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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.
