Apocrypha Sequence: Inferno

by Shane Jiraiya Cummings

  On the edge of the horizon, beyond the peaks of the icebergs still floating off the coast, a vast black ridge churned through the water at tremendous speed. A towering plume of exhaled air and water shot into the sky, an immense geyser reaching into the heavens and catching slivers of twilight.

  Dana lowered the phone. "That's from a blowhole. A whale's blowhole."

  The sea chopped and churned, and the icebergs bobbed with the whale's passage. It was headed east after the Kraken and into the gloom of the approaching night.

  * * *

  Phoenix and the Darkness of Wolves

  I - Empire of Ash

  The phoenix burned brightest at dusk, a beacon of hope and frustration shining on the horizon. It floated close to the ground like a land-bound star, the first each evening.

  "Not again." Damon stretched a hand toward the distant phoenix as it blazed to life.

  Exhaustion shortened Damon's steps until he faltered, his footfalls on the bitumen stolen by the wind. Another half hour of the chase and the phoenix would be his for the claiming—the trek and his torment ended at last. But not tonight.

  With every flap of its blazing wings, the phoenix gathered speed and continued west, beyond Damon's reach once more, dwindling into the setting sun.

  Shadows lengthened across the highway. Damon stood puffing in the centre of the old road, at the edge of what was once the town of Merredin. The highway, like the wheat fields and the town itself, was charred, cracked, and forsaken.

  Wind snatched at the roadside ash and spiralled into short-lived dust devils before petering out. The ash gathered at the base of the skeletal black trees that lined the road and dotted the town beyond. They could have been marris or gums, but like the knots of wire that had once been shrubs, the trees were stripped of their identity.

  The charcoal stench was a constant companion, as was the grit, the desiccating grit. Damon's skin was as black as the land.

  The dwellings on the outskirts of Merredin were little more than stubs. Here and there among the ruins, a house stood on brittle foundations. All were scorched beyond recognition. Damon had no reason to think the heart of the town would be any different. He'd seen it all before.

  He had stopped near the site of an old petrol station, only recognisable by the slag of the bowsers and the tin roof. The Fire had triggered an explosion so intense a crater had been gouged into the concrete where the fuel storage tanks had been.

  On the other side of the highway was the town's water tower. Through happenstance or luck, the tower had escaped the worst of the Fire's rampage. Its reinforced steel and hardwood stilts were as blackened as the rest of Merredin, and much of the metal drum had been cracked or shorn away, yet it stood largely intact.

  Damon spared a final glance at the phoenix as its flames dwindled into the distance before trotting to the tower. As he neared the tower's base, he bent to snatch up charcoaled branches and debris, anything with a chance of burning. The canteens on his belt sloshed with each movement and the backpack slung over his shoulder threatened to slip free.

  He was a third of the way up the tower when the howls punctured the silence.

  At first, they were the wind given voice. Hollow gales that grew more substantial by the moment. As he continued his climb, the howling tore free of the wind to become three distinct, mournful cries.

  The breeze stilled.

  The shadows around the petrol station stretched and thrashed. In the glare of the orange twilight, they were more than mere tricks of the eye. Damon quickened his pace up the ladder. Where several rungs were missing, he deviated along timber struts, which stabbed him with splinters. He gritted his teeth against the pain and clambered upwards.

  The howling lost its mournful edge as the shadows ripped free. Instead, they grew savage: the hunting calls of wolves. Their snarls were without echo, too piercing to be natural.

  Three inky shapes sprinted across the highway on all fours. Three wolves woven of shadow bayed for Damon's blood. The sound never failed to chill him to the bone.

  Damon clung to the top of the ladder, only a meter or two from the summit, his eyes closed, his pulse pounding.

  The wolves reached the base of the water tower and circled in short, frenetic starts. Their snarls subsided, only to flare again every few moments. They snapped at the lower rungs of the ladder, their jaws tearing at the air.

  One of them leapt up, clearing the ground by a meter. Its paws clutched for the ladder and the lowest struts to no avail. Time and again, it crashed to the ground in complete silence, as if its body were insubstantial. After three or four attempts, it gave up and rejoined the pack.

  Damon tightened his grip on the ladder. Grit turned to sludge as his palms saturated the rung. Sweat from his armpits sliced like ice shards down his sides. His chest was close to bursting. He dared not move.

  Ten meters below, the wolves stalked impatiently. Their jaws and silhouettes were jagged beyond anything natural.

  "Husband, dear," the largest of the wolves called up to him, "your children are hungry."

  A chorus of snarls followed. Distended jaws snapped at the air.

  "Come on, Dad," called the voice a young boy, "come down."

  "I can't, Toby," Damon mumbled.

  The shadow wolves growled and bayed, drowning out the echoes of his words and anything further he had to say.

  "No more lies, Damon. No more lies," the largest wolf snarled, her voice as dark as her form.

  The frenzy of growling and snapping became a prolonged howl as the sun dipped below the horizon. Orange and burgundy light faded from the sky and the shadows knitted together into darkness. Evening subsided to night.

  The howl pitched into keening once more and thinned out.

  "I'm so sorry," whispered Damon.

  Within moments, the howl, like the shadow wolves, faded from the world.

  The wind picked up, toying with dust and ash where the wolves had paced only moments before. The world was plunged into silence once more.

  Damon eased himself up the last few rungs to crest the tower. He hauled himself through a tear in the water tank and groaned from the effort. The inside was near impenetrably dark, with only the evening starlight shining in through the gaps in the tin.

  He turned to gaze out over the land, over the baked remains of Western Australia. The Fire had scoured everything, absolutely everything, for as far as he could see.

  Beyond the remains of trees, black and bone-like in the uncertain light, mounds of charcoal dotted the fields. The mounds looked to be boulders, clustered together in random patterns. Many of them lined the wire fences that still ran taut, marking the fields like razors gouged across the earth.

  Uncounted days of passing through this land had finally revealed what those mounds were—the charred remains of animals, burned where they stood, huddled together in a futile attempt to survive.

  The townsfolk were the same.

  This town, Merredin, was much like the others in WA. Kalgoorlie, Southern Cross, Norseman … all of them. Black skeletons caught within the black skeletons of their homes. Animal and master alike shared the same fate.

  Damon wiped a tear from his eye, smearing ash sludge across his cheek.

  With the phoenix lost to the horizon and his family banished again for the night, Damon was left with nothing but fading twilight and an uninterrupted view of his empire of ash.

  #

  Rays of dawn light lanced into his makeshift camp site. The brightest shaft fell across his campfire in the centre of the water tank. After burning through the night, the fire had reduced to embers.

  Stiff and sore from another restless night, Damon climbed to his feet and stretched. He closed his eyes as he stepped into the light. It soaked warmth into his skin, a contrast to the ever present chill of the wheat belt winds. The breeze had gained strength through the night, producing an almost constant howl as it squeezed through the cracked tank to haunt his sleep. He swore that howl carried the voices of the dead—
his family and the millions more who died in the conflagration that consumed a continent.

  Even in more comfortable circumstances, he never slept all that well.

  Damon stepped back into the shadows and retrieved the remnants of his gathered kindling. With practised skill, he inserted the blackened twigs into his fire, watching the flames catch and rise by degrees. He saved the prized branch with an unscathed tip for last. A lucky find, he'd torn it from a shrub found close to the tower during his nocturnal scavenging raid.

  When the flames were high enough, he laid the shrub branch carefully across the fire. After the stick caught alight, the fire threw off enough heat to penetrate his ash-encrusted skin.

  Damon hovered over the fire, basking one hand in the heat, palm open like a baptising preacher. With his other hand, he reached into the back pocket of his jeans and withdrew a folded pocket-knife. When he prized the knife open, the blade gleamed, caught between the flickering flames and the dawn light. He turned the blade over, studying the dried brown smears that dulled the light.

  He spared a glance at the blasted landscape outside before scoring the blade along his thumb. He winced, as he always did, as the ice and fire sensation shot up his arm. The first drops of blood hit the flames before his knife was back in his pocket.

  Damon chanted the now familiar words, visualising every facet of the phoenix—the span of its enflamed wings as they melded with the sky, the aura of heat, which gave it an indistinct outline as though it were about to wink out of existence at any moment, and the unwavering crimson beads that were its eyes.

  Blood fizzled as the flames consumed each drop before it struck the metal floor. The fire grew steadily darker—incremental shades of red—until the flames were indistinguishable from the blood. Sizzle and crackle merged into one sound, a constant hiss. Wisps of smoke, blacker than the land and the shadows, spiralled from the fire and into the air. The hiss morphed into a whisper, and then into murmurs of anguish, low and soft to the ear, like an unpleasant secret revealed.

  As his chant reached a feverish crescendo, competing with the rising anguish escaping the fire, the kindling collapsed and spilled out across the floor.

  Tiny coals fizzled and died where they met the murky water pooled in dents in the tank floor. The bulk of the fire's source spilled into an arrow-straight line, pointing at one of the larger tears in the tank wall.

  Damon ceased his chanting and doubled over with exhaustion, his elbows propped on his knees. The dwindling flames warmed the sweat banded across his forehead.

  The murmuring fire quietened, then stilled.

  After a few moments, he regained his composure and followed the line of sputtering coals. He stepped over a steaming puddle and crouched, catching his breath, beside the metal gash to stare out into the world beyond.

  The dawn sun cast the land with an ochre tinge. Native reds and blacks were sapped of their vibrancy by the light, while shadows loomed as titans attached to anything jutting from the earth.

  Like the shadows, the line of coals pointed to the horizon with its purple-black plume receding from the sky.

  West. The phoenix was headed due west.

  Damon rose and stretched his muscles to ease the ache. He soon had his meagre belongings gathered and slung over his shoulders. Before breaking camp, he stamped out what remained of the fire and tore off a morsel of meat from his backpack stash. It was surprisingly tender, but the first signs of spoiling were clear when he sniffed his second bite.

  "I'll have to find more of you," he said to his final mouthful before scoffing it.

  He took a swig from one of his canteens to wash down the meat, grimaced against the bitterness, and slid the container back into place on his belt. He then sloshed the other canteen to gauge the level of water. Unlike the first, it was nearly empty.

  Damon eyed the puddles of water collected along the floor, which were more sludge from the wind-blown ash than water. He sighed before unstoppering the canteen and scooping it through the largest of the puddles. He repeated the act a few more times until his canteen was as full as it was going to get.

  Fully provisioned, he climbed out into the morning, shivering against the dawn breeze as he unsteadily negotiated the ladder. Despite the pain from the splinters still in his hands, he was quickly to the bottom of the water tower and jogging for the highway.

  The journey soon became a slow-motion blur as the landscape moulded around him. With the ruins of Merredin out of sight, much of the highway became scorched tar lined by more of those sinuous tree-husks and shrubs. The ash was everywhere, and as the wind swept it away and replaced it with more, glimmers of light could be seen out in the fields.

  As the morning gained a foothold on the day, and the sunlight strengthened from orange to yellow, the wheat belt sparkled with greater intensity. The glittering was particularly concentrated at the sides of the road and in a huge swath running parallel about a kilometre to the south.

  The sparkling fields captivated Damon as he maintained a constant pace just shy of a jog, a Cliff Young shuffle. At first, as with the charcoaled animal carcasses, he didn't understand what the glittering was. The phenomenon was richest in the west, particularly along the Nullarbor. It hadn't taken him long to discover the cause on his outward bound hunt for the phoenix.

  The tremendous heat of the Fire's passage had transformed huge patches of sand into glass. Its most intense blazes and off-shoots also had the same effect.

  It was an especially good omen that the sparkling glass was so intense, so beautiful today. The ever-present charcoal smell was also strong in his nose, which unsettled him a little since he could all but ignore it on most days. Perhaps the acuteness of his senses meant the phoenix was closer than he thought? It had the effect of sharpening his awareness when it was near.

  His every step clinked and sloshed from the load he bore. The buckles of his backpack slapping against his sides set a clockwork pace, echoed by the water-splash sound of his canteens a bare instant later. The thud of his boots hitting solid asphalt completed the regular staccato rhythm. Aside from the near-constant wind, the sound of his jogging was the only thing to be heard in the vast dustbowl of the West Australian wheat belt.

  The wind was a subtle sound. Sometimes, it carried whispers and the laughter of far-off phantoms that could only exist in his mind. Sometimes, it carried the spectre of a wolf's howl, and when he fancied he'd heard such a howl, a chill always prickled his skin. Most often, the wind carried nothing at all, and that was the worst sound to bear.

  Today, the wind brought a sound he had all but forgotten—the cawing and cries of birds. Only once on his trek had he seen a bird, and that was a raptor on the wing, high above the New South Wales wasteland, circling for prey that would never appear. The bird had circled above him for three days, trailing him in a hopeless, roundabout way, much the same way he trailed his own bird, the phoenix. On the third morning, when he awoke in the remains of some abyss of a town like Dubbo or Griffith, he found the sky clear, and he had travelled in solitude since.

  While sparser than the highways of the Eastern states, the occasional burnt-out car hulk still littered this road. When the Fire took hold, most people were barricaded in disbelief inside their homes. The few who were caught in their cars were either trying to flee or just taking their chances.

  There was nothing great about this highway, the Great Eastern. Heat had melted much of the tar, causing the blacktop to pool in places and thin out in others. It was just a two-lane wobbly smear that connected Perth to the rest of Australia. He'd seen a hundred more like it in the last few months.

  A car loomed on the side of the road, the first he'd seen since Merredin. He slowed from a jog to a brisk walk and veered close, leaving the centre of the road.

  A pair of seagulls ducked in and out of the open space that once served as the sedan's windshield. Like everything else, the car was a twisted wreck, identified as a car only by the remains of its chassis. The roof and one door were ripped awa
y, both lying in the ash meters away.

  The seagulls were dirty-white, their once pristine feathers marred by the ash, just like everything else. The birds alternated between snapping and screeching at each other and pecking at something jutting from the dashboard.

  At his approach, the gulls turn to regard Damon. The largest of the pair, perched on the strut that would have held in the windshield on the driver's side, ruffled its wings in obvious indignation. Both tracked Damon's progress in silence.

  He paused a few meters from the car and bent down to grope for something in the dirt until his fingers clasped a solid object. He took another couple of steps and hurled a rock at the gulls. It smashed across the bonnet, scuttling the seagulls into the air.

  "Damn it!" Damon charged for the birds as they scattered. He slammed against the side of the car and swatted the air, but the seagulls were already out of reach. "Filthy vultures!"

  He panted and steadied himself against the bonnet. The throb slowly eased from where his thigh and hip took the weight of his charge.

  The gulls squawked as they retreated west along the Great Eastern Highway, towards the distant Indian Ocean. He watched them disappear from view, his stomach growling all the while.

  "Damn stupid birds." He slid his thumbs beneath the straps of his backpack. Hefting the weight was reassuring, especially considering most of it was meat from his last find. If breakfast was anything to go by, his next meals would become increasingly unpleasant until the flesh grew too rancid to eat. "Birds," he muttered again, a half curse, half summons.

  Their absence left him alone once more, with just the wind and the ash and the sparkling glass for company.

  Damon inspected the ruins of the car with cautious optimism, but like the hundreds of others he'd searched, he only found charred metal and corpses. There was precious little time for a more comprehensive search.

  The gulls had been pecking at the corpse's wrist, which was laid out across the melted plastic of the dashboard. It appeared as though the person had tried to protect themselves from death with a warding arm. The gulls' pickings would have been poor, especially for birds that had been driven so far inland to find food. The corpse was just ash and bone. Nothing else remained. If anything did, the birds had since stolen it for their own greedy ends.