Tails of the Apocalypse

by David Bruns

  We didn’t land at Heathrow like we were supposed to. The pilot took us north, banking up towards the Highlands of Scotland. We didn’t understand why he did that at first, but the Scots built their roads to function as emergency runways. So we could land on a remote strip well out of any city, away from the radiation and the sickness that threatened. We didn’t think about stuff like altitude and the cold or how tough it would be to scavenge food when our new world was frozen. We just wanted to hide from the worst of the destruction.

  Of course, we’d have to go into the cities eventually. We had a full roster of passengers, some with brilliant minds, others not so sharp. There were engineers, musicians, teachers, salesmen, you name it—the entire spectrum of knowledge was represented, thousands of years at the best schools in the world amassed between us. And no one could agree how long we’d have to wait before it’d be safe to venture into what had been civilization.

  As we went into that first night, it was hard to believe that the sun would still rise the next day. But it did.

  Some of us didn’t make it through the first week. We’d lost fourteen people by the end of the first month. I think it was the reality of life in a post-nuclear world that killed them. All the things we’d taken for granted, those precious status symbols we’d paid over-the-top prices for because they had a glowing apple for a logo, our cell phones and laptops, all were suddenly worthless. Our social network was reduced to the faces around us. The only tweets were from the birds in the trees. The only music we made ourselves, though we didn’t have much to sing about. It was hard to believe that it was all gone; not just generations of learning, but entire civilizations’ worth of understanding. Lost to the world.

  We focused on shelter at first. Gutting the hulk of the plane to make sleeping bays. We each had a blanket, which wasn’t nearly enough to see us through winter. I didn’t have many friends in the group. I’d been on the flight alone. My family was back home in Epsom, a little town just south of London. We’d lived up on the Downs in a little cluster of two hundred houses called Langley Vale. I say we; I mean my wife, Em, and our best friend, Buster, a soft-coated Irish Wheaten Terrier we’d nicknamed The Terrorist. He was nine months old when the vodka-swiller pushed the button. Buster had barely started living. I thought about trying to walk home, but six hundred miles in the fallout might as well have been six thousand.

  I wasn’t sure it would even be possible.

  I thought about heading to the east coast of Scotland and trying to steal a boat. The water would’ve kept me away from the worst of the radiation. But I never took that course because deep down part of me knew Epsom was only seventeen miles from London. The blast radius of a one megaton nuke was about six miles.

  The Tsar Bomba, the new Russian nuke, was a hundred megaton bomb. It had a fireball radius alone of two miles, meaning there was no City of London left. The radiation circle was nearly five miles wide with an expected 90 percent mortality rate from radiation sickness in just the first month or so. The air-blast radius came in two tiers. Within eight miles of detonation, the winds were forceful enough to tear down huge concrete-and-steel structures, rendering the devastation absolute. Up to twenty-one miles from the heart of the explosion, the nuclear winds were still damaging enough to demolish most buildings. As far as fifty miles away, people would experience third-degree burns to all exposed skin. Flammable material, like clothes, would burn away. It would have been like hell on Earth.

  And that was the real reason I wasn’t thinking about trying to go home. I could only pray Em and Buster hadn’t suffered.

  That was an odd thing, too. Suddenly I was thinking about religion, but I wasn’t religious. I’d always been a non-believer. A lot of the survivors, though, were born again in the wake of the world’s end. They kissed the ground and thought about everything in terms of prayer and miracles.

  People were getting superstitious, too.

  That happens when you’re reduced to firelight. It takes you back to a more primitive existence, and with it come primitive fears. We’ve never really grown out of them as a species. They’re still there, all of those old caveman fears we thought we’d left in the Stone Age. They’re hardcoded in our DNA, just waiting for disaster to reawaken them.

  It didn’t take long before the first of the survivors started seeing things in the moonlight, shapes circling around the ruined plane. Out there. Watching. They rarely came close enough for us to get a good description, and everyone seemed to see something slightly different. Different sizes, different shapes, coloration, but one thing everyone agreed on—the phantoms moved on all fours. Piecing their different stories together, it sounded like everyone was describing their own version of a pack of stray animals, some dogs, maybe wolves, some more exotic; there was even a horse among the sightings. I didn’t think they had wolves in Scotland, but I didn’t want to stake my life on it.

  What I didn’t tell anyone was that I’d seen something out there, too. A shape. Low. Golden fur matted with ash and dust and dirt. Nosing around in the undergrowth. It never came closer than maybe five hundred feet from the crashed plane, but that was close enough for me to recognize what it was.

  A ghost light.

  I kept what I saw to myself, but some people in the group must have worked out that everyone was seeing something similar flickering out there in the darkness of night.

  Those dogs were a curse.

  To see them was to know you were dead, even if death hadn’t caught up with your body yet.

  It was only a matter of time.

  I wasn’t ready to go. Nothing was going to make me give up my grip on this life until I was ready. I hadn’t survived a nuclear holocaust to give over my fate to phantom hounds. I’d leave, but on my terms. Though I had no idea what those terms actually were.

  I started to look for a purpose, beyond the obvious, in living. I wondered if it might not be worth going on a pilgrimage, trying to find some of the old relics, maybe venturing over the water into Europe, try to find the Spear of Longinus or the Shroud of Turin, some kind of holy artifact that survivors could rally behind. Was that my hope I was looking for? Maybe the mainland hadn’t been hit as badly as Britain? That was something to cling on to, wasn’t it? The notion that old enmities had made us a target, but that somewhere out there, life was almost normal.

  I thought about the old legends, about Glastonbury Tor and ley lines and the legends of Arthur, the Once and Future King, who was supposed to return in the hour of our greatest need. If ever there was a time for him to show up, this was it, wasn’t it? I thought about Saint Patrick charming the snakes out of Ireland and the old forest gods that predated modern faith. Herne the Hunter, Puck, and Robin Goodfellow. I thought about our warrior queen, Boadicea, and our Lionhearts and bravehearts and broken hearts. The landscape, sour now, reminded me of the burned monasteries and kings buried in carparks.

  Surely, in all of this ruin, there must be some sort of symbol, something that could be used as a beacon to shine its light in our dark time?

  Yusef, an old IT programmer with no useful skills in this broken new world, was the first to volunteer to become one of my Grail Knights. Hejdur and Heldur, two brothers from Iceland, offered their strength—and with both of them close to six-five and built like the proverbial brick shithouses, they had plenty of that to offer—and Priya, a mother of three from New York who’d lost everything just like me, completed the circle. Five of us from the original 418 survivors broke camp and set off south, walking out of the mountains into the nuclear winter.

  I don’t remember the first time we noticed the shadow moving through the trees, but it was Yusef who saw it. He pointed through a gap in the skeletal limbs toward a deeper darkness he claimed was back there, but I couldn’t see it. Neither could the others. We believed him, though. It was one of two things: a dog, hungry, driven out of the shadows to follow us and find food, one that none of us could seem to get a fix on. Or Yusef’s days were marked.

  I almost told h
im, but almost is a big word. I couldn’t. Not when it came right down to it. Telling someone you think they’re going to die because they’ve seen a ghost dog … well if it isn’t exactly bugfuck crazy, it certainly isn’t normal conversation, put it that way.

  And if it wasn’t a ghost, then it was a flesh-and-blood animal, and it was only a matter of time before it became desperate enough to attack.

  We were in the heart of its territory.

  We made camp that night, huddled around the few sticks we’d managed to scavenge, warming our hands. We didn’t talk much at all. No matter how much life we managed to stir into the flames, they didn’t give off any real heat. I was shivering despite being layered up in several skintight tee shirts beneath my heavy-duty four-seasons fleece. I should have been sweating. But I just didn’t sweat anymore.

  He saw it again. I know he did. But he didn’t say anything. That was the first real hint he knew what was going on. He was a smart guy, Yusef. When no one else was looking, he tugged down the collar of his shirt and I saw the blisters. He was sick.

  The dog had come for him, come to shepherd him into a better death.

  Again, I thought about the golden shadow shape that had dogged my footsteps since the plane; my own ghost light.

  I wished he’d fought it. I wished he’d realized it didn’t have to end this way, that there had to be hope, there had to be miracles in this ruined land.

  His answer was to tell me there were 23,000 nuclear warheads in existence. That was it. His version of a miracle. I didn’t grasp what he meant until we reached Arthur’s Seat and what had been Edinburgh Castle.

  Twenty-three thousand warheads.

  How many of them had been launched? Not just one or even a handful. When the Russians launched theirs, had we retaliated with Tridents and the Americans with their bombs, filling the sky with that long-promised mutual end? We had no way of knowing, of course. There weren’t secret factions out there with shielded computers and secret networks clued in to news broadcasts on hidden television stations. There was nothing. We hadn’t seen a soul since leaving the wreck. That alone scared me more than all the other things we had seen added together.

  Edinburgh had been razed. Several walls had survived intact, the shadows of collapsed landmarks charred onto them as a reminder of the city that had been lost. The wind was the worst. It churned up the ash, making devils to blow down Princess Street. It stung my eyes.

  I wept. And not just because of the dust.

  There was no weakness in tears, no matter what I might have thought when I was a kid trying to learn to be a man.

  We went down towards the River Leith, though in my mind I was calling it the Lethe, which made it feel like an entirely different river we had to cross. The Queen’s ship was down there. Or had been. The metal had buckled and warped under the incredible heat. Now the thing in the water was unrecognizable.

  Staring, fixated at the hulk, I heard something.

  Birds.

  A huge murder of crows. Thousands upon thousands of them came banking and arching down the slope from the ruined city to ride the thermals out over the water. They cast a shadow across the world that might—if we truly were Grail Knights—have been a dragon. It wasn’t until the first of them fell out of the sky that I began to see the sickness in the flock. The surge of hope I’d felt at finally seeing some sign of life in the land died with them as one by one the birds fell, splashing down into the estuary.

  It took an hour for the last of the circling birds to fall.

  An hour of us watching them die.

  I hated my eyes.

  There was nothing there for us. We needed to move on. To hope that it was different in Newcastle or York or Leeds. We needed to believe that somewhere had survived. But with every passing mile, it became more obvious that no place had.

  On the third morning out of Edinburgh, Yusef left us.

  We’d slept around the campfire that night, taking refuge in an old Roman hillfort in the borderlands. When we woke, he wasn’t there. I stood in the doorway calling his name. My voice echoed across the Northumberland moors. Purple heathers stretched as far as the eye could see. Midges swarmed around us, but where a few weeks ago they would have fed on our blood, they left us alone now.

  I saw the dog in the heather, playing. It raced in circles, chasing some invisible prey, each circle faster and tighter than the one before. I could have watched him play for hours. The way his tail was up and his gait changed to a prance as he finally tired was so familiar.

  When the brothers emerged from the hillfort, I thought about pointing him out, but realized I didn’t want them to tell me they couldn’t see him.

  Instead, I told them that Yusef was gone.

  They didn’t say anything.

  Maybe he’d walked off in the night to die alone so we wouldn’t have to worry about his body? What would we have done? Buried him? Built a cairn of stones over his corpse or left him to feed the animals? I realized we hadn’t discussed what we wanted to happen to us when we died. There were four of us left. We weren’t alone in this. Our deaths would require a certain measure of practicality from those who survived. We should agree on these kinds of things going in, shouldn’t we? It would save any arguments if someone wanted to be laid out for the birds or someone else wanted to be cut up into steaks to feed the rest of us.

  I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been hungry.

  Properly hungry.

  I should have been ravenous.

  But I wasn’t.

  I remember a story, the Lambton Worm. I’d grown up with it. A local legend. I could only remember the first few lines of the poem, but I knew its lair was supposed to be around here somewhere.

  Whisht! Lads, haad yor gobs

  An’ aall tell ye aall an aaful story.

  Whisht! Lads haad yor gobs

  An’ aa’ll tell ye ’boot the worm.

  The legend went that a local lad had skipped church to go fishing but hooked the devil rather than a fish. But thinking Old Toby a mere lamprey-like worm, the lad tossed it down a well and forgot all about it. As penance for his rebellious youth, the lad joined the Crusaders and went off to the Holy Land while the worm grew and grew down that well, until it grew so big, it could wrap itself seven times around the base of Worm Hill. The worm would snatch local children, growing fat on them, you see. With armor and sword magically blessed by a witch—the blessing itself heavily weighted with a curse—the lad’s promised his armor will protect him and his sword slay the worm. But after the worm is dead, the witch requires the lad to kill the first living thing he sees to pay the blood price and seal his pact with her. He slew the worm in a raging river, then looked up at the riverbank to see his beloved dog barking, full of excitement at its master’s return. The lad couldn’t kill his dog, and in breaking the pact brought a curse down on his family that saw nine generations of his descendants doomed—his son drowned at sea, his grandson killed at the Battle of Marston Moor, his great-grandson slain in the Battle of Wakefield, his great-great-grandson trampled under the hooves of his horse, and so on.

  We were a day’s walk from Worm Hill.

  The dragon-slaying sword was supposedly sealed away in the monument built atop the hill.

  Was that the kind of truly British relic that could unite the people?

  The story of the Lambton Worm was a variant of the Saint George tale, with the worm replacing the dragon. There was no more British a legend than that of George and the Dragon. Could the sword under the hill be Ascalon, the saint’s fabled sword?

  The chance, however remote, that it might be gave me something to focus on as we walked. Part of me truly believed we needed a miracle to return life to a dead land. No matter how remote the possibility that Ascalon actually existed might be. I wasn’t thinking rationally. I knew that.

  I told the others what I had in mind.

  They followed me to the monument.

  Before we disappeared inside the cavern at the foot of the hil
l, Priya let slip that she’d seen a stray trailing us for the last hour. Neither of the brothers had seen it, and I didn’t dare admit that I’d been seeing my own dog for the last month or so, or that he was watching us even now from a spot up by the Athenian structure that guarded over the top of the hill. There was so much destruction over the last hundred miles we’d traveled, it was amazing to think the ancient monument was still standing.

  We lost Priya in the darkness.

  Four of us walked into that cave, but only three of us emerged.

  There was no sword in the stone waiting for me to find it.

  We crawled about inside the cavern, reaching out blindly to feel our way along the walls in the claustrophobic darkness that smothered us. The air was old in there. Stale. It didn’t taste like the air outside, which in turn didn’t taste like the air I’d grown up breathing. The air now carried the dust of our lost world. Every lungful inhaled was another little bit of our loves that we’d lost drawn into us. That almost made the hell of it all bearable. But again with that word, almost.

  I don’t know what happened. There was no fight. No screams. But with no light, we were fumbling around in there, trying to feel our way towards a prize we could never hope to find. It was a stupid way to go about it, I know that now. It wasn’t as if the sword would just be lying on an altar down there, waiting to be drawn up. I had tried to sell myself a lie that there was something Excaliburish about the whole thing, and that by raising the sword, people might start to believe that our greatest hero had found his way back and that we would prevail, we would batter back the darkness and find a way to rebuild. But even I didn’t buy the lie I was selling anymore.

  I followed the golden blur of my ghost light out into the fading twilight. The Celts used to call it the time between times. It was one of the two hours of the day when magic was possible.

  I guess the only magic here was that I was still alive.