Day 143 - Babel - Chapter 39 (1742 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 39

Philip, Bob and Evan were left to their on devices for large amounts of time, but they knew they were prisoners, they did not have to be told that. They had left the plane at gunpoint, knowing that the people at the other end were not like them, they were of the Few, the immune.

The fear and confusion that registered on them required no spoken language to be translated though, it was plain to see that they could not understand how three people could manage to fly a plane and land in their city from so far away. They had established that they were form New Zealand, the shape and position of the country on a map was not hard to communicate, but beyond that it was getting harder tell why they were there. They were put inside the airport terminal, among abandoned duty free stores, restaurants and boutiques that had serviced travellers in and out of Sydney before the Babel came.

There were markings in the cockpit on the instruments to mark points of reference to keep airspeed and altitude constant enough above sea level, but mostly it had been instrument free and using the pilot's knowledge coupled with what they could get from other pilots on the ground back home who were taking in all around them at the same time. They had access to everyone's view from the cockpit as they flew or just stared out the window. The Looped in minds of the Babel were taking in things that the people on the plane itself were not necessarily seeing themselves. Philip spent a lot of time looking at the horizon, looking for land and where he was going. In that view he saw weather, position, the sea below him without really taking it in. The hive-like connection of the Loop saw it all too and they could focus on those things while Philips mind was elsewhere.

A pod of whales was breaking the surface below them and while Philip did not initially register their presence the Loop did and started processing what they saw, with people who had the ability quickly identifying them as pilot whales, assessing the trajectory of the path the were taking, the time of year and the seasonal habits of the creatures to confirm the identification. Philip had 'seen' the disturbance in the water but had not consciously noticed it, while the Loop had. They processed the information into a usable source and then it fed back to Philip all a very short space of a few seconds, and he turned his head to see the whales better, reaching for binoculars and allowing alal who were interested in them a remote view.

The journey progressively got less and less interesting the further away they got from land and the lower the dipped in altitude. If they could feel the link to the Loop softening then a climb would bring it back, but often they just kept flying until the reached the main land and the Loop became stronger again. It was not as strong as it had been at home, the sensations and feelings were dulled slightly, like a hangover, but the communication was still there and information flowed freely. So when they landed, they followed the gibberish orders shouted at them with fingers pointed had gesturing where they needed to go, but it was familiar territory for some of the Loop who had personal knowledge of airports, Sydney in particular with a handful of expatriate Australians and Kiwis in the Loop who had worked there before the Babel fell.

They wandered around the Duty Free section of the airport, it was a contained area with mesh gates and doors that were locked to bar entry or exit until they were ready to be dealt with. There was no power inside but the glass domed celling afforded plenty of light inside the area, so they felt comfortable if a little warmer than they were used to with stale air and no air-conditioning. A section of the Departure Lounge had been destroyed and was open to the Runway. A huge hole was there, big enough for a Jumbo jet to have crashed through it and cause the circular opening. Philip assumed that's what it was, and the guessing was feeding back to them from the Loop, with size and damage approximations being calculated in peoples heads, their judgement and memory of the ingredients of any potential crashes all being polled, analysed and compared as they wandered around.

The hole was where the men who had greeted them had stationed some guards, and the boy who had been pointing the fifty calibre gun at them from the back of the Jeep was standing there with a semi automatic in his arms, crooked uncomfortably, trying to look tougher than he obviously felt. After maybe an hour had passed the boy took out a book when he could see that the three of them were not coming any closer and they made no attempt to try anything risky or threatening.

Philip lay down on the row of chairs that were in the middle of the room and slept, closed his eyes and the Loop went silent in him as he drifted off to unconsciousness. When he woke it was dark and he was alone. He sat up with a start and he knew where the others were immediately.

The men had come through and take the other two and they had separated all three of them and taken them in different directions, leaving Philip alone to sleep with guards outside watching him. He could see from the way that Bob and Evan were taken away that there were sentries in the mezzanine above, just out of sight from the place where he was and he had to assume that at least one or two of them were still there. The hole was empty and so he got up and walked out of it, only to have a few torches shone in his face and to be restrained physically, more nonsense sounds fired at him to no avail other than to remind him that he was a prisoner.

The younger man that had been watching him had gone, he had still been there when the other two had been put into cars and driven away some time before while it was still light. Evan was on a river inside a boat, being taken somewhere down and out west. Philip and Bob could still see him and hear this thoughts clear enough as the water was not deep and they followed a narrow course of the River to a dock out west near Parramatta.

Bob was in a room, he had not seen too much other than he was being driven to the inner southern area according to the Loop, they had blindfolded him for his journey though why they did that it was not clear. The three groups that had taken them apart were operating independently of each other and all seemed to want to achieve different goals by different methods in splitting them up.

Evan was not going anywhere fast, the boat trip was aimless and the pilot of the craft looked as lost as Evan himself was, though he had as much information as he could get from the Loop about his proximity to the largest of Sydney's western suburbs. Bob was manhandled and the Loop were on the lookout for torture or duress from his captors, but the treatment did more to disorient than discomfort Bob.

Philip was being walked to a a large warehouse and taken inside, this was an area they had not seen yet and from what he could get from the Loop it was a storage building for airport consumables and products that maintenance staff would use. It was also used for repair work on Airport vehicles and emergency units. The men who led him there were keen to drop him off and leave, they opened the door and pushed him inside, turning away quickly and shutting it behind him, putting him out of sight and assumably out of mind.

On the other side there were people, and they were moving boxes of various products from this warehouse and stacking them in the back of a truck. Philip felt that he could reach these people straight away, just being near to other Babel made a physiological change in the way his body reacted to the air and the temperature, his skin had come alive and the intensity of his senses grew, as did Bob and Evan in their respective locations.

This was the connecting point they needed, there was a dozen people here in the warehouse loading up the truck and Philip had been thrown in here to help out, being put to work with other Babel. There was a guard watching him, but he looked away and started yelling loudly, nothing that Philip could specifically state for sure, but he was confident he needed back up as fast and as urgently as he could.

The Babel felt Philip's presence and stopped doing the work they had been on the truck and they formed a daisy chain of eleven people and the last one, the one nearest Philip stood apart from them and held out a hand to him, grasping it firmly as he Looped in and in seconds came up to speed with everything and everyone six thousand miles away in New Zealand, one in Parramatta on a boat and one in a dark room in an undisclosed but local area.

Philip reached out to touch the first in the chain the same time as the person he connected with first, Andy Rollins a former Bus Driver from Cabramatta, who had been working with the few to organise food and shelter for the people he had taken into his house. He understood following instructions, and he got that as a middle aged man he took whatever opportunity he could to look out for those he needed to.

The two of them connected to the remainder as a group of the Watch burst in with guns, shouting and pointing them at the group who were all smiling at them as one of the men opened fire and bullets rained pain and suffering on all of them as two of the ones nearest the Watchmen took fire and fell to the ground.