by K.Z. Freeman
We had reached the small town sometime during the night and found a half-broken house where we went to sleep.
I dream of the explosion and watch myself in third person. I am afraid, I feel my teeth grinding... yet I cannot wake up. The rock-dust itself seems to move against me as though alive, a wall of molten iron and smoke. Spectral hands leap out of the debris and grope at my legs. I struggle, soundlessly, the smell of blood burning in my nostrils, my eyes wet with tears. I cannot shake the dream even though I plead, beg for someone to wake me up. Mercy! The feelings are almost tangible in their intensity. No matter the struggle, the exit of my dream remains elusive. Sensations. Actions. Glimpses and fear. They all converge on me in a vice-grip of terror. At one point, the entire floor shifts and I begin to rake down towards a pit – its floor overgrown by razor-sharp spikes. I cut my hands and break my nails as I try to grope onto something, anything, but to no avail. Bereft of breath I hear the sound of flesh tearing as spikes impale me. My scream is feral, primal, my grimaces make me sweat as I watch them contort my face. In the middle of it, at the height of my outburst, I shoot back into my body and look up to where I had fallen. I see myself, only it’s no longer me that I see. It is her. She floats, her coat flapping behind her, majestic and backlit as though by a star. But there is no star. It is only her, radiant her. Resplendent. She reaches out, grabs my outstretched palm gently, yet firmly, perfectly.
"Please," I manage.
Her smile is all I need.
I wake up and look around me. I see Ty still fast asleep, undisturbed and curled up on the other side of the room, resting on pieces of half-burned wood. I stand up and walk outside of the house and notice it to be in better shape than most of those around it. Its façade still holds in some places and the wood used in the construction of its roof yet holds. For the most part, at least.
Outside, dawn is unfolding in yellow dryness from the east. It quickly becomes clear no one seems to live in this small town. I see a twelve-story building hulking just a few hundred meters to my right, a mall next to it, and what looks like the remains of a church across the street. There are other building scattered on the hills around me. There’s even a playground right below me to my left. But no people. Another ghost town, I think. Indeed, I found plenty of these on my travels. People seem to abandon their homes quickly once they realize they’d never be able to scrape a living. One could hardly blame them, the town must have been a wreck even before the bombs hit.
I hear footsteps behind me and turn. Ty had woken up and is now walking towards me.
“For a second there I thought you bailed on me,” he yawns.
“Not until we bust that vault,” I say.
He doesn’t reply, his eyes half-closed in the morning twilight. He looks around and seas the same thing I had, desolation and silence. Even the wind stands mute.
“A ghost town?” he asks.
“Looks like it,” I nod. “Although I imagine even the ghosts left.”
We head towards the mall first, but find it stripped of everything. Neither of us had actually expected anything else.
I listen for any sound of birds while we’re in the open again, but hear nothing. The air is still, shrouded in graveyard silence.
We end up eating insects that make us sick more than they manage to alleviate our hunger. There are quite a few of them skulking around inside the church.
“We do I always find these inside churches?” Ty remarks.
I realize I had never thought about it. It truly seemed that, when all else failed, you could find a church and eat some bugs. What this might mean, if anything, I had no idea.
The beetles are elusive and quick and I can feel them squirming in my mouth as I chew. Their bellies pop with a sickening crunch and we eat the damn things until we can’t find any more. I pull out a bottle I had bought at the inn the other day and wash down the wretched taste. Ty does the same with his own bottle, but where mine was purchased, he had extorted his from the barkeep at gun point.
I remember the man being convinced the gun was empty and only when Ty had grown angry enough to shoot the man’s foot, did the barkeeper yield. Ty had taken three bottles of the purified stuff and gulped one down on the spot, storing the empty jug in his backpack.
I later asked why he had taken only three bottles.
“Shooting the only man with some balls seemed like enough of a punishment,” he had replied. It was the first reason why I like him. The wastes breed men like him rapidly. Yet feelings of being in mortal danger by simply standing near him were absent when it came to Ty. And perhaps this was part of the trick he was able to pull. It made me wonder how long he would continue to put up with me until he should throttle me in my sleep. He didn't even thank me for the seeds, the bastard.
We reach what looks like the lowest part of town. The road ahead stretches to both ends, and we immediately notice a bank to our left. It’s pretty hard to miss, since it seems no matter what language we come across, the term ‘Bank’ always finds a place somewhere on the building. It’s either that, or the sign looks overly pretentious and official to be anything else.
Crumbling and decaying buildings and apartment blocks sit all around us, although the layout of the town doesn’t allow the structures to be too closely packed due to the rapid rise of altitude. A slope rakes down into the town from whence we came. The soil had been flattened at the center of the settlement. A crater now sits where some kind of bomb had fallen and the surrounding buildings all carry the consequences. The permeation of the blast is clearly visible and the structures are increasingly blackened or flattened with every meter nearer to the blast. The nearest houses had simply been leveled. A large bell lays half-buried in a pile of ruin of what I guess had been a church at some point.
“In here,” says Ty, his voice bringing me back from my surroundings. I follow him into the bank. This close to the blast, the doors of the entrance, which I suppose were made of glass or some sort of melding of glass and plastic, had not been shattered, but melted. Inside, the bank is in shambles. What could have been looted had long since been looted, and most of the drawers behind the dark counter had been thrown out, their interiors stripped of anything and everything.
The safe awaits us at the far side of the bank. The heavy door which leads to it had been torn off its heavy-duty hinges. I can see someone had tried their best to break into the safe. The clawing of chisels and whatnot had left a clear imprint on the wall beside the reinforced steel door. It reminds me of scratches, and I can tell someone must have tried for days, perhaps weeks, to destroy the wall next to the doorway.
Ty doesn’t waste time and attaches the explosive charge on the exact spot where the marks are. He fiddles for a second with the trigger and then moves aside. The detonation comes with a subtle bang. We share a look while the dust settles. I walk through the opening in the wall first. Much to our dismay, we find the insides like the ones we had seen in the previous safe a day before. There are lots of deposit boxes, most of them still locked, but we find some that aren’t.
Nothing. We find nothing of value in any of them. Some gold bars inside one of the compartments, but they are next to useless. We don’t bother picking them up.
“Shiny fucking rocks,” Ty snorts. “Can you believe humans used to place so much value on this crap?”
I ignore him since he apparently doesn’t realize we now place just as much value on plastic and grab one of the deposit boxes lying on the floor as Ty scavenges around the rubble on the other side of the room. Inside the deposit safe, I find old folders with some kind of printing on it. I’m able to read most of it but understand none. As I’m about to throw it away, a picture which I hadn’t noticed slips out in between the pages of the folder and glides to the floor. It turns its blank side to me and I pick it up. As I turn it around, my heart stops. On it, I see the most extraordinary thing I had ever witnessed. I have no idea where the picture was taken, but it depicts what I thought could easily be a father and
daughter. Something in the kid’s eyes tells me she is the progeny of the man in the picture. Both look very happy, with grins on their faces as wide as can be and hands waving in gestures of ‘Hello’. The father has his arm resting on his daughter’s shoulder. But what really catches my attention is where the two are standing. I see a city of white in the background, an incredible display of towers and squared buildings, unscarred and untarnished by strife or warfare. The sky looks to be completely black, although I can spot faint lights in the darkness. The city appears curved behind them, as if they were standing on a precipice or the crest of a wave and the city stretches below them as if built inside the walls of a crater. On the far edge of it, a blue sphere dominates most of the picture. The sphere is punctuated by white strips of what I can only guess are clouds, although I had never seen anything like these clouds before. My reading skills aren’t anything to be proud of, but I can read things that are written in the Central-Engleshe. On the bottom, over a black strip on the picture, it says simply, “Hope to see you soon!”
I stare at the picture for at least a couple of minutes. Is this our planet? How could these people be above it? How can I get above it? For a while I can neither move nor speak.
“Nothing,” Ty shouts behind me. “There’s fucking nothing! Merde!”
It takes him a second to notice I had found something and walks to my side, the debris crunching underneath his boots. He snatches the picture form my hands and takes a good look at it. He doesn’t look impressed.
“Seen this type of picture before,” he says.
“Really? Where?” I ask. My enthusiasm doesn’t quite catch on and he simply hands the image back to me. “In Francia, there are Museums. They’re filled with junk like this. All sorts of things people pick up and think are somehow important. It’s all in the spirit of us not forgetting the accomplishments of those who came before us or some other merde. All crap if you ask me. You can’t eat or sell any of the things inside. What good are they then? The past!” he spits on the ground. “No such thing, I tell you. There’s only the present and the future,” he claims. “And it’s looking pretty shitty right about now.”
“What are these called?” I ask him. “These things on display which people have made?”
“Don’t know about the machinery and stuff. But the pictures in frames and stuff like that is art.”
The word holds some kind of resonance. I can’t explain it, but it feels… strange.
At first I think to ask more, but something catches my ear. I feel a deep hum saturating the air. It emanates from the outside and I put the picture in my coat pocket as we both rush to the street to try and see the source of it. We don’t notice anything at first. Everything is still, calm with nothing but the sound and us. I have never heard anything like it. Fear grips me.
“What the hell is that?” I ask, looking at the sky. For some reason and at that moment, it feels like the right place to look. I don’t get an answer from Ty and gaze behind me. Ty stands frozen in place. It appears as though something had stopped him mid-stride and is holding him there. Even his clothes are stuck in motion. I walk back to him and notice his brown eyes yet move. They scan about franticly and in fear, his face an expression of sheer terror. A sensation engulfs me that is unlike anything I had ever felt. I can sense the air getting heavier as the sound increases and I find it difficult to move. My muscles strain against the pressure. The smaller hairs on the top of my head spread out in all directions. The sound becomes harmonious and I get the distinct impression like something in spinning in circles at speeds I could never match or even have the capacity to whiteness. I look up to see a small portion of the beige, radioactive mist part with a circular motion. Lighting flashes from the parting mist and stabs crooked daggers into the clouds. A shiny, disk-shaped object swims through the veil and slowly descends towards the soil. In a state between frozen panic and complete fascination, I observe the object. Light glints off its polished surface, refracting in silver halos which seem to permeate from it. The sound never stops, even when the object lands within the small crater dug by the blast. I observe it from atop the depression. I sense eyes watching from within the craft. I begin to see them. Shapes with wide hats and strange eyeballs above their heads. They bend like trees in the wind.
I have no idea how long I stood there – locked in gaze with eyes I cannot see. I notice I had, at some point, taken the image I took from the bank and fished it out of my pocket and am now holding it in my hand. The picture begins to burn, its edges twisting in my grip. I let it go as the flame reaches my fingers. Nothing but ash drifts to the ground. Then, as though someone had cut the sound off and replaced it with known reality, the craft vanishes. I stand convinced I had not blinked to have missed it go, it simply disappeared.
I look back at Ty who had collapsed on the ground. I rush to him and kneel on one knee, try and rouse him. He appears unconscious. While half-occupied by this, I notice a figure to my left, watching me from the far side of town. All I can really see are the black coveralls which the lean figure seems to wear and stands too far to tell anything else. As soon the thing notices me staring back, it turns and walks away, disappears on the road’s bend. I had seen something huge and metallic upon its back. I haul Ty up with little difficulty, throwing him over my shoulder like a sack of meat. His wide-brimmed hat falls to the floor and I pick it up, place it on my own head instead and follow where I last saw the figure in a semi-jog.
CHAPTER 5
