After the Winter (The Silent Earth, Book 1) (13 page)

Then I was crashing through the ruined outer door and up the stairwell, into the sunlight.  I kept running, weaving my way across the ruined base with my satchel thumping against my back and fear giving wings to my heels. 

I didn’t look back.

13

“You’re the world’s worst blacksmith,” Max grumbled.

“I’m the world’s
only
blacksmith, more likely,” I corrected.

The sound of the hammer rang out across the courtyard as I pounded away at the alloy. Max lay there patiently, his leg outstretched on the steel girder I’d dragged out of the debris, my makeshift anvil.

It was the third time I’d tried joining the alloy with the stump of Max’s right leg. On the first two attempts I’d heated the metal in my little forge, a ring of bricks filled with coals, and bashed away at it until my arms and shoulders ached. Both times I’d instructed Max to remain seated until it had cooled. He’d done so, but after applying weight to the limb it had cracked and fallen apart.

As a trial run I’d fused two of the curved pieces of alloy together, creating a two pronged base at the bottom. I figured this would help Max maintain some stability as he moved around. Those pieces formed a strong bond, most likely because the surface area of the join was longer. I incorporated this idea into my third attempt to connect it to Max’s stump and seemed to be making more progress that way.

After what seemed like hours, I finally relented. It all looked pretty mashed up. This technique was poorly suited to modern alloys, and to make matters worse, I wasn’t really equipped with the knowledge to perform the work. The forge should have been hotter for a start, but I couldn’t figure out a way to increase the temperature. Not given the materials I had at hand, anyway.

For his part, Max just sat there and watched me, unconvinced.

“You done?” he said impatiently.

“Yeah, but sit still for a while, okay?”

“Yeah, yeah,” he said, crossing his arms. “I know the drill.”

“It looks good,” I said, mustering as much cheer as I could.

“Amazing,” he said dryly. “I should be able to stumble around on this for at least a few minutes before it gives out.”

Ignoring the mocking tone, I said, “I really think we’re getting somewhere.”

“Yeah, this thing should make a great cheese knife. Just what I always wanted.”

“Hey, I told you how much work I had to do to get these materials.  How about a
bit of gratitude?” I said good-naturedly.

He grunted and rolled his eyes. “Yeah.”

I looked down at his leg thoughtfully. “I just have to find more alloy.”

“More?”

“For your other leg.” I pointed with the hammer and he glanced down. His left leg was in far worse condition than the right, amputated almost all the way up to the hip. “I’ll have to figure out how I’m going to make such a long limb, and whether I can make it articulate at the knee.”

Max just shook his head. “This is madness.”

“There’s this place I saw....” I trailed off. I was suddenly alert to danger.

Max heard it too. “Damn, it’s a big one!” He craned his neck. “Is it Ol’ Trembler?

The ground began to shake, and that primal roar intensified, coming at me from all directions, as if I was in the middle of a vortex. This felt different than before.

“Something’s wrong. Max! Something’s wrong!”

He wasn’t looking at me. He was only intent on crawling to where he could find a better view of the honeycomb spire in the distance.

I lurched over to him, took him by the arm. Then I saw it. Much closer than Ol’ Trembler, slightly to the north of our location, a rectangular skyscraper was dropping.

“
Look!
” I screamed, pointing.

The building was in free
fall, shredding apart and making an immense, teeth-rattling roar.  It shook every building I could see - felt like it was shaking the entire
world
apart - and those other buildings too began to shed pieces of themselves, like sloughing off skin. Behind us, a wall of bricks plummeted into the street and landed with a
crash
. Chips of stone and brick thrown up by the impact pelted me in the face and stung my arms.

“
Shit,
Max, get up! 
Get up!
”

Max heaved upward and I took his weight on my shoulder. 
Damn
, the guy really
did
weigh a tonne.  He hopped alongside, out the back of the apartment block and down the street.  I didn’t have a specific escape route in mind.  We were just running, trying to put as much distance between us and that screaming monster behind us as we could.

After about thirty seconds the cacophony began to die down, the earth settling, the falling debris becoming less. We stopped and turned around. Over the rooftops, there was no sign of the rectangular skyscraper, just a plume of steadily rising dust. It came billowing down the street as well - a massive cloud of it, thick and orange, swallowing everything in its path. Car wrecks and buildings alike disappeared from view as if they’d been swept out of existence.

“C’mon, let’s go find some shelter,” I said.

“Okay.” Max shifted his weight and hopped again on the leg. It held firm.

“Well,” I said appreciatively, “that’s a pretty good acid test for the new leg. It looks great.”

Max said nothing, but a moment later muttered, “Dammit.” He cast an eye over to where Ol’ Trembler had disappeared behind the dust cloud.

“What is it?”

“I just lost good money on that fucker.”

Later that night the dust had settled. The apartment was coated in it, like an orange skin on everything. Max sat staring outside with his new leg resting on the windowsill, jingling the copper coins in his hand. I’d cleared the dust from one section of wall and started sketching with the pencil from my satchel.

“I’d call that a good day’s work,” I said.

“I guess.”

I rubbed at the drawing with my thumb, trying to erase a mistake. It left a smudge on the wall. I drew around it.

“I know it’s been slow progress, but I’m learning as I go,” I said optimistically. “We’ll get there.”

Max seemed pensive, lost in his own thoughts. “What did you do out there? In the darkness.”

“Huh?”

He turned to me. “What did you do, during the bleakest days of Winter?”

Caught off guard, I wasn’t sure how to answer. I ceased my scribblings as I considered.

“Well, for the most part I just laid low with Arsha back home. With people starving and thinning out, there were some pretty desperate people out there. I had a good stock of flashlights and batteries that I carried around when I needed to go scrounging for stuff in the city. How about you?”

“Crawled around in the murk,” he said simply. “Crawled, and crawled, and crawled. I figured there had to be survivors out there somewhere. Came across a few people, crazy and wild-eyed. But they couldn’t eat me or use me for labour, so they ignored me. Saw plenty of clanks too, but that was before the Marauders got together. They didn’t pay me no mind. In the end, I realized the truth: everyone was out for themselves, and I had nothing to offer them. So, I crawled around some more, until I ended up here. And then I just stopped.”

I stepped back from my sketch again, scratched my chin uncomfortably. I didn’t like where this was going.

“They were bad days, Max. Bad days for all of us.”

“Yeah. Bad days,” he said absently, spinning a coin in his palm.

I drummed the pencil in my fingers, unsure where to go to from here.

“Anyway, check this out,” I went on brightly, waving a hand at my sketch. “I’m coming up with a design for your other leg. I think I can fashion a kind of knee joint if I can locate a few other bits and pieces.” The rudimentary sketch on the wall did not inspire confidence, but Max didn’t bother to look anyway.

By way of answer, he lifted his hand and tossed the coins out the window. They tinkled and chimed as they bounced and rolled about on the hard surface of the courtyard below.

“What are you doing?” I said, startled.

“Lost my bet,” Max said simply.

I tried to raise some cheer in my voice, but even to me it sounded flat and empty. “Not to worry, Max. Tomorrow we’re going to get you up and about.”

I hope
, I thought, imagining what it would be like to finally head home. 
Because I need to get out of Perish.

14

For the first time since I’d been in Perish, Max didn’t make his pilgrimage downstairs the next morning.  He sat in his chair and stared out the window, cutting a disconsolate figure against the sunlight that streamed in around him.  I couldn’t figure out what he was thinking, what was going on
in
his head.  We
were
making progress, weren’t we?  We were getting out of here.  Why wasn’t he responding to that?

“You uh... heading out today, Max?” I said uncertainly.

He started, almost as if I’d awoken him from a deep slumber.

“Yeah,” he said absently. “Probably a little later.”

“Sure. I’m gonna head over and check out that collapse. Have a look around and assess the damage. See what there is to see. Then I’m going to get stuck into that other leg.”

“Okay then.”

I clapped him on the shoulder as I moved past him. “Want me to bring you back a souvenir?”

“I could use a new kitchen,” he offered, but it was clear his heart wasn’t in it.  The banter lacked its usual bite.

“I’ll see what I can do.”

I had an idea to head to the north to check out an industrial district further along the river. I’d given it a once over a little while back, but it seemed the most likely place for me to find alloy, and a more determined search might come up with something I could use for Max’s repairs.

I stopped by the newly fallen building on my way. It had created a sizeable field of debris. There was smoke drifting up from a number of spot fires that had sprung up, and the air was redolent of burnt sulphur.

Just as Max had predicted, the buildings around it had also taken a hit from the fall. I couldn’t be sure, but it looked as though a couple of the smaller ones had been demolished completely. Others bore long, jagged tears on the side facing the collapse where debris had ripped and clawed at them on its way down.

I looked up at one such tear, the morning sun shining brightly on its newly revealed innards, like a medical cross-section. I saw a number of floors of what looked like office space: broken desks and chairs, cubicles and panel displays. I could also see parts of a staircase revealed by a hole in the side of the building. Despite the chance of finding something useful in there, I decided it would be a building that was best to avoid.

With my investigation over, I went on my way. The high spirits with which I'd started the day began to evaporate as the hours ticked by. I searched through any number of factories and warehouses, crawling through dim and dank interiors, across rusted machinery and gigantic mechanisms of yesteryear, but there was nothing suitable that I could carry away with me. It seemed that most of these places had been stripped bare of useful materials long ago.

I decided that, instead of traipsing around and wasting time, I would return to the apartment and discuss my plans with Max. It was late when I finally got back, and when I reached him he was sitting quietly in the light of the lamp.

“Hey,” I said, edging around him, making my way over to the sofa.

He nodded his head sombrely in greeting.

“So, Max, I’ve been thinking. We’re probably going to have to scratch the idea of getting a second prosthetic hooked up for you.”

“Yeah?” he said, indifferent.

“Yes, unfortunately. We’re running out of time now. I’m not sure I have the ability to make a working prosthetic for that second leg, either. The thing with the knee, it’s tricky. I could try banging a long peg on there but I’m not sure if it will be a help or a hindrance.”