“Are you ready Ol?”
He nods sadly.
“Come on then.”
We step out and into the glare of the sun. A lot of the snow has melted away, uncovering something else much more gruesome. We walk onwards trying to ignore the bodies, but it’s impossible. They lay there as if they are sleeping, but they are not sleeping. Olly grips my hand tight as we walk on through this no man’s land. We try not to stare at the faces, we don’t want to give ourselves any more nightmares. We have to be strong. We have to find a way through.
“Imagine they are sleeping.”
“Sleeping?”
“They’re all having a nice sleep, yeah?” I nod, encouragingly. “Having lovely dreams. We mustn’t disturb them.”
Olly’s face brightens, his eyes glisten. We begin tiptoeing around the bodies as if we are trying not to wake them. We giggle if we step too loudly near one of them. As we walk we feel the heat of the sun on our skin, embracing us. I see the rain evaporating off of our coats. It disappears up and into the air, creating clouds somewhere in the atmosphere. My layers become lighter. I am able to sense these tiny changes as if they are huge. Things are going to be OK. Things are not all that dire. Things are improving. I squeeze Olly’s hand. He looks up at me with all the joy of his age. I feel an optimism begin to take root inside us.
Yet, still, as we walk and walk, onwards like a hamster on a wheel, the pretence of happiness is eroding. The situation is etched into me. I am constantly on guard looking and listening for people, for soldiers, for immunes, for the sick. Any moment, around any corner, we could be taken, and still I have no idea where we are. I need something, anything, to indicate where we are and where we should go. I need something I recognise to tell me how to get out of the city. There is nothing familiar around here for me to clutch onto. I don’t recognise any of the place or road names, I am utterly lost. The heat of the day begins to fade, along with my hope. We walk and we walk but the city never ends. All around us is the same concrete, the same pavements, the same dead soulless sights, and… and the bodies. They are not sleeping angels. They are not dreaming. I can no longer pretend. They are dead, dead, dead. We are in the city of the dead, like wanderers at the end of time. Alone, fearful, nervous. We try to ignore them but it’s impossible. There are so many of them. They must have fallen as they escaped from their cars, from their homes, searching desperately for help, but there was none to be found. And we are still searching, even now, even while we are not sick. I find myself staring at the frozen and gruesome faces as we pass. So does Olly. We have to get used to this. We have to desensitise ourselves.
Dark clouds begin forming way above our heads once more. They are blotting out the sun. The meagre heat disappears. It is a miserable, grey, graveyard once again, and we are stuck in the centre, always running getting nowhere. I feel as if we are slowly dying, slowly dissolving, as every second goes by. Every corner, every street, the same scene. Day turns into evening, then evening begins turning into night. The light has almost completely faded now. We are in the illusion of light, reflecting down from the thin, suffering, atmosphere. I feel strange. Strangely awake to the darkness. I somehow feel as if we are walking on the dark side of the moon. Almost as if I am bouncing. We may as well be on the moon. It is just as grey, just as cold and lifeless. And at that moment, snow begins to fall from the ever-thickening clouds. Are we the only ones here to suffer the cold now? Tiny snowflakes, so weak, so pathetic, hit our faces and melt instantly. They turn into tears that roll down our cheeks and drip away. Gone. They are a symbol of the big freeze to come. Huge unstoppable glaciers destroying everything that we love, scraping away all our history, everything that we have made, everything that we have done, and everything that we were. Nothing can stop it now. It is turning into something else, something other. Spring is far, far away. Yet we live, we are the hope. I know that now. We were meant to survive. We were born for it. I see a place name up ahead that I recognise. We head towards it. The maze can be navigated after all.
fifteen
We somehow keep on placing one foot in front of the other. We somehow keep on walking and walking and staggering onwards, following the signs out of the city. We are silent as we march, fearful of the dead, fearful of all the horrors laid bare before us on the pavement. This is only going to get worse. There is no point in continuing to deny it. And it is growing darker and darker. We have sleepwalked into the nothing and still we need to find a place to stay tonight. I stop and listen. The silence is impenetrable. It has almost completely encapsulated me. No hum of electricity, no roads in the distance, no animals, no life, nothing but us. We are in the dead zone. I become aware that I can actually hear Olly’s heart beating. The sound floats up and into the cold and wraps around me. I am warmed. I look down at the little guy. He looks up at me. We are becoming more. We are changing. We are becoming one. I bend down and kiss him. We do not need words anymore. We know. We step forwards into the unknown together.
Olly tugs on the sleeve of my coat. His bottom lip juts out.
“Izzy, I’m tired. My feet hurt.”
“I know. I’m sorry, baby.” I stop and put my hands on my hips and breathe in the cold air. “Where shall we stay tonight?”
“Another house, another house.”
“Which house? You choose.”
Olly and I stand perfectly still. He closes his eyes. I hold my breath.
“We are close to somewhere good,” he says mysteriously.
“Close to what?”
“Somewhere safe.”
As we stand and absorb our surroundings, the Sun disappears behind the Earth once more. Darkness encompasses us completely. It is so dark, you could almost believe that all the light in the world had died, and we are the only things left. We are in a vacuum. We are in the dark ether. We are becoming the ether, without light, who’s to say that we aren’t? Yet I believe I have form. I pinch myself to make sure.
“Close your eyes,” Olly says.
“OK.”
I am blind with my eyes open, so I may as well close them. Olly squeezes my hand the instant my lids seal, like he knows, like he senses it too. I feel an energy flowing between us and through us. There is a warmth in me that I have never felt before, or never noticed. I feel rejuvenated, full of hope once more. We walk on with a new sense of seeing, and for those few minutes in the land of the blind, I am amazed. I have never experienced anything quite like this. I am blind yet I see more clearly. There is more clarity in the darkness, in the nothing, than there is in the light. I can feel my surroundings as vibrations calling out to me, telling me where there is a safe place to plant my foot. Molecules are talking to me, I feel their protective embrace. I hear them calling out to me, a billion tiny songs all humming to the beat of their meagre existence. Without them I am nothing. I see shapes growing and expanding in the distance, fantastic patterns, eating into the darkness. What are they telling me? Why have I have been wired to receive this experience? I feel as though I can hear the grass and the flowers in the gardens all around crying out to me, as if we are one, as if there are invisible threads weaving us together. What am I sensing? I open my eyes, I shake my head. A hot flush travels up through me. I remember this feeling. I am recalling something I never knew I had lost.
Olly grips my hand once more. We are back in flow. Nothing else matters. I am calm. I close my eyes again. I realise that I have become aware of a sense dulled through evolution, sonar, we were bats once, we were fish in the deepest darkest ocean once, we were less than that, we were microbes. The body will remember these senses. The body will heighten that which we thought we had lost. That is how they survived, that is how we will survive. I see it all so clearly. All we have to do is allow it to enter, without thought, without resistance. That reptilian brain takes over. I am beginning to remember. Everything that has been fused to create me, through the ages, the millennia, wants me to survive just as much as I do. I am them, and they are me, I know it now. I do not slip, I do no
t fall. I am seeing for the first time, I am experiencing the world as it truly is. Olly is a master. He is beginning to learn how to control it. I have forgotten. He suddenly diverts off the main path. I feel gravel move beneath my feet. We are walking up a driveway. We stop. I absorb the essence of my surroundings. I feel it streaming into me. It is overwhelming. I shudder. I am fighting it. I take my torch out of my pocket and turn it on. We are stood at the front door to a large house set a little way back from the road.
I push the buckled front door forwards, and we peek inside. The house had already been ransacked. It is a total mess, furniture all thrown about, rubbish all over the floor. I hold Olly’s hand and turn off the torch to listen. I want to feel what he feels. I want to be able to sense if this is a safe place to stay. I have so much to learn, so many mistakes in my mind to overcome, this is the world now. In the house, the sweet sound of silence vibrates through the air. I close the door behind us and switch the torch back on. We walk down the hallway and into the kitchen. We search the cupboards. There is quite a lot left over, in their panic, the looters have left many tins and cans, some of them have no labels, but the metal is clean and undented. I believe that is a good sign. Whatever is inside them, it will have to do.
Tomorrow we will have another look. Tomorrow in the light.
“Do you feel that Izzy,” Olly says. “There is something else here.”
I try but I cannot, I am too tired. I know I am fighting this new sensation, this new wave of being that is washing over me, I do not want to, but I am overwhelmed. A memory hits me, and I remember feeling this way as a child, before I learned how everyone else lived. I was a strange child, I remember hearing people say it about me. Olly is a strange child too. It is only the strange that have survived. I can’t do this anymore. My mind goes blank. Hunger bites. I am too tired to think. I shake my head and shudder all over as if I am shivering. In the torchlight, I open two cans. Peas and sweetcorn. I give Olly the sweetcorn. We eat silently.
“Let’s go to bub-byes baby, yeah?” I say.
“Yeah.”
We both collapse on to the bed. I didn’t realise quite how tired I was until this moment. My whole body just seems to deflate, until I am part of the bed. I am slowly merging with it. Olly rolls over and pulls the covers over himself. He falls asleep, instantly. I’ll just close my eyes just for a minute, I think. I turn off the torch and lay beside my brother.
I stir. I am somewhere between sleeping and waking. It is dark, so very dark. I am inside the darkness, like it is a blanket, wrapping me up in layers upon layers of nothing. In the distance I feel a faint buzzing noise cascading up through the atmosphere. It is calling to me, scratching my name into the space between spaces. It is expanding. It is all forgotten now. I do not understand the language. Did I ever know it? There is a hand inside me pulling my stomach up in that direction. Up, up, up, I feel as if I am being suspended in the void. I am attracted to it, a part of it. I have the strongest sensation that I am going home. Yet, I am falling through something and nothing, forever falling, or endlessly rising in the vacuum of infinite space. I am being pulled apart and put back together over and over and over, the same but different, as if only one molecule has altered, but that tiny change has transformed me completely. A sound wave passes through me, I feel the molecules vibrate in turn, a beautiful orchestra each one connected, each one in flow. I am in peace, feeling their songs. Time has slowed to allow me to feel this. They begin popping away inside me. I feel like a fireworks display is erupting on the microscopic level inside me, and only I am able to observe it, only I know it has happened at all. I am learning so much. The Earth has so much more to offer, more than I ever knew. This is our future. This is our fortune. Turning back to nature, turning back to plants and trees. We were searching for the answers but we had forgotten the question. This is not going to be bad life. We are going to have a more profound existence from now on. We are going to be OK. I suddenly see his face, that man, that soldier, that immune, bursting into my vision in short hallucinations. He is saying my name, whispering it. I no longer know who I am anymore, my mind is utterly broken. I wake with a fright.
I sit up in the darkness. I can hear Olly breathing. My dreams are becoming more abstract, more airy, more intense. I believe that they are trying to change me, to help make me see, make me know how to progress. I close my eyes and lay back down. New feelings are flushing through me and around me, I am vibrating to a new beat, I try to stay calm, the world is alive, so alive. I am becoming one with it. I am merging into it, as a part of it, not an individual. I realise I am smiling. In the distance something is calling to me, I can feel something drawing closer. Dawn is just over the horizon. I can feel the pull of the Sun rolling closer and closer, the Earth is turning, and soon there will be light, with its meagre warmth and singular ability to cast greyness upon the horror of our new reality. How am I able to feel it? What is going on? I am myself, but not myself. I am different. Everything is different.
I suddenly realise that today is Christmas Day. What a place to spend it. Images of Christmas mornings pass through my mind like a flick book. I am running down the stairs of our house to the living room to where the Christmas tree would have been. I would stop with my hands clasped to my chest and absorb the sight of all the lovely presents sitting underneath it, each one wrapped in colourful paper. Reds, silvers, golds, a robin on the tree. Santa. My heart would rush. I would be so happy. Then I would fall onto my knees and grab one of the presents and run back upstairs with it. Without thinking I would rush into my parent’s bedroom. My parents, my heart leaps, my eyes start to water, my lip wobbles, ice rushes through my veins. They are gone, gone, gone. I remember them sitting in bed with their coffees, big happy smiles on their faces. Is all this really happening? Are they really gone? This is all some sort of sick dream, some awful test, isn’t it? Isn’t it? Please let that be true. After I’d opened my first present while sitting on their bed, their deathbed, oh God, oh God, my Mother would make us all a gluttonous fried breakfast, the best one of the year. I’d gorge, then I’d open the rest of my presents, with my parents watching on, savouring my happy face and the range of excited expressions I boundlessly expressed. I would open a present and then eat a chocolate then another present then a chocolate. I’d do anything for a chocolate right now. My mouth salivates as I imagine the flavour on my tongue and the richness. Then there was Christmas dinner, with all my extended family. I remember the oceans of thick gravy poured over the veg and the roasted potatoes. My stomach pangs, like lightning scratching across the inside of my guts. Hunger is really beginning to bite into me. What I wouldn’t do for a disgusting brussel sprout right now. I feel so weak, so different, I am no longer that stupid bubble wrapped child. Poor Olly, he will never experience one of those days, not one that he would remember anyway, this is more his world than mine. Perhaps Christmas will die out altogether. I wonder if I should even mention it to Olly. Would he care? Would he still believe in Santa? Probably not, how could he? I lay staring up at the ceiling in the dark. I imagine what this stranger’s room looks like, is there chocolates anywhere hidden away? If I find chocolate I will tell Olly it’s Christmas. At least we would have something to enjoy, for once.
I can taste the imminent light, it is ready to burst forth from the shadow of the Earth, and just as I think this, the blackness begins to turn to grey, as if I had willed it into existence. Morning is breaking on the worst Christmas ever. I close my eyes and pray for sleep to take me away to a happier place. I wait for the light to show me the way. But it’s no use.
I wake to the sound of Olly trying to open one of the tins.
“Hey lil’ man,” I croak rolling over on to my side.
He looks my way.
“Bring it here, let me do it.”
He runs over and shoves the can and the can opener into my hands. The metal is so cold I jump. Olly’s little hands are almost blue. How long has he been doing that for? I sit up on the side of the bed. Olly s
tands in front of me. I rub his hands in mine then cover them in his mittens.
Fruit salad, not bad. I check it over. I smell it. I taste it. It seems fine. I give it to Olly. He drinks it from the can. I open another, orange segments. I follow his lead and tip the contents into my mouth barely chewing on the cold fruit. It slides down my throat and into my stomach. My body responds to the sugars and vitamins like a believer at prayer. I actually feel my blood absorbing the nutrients and sending them to my vital organs. I slowly sip the juice and slide the orange segments down my throat until the can is empty. I stick my finger in and slide it around the inside of the can. I suck the rest of the sugar water off of my finger. I open another can. Beans. It’s all good. I get a spoon for Olly and a spoon for me and together we take it in turns to eat from the can. I have never been fuller. I burp. Olly laughs. I lie back down and allow my stomach to adjust while Olly hunts about the bedroom looking for toys to play with. Tough luck, this is a couple's bedroom.
As we explore the house, Olly suddenly grabs my hand and drags me into the hallway at the bottom of the stairs.
“Somethings here.”
He has that faraway look in his eyes again. I can almost see the universe reflected in them. They are a microcosm. I am sucked in. I shake my head.
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know what it is yet.”
He closes his eyes and runs his little hand over the wooden mahogany features on the under stair wall. His little fingers are sliding over the beautiful intricate carved design in the wood. He stops, and opens his eyes.
“Here,” he says.
We both stare at one of the roses in the wood. I begin feeling it too, an electrical energy, a calling. It is something undefined. I don’t know how to understand it, yet.
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