Terminus
Page 32
She let the current carry her further from Fenwick Street.
Sicknote’s voice:
‘Lupe, can you hear me?’
She unhooked her radio.
‘Yeah, I can hear you.’
‘It’s beautiful, Lupe. Truly beautiful. The sun is rising. It’s topped the horizon. I can see the whole city. Christ, if only you could be here, Lupe. If only you could share this . . .’
The last reception bar flickered out. The LCD screen flashed:
NO COMMS
Lupe shut off the radio and tossed it into the water.
She picked up the oar and began to row.
The boat was carried on the current, swept deeper into the flooded tunnel system.
Flare light dwindled to a blood-red pinprick as she rode the black tide to the end of the line.
73
Sicknote walked across the wide, flat roof. Boots crunched virgin snow.
Rusted chimney pipes. The remains of a water tower: cedar planks and galvanised steel hoops.
The beige JetRanger parked at the centre of the roof. Empty seats. Headphone coil dangled from an inert switch panel.
He ducked beneath the tail boom and walked to the edge of the parapet.
‘Can you hear me, Lupe? I can see the whole city.’
He looked out over broken towers, vertiginous cliffs and canyons. No birds. No traffic. No car horns. Nothing moved. Empty streets, empty avenues. Titanic desolation.
Ruins that would, in time, be reclaimed by vegetation. A slow and beautiful decay. In a couple of thousand years, Manhattan would be woodland one more. Rubble buried beneath forests of hickory, hemlock and pine. Central Park would return to salt marsh. The street grid would be reduced to soft delineations in the forest floor, blurred by leaf mulch and bracken.
Perhaps a handful of landmarks would endure. The marble lions of the Public Library might stand in the humid twilight of an arboreal clearing, draped in vine like a lost Inca temple. A home for salamanders and toads.
The city wiped away. A restored Eden. It would be as if New York never happened, as if the Dutch sailors never came.
A rolling crash like thunder. A partial tower collapse in the far distance. An apartment building on the upper west side. It crumbled like an ice floe. A wave of dust washed down adjoining streets.
Built by giants, smashed by gods.
‘This is it, Lupe. Humanity is finished. Nothing left of us but old analogue TV transmissions radiating out into the cosmos.
No sound, Lupe. Not even wind. I wish you could hear it. I wish you could be up here right now. Absolute stillness. Absolute quiet. A city of the dead.
‘Can you hear me, Lupe? Are you there?
‘The silence. My God, the silence.’
Five years have passed. Five years in which the plague has spread across the world leaving only tiny enclaves of survivors . . .
OUTPOST
They took the job to escape the world.
They didn’t expect the world to end.
Kasker Rampart: a derelict refinery platform moored in the Arctic Ocean. A skeleton crew of fifteen fight boredom and despair as they wait for a relief ship to take them home.
But the world beyond their frozen wasteland has gone to hell. Cities lie ravaged by a global pandemic. One by one TV channels die, replaced by silent wavebands.
The Rampart crew are marooned. They must survive the long Arctic winter, then make their way home alone. They battle starvation and hypothermia, unaware that the deadly contagion that has devastated the world is heading their way . . .