Survival Instinct- Forces of Change

by Sandi Gamble

  The task, in the face of nature’s unrelenting power, is to minimize the harm to man in the process. We were fortunate that anticipating exactly the process that would occur, they had the foresight to shut down all of the nuclear power reactors around the world.

  I shudder to think how long our race would have had to remain underground if the flooding had included numerous accidents in which nuclear materials were dispersed into the atmosphere.

  “We are approaching the Rockies.”

  I looked through the window to see the graceful, looming mountains. Still snow-tipped, still beautiful. This is how they have looked for eons. Sometimes, we are given a glimpse of a world unchanged and unchanging. It was a welcome relief from the dramatic changes we’d seen of man’s efforts to control the world.

  We arrived at Denver Airport. It was only then that I realized that Jace had remained quiet throughout the trip. I had been so lost in my own thoughts that I didn’t even realize that others had been as well. Now, I looked over at him and could see him staring out the window at what lay below us. Unlike in the past, our Fú’s do not fly high in the sky, they fly quite close to the ground. As a result, we were able to not only see a great deal during the trip, but we could see everything in great detail. Much of what I had seen during our trip was quite disturbing. Even so, the journey had somehow steeled me. I could feel a strengthening within myself. I felt stronger in my belief that nature is resilient. We humans do a great deal to try and “tame” nature and bend her to our will, but what I had seen reinforced my knowledge and faith that even after the folly of human capriciousness, nature does and will regenerate.

  Any sadness I felt came from the realization that so many people had to perish to prove that lesson once again. And why? Ego? Power? Greed? Yes, yes and yes. The question that gnawed at me even in the face of the obvious was, can we be fully human without feeling these horrible emotions or be driven by these horrible drives? What would it mean to be a creature that lived in harmony with nature rather than at odds with her?

  Even after the lessons of our greed and recklessness became clear, people – and we should make no mistake, governments are just people – refused to clean up our mess, refused to take on the difficult task of making amends with nature. And why not? Money. Economy. We would lose jobs, they claimed. Our standard of living would decline, they opined.

  Well, how important are those jobs now? How might you describe the standard of living now?

  “Prepare for landing.”

  The pilot’s voice startled me out of my reverie. There were tasks to be attended to. I had my responsibilities in the landing sequence, although they were hardly as essential as those of the pilot. Still, I, along with the others, focused on the task at hand. In another few minutes, we had hovered down, touching down with barely a whisper of sensation.

  There was a momentary silence, as we each seemed to draw in the same breath. We had arrived. Up until that point, our experience was one that we had experienced any number of times before. But now, in light of what had happened, we were going to leave the Fú. As confining as it is, it is a safe space. Leaving it would open us to all the dangers and threats that existed on the outside, whatever they may be.

  “Let’s gear up.”

  That directive made concrete our task. As much as I wanted to remain fully “present” and to process everything I saw and experienced, I also had a job to do, a job that I was trained well to do. So, my training kicked in. Like the others, I began to gather my equipment and tools. Optimally, we would each have exactly as much as we needed, no more and no less – everything we might need to do our job but not so much as to weigh us down.

  In reality, things don’t usually work as neatly.

  For my part, I wanted to be sure that I had my most important devices. Whether or not it was onerous to carry or move, I needed what I needed. The same, I knew, was true of the others.

  One by one, we descend from the Fú. When we are all on solid ground, Tim locked the Fú to ensure that it was secure upon our return. None of us was interested in any surprises upon our return to the craft!

  We gathered in a small circle as if to take a check of our status as individuals and as a group. My eyes travel from one to the next, landing finally on Jace. Our eyes held each other’s a bit longer than might have been necessary, but just long enough to communicate everything we wanted to be sure to communicate with one another.

  “Ready?” Tim asked.

  One by one, we nodded. Yes, we were ready. As ready as we would ever be.

  “Then let’s do this. We have a long, long road ahead of us.”

  Indeed we did. We had a long trek in front of us. Even so, as soon as we arrived at the tarmac, Jace began to take air quality readings. We were all, of course, outfitted with CO protection. Even so, we had been advised not to take any chances with our health. There would be enough dangers we could not anticipate – CO poisoning was one danger we could anticipate and prepare for.

  As Jace took his readings, I raised my head and looked around. The tarmac was littered with aircraft, both small passenger and larger passenger planes. One or two military transports were off to the side of the tarmac. In all, I took in an image of chaos. I had in my imagination an image of multiple planes trying to take off or land in a haphazard and desperate attempt to escape whatever the immediate danger was. There were several planes in such a position that it seemed their wings clipped, adding to whatever kept them on the ground at that time.

  All the planes showed emergency exits opened and belts that once held the inflatable slides that allowed passengers to escape the plane. The slides were long gone, as were the people who had desperately fled the planes when it was apparent to them that they would not be taking off, and even if they did, there would be no place for them to go.

  “We’re good,” Jace said, sliding his meter back into its holder.

  “Let’s move on,” Tim said.

  We crossed the tarmac in a single-file line. Tim led us into the closest terminal. Based on my review of the Denver Airport, this would have been the International Terminal.

  We scaled the terminal and entered through a broken window. We walked through a terminal at which time seemed to have stood still. There was still luggage alongside seats. Still cups of beverages in the seat cupholders. Still magazines and newspapers opened.

  “Look at this,” Jace said, pointing to a half-finished crossword puzzle.

  I don’t know if he noticed that a pencil, possibly the one that had been used on the crossword, was still teetering on the chair.

  It was an eerie scene indeed. All around us, we could see the evidence of people, but absolutely no sign of people. There were diaper bags, but no babies. It was as if everything stopped all at once, in an instance.

  What we were seeing did not comport with what we’d been taught in the Academy. There, our professors and instructors had indicated that a climate change had caused a deadly increase in CO levels, wiping out the populations who could not escape.

  But CO poisoning of that degree might have allowed for some planning, some coherent strategy. It was clear that people were trying to get away. But from what? I didn’t believe it was Carbon.

  I felt Jace brush against my shoulder. I appreciated the contact. It brought me back to the present. I could see in his expression the same kind of concern that I felt. Both inside and outside the terminal, the atmosphere felt heavy and dark. Its weightiness was as much psychological as it was physical.

  Rusting aircraft remained anchored to the ends of the airport walkways. Some had become covered in moss and vegetation. Small animals seemed to scurry around. But those animals were the only signs of life we could discern.

  With each step I took, I felt the strange sensation that I was somehow walking between time. I felt as if time had stopped and I was moving at that moment between when one draws one’s breath and when one exhales again. I was in a moment of existential pause. Nothing was moving. And yet, we were. We w
ere walking through the terminal, pausing to glance at the artifacts of lives once lived, of lives suddenly ended; walking past the artifacts and evidence of some catastrophic and cataclysmic change which was at once devastating and unhurried. Children’s sippy cups were still standing upright. Strollers remained alongside chairs once occupied by young parents.

  All the signs that people had been here, but there were no people!

  Other than the artifacts – the small airport restaurants and sandwich shops – and the thing people had left behind, there was nothing. Not a body. Not a soul. No one.

  We pushed open doorways. Restrooms. Looking, looking. Searching. No one. There was ample evidence that people had been there, but it seemed they had simply vanished, from one moment to the next.

  There was long, long before the remains where a great volcano had overrun the city, entombing an entire population. Clearly, at that time, the noxious gases of the volcano preceded the dust and ash, murdering people in place. Then came the ash and the materials that entombed them, allowing future generations to see them as they were. But here, there was none of that. Just an empty set, devoid of actors.

  I looked out the giant, plate glass windows still intact. On the tarmac, catering trucks sat next to cargo holds. Refueling trucks remained attached to some of the planes. Personal luggage and suitcases remained on flatbed trays waiting to be put onto aircraft by hands that never reached for them and would never reach for them again.

  Some of the luggage was overturned, perhaps rifled through in haste in the last moments or maybe just overturned by people in their haste to escape, but escape what?

  But still no people.

  “Oh my God.”

  My eyes widened. Jace turned to look at me. Looking into my face, he turned his own eyes in the direction I was looking. As soon as he saw what I saw, he began to walk, then run, toward the airline at the end of the gateway.

  Through the windows of the plane, I could see skeletal remains. The group followed after Jace. Walking quickly and then running. We worked as one, turning the rusted door lock and then pushing our way into the plane, we could see a plane filled with the remains of passengers who never left the aircraft. Some were in their seats. Others pushing against the doorway.

  Whatever had brought about their demise, had, unlike what had happened inside the terminal we’d been in, caught them unawares.

  “Don’t touch anything,” Justin said as he moved through the plane’s cabin, observing. “I have to test everything. Until I have readings, I’d suggest leaving the plane as well, in case there is something here that we cannot filter.”

  “But then you…” I began.

  He waved me away. This was, after all, his job. Besides, if there was a danger better to lose only one rather than all of us. So, realizing the logic of his suggestion, we left him alone in the plane to take his measurements and samples.

  As we waited for him, I considered what I knew about life when this cataclysm struck, at a time before the purge.

  I knew that pre-purge, humans driving cars pumped an average of ten billion tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year. Ten billion! That worked out to nearly one tonne per person on earth – and that was only half of the dangerous greenhouse gases that impacted global warming. The remainder was the result of industrial activity.

  This human contribution – cause – of global warming continued to astonish me. Why hadn’t someone recognized and done something about it? I knew that there were any number of scientific papers written, even mass movements, calling attention to the coming danger. But the government, the decision makers, had remained remarkably deaf to the evidence and protests.

  Job losses.

  Inexact science.

  Out and out lies.

  Economy.

  People love their cars.

  Whatever the excuse, the government had used it… until it was too late.

  After the discovery of the skeletal remains on the airplane, it seemed that we were finding bodies and remains everywhere. For whatever reason, the terminal and area we had first entered had been abruptly abandoned – perhaps in the face of imminent danger. Perhaps an alarm had been sounded. Whatever, that area had been evacuated. That was not true of any other area of the airport.

  If nothing else, I made a mental note to never draw absolute conclusions based on an isolated sample. As we walked forward through the walkway connecting terminals, I recalled the folk story my father had once told me about blind men encountering an elephant. Each man, touching a different part of the beast drew wildly different conclusions about what they had encountered.

  All were wrong.

  “We are all blind,” my father told me. “And life is an elephant.”

  We arrived in the welcoming hall of the terminal. This building, which I could imagine bustling with thousands of people, excited to be flying out or arriving, was deathly quiet except for our footsteps. Instead of the excitement of travel and adventure, we were greeted by lifeless bodies. Some still seated. Most on the floors. Some slumped in chairs. A few piled upon others. Some of the smaller bodies, children, still held in parents’ arms. Almost all the bodies had been reduced to skeletons, but some still had toughened, leather-like skin stretched over their bones.

  Jace grabbed my hand. “Put your mask on,” he said, his eyes glancing in the direction of the bodies.

  I nodded. It was a prudent and sensible thing to do. Even if there was no longer any trace of whatever killed these people, there could still be some degrading toxin in their bones and taut skin.

  We moved carefully making sure not to disturb any of the bodies. Justin, who had caught up with us after leaving the plane, was particularly interested in those bodies that still had some skin on them. Kneeling beside one after the other of them, he opened his kit, took out a sterile scraper and a vile and scraped a small amount of skin into each vial, making sure to document as much as he could about the source of each sample.

  Once he finished, he saw that we’d been standing around, watching him with a variety of astonished expressions on our faces. While he had devoted a good deal of his time at the Academy to biology and had looked forward to experiences of this sort, the rest of us had focused our attention on other matters and found his scraping and pulling off the parchment-like skin somewhere between fascinating and macabre.

  “I’m good,” he said.

  Cate breathed an audible sigh of relief. “Good. Let’s keep moving. This place is giving me the heeby-jeebies.”

  Justin laughed. “They are only bodies,” he observed.

  Just bodies! Easy for him to say! I wasn’t as troubled as Cate was but I couldn’t say that I enjoyed finding myself surrounded by skeletal corpses.

  We continued through the terminal, taking mental note of everything we were seeing – not only the bodies but everything we were seeing. Food courts. ATM machines toppled on their sides. Bins and garbage containers on their sides, their contents were strewn all about. Most likely from small animals, I thought to myself. Surely humans wouldn’t have eaten from bins and garbage.

  The small shops in the airport were emptied out – nothing remained on their shelves. Not a tee shirt, mug, or magazine. Strange.

  “Look at that,” I said, pointing to a Gargoyle sitting in a suitcase perched on an outcrop high above the area.

  Jace shrugged.

  “Seems an odd sort of thing to have in an airport, don’t you think?” I said, half to myself. The fact was, I had seen pictures of this airport in texts, and I’d never noticed a Gargoyle in any picture I saw. I did though, think of the photographs of where I had seen gargoyles. Medieval churches. Universities. Places where the architecture felt the symbolic power of a gargoyle was necessary, gothic architecture – whether as a protection from evil or a nod to classical thought. But this, I thought to myself, is an airport. What was this Gargoyle doing here? What symbolic significance could it have? And, perhaps as importantly, when was it put up?

  The
eerie feeling the Gargoyle created in me caused me to tremble slightly. Jace turned to me.

  “Are you all right?”

  I nodded.

  As strange and disturbing as it was to see the Gargoyle, it was even stranger to see the murals that adorned the walls of the long walkways. They were so disturbing that I tried to avert my eyes from them, but they seemed to call to me, forcing me to look at their scenes of apocalypse and rebirth.

  I reached out and held Jace’s hand. I could not keep a tremor from going through my body.

  There were, in total, four murals. Related but distinct. In the first, three women, dead, lay in coffins. By their looks and attire, they are an African, an Indian and a young Jewish girl. Beyond the coffins, in the distance, there seems to be the destruction of cities and forests. All around, there are images of extinct animals.

  In the second mural, a man in a gas mask is carrying a sword and a gun. The technique and image reminded me of a depiction of a German soldier from my studies. In the mural, the man is walking down a street through a devastated city. It appears that the buildings are on fire. His sword is piercing a dove, which is the symbol of peace.

  The message was not subtle. Peace will be destroyed.

  Dead children and babies lay on broken bricks. Weeping women surround the children, raising their eyes and arms to the darkened sky. On the floor in front of this second mural, there was a plate on which the symbols “AUAG” were clearly etched.

  “Gold and silver?” I asked aloud, looking at the plate.

  “Maybe,” Justin agreed. “But that is also the symbol for Australia Antigen, one of the more lethal strains of hepatitis ever known.”

  I narrowed my brow. Here we were, surrounded by evidence and clues of some cataclysmic event and even the most straightforward ‘clue’ could easily mean multiple things. It seemed overwhelming. Still, whatever its meaning, the floor plate had been placed before a mural that depicted a genocide. Perhaps that suggested that Justin’s suggestion was more apt.

  The third mural showed children of all nations taking weapons from their countries and giving them to a boy. He looked to be taking the weapons and molding them into something else. In this third mural, the soldier from the second mural lies on the ground, appearing dead, with two doves perched on the butt of his gun which is still in his hands.