“Now what?” he asked when they eventually reached the base of the hill.
“Dig,” she said, and used the club to indicate the base of the tree. The roots were gnarly, half exposed, and the tree was dying, but not dead.
She watched as he lifted a bone and started to burrow into the ground around the roots of the tree with it. “How have you survived?” she asked.
“There were others,” he said. “We had stores. The stores ran out. The others died. Eventually, I was the only one left.”
She didn’t reply. He continued to dig, his task made more difficult as the wind blew sand back down into the holes he’d dug. She watched as he made some slow progress.
“I’ll check out the cave,” she said.
“Uh huh,” he grunted, and continued to dig.
She walked backwards for a few steps, and then finally, reluctantly turned her back on him. The ground was still littered with bones. She figured she would hear him if he followed her.
The cave was dark. She stepped inside, and then gave her eyes a little time to adjust. It was cooler as well, and she could taste dampness in the air when she took a deep breath. There was water here somewhere. She knew it. She smiled.
Compared to the usual dull aches of loneliness and hunger, this pain was a sharp, sudden blow. So much so that it took a moment for her to realize what had happened. By then, she was already falling to the ground.
As she felt blood seeping out of the back of her head, her first thought was that it was a waste of precious liquid. Almost immediately, she realized it wouldn’t be wasted at all. He would make good use of it. Just, perhaps, not as good, from her perspective at least, as what she was using it for.
“You’re not the only one who can avoid stepping on the bones,” she heard him say. “I’ve been tracking you for weeks now.”
She knew she was dying, so she allowed herself to waste some drops of precious water in the form of tears that slid down her cheek. Before her eyes closed, she saw the skeletons on the floor of the cave and knew she would be one of them soon. He would strip the meat off her bones, and they would be all of her that would remain.
About the author:
Joleen Kuyper likes to write dark stories in which horrible things happen to her characters. In real life though, she’s actually quite nice and almost normal. She lives in Ireland, which she finds provides plenty of inspiration for horrid tales. To learn more about Joleen and her dark stories, you can visit her blog http://joleenkuyper.blogspot.com/
After the Revelation
by Marissa Farrar
Revelation 20:7
And when the thousand years are ended, Satan will be released from his prison…
A hot wind blew, carrying with it the stench of burning. The ground blackened and scorched beneath foot. Jez Stephens stood on London’s Primrose Hill, looking down across the city below. The huge curve of the London Eye rose from the skyline, though it would never again turn with tourists, and the huge antennae of the BT tower, protruded into the sky like an alien spaceship.
Even the aviary of London Zoo could be seen, though no sound of birdsong rose from beneath its netting, the birds long since dead. Those left had bigger problems than feeding them.
On first glance, most things appeared normal. Only on closer inspection did the silence of the city become deafening, the fires—both those raging below ground and those above—became painfully obvious.
Death surrounded him. The trees and grass were little more than charcoal. Ash thickened the air, falling like snow on much of the city.
Nature could no longer provide them with what they needed. The soil was charred, the water polluted. Most livestock had been killed. Jez survived by looting and stealing from shops and restaurants. Anything pre-packaged and tinned was still edible. Everything else was ruined.
Jez narrowed his eyes, his body tensed for fight or flight. He watched for movement, for any sign of life. So far, in his experience, finding others alive was not such a good thing.
Unconsciously he rubbed at the huge twisted scar running from the top of his right shoulder down to his elbow. The scar was the width of his hand, and had formed badly, being that there were no surgeons, plastic or otherwise, to put together the arm that had basically been flayed.
Those had been bad times, worse even, than now. He had not believed he would get out of it alive, especially when so many others didn’t.
With the memory came a pang of guilt and he pushed the memory aside, concentrating on the job at hand.
He hoisted his bag onto his shoulder and started the walk down the hill. The soles of his feet warmed from the heat of the hill, from the fires that raged beneath it. Fire burnt throughout the country and, he guessed, the rest of the world. He had heard no stories of anywhere that had escaped. No cool oasis in this scorched earth.
Jez needed supplies. Only a small bottle of water weighted his bag and he needed to restock. If nothing else he was thankful for the twenty-first century’s obsession with bottled water. Without it he would have been dead a long time ago. Sulphur had poisoned all of the water sources—leaving rivers with dead fish, floating like fallen autumn leaves, clogging the waterways.
He walked down the hill, approaching the road ringing its base. Traffic was at a standstill—permanently so. Cars were smashed into the backs of others, causing mini pile-ups everywhere he looked. As he grew closer he could smell the unmistakable stench of death beneath the acrid reek of burning. It was a smell he could never get used to.
In front of him a blue Ford skewed in the middle of the road. The body of a man slumped over the steering wheel; a woman slouched in the passenger seat beside him. Behind them a small child was still strapped into its car seat. Each of their faces black and puffy with decomposition.
Jez couldn’t t tell if the child was a boy or a girl, but he wasn’t planning to look hard enough to find out. How strange to think that these were the lucky ones? The ones who experienced the Revelation. The ones who escaped.
It never failed to amaze him how people had just dropped dead where they were. The world had turned into the Mary Celeste, only the people hadn’t disappeared in the middle of what they were doing, they had died. The Revelation had been so instantaneous people had not even had a chance to run. They were all just living their lives one minute, and gone the next.
Jez had asked himself the same question a hundred times: if he had known the truth, would he have done things differently? If he had known there truly was a God, and what He was capable of, would he have thought before he acted?
He doubted it.
Even before God had allowed that perverted psychopath, Mitchell Werner, to rape and murder Jez’s nine year old daughter, he and God hadn’t been on such good terms. That there had been a God who could have prevented such things from happening just made him all the more furious.
Murdering Mitchell Werner wasn’t something Jez would ever regret. The bastard deserved everything he got.
It had been a big deal at the time. People had known the name ‘Jeremy Stephens.’ He had been all over the news. Many protested on his behalf, saying he shouldn’t be locked up for what he did, but the court had wanted to make sure the rest of the population knew it was not okay to take the law into your own hands and had given him three years. Three years that had almost turned into a life’s sentence.
Now nobody had the use for surnames, and his nickname of Jez almost made him forget the man he used to be. All Jez took comfort in was knowing that Lily was safe, wherever she was now. Judgment day had been real and even a heathen like him knew that the dead were raised before the living. Where ever Lily was now, she was at least in the arms of God.
Jez didn’t like to go into the cities. It had been over nine months now since the Revelation had happened, but London had succumbed to a long and hot summer and the bodies had not fared well in the extended heat. With the now polluted atmosphere acting as cloud cover, the city remained warm and muggy.
Jez nego
tiated the pile up of cars, trying not to look into the blank, cloudy eyes of the corpses they contained. He was heading towards Camden, knowing there were some small supermarkets there that would have water and other supplies. He wasn’t relishing the idea of going into the store. There would be bodies littering the aisles. Anyone who was out shopping when it happened would have simply dropped dead in the aisles. There was no one left who cared enough to attempt to clear them away or bury them. Even if the size of the job had been comprehensible, the people left weren’t the type to care.
He walked along the canal, the red stone wall dividing the pathway from the main road. The route was preferable to the road, but was still not empty. Either side of him, through cracks in the earth, small fires raged. Beside him the canal had long since dried up, leaving the bottom fractured and broken. Jez stepped over an old man, crumpled in the middle of the path, and a young mother toppled, a baby dead in its pram.
Jez clenched his jaw, his lips tight. He would never get used to seeing the children. It was the thing that hurt most of all, despite knowing their souls had gone to a better place.
He kept walking, averting his gaze the best he could. Instead of the bodies, he stared at the tired red brick of the wall running along beside him. Graffiti marked the wall, ‘Denny woz ‘ere’ and ‘FJ LUVS RS’. They were markings of a time before, of a time when people had lived in ignorance of religion, believing it to be no more real than the latest sci-fi flick at the local cinema. Of course, ignorance hadn’t bought them eternal damnation; far from it. Even those who had never so much as uttered the word ‘God’ had still made the cut, as long as they hadn’t committed whatever sins God decided were too great to forgive.
Lost in thought, one marking in particular caught his breath. His heart raced, his muscles tensed. About a foot long and high, the shape of the dragon had been sprayed in white paint. The marking was new, its whiteness not yet sullied by the grey soot of the environment.
Despite the warmth of the day and the heat of the fires burning around him, the sight of it ran a chill through him. He had seen the same graffiti all over, or at least versions of it, but it wasn’t just that. His dreams had been plagued by visions of the dragon, though sometimes it came in the shape of a serpent. Whatever shape it took, Jez knew it pointed towards the same thing.
The devil walked among them.
Judgment day had happened. Taking the innocent into Heaven, God had left only the unworthy to fight it out amongst themselves. Now the devil was among them, calling to the ones who had been left, calling to them to fight. Jez tried to remain strong, tried to keep its power and passion out of his head, but, when times were as hard as this, it was difficult not to turn to something of strength and authority, to give his future into the hands of someone else.
Of something else.
Jez shrugged his bag closer, clutching its strap as though it was something that could protect him. He did not believe he should be delivered into the hands of thedevil. Though he neither thought himself worthy of the hands of God, he wished only that there was a middle ground. Another earth he could reside on.
He stepped from the canal path and onto the street. Market stalls were ahead of him, the traders dead beside them. More cars piled together, a big double-decker red bus was slewed across the road. It was almost normal London life, but at a standstill, the dead rotting in their metal coffins.
Jez headed down the road, the dark open maw of Camden tube station ahead. That was one place he would never go, though the bodies were in the one place they were supposed to be, beneath the ground, in the dark. In his head he could see the twisted metal of tube trains, crashed when all the power went off.
Above his head, Christmas lights and decorations stretched from one side of the street to the next. Their parody of cheer was only depressing. Either side of the street, the once trendy bars and cafes were now mortuaries, housing their dead.
Jez found his eyes drawn to the glass front of one of the restaurants. A long table stood in its window, dead office workers slumped across it, or slithered onto the floor from their chairs. But it wasn’t the bodies that caught his eye, or even the brightly colored party hats still sitting on the heads of some of the dead. It was the single solitary chair lying on its side, toppled, as though knocked over when someone had stood suddenly.
Of course, Jez might be reading too much into it, but he couldn’t help but ponder on the significance of the chair. Had the person sitting in it simply been desperate for the bathroom? Had he been sitting on the john when it had happened? Or was it more likely that its owner had been one of his own kind? That he had held a secret so dark none of his colleagues had known about it, a secret that meant even God had not wanted him. Had the guy, or girl, woken, as he had, to find everyone dead around him? Had he knocked back his chair in his panic to get away?
Movement near the tube station made Jez stop, all muscles tensed. In a swift movement, he ducked down between the two nearest cars. His hand went to the huge butcher’s knife strapped to his waist. He knew a gun would have been better, but he had absolutely no experience with guns, and even if he had any idea where to get one from, he would never have known how to handle it. A random statistic of more people being shot by their own guns haunted him and made him steer clear, despite his need for protection.
The person he was certain he had seen hadn’t moved. If he was right, they had hidden behind one of the market stalls.
Neither of them budged.
They were at a standstill. Both knew the other was there, but neither was willing to be the first to move.
“I don’t want to fight,” he called out, his voice sounding too loud in the stillness. “I just want to be on my way.”
No answer called out to him, but in the silence of the city he heard frantic whispering. Were there more than one?
In his crouched position, his legs were starting to cramp. “We can’t just stay here all day,” he yelled. “If you want to leave, then I won’t stop you. Just go back the way you came.” Again he listened. This time there was an answer.
“You go back the way you came.”
He was surprised to hear a female voice. Despite her obvious attempts to deepen it, there was no mistaking its feminine pitch. His shoulders softened, though he knew he shouldn’t let his guard down. They were each here for a reason and it wasn’t because they were nice people.
“Look,” he called out, raising both hands in the air so she could see them. “I don’t want any trouble.”
“Neither do we.”
We. There was more than one.
Jez stepped out from behind the car, both hands still held high. His heart thumped, part of him expecting to receive a bullet in the chest. One thing he was glad of was that at least he was in England when all this had happened. He couldn’t imagine the carnage happening across the pond.
She stepped from behind the over-turned market stall.
Her dark hair was cropped short, close to her head, so it spiked out in uneven clumps. In jeans and a grey vest, her arms were exposed. They were taunt and sinewy with muscle. From above sharp cheekbones, hard, dark eyes stared at him, but her mouth was as full and sensuous as any model. Still, she looked like the sort of woman you didn’t want to fuck with.
Close behind her, another tall, slim figure stepped out. Jez was surprised to see the newbie was male, and not only that, he was only about fourteen-years old.
He didn’t come across many children these days, for obvious reasons. He wondered what the hell this kid had done to buy himself eternal damnation.
“It’s okay,” he said again, taking a tentative step forward. “I promise I won’t hurt you.”
The woman snorted. “It’s you who should be worried if we’re going to hurt you.”
“I am, believe me, I am.”
She narrowed those dark eyes. “Good.”
“Just tell him to get fucked, Kay,” said the boy. “We don’t need him hanging around.”
Her eyes fli
cked to the boy, and his comment seemed to make up her mind.
“What do you want?” she said. “What are you here for?”
“Same as you, I expect. Food, water.”
She nodded. “Okay. But if you try anything funny, don’t think I won’t hesitate to cut you.” She flashed the knife, also kept strapped to her belt.
The boy shot her a look, obviously disappointed with the woman’s decision to make conversation. He turned and scowled at Jez.
“My name’s Jez,” he said, gaining ground. They were now only a few meters apart. He risked a smile. “If you’re not a nutter, it’s good to meet you.”
A smile twitched her lips and she dropped her hand from the hilt of the knife.
“I’m Michaela,” she said. “This is Denny.”
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