Sondranos: The Narrative of Leon Bishop (2 page)

As I passed by, I imagined
Daniel. He was standing beside me grinning and pointing at the
carousel saying: ‘Congratulations, you’ve won your stuff!’

Psychological manifestation or
not, it was still pretty creepy.

Immediately past the terminal,
the Abbey sprouted from a large patch of Montana grass that nipped
at the edges of the stonework. My first thought was that it didn’t
belong next to such an unfeeling, stark building as the terminal.
It resembled a church I’d once seen in Dorset. Four thick
buttresses introduced the façade; a doorway bearing two thick oak
coloured doors told me to be careful of how close I came in that
non-threatening way that gothic architecture achieves.

I stopped at the doors. The
framing looked like wood, but was hot to the touch.

Smooth and glossy.

Someone had taken Aurichrome
minerals and mixed them with the steel, allowing it to be coloured
like oak. I pulled open the doors and instantly felt the breath of
cool, processed air rushing through the nave and past me.

Cinnamon incense came next. A
dozen pews on either side accompanied my walk down the centre of
the Abbey. A small shop offering dozens of shirts and clothes
marked by an emblem I didn’t recognize stood out, just like the
co-pilot had said.

“
May I help
you?”

I jerked around, coming face to
face with a priest.

Black robes hung over his
shoulders and masked the rest of his body. His eyes were wide and
streaked with sleepless red. Wrinkles cracked the skin around his
mouth and brow like firecrackers had exploded on his cheeks and
left smudge refuse behind. His hair was grey and his skin was
pale.

“
I’m looking
for Davion,” I said. “I need something else to wear.”

He looked me
up and down; his smile turned to a frown as he glanced from my
shoes to the
Korsikov 2303-D
shirt I’d been wearing for the last
week.

He winked. “I think we may be
able to help you out.”

Davion extended his hand. His
touch was gentle, not the kind of touch I would have expected from
a middle-aged man like him. Most like to express their strength and
superiority through handshakes, but not him. He didn’t need to show
off or impress. The tang of incense clouded away from him.

A loud crash rebounded off the
walls from the other side of the Abbey.

Davion jerked away. The
contents of the left transept had been occupied by a display of
candles laid out like tombstones across a table. A woman had
knocked over a stool that had been holding a stack of hymnals and
whispered with every muscle in her body at a young man in a white
vimpa. Her arms tensed, her fists were clenched, and she lunged
forward in small gasps of movement. The boy’s eyes darted to
Davion. The woman caught the movement and – suddenly -
responsibility had passed.

“
You!” she
yelled. The accusation was palpable.

My first impression of Melanie
came quick and shallow. As she trundled down a pew and towards us,
she held weight around her waist much like a balloon balances a
small amount of water. When she stopped in front of us, she was
breathless. A small paunch of fat jutted out from beneath her shirt
as she raised her hands and rested them on her head. Her chest
heaved as she gulped at the air, fighting off hyperventilation. Her
voice echoed with the same power of a sermon. High blood pressure
must have run in her family if she’d been so winded.

“
Melanie, if
you will please lower your voice, I’m sure we can discuss this in
private.” Davion held hands up, palms out.

“
Every time
you’ve mentioned the word private, it’s always ended up with me in
a room talking to myself!”

“
Are you sure
about that?”

“
Sounds like
something a priest would say.” She closed her eyes and calmed
herself. Davion let his hands falter and offered a placating
smile.

He was about to step in her
direction when a rumble shook the Abbey.

It would have been easy to have
confused it for a burst of thunder.

How passive. With such a simple
phrase, I tell you how Sondranos ended:

While Melanie and the priest
had begun to squabble, as a handful of tourists boarded an
underground metro bound for the city, and as a couple of transport
pilots finished their flight shut-down, Sondranos came to a
shattered halt.

Easily confused for a burst of
thunder.

“
What the
fuck was that?” Melanie spoke as if she knew something I couldn’t.
Davion acted in tune with the secret, cocking his head to the side
and listening carefully. When the sound died away, Melanie’s
expression had changed to one of absolute confusion. She looked
around with the same look of fear that Davion wore. I almost joked
that she’d angered God, but my curiosity kept me silent. “That
can’t be…”

“
Quiet,
Melanie,” Davion said.

Another rumble shook the
framework of the Abbey, causing dust to rain from the rafters and
blanketing brown snowflakes on the rug. Davion’s eyes grew wide and
locked onto Melanie’s.

Before they could speak, the
rumbling growl was replaced by a detonation that rattled the
windows.

The boy she’d been yelling at
ran off to a room in the distance, calling for someone I would
never get to know. All three of us moved quickly to the entrance. I
reached the double doors first and pushed out; my eyes were drawn
to the terminal. It seemed fine, still standing, and I nearly
cursed myself for thinking of that option first. However, behind
the terminal billowed a large cloud of black smoke. It climbed the
air like it was trying to escape the fires that fuelled it.
Something had destroyed the shuttle.

Melanie emitted a short, sharp
sound from beside me that drew my attention. She pushed away from
my side and tiptoed in the direction of the city. Sondranos-proper,
hulking in the distance like some great mirage, burned. Gone were
the tall spires – the tallest one replaced by a cloud of smoke and
dust. Some buildings still stood, but the shimmer of heat that made
me think of the city as a mirage had been replaced with an orange
glow that dwarfed the city in an auburn cloud licking at the
sky.

Three flies caught my eye,
scattering in the distance. It took a moment for my stunned brain
to realize they were private transports. Davion placed a hand on my
shoulder as we watched a small blue beam come from beyond the
darkest point in the sky. It centred on each transport and shot
them down\. The person shooting must not have even taken time to
consider. The pods fell in meteorite-sized balls of flame. From
flies to moths, I thought. My mind begged for fighter jets to
scream into sight with defensive weapons locked.

But what would they have aimed
at?

Part of me wanted to hear
shouting, the sounds of sirens wailing, and the general noises of
panic to prove that it was all real. Without them, I didn’t know
what to think. Whoever did this knew there was no way off the
planet or out of the crater; they knew exactly where to strike and
could successfully do so from orbit.

With the city still burning,
Davion, Melanie and I watched as a large orb, a cacophonic mass of
energy, descended into what was left of Sondranos-proper.

Understand that what I saw next
only took a few seconds.

While I’d stopped just outside
the façade of the Abbey, I felt like I was floating. My feet
planted on the semi-solid patio gravel as if they’d rooted
kilometres deep, but my body felt like it had taken to the sky. I
was dizzy, unresponsive. ‘I shouldn’t be here,’ I thought. Then,
callously, ‘not anymore.’

Melanie muttered something I
didn’t hear while Davion remained silent.

The orb tumbled and plummeted
towards where the tallest spire in Sondranos had been reduced to
smoke. For all we knew, it could have been a drop of light. Why
not? More impossible things have happened.

The light crumpled into itself
as the dust engulfed it.

I thought of a lighthouse
disintegrating into the ocean.

I blinked and could see the
ghost image of Sondranos on my eyelids.

What followed was an implosion.
The shockwave threw us against the doorway like a kick to the
chest. I couldn’t breathe. During this, the ground trembled but, to
the best of my memory, it wasn’t loud. It sounded like pebbles
rolling down a hill, all muffled my an intense and red-hot ringing
in my ears and behind my eyes. At the same time, the stained-glass
windows in the Abbey erupted into shards, raining glass on the
transepts and throughout the nave. Their sound was nothing more
than a twittering of birdsong in the back of my mind.

Then, silence.

We all struggled to stand
together, helping each other up, ignoring the soreness in our
bodies. Within a blink, there were no more fires in Sondranos. All
that remained of Sondranos was a cloud of grey stretching over the
sky and dust as far as the eye could see. My eyes burned and my
entire body threatened to collapse. But I couldn’t stop
staring.

Again, I wished it was
thunder.

I’ve been
told
,
as
part
of the therapy I’m being asked to
undergo, that life doesn’t flash before your eyes when you face
death. You simply remember what you should. Those memories will
drive you to survive or allow you to accept death. When I
eventually die, the destruction of Sondranos will be one of those
memories. Because of it, I’ll know if I’ve earned my
death.

Davion pulled
me into the
façade by the sleeve of my
shirt after coaxing Melanie inside. We shuffled blindly forward. He
stopped me next to a pew just shy of Melanie. The sight of
Sondranos vaporizing before us had burned a hollow, empty
appearance into our features.

Davion returned to Melanie,
whose eyes tuned to static.

She clung to a buttress as she
nudged away a smattering of ruby coloured glass with the toes of
her shoes. ‘Get it away’ and ‘That didn’t happen’, those nudges
implied.

“
Are you
hurt?” Davion asked.

She responded with blank
silence.

His eyes jumped around the nave
looking for something – most likely he was looking for anyone else
in the Abbey when the windows shattered. The young man had
thankfully escaped, but to what I’d never know. I could sense there
was something more from Davion. It seemed like he expected
something to walk in and fix everything.

He then turned to me. “There’s
a door through the gift shop which leads to the chapter house. Just
beyond that is the entrance to the cellar – take Melanie.”

He didn’t wait for a response.
“I will meet you there.”

He sensed my hesitation.

“
How can you
be so calm about this?” Melanie’s vacancy fractured as much as her
voice; the angry Melanie from before started to peek through. “You
saw what I saw, right?”

“
Friend,”
Davion ignored her for the moment. “I suggest we use what the Abbey
provides until we can fully assess the situation.”

Davion walked close to her,
treating the glass like sand on the carpet. The pieces were too
small to crack under his heels, but his steps left them embedded
into his footprints. He was cool and collected. This is the kind of
man Daniel deserved, I thought. The kind of man who doesn’t
run.

“
Melanie,”
his voice was stronger, louder even though he stood next to her. It
forced her attention to him. “You are going to go with this young
man as he leads you to safety. You are going to wait for me as I
scout the area. I will arrive either with or without survivors.
Then we will find out what we need. There is no sense in panicking.
I have things under control. Do you understand?”

The first tears of desperation
and fear fell from Melanie’s eyes and streaked the makeup that I
hadn’t seen coating her face. It revealed a darker tone to her skin
and implied a few blemishes.

She took Davion’s hand when he
offered it again and nodded her compliance.

Davion strode towards me and
whispered, “Hold on to your strength so that Melanie doesn’t lose
hers. I know her well and I’m afraid she’ll need it soon enough. I
don’t know you well enough to know but I hope you will prove my
faith in you correct.”

“
I can do
that,” I lied. I could hardly believe he spoke that way: part
rehearsed, as if he’d been planning for emergencies his entire
life.

Davion left, crunching over the
broken glass and out the front door. I walked over to Melanie and
took her hand. She trembled.

“
I was
determined today,” she muttered. “I knew I was going to find him
when I woke up.”

“
I know,” I
said. “Come on, we have to get to safety.”

She said more, but I didn’t
hear it.

The exit sign blinked at us,
half obscured by a dozen colourful streamers that once adorned the
roof-tiles of the gift shop. I swallowed a deep breath of the air
which had turned bitter, somewhat metallic. I looked back long
enough to see the candles in the other nave blown out; thread-like
wisps of smoke still ran from their wicks. Then, and only then, did
I realize that running meant you had to accept whatever you ran
into – and that not every new life is meant to be survived.

Chapter
Two:

Dead

My name is
Leon Bishop.
I learned how to dance by
walking two dogs on separate leads; my parents were amazing and
convinced me to study what I loved instead of what everyone else
only liked; as a teenager, I fell in love, lust, and into trouble
as easily as anyone else. But what really matters right now is
this: