Eschaton - Season One

by Kieran Marcus

  The moment his TV screen went blank, Tetra switched on the radio. Part of him didn’t want to hear the details about the terrifying tragedy that engulfed the Earth, but his curiosity and his childish hope that everything might turn out not quite as catastrophic as the experts had predicted were stronger.

  “… those of you who get their TV via satellite—and I understand that’s most of the people in Britain these days—have now lost their signal because that giant cloud of ash and debris that you have seen rising from the impact site is now blocking satellite signals across most of Europe and soon across the entire world. Stay tuned to this radio frequency as we will continue to broadcast as long as the circumstances allow it, and please do brace yourself for the seismic shockwave that should reach us in just under three minutes …”

  Sitting on his mattress, Tetra put on his cycling helmet, pulled a blanket over his shoulders and hugged Isambard, his plush toy dog that had been his sleeping companion since he was four.

  Despite the softness of his mattress, Tetra first noticed it in his bottom. He felt the tremors a long time before the voice on the radio said, “Here comes the quake,” before the chairs started dancing as if by magic or haunting and the water bottle on the table fell over. It started as a very faint vibration, its intensity increasing so slowly that it lured Tetra into a false hope that it would just come and go and be nowhere near as dramatic as the experts had predicted. But then the faint and distant trembling rose into heavy jolting and shaking that would have been intimidating to anyone who had never witnessed an earthquake before. Holding on to his cycling helmet and with Isambard tucked in his armpit, Tetra crawled across the floor to seek shelter under the table. As soon as he had made it there, he wondered if this had been such a good idea. If the house collapsed on him, the table might create a cavity that would keep him alive—but for how long? He wouldn’t be able to dig his way through the tons of rubble, and with no water he’d die of dehydration within a few days.

  The water bottle rolled off the table and fell to the floor. Without hesitation, Tetra grabbed it.

  Well done, he thought. You’ve just prolonged your death throes by a few days.

  That bottle of water would keep him alive just long enough so he could die of starvation. In his claustrophobic one-cubic-meter space under the table he would lie in complete darkness—and soon enough in his own excrements—because he had left his flashlight and his phone two meters away on the mattress. How could he have been so stupid? Hadn’t his dad told him explicitly to keep his phone with him at all times? What if the house really collapsed on him now? How long would he be able to retain his sanity in a confined space in absolute darkness with no reasonable hope of rescue or escape? Wasn’t insanity even more daunting a prospect than death?

  Hurriedly, Tetra crawled back to his mattress to retrieve his devices.

  Maybe it would be better, he thought. Maybe it would be a more benign death if the house collapsed on me now, before I make it back to the table. A ton of bricks on the head. Instant death. No suffering. No time for insanity. No whatever hardships the post-apocalypse may have in store for us.

  Panting heavily and clutching the two devices in his hand, Tetra made it back to the space under the table. Feeling dizzy from hyperventilation, he lay his head on the cold stone floor and took long, deep breaths that slowly melted into the sudden stillness around him.

  “It’s over,” the radio announced. “The seismic shockwave is over, but the worst is yet to come.”

  * * *

  “I understand that most of you have to go without a TV signal in these dark, dark hours, and that’s quite a shame, because all the terrifyingly brutal and destructive forces of this unthinkable disaster notwithstanding, it is difficult to deny the aesthetic beauty—if you allow me to call it that—of the spectacle that befalls the skies above Britain and indeed above all of Europe at this very moment as the ejecta material from the impact is arriving.

  “We’re here deep down in the vaults of Broadcasting House, but we do have remote controlled cameras up on the roof, and so we can see this sight that is as magnificent as it is scary. Ash and debris from the impact that occurred seventeen minutes ago, three thousand kilometers away in the Sahara desert, are now beginning to rain down on us. Some of it is still glowing hot from the incredible amount of energy set free in the impact, some of it is only now heating up as it collides with gas particles on its way from the mesosphere back down to the surface. The sky is ablaze with what looks like a million shooting stars, and I can assure you it’s just as spectacular as it sounds. However, we must strongly urge you, tempting as though it may be, not to leave the safety of your shelter to catch a glimpse of this magnificent spectacle. The sheer amount of red hot debris falling from the sky creates so much thermal radiation that you’d suffer from second degree burns in just seconds. In some areas, the temperature at the surface might even get so hot that it would set your clothes on fire. You also have to keep in mind that while the average size of ejecta particles reaching the surface is less than a quarter of a millimeter, this is just an average. That means some will be even smaller, but others will be several millimeters in size. If they hit you at a speed of several hundred meters per second, you won’t stand a chance. It’ll be like a gunshot to the head. It is a magnificent sight out there, but it’s not worth getting yourself killed for, so please stay in your underground shelters until the fallout ceases. However long that may take.”

  Tetra pulled his pillow over his head and pressed it against his ears to block the monstrous, terrifying noise of millions of particles of ejecta material raining down on the house above like a hailstorm, the most ferocious, most violent hailstorm he had ever witnessed.

  “Please stop,” he muttered with his eyes closed and his hands holding the pillow over his head. “Make it go away. Please stop. Make it go away.”

  * * *

  Tetra awoke to the sound of absolute silence. His legs had freed themselves of the blanket he had tucked under his arms for comfort rather than warmth. His clothes lay in an untidy heap next to his mattress. He remembered the radio telling him that soil was a good insulator, so that despite the scorching heat on the surface, the temperature in underground shelters should stay below forty degrees Celsius. Not much below forty degrees, Tetra had found, and so he had kept only a T-shirt and his boxers on when he went to bed, despite the warning from his father.

  “If we’re going to sleep, we’re going to sleep in our clothes,” he had said, “because if something happens, if we have to leave the shelter in a hurry for whatever reason, we won’t have the time to start looking for our shoes.”

  It had made sense at the time, but after going through half of the apocalypse all on his own it had made just as much sense to not give a damn anymore. He had realized that sooner or later he would have to make his own decisions and live or die by them. One day, he was going to be the only person looking out for him, and apparently that day had come sooner than expected.

  As Tetra stretched his sleepy limbs, a tired moan escaped him that only seemed to emphasize the silence around him. He didn’t remember switching off the radio, but it was switched off. He had no recollection of the anticipated air blast either that should have arrived at around 2 a.m. with a loud bang and the most destructively forceful winds the country had ever seen. Could he really have slept through this, or had the air blast been less severe than all the expert had predicted? There was only one way to find out. Tetra got dressed and ran up the stairs. When he opened the front door and stepped outside, his heart sank.

  The first thing that struck him was the gloomy darkness. He checked his device to confirm that it was indeed almost ten in the morning and not half an hour before sunrise. With no individual clouds discernible, the sky was a dull grayish brown. The air tasted of ash, and a faint musty smell of burned flesh made Tetra turn up his nose. He thought of the deer and wild boar that he occasionally spotted from his bedroom window when they emerged from the forest in t
he evening twilight and came out onto the clearing some thirty or forty meters away from the house. He imagined that probably no one had bothered to evacuate all the animals from the forest and that their charred cadavers were lying all around the forest now—or what was left of the forest anyway. Against the gray sky he could see the considerably decimated silhouette of the forest, and most of the trees that were still standing had been almost entirely stripped of their leaves. As Tetra stepped off the porch, he noticed an unusual sensation beneath his feet. Using his device as a light source, he found his shoes sunken three or four centimeters deep in a layer of ash, dust, and tektites. He shone his light around. The layer covered the ground as far as he could see. He stepped a few meters away from the house to have a look at the solar panels on the roof. As expected, they were covered with a thick layer of ejecta material as well. He would have to find a way to clean them, but at the same time he wondered if it would make any difference if the amount of sunlight remained as low as it was now. Either way, he’d have to get back to this problem later, because right now he had more urgent things to tend to, as his growling stomach reminded him.

  Tetra went back into the house. In the kitchen he fixed himself a quick breakfast. As he poured milk from the last remaining carton over his cereal, he wondered what might have happened to all the cows. How many local farmers, if any, had managed—or even bothered to try—to save their livestock from the disaster? The radio didn’t know or wouldn’t say. Today’s broadcast was an endless list of casualty and damage reports too depressing to listen to for longer than a few minutes.

  After he had finished his breakfast, he went to the bathroom to discover the first major blow his quality of life had taken in the aftermath of Fat Boy. When after his extensive—and rather smelly—morning business he tried to flush the toilet, nothing happened. He tried the tap and the shower, only to find his worst fear confirmed: there was no water. While this didn't constitute an immediately life threatening problem—after all, he had two hundred liters of bottled water in the basement that, if he used it as drinking water only, would last him quite a while—it was going to be a considerable inconvenience. Tetra didn’t mind going without a shower for a few days, and he didn't have a problem with peeing against a tree either, but digging a hole in the ground twice a day, a hole he could squat over and defecate into, was, as he soon found out, even less appealing than it sounded.

  The creeping deterioration of his life continued. In the afternoon, Tetra carried a chair up to the attic and opened a skylight. He stood on the chair and used a hand brush to remove the ejecta material from a portion of the solar panels. They had been sandblasted and largely destroyed. He cleaned about a square meter of them and went down to the kitchen to check the control panel. Even at the reduced sunlight—they sky was now slightly brighter than it had been in the morning—a single square meter of solar panels should produce a small amount of electricity and charge the house battery, albeit very slowly. Nothing. The refrigerator, the lights, and the radio were draining the battery, but there was no charging activity. Maybe if he could manage to clean all of the solar panels. Maybe some of them were undamaged. But there was no way he was going to climb on that roof. He was scared of heights.

  On the evening of the fourth day, Tetra ran out of milk, and he had to prepare his cereal with bottled water. After he had choked it down he went outside, dug a hole, and shat in it. As he was squatting there with his pants down, contracting his abdominal muscles to put pressure on his bowels, his naked thigh was hit from above by a drop of dirty, grayish-brown water. Then another and another. For the first time after the impact, it started to rain.

  * * *

  The rain continued all night long, washing particles of ash and dust out of the air and turning the layer of ejecta material that covered the ground into a sea of sludge. It also cleaned the solar panels on the roof and revealed the degree of damaged caused by the tektites: it was total. With so much dirt washed out of it, the sky was now a much brighter shade of gray, but the house battery was still not charging. Not only was it not charging, it was drained, leaving Tetra with no radio and no light inside the house.

  This latest development prompted the boy to act. He wasn’t going to sit in the dark all day, nor did he want to spend the entire time outside. Removing the boards from the windows was the most obvious option, but it had taken Tetra and his father an entire week to put them up, and since there was a minimum of four hands needed to handle a single one of the heavy, bulky polyurethane boards, there was no way Tetra could remove even one of them on his own. Especially not without a ladder, and he was still afraid of heights. Furthermore, Tetra became increasingly worried about his father. When he hadn’t made it home in time, Tetra had assumed that he had been temporarily delayed and decided to take shelter elsewhere. But that had been five days ago now, and Tetra was reluctantly beginning to consider the possibility that his father’s MIA status was down to a more serious problem.

  The longer he thought about it, the more obvious it became: his father needed help—his help. Kettering was only a half-day’s walk away, and he could probably save an hour or two if he didn’t take the road but a shortcut through the woods. Once he was there he’d try to find his father, and if he couldn’t find him he could at least retrieve the car and drive back home. He didn’t have an official license yet because you had to be fourteen to operate a driverless car, but he knew how to do it anyway, and the police probably had better things to do than chase after unlicensed drivers. If there still was such a thing as the police.

  Once he had made his decision, Tetra didn’t waste another minute. He went to his room, and with his flashlight between his teeth he packed his backpack with a few essential items: three bottles of water, a box of crackers, and his pocket knife. He also packed his wallet in case money was still a thing and he should decide to buy a carton of milk somewhere, one complete set of fresh clothes in case he fell into the mud and had to get changed, and of course Isambard, his plush toy dog that had been his sleeping companion since he was four. Tetra had no intentions to spend the night in Kettering—if everything went according to plan he’d be back home by nightfall—but who knew if plans had any merit in the post-apocalyptic world, and it was better to be safe than sorry. He had no idea what would expect him, but no matter what happened, he was not going to spend the first night in nearly ten years without Isambard in his arms.

  Half an hour into his trip, Tetra began to wonder if taking a shortcut through the woods had really been such a good idea. The terrain turned out to be quite different from what he had expected. Most of the trees inside the forest had seen much less damage than those on the fringes, at least on ground level. Many of them had even retained some of their foliage, and only a few had been uprooted. But at the top the air blast had broken off quite a number of small and large branches as it had swept across the countryside. All the debris that had fallen to the ground had created quite an obstacle course for Tetra as he tried to make his way down south. The ground was thick and heavy and difficult to walk on, even if the ejecta sludge wasn’t as deep as it was outside the forest. The air was musty and humid, and soon his underwear was soaked with sweat, but he didn’t want to remove his sweater or even just roll up his sleeves because there were hundreds of nasty, mean-spirited little twigs and thorns that were clearly out to get him as he was climbing over and crawling under tree trunks and branches. The last thing he needed was getting a splinter in his arm that would give him sepsis.

  When it was time for a break, Tetra sat down on the trunk of a toppled tree and wiped the sweat off his face with his sleeve. As he took a few swigs of water and looked around, he realized how desolate the place was. He remembered taking long walks through this forest with his father and his sister when it was lush and green and teeming with life from insects to birds, to foxes, wild boar, and deer. Now this place was as good as dead, gray and dull, smelling of sulfur and rotting animal corpses, and not a sound was to be heard. Earlier, Tetra ha
d heard the chirp of a solitary bird in the distance, and he had taken a special note of it because it had been the first sign of life—any life—after the impact that hadn’t come out of the radio. Now the bird had fallen silent again, or maybe it had flown away, and absolute, unnatural silence lay over the forest again like a blanket that was too thick and heavy for comfort.

  Tetra took another swig of water and was about to get ready to move on, when a sudden noise made him jump. It was the sound of a twig snapping as if someone had stepped on it, but that couldn’t be, could it? He turned around and listened closely, but there was nothing to be seen, and the only thing he could hear was the agitated pounding of his own heart.

  Taking slow, deep breaths to calm himself down, Tetra stowed the water bottle away, shouldered his backpack, and continued on his way. He was walking faster now, and he kept looking over his shoulder because he wasn’t feeling comfortable. Even if he couldn’t see anything, he couldn’t help but feel a strange presence as though he was being watched and followed. Inadvertently, he started walking faster and faster, but the faster he walked, the more he seemed to feel that the presence was closing in on him, which made him walk faster still, and as soon as he reached a part of the forest that was less dense with less debris on the ground, he started to run. He ran, now panic-stricken, for two or three hundred meters, and then he stopped. Panting heavily, although he knew not whether it was from exhaustion or fear, he turned around and looked back. The forest lay empty and silent. Bending forward, catching his breath with his hands propped against his knees, Tetra shook his head.