Revolution (2 page)

"Or
Scotland or Wales," piped in a man with a thin face and an Armani suit.

"Ireland?"

"Oh, it’s
still there. North and South. And the Orkneys and Shetlands. So far anyway."

"And
Europe?"

"Still
there."

"Paris,
France?"

"It’s
there, too."

"Just my
luck."

"Everything’s
been diverted, flights, boats, freight."

"But no
England, my England," said another with a singsong lilt.

"The
Emerald Isle?"

"That’s
Ireland, sir."

"Oh,
yeah, yeah. I knew
that
."

"No
England, no Sceptred Isle, no Great Britain, nothing is there."

The Landstat
image flashed up on the screen. "This is the last we have of it, before
and after."

"Terrorists?"

Is this dumb
fuck taking
any
of this in?

And everyone
turned to look at the guy who had said such a stupid thing and how he looked so
little now.

"Sir,
the whole country has vanished," someone offered, with a look on one side
of his face like barbed wire had been dragged up it.

One said it,
the others wished they had.

"Find me
someone to blame for this. I cann
ot
go to the country, on television,
address the nation and say, I dunno, whahappined? So give me something.
Anything."

First image
from space — country basking in sunshine. Next image — cloud cover. Last image
— sea and a great big fucking gap.

"Did it
sink? What about Menwith Hill? Fylingdales? Are they gone too?"

"Well,
we did try telephoning a few folks, but..."

"Yes?"

"Unobtainable."

"Ten
Downing Street?"

"No one’s
home, sir."

"What
about the other one, whatshername, the Queen?"

"Mrs.
Windsor doesn’t seem to be answering calls either."

"Damn
terrorists."

Everyone gave
everyone else an uncomfortable look and shifted those uncomfortable looks back
at the guy with his fists clenched on the table. Then they did something more
useful and shuffled around in tiny little steps, like they had horned toads
under their feet.

The door
burst wide. A young bespectacled man rushing in and stopped in a skid on the eagle’s
head.

The man who
thought he was in charge of the planet, now minus one little bit, his fists
still clenched on air, stood up, and leaned on the big-wig’s all important
table.

"
What
?"

Sweat ran
down the young man’s face. He could have been straight from the pages of
Vogue
.
"Sir?"

"Yes.
What is it, son?" the little man who used to be the big man said, drawing
the sweat off his face with a twitching hand.

"The
cloud cover’s piling up over France."

"And?"

"And,"
someone drawled, followed by a whistle. "Same thing happened to Great
Britain before
it
vanished."

#

Every parent
has his child’s life mapped out from the day he is born, and this part wasn’t
what I had planned for Eddy. It was all wrong. Would there only be dark and
night for him? Would he always be on the run?

"Dad,"
he said. "I think it’s your birthday."

Maybe it was,
maybe it didn’t matter. But I sunk inside another day in another year, and if
he was right, I’d forgotten about my own son’s birthday two weeks before.

He had his
hands behind his back. "Close your eyes," he said.

I wanted to
be blind.

"Okay,
you can open them now."

And out of
the darkness he held a pillow of moss woven with reeds. How long had he thought
about it? How long had it taken him to make it when I wasn’t looking? How long
had he thought of my comfort?

He smiled at
me, happy to be giving.

I couldn’t
help it.

I cried.

#

"
What
?"

"Europe’s
gone. Canada too, but no big deal on that, right?"

No one
laughed in the shuffle out the door.

"South
America going I can about stand, but Russia?"

"Sir, there’s
nothing else but us, now."

"Damn!"

"There’s
nothing but us and ocean all around," the man said, picking up his jacket,
running sweating arms into the silk-lined sleeves. A wall behind him split and
cracked open and spewed out gunk. He never flinched even as the sleeve he was
shoving his arm through fell off.

#

I felt it on
my shoulder. I had been dreaming of sea and sand and sun, of a place I’d never
been. The waves lapped at the shore’s edg3, enticing me, drawing me nearer and
nearer, come with me, sleep with me, drown with me, but something else was
pulling me away, dragging me back.

"Dad,
Dad!"

The darkness
swamped in on me and tarred pitch over my dream. I rubbed the heels of my hands
into my eyes. What
is
that heat, what is that humidity, what now? Eddy’s
voice, still a whisper, had an edge, an urgency to it. He crouched, his hand
pushing and pulling my shoulder.

"What is
it?" I said.

""Look,
dad."

But the first
thing that came to me was the stink. Of wet walls, of rock, of old sweat and
bodies not washed in days, of clothes unclean, unchanged and threadbare,
falling apart like everything else. Like the rucksacks, the billycans, the
boots on our feet, like me.

"Over
there, Dad.
Look!
"

It came to me
then. Even in the short space of needed sleep, I had abandoned him. What if I
had never woken up? What then? My head snapped to the left and looked out of
the mouth of the cave we’d called home for the past week. Blood, I thought.
Blood and bleeding. A thin slash across the sky at its lowest point, crimson
stretching so thin  and so long I had to hunker closer to the opening to take
it all in.

"What is
it, Dad?"

Like the old
days — why is the grass green, Dad? Why is the sky blue? I knew why the sky was
blue and the grass green. I knew about physics and biology, about chlorophyll
and wavelengths measured in nanometers. I knew about aerial-complexes and how
plants accelerate electrons until they are just right. I knew that grass isn’t
really green but red., because green is the wavelength of light grass kicks
out, rejects, no use. I knew all the complicated answers. I never had the
simple ones.

The slash
widened slowly into a gap.

"The
horizon," I said.

The gap
widened more, the red fading into vermillion, then into a widening deep ochre
bleeding into soft fuzzy-peach.

"The
sun," I said, though I didn’t believe it even as I saw it.

And we sat
there watching the glow stretching over, warming and casting shadows with
light. The cities were gone, nothing to see, nothing down there, no structures,
no anything. We’d already witnessed how every man-made structure had ground
into dust. Steel, glass, and fancy wrought-iron work had blistered and peeled
and rusted, and roads had bubbled up and turned into mulch wherever we went.
There had been nothing for weeks, nothing to look for, nothing to head for, no
sanctuary to seek.

And now, as
we looked out and down from our Alto Plano, down into the first dawn in months,
there was nothing to be seen of man, his life, his work, his meaning, his
history. Everything had been erased, reworked and woven into the fabric of a
New World.

There was so
much green out there. A never ending sea of green, of tree ferns and vines
reaching up to the light rolling in from the horizon. And the air was heavy and
warm and dense with humidity. The beginning of clouds rose up in a filigreed
mist, so pure, so soft, so real.

It had been a
long time since I’d looked at those drawings as a child, those paintings,
representations by another hand, another fevered imagination. But the memory
came back to me now. Only I wasn’t looking at paintings and drawings, at someone’s
imagination. I was seeing them in the flesh. Sigillarias, Lepidodendrons,
Medullosas and Calamites and gigantic club mosses, and I knew there would be
insects and dragonflies with two-foot wingspans. Then it came to me. Laurentia,
Gondwana, Balitica, the Panthallassic Ocean.

"What’s
happened, Dad?" Eddy asked, legs dangling over the edge of the cliff.

"Pangaea,"
I whispered.

It wasn’t an
answer, more a feeling than a knowing. As if everything had reversed on itself,
and time and time, and man and men but for us had vanished.

We must be in
the Southern Hemisphere now. No wonder it was so damn warm and humid and the
air so dense. So thick it was pushed in faster than I could breathe it back
out. But there was light and there was green, there was musky scent to the
heavy air.

"Look,
Dad," eddy said with genuine excitement, innocence, raising his arm,
pointing a finger down into the distance. For a moment he was lost in the
wonder of it all. Perhaps we were the only humans here. "Look at it, Dad."

And so I did.
A
Meganeura
, a gigantic dragonfly ascending from the canopy of giant
tree ferns. The insect hovered in front of us, its body a glittering metallic
blue, a deep blue in the hazy orange sunlight still low on the horizon. It must
be true, it must be. Dragonflies with wingspans this big wouldn’t be capable of
flying in air too thin. There was only one time when the atmosphere was hyper
dense enough to support them, and I breathed it deeply.

This is where
the trouble started, I thought, as we sat there, legs over the edge, looking at
that beautiful creature with curiosity in its glinting black eyes, its wings
beating in a golden blur.

We were in a
place and time all the energy for a future Earth would be stored and fossilized
for another species to emerge and exploit, to ruin the air, to release the
energy too fast in too short a time, to choke the planet. But that would be a
long time from now — three hundred and fifty million years away. For now we
were in a time when the northern ice cap hadn’t even begun to freeze over, and
the sea level was high, higher than it would ever be again.

#

The storm
clouds gathered over Washington. The blackness came and stayed and the lights
went out. And no amount of F-111s can shoot down clouds. They tried busting
holes in them with tons of silver nitrate. But the V2 bombers that took it up
there never came back, and the clouds stayed anyway. And now the White House
began to sink and bury itself into the earth giving way beneath it, as a
President sat at a table as the walls came tumbling down.

"Damn terrorists,"
he muttered.

The glass of
the windows, six inches thick, exploded inward as the foundations melted away.
The candle on the table wavered, its glow dying, and lumps of rust fell from
the holder like and over-stuffed, over-cooked, dead fat turkey. The rioting had
stopped. The screaming had died away. The wailing and whimpering and prayers
and church spires had crumpled in on themselves like wet hymn sheets. It was
the last day the Earth Stood Still, and Dear Mister President waited for the
final convulsion. There was no enemy to fight, no reason for being, nothing to
push against to give meaning to existence. There was nowhere to run and no
point in being alive without an enemy to kill. He looked up, higher, higher. "In
this island we trust..." standing up slowly, saluting, as the foundations
buckled and snapped beneath him.

#

I worried
about predators and disease, new microbes and gigantic carnivorous worms. But
so far nothing had happened. We’d climbed and slithered down vines onto the
ground below. Most of it was swamp with a sweet smell I’d never known before.
Mostly decaying vegetation, and new growth, a lot of new growth. So much growth
we could hear the fronds unfurling during the night and open up for the
blessing of a new day. And we stepped carefully, very carefully, very careful
not to trample on anything with legs enough to run, or smooth muscle to
slither, circular jaws to bite with.

In the end we
managed to yank some peculiar looking fish out of the after. But it seemed to
take a lot more effort than the energy we gained from eating it. But there was
soul food too, and that can go a long way when there’s none other for a while.
And soul food was Eddy laughing at dumb Dad’s dumb efforts at trying to catch
dinner. Okay, so he was better than I was, I’ll give way to that, but only
sometimes.

Eddy thrived.
He didn’t complain. Maybe he was growing up too fast too young and learning not
to. I just grew leaner. Insects, crawling or scurrying were more afraid of us
than we of them. And yes, we made meals of some of them. The trouble with fire
around here is that everything is so damn damp, sodden. Besides, I’d not seen
any flint to make a spark with anyway. So in the end, most of the stuff we
consumed was raw. Thank God, I still had my own teeth.