When the End came
The mist came from a platinum sky, one fine spring day like no other. Those lunching in parks watched with loose interest, as the first silvery skeins drifted down to drape themselves about the fresh-budding trees. Within moments, those crisp little leaves twitched like bones among their branches. Finally, soaked and dark, they had fallen in drifting droves, too early for the newness of the year.
The mist sank lower, seemingly driven by a keen whistle-wind that scoured the cracking ground. It would settle in thick folds about cities and plains, over forests that twisted to still silence. Yet there were those who would swear that the haunted trees cried out in agony as their blackened bark froze and split; a prelude of what was to come.
It travelled across the oceans, dragging tongues of damp in its wake. In their shroud, the sun hung as a tattered white thing; it had flared briefly, fighting that which choked its warmth, broke its light. The world rolled on. It had seen this killing cold before, millennia gone, more fable than past in the recent years of abundance. They could outlast this. Such was the belief of innocents, and those with too much to lose by paying heed to old fears.
But the sun didn’t return.
Embargoes were met with quiet efficiency. All commerce was restricted to local regions, and people were discouraged from straying too far from home. Eventually, as is always the case when restrictions are made without explanation, the pressure-pots had blown; rioters met with police on streets glistening with damp. The chill, many said, explored the bones; it was felt in the marrow, working slivers of ice through the blood, to the heart.
Finally, those energetic ones lost all will to fight, and went home.
Fallen leaves, fallen house prices. Markets crashing beyond numbers, tearing apart the will of those who might still care. Before long, the creeping lethargy that had afflicted the trees would seep into human pores. Looting became a thing of the past, a worthless expenditure of energy. While the silver-lilac sky drifted ever closer to the dying ground, full of ice crystals, governments collapsed under the strain of staying alive.
People no longer watched the news for a daily intake of war and famine in parts of the world they would never visit; they watched, with tired, itchy eyes, to see which local reservoir had become encased in the thick black ice that eventually snared all possible supplies. The time came when the power was shut off, for their own good (it was said) since the sliding chill had made its way into power plants, burrowing ice to their chugging hearts; flooding the underside of cities, locking up sewer systems. Blackouts were no longer a wartime memory; they were a reality of shuddering darkness, heaped blankets and smoky breath.
Children died beside their parents, hands lost in the larger grip that couldn’t save them. Lovers died in copulation, desperately trying to keep warm with the only heat left in their bodies, sometimes cutting open their flesh to allow sluggish blood to flow – a last desperate act of love. Older men froze in place standing up before the john, while their wives broke the ice on the old backyard well a thousand times over, crumbling brick in hand, weary thrusts between aching shoulders. Pets were thrown out, or eaten alive, or slaughtered for their voluptuous fur. Many now cursed Darwin and his ridiculous theories, for what strength was born of a larger brain, when it couldn’t conjure the meaning of survival in an ice-locked world with only bare skin and bone for company?
In the end, the world retreated to itself. The screams died to sighs, to silence. The rape and the fighting tailed away to a sullen memory. None had the passion or impetus for such banalities. When a throat shook with the effort to drink of water that froze on its way down, it was difficult to imagine the ripeness of a clutched breast, the warmth between parted legs.
And the silence, it came – it crept out of those haunted trees, threaded through the mist that grew and expanded like a living thing, one none could catalogue or name. The higher powers died with the rest; perhaps their last words were only whispered prayers, to a God of mercy or money. It didn’t matter. All felt the ice-knife in their heart.
*
His footsteps crackled, black on silver, through the grass.
Locked in frozen damp, the chime of each falling blade was a bitter echo of birdsong. The birds were long gone. The gulls went back to sea, as though it could save them. He knew the water had frozen in its dance, along with all its dwindling tributaries – that continuous movement, snared at last. The moon was an absent-minded memory, called in place whenever night fell.
The only way to tell the difference was in the shifting of the light – from gunmetal to ebony, locked beneath a deeper darkness, like a winter pond. No stars to pinch the sky. No silver candle to light the way. Only a cold none could bear, and a silence made louder by its absence of chirrups and rustles, the bark of a fox, long dead beneath the iron earth.
Roman moved slowly, placing each foot like a thought. His arms crisscrossed his chest, tight as the belt beneath them, which lassoed the bag in place. It had frozen to his back long ago; he dared not remove it. Only last week, skin had peeled away when he took off a glove to dip a hand in a pool of water – miraculously untouched by ice, though steaming with a thunderous smell that reminded him of volcanic rock. He’d once worked in a science department; he’d tried to recall the name of that ominous smell, brought from the beginning of Time, the planet’s birth. Now here, somehow, shrivelling the rotten grass around it, at the end.
It hurt too much to think on it long. The past was a dead weight to his brain.
Oh, he’d heard the whimpers and cries; his face had steered towards them with that human gratification of company, of other survivors like him. He’d even half-stepped, turning from his path to theirs, to offer what help he could. But the tug in his chest led him on, always. The compass that couldn’t be reset. He knew, because he’d set it himself, after logging off the computer that last time.
She’d finished her final message with seven kisses – For Luck, she’d said, a brave smile in her words. The power had cut out before he could reply. At least he’d managed a print out; her loving face, caught forever in a small square of paper. All shining golden hair, like that old mocking sun, that useless rag in the sky. Her light was warmth; her eyes were the blue the sky had once seen, turning in on itself to preen. Her lips were the redness of his blood, as it’d once flowed from a split thumb. Now, when he bled, sometimes from the corners of his eyes, it crawled out like a purple tongue.
We’ll find each other, he’d told her. His hand had clutched the mouse, willing it to live just long enough to Send. On that beach we talked about. Remember? It’s not so far away. I’ll make it there in a few weeks. You can make it too, if you leave now. Like we always talked about. Those long hours in the night.
Her laugh was a sad spontaneous thing; she rarely laughed, had had little to laugh for in life, with a husband running out and children grown to forgetfulness of their mother. I’ll do my best, love, and she’d self-consciously stroked back the golden hair, thinning to shiny baldness in places on her beautiful scalp. One eyelid buckled as she looked straight at him, through the SpeakEasy camera. I’m afraid I’ll look a little different from that silly old photo I sent you.
And he’d laughed in turn; God, it’d throbbed in his chest, but made his throat warm all the same. I doubt I’ll mistake you for anyone else. And I’m no bundle of roses now, either. He’d run a hand through his own hair, the thatched grey coming out in bundles, where sleek black waves once lived. How he’d waxed and preened it, in the office days! How detergent his smile had been, with his white lab coat! He’d tried to remember if he’d let all the animals out, but the concentration made his eyes water, freezing up at the ducts.
I’ll pack a bag now. We’ll set off at the same time. It’ll be an adventure. No mention, of course, that this had been for the past eight years of SpeakEasy online chat. No reference to the insidious mist, which had come from nowhere and devastated everything.
I can’t wait. Xxxxxxx (For Luck)
And that had been that. The blank screen was a silent laugh in his face. Taking off his glasses – long ago cracked with the pressure of staying intact – he’d fumbled about his apartment for what might be
needed, in a dying world.
*
Forests and low hills. Sad little bonfires, unlit and staggered with miles of travel, between people too cold to stay still. Like frantic animals they’d scurried between each city and town, until the energy required was too high a price to pay. Then they stayed where they were, raw-eyed and wild, chewing their own fingers for comfort and food.
Little sandy shores, lakes encasing their fish and frog victims in ice of many colours – midnight blue and emerald green, the dusky purple of a winter sunset. He once encountered a pool crusted over with thick yellow, a noxious carpet; it gave off a horrific stench, and he’d stump-stumbled away with his heart clattering in his ears. Caught in the middle was a horse, scrawny legs locked in mid-canter. Those rolling white eyes haunted his nights.
How he continued – how he was permitted to continue, despite the mist that travelled with him, a companion that offered no comfort yet hid him from dangers other than its own – he didn’t dare ask. The mission was simple. As a man whose career had been born of laboratory work, he was used to dialling down all concentration to single-slide notes, to the tiniest lens. He knew that, under extreme pressure of concentration beneath the fierce little bulb beamed beneath, a slide might crack. He couldn’t afford to crack. He had made a promise. And when each sandy little beach encrusted with ice wasn’t his, wasn’t the one he’d promised her, with her faded little shadow waiting – he simply moved on.
Never mind the rattle-throb of dying generators. No heed to the whisper of hair, swishing to and fro in a wind that some days tried to carve off his ears. The fact the hair wasn’t his, could perhaps belong to a young maid caught out alone beneath the tree of her eventual hanging, didn’t deter him. He wouldn’t investigate. He had no time. Time was a reckless beast, run away to play where the sun still shone. It didn’t shine here, and nothing moved, except himself, and the occasional splintering of ice.
He even spoke to the mist some days, fancied it was a lost and lonely friend, adrift in this death-silence world as he was. It only told him lies in return though, guiding him the wrong way, until he lost patience and grew weary enough of its company to sit; until his clothes, bulky as they were, cemented themselves to the ground, and he was forced to drag half of it along with him in ringing snaps.
The fear that she might not make it to the beach, never left him.
*
Roman blinked slowly, letting the rime sift off his heavy lids. Moving his lips beneath their cowl, now stiff as wood, he tasted something new. Taste had recently begun to fray, along with smell and sight. He was shutting down. But he’d know this place anywhere, had spent too many sun-lazy holidays on that stretch of sand, to forget. There was the raw tang of salt, as always, forming a new crust on his skin. The grains went flying into the wind, freezing in mid-air to sheets of nubbled black, before breaking their bonds and collapsing in whipped sighs, to the lilac-ice shore.
And there she was, of course. Her black form packaged on the beach in a stillness of thought, as though this were any old day, beneath a summer sun and a sky of hard blue. She stared out to those waves, locked forever in place like ancient curtains. As he stumped towards her, each step dragging more than the last, he felt a pain in his chest to rival the burn-black of his fingers, before they’d dropped off. His wheezing breath snared the air. She heard him, long before she turned to watch his approach. Her smile, behind the ice-riddled veil, was a single bird-note in spring air.
Lara. Standing before her at last, as he’d meant to for eight years while lab timetables and office dinners spooled out to fill his worthless life, he felt his tear ducts give out at last. Only hard rain fell down his cheeks; he ignored the pain.
“Tears, now?” Her black teeth gleamed like the hoar frost under their feet. Raising one hand stiffly, she stroked his cheek. “We’ve far more to say to each other than that, surely.”
And, wrapping both arms about him, she had turned Roman to face that amethyst sea. “We beat the oceans. We beat the sky, the sun. When all are gone, we made it here still.” A wheezing cackle. “I told you I’d see you in frozen hell before we met face to face. You know I can’t stand these awkward first dates.”
Raising her mittened hand in his fingerless one, Roman kissed it, shaking as the ice scarred his lips, took off flesh. Still, he knew his manners. “I can’t believe it took me this long to know the feel of your skin.”
“Hardly that,” she told him with a laugh. Such a laugh! He saw planes of dust and volcanic ash, the sun a gold ribbon over the streaming sky, as all days flew to this one, in her laugh. Such heat that lived within her spirit. How had he ever doubted she would make it?
With one hand, she peeled off the protective mitt from her other, laying bare the skin below. He’d never seen such mottled beauty. Such fragile lines. The raw blue of her eyes made him brave, and he felt the shredding of his own skin only as a series of tugging jolts, as he removed his own glove.
“Hands only meet with purpose,” Lara told him. Angling herself around his withered body, she’d led them both down to the black sand. The fact they would never rise again, seemed as absent a thing as the once-was sun.
The mist whispered its own trickling song, just for them, as the sky broke.
celenagaia 