Day 43 - Babel - Chapter 5 (1507 words)

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BABEL

By Wayne Webb

CHAPTER 5

The gun felt dead in his hands, lifeless and cold and yet necessary and unwilling to let go. It had been a long time since Victor had required it's use, and still it was a daily ritual to look down the sights at targets that did not exist. The first months after the Babel had been chaotic and insane, the amount of people coming to the city to loot and to steal, maybe even to look for answers. As days dragged into weeks some people just came here to be in familiar surroundings, but they were easy pickings for scavengers and the opportunists that lived like animals in the ruins of the city.

Victor had a perch of sorts in an isolated high rise building down Queen street, near the end where he could see the water. The buildings on either side of his were shorter and he had a floor above them that had an uninterrupted view up and down the rise into the heart of downtown. He had a decent supply of food in the supermarket that was on the sub-ground floor of the complex, no windows and only door and stair access to it meant that it was easy to block access to so only he could get in and out. There had been fires and explosions in those early days, rubble from buildings collapsing littered the street, not every building, but enough to make it look like a bomb had hit.

Victor chose this position because of the tower across the street had fallen after a fire gutted the lower floors, gas pipes exploded and crushed the struts supporting the weight of the tower. It had fallen into the middle, blocking the road and covering the entrance to the building that Victor now called home. He had explored it early on when looking for a position to watch the City from. Ropes and cables dropped down the elevator shaft, spelunking to the depths and looking in the black until the light was apparent. There was an emergency battery running the lights and so it was not pitch black down there. There were rats and some feral cats, which he took a few days hunting down and clearing out. It had not been that long since the Babel had happened before the city became a dangerous place to be. That was perfect for Victor, he wanted nothing to do with the human race as he saw them before the Babel, afterwards it was just the excuse he need to isolate himself completely.

In the basement level there was a generator and with a litrle work he fired it up and got power to the parts of the building that needed it. Most of the frozen foods and fresh produce was already rotten and needed clearing out, it took him days and it was a mammoth effort on his own, but he was left with a decent store of canned, preserved and processed foods that would keep him fed for a very long time, and no one else around to take it from him. Stray dogs and cats roamed the streets and fed on rats and other vermin that came to the city, infested the buildings, finding the rotting contents of food courts, restaurants and office cafeterias. Occasionally the odd straggler would make it to the city looking for god knew what, and a warning shot was all it took to dissuade them. The further you got out of the city the more people there were, the houses were not empty, they had people in them, but organising and feeding them was beyond the small number of speaking remaining.

Suburbs near the city fenced themselves in to keep their residents safe, where they could, banded together into little fiefdoms that were a law unto themselves and with little interaction to the others. There was a central conclave in Mt Eden, and atop the cone there was a headquarters of sorts that held a few dozen speaking people that tried to desperately form a government, something central that would work for getting people housed and fed, but with that many people, tens of thousands congregated there, tensions rose and violence erupted breaking the community and leaving hundreds dead in the streets. The City became a symbol of death and all the problems that large amounts of people together would cause. Slowly buts surely people abandoned the inner city and moved to the suburbs where there was more land and more scope to grow and look after your own. The larger properties out west and south became the places where the survivors would flock to, where they could get some semblance of order and modernity, but could take care of basic needs and food by growing and feeding each other. Large family units were at an advantage, they had the links and the trust and usually enough skill to survive together. The other side of that was the clannish nature of those families. Racial tensions were high and naturally people of the same racial background could tell that the people around them were like them, and by default easier to trust. Some of the compounds that grew had begun to embed defences into their new villages, digging trenches and lining their homes with weapons.

It was a powder keg and it resulted in all out war for weeks until the dead piled up in the streets. Like the attempts before hand in the inner city the people turned on themselves and eventually turned away from other people, fleeing to open areas of land, getting away from people and creating smaller communities out in the countryside. There were still pockets of settlements left, now that the bulk of people had moved out, the remainder had street upon street of houses to raid and pillage for supplies, but the more one family hoarded the more vulnerable they became. They could only defend themselves so much and so far before desperation and fear drove the people against them to take drastic and unthinkable measures.

So few people were left and no one went up to the downtown any more. The communities in the countryside or small family settlements were all following a similar pattern driven by need and survival mentality. Off the beaten path, well away from the roads, in defensible areas near hills of forests, were raw materials could be sourced for fire and building.

Humanity was a changed beast and it took so very little time for the old paradigm to collapse around them and scatter the survivors to the wind in a new diaspora for the twenty first century. Victor had been on expeditions to the edge of the city, to the border formed by K Road and Grafton Bridge and had not seen anyone approach in months now. There were cars and trucks abandoned in places all around and he had gotten adept at siphoning them for fuel for the generators he had in this building. A number of the other office blocks, hotels and shops had things that he could raid and install in the building he now called home.

The gun was his, he had it for years before the Babel came, and it was enough to dissuade the occasional raider stupid enough to try the city. He had painted warning signs at various entrances to the city, driving up buses, overturning them, setting fire to them to block the roads in with their charred corpses. He got to a building site down town where they were tunnelling into the bed rock and scavenged explosives, detonators and other useful equipment and sealed the city as best he could. Symonds street bridge supports were detonated, the section of the bridge dropped in pieces to the motorway below, sealing the access to the city via the streets as well as the spaghetti junction intersections. Grafton Bridge was destroyed, and the mid section of K Road also closed the same way. Any raised sections of the motorway were exploded or collapsed. The roads through the suburbs of Ponsonby and Parnell were treated to lined up burnt out cars and buses, a wall of dead machines and red icons telling people to come no further.

The warning signs were in English, but backed up with skulls and cross bones, radiation warning signs and anything else he could throw up on the sides of buildings and billboards to keep people away from the city.

The city was his, he alone would have it. There was nothing here for the wasted creatures gibbering away nonsensically, nor for the insane do-gooders who wanted to corral the survivors who were not any longer capable of human contact. It was a recipe for disaster and death, he had predicted it, seen it happen in the early days and had spent far too long burying the dead that no one else was coming for. This was the end of days and he had a front row seat with an amazing view of Auckland harbour.