Of the Shadows' Own Accord (The Green and Pleasant Land)
Oliver Kennedy
Copyright 2014 by Oliver Kennedy
Chapter one, Crash
Something moves outside the window
Does it see me? Does it see me?
Something moves up and down the hall
Does it hear me? Does it hear me?
Something's shadow falls over my bed
Does it know me? Does it know me?
A.B.
Hello. My name is Annabel Benyion. I am going to tell you about my journey. How I came to be here, all the things I saw between the now and then. He sits opposite me at the moment. The giant, the blackwing, the silent, brooding saviour. He polishes the pistols, the long silver cannons which deal such beautiful destruction. I will sit quietly in his company, for within the sphere of the calm colossus I feel safe, I am safe. It all started some months ago, as I sat screaming in the back of a car...
...The twisting of metal. The breaking of glass. The smell of burned rubber. The hiss of airbags. The thud and crack of bones striking hard surfaces at high speeds. We were trying to escape you see. Escaping is rarely something done in a relaxed way.
“Dad.”
“Mum.”
Neither of them respond. They are both dead. As dead as dead can be these days. Dad leans over the steering wheel which has smashed his ribcage to pieces. Mothers blood drips down over the dashboard.
“Dad.”
“Mum.”
We need to escape now. We need to run away just like they said on the radio. How long do I sit here? Outside the tinted windows of our luxury car I would say the world is ending. A world has ended in here as well. The causes of our crash are getting to their feet, they stagger, imploring arms outstretched.
Bloody knuckles hammer at the tinted windows. I know not which ones are worse. The ones with grey, black veined faces who leer and growl. Or the faceless ones who have had their features gnawed off by their cadaverous comrades while they were waiting to turn. Gore and grey matter smear on the glass as their demand for sustenance grows more frantic. The windscreen gives way.
They do not take the time to drag my parents from the vehicle. They seep in through the broken glass like a thick mist of tangled limbs and gnashing teeth. I put my hands to my ears to block out the sounds as skin rips and bones crack. I can still hear, gurgling noises punctuated by growls as the undead vie for supremacy at the dinner table. The odd string of bloody goo splatters over me. My eyes are squeezed shut. But nothing will block out my imagination, my minds eye in which grey hands are reaching for me.
Then there comes a different sound. A high pitched screeching followed by a low boom. The minds eye sees a giant, whose mighty footsteps cause the car to shake and rock. The grey hands have not reached me. More screeching, more booming, the crackling hiss of fire being born. There is an acrid smell in the air. That same smell has hung over the city for weeks now; it is the smell of war, the scent of a weapon that is working hard and breathing heavily.
I turn towards the door. I look only at the door. I do not need to look at the front seat. My daydreams will paint the picture of the remnants of my parents bodies for me, images I never saw will be plastered on the corridors of my memory forever. For we are at a point of union now, a point at which the worse things we can imagine and the real world have met. It no longer matters whether you think it or see it, the horror is identical.
As I exit the car I see the helicopter swooping away. The ground around the car has been churned up by the rockets. Alas it was no giant after all, another fairy tale fades, swallowed by the steely miasma of the collapsing world. The mud still smoulders as I run through it. My saviours will never know that they rescued me, nor will they be aware of the life they condemned me to with their salvation. I glance back once. At the ruined black car and the mounds of bodies in front of it. There are bits and pieces scattered across the earth, chunks of bone and metal that have fused together in the heat.
The helicopter is far away now, it has joined the flock which courses through the city skies, trying to save us, trying to roll back the tide.
I have nothing to cling to now. Just a broken heart, these tears, would that I could fall into a well of them and drown. But the well is overflowing with grief which would flood me back into the world. So I run.
I run up Prince Charles road towards the roundabout and across it without needing to check to see if there is traffic. Black clouds stare down at me, frowning at my flight. I cross Charlton way into the apparent safety of the trees.
This a deer park. Dad used to take me here often. In the days when we could go outside. The deer were so tame that a steady hand might feed them straight from it. Over thick tree roots I stumble, low branches grab at my hair and thorny bushes lash at my unprotected legs with their spikes and barbs.
I reach a clearing and see the deer. The beautiful creatures, they are graceful, and peaceful, they are a symbol. They are all lying down. Thick layers of their blood coat the grass. Bloody cadavers kneel over them, feasting. The deer have died, as have the memories.
I stand stock still. One of them notices me, it looks up with bloody slobber dripping from its maw onto the body of the doe it is devouring.
I was good at cross country in school. This is something for which I am profoundly grateful as the Wilderness deer park disappears beneath my fleet feet and I move into Greenwich Park. The scene here is hardly different. I see the occasional live person soon to be not so. What can I do to help? Live, remember them perhaps, it is a weak promise, but it is all I have to offer. For all I have in my mind is to run.
The dusty grass throws up a thin cloud of dirt as I move over it at speed, for the ground was much in need of a drink, though it is more likely to be quenched by blood than rain such is the weather of the world right now.
As I reach the fence on the far side of the park a cadaver lunges for me. I am like a cat as I scale the barrier between death and a reprieve. All he takes is a shred of the once pretty white dress, which is now caked in dirt and the splattered contents of my parents corpses. I need to stop thinking about them.
I am the grounds of the National Maritime Museum. This place always made me think of old men with wispy moustaches, standing in the sun twiddling them and talking about the state of the empire. What would they think of the empire now I wonder?
I am glad to see more of the living here. They run from in between the ornate pillars. From underneath magnificent, carved marble lintels they emerge. Some of them look like students. They are being chased by a professor, who seeks to teach them one last lesson. They will not learn it from him, for several of them turn, they grab bricks and metal posts and batter him. More cadavers emerge from the buildings.
I join the tide of unfortunate tourists and students who have been driven from their hiding place. They are running through the west wing of the museum. I am amazed to see some people turning with cameras in hand and photograph the staggering pursuers who lunge across the quad after us. Why would you take pictures of such things? For which future that will never be are you hoping to preserve the memories? Where will you find yourself if you have the time or the inclination to peruse such images? Our minds will recall with perfectly clarify this horror, and where they fail it is a good thing, each moment of this nightmare that we forget can only be a good thing.
I pay no heed to the lovingly cared for exhibits. I have no time to read the notes on the displays, I have no history, for I am trying to preserve this small piece of present that is mine. Suddenly we are outside. The throng of which I was so
gratefully a part breaks up. Within moments the mass has splintered, there is no cohesion to our panic.
I am on the streets now. My feet ache in my white trainers, every muscle burns and my lungs are pleading with me to stop. I keep going. It is what they would have wanted. I run past the tooting cars who are going nowhere. I run north, for no other reason than that is where a number of others appear to be going. Explosions rock the city. Windows which have seen decades of rumbling vehicles and passers by are broken by the noise and the sonic vibrations.
Plumes of fire and smoke erupt on every horizon like miniature volcanoes. All of a sudden I run out of road. In front me the great grey worm that is the river Thames rushes by. I look to my right and head for the bustling ferry port. There are many of the living here. They jostle for a place on the ferry they think will save them.
“Women and children, women and children!!” bellows the red faced man in the life jacket standing by the gangplank. The looks on the faces of the many men gathered here seem to show that they disagree with such sentiments. The red faced man will brook no arguments though, nor will the large revolver in his hand.
I feel a pair of hands grab me by the underarms and thrust me towards the ferry. I stumble down the gangplank towards a vessel filled with sorry souls just like me. I clamber through the wall of tears. There are several shots from the dock. The red faced captain leaps aboard the ferry and knocks the boarding plank into the water. The engine hums into life, a large pole prods at the dock wall to propel us away, then prods again at a few pitiable souls who are attempting to board by force.
The ferry is not large. This was a leisurely transit from the south bank to the north for those who did not feel like taking the train or the bridge. With a maximum capacity of fifty people, it lists and pitches badly in the water with almost three times that number clinging to every pole and long wooden bench.
I look at the hundreds still on the ferry port. Some of them stay where they are, staring forlornly at the overloaded ferry. Many others drift off this way and that, it will not be long until the cadavers arrived in force, or worse. Then they will run, for but a scratch is all they would need, but a single bite and they shall turn and turn and cease to be. But they would never cease thereafter. They would forever walk, and kill, and eat, and walk, and kill, and eat.
They are not office workers any more, they are not scientists, or students, or bin men, or bankers, or anything else. They are waiting to be victims, they are not survivors, survival is many tomorrows away. I lose sight of them. I would later think about the person who lifted me up through the crowd and deposited me on the the gangplank, I never even saw their face.
Dad used to say that cities like London were giant cogs which helped to drive the world. Well now the machine was broken and the cogs span wildly and brought death to those caught up in them.
“Mum, dad, mum, dad, mum, dad, mum, dad.”
A kindly woman strokes my hair. She speaks soothing words. Only then do I realise it was me calling out for mum and dad. I do not know at which point I sank to the deck of the ferry, but here I lay amidst the destruction of my home town.
“Mum, dad, mum, dad, mum, dad, mum, dad.”
Jet planes screech overhead. That which was once a symbol of power has now become a sign of desperation. The RAF was bombing its own capital city, destroying all to deny the cadaver.
Suddenly there are screams where before there had been only sobbing. I sit up and looked through the crowd. All along the riverbank there are hundreds of cadavers. Many up them leap into the water and sink beneath the murk, they want us, such is the totality of their hunger that they have neither the sense nor reason to understand the water, they see flesh and they would follow it through the fires of hell.
Then I see the reason for the screams. Up ahead on the south bank is a construction site. A large container ship whose deck is stacked up with building material is moored there. Hundreds of people are swarming onto the ship trying to escape the host of cadavers appearing from the direction of the O2 Arena. There is no armed man standing by to control the crowds here, it's a free for all and there are evidently already far too many people on board the cargo ship which is listing badly.
Then there is a roar of engines, the bellowing of the horn and a huge wrenching sound as the struggling vessel pulls violently away from the riverbank, too violently.
“No, no, no, no, no” shouts our captain who looks back from the tiller with panic on his face. We see it only a few seconds after him. The container ship pulls out across the river, it begins to turn and it begins to flip onto its side, right in front of us. The captain steers the ferry to as far over near the north bank as possible, maybe, just maybe we can squeeze through the gap and avoid the stricken vessel. Some maybes just aren't meant to be.
Horror seizes me as I see hundreds of people plunging into the water of the Thames before being pushed under by the body of the ship rolling on top of them. I am equally horrified as the prow of the construction ship smashes into the front of the ferry. We rock, we dip, we flip and are flung towards the water with tremendous force. The ferry tips over onto the sandy shore at the foot of the river wall, and for a few merciful moments I am plunged into darkness...
Women and children first, women and children into the water...
When I come to I can hear the tail end of the screams which had accompanied me into the dark. My blessed sojourn from consciousness was all too brief. They say there is such a thing as flight or fight, an instinctive reaction to events which kicks in when we are faced with extreme circumstance. It works. There is blood on my hands as they reached for the rusty iron bar which forms the first rung on a ladder up the river wall. One by one I clamber up.
I am getting good at not looking back, but as I scurry up over onto the riverbank I spare a glance. There are still hundreds of people in the water. Some of them have started to turn. It is a scene of utter chaos, which does not seem out of place in a city that is collapsing in on itself, in a nation that's disintegrating, on a world which will continue to turn regardless.
I am just next to a large lock which leads to one of the Isle of Dogs inner docks. There is no time to take in the scenery. The time for running is back again, the currents of the world had carried me such a short way.
There are containers, and offices. Live people fight with dead people, dead people fight with each other over the remnants of the living. Tanks. People on fire. A row of dead policemen with riot shields scattered about them. Creaking tyre tracks, burning buildings, billowing smoke. Run, run Annabel, run for them, run for you, run for life. Don't stop, don't ever stop tiptoeing at high speed through this tragedy, the stage is so busy that no one will notice you.
Then suddenly there is greenery. Suddenly I am in the shadow of true giants of the modern world, steel and glass behemoths who breath fire from their thousands of broken eyes.
This used to be what I could see from my bedroom window. Dad used to tell me that I was lucky, he told me that places like this were man made inspirations. Dad said a lot of things, I think I will spend the rest of my life sifting through his little sayings, finding out which ones were wisdom and which ones were opinion.
The banks are burning. They loom all around me, I am in this tiny green space surrounded by the leering towers which teeter on the brink. Through the windows I can see thousands of things which used to be people. They reach down towards me, they drawl and slaver out of broken windows. They moan and screech. There are other things there too, beings which were never human in the first place, the dread in the middle of the nightmare.
The jets roar past again. Weaving between the towers unleashing destruction as they go. Missiles hit the already unsteady feet of the giants who start to fall towards me, bringing their hungry inhabitants with them. I run. I run towards familiarity, towards the sign. The red, the white and the blue. One step, then two steps, then three steps, then four. Down into the dark of Canary Wharf I go, down into the underground as the over gr
ound comes crashing down on top of it.
Dust and metal and glass follow me down the steps into the tube station. One little ripple in time, one world, many bad decisions. The walls have come tumbling down. My name is Annabel Benyion. This is my ninth year in the world, I saw too little before it was gone.
Of the Shadows Own Accord (The Green and Pleasant Land, Volume 3) Page 1
