Day 45 - Babel - Chapter 7 (1399 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 7

Not everyone who survived saw the ships, some small pockets of people, holed up and hunkered down were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Those in the South Island mostly missed the show entirely as the ships only appeared out to sea off the coast and could only be seen from the westernmost towns and villages. They had been an area populated in the larger part by senior citizens, retirees and others who already dealt with the initial sickness badly but the dementia like qualities of the Babel with surprising deftness. A generation of elder folk used to fending for themselves in harder conditions, they had their losses and problems without power like so many other areas, but with older houses fitted with wood fires and coal ranges, the harsher life without newer amenities was less of a challenge.

After a couple of raids from the more enterprising individuals used to fighting for position and driving the mountain passes, there were steps taken to isolate Westland district from the rest of the mainland. Well placed trees in the Buller gorge, and a number of slips encouraged in the mountain passes and Westland was cut off quiet quickly and effectively. The trains were not operating, the fuel to run them was gone. The tracks grew over much faster than anyone would have guessed without the daily runs from Christchurch.

They were the only people to see the ships flying in slowly crawling across the horizon out over the Tasman Sea and heading north, one breaking off and angling in, not coming to the mainland, but as the locals could guess from the trajectory, vectoring towards Wellington. Three others heading on the same course.

When the ships hit Wellington they came in on the Ferry path, eclipsing the heads and visible from Picton and the homesteads in the sounds with tiny, hermit family outposts now with solar and generator power being used sparingly and praying for consistent rain for the tanks. It was a surreal sight to see giant flying saucers descending and coming to hover over the Harbour, not the City itself. Those who stayed and were watching only saw that one disc heading for the former capital, which was still there, but mostly populated and the site of some very grim days and violence. The fires had started a few months after the Babel set in and the smoke rose and drifted into the Straight for weeks as the metropolis was ravaged and over a quarter of the city burned. Fire-fighters worked on auto pilot but a number of them died without the direction and concentration of a plan, they just threw themselves bravely at the problem and helped pin it back, but at a significant human cost. The smell and the fear settled in and permeated the City, driving a large contingent of the City dwellers either up the coast to the Kapiti farmlands, or up the valley and beyond to the Wairarapa and more open land. Burned corpses and hollowed out buildings were left behind, no one to clean it up and the terrified inhabitants either fled after the fire or after the next earthquake.

A quake hit a few days after the fire, not a big one by Wellington standards but enough to remind people how tenuous their grip on the earth's crust really was. After the fires had torched the high rises and terraced streets there were some severely fire damaged structures teetering on their last legs, and with a 5.7 Quake, one that the windy city would usually have slept through routinely the worst happened. Most of the buildings that survived the fires, were fine at first but the fire hollowed ones were paper thin in parts, a house of cards waiting that gust of wind. People were still trying to scavenge and raid the office blocks for tools and supplies, a few thousand marked out territory and managed a systematic approach to stripping the city, taking their own turf seriously and leaving others to themselves in an unspoken truce of the desperate.

The quake tore the Terrace apart and like dominoes the buildings fell in on themselves and on the buildings below them. The Botanical Gardens had been a Tsunami of fire only weeks before and all of the places down and around them caught fire with them jumping roads and breaks in lane-ways with the winds that howled their way with the flames. A harsh rainstorm finally put the fires out, just short of Lambton Quay and Willis Street, but everything on the slopes above them were balanced on thin bones of the buildings, once mighty and earthquake proof, now awaiting good shove in any one direction.

The locals felt the quake and new immediately it was bad, not because of the shaking, they could weather that, but the noise that followed. Like waves crashing on the beaches, but a thousand times louder and harsher, the tide of burnt out concrete and steel fell to pressure and time. It took less than ten minutes for the quarter of the city that died in the fires to double their damage in only a few small blocks. The high rises crashed into each other like the scenes from a Hollywood disaster film, anyone close enough to see it in any detail was deafened by the roaring and screeching of the City tearing itself apart. Each after shock, progressively smaller shook the rubble and remnants like a tin can, sieving out the dead, the dying and the impossible survivors screaming at each other unintelligibly and heartbreakingly without real words.

After that the City emptied, whether or not people had transport or anywhere to go, they just fled. The population had been slammed so hard and so devastatingly that it was impossible to stay sane in the charnel house that was once the capital of the country.

By the time the ship arrived and settled in the harbour, just beyond the waterfront edge of the capital, above the water and not the land itself, there were only the valley residents able to see it. Without word of mouth and with no real organisation to spread the word only small number of remaining people came to see this giant thing hanging in the sky above the port. Most of the people in the valley moved further up and in, heaidng to the hills up above the Hutt where there was the river, from which water could be boiled and cleaned up for consumption, and where the land was a little more open, a little less densely packed and the houses could be stripped if they were empty and abandoned, or made into new homes for anyone staying.

The Hutt had always had a reputation for rough edged and violent sub cultures and this was no different after the Babel. Fists spoke louder than reason without words, knives spoke louder than fists and death had the final say. Cars were broken into, and the pass to the farmlands of the Wairarapa was the way out of the madness.

The other ships, three of them carried up the Taranaki coastline and one went central to hover over Taupo, the remainder to Auckland, one on the Manukau Harbour, covering parts of Onehunga, Mangere and the port itslef, and the last one, the largest of all four sat in the Hauraki Gulf and hovered just above Rangitoto Island, watching and hanging impossible and silent in the sky.

Vitcor could see it clearly from his eyrie’s windows on the upper, unobstructed floors. The scattered residents of the city of Auckland, only a fraction of the previous population but not as decimated as the capital saw the two ships paired up and flying in over the Central land areaof the Volcanic Mounts spanning the opposing Harbours. They came in straight and exact, quite high up and then halted for about a fifteen minute period before heading off at a slow ninety degree angle from the trajectory they had entered on. Splitting up and heading away from each other at one hundred and eight degrees. One to the South-west Harbour, the other North-east.

When they stopped finally in position they hovered and did not move again for days. It was just when everyone had stopped looking at them constantly, just checking every now and then, that they made a new move.