Day 121 - Babel - Chapter 17 (2096 words)

©Wayne Webb and constantwriting.blogspot.com, 2013. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Wayne Webb and constantwriting.blogspot.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

BABEL

By Wayne Webb

CHAPTER 17

George and Barbara, Fire and Water, were in the City centre standing among the amassed pairs of people that were crowing out the centre, unmoving for a whole day now, but still filing in and taking up position in the streets and lane-ways, every open space they could find. They had filled the car with provisions for the other two and sent them on their way, back to the four villages though they would now be empty. Tree was pregnant and with the explosions, the zombified Babel and the overwhelmingly bizarre nature of everything, it was all just too much. So they left, it was for the best and George along with Barbara decided to make their way to the city by boat.

It was Barbara that came up with the idea, that the frigate that was docked in the Naval Base would had lifeboats on it, and they could commandeer one of those to make the harbour crossing to the city. They made it into to the Navy yards with little problems, security was none existent and the fences had been torn to shreds long ago. There were three vessels docked and they scoured through them looking for anything useful, though they had been picked clean long ago of tools and supplies, the lifeboats on the three vessels were mostly untouched. They had their pick of them, so they dropped the one on the starboard side of the one that was on the furtherest mooring from the landward side, into the water of the Waitemata Harbour.

George and Barbara took and oar each but it was too hard to coordinate their speeds that well, so George took on the rowing and took them all the way from the Naval pier to the Container Wharf at Mechanics Bay. It had taken them a while longer than they expected to get across there and, that was the shortest route they could have taken, they were unsure exactly how long but it would have been an hour or two and they were fighting the currents and George's aching arms. They tried swapping out at one point, but they simply made better time with him at the oars, even when tired and slowing down. The length of the lifeboat worked in their favour, as did the hard v-shaped hull, but it still took them time to get what looked like a deceptively short distance.

As they made it to the wharf and climbed in among the derelict and damaged containers they could see already that people were walking along Quay street in pairs and a few hundred meters up the road were stopping, standing in place in a static mass of pairs of people. They rested a little first, taking shelter in crane housing that had fallen to the ground, using it to hide from the sun and any unwanted attention. They did not want to assume that it was the same with all of the Babel, that they were all zoned out our disconnected from reality, they wanted to be alert and ready to react if need be, rather than tired and exhausted from the hard slog it took to cross the harbour manually.

George slept while Barbara watched out and saw more and more of the Babel lining up, at one point filling up Quay street beyond the point where the entrance to the Container Wharf was. Curiously they did not go over the water on to any of the wharf surfaces or piers, they stayed on the land, as if quay street was a natural barrier. Barbara walked out of the housing and took a surreptitious view of the Babel in their new obsession with the downtown Auckland area. They never looked her way, not even once when she tripped over a cable the thickness of her arm that had been laying in a rut, only slightly raised above the tarmac surface. She stumbled and skinned her knee, swearing profusely and then catching herself and standing up in plain view of thousands of Babel.

They were unmoved, they did not so much as glance in her direction. She made her way back to the fallen crane and dropped any pretence of subterfuge or subtlety in her movements. She let George sleep a little longer and then when he finally woke up the evening was settling in.

“How long was I asleep?” George was a little groggy but was massaging his strained muscles, still cramping in his arms.

“As long as you needed to be.” Came her reply.

“We should find somewhere to stay the night, it'll get dark soon and we may want to be off the ground tonight?”

They discussed a strategy, looking from a higher vantage point they figured out that there was a focal point where everyone seemed to be pointed towards. Queens Wharf, no one was on it and all they could see was focussed towards it. It was an exposed route but they could have walked all the way too it along the edge of the wharves, the natural edge for the Babel was along Quay Street so there was enough free space to walk along all the way to Queens without touching any of the Babel, but they would have been walking parallel to them and fully in the open, a few meters away at the closest.

George and Barbara both thought of the Hotel on Princes Wharf as the logical place to stay the night, and they could get there in relative ease from the outer edge of the opposite end of the far container wharf from where they had landed. There was a ship there, partly submerged but from this distance they could see at least one undamaged lifeboat dangling from the wharf side of the boat. Worst case scenario was go over and pick it up, drag it to the water and take the very short journey past Queens to Princes and alight at the Hilton, climb the wharf and take a room for the night.

They were in luck as there were more boats to choose from on the water side of the partly sunk ship moored there, and it was easy enough to drop it in the water, and in the darkening twilight take the journey across to their destination, and this time with less currents among the jettys and piers of the harbour, Barbara took a share of the rowing at less physical cost than George had paid for the harbour crossing.

They climbed the exterior steps and made their way into the second floor restaurant, using sunlight areas to find the way up staircases, fire escapes and balcony areas to get to the top section of the hotel that jutted out into Auckland Harbour. They had unimpeded views of the Queens Wharf Cloud in the moonlight and took a room to share. There was nothing between them, but they shared a bed for convenience and safety's sake. Neither was that keen on spending the night alone in the eerie quiet of a powerless and hollow hotel in the night time, and they had security in proximity that they would not have had with the prudence of respectively ensuring each others modesty or privacy. Such concerns seemed like they belonged to a different age, even compared to a week ago when they were the Few and they were the Babel, and it was a symbiosis they could all live with.

They woke to the sun streaming in and lighting the room, the curtains had been open all night to allow the moonlight to give them at least some semblance of normality without power. It was so odd to be in the centre of the city and have it unlit, no ambient light at all, it felt wrong in such an urban environment. Out in the villages, it was lit by fire, candle and occasionally electricity when it was appropriate, but it was also expected to be dark, and moonlight was OK most of the time but there were nights of pitch blackness where the milky painted the sky white in a myriad of stars never seen in their previous lives. In downtown Auckland to see such a sight dripping down the spine of the night sky, it was like gazing on an alien world for them.

They found a convenience store in one of the shop fronts at the base of the hotel, one that had miraculously not been completely ransacked and they salvaged some cans of food and some stale but edible food that was discoloured but not rancid or rotten. There was also a box of coke cans, hiding under a fallen shelving unit in the back, and surprisingly it was still good, warm at room temperature but bubbly and drinkable. They took what they could and stashed in it the room, making provisions for another night, to see what was going on here, they did not expect that the answer would be forthcoming that rapidly just because they were here now.

After midday they worked up the courage to cross the street and get close to the Babel, walking parallel to them at first, walking into the viaduct harbour and seeing how far and how consistent the mass of people were before taking the plunge and walking amongst them. Barbara had shared her experience with George, how she had sworn and fell in plain sight but had not attracted attention, but being visible to moving people, people arriving and potentially spotting them was a long way from standing among them and being shoulder to shoulder with tens of thousands of people who were not moving.

Over an hour passed with the two of them weaving in and out, slalom-ing between pairs of Babel, not touching or saying anything, though what would be the point of saying anything to a Babel anyway? Then they evolved to trying to provoke a response and elicit a reaction if they could, but there was nothing and their expectations were fulfilled making any and all of their trepidation seem silly now, but there it was anyway. Nothing was happening but neither of the two Few among the tens of thousands of Babel could shake the feeling, the sense that they were loaded and ready to go for something, waiting to fall in domino chains to whatever they had been gathered for.

“Oh. Would you look at that.” Barbara was pointing to the sky and it took George a few seconds to see it in the glare of the sun.

“Jesus.” exclaimed George.

“I don't think it is.” countered Barbara drily, and he laughed out loud at the unexpected burst of dry with from his companion, something he had not seen in her before. The sound of his rasping laugh echoed in the street, bouncing of the concrete and steel of the buildings along the Quay.

The two Few left what they were doing, exploring the amassed Babel in unaccosted peace, to get back to the hotel and the view of Queens Wharf. A couple of rooms had intact mini bars, so there was Vodka among them and it was cracked open and poured into a coke as soon as they got there.

“Is there any Diet?” Barbara was turning out to be much funnier than he knew.

They sipped on the comfort of an alcoholic wedge between themselves and the increasingly odd reality they were now in, working on a decent prophylactic buzz between them and an Alien Shuttle Craft slowly descending into the open area at the front of Queens Wharf, between the Cloud and Quay Street.

“Do you think we should go down there and … I don't know? Greet them?” George asked Barbara, who responded with a shake of her head and the pouring of another healthy shot of Vodka and Coke.

They saw the Craft land, felt and heard it hit the ground with a solid but controlled thump. The ramp extended and from their location the next thing they saw was the muzzle flash, and they then saw people running down the ramp away from the two gunshots.

“What the fuck!” George swore, and Barbara just stared as they watched the small group of people scatter on the ground, the figure on the roof with a gun stood up and looked down on the scene, they could not see an expression from this distance, but they imagined it was horror from the wat he stood his gun hanging uselessly from his arm.