Posts
BABEL
By Wayne Webb
CHAPTER 8
Victor was making himself a cup of tea,
it was a thing he did to remind himself he was still human, could
still function as the world around him was dripping insanity. He had
a large cache of UHT milk and a fridge to keep it cold once opened.
So twice a day he would light his gas cooker and boil water, manually
and brew some tea in a kettle. He had a stash of gas bottles, the BBQ
kind that the market below the building had sold. A trip to an inner
city petrol station had put him in touch with with an untapped
resource of natural gas. The initial scavengers that hit the city,
before the buildings began to fall and the fires took hold, went for
the oil, the petrol and the supplies. The gas stations had been
mostly stripped but the gas containers were intact, the ones not
destroyed by other factors. No one knew how to use them, and could
not read the instructions or find the manuals. Victor had the ability
to read that ninety nine others did not. So he corralled his gas
bottles, and took two every day and filled them until he had taken as
much as he could. On his missions around the city he found camping
stores and took the butane tanks and the empty gas bottles from
office buildings that had BBQ's on balcony landings and the like.
Over the weeks he amassed over a hundred of them, had fuel that would
last him a while, and still the gas station had LPG left in it.
The last run he did, he was chased by a
pack of dogs, a new pack not seen before, straying off the beaten
path and into the city. They rushed him and he shot two of them dead
before the others retreated at the ferocity of the noise, the clap of
thunderous death leaping at them. He made his way back to the more
familiar territory and saw them following at a distance. He hunted
for rats and birds, skinning and changing them to slabs of meat, bait
for a trap.
It was only a half day later that he
lured them back to the service station where they had first found him
and they zeroed in on the offering of the meat, inside the main
building. He bolted the doors and trapped them inside that main area,
stripped of anything remotely useful a long while ago. It was left
with no food, some magazines he would never read and music he would
never listen to. Everything else that could be of use, he took or had
been emptied in the early days.
As the dogs ate and snarled at each
other he laid the basics of the final snap in his cage. From a
distance he stood and saw the dogs, now full of their last meal
hurling themselves at the glass of the doors, shaking them but in no
danger of breaking out. He lit the fuse, a trail of lighter fluid,
taken from some other store somewhere, now his own trail of fire.
Tracing back into the gas station, finding the pooling gas that was
seeping into the air from an opened valve, the safety mechanisms
circumvented and the contents leaking into the air.
Even at the distance he had allowed the
explosions knocked him off his feet. First there was a bang, louder
and harsher than he thought as the gas tank exploded, it was barely a
quarter full by his estimations but the thumping wave of pressure it
caused blew the windows in and the dogs scattered, bleeding or dying
from the shards of glass. The secondary thump of the below ground
tanks, filled with fumes and dregs of fuel igniting and in a rush of
fuel enriched oxygen injecting into the contained space, was a bomb
going off. The rush from the tanks going off threw him metres in the
air, deafened him with a ringing noise that took days to dissipate.
The dogs were vaporised, the gas
station no longer a shell, empty and ruined. In its place was a
crater, a carved out hollow that blew away so many of the surrounding
windows, destroyed the forecourt and the road access on both sides,
the tarmac and surfacing torn like a backhoe went amok in a semi
circle radiated out from the pumps.
He had vowed to be a little more
circumspect when making such plans for conflagrations and explosions.
The kernel of the idea to seal the city came from this experience,
and he was more careful with the larger and more targeted demolitions
he planned for the bridges and roads into his city.
A year later the ships arrived, on the
tail of the Babel and settled in in the positions above the sea,
overlooking the city, the harbours. Victor only saw the one ship, but
assumed correctly that there was more than one. This was a small
representation of humanity here, there must be thousands more across
the planet.
A week passed and nothing happened,
they just hung there implacable and imposing in the sky, day or
night. By the time that the second week was almost half way through
Victor resumed his daily routines, knowing that there was likely
nothing he could do to advance the Alien Agenda whatever it might be.
In the mean time it was best to just get on with life, his patterns
and his rituals.
So he sipped on his tea and had his
treat to go with it, he allowed himself two biscuits for each cup he
drank. He was staring out the window, eyeing the spaceship, imagining
that it was eyeing him back with some modicum of respect when he
heard someone call his name.
“Victor.”
He spun around, the sudden interruption
to his ritual was like a knife in the dark. The teacup bounced on the
carpeted floor, the contents spilling about where he spun in a
graceless arc of flying water.
There was no one there. His heart was
racing and chest thumping the blood pumping through him madly,
maniacally driving a pressure and intensity he could not help but
feel. He scanned the room quickly, but he saw nothing. The voice had
been loud and clear, not distant or incomplete. He had heard what he
though were voices before, they turned out they were anything but
voices. The wind, dogs howling, gulls and other animals echoing
through the bones of empty city buildings. He had come across a few
of the Few, the ones who shouted their threats at him, voices from
the early days before people fought themselves out, to a standstill
or bravely came to intimidate the deadly assassin in the high towers
of Queen Street.
He had defended himself when he needed
to, took a low tolerance to other people. On one level he missed some
company, he wanted a level of physical intimacy, he was human after
all. Though beyond the hate for the bullies and the abusers trying to
fight, claw and scrabble over him to what passed for power these
days, he had a contempt for any and all people who were unable to
rise to the new way of living. He was not giving anything up, not for
the chance of sex, power or society. None of those things was as
important to him as having his own land, his own city, once a vibrant
and lively madness of people and noise, now it was silent and empty,
a house bigger than he could ever had imagined. His home filled
square miles, had rubble and death lurking, lying in wait but he knew
his way around it all. This was his home, he was not giving it up for
the lesser humans that tried to edge in to his world, his home. He
would not give it up to these ships, whatever they were or whatever
they meant was not the issue.
“Victor.”
This time he was looking, and he saw no
one but heard the voice clear as a bell. It was like it was inside
his head, talking at him from the inside.
“Shit.”
What the fuck was this? Is this
madness? Had he been alone too long? Victor sank to his knees,
feeling a despair for the first time since before the Babel, back
when he was not in control, back when it was beyond him to use what
he knew, what he could do to control his world. Now he was the master
of his domain, the master of a domain beyond all people except a few
very capable individuals. He was alone, by choice and by design. He
was alone because there was no one like him and now he was staring at
nothing, hearing a voice clearer than the should have in a room empty
of anyone but himself.
His knees were wet from the tea soaked
into the carpet. That cooling feeling as it soaked the bends of his
jeans was the straw he needed to break the back of the fear. He
picked up a towel and started to clean up the mess he made.
“I know you can hear me Victor.” He
looked up from that moment and saw the ship, it was glowing a new
colour, and then he understood.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Feel free to leave any comments about the project - but be aware I won't be taking suggestions, requests or feedback on the content or style of writing - I want to write what I want free of any one else's issues.