Revolution

by Michael Sutherland

  REVOLUTION

  It was the weather. It was fog. It was humidity; it was lightening and tornadoes ripping through housing estates. It was terrorists and mad scientists. It was Porton Down and Rendlesham Forest and all that creepy UFO stuff going on down there. It was Montauk and Orford Ness. It was Watson-Watt, Tesla and Death Rays. It was When Worlds Collide. It was Velikovsky and Worlds in Collision. It was Nostradamus and Satan had finally arrived. It was greed. It was poverty. It was Gaia fighting back. It was the night and it had something to do with the days, too. It was endless pure bloody murder and grief, and everything switched off.

  It was the middle of summer and the night sky at its clearest when the lights went out. Streetlights wavered and flickered a few times before blinking off completely. House lights were next, then fridges and freezers, then televisions. Plasma screens whimpered, and faces screamed into meltdown, into thin white dukes from nowhere, and lines became monsters transformed into things of the night bringing darkness that stayed.

  Mobiles transformed into backyards of junk, and landlines dying sealed the fate of communication — everyone lost power, no medium, no talk. They were lost. We all lost in a sea of pitch and silence.

  Amalgams melted, fillings dropped out and evaporated. Braces buckled and buckles rusted as wheels burst and eyes of glass shattered in orbit. Struck numb and dumb we stood around like eyeless marionettes, an endless, thoughtless mass of wireless puppets.

  Nowhere to go, nuhin to do.

  Computers and Internet faded like old radio shows, nothing but static coming and going, sounds sinking, screens dying, then all off. Cars and busses and trains and planes, anything with an engine in it, ground to a halt and was left where it was. Lifts jammed and dumbwaiters stayed dumb and kept their traps shut en masse.

  It was the homos what done it, and them there drag queens, and the whites and the blacks and the liberals and libertines. It was the breeders and men and women and children for daring to breathe. It was a genetically modified conspiracy. It was bird flu and measles and mumps and rubella. There was too much of everything and not enough of anything. Whatever it was, it was always someone else’s fault, for someone else to fix, and fix it damn quick or I swear to God I’ll... I’ll... But a bullet in the head stopped her and no one blinked or gasped and they all drifted away in rags from riches into a fertile brew of plutonic lethality.

  Dialysis machines were hand-cranked until nurses' arms grew too tired and their patients died before their eyes. The relatives and friends beat the nurses and doctors to a pulp with threats and crankshafts for not trying damn well hard enough. Ventilators ceased to function and doctors and nurses struggled to force air into lungs too sick to breathe, until, through tears and exhaustion, fear and loathing and knives and guns at their heads, they all stopped. Everything stopped. Dead.

  #

  We watched a sea of souls rising each year, but we all turned away and didn’t do a damn thing to stop it, even when its rot wafted us cool in purulent waves. The signs had been quickening quicker than before. Eddy’s mother one more domino in a long line of dolls, a yo-yo of sine waves strung out on statins and Moclobemide. Another pill, another push over the edge, and another to yank her back on a chair-o-plane ride. Losing faith in instinct, she became a monster, an NHS junkie imploding on suicidal impact, or was it medicalized murder? Who can tell when a victim’s victory is to torture loved ones with taunts of her own demise? She won and she lost on measure for measure, equal on none, leaving a motherless child.

  My son, my life, it was never easy to be a hawk in a dove. I watched over my child, and I looked on a world hungrier for highs ever higher than before.

  We aimed for the coast, sea breeze and ozone. I don’t know why. Safer in the thought that life had crawled onto the edge on such shores, who knows? And with us enough oil, lard and wax to keep things alight.

  Eddy saw the cave first, high up on the cliff, so high I thought he had lost it being in the dark for so long. With the last of the batteries in the night-vision lenses, I saw it too. High enough to feel safe from immediate danger, but high enough to kill us getting up there.

  Eddy took over. I was exhausted. I crashed down on cold and damp rocks. Eddy tied together old rags and scrub-grass and dipped it in oil. The cave glowed. We looked at each other. I had no idea if my face was as grubby as his. We laughed, so I guess it was. I felt safer in that I could sleep, and he held onto my back, each feeding the other warmth. Just don’t let me walk in my sleep.

  "Eddy?"

  I bolted up, rocks punching my back.

  The light was gone.

  I pushed myself to my feet, stumbling on rubble.

  "Eddy!"

  A light flared.

  "Jesus, Eddy, don’t do that!"

  "What’s wrong," he asked walking past, nonchalant.

  The nightmare was wrong. The dark and the danger were wrong. Everything was wrong. Didn’t he know? He looked away from me, holding a chalice of fire.

  "Why didn’t you answer?" I asked.

  "You didn’t give me a chance."

  He crouched down, laying rocks in a circle, dumping twigs into a pile.

  "You went down there/" I pointed at the opening, the maw of the cave.

  "Yes," he beamed.

  He pulled eggs out of a bundle of rags like it was a peace offering.

  "I found these," he said.

  I lurched. He jumped.

  "I thought you would be pleased, Dad."

  I grabbed his shoulders. The egg dropped and smashed.

  "Don’t ever do anything without telling me. You could have been killed."

  He pulled away from me and sat down at the back of the cave, face hiding in his arms.

  "Eddy, don’t..."

  "I can look after myself," he blurted.

  "What would happen if you never came back?"

  But the innocence of youth was fermenting into adolescent brew.

  "You’re the only thing I have, Eddy. The only thing that matters."

  I sat beside him, pulled him close. He tried pulling away, but gave up after a while.

  "I just wanted to..."

  "To show your old man that he’s too old and you’re growing up too fast."

  I said sorry. We made a pact. Never go it alone. He showed me where he’d found the eggs. I nearly died seeing how far up it was. But I didn’t say anything, except, maybe let’s find things a little closer to the ground.

  It’s been two months now. At least we think it’s been that long. We have no way of telling since every time machine has stopped and rusted on wrists and walls and even plastic has evaporated into the ether. There is no sun. No stars or moon. Nothing moves through the celestial gloom. Nothing to measure time by but instinct.

  As civilized as we like to think we are, people have reneged on their humanity, and sentience has become a sweet and sour fuck-all thing, a no sweat, no worries, and fear-in. Soon enough everyone has turned into a savage just to survive. |No longer is money enough to buy. You got it, whatever it is, I need it. End of story.

  Murder, mayhem, old grudges and new, have bubbled like lava over the lip of a nuclear reactor. No Lawmen no more. No control and no nothing to bash sense into knuckled-heads using rules and regulations and polite soft spoken language that means nothing in the need to survive – fuck that! The whole country has shut down. The borders, the coastline, have turned into no-goes, lucky for Eddy and me, and there is nothing but endless sea all around fading into black anyway. No big birds with Rolls Royce engines have ever returned. No boats, no ferries, no cruise liners either.

  A few brave souls in junkets took their chances and left on that glass-smooth Styx. But no one came back. No great expectations were deluded.

  The temperature fell, dark
ness stayed, plants died, animals starved.

  Allotments were raided, their owners mugged, stabbed or just plain shot.

  Groups came together and nodded in agreement, and looked for soothsayers to tell their worried heads what they wanted to hear. Then they fought amongst themselves. War broke out all over the place, and people and pets were flattened or firebombed or both in revenge. And if a pet was still standing, well, that was hamburger stew.

  We escaped the city. But the countryside had become a swamp of the mad, bad and downright dangerous. Desperate monsters had escaped from cages whose walls fell in a crumble of dust. Bedlam threw up every madman from hell.

  The sick and the dying were left to get sicker and die. And thank God, some said, and thank God again, because the suffering was over on both sides of the seesaw at that. No pills, no potions, and insulin and heparin dried up too. Ain't no nuhin no use, because needles are blunted and buckled and rusted anyway, man.

  Pounds of flesh broke out in spontaneous combustion, and funeral pyres rose higher until their smoky entrails sailed over rooftops sinking and crumpling down. Slate slipped and sliced through the air, through the stink of it all, and bugs and bats, and cats and rats died in a Hell’s Kitchen genocide.

  Weeping stopped and weeping acquiescence in rivers of putrescence swilled around ankle deep. Parents killed their children and children their parents, everyone blaming everyone else for the situation, the happening, the whatever you liked to call it. New-borns became victims for taking up too much effort and air, and the adolescent hacked his parents to death for having the sheer downright arrogance in having him born into this, this fucking shit – their fault, man, their fucking generation caused this. And for that they had to die.

  The government helicoptered itself into the black oblivion above and vanished. What a surprise.

  We were on the run for an enemy we didn’t know. We took to underground dwellings, tunnels and caves, whatever there was to feel safe in. Then after a while we’d move along. We lugged around rucksacks, our survival on our backs. We tried to be smart, we tried very hard. But he was only twelve and I was scared shitless for him. What happens if I’m not here? And I’d think of the difference between muscle and axe, of a big heavy blade whacking down as I tried to defend my son my son my son, unable to hold him, to shield him, to hide him from the madness.

  "Will things ever get back the way they were, Dad?"

  Eddy was following me along the beach, me the old man poking a stick into the sand, looking for what? Turtle’s eggs? Here?

  "I don’t know, Eddy."

  "Okay," he said, walking past me, not looking back.

  "Just, okay?"

  "Uh huh," he sighed. "Just, okay."

  "Don’t you miss things?"

  "Mom... Sort of."

  Pandora, do not be with me here on this one, I thought, but I flicked the latch on the lid before I knew what I was doing.

  "Like?"

  "School."

  "School?"

  He looked at me. "I miss Mondays. I miss knowing it’s Friday. I miss weekends. I miss time. I miss Johnny and Jimmy..." his voice began to crack.

  He lumped down on his rear in the sand. I could tell he was crying. "I miss mornings and nigh times, Dad."

  I was a powerless failure for my own child and all I could do was sit on the sand beside him. Nothing was happening. Nothing was changing, forever black.

  "I was thinking," I said. "Maybe we could go back."

  He looked at me then. "Where/"

  "The city. Maybe we could find your friends, Jimmy, Johnny, and maybe I could find some of mine too."

  He looked away from me. "They’re dead."

  "You don’t know that, Eddy."

  "They’re all dead."

  And Santa claws too.

  #

  Fat and thin men sat around the table, collars open, ties loose, and jackets long abandoned were hanging weary on the backs of chairs.

  "Will someone answer me?"

  "We don’t know, is the answer." The man rubbed his fat neck.

  "A whole country cannot just disappear! Now tell me again. Where the hell is it?"

  An embarrassed hush fell over bowed heads and shifting eyes that looked everywhere, anywhere, at everyone else — avoid the eyes. Don’t look at the eyes.

  "Will someone answer me!"

  "That is the answer," one brave soul said, leaning on the sacred table. "There is Atlantic, there is North Sea, there is English Channel, but no England."

  "Or Scotland or Wales," piped in a man with a thin face and an Armani suit.

  "Ireland?"

  "Oh, it’s still there. North and South. And the Orkneys and Shetlands. So far anyway."

  "And Europe?"

  "Still there."

  "Paris, France?"

  "It’s there, too."

  "Just my luck."

  "Everything’s been diverted, flights, boats, freight."

  "But no England, my England," said another with a singsong lilt.

  "The Emerald Isle?"

  "That’s Ireland, sir."

  "Oh, yeah, yeah. I knew that."

  "No England, no Sceptred Isle, no Great Britain, nothing is there."

  The Landstat image flashed up on the screen. "This is the last we have of it, before and after."

  "Terrorists?"

  Is this dumb fuck taking any of this in?

  And everyone turned to look at the guy who had said such a stupid thing and how he looked so little now.

  "Sir, the whole country has vanished," someone offered, with a look on one side of his face like barbed wire had been dragged up it.

  One said it, the others wished they had.

  "Find me someone to blame for this. I cannot go to the country, on television, address the nation and say, I dunno, whahappined? So give me something. Anything."

  First image from space — country basking in sunshine. Next image — cloud cover. Last image — sea and a great big fucking gap.

  "Did it sink? What about Menwith Hill? Fylingdales? Are they gone too?"

  "Well, we did try telephoning a few folks, but..."

  "Yes?"

  "Unobtainable."

  "Ten Downing Street?"

  "No one’s home, sir."

  "What about the other one, whatshername, the Queen?"

  "Mrs. Windsor doesn’t seem to be answering calls either."

  "Damn terrorists."

  Everyone gave everyone else an uncomfortable look and shifted those uncomfortable looks back at the guy with his fists clenched on the table. Then they did something more useful and shuffled around in tiny little steps, like they had horned toads under their feet.

  The door burst wide. A young bespectacled man rushing in and stopped in a skid on the eagle’s head.

  The man who thought he was in charge of the planet, now minus one little bit, his fists still clenched on air, stood up, and leaned on the big-wig’s all important table.

  "What?"

  Sweat ran down the young man’s face. He could have been straight from the pages of Vogue. "Sir?"

  "Yes. What is it, son?" the little man who used to be the big man said, drawing the sweat off his face with a twitching hand.

  "The cloud cover’s piling up over France."

  "And?"

  "And," someone drawled, followed by a whistle. "Same thing happened to Great Britain before it vanished."

  #

  Every parent has his child’s life mapped out from the day he is born, and this part wasn’t what I had planned for Eddy. It was all wrong. Would there only be dark and night for him? Would he always be on the run?

  "Dad," he said. "I think it’s your birthday."

  Maybe it was, maybe it didn’t matter. But I sunk inside another day in another year, and if he was right, I’d forgotten about my own son’s birthday two weeks before.

  He had his hands behind his back. "Close your eyes," he said.

  I wanted to be blind.

  "Okay, you
can open them now."

  And out of the darkness he held a pillow of moss woven with reeds. How long had he thought about it? How long had it taken him to make it when I wasn’t looking? How long had he thought of my comfort?

  He smiled at me, happy to be giving.

  I couldn’t help it.

  I cried.

  #

  "What?"

  "Europe’s gone. Canada too, but no big deal on that, right?"

  No one laughed in the shuffle out the door.

  "South America going I can about stand, but Russia?"

  "Sir, there’s nothing else but us, now."

  "Damn!"

  "There’s nothing but us and ocean all around," the man said, picking up his jacket, running sweating arms into the silk-lined sleeves. A wall behind him split and cracked open and spewed out gunk. He never flinched even as the sleeve he was shoving his arm through fell off.

  #

  I felt it on my shoulder. I had been dreaming of sea and sand and sun, of a place I’d never been. The waves lapped at the shore’s edg3, enticing me, drawing me nearer and nearer, come with me, sleep with me, drown with me, but something else was pulling me away, dragging me back.

  "Dad, Dad!"

  The darkness swamped in on me and tarred pitch over my dream. I rubbed the heels of my hands into my eyes. What is that heat, what is that humidity, what now? Eddy’s voice, still a whisper, had an edge, an urgency to it. He crouched, his hand pushing and pulling my shoulder.

  "What is it?" I said.

  ""Look, dad."

  But the first thing that came to me was the stink. Of wet walls, of rock, of old sweat and bodies not washed in days, of clothes unclean, unchanged and threadbare, falling apart like everything else. Like the rucksacks, the billycans, the boots on our feet, like me.

  "Over there, Dad. Look!"

  It came to me then. Even in the short space of needed sleep, I had abandoned him. What if I had never woken up? What then? My head snapped to the left and looked out of the mouth of the cave we’d called home for the past week. Blood, I thought. Blood and bleeding. A thin slash across the sky at its lowest point, crimson stretching so thin and so long I had to hunker closer to the opening to take it all in.

  "What is it, Dad?"

  Like the old days — why is the grass green, Dad? Why is the sky blue? I knew why the sky was blue and the grass green. I knew about physics and biology, about chlorophyll and wavelengths measured in nanometers. I knew about aerial-complexes and how plants accelerate electrons until they are just right. I knew that grass isn’t really green but red., because green is the wavelength of light grass kicks out, rejects, no use. I knew all the complicated answers. I never had the simple ones.