much in decades.

This tired-looking woman was the owner and sole employee of the eight-room inn. Sure, the building had upwards of 40 rooms but she only kept eight in any sort of rentable condition.

She didn’t care too much. The building was long since paid off by her late father and what little business did come her way was enough to afford upkeep, food and booze from the small supermarket some 50 miles away. Social Security would be on its way for her in a few years anyway and lacking any heirs for the building, she’d probably just let it fall into ruin once the monthly government checks started coming.

Such was also the nature of the town, the outskirts of which this hotel occupied. Not too terribly long ago — before the river dried up and the doomsday cult took hold, before the deaths and raids by federal agents and the near-abandonment of this once populated place — townsfolk would say the hotel was “just outside of town.”

That was the way the good Christian people of this tiny oasis in what had become a desert referred to the inn. No one would admit to it but it was the way to distance them from the perceived wickedness of this place, which only carried such a perception because of the neighborhood it occupied and its formal clientele, none of who came around anymore.

When the river was still flowing — long before the word “drought” entered anybody minds and certainly before the word lost meaning as it became the new normal once the heat and lack of rain killed the only water source running through this place — the hotel was lively. You couldn’t book one of its 40 rooms because each was filled with a man looking for the vice offered the gambling house across the highway.

That gambling house, along with the owner, dealers and women who worked there as ladies of the night, was the first thing to go when the “reverend” seized control. The only sign it had ever even been there were the few black patches of dirt from the reverend’s fire.

This revered — who lacked any formal declaration of the title he claimed — had called it a “great purging fire” and no one from the county fire company even responded to the blaze. The ones who lived in town were the false holy man’s first disciples and every one else was just too afraid to call anyone. This reverend burned the whole goddamned place to the ground, with all of these so-called sinners inside.

It was the start of the reverend’s rise to power before his inevitable arrest and execution at the hands of the state — the very tale that brought the writer to this town now. To see what — to see who — was left some 30 years later, long after maps stopped listing the town and the name of the river most had forgotten when it dried up.

To the writer, the few people who stuck around and the empty and burned buildings all represented his own sort-of redemption. No, not the kind of spiritual salvation the reverend had promised his flock before passing out the cyanide pills, but the kind that came from a writer who’d lost his craft along the way.

The man sought to rebuild a once-respectable career that faltered out of inactivity and a tight grip on his own former prominence. He sought to return to his glory days before the internet made writing like his an abundant and therefore devalued commodity. Before he had to know what Facebook and Twitter and Meerkat were to stay relevant. He didn’t know what those things were and still carried a years-old flip-open cell phone that he had trouble operating.

He wasn’t clinging to that phone out of some sense of luddite pride, he just couldn’t afford anything better. A well-nourished sense of accomplishment led to the complacency that killed his career and he was aiming to breathe some life back into that corpse.

Before bylines were only as permanent as the websites that hosted them, this writer was an accomplished professional. People paid him to write great stories about great men and women, and some deep in his industry even called him famous. And he so wanted to return to that time even though it was long lost to him.

If he couldn’t get back to the time when he was important and the most you’d use a computer for is writing up a story, he’d sure as hell try to reinvent at least the first part of it now.

This zombie town was his ticket to that. He’d spend a week there, talk to whomever would go on record about their memories of what happened and what’s going on in this desolate place now. The answer to the second question probably wouldn’t yield much but the sense of dread and isolation that permeated every inch of this town.

He’d even make up names for the people who wouldn’t go on record and explain in the piece he’d write that they didn’t want their names out in the world. These simple people didn’t have the internet or even reliable electricity, they certainly didn’t want to be known as the few still left in this place that God must have abandoned the minute this terrible reverend arrived.

The writer even brought his old camera to get some pictures of these worn out buildings and worn out people. Pictures will help sell the story, he said to himself over and over again, even though he’d have to find a place that still developed film.

Yeah, a week, that’d be enough time to get a few thousand words out of this town, the writer thought. Even if it wasn’t, that’d have to do, as the writer could only afford the rental car for the week and even then, it was paid for by what little room he had left on his credit card.

A few thousand words, he figured, was enough to get a decent paycheck and maybe even a spot in a printed magazine. He’d cut out the article and paste it into his dusty old notebook of clips — the kind of thing great writers like him kept when their stories had a sense of permanence on a printed page.

Those few thousand words would certainly earn him a spot on a good website, one that actually vetted its writers before letting them submit stories. Certainly some important person in the business would see this story, recognize his name long enough to search it and learn the writer was once a prominent figure in this trade.

Once that happened, other websites would link to the story with other stories about how great it was and how this heralded the return to form of this great man. Other writers would seek him out to tell his story and he’d talk to them just to keep his name fresh in people’s minds or score another writing gig.

With that fame, maybe he’d even start his own website with an email address so people could reach him easier. Maybe he’d even get a column — something that just paid to write about his experiences and opinions without the need for him to seek out dead towns to profile.

That’d be my ticket, the writer said as these thoughts poured through his mind. Hell, with column money, he’d be able to pay off that now maxed-out credit card, maybe finance a used car and, if he was lucky, get one of those fancy smartphones for the emails he was certain to receive.

He’d planned out his return and this old town was the key. This dried-up husk of killings, fires and a man who thought himself Christ resurrected would be his own sort-of salvation from the life of poverty and obscurity.

That was the thought the man took to bed that night he checked in ate the fast food dinner he had to drive farther than you’d expect to buy.

It was the same thought he went to bed and woke with, the thought he held onto went into the shower. It was the last thought he had as he slipped getting out of the shower and struck his head on the edge of the tub.

It was the thought that carried the writer to unconsciousness as he bled out on the floor from the cut in his head left by hitting the bathtub.

It was the thought he died with; the thought that made the pains of the head wound and the slow rot of his professional career seem not so bad as he slipped away. It was the thought he never got to tell the grizzled inn owner, who found his body three days later and would have been his first interview attempt in the light of day.

This hotel’s owner didn’t think to check on him earlier, as the writer had paid two days in advance and she had a policy of not bothering her guests unless they asked her for something or owed her money.

She called the paramedics like any decent person would do but there was nothing to be done for the writer except load him into a black bag and take him to the morgue. The medical examiner would be one of the last people to read his name, save for the folks who read death notices in the newspaper out of hobby and to see if one their friends had passed.

So the writer became a part of this town he’d set to ride back to glory. Once full of promise and hope for a better future but now dead and forgotten. Both destined to become a distant memory you might recall if you read it somewhere first.

And maybe that was the most fitting way for things to end.