After the Winter (The Silent Earth, Book 1) (19 page)

Jarr took a shuddering step forward. “I knew it,” he breathed, his voice a mixture of joy and relief. “I knew they’d be here.”

“It’s a little girl,” I said. Luckily, Jarr had no idea that my flashlight had already run out of juice and that I couldn’t see a thing. “A little blonde girl.”

“Marni?” Jarr called. He took another step forward. “Roona? It’s me, Jarr. You don’t have to be afraid, sweetheart. I’m here. I’ve come back for you.”

With the lie sold, I tossed the bone gently into the nook. It thumped into the wall and landed on the pallet.

“There! She’s moving!” I exclaimed. “She’s trying to get away!”

“Sweetheart, wait,” Jarr bawled, brushing past me and stumbling toward the nook. “Don’t leave me. Don’t leave me again!”

There was something in his voice that caught in my chest - a harrowing despair, a loneliness. A sense of guilt.
  The knowledge that he had failed in his duty to protect these people, and that he had been forsaken for decades because of it.  It was entwined in every word.  Deep down, there was a part of him that knew.  Knew
everything
.  And yet he couldn’t bring himself to face it, to own up to it.  He’d pushed it way down inside and tried to bury it.  Every day that he’d waited was like another shovel full of dirt, another inch further down.  Down into the deep dark earth where the light could never touch. 

But now it had been disturbed. It came scratching its way back up to the surface like the undead, a thing that wouldn’t die, that couldn’t be killed.

But that feeling of pity for him was fleeting. I turned and ran.

He understood the ruse when he heard my footsteps thumping down the passageway.  He loosed a scream of rage, his dual pitch voice simultaneously a guttural roar and an ear piercing shriek.  I heard him stomping after me, heard the knife scraping on walls and tables as he swung it madly about.  I refused to look back. 

I tripped over one of those burnt corpses lying prone on the floor, unseen in the darkness, and went sprawling, banging my chin on a chair, ash and dust flying everywhere. I was dazed. I had to get up. I clutched at the chair for purchase.

I could hear him. He was almost on me.

I whirled to my
feet, threw the chair on the floor.  It clattered and skidded behind me.  I kept running.   My satchel flapped around my back and shoulders like a mad thing.  I heard him stumble into the chair.  It clanged away noisily against the wall, but he didn’t go down.

The ladder was close now, bathed in white light from above. A stairway to the heavens.

I threw myself at it, caught at the highest rung I could reach, got my legs pumping. Jarr hit a moment later. The vibrations that coursed up and down the metal rungs of the ladder felt as though someone had wailed into it with a sledgehammer. I looked up as I scrambled. The top seemed an eternity away.

Jarr was coming after, frenetic, snarling like an animal, chopping with the knife on every second rung, sending out another wave of vibrations with every stroke.

Ten rungs to go.
 
So close now.

His hand brushed my foot. I pulled both of my legs upward just as a slash of the knife whizzed past. I felt the air of it.

Five.

“
Nnnggaaarrrrr!
” he screamed in frustration.

Two. One.

I vaulted out the top of the hatch and in one movement pirouetted, bringing the flat of my hand down on the hatch with all my might.  Jarr appeared there briefly, his ruined face demonic, a beast crawling out of the bowels of hell if ever there was one.  He attempted to slash at me, but the
weight of the hatch came crashing
down on him mid-swipe.  It closed with a thunderous boom, and through the reverberations I could hear his body caroming off the rungs, into the wall of the shaft and back again, over and over, until finally it hit the floor of the Can far below with a final tumultuous crash.

19

I ran. I ran and I kept running for hours on end. The dead trees of the forest streaked past in a blur. I stumbled many times, got back up. Ran again. Orange rays of light poked through the tall needles of wood, casting elongated shadows across the reddened earth. Still I ran. I splashed through another stream without pause or any measure of care. I just kept going.

It was night when I stopped. I was brought to a sudden halt by the bole of a massive tree that jumped out of the darkness, offering no quarter, and I ended up on the flat of my back, staring into the night. I coughed and moaned, sobbed, scrubbed at my face, overwrought.

How had I allowed this to happen?

It was stupidity from the outset. I should have backed away from that clearing at first sight, found another path and continued on my journey. Why did I bother trying to help Jarr in the first place? There was no possible benefit in the interaction, nothing he could offer. That was clear from the moment I laid eyes on him.

Maybe I was still trying to compensate for my failure to help Max.  That, and the fact that there was a part of me that was driven by a strong sense of empathy for the wretches who shared this world with me, this silent earth.  No matter how depraved, how lost, how demented they might be, I figured that there was still a part of them that was
good
. A part that remembered, that could feel happiness, that was worth saving.

I had to believe that about them as much as I had to believe it about
myself
.

But at some point, I had to draw the line. The risk was too great to continue with such trust, such openness. I was so close to my goal, to that shining future that lay in the west. To lose it all now would be such a waste.

From now on, I decided, I wouldn’t be helping anyone but myself.

When morning came I took some time to go through the satchel. I checked every item in turn. Nothing broken, nothing lost. I was fortunate, more fortunate than I deserved. I’d come through relatively unscathed and would be able to pick up my journey where I’d left off, with nothing more than a few scrapes and bumps to show for it.

At this time of day the sun was still just a red-golden promise on the horizon.  I’d found that sunsets and sunrises were always a deeper hue since the Winter, owing to the trace amounts of soot in the atmosphere that hadn’t yet settled.  They were the last vestiges of those bleak days when sunrises had existed only in memories and in the breath of uttered prayers. 

I steadied myself on the trunk of the giant gum tree that had halted my flight the night before and got to my feet.  The red earth was all over me, in my hair, on my satchel, streaking my clothes.  I dusted it off.  It caught the early morning light as it drifted away in great puffs.  I made sure to be careful with my trousers.  They were getting decidedly holey and might not stand up to a vigorous beating.  Now that my attention was drawn to it, my shirt was beginning to suffer the same fate.  I made a mental note that I’d need to seek out some new gear in the next house I came to, since I’d run out of spares.

I rounded the tree. Just ahead of me, towering amid the trees and shining in the glow of the sunrise was the giant frame of a war mech.

I froze, not for fear of the mech, but because of the unexpectedness of it standing there. Under the cover of dark I hadn’t seen it the night before, and now here it was, a hulking metal behemoth right under my nose. It rose up between the trees, broad shouldered and maybe three times the height of a man, arms and legs thicker than most of the boles near which it stood. Behind it, a steep rocky incline effectively masked its presence from the other direction.

So what on earth was it doing out here?

I moved forward. Unmanned, it was of no danger to me. These were never built to operate without a pilot. Essentially they were like an extension of specially trained soldiers’ arms and legs, another weapon in their arsenal. As I approached I could see the cockpit was not empty. The skeletal form of the pilot lay half out of it, ragged clothes holding the bones together, as if he or she had attempted to crawl out of the machine but died trying.

I stood at the foot of the mech and looked up. The rusted metal casing glistened with morning condensation, and, remarkably, there was moss growing on it. All over it, in fact. In most places the covering was thin, but under the great squarish forearms that extended horizontal to the ground it grew thicker, hanging like a little blue-green beard. I reached up and ran my hand along it, felt the wonderful texture of it. The feel was reminiscent of soft curls of baby hair.

The vision of it standing here, this great hairy giant, was almost surreal. Where had it come from? Why had the pilot brought it here? I made a slow circle around the base of the machine. Its thick, elongated legs were in the rest position, slightly bent at the knee, armour plating jutting out, chipped and cracked, the traces of long forgotten wars. One arm seemed to be equipped with a rocket launcher, the other with both a chain gun and a retractable three-pronged claw used for manipulating items that might get in the way. A narrow midsection broadened out to a blocky, pronounced chest to accommodate the cockpit. Two shoulder mounted turbines jutted out the back, allowing the mech to make small jumps during operations.

The oxidation on the chassis had rendered the markings unreadable. I couldn’t tell where this thing might have originated or to whom it had belonged. It all added to the mystery of the whole scenario. Completing my inspection and stepping back again, it seemed more like a stone monument than an artifact of war, as if an ancient tribe had carved out blocks of solid granite and dragged them here, erecting them one on top of the other until it towered above the earth like a colossus. Its glistening skin and shaggy coating only heightened the illusion of it being more than just a lost relic of the conflict.

In the White Summer, they had been fearsome machines.  I’d seen them marching through the city, a line of ten or more plodding thunderously through downtown, their torsos rotating this way and that as they scanned the environment.  A show of military power.  The turbines, when activated, were deafening, the sound of the mechs’ feet crashing back to the ground bone jarring. 

This intimidation was not coincidental. It was meant to strike fear into the hearts of enemies. These monstrous, lethal creatures of war somehow tapped into a primal human instinct, with their predatory curves and cruel contours, their deafening roars and their ability to destroy with barest of effort. They could wilt the hearts of grown men with just a whirl in their direction or by the sound of their passage.

They were also designed to raise the morale of allies. What better to boost the confidence of those at home than to see these fearsome machines striding past, on their way to war in some far off place where they would wreak havoc?
  These savage metallic creatures were tamed and
compelled to our bidding, to jump at every command, obey our every whim. How could we lose with these on our side?

But I never felt comforted seeing them march past. The thought of them did not bring me solace as I lay in my bed at night, the sound of distant bombings rattling my window frames. I only ever felt appalled. Appalled that we humans were capable of creating weapons such as this to unleash upon one another. Appalled that we could imagine such a nightmare and bring it into existence.

  I left the old relic and moved on, finding my way around the rock wall and up onto the ridge, and from there following the far slope downward on a gentle incline.  I could see the end of the forest below at last as it opened out into another sandy plain.  I stopped while I had the advantage of elevation and surveyed the terrain with my binoculars.  The wind was picking up out there on the flat.  Gusts and whirlwinds whipped across into where the forest ended, creating dancing flurries of sand among the tree stumps.  I pulled the cloth from my satchel and wrapped it around my mouth and nose, attempting to cover the wound on my neck as well.  It was going to be another tough day out there battling across it.  I’d be in the open and more vulnerable to attack from the Marauders.

But it was another step towards home.

20

For a long time the world had been ash.  Just soot and falling ash.  There was a cloying mist that never went away, a flurry of grey that fell from the tenebrous sky, as if the clouds that had once graced our skies were now corrupted, shedding their rotten scales piece by piece and allowing them to fall slowly to earth. 

Years later, when the sunlight began to return, I could not comprehend what the world had become. It wasn’t the Earth anymore. Our vistas of green and blue, our towering cities of glass and steel, our beautiful forests had been reduced to this - a place that looked more like the surface of the moon, and was just as inhospitable to life. It couldn’t be the same place.

But it was.  This was home. 
Our
home.  We’d taken a torch to it, reduced it to cinders, to an achromatic, alien world where nothing lived, and in which almost nothing moved.  All that remained was the faint stir of ash in the breeze and the shuffle of lost souls like me, trudging through the dregs of a world that was just a memory.