THE QUIET
Part 1.
It was just north of midnight when the lights went out, an entire city reduced to darkness, it’s steel structures now nothing more than silhouettes. Several miles above, a passenger plane cut through the cloudless sky, below it a void of blackness. Those that were outside the city had watched from afar as four bright lights curved across the sky like falling stars. On the streets people scattered and fled like wild cattle, falling over one another and some even descended to violence. The missiles themselves detonated high above the city, and the initial blasts took what they could and erased it in milliseconds. Thousands had witnessed the explosions above them, a magnificent white bulb that engulfed the sky entirely and seared those beneath it to mere x-rays. Some had even been blinded before they were killed, the DNA of their eyes deconstructed without a moments warning. For their final seconds, millions of people were turned inside out, appearing as nothing but veins and vessels, bones and then nothing. Mother’s on the street had cradled their wailing children close until they were vaporised to something finer than dust and their ghosts, memories and dreams were inscribed onto the walls behind them.
Those in the suburbs had at first felt a rumble beneath the earth, a tremor that coursed through the ground like a suffocated trumpet. The shock wave had tarnished windows and caused those that were standing to be slung backwards into whatever was there to stop them, many had been impaled and died instantly. Some had managed to make it to shelters in the garden, and others had tried but died doing so.
For that short time, all night became day and all darkness was overcome by a brilliant light that caused a population to unify in a horrifying outcry.
After some time the darkness resumed, and the light never did return.
They had surfaced from their shelter two weeks after the bombs were dropped, their town a carcass, a blood-red hue on the horizon, bodies strewn about the streets, bedded in ash. They have been walking for months in search of food, Noah is weak and his wife Ella is pregnant. She can walk no more. In days the child will be born and it will starve, living only to die a gruesome death. They search for somewhere to take shelter, for the child to be born. Noah had found a wheelchair and he pushes his wife along the highway, she is tired and sleeps most hours. In the morning they pass under a bridge where the dead are hanging, a family of four, murdered. Two days before the child arrives they find a barn with a roof and hay, the ground is dry and they sleep through the daylight hours. The following evening the baby is born around midnight, Ella cradles her child but says no words, she kisses the head, remaining silent in her thoughts. Noah holds his wife’s hand and fiddles with her hair, then he cleans the blood from her legs and cuts the chord with his blade. The next morning he crouches in a clearing beyond the barn and cries silently so that she cannot hear him. He sorrows the child, it cannot survive, the new world has been founded upon death and those that were taken in the blast are the privileged.
The child sleeps in a filthy rag, she is small and premature. Of a nighttime she cries and storms loom overhead, the rain is poisonous and scars all that it touches. In the daylight hours Noah lurks through the woods in search of food and Ella remains in the barn, the child feeding on her breast.
He waits on the precipice of a ridge overlooking a great expanse, but there is no movement and no prey that warrant the effort. When the moon is at large the wolves turn out in their dozens and Noah sits and listens to them in their howl. The sky’s are black and the clouds infected with radiation, earth’s water contaminated for a thousand years, the crops besieged. There is little food. When the child is weeks old they walk the road and find a gas station. Noah scrutinises the shelves and the back rooms, he finds two protein bars and stuff’s them into his jacket. Along the road there are more of the dead, theire bodies burnt and ashen, but not from the bombs. Some hang from trees and others are impaled on pikes, the crows gather about them in their numbers and scream in celebration.
‘Who would do this?’ Ella asks, cradling the child closely.
Noah looks at the dead as they stand crucified upon their pikes along the road, men, women and children too.
‘We should keep moving’ he insists.
‘But what if they’re still out here. The people who did this.’
‘That’s why we need to go, now.’
END OF PART 1.
