After the Winter (The Silent Earth, Book 1)

by Mark R. Healy

  The Can was narrow, only two or three metres wide. It reeked of burnt things. Burnt wood, burnt chemicals, burnt gasoline, burnt plastics, and other things that I didn’t even want to contemplate. There was a good reason for that. Everything in sight was charred. Tables, chairs, books, you name it. Plastic cups and jugs were half melted, metal tins and canisters stacked against the wall were scorched. There were piles of powder and ash where unrecognisable objects had been incinerated. There were even scorch marks on the arched steel roof.

  “The place has been torched,” I said. “There’s no use going on.”

  “Bullshit,” Jarr spat. “I’ll be the one to make that call.”

  “Hey, did that shotgun blow off your sense of smell, too? Can’t you smell what’s in here?”

  “That’s it,” he goaded, pressing the knife in harder at my throat. “Keep wisecrackin’ and we’ll see how far that gets you.”

  I edged forward, swinging the beam this way and that. Wherever it pointed, it told the same story: a flash fire had ripped through here, roasting everything inside. In such a confined space there would have been no hope of escape. Aside from the main passageway, there were also little nooks on either side, and I could see blackened pallets within, sleeping quarters or personal spaces, I guessed. I didn’t bother going inside them. I just kept shuffling along in a straight line, hoping this would be over soon.

  “How did they even breathe in these things?” I wondered aloud. “Maybe they all suffocated and the fire came later.”

  “No chance,” Jarr said. “There’s vents leading up to the surface. Well disguised up there, mind you. We had two configured for intake and one for output. No chance of suffocation.” Despite his strong words, the tone of his voice indicated that his conviction was wavering.

  We found the first body. There wasn’t much left of it, just another blackened mass in amongst a sea of blackened masses. I recognised the shape of a human skull, however. No question. The remains were piled on the floor behind a metal cabinet.

  “There,” I pointed. “There’s one of your ‘people’. Nothing left but a cinder.”

  “Where?” Jarr demanded. I guided his hand down until he touched the skull. He flinched, then eased his fingers back onto it and gently moved them around. After a few moments he straightened.

  “That’s not a person,” he stated flatly.

  My mouth hung open in astonishment. “What? Oh come on....”

  “Move it,” he said, giving me another shove forward.

  “You have seriously lost your grip on reality,” I said, resisting his manipulations. “I’m telling you there’s nothing here for you.”

  He continued to push at me. “That’s not for you to judge. Now keep going.”

  On we went, further into the bowels of this underground hall of the cremated, finding more and more bodies. They sprawled across the floor of the hall, cowered under tables, lay curled up on pallets. I counted thirteen by the time we reached the end, but I hadn’t bothered to check the nooks. There would likely be more.

  “That’s it, we’ve reached the end,” I said. “There’s nowhere else to look.” As the flashlight began to give out I examined the large piece of machinery that was situated here embedded in the wall. It was most likely the generator. It too was covered in black powder and scorch marks. As the light winked out I turned back to Jarr.

  “Can’t be,” he muttered. “No, it can’t be.”

  “Listen, something bad went down here. Something real bad. My guess is a gas leak. In this confined space, the fire would have torn through here in seconds. No chance to escape.” I shook my head. “I’m sorry.” And at that moment, I was. This couldn’t be easy for him to deal with.

  “No,” he muttered vacantly. “They’re here. They’re resourceful, they’ve just found a place to hide. If we wait here long enough, they’ll come out.”

  “If we wait?” I said, incredulous. “If we wait? What are you talking about?”

  He stepped out into the centre of the passageway, allowing the bulk of his body to block my path, the knife held at the ready like a butcher preparing to carve. I could see the distant light of the hatch over his shoulder.

  “Yes, we wait. You and me.”

  There was a menacing determination in his stance. With his shoulders set, the knife gripped tightly in his hand, it was the look of a man ready for a fight. He was like a gladiator poised in an arena, calmly waiting for the advance of his adversary, singular of purpose and utterly self-assured.

  He wanted me to come at him.

  Panicked, I considered my options. The first was to just wait and see if he relented. See if he came to his senses, realised his folly and backed out of his own accord, let me go on my way. That might take minutes, hours, days. Or longer. It might take forever, and meanwhile, the Marauders were coming. How long had he waited up there just to get back inside? Years. His patience might be limitless.

  I could rush him, try to knock the knife out of his hands, or just shoulder him out the way. It might work, but I was worried about that blade. One lucky swing would be all it took to do some serious damage. If he didn’t kill me he might still inflict enough damage to prevent me from climbing out of here.

  I didn’t like either option. But something told me he never had any intention of letting me out again. After all, he viewed me as a ‘threat’ to his people, one that now possessed the code for accessing the door. There’s no way he’d let me wander off with that knowledge.

  I was going to have to take things into my own hands. While neither of the first two options were particularly appealing, perhaps there was a third. Subterfuge.

  As gently and as quietly as I could, I reached onto the table behind me, carefully groping for an item to pick up. Something I could throw. My finger brushed against something that felt like a stick. Carefully I gathered it and held it firmly in my hand. With a degree of revulsion I realised it was a scorched human bone.

  “Uh... hey,” I said hesitantly in a hushed tone. “Hey, I think you were right. I think I can see someone.”

  “What?” Jarr said, astonished.

  “Yeah, I can. I can see them,” I lied. “They’re here in this end nook.” Even though he couldn’t see the gesture, I pointed past the generator into the small room beside it.

  Jarr took a shuddering step forward. “I knew it,” he breathed, his voice a mixture of joy and relief. “I knew they’d be here.”

  “It’s a little girl,” I said. Luckily, Jarr had no idea that my flashlight had already run out of juice and that I couldn’t see a thing. “A little blonde girl.”

  “Marni?” Jarr called. He took another step forward. “Roona? It’s me, Jarr. You don’t have to be afraid, sweetheart. I’m here. I’ve come back for you.”

  With the lie sold, I tossed the bone gently into the nook. It thumped into the wall and landed on the pallet.

  “There! She’s moving!” I exclaimed. “She’s trying to get away!”

  “Sweetheart, wait,” Jarr bawled, brushing past me and stumbling toward the nook. “Don’t leave me. Don’t leave me again!”

  There was something in his voice that caught in my chest - a harrowing despair, a loneliness. A sense of guilt. The knowledge that he had failed in his duty to protect these people, and that he had been forsaken for decades because of it. It was entwined in every word. Deep down, there was a part of him that knew. Knew everything. And yet he couldn’t bring himself to face it, to own up to it. He’d pushed it way down inside and tried to bury it. Every day that he’d waited was like another shovel full of dirt, another inch further down. Down into the deep dark earth where the light could never touch.

  But now it had been disturbed. It came scratching its way back up to the surface like the undead, a thing that wouldn’t die, that couldn’t be killed.

  But that feeling of pity for him was fleeting. I turned and ran.

  He understood the ruse when he heard my footsteps thumping down the passageway. He loosed a scream of
rage, his dual pitch voice simultaneously a guttural roar and an ear piercing shriek. I heard him stomping after me, heard the knife scraping on walls and tables as he swung it madly about. I refused to look back.

  I tripped over one of those burnt corpses lying prone on the floor, unseen in the darkness, and went sprawling, banging my chin on a chair, ash and dust flying everywhere. I was dazed. I had to get up. I clutched at the chair for purchase.

  I could hear him. He was almost on me.

  I whirled to my feet, threw the chair on the floor. It clattered and skidded behind me. I kept running. My satchel flapped around my back and shoulders like a mad thing. I heard him stumble into the chair. It clanged away noisily against the wall, but he didn’t go down.

  The ladder was close now, bathed in white light from above. A stairway to the heavens.

  I threw myself at it, caught at the highest rung I could reach, got my legs pumping. Jarr hit a moment later. The vibrations that coursed up and down the metal rungs of the ladder felt as though someone had wailed into it with a sledgehammer. I looked up as I scrambled. The top seemed an eternity away.

  Jarr was coming after, frenetic, snarling like an animal, chopping with the knife on every second rung, sending out another wave of vibrations with every stroke.

  Ten rungs to go. So close now.

  His hand brushed my foot. I pulled both of my legs upward just as a slash of the knife whizzed past. I felt the air of it.

  Five.

  “Nnnggaaarrrrr!” he screamed in frustration.

  Two. One.

  I vaulted out the top of the hatch and in one movement pirouetted, bringing the flat of my hand down on the hatch with all my might. Jarr appeared there briefly, his ruined face demonic, a beast crawling out of the bowels of hell if ever there was one. He attempted to slash at me, but the weight of the hatch came crashing down on him mid-swipe. It closed with a thunderous boom, and through the reverberations I could hear his body caroming off the rungs, into the wall of the shaft and back again, over and over, until finally it hit the floor of the Can far below with a final tumultuous crash.

  19

  I ran. I ran and I kept running for hours on end. The dead trees of the forest streaked past in a blur. I stumbled many times, got back up. Ran again. Orange rays of light poked through the tall needles of wood, casting elongated shadows across the reddened earth. Still I ran. I splashed through another stream without pause or any measure of care. I just kept going.

  It was night when I stopped. I was brought to a sudden halt by the bole of a massive tree that jumped out of the darkness, offering no quarter, and I ended up on the flat of my back, staring into the night. I coughed and moaned, sobbed, scrubbed at my face, overwrought.

  How had I allowed this to happen?

  It was stupidity from the outset. I should have backed away from that clearing at first sight, found another path and continued on my journey. Why did I bother trying to help Jarr in the first place? There was no possible benefit in the interaction, nothing he could offer. That was clear from the moment I laid eyes on him.

  Maybe I was still trying to compensate for my failure to help Max. That, and the fact that there was a part of me that was driven by a strong sense of empathy for the wretches who shared this world with me, this silent earth. No matter how depraved, how lost, how demented they might be, I figured that there was still a part of them that was good. A part that remembered, that could feel happiness, that was worth saving.

  I had to believe that about them as much as I had to believe it about myself.

  But at some point, I had to draw the line. The risk was too great to continue with such trust, such openness. I was so close to my goal, to that shining future that lay in the west. To lose it all now would be such a waste.

  From now on, I decided, I wouldn’t be helping anyone but myself.

  When morning came I took some time to go through the satchel. I checked every item in turn. Nothing broken, nothing lost. I was fortunate, more fortunate than I deserved. I’d come through relatively unscathed and would be able to pick up my journey where I’d left off, with nothing more than a few scrapes and bumps to show for it.

  At this time of day the sun was still just a red-golden promise on the horizon. I’d found that sunsets and sunrises were always a deeper hue since the Winter, owing to the trace amounts of soot in the atmosphere that hadn’t yet settled. They were the last vestiges of those bleak days when sunrises had existed only in memories and in the breath of uttered prayers.

  I steadied myself on the trunk of the giant gum tree that had halted my flight the night before and got to my feet. The red earth was all over me, in my hair, on my satchel, streaking my clothes. I dusted it off. It caught the early morning light as it drifted away in great puffs. I made sure to be careful with my trousers. They were getting decidedly holey and might not stand up to a vigorous beating. Now that my attention was drawn to it, my shirt was beginning to suffer the same fate. I made a mental note that I’d need to seek out some new gear in the next house I came to, since I’d run out of spares.

  I rounded the tree. Just ahead of me, towering amid the trees and shining in the glow of the sunrise was the giant frame of a war mech.

  I froze, not for fear of the mech, but because of the unexpectedness of it standing there. Under the cover of dark I hadn’t seen it the night before, and now here it was, a hulking metal behemoth right under my nose. It rose up between the trees, broad shouldered and maybe three times the height of a man, arms and legs thicker than most of the boles near which it stood. Behind it, a steep rocky incline effectively masked its presence from the other direction.

  So what on earth was it doing out here?

  I moved forward. Unmanned, it was of no danger to me. These were never built to operate without a pilot. Essentially they were like an extension of specially trained soldiers’ arms and legs, another weapon in their arsenal. As I approached I could see the cockpit was not empty. The skeletal form of the pilot lay half out of it, ragged clothes holding the bones together, as if he or she had attempted to crawl out of the machine but died trying.

  I stood at the foot of the mech and looked up. The rusted metal casing glistened with morning condensation, and, remarkably, there was moss growing on it. All over it, in fact. In most places the covering was thin, but under the great squarish forearms that extended horizontal to the ground it grew thicker, hanging like a little blue-green beard. I reached up and ran my hand along it, felt the wonderful texture of it. The feel was reminiscent of soft curls of baby hair.

  The vision of it standing here, this great hairy giant, was almost surreal. Where had it come from? Why had the pilot brought it here? I made a slow circle around the base of the machine. Its thick, elongated legs were in the rest position, slightly bent at the knee, armour plating jutting out, chipped and cracked, the traces of long forgotten wars. One arm seemed to be equipped with a rocket launcher, the other with both a chain gun and a retractable three-pronged claw used for manipulating items that might get in the way. A narrow midsection broadened out to a blocky, pronounced chest to accommodate the cockpit. Two shoulder mounted turbines jutted out the back, allowing the mech to make small jumps during operations.

  The oxidation on the chassis had rendered the markings unreadable. I couldn’t tell where this thing might have originated or to whom it had belonged. It all added to the mystery of the whole scenario. Completing my inspection and stepping back again, it seemed more like a stone monument than an artifact of war, as if an ancient tribe had carved out blocks of solid granite and dragged them here, erecting them one on top of the other until it towered above the earth like a colossus. Its glistening skin and shaggy coating only heightened the illusion of it being more than just a lost relic of the conflict.

  In the White Summer, they had been fearsome machines. I’d seen them marching through the city, a line of ten or more plodding thunderously through downtown, their torsos rotating this way and that as they scanned the environmen
t. A show of military power. The turbines, when activated, were deafening, the sound of the mechs’ feet crashing back to the ground bone jarring.

  This intimidation was not coincidental. It was meant to strike fear into the hearts of enemies. These monstrous, lethal creatures of war somehow tapped into a primal human instinct, with their predatory curves and cruel contours, their deafening roars and their ability to destroy with barest of effort. They could wilt the hearts of grown men with just a whirl in their direction or by the sound of their passage.

  They were also designed to raise the morale of allies. What better to boost the confidence of those at home than to see these fearsome machines striding past, on their way to war in some far off place where they would wreak havoc? These savage metallic creatures were tamed and compelled to our bidding, to jump at every command, obey our every whim. How could we lose with these on our side?

  But I never felt comforted seeing them march past. The thought of them did not bring me solace as I lay in my bed at night, the sound of distant bombings rattling my window frames. I only ever felt appalled. Appalled that we humans were capable of creating weapons such as this to unleash upon one another. Appalled that we could imagine such a nightmare and bring it into existence.

  I left the old relic and moved on, finding my way around the rock wall and up onto the ridge, and from there following the far slope downward on a gentle incline. I could see the end of the forest below at last as it opened out into another sandy plain. I stopped while I had the advantage of elevation and surveyed the terrain with my binoculars. The wind was picking up out there on the flat. Gusts and whirlwinds whipped across into where the forest ended, creating dancing flurries of sand among the tree stumps. I pulled the cloth from my satchel and wrapped it around my mouth and nose, attempting to cover the wound on my neck as well. It was going to be another tough day out there battling across it. I’d be in the open and more vulnerable to attack from the Marauders.

  But it was another step towards home.