After the Winter (The Silent Earth, Book 1)

by Mark R. Healy

  20

  For a long time the world had been ash. Just soot and falling ash. There was a cloying mist that never went away, a flurry of grey that fell from the tenebrous sky, as if the clouds that had once graced our skies were now corrupted, shedding their rotten scales piece by piece and allowing them to fall slowly to earth.

  Years later, when the sunlight began to return, I could not comprehend what the world had become. It wasn’t the Earth anymore. Our vistas of green and blue, our towering cities of glass and steel, our beautiful forests had been reduced to this - a place that looked more like the surface of the moon, and was just as inhospitable to life. It couldn’t be the same place.

  But it was. This was home. Our home. We’d taken a torch to it, reduced it to cinders, to an achromatic, alien world where nothing lived, and in which almost nothing moved. All that remained was the faint stir of ash in the breeze and the shuffle of lost souls like me, trudging through the dregs of a world that was just a memory.

  It was like that for years. Maybe that was the worst time of all, that epoch where I wasn’t sure if the world would shed this putrid membrane of ash and soot and return to its old self, or if this was just the way it was going to be. Forever.

  But slowly, over time, the wind and the rain did their work. The ash began to scatter to the winds. With each storm that passed a little more of it washed away. A little more vibrance poked through that coating of black and grey. Like a discarded cocoon, the ash was eventually shirked aside.

  Out on the plains, I often thought of that ash. Of those times. I was acutely aware that, as hateful as those days had been, they had been a product of something else. The destructive power of the Summer. The wrath of Man against himself.

  This flat slab of desert had not always been this way. Evidence of this was all around me, little clues like bread crumbs dropped across the wasteland. A twisted street sign, bent at an acute angle, the crumbled wall of a building, scattered foundations protruding from the earth, unrecognisable bits of metal and melted glass buried in the sand. It all added up to one thing: a blast zone. There had been a major strike here.

  I remembered seeing blasts like this on the horizon during the Summer. Huge columns of black smoke the size of whole cities would twist into the sky for weeks on end like great caliginous trees, their sooty branches streaking across the heavens from horizon to horizon as if they were as limitless as the sky itself. And when the sun heated that smoke and it lifted into the stratosphere, there was no bringing it down. It was too high for the rains to reach it. These were the progenitors of Winter.

  I scanned the terrain with my binoculars. There, further afield, I could see more shapes between waves of heat rising from the desert. Husks of slanted buildings were spread out sporadically like a caravan of travellers bent under the harsh yellow sky. I saw the rise of tangled knots of metal that might have once been the trusses of a bridge. Most likely, where I was standing had been close to ground zero. Those structures in the distance would have suffered less of the impact.

  A gust of wind caused me to hunker down and shield my face. It whipped around my ears and stung my cheek with sand. When it had passed I stood and raised the binoculars again, but the view seemed different now, shifted, as if the caravan had moved on and new stragglers had moved in to take their place.

  The desert was like that. Distant shapes on the horizon often came and went, seemingly of their own accord. I could never decide if they were real or just products of my own mind, imaginary shapes created where none really existed.

  I panned the binoculars to the west, to see a row of small bumps that stretched across the desert. More buildings? Marauders? With the sun dropping lower it was difficult to be sure from this angle. I decided I would head south so that I could gain a better viewpoint from which to study them. Most likely they were remains of buildings, but with the Marauders around I wanted to be sure.

  I travelled southwest for a couple of kilometres, keeping low, with one eye on the compass and the other on those odd little bumps to the north. With the sun located in a more accommodating position, I raised the binoculars again. This time I could make them out more clearly. It was definitely a convoy of vehicles, that much was for certain. I identified the bulky shapes of transports as well as others whose purpose I couldn’t quite determine. I thought I could see the outline of mounted turrets atop several of them but this may have been my imagination. All told I counted at least twenty of them.

  They didn’t look like Marauder rides. Those were always lean, built for speed and manoeuvrability, for chasing targets down. These were more like bulky transports, most likely gutted and removed of useful parts long ago. But I had the strangest feeling that these weren’t simply wrecks in the desert. An image formed in my mind of them rolling in from the north, coming to a stop only hours ago as those inside conferred on how to proceed, heat rising from the engines and the smell of gasoline thick in the air. There would be discussions, plans and then finally orders barked. Figures scurrying back to their compartments and kicking over engines, the convoy swinging out in an arc and then turning southward, straight toward me, headlights blazing in the desert twilight.

  “Get a grip, there’s no one there,” I muttered, but I couldn’t resist raising the binoculars again and leaving them there for minutes on end while I searched for the tiniest hint of movement. Flaps of loose canvas drifted in the breeze on one of the transports. I kept returning to it, half expecting to see a figure step out from behind it. But there was nothing, just the deepening of shadows as the afternoon wore on.

  Eventually I turned and got on my way again, giving the convoy a wide berth south. I walked on longer than usual as night fell, unable to shake the feeling that any minute I would hear the roar of engines on the breeze and the rumble of wheels on the earth as the convoy bore down upon me.

  21

  Waves crashed on the shore. The sand sparkled far below, curving along the cove like a broad smile, a dazzling white crescent set against the deep blue of an ocean that stretched as far as the eye could see. Pearly outlines of breakers winked ephemerally before they emptied themselves noisily on the beach. Time and again they threw themselves forward as if trying to escape the confines of the ocean, only to be dragged back down the beach to be one again with the sea.

  The whole vista seemed like something out of a dream, such was the contrast to what had come before. A little slice of paradise in the most unlikely of places. But here it was, undeniable and in broad daylight.

  The metronomic ebb and flow of the tide was hypnotic. It held me entranced, the smell of salt strong in my nostrils as I stood perched on the cliff high above the shoreline. Not far away to the north, the massive frame of a Grid spire sprouted out of the earth like a lighthouse, towering so high that the peak of it disappeared into the clouds.

  Its twisting shaft was dull and inert. Once, radiant pulses of energy had coursed from base to summit, day and night, the manifestation of data pumping like blood through its innards. Transmissions to distant spires, each a thread in the web that comprised the Grid.

  An idyllic location worth savouring. One to remember. But I shouldn’t be here.

  I’d come too far south. Way too far south.

  I wasn’t sure where I’d gone off track. Looking back on it, I figured I must have overcompensated while trying to avoid the convoy, and as a result I’d ended up here. It was not an altogether regrettable mistake. To see the water and the sand, to hear the gentle whisper of waves on the beach was something in which I could take comfort. It was almost like experiencing a slice of the old world, a slice of normality. The sea didn’t look so different from what it always had, unlike the land. There were no cities to destroy out there, no deserts to be created. At least on the surface it seemed unchanged by the conflict, indifferent to the actions of humans.

  A little way south I could see a comfortable descent down to the shoreline, and I weighed up the decision of whether to take a detour there. On the one hand it was
an unnecessary diversion - on the other, there was no sign of danger, and it might do me good to take a walk on the beach. Rejuvenate my depleted spirit.

  “Why not?” I murmured.

  I made my way down the path. At the bottom, I stopped for a moment and shielded my eyes against the glare of the beach. There was nothing but the sound of the waves meeting the sand and the hollow whisper of the wind about the cliffs.

  I removed my boots at the bottom of the cliff and wedged them into the satchel, where they bulged out through the top of the flaps, unable to be fully accommodated within. I stepped out onto the powdery dry sand and stood for a moment, allowing the heat of it to soak in through the soles of my feet, feeling the grainy texture between my toes. I’d seen enough hot sand to last a lifetime in my travels, but it was odd how the context altered the experience. Here on the beach, the sensation was reassuring and decidedly pleasant. It felt right. Out there in the desert it evoked the opposite feelings. There was something malign about the sand out there, something poisonous. It was like a disease, a cancer that spread across the land and swallowed everything that had once been beautiful and decent. And yet, when I knelt and felt the sand of this beach slip through my fingers, it wasn’t so different.

  Perception changes everything, I thought.

  I stomped across the dunes, my feet making little squeaking sounds in the sand. The waves were close now, and much louder, and a fine spray of mist clung to the air along the water’s edge. I slowed my progress as the grit beneath my feet became firmer with moisture, and stopped a few paces away from the frothy outline of the tide. I decided it would be a very bad idea to have seawater gushing into the wound on my leg and corroding the alloys within.

  I crouched on my haunches and watched the waves slide up the beach, depositing tiny pebbles and other detritus with each sweep. I scanned out across the water, to the edges of the blue horizon. It was serene, untroubled by the problems of the world, but still hauntingly lonely. I felt like I’d travelled to the edge of the world, having crossed through every part of it and found it empty. I’d reached its limits. There was no more.

  Leaning forward, I scooped up a handful of sand and began to pick through it. There were little shells and bits of coral aplenty. I gathered and dumped successive handfuls, finding a little more each time: tiny smooth shells, pearlescent on the outside and lilac inside; corrugated, fan-like shells of black, pink and brown; orange and white spiral shells; shells with bumps, cracks and gnarled edges.

  I made a little pile of them beside me. Leaning further forward, I scooped up a handful that had been freshly deposited by a frothy wave and had to wait as the seawater dribbled out of my hand, sculpting a little mound of wet sand between my feet as it did. When it had cleared I began to push it apart. Another perfectly formed spiral, smaller than the others, went in the pile. My finger met something squishy, and, curious, I smoothed away the sand around it.

  Approximately the size of my thumbnail, partially transparent, bluish around the tip, it was unmistakably a piece of organic material, most likely part of a jellyfish. Excited, I got to my feet and dunked it into the water to clear away the rest of the sand. Yes, there was no mistake about it. This was part of a sea creature.

  I raised my eyes again to the ocean and pondered the implications. Most of our simulations had suggested that marine life would be adversely affected by the Winter, just as land-based life had been. The impact of soot in the atmosphere on light filtration created just as many problems out in the sea, undercutting photosynthesis in coral reefs as well as mangroves and sea grass, creating a flow-on effect for the whole ecosystem. However, there was no way this chunk of jellyfish could have stayed intact for decades - it would surely have disintegrated by now.

  The only conclusion I could reach was that there were some sea creatures that had survived.

  It was a remarkable revelation, and one that was totally unexpected. I began to pace further along the shoreline looking for evidence of more life, whether it be another jellyfish, a strand of seaweed, or anything else I could find. At one point I thought I saw furtive movements out in the dunes - a tiny ghost crab perhaps. I made haste across the sand but, after much searching, could find no trace of the crab or its burrow. Perhaps it had just been wishful thinking.

  Either way, I knew that this was a hugely important discovery. Finding the weed back in Perish had indicated that plant life was returning, which was an important first step, but evidence of animal life was perhaps even more astonishing. It meant that there was at least one ecosystem out there still active, which did not need to be rebuilt from scratch, and that there were still habitats where life was continuing on as it always had.

  It reinforced to me that there was still reason to be optimistic about the future. When I returned home and entered my human body once again, I wouldn't necessarily be returning to a world that was sterile and uninhabited.

  This was another sign that the worst was over. Another reason for me to reach home as quickly as I could.

  It was getting late by the time I’d grown tired of searching and, without further success, I decided it was time to move on. I gathered my things and started back up the cliff, pausing now and then to gaze out to sea, hoping that I might see a sign of something out there apart from the undulating waves. I had no such luck. I was perhaps a little disappointed, but still thankful for my serendipitous find earlier.

  I camped near the spire, laying back on the earth to stare up its towering reach. It was breathtaking, even stripped of its former glory, seeming every bit as high as the ocean was wide. The wind had picked up and now it blew in off the sea in great gusts, swirling around the spire and creating distant sounds of creaking metal from far up its length. In the depths of the twilight sky I could see it sway ever so slightly.

  Tomorrow I’d be heading north.

  22

  I sat watching the camp for hours.

  The binoculars had surely made circular impressions around my eyes by now, such was the duration I’d spent pressing them to my face. For the umpteenth time I raised them and watched the shredded tents flapping in the gale that whipped across the wasteland. There were no signs of occupants, no noises apart from that insistent fluttering of canvas dancing about in the wind.

  I sat back in the trench, my little hidey-hole, and reassessed my next movements. Initially, I figured I would just walk around the cluster of tents and be on my way. There was no safe place to conceal my passage however, as the terrain was flat on either side for some distance. If they had binoculars of their own, they’d have a very good chance of spotting me. That in turn would necessitate a pretty hefty change of course.

  There was the matter of clothing, however. My situation in that regard was becoming a little more dire now. A tear in my trousers was letting in more gunk than I wanted, especially around the region of my wound. My shirt, too, was starting to come apart and I’d run out of spares. Synthetic skin was relatively hardy, but it was not indestructible. Given enough time the sun would eventually break it down, causing it to peel and thin out and then rupture, as it had in several other spots on my body. That in turn allowed more water and grit into the inner workings of my anatomy, causing further complications.

  I needed this body to keep working for a while yet. I needed to look after it where possible. It was the only thing I had to carry me home to my real body.

  And that was why I sat here for so long, considering the camp, and the possibility that I might find clothing within. It had been a while since I’d crossed a city or even a sizeable township, and for the moment this rudimentary conglomeration of tents was my best option.

  It seemed utterly deserted. As far as targets for exploration went, it was a good option. Out in the middle of nowhere, it was an unlikely spot for someone to occupy. My first guess was that it was either a secluded military outpost or a field hospital that had been erected during the White Summer. But if so, what was it doing out here? Where were the military transports, the supply veh
icles? It all seemed a bit haphazard to be anything so well organised. Perhaps it had been hastily abandoned and the tents left where they stood in the rush.

  Whatever the case, I wanted to be extra careful before approaching it. During this extended surveillance I’d conducted, I’d been able to assess every tent in turn. They were all in bad shape. There was nothing much they could conceal now in this condition.

  I climbed out of the trench and placed the binoculars in the satchel. I stood there in plain sight for a few moments, but no madmen came tearing out of the camp wielding machetes. A promising start.

  I closed the distance quickly between the trench and the camp and stood between the ruptured folds of the first tent, peering down the gap of bare earth that seemed to serve as the main thoroughfare. There were only about a dozen tents in total, some nothing more than errant poles waving around in the breeze, others twisted flaps of green canvas, falling apart and half buried in sand. I stood very still and listening for a couple of minutes. Nothing. No response to my footsteps across the ground, no mutter of voices nearby. No sentries revealed by my new angle of observation.

  Stepping lightly into the first tent, I got to work with my investigation. It only took a few seconds for me to realise I would find nothing of value in this one. A portable folding cot had been knocked over and there were traces of human remains beside it in the sand. Also half buried were a blue plastic water bottle and what appeared to be a very old kerosene heater, rusted and sand blasted by the wasteland. There was a similar story told in the next three tents. One of these contained two cots side-by-side, and more remains spread around than usual. As for items I could use, there were none.

  The next tent was slightly larger, furnished with not just a cot but a fold-out chair as well, the flexible kind one might find in a camping supply store. In the dirt I found a little wooden chest partially buried. I pulled it out and dusted it off. Burned into the wood itself was a decorative image of a wintry tree, leafless branches snaking off in all directions. It was a detailed and yet amateurish depiction, the proportions all wrong. I turned the chest over in my hands and saw that the joins were ill-fitting and poorly rounded, so I gathered that this was either the work of a child learning the craft or of someone who just didn’t know what they were doing. Underneath the tree was crudely inscribed: JB 11-10-77