After the Winter (The Silent Earth, Book 1)

by Mark R. Healy

  Slowing my pace, I examined the hill again with the binoculars, twisting the focus ring to bring it more sharply into view. I waited for a few seconds but couldn’t see any sign of the movement I’d witnessed a few minutes before. I wondered if perhaps I was simply on the wrong angle. Time would tell.

  I got moving. Fast. My feet skipped across the pavement and I clutched the satchel tightly to my ribs in one hand, the binoculars in the other. I thundered down into a canal, the trickle of water exploding around my feet as I charged through. Up the other side, I almost lost the aluminium canister from the satchel in my haste. I juggled it and shoved it back down inside and kept going.

  Reaching the foot of the rise I stopped, listened, straining to hear even the slightest noise. Nothing. Not even a breath of wind to alleviate the silence.

  Ahead of me, winding its way up the gentle slope was an old stone staircase. It was cracked and uneven and, in parts, swallowed up by sand. I took the steps slowly, deliberately. I didn’t know what was up there, but whatever it was might not have my best interests at heart. It was best to disguise my presence should I feel the need to make a hasty retreat.

  It would be foolish to have come all this way home and then fall into the clutches of the Marauders, or one such as Jarr.

  Little weeds grew out of cracks in the staircase, and I made every effort not to trample them. Every single one of them was like gold, a precious gift to be treated with care and respect. With my eyes fixated on the crest of the rise it wasn’t easy. The sound of sand scraping between stone and the leather of my boots seemed like such a racket in the silence. I tried angling my feet to walk on their outside edges but it didn’t help lessen the noise.

  At the top of the stairs, a rusted wrought iron archway rested on pillars of stone. The stonework was messy and uneven, and there were gaps where pieces had fallen out. The archway itself, although heavily deteriorated, was resplendent with ornate curls and swirls and ripples that coalesced into a flowing script that spread across the apex. It read Hillview Cemetery.

  I passed surreptitiously beneath and out onto the crest of the hill.

  The cemetery was ancient. At one time it would have been a beautiful sight, adorned by trees and presenting a serene vista as it looked out across the city. Now it was a bare patch of dirt littered with broken headstones that jutted out at all angles like jagged teeth. I moved forward, my eyes darting from one place to the next as I tried to identify what it was I had seen from down in the city. Row after row of headstones appeared as I ascended the last few steps, poking out from behind the ones before like timid children.

  Then I saw it. In amongst them, a figure was hunched over a grave. I moved forward cautiously. Whoever it was didn’t know I was here yet. I moved slightly to one side to get a better angle, but stopped when I heard the sound of boots scuffing on gravelly earth.

  She stood and turned her face to the sky, staring up as the waning sunlight titled through the skyscrapers, her auburn hair gently caressed by the breeze. She lifted a slender hand and brushed at it, scraping it away from the sides of her face. A mannerism I had seen so many times before.

  She was the one thing in the city that hadn’t changed.

  “Arsha,” I called softly.

  She turned jerkily at the sound of my voice, looking about in confusion as she tried to locate me. When she did, something passed across her face - a mixture of shock, disbelief and perhaps even fear. She clutched at her breast and seemed to recoil ever so slightly, as if I were a ghost newly risen from the grave at my feet. A thing of loathing. A thing that couldn’t possibly be.

  “Brant!” she breathed in bewilderment, but as she said it, her expression changed to one of pure astonishment and a tentative kind of delight. Her mouth worked as she tried to say something else, but no sound came out. Instead, she started forward, closing the distance between us in a few strides, her eyes never leaving my face. Then she was against me, her arms wrapped around my neck and her face buried in my chest, almost knocking me over in her ardour. I lifted my arms and returned the embrace.

  She pulled away after a moment and took a half step back, dropping her hands to my shoulders and holding them firmly as her eyes darted across my face. She shook her head ever so slightly as if she still couldn’t believe it was really me.

  “I...,” she stammered, and then pressed her eyelids shut. When she opened them again she had brought herself under control. “I thought you were gone for good.”

  I grinned sheepishly. “So did I, for a while.”

  She let go of me and stepped back further, running an eye up and down my length. Taking in every detail. Assessing. No, she hadn’t changed at all.

  Her evaluation completed, she smiled and returned her gaze to my face. She lifted her fingers thoughtfully to her lips and drummed them distractedly as she contemplated, what must have been for her, a strange development. A smudge of dirt darkened the skin across her cheekbone, but her pale complexion was otherwise unblemished. Pristine. Her eyes sparkled, bright and blue in the twilight.

  “I just....” she trailed off and shook her head one last time. “I just don’t believe it.”

  I shrugged, a little lost for words myself. “You uh... you look good.”

  She laughed, a spontaneous and genuine sound that rang out across the hillside. She clapped her hands together once lightly in her mirth.

  “I look good, huh? That’s the first thing you have to say to me?”

  She was smiling, but I picked up the undercurrent of something more biting beneath those words.

  “Yeah. You look good.” I grinned ruefully.

  “Well, you look like shit,” she said, and laughed again. This time I joined her.

  “I guess I’ll be withdrawing from this year’s beauty pageant.”

  “That’s a good idea,” she said, her laughter subsiding. She cast a furtive glance over her shoulder at where she’d been standing when I’d arrived, then smiled awkwardly.

  “Uh, what are you doing up here?” I said.

  She shrugged self-consciously. “I come here sometimes. It’s peaceful.” She glanced about. “Wouldn’t you say?”

  “Sure,” I said. “But a graveyard? You could have chosen somewhere a little more cheery.”

  I began to pace among the gravestones, glancing from one faded inscription to the next. These dates were very old, pre-dating the White Summer by many years. The people buried here had lived and died during times of peace, in a world that had yet to face the curse of Winter. They didn’t know how lucky they’d had it.

  I came to the spot where Arsha had been kneeling. I could see her footprints in the dust where she’d been milling around. They traced a roughly rectangular shape, and it seemed evident that she’d taken caution not to step on the grave itself.

  There, laid across the bare earth, were a handful of flowers. Carnations, a daisy, a tulip. Arsha appeared at my elbow.

  “Amazing, isn’t it,” she remarked. “I’ve begun to grow these again.”

  I stooped and lightly gathered up the carnation. It was bright and pink. I pressed it to my nose and inhaled the light scent of it. It sent a tingling sensation down my back, as if awakening nerve endings that had been slumbering all these years.

  “Wonderful,” I said, placing it back down. “But whose grave is it?”

  She turned away and gazed out into the distance across the city, folding her arms across her chest. “No one’s. Everyone’s. It’s symbolic. It represents the human race and all that’s been lost.”

  Her words hung heavy in the air. All that’s been lost. There was no way to quantify that concept. We’d lost everything.

  Needing to break the silence, I uttered the first thing that came into my head. “So, uh... were they growing naturally around the place?”

  “No,” Arsha said. “I took them out of cryostorage.”

  A mote of excitement scuttled around in my belly. I went and stood beside her. “The seeds are still viable?”

  She
smiled broadly and she gave me a sidelong glance. “Yes. The seeds are still viable. And they’re not the only things I’ve been growing.”

  “Well, what else?” I said eagerly.

  She turned her body and gestured toward the archway on the edge of the hill. “Why don’t you come back to the workshop? We have a lot to talk about.”

  “Sure. I was just there.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah. It looks like you’ve changed a few things.”

  She shrugged. “I guess.”

  We reached the archway, the stone steps curving away below us. She stopped suddenly and lightly placed her hand on my chest, halting my progress.

  “I just want to know - is everything okay with you?” she said soberly, her eyes boring into me.

  I took a moment to frame my response. “Yeah. The danger has passed. I’m just glad to be back.”

  “What danger?” she said, alarmed.

  “The Marauders. They’ve been driven away. Don’t you remember?”

  She watched me for a few seconds, her countenance unreadable. Then her hand dropped away and a pensive look came across her face. She forced the corners of her lips upward unconvincingly.

  “Yeah.”

  With that, she turned and began making her way down the stairs toward the darkening monoliths of the city.

  32

  “You sure have taken a beating out there,” Arsha remarked as we wound our way through the deserted city streets. I probed at the gash on my neck and she observed with that cool, watchful manner she adopted so often.

  “You can say that again.” I could only imagine the cuts, scratches and abrasions that covered me. My body was worn and tarnished, but through all the hardships it had never let me down. It had borne me across every challenge, refusing to give in.

  “I’ve had a few scrapes myself,” she said.

  “What? Really?” I said, surprised.

  “Yeah, really,” she said, sounding mildly offended at my response. She held out her right arm where a small patch of skin was missing. I could see her synthetic muscles stirring beneath. “This one I picked up trying to haul generators around M-Corp. I was a little over-ambitious that day.”

  “Well, if we’re comparing scars, I think I’ve got you covered.” I stopped and lifted my trouser leg to show the gash above my ankle. “How about that?”

  She gasped. “Brant, what on earth did you do to yourself?”

  I dropped the fabric back in place and kept walking. “Y’know, I’m not sure I remember how this one happened. It probably wasn’t any one incident. It just got worn away over the course of the year.”

  “The course of the year? What do you mean?”

  “I mean the year I’ve been gone.”

  She stopped abruptly. “Brant....”

  Her face clouded with concern. “What?” I said.

  “I don’t keep an exact calendar anymore, but I follow the seasons and... you’ve been gone more than a decade.”

  I gave her a doubtful look. “No. No way.”

  “It’s true.” She gave me a worried look.

  “Arsha, I’m sure it’s been a year, maybe a bit more. That’s all.”

  “Look around you, Brant. You must see a lot of changes in this city. Do you really think it all happened so quickly?”

  The vines creeping up buildings and the weeds and grass poking out of cracks in the asphalt and old garden beds seemed to reinforce what she was telling me.

  “I don’t understand,” I said, lifting a hand to my brow.

  “Did something happen to you out there?”

  “There’s a lot that happened to me. I don’t understand how I could have lost all those years, though.”

  “Try to think. Did you take a knock? Something that might have damaged your memory?”

  “Maybe. I had plenty of tussles out there.”

  “Well, don’t worry about it for now. Try to relax. You need to get those wounds patched up. You’re going to have complications with the bearings in your knee and ankle if you don’t. Come on.”

  We started walking again. “I know. I just haven’t had much luck finding anything to patch it with.”

  “I should have something we can use,” she said. “I’ll get you fixed up once we’re inside.” We made the last turn and the M-Corp building appeared on the street before us. “Here it is. Home sweet home.”

  She quickened her pace and surged on ahead of me. Dressed in a collared, black cotton blouse with frayed edges, I noted that one or two buttons were missing, causing the fabric to flap about in her haste. Her dark grey cargo pants showed signs of age, with small holes causing her skin to poke through at the knees. A tawny hat was neatly tucked in her back pocket, and I remembered she’d carried it around often. She was always conscious of sun damage, even with her more resilient synthetic skin.

  All things considered, Arsha was a beautiful woman, even though these days she did little to maintain her appearance. Her fine features, pale skin, the athletic arch of her back and slim build would have once set the pulses of men racing, despite her aloof demeanour.

  For me, I'd always just regarded her as a colleague. We'd developed a closeness over the years, a bond forged through the hardship of our predicament, but any affection I held toward her was more of a sisterly nature than anything romantic.

  I felt a pang of loss for Jenn, and how I would never feel about a woman the same way I had once felt about her.

  The clap of Arsha’s shoes on the pavement brought me back to reality. She sounded like a businesswoman late for a meeting, always walking at that one, bustling pace.

  “Here,” she said, approaching the dumpster that blocked the alleyway beside M-Corp. Opening the hatch, she indicated to it with her hand. “After you.”

  I crawled through. Arsha followed, pausing at the hatch to pull some debris back in place, disguising the entrance. Then she eased it shut and stepped through.

  “What instigated the barricade? Did you see Marauders come through here?”

  She twisted her mouth as we walked down the alleyway. “Not exactly. It was more of a scare.”

  We proceeded through the steel door and into the stairwell, taking cautious steps upward, boots thudding dully in the confined space.

  “So tell me about this scare,” I said.

  “Well, it was a while ago,” she began. “I was here in the workshop up on five and heard something out in the street. I have no idea what it was, but it was something that sounded big. It made this kinda scraping noise,” she said, dragging her foot along the concrete step in imitation. The stairwell reverberated with the slow rasp of her boot. “Creepy. Real creepy. I didn’t want to poke my head out the window just in case it looked up and saw me. So I sat hunkered down while it moved around in the street. I think I heard it push at the foyer doors, like it intended to bump its way around down on the ground floor, but it didn’t go in. Who knows, it might have been my imagination. Not sure. In the end it went on its way.”

  “I wonder what it was.”

  “No idea. A big clank, I guess, maybe an industrial. They made some of those pretty huge.”

  “Yeah, I just saw some very recently.” I retold of my close encounter with the Marauders earlier, and how Ascension had intervened.

  “It’s great to hear someone is finally standing up to those bastards,” she said.

  “Yeah, I’ll say.”

  “But anyway, that was when I decided I didn’t want to take the chance of another one coming along. I hauled everything I could out to the foyer and stacked it up against the glass.”

  There was light coming in from above, and up the stairwell I could see a door wedged open, leading to the interior of the building.

  “Come on in,” she said amiably as she reached it, and she led me through a familiar corridor and down to the workshop.

  I took my time to look around on this occasion, and Arsha stood in the doorway, carefully watching me reacquaint myself with my old workspace.

>   “The changes I made were out of necessity,” she said. “I tried to move as much as I could away from the windows. Plus, we don’t have the power resources we once had. The old generators down below don’t give out much juice anymore. In fact, they’re almost dead. I use power very, very carefully. The main objective is to keep the cryotanks running. Keep the embryos in stasis.”

  “What about the solar framework from the roof? That should give you a bit more juice.”

  “Well, I’m going to need your help with that. Those stopped providing charge a few years ago. I’m hoping it’s just a frayed conduit on the roof, but I haven’t been able to gain access up there. Something is blocking the door on the roof from opening out, so I’m going to need to climb up from the outside.”

  I looked at her quizzically. “You’re going to climb outside the roof a couple of hundred stories up?”

  She shrugged. “What choice do I have? We need this power. Like I said, the generators don’t have much life left in them.”

  “How do you intend to get up there?”

  She waved dismissively. “We’ll sort that out soon. Here,” she said, moving past me. She approached a glass doorway embedded in the wall. It was the entrance to the inner lab, which was sealed away from outside contaminants and thankfully still intact. “Come and have a look.”

  I followed her in through the outer door. We both shrugged into white cleanroom suits that hung on the wall and proceeded into the inner lab.

  Inside the dimly lit interior sat the familiar bulk of the laboratory enclosure. A large rectangle of grey steel and blue glass windows, it seemed just as immaculate as the day I had left. Wedged in the gloom underneath was the rounded shape of a cryotank that had been specially fitted into the enclosure. Arsha bent and keyed in a few digits on the control panel and a small sliver of casing popped out. Reaching for a pair of laboratory tongs from the enclosure, she secured the sliver between the pincers and lifted it out, delicately carrying it over to a microscope on a bench by the wall. The sublimation of chemicals on the sliver left a thin trail of steam behind her. She activated a lamp and slid the specimen onto the microscope stage, pausing briefly to centre it and adjust the focus. Then she stepped back, allowing me room to move in.