A post-apocalyptic short story about a village that survives on the ruins of an old cathedral, the only remaining building centuries after the nuclear wars. Brother John and Brother Paul are in search for electricity – the magic of the old times.
The Dark Ages II: St. John's Coffee Master
The heavy doors opened and a man wearing large heavy robes walked in. The early sun was poking through the dust clouds outside and into the large room, which had once been a chapel and was now used as a monastery. What had once been an altar was now the workstation for one of the chief’s servants. Carrying clout upon a raised chin, the leader approached the frail individual who was surrounded by a hill of plastic. “Any luck, brother?”
“No, father,” the older person answered.
“Does any of it make sense? Your fellow brothers and sisters are continuing to dig.”
“Some are easier to pick apart then others. None of it makes much sense, though.” The monk lifted up a shard of light rotted plastic. “Stuff like this is useless.” He then displayed a knotted heap of various cords and wires. “Now this… these noodle things might lead us to something.”
“Come get some breakfast, brother John.” The head priest bowed and then turned around to exit. The other fellow pulled his weak bones up and followed, reaching the door several moments later. This structure was big, once a Cathedral in a major city. It was the only building that had remained standing after the nuclear war centuries earlier.
Without electricity, much had been forgotten over the years. There were a few books, but little to be found of much use. The only communities to survive were separated from each other by vast stretches of wastelands where humanity and life used to thrive. This one little village had found itself in a religious dictatorship, but the strict rules and harsh conditions kept order in place and increased their chances for survival. Welcome to the Dark Ages II.
In the dining hall underground, the occupants huddled in segregated groups. The monks at one long table, the nuns at the other. Kids of a certain age were sitting with the masses while the people who were of breeding age were housed in different quarters. Kids and older adults were considered closer to death and kept away from those in the middle of their lives, where members were free to create art and be merry so long as they worked their hardest to provide children for the community. Only those considered sterile were cast back out with the elderly and the youth.
The whole tribe was roughly 300 people, several original community members had passed away this year. It had been a tough Winter filled with funerals. While digging a grave, a stockpile of junk from ancient times had been found. It was mostly electronic garbage that they couldn’t make sense of, but Brother John had been trying tirelessly.
One of the few monks in his thirties, a eunuch named Jeremy, made sure to have a seat near the older monk. “How it be, Brother John?”
Dipping a spoon into a metal bowl filled with some sort of oatmeal and meat, a grunt was given as a response. “Weathered.”
“Do we know what any of it means yet?”
“Not even close.”
To most of the town’s knowledge, there were no other such humans surviving throughout the world. For all they knew, they were it. And they acted as such. Life, as it had been in ancient times, was once again sacred. Few plants had survived, but enough to maintain crops. There were goats and dogs and cats and bugs but few other critters besides vermin existed still. To spot a bird was a rare occurrence, but it did still happen and regardless of the bird – which was usually a vulture – to witness a flying animal was considered good luck.
Another monk was tasked with rummaging through the books that had been salvaged, but there were two problems with this. For one, much of the written words had lost their meaning. They could read the word “quantum dynamics” but it meant nothing to them.
Most of these works required knowledge that was to be learned from another books, which had been lost.
Some of the novels offered clues, but it was hard to discern what was an invention only capable in the imagination and what reflected actual human existence at the time the work of literature had been produced.
One book was filled with characters using these things called ‘phones’ to talk and communicate while another book had every character holding their own phone, which was apparently “smarter.” This made little sense to the monk trying to decipher the texts. The one book that could be interpreted was the Bible, and this had led to a reestablished mutant variation of what was once the Catholic religion and it had consumed the town just like in medieval times. Other than the young potential mothers, the women were subjugated under the guise of divinity. All was dreary, clinging to spirituality until the human spirit was ready to rise, in perhaps centuries, from these ashes… if they could survive.
An afternoon in the following Spring, Brother Paul found a book he went to share with Brother John by the old altar. He held a book in his hand. “I wanted to share this with you and see if it mean anything. We dug it up a couple of week ago, I just got to it.”
The frail monk pulled his trembling frame to his feet and took the decayed stack of papers from hundreds of years prior. “I never learned to read much.”
“Well there are pictures in this one. Open it up,” Paul instructed. “It’s called the Coffee Master 5000. This is a rather detailed text, it appears, on how to get one working.”
Brother John began thumbing through the stained booklet pages. “Hmmm.”
“Does this look like any kind of artifact you’ve been sifting through?” the other monk wondered. “The high priest said this would be your area.”
“I’ll take a look. Are you able to read any of the text to me. What is coffee or the significance of 5000. Could that be a year or date you think?”
“We could ponder on this together if you’d like. Most of the other books don’t seem to offer as much promise regarding the old times and the supposed magic they possessed.”
“A magic they used to almost destroy our world, don’t forget.”
“Or a magic that God punished them for misusing, whichever interpretation you prefer…”
Throughout the following Summer, the two old men sifted through plastic and compared the junk to the diagrams in the brittle worn out parchment of an instruction manual for an old coffee maker. The piles and piles of recovered plastic, metal, and wires offered little that resembled the contraption depicted in the odd booklet.
There was however a breakthrough in the hottest months as the monks were careful to not let their sweat drip onto the ancient text. In these months the global temperature oscillated wildly between cold desert nights sweeping wastelands from the arctic circle’s untamed wind streams and brutally scorched days with the sun pounding down relentlessly. Without electricity, true darkness had reclaimed the nights and returned the moon to her holy throne. This village also had no way of easily starting a fire, and only the nuns in the kitchen possessed that knowledge. What Brother John and Brother Paul realized was that a lot of the recovered devices – including the one detailed in the manual – had a certain cord attached to it with two prongs at the end.
Suddenly the rusted sockets scattered around the cathedral had a purpose. They informed the high priest immediately. Despite the intense heat, the chief still sported his heavy royal robes as he watched the monk plug in one of the pronged cords into an eroded socket. To his astonishment, it fit perfectly, but, as he observed, “Nothing happened. The thing does not work. Does it require some magic spell or ritual?”
“Well no,” Paul answered. “In the booklet, it says if it doesn’t turn when plugged in that we should check the outlet’s power source. Make sure it is live.”
“Live?” The priest’s face twisted with repulsion. “These things were alive?”
“Follow me outside,” the other monk said. Once on the other side of the building’s stone walls, he continued, “If the plug is on the other side of this wall, then we should be able to remove it and see if the holes or, uh, outlet, are somehow connected to a power source from ancient times. Even if that source is dead or asleep, finding the remnants of whatever this source was could become an invaluable resource for our congregation.”
Over the course of about a dozen weeks, a team of monks worked carefully to remove sections of the holy walls, find the wires behind the plaster panels, and they traced that to the large, rusted fuse box in the basement. This, they concluded, was not the prime source of the old times magic for it, too, seemed to be connected to some other unknown machine underground. After some digging, they discovered the much thicker black cable deep in the dirt that clearly led far away, away from the village.
No one had ever ventured off from this town and survived without returning in a matter of hours. The conditions of the wastelands were inhospitable and the weather out there was volatile and unpredictable. And for all these people knew, monsters and dragons could be real. By Autumn, with the harvest moon full, a eunuch had been chosen to follow the underground rope as far as could to hopefully find the prime source of yesteryear’s magic. The young man gazed at the moon before offering his final farewell to the brothers. The abandoned moon base from centuries prior could be discerned, but to an untrained eye, just looked like another lunar crevice or crater.
“Return if it gets too treacherous,” the high priest advised. “This is a great honor, Brother Jeremy. May the Lord and holy ghosts protect you on your journey.”
“Praised be,” he said. Off he walked into twilight of early dawn, until several minutes later, he was out of sight…
Although Brother Jeremy would find the old generator, he could not activate the electricity. Even if they did manage to get it going, it would not matter in the end for hundreds of miles away, a renegade band of warriors was on a crash course with the tiny religious village and these post-apocalyptic Vikings had dug up something much more valuable in this world than electric power... they had found weapons and for enough of the guns, they had bullets and they figured out, through deadly trial and error, how the things worked.
.The unfavorable were then murdered and the remaining gang, now hungry, was on a ravenous rampage to find women, water, and food.
They could not eat their weapons.
Written by BW Derge, All Rights Reserved 2024
© USA
This was a short story composed in 2024 called "The Dark Ages II: St. John's Coffee Master"
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