After The Fall

City

It might be Christmas in a Dickensian novel the way the flakes fall and muffle the city. The way the water in the pipes has congealed to misanthropic ice. The way the air is thick and brown and damp and seeps into the bones. Hadn’t they all read that in school and not understood what it meant to live in darkness and the want of common luxuries - of common necessaries; the death of surplus population, and the spectral hand upon the tombstone?

Squeezing through the doors of a supermarket, everything tilts to the left. Yellowing shelves were pulled from their brackets in a long-ago looting by panic-stricken hands stripping them of pasta and toilet rolls. Funny to think of it now. The priorities of a society that was one missed meal away from rebellion.

Turns out they were one disaster away from the dystopia they grew up with and thought could never happen. Like the author who thought her novel was too far-fetched only for it to be realised before the ink was dry on the page.

In the time before, they had played this level. Cleared out the zombies, collected the health pack and the shotgun shells. Thought it fun. Relished the sense of threat in the high resolution, surround-sound, cinematic fiction. Thumbs numb from the vibrations of the controller… Now there is only boredom and isolation.

At the back of the store, a fire door leads out back to a yard. If there is any luck left in the world there will be wooden pallets left over from deliveries – perhaps an old oil can or some rags. Maybe a pot or pan to warm some water over a fire.

And then maybe, if the gods will it so, this survivor might last one more night.

Space

In the vacuum of space, there is a deathly kind of peace. No dull consonant clang of spanner on hull. No roar of rockets or thrusters. Nothing but the aspiration of your own breath (inhale… exhale…) misting your visor, and your slow heartbeat pumping the oxygen you have brought with you. You are a thin skin away from extinction.

Step outside your ship, and you are held in suspension - one solitary molecule in a beaker of blackness. Look away from the Earth and there are no points of reference beyond your own body. You are a whole world. Adrift. Untethered. There are no lighthouse beams or harbour lights to lead you home. No fairway buoy or channel markers.

So you keep your eyes fixed on that blue ball and try not to think about why you left it. Try not to think about the ones you left behind to die. Try not to think about what might have happened to those that survived. Try not to think of going home.

Just do the job that you were sent out here to do before you are pulled back into the tin can you call home.

Stars

In the sand dunes, a girl and her dog are huddled by a fire. It is dark and they are hunkered down far enough to be out of sight. The marram grass tips shiver in the breeze, and a gust moves the pale, dry surface sand. The dog yawns and lays its head on her thigh, nose pointing towards her body, one eye closed and the other on her face. Watchful. Trustful.

The girl reaches down and strokes the dog’s broad head, its silky ears, the rougher fur of its neck. She places a blanket over her legs, covering the dog too, but it noses the cover back a little to place its head once more on top. She covers his head and he pokes it back up again. She laughs a little. This is a nightly game they play. A ritual.

There is a beach hut they could sleep in, but she likes it here under the canopy of night.

She pulls another blanket around her shoulders and wraps herself in it as she lies back and looks up at the stars, searching for a moment. Getting her bearings. There is Orion’s belt – three bright points of light in a line. Taurus. The twins – Castor and Pollux. Her father had shown the constellations to her. Taught her how to find the pole star too. How to use it to steer their boat home that time they crossed the channel.

When he died, she and her mother had had a star named after him, so they could look up in the sky and see him there still shining. It had comforted them then. And now, the girl looks into the heavens and sees both her parents in the stars, and her aunts, uncles, brothers and cousins. Her school friends. Her teachers. At school, there had been a poster on the Science corridor wall that read: “We are made of stardust”. She thinks of this now as she drifts off to sleep.

As she dreams, the dog is roused briefly by a bright light which passes overhead. He stands and looks in the direction of the ocean. When she stirs slightly, he lies down again – his great black body against her side – and puts his head on her chest.

Roads

A fireball moves across the sky from west to east. It is bright enough so that for a brief moment a person breaking wooden pallets in an abandoned supermarket delivery yard can see everything as bright as day. They follow its path with their eyes, noting the direction it travelled.

In the morning, having nothing better to do, they gather up their belongings and begin walking out of the city towards the sea.

They pass through streets that were once bustling thoroughfares, past shops, cinemas, schools and parks. Places that had teemed with human life and it occurs to them how feral they have become. As mistrustful of others as children raised by wolves in old documentaries.

How long has it been since they saw another human? Looked into the eye of another? Opened their mouth to greet? To say their own name?

As they walk, other grey shapes appear on the road. They come stumbling from the remains of houses, garages; from side roads and cul-de-sacs. Shambling in ones and twos. One couple have a child with them. A girl? It is hard to say, and they are surprised to find the question in their minds. What does it matter, after all?

Someone waves a hand. Calls a greeting. Says a name.

More join, and more. A ragged band of survivors out of the ruins moving as one.

Wreckage

The first light of the day is watery and cool. A damp has formed on the blankets the girl and her dog have slept under, and they rise stiffly and stretch. The girl fetches firewood from above the highwater mark assisted by the great loping dog. He runs up the beach towards a flock of gulls and bounds into their midst; they screech their alarm calls and rise into the air. They land further down the beach, and he repeats the game with a deep throated bark.

Eventually, he comes back to her, solitary piece of driftwood in his mouth. He drops it at her feet and backs up, tail wagging, bright expectant eyes. She throws it into the sea, and he leaps after it, swimming out strongly through the surf.

She collects eggs from the hens which have started to lay, adds milk from one of her goats and scrambles them. Adds green herbs and salt to hers. Puts the dog’s eggs in his bowl and calls him. He comes running up, and devours his food, big pink tongue licking into the edges – pushing the bowl round on the sand. She pours goats milk into the bowl, and he laps it rhythmically and licks his chops.

He goes back to the thing he has pulled from the waves and she sees, when she glances over, that it is not a wooden stick but a piece of metal with holes in it. It is twisted and blackened in places. Tarnished. The tide has receded further now, leaving debris among the seaweed and shells. She picks a piece up and turns it in her hands – wondering at its lightness and what use she can put it to. She sets to gathering more of it and piles it up by her beach hut.

Gathering

Four more high tides have deposited their detritus on the shore before the first of the stragglers arrives at the coast. A few come along the coast, but most come from inland. A dozen or so reach the girl’s beach and the dog barks a sharp warning at their approach so that they give her a wide berth at first.

At a distance they all look the same – worn out and wary.

A tall man squats down, dips his hands in the sea, lifts the water to his face and inhales its salt tang. He lets it drip from his hands, washing the grey film away and the early sun shines on his dark skin like diamonds. He turns and beckons a child to come to him. She is small – a toddler – waddling unsteadily towards him. She stands with her feet in the tiny wavelets and squats beside the man and puts her hands down into the water and laughs up at his shining face. He picks her up and kisses her again and again as the saltwater falls from his face.

A couple are holding hands. She is cupping her belly with her hands as she gazes out to the horizon. In the offing, there is a shape on the water like a huge cannister. She shades her eyes to see better. Points. Someone has a pair of binoculars. Can see shapes on the cannister, clinging to it. They are waving.

Waving

A new moon appears in the sky and the stars come out one by one. On the beach, a fire is lit. It is as big as the one the girl remembers them building one bonfire night when she was a child. Remember… remember…

The flames lick up at the sky, sending ardent orange sparks flying. Fire crackles like a transistor radio searching for a signal and spits like a mad cat. They dance around it. Cook eggs, fish, potatoes. Fill their mouths and bellies.

The dog has found a friend - a wiry terrier that likes to run and chase and play. They dash around the beach, in and out of the surf, curl their lips over their teeth, play and roll together like puppies.

Far around the bay, an orange glow suddenly answers theirs.

And further still another adds to the conversation.

Each lit by human hands – calling out across the blackness.

Bright beacons of hope.

Waving.