The Haunting in the Ruins

by Johnathon Devere



  THE HAUNTING OF THE RUINS

  Copyright Johnathon Devere 2009

  THE HAUNTING OF THE RUINS

  By

  Johnathon Devere

  Towards the the middle of the century Russia had become engulfed in years of all out civil war.

  The war had its roots in events which had taken place decades before. In 2011, in the wake of the civil war and NATO led bombing campaign which resulted in the ousting of the Libyan dictator Gadhafi, the leaders of the then ruling United Russia party put together plans to abolish all of the non-Russian republics within the Russian Federation to create a centralised unitary state. This was designed to prevent the same chaos which Libya had fallen into from happening in Russia. Some commentators though described it as a ticking time bomb which could ultimately result in the very disintegration and strife it was designed to prevent. It was said they were burying a ‘powerful mine’ deep under the new political system.

  From 2013 onward, more and more Russians in the vast Far East no longer identified themselves as Russian but as Siberians, and increasingly considered themselves a separate nationality.

  After Moscow recognized the independence of the breakaway Georgian states of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, it gave renewed impetus to other separatist movements within Russia, such as Taterstan, an oil rich province in the heart of the country, Bashkiria, rich in natural gas, Komi, which produced coal, and Bashkortostan, a major petrochemical center. Over the years breakaway movements from all these regions grew increasingly desperate and violent as Moscow continued to crack down on dissent. After one obviously rigged general election too many, towns and cities everywhere were torn apart by street fighting between dissident factions and forces still loyal to Moscow. It soon escalated into large scale civil war as parts of the military broke away in support of newly formed republics.

  Inevitably, parts of the nuclear stockpile eventually fell into the hands of the separatists, who attempted to use them to blackmail Moscow to cede to their demands. Equally inevitably, Moscow’s response was to demand that all hijacked nuclear weapon systems be immediately surrendered, or risk having similar weapons used on them, as an example to the others. Neither side could back down because there was too much at stake.

  It all ended in a final exchange in which a dozen cities were wiped from the face of the Earth in under an hour, leaving millions dead and millions more homeless. It was never made completely clear in the aftermath who it was launched the first missile that initiated Armageddon.

  This is not the story of that terrible war. It is the story of some of its consequences, both expected, and completely unexpected…

  It was on the last day of the war my home was destroyed. I don’t remember all that much about the war itself, being as young as I was at the time. All that comes to mind when I think of it now is a feeling of unfocused chaos, trucks and tanks and other things rumbling by in the distance, distant jets going by overhead on their way to do who knew what to whom. Not even knowing whose side they were on. Always somewhere in the background was the unrelenting fog of daily fear, made more intense by constantly going hungry and never being certain whether we would still be able to eat the next week. You could always sense it in the adults, though as far as I can recall they always seemed to do their best to hide it from us. My younger brother was lucky in that he was too young to know much of what was happening.

  There were times when it could not be hidden though. There was once a group of bedraggled soldiers who showed up on our street, their faces haggard from fear and exhaustion. No one seemed to be in charge. A few of them threatened us in a half hearted way to give them food, but gave up after two of them tramped through our kitchen, and it must have been plain to them we simply had nothing to give. We had been mostly lucky so far. The war, though going on only a few hundred kilometers away, had hardly touched us at all.

  Then came the day everything changed forever. A major with a large contingent of troops in two army trucks arrived on our street. As we watched from the window the soldiers all leaped from the trucks and started banging on peoples doors and shouting at us to come out. Fearfully we emerged from our house. We didn’t know what was happening. The major climbed on top of a car with a bullhorn. I don’t remember all that well what he looked like. Every time I try to visualize his face all I can recall is a camouflage cap pulled down low and a hard thin mouth.

  “The city is about to be bombed,” he announced. “You must all leave immediately. You will be in danger if you stay here. There are emergency shelters being set up to the south.”

  “Who? Who is bombing us?” asked someone from the crowd.

  “You have twelve hours to leave,” he responded. He got back into the truck and they drove on to the next place.

  At first this made little impression. We had never really been bombed seriously before, there had been some sporadic attempts, back when it first started, but not since. And why would they come back and do it now, when it seemed like it was almost over? The fighting had largely died down. But now things were different. Someone else said that the guerrillas had become desperate, and had become capable of anything. Reprisal attacks could be coming.

  People were divided between those who took the warning seriously, and those who felt it would be wiser to stay and sit things out. Their reasoning was that if we were to leave our homes now, there was no guarantee they would still be here when they eventually returned. Anyone might take them over, military, guerillas, anyone. And there were looters. But after talking it over my mother and father decided we had to go.

  Camps were being set up on the outskirts of the suburbs, huge marquee tents that could sleep thousands. There was of course no gas for the car, had not been for a long time. We took what little we could in a couple of old prams and some duffle bags. Many used shopping carts. One man had an ancient wheel barrow. Another family had two old mountain bikes piled so high with plastic bags you couldn’t even see the wheels. We all headed out of the city, unsure of what was going to happen.

  In the center of a sprawling park were several imposing marquee tents, dingy olive green, like a miserable circus. Some more military were there with clipboards, trying to keep control of the noisy throngs that were on the verge of panic and give directions and assign places. My mother took one look inside one of the tents and refused to let us sleep in it, the way it stank. We set up our own little family tent nearby. We still had most of our old camping equipment left over from a trip years before, when everything had been okay and you could just take off for a holiday any time you wanted.

  It all seemed a million miles away now.

  We had blankets and linens from home, but we still had to sleep on the hard ground. It wasn’t so bad after the first night or so and you got used to it. I tried to make believe like we were still on holiday, that it was like the old days back again. If I closed my eyes and smelt the nylon fabric and the grass and soil of the park it was a fantasy I could keep up for nearly a whole minute. But then some noise from outside would always interrupt and I’d be back there again.

  Over the next two days the distant sounds of truck convoys as they rumbled along the roads from the city became more prevalent. Always they were accompanied by the insistent drumbeat of distant helicopters. What I did not know and did not find out until many years later was that they were engaged in trying to get as many out as they could in the little time they had left, in what had become a countdown.

  Early in the morning of the third day it happened.

  A second sun appeared on the horizon, a phantom flashbulb of searing blue white that rose and faded in seconds, and there was a sensation of a hot oven suddenly opening on my face, the heat sweeping over everything in an invis
ible searing wave. My father ran to us, screaming. He tackled both my brother and I to the ground and kept us pinned there. He kept saying, stay down, stay down-

  A giants hand slammed the ground around us, shaking us violently. A giant’s roar came over the landscape, louder and louder, swallowing up the whole world, taking the wind out of my lungs. My ears popped painfully. As the tremor died away I dared to look up, just for a second, to see huge big things flying through the air. Then there was the sound of several dull thuds coming from the middle distance.

  The silence immediately afterward was even weirder. There was a bitter metallic taste in my mouth. My ears were humming.

  I gradually became aware of a distant crackling