Day 125 - Babel - Chapter 21 (1451 words)

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BABEL

By Wayne Webb

CHAPTER 21

Nick started hearing planes in the sky, a sound he never expected to hear in his lifetime. He thought at first he was hearing things, having been out in the woods for some time now. The first time had been a few days ago and he had not seen it just heard what he thought was an aircraft, then again the next day closer still.

Perhaps it was delusion or guilt weighing on him, but then he actually saw a plane in the sky on the third day since he had first heard it. The noise was getting progressively louder while he was quite some distance from the house, cutting through a new fire break and working on breaking down the felled trees into firewood. It was slow going because he was so far from the lodge, he had a wheelbarrow that bumped terribly on the uneven ground where he had already made breaks and lanes in the forest. He was only half full on the latest barrel load when he heard the noise for the third day in a row. This time it sounded closer and more real, previously it had been distant and hollow, as if it could easily have not been at all real.

Then there it was, it came over the line of trees and was in his line of sight, he could tell it was a long way away and that it was a small plane, before he quickly dove into the tree line. As he took shelter and waited for the aircraft to get out of line of sight, he realised his mistake in leaving the wheelbarrow in plain sight. He didn't want to be seen, he didn't want to be found and he had pretty much drawn anyone a map from the air to find where he lived. All anyone would have to do would be to follow the concentric rings, irregular though they may be, back to the centre of the circle and there he was.

He had not expected that anyone would be looking, at least not via air and maybe not even for a few generations when humanity had a chance to recover. It would be chaos, it would be disastrous in some areas, nuclear power plants had worried him he had chosen his mountain forest retreat based on no nearby power plants and no prevailing winds from areas where he could expect plants to have melted down and caused the inevitable fallout and radioactive clouds.

It could have been a lone person, one of the Few like him who were immune to the Babel, his immunity to ASHA 3F was of course artificial but the initial disease had run it's course and he was unlikely to pick it up again as the shelf life of ASHA 3F was pretty short. He knew that future generations would be without the disease and it's effects, but it would take a long while for those born after the initial run to grow into a speaking generation, or so he hoped anyway. There would be Few who could teach them language, some languages would probably die out and be forgotten, even if future generations grew out of the shadow of the Babel and rediscovered languages it would be hard resurrecting some of them after what was likely decades of a modern Dark Age where records, electricity and the amassed digital archives of the modern world would fall into disrepair.

That was pessimistic thinking, it was possible that there would be a new renaissance of sorts and that when put under adversity the human race could rise to greatness, but he did not think that it was that likely. History teaches us nothing that we do not already know and fear. That was the problem, things could have gone well, that was a possibility that he could conceive of, but was unable to accept. If he went looking he would know for sure, and then that would be a final nail in the coffin he had built for himself.

He had never intended that the ASHA 3F virus package would ever be used for anything but a peaceful mission, but like the atomic bomb, the genie was out of the bottle and the bell could not be unrung. He had thought long and hard about how it had gotten out of the lab and into the wild, how had it cross species and jumped to humans when it had not even been tested properly on the bird subjects they had for the following quarter's budget plans? It didn't make any sense, but there it was out there and with it's sights set on the general population with no inoculation in massed produced quantities, and even when they worked on that, it was already too late. The first stage had swept through the genome like a flash flood.

Whoever was in the air would see the rings, see the wheelbarrow partially filled and of course freshly felled trees. If they were looking for him then they would have found him. He had no back up plan, well no back up plan other than suicide. He half expected craved language-less hordes crushing in on the house, like zombies, the non-speaking dead pushing at his doors. That made no sense of course, they would be unable to co-ordinate without any spoken or written language and it would have hit them hard and fast with little or no forewarning that it was coming.

He had regular nightmares, planes falling from the sky and crashing to earth full of terrified people who were in mid air when the Babel phase took their pilots. He hoped that the effect would be minimally devastating in those cases, co-pilots and pilots would both be infected but depending on when it would have been a case of one would be able to communicate with ground crew to land the plane. He hoped that people would have the sense to ground planes and flights, but there was also the chance that small flights, long haul flights could conceivably have the pilot and the co pilot fall to phase 2 in the same twelve hour window and then what?

His dreams had dark soundtracks of tense music and moody lighting like a film where everything was despairing and hopeless, the worst case scenario was going to happen to ratchet up the tension and the stakes. They would progressively loose control, unable to find the auto-pilot switch operating from memory may have saved them, but at some stage instruments would be necessary to land the plane, and to avoid other craft in similar distress, air traffic control was nothing if not communication critical. The nightmares were highly detailed but not graphic or gory, they never resulted in fireballs or torn limbs, but focussed on tilting worlds of planes dropping like stones, passengers in terrified free fall, statistically there was not even the likelihood that one of the Few who had that 0.01 percent chance was even on the flight in most cases.

Some of the scenarios started well, village like life where better humans than he managed to work for the betterment, with mute and dumb citizens that actually did the right thing regardless of having no clues, no instructions and no help to communicate. These always ended badly, by a rogue violent man with a knife and no soul, gangs (again it was unlikely but dreams are not always rational) that marauded unprotected people, raping, killing and stealing their way in the brace new world. The worst ones were the 'Judgement Day' styled ones where a nuclear power plant reached critical mass and disaster ensued. Some would be OK, plants in Europe and Asia used Thorium as the radioactive element and those were meltdown proof and less likely to cause any fallout even if abandoned. Those were in the minority and there were a lot of reactor plants in the states. He hoped they had fail safes, but he was a pessimistic soul and dreams of a nuclear winter descending on his home country and in Europe only fuelled his bad dreams.

He waited a while but the plane did not circle back for a second look, and so he took his wheelbarrow back to the house, only half full, not wanting to be caught out in the open if they came back again. He hid inside for the rest of the day, did not drink anything that night and kept lighting to a minimum, the full moon afforded him the light he needed when not sleeping. For the first time that he could recall since first coming here, he locked the doors to his home.