After the Winter (The Silent Earth, Book 1) (15 page)

I continued along and the city thinned out. I passed the apartment where I’d first taken shelter, hiding behind the safety of its wrought iron fence. My first stop in Perish. The first time I’d seen it, it had appeared out of the maelstrom of sand and wind like a beacon, a safe haven. Now as I left it in my wake, it disappeared into the serene grey mist, like a lighthouse on the shore disappearing from view as I headed out to sea.

  And then I was back in the outskirts.  The bulk of the Perish left behind, I was again amongst those frail old houses, the tentative edges of the city’s reach.  There seemed to be less of them now.  Perhaps they had succumbed to the sandstorm.  I couldn’t help but think of them again as old men, the weakest and most elderly of them slowly dying out, collapsing to the ground and seeping back into the earth below.

The sharp clack of my boots on asphalt began to dull, as the road gave way to sand and dirt. I was out. The city was behind me and I was on my way.

Finding my way up onto the ridge was made difficult by the foggy conditions. Rather than sighting my preferred path and making my way as the crow flies, I had to progress like a blind man feeling his way. Out of the mist I abruptly came upon a wall of rock. In the wet conditions, there was no way I was going to attempt to scale it. I turned north and trudged along the base of the outcropping for a number of minutes, in my impatience wondering if it was ever going to end. Quite irrationally, I considered turning around and heading back the other way. I knew that would inevitably lead me to walking and circles, and I resisted the urge. All the while I kept an eye on the compass. North. Now north east. Veering back to the west. It had to end soon.

And then I had made it. Eventually, I found a gentler gradient of hillside that would result in a much easier climb. I scrambled up the incline, scaling it without too much difficulty. I bounded, hands held low for balance and sometimes scrabbling for purchase, my satchel thrashing about noisily on my back. The mist was clearing the further I ascended. The sun became visible as a bright patch in the sky. The air was warmer. It spurred me on to an even quicker pace.

At the top, the sun was shining brightly, high in the sky. I looked back into the valley. Perish lay hidden beneath the blanket of fog that extended across the entire valley. It was like a witch’s cauldron down there, seething with a heavy, arcane vapour.

I reached for my pocket and pulled out the photograph of Zade. I took a moment to let the sun shine upon it. It had been a sunny day in our backyard when I’d taken the photo, much like this one. I remembered every detail, of how he’d run toward me, and how I’d asked him to slow down to pose for the photo. It was a fine art to take a decent photo of a kid like Zade. He was always on the move, always looking this way and that for the next target of his amusement. He didn’t have time to pose for photographs. To capture him like I had that day was a rare moment. A special moment.

I put the photograph away. Excited by the prospect of the journey, I still couldn’t shake the melancholy of leaving Max back down in the valley. I consoled myself with the fact that I’d done all I could to help him. He’d made his choices, and he would have to live with them. In the end, maybe this was the best for both of us. Beneath the sarcastic facade, beneath the gruff exterior where everything was made out to be a joke, he was terrified. Terrified of leaving, of staying, of living, and even dying. He was afraid of everything and I couldn’t change that, no matter what I said and no matter what I offered.

In the distance, poking through the fog, skyscrapers jutted out like skeletal fingers grasping for the heavens. In a way, that’s exactly what they were. I saw the distinctive onion-like tip of Ol’ Trembler among them. It, then, was the last piece of Perish that I bid farewell. The last structure to which I gave a silent nod goodbye.

“Well, you did it,” I whispered. “You outlasted me as well.”

I flipped the compass open and turned my back on the city. I had a long way to go.

Ahead of me, my old companion, the wasteland, was waiting.

Part Two

Wasteland

16

The footprints I’d left out here were gone.  They’d been swallowed up some time ago, melting away into the sand as if they’d never existed.  Like
I’d
never existed.  That was the way of it out here, the first rule one had to learn:
Forget who you are.  Here, you are no one.

That feeling of insignificance was swift to assail me, like a desert vulture of old swooping in to rip open my innards and pick clean my soul. The emptiness was inescapable. It permeated everything. But, strangely, it was also like a comfortable old blanket that the wasteland wrapped around me, cushioning me from all the joy and suffering, the fear and love of the real world. It cancelled out the good with the bad in equal measure, without discrimination. I was nothing again.

I thought of it as the silent earth, a place where the voices of people, animals, birds and insects had been stilled. Mother Nature’s offspring had all been wiped out.

But there was a difference this time, something that separated this journey from those that had come before.  I was borne along, not by the fear of Marauders, but by a newfound desire.  My stride was longer, the pump of my arms more determined.  The hunch of my back as I leaned into my march was more purposeful, the rhythmic
thud thud thud
of my footsteps more rapid.  I pushed on because I had a destination to strive toward, and not just a waypoint on an endless flight from danger.  There was an end in sight.

By day I would make my way across the sand. The sight of distant Grid spires, thin towers of rusted metal, impossibly tall and now useless with no one to maintain them, were often the only objects to break the monotony. The Marauders, for now, seemed to have cleared out. Maybe they were pursuing new quarry, or they’d headed north, as the Marauder back in Perish had suggested. I didn’t question my good luck, I just hoped it would continue.

By night my muscles would ache. Even synthetics had their physical limits. I’d camp out under the cloudless sky, staring up at the stars. As eager as I was to put distance at my back, the thought of stumbling around at night, weary and careless, held my enthusiasm in check. I didn’t have enough supplies to light my way for hours on end. It would be just my luck to fall over a cliff, or into one of Max’s crevasses, and have it all come to a senseless end.

Instead I preferred to lay with the warm sand beneath me and watch as those tiny pinpricks of light spun slowly across the sky. I’d never learnt all of the constellations before the Winter, but I’d had enough time now to devise some new ones of my own. A dog, a giraffe. An arrow. A bridge. Not anything to rival the majestic patterns of old, but for me, they were enough. I learned to watch for the planets, although I couldn’t be sure which was which without a telescope. Venus and Mars were easy enough to identify, the former with its evening and morning brilliance, and the latter with its dusky yellow glow. I thought I could see one other planet, but wasn’t sure if it was Jupiter and Saturn.

Every now and then I’d see a satellite flinging its way across the blackness just after nightfall.  That always made me sit up and pay attention.  Technology of old, there for all to see, still floating in space, as it had fifty or a hundred years ago.  Was it still powered on?  Was it still
functional? Was someone down here communicating with it, even controlling it? Could they see me right now through telescopic viewfinders?

Or perhaps it was merely space junk, another useless relic of human technology that no longer served any purpose, and which would soon burn up in the atmosphere, transmuted into tiny particles of dust just as the rest of man’s civilization seemed destined.

To rebuild civilisation there were so many things we’d have to start again.  So many skills and technologies we’d have to rediscover, or reinvent.  There were pockets of the Grid’s repositories out there, no doubt, sitting in data stores deep underground or in bunkers.  It hadn’t all been lost to the chaos.  But there was no way to store everything that had been contained within the Grid - that endless framework of data, the underpinnings of knowledge, of communication, of entertainment, of
everything
.  The Grid had been central to modern life. 

It had been the first thing to reach for in the morning, the starting point of the day.  I remembered the routine of gathering up the handheld flip by my bed and then transitioning the information from there to the wall of whichever room I entered, to the glass of the shower screen and the head up display in my car.  It gave an overview of sleep patterns, assessing the quality of sleep. It provided suggestions for breakfast as I approached the refrigerator, based on nutritional data gleaned from receptors in door handles throughout the house. It mapped out my day’s activities and appointments and visually prompted when something was added, changed or removed. It presented a real-time aerial map of the city, updating traffic flows and congestion and marking out the fastest possible route to work at any given time. 

Suggestions for clothing and leisure activities would also appear, the result of algorithms that crunched data from every conceivable avenue: time of year, vital statistics, societal trends, as well as previous choices and, it was rumoured, more nefarious methods: analysis of eye tracking data whilst in department stores and online to determine which items caused the eye to linger the longest.  Whether or not these stories were real was debatable, but there was certainly an almost mystic quality to the Grid.  It knew what you wanted even before
you
did.

All it took was a curt gesture to dismiss one set of data and move to a new set of information, detailing the same kind of data but which pertained to partners and children, friends and acquaintances. The data was correlated and streamlined so that only the most pertinent information was displayed first. One could sit there for hours and go through every last detail about everyone they knew, and there were those who did just that. They made a science of knowing everything about everyone, both close acquaintances, celebrities, and everything in between. It was all there at their fingertips. Nothing was really private anymore, an accepted part of the way society functioned.

I’d even had colleagues ask why I wasn’t sleeping well, or how much I’d enjoyed eating at a restaurant when I hadn’t previously volunteered the information. That was how it was.

But the fury of the White Summer had broken the Grid, irrevocably collapsing all those technologies that had been built upon it. Just as buildings, bridges, bricks and mortar were torn apart in the conflict, so was the information network that held society together like a mesh. The very fabric of it was shredded. Our ability to respond, to coordinate ourselves in those most grim days of the conflict was subverted. We’d become so reliant on the Grid that, without it, we were all but powerless. We were blind.

I raised myself up onto my elbows and stared into the east.  There was no sign of the light of morning yet.  I’d be here a while.  A gentle breeze tugged at my shirt, stirred the sand around my legs.  The cold was setting in again.  Out in the desert, without the blanket of cloud cover
overhead, the heat of the day evaporated quickly, and temperatures plunged at night. The low temperatures were unpleasant, but I’d learned to deal with them.

My hand reached about in the darkness, snagging handfuls of sand.  After a moment it fell on the satchel.  Reaching around inside like a blind man, I produced the compass and held it in my hand, felt the comforting weight of it.  I opened and closed the metal case over and over again.
Fick.  Fick.  Fick.  Fick. 
It was a metronome to set my mind to, allowing me to fade into autopilot. To tune out.
 
Fick.  Fick.  Fick. 

I slipped my mind into a state of rest and waited patiently for morning.

17

Some days later the terrain became a little more manageable.  I saw tyre tracks here and there, which I assumed to be Marauders, since they’d taken control of most of the vehicles out there that were still working.  Warily, I began heading steadily north, and the sand of the desert turned into firmer ground and rolling hills. 

I found a road, or what was left of it, and began to travel along as it wound its way lazily toward the west. 

There were bent and broken telephone poles at intervals along the edges of the crumbled asphalt, the cables that had once stretched taut across their upper extremities long since buried in the dust. This was old tech. Poles such as these hadn’t been used in communications for a long, long time. They had been superseded by underground cabling, meshes of wireless transmitters and satellites, and those in turn had been made obsolete by the reaching tendrils of Grid spires. The older tech simply hadn’t been torn down when it became redundant.

These old poles that had, in their fingertips, once felt the surge of information that brought the world into a new technological age were long forgotten, empty and stripped bare of functionality. It was ironic that those technologies that came after - the cables, the satellites, and then eventually the Grid spires, were now equally useless.