The Black

by Neil Mosspark

  People muttered and shook their heads.

  “It’s a bedtime story we tell the children so that they know that we are safe here from behind the curtain. It’s just a children’s story.”

  “Safe from what? the outside world is trying to get inside. In fact, the bubble is starting to soak up our air and water. It may cause a lot of problems for everyone if it continues.”

  The mayor thought about this. “How many people are outside?”

  “Eight... billion,” Dave said.

  “Eight billion people?” The man was astonished.

  “The idea was to come here and turn off the ‘curtain’ to stop the loss of air and water. We didn’t think there would be people still alive.”

  “What if you can turn off the curtain? What happens to us?”

  “You will be able to leave if you want. The outside world will be able to see inside, and you will be able to travel, get medical care... lots of things. People will have a lot of questions.”

  The mayor thought about this. “And if you don’t bring down the curtain?”

  “Well, I think Tony said that if we don’t bring down the dome, or ‘curtain’ as you call it, it will absorb enough energy that it punches a hole through the planet. Maybe it explodes or implodes. Tony knows more than me, but either way, I’m sure it won’t be good for either of our sides.”

  “How long before that happens?”

  “Well, Tony thinks that it was going to happen within a few months on the outside. The discharges of raw energy were getting stronger and more frequent. But...”

  “But what?” the old man asked, leaning in.

  “Well… to people on the outside, only ten years have passed since the dome arrived. To you, it’s over a hundred years. That probably means time here moves slower. It might be years before anything happens. In here at least. So that’s about, what? One to ten. That means if there are three months on the outside before the final event. Let’s say ninety days. Then there’s about three years before an event.”

  “Before what?” the mayor asked.

  “Before the dome destroys everything.”

  Chapter 10

  “Actually, I think it’s more like a week...” Tony stated, nursing the fabric wrapped around his ankle. The doctor who had looked him over suspected it was just a bad sprain that would take a week or so to heal fully.

  Dave leaned forward with a start in the waiting room chair. “I thought you said it was months?”

  “It is. Sort of.”

  “Please explain,” the mayor said, wringing his hands.

  “It’s like a fire; it builds from the inside. Imagine a house with a fire in the middle of the floor, spreading outward. If you live on the outside of the house, down the street, you might not even notice the smoke. Maybe if you’re close enough, like just outside the front door. At most, you will pick up on the symptoms of the problem.”

  “The discharges? The yellow lights?” Dave asked.

  “Yes. Exactly. But the problem is that if you are on the inside, things are getting hot. There’s smoke, fire; the air gets poisoned. It’s not the house collapsing from the fire that kills you; it’s the smoke inhalation from when the fire starts.”

  “It seems like this would have been important to discuss a while ago. There’s a lot of people here that are going to be affected.” Dave leaned back. “Including us.”

  Tony looked at the mayor. “We didn’t think anyone was alive. From the outside, there is only a black dome. No light comes out, no heat, no energy, no radio signals. Nothing.”

  “So, we got it. We just have to wait for the rest of the people to follow.”

  Tony shook his head. “How long do you think that it will take for them to clear the tunnel and get inside?”

  “One day if things if the charges fired correctly. If the tunnel collapsed, two days, maybe three at the most.”

  “In here that would be about ten days to a month. We don’t have the luxury of waiting.”

  “This makes sense,” the mayor said, wringing his hands. “The heavies are growing in number and size. A few of them have destroyed some of the houses of the village.”

  “Have they ever moved?” Tony asked.

  “Never... their numbers just grow.” The mayor’s face scrunched with worry.

  “There’s a pattern, isn’t there?” Tony asked.

  The mayor nodded. “They are evenly spaced, like a growing wall. Much of the village has moved away toward the interior. To the city to avoid them.”

  “Wall?” Dave asked.

  The mayor plucked a rough piece of paper from the doctor’s desk. Drawing a large circle with a piece of charcoal, he lifted it, showing it to the men. “This is the outer curtain... The dome.”

  Placing it back down, he continued his work and after a moment lifted it again. Concentric rings of dots evenly spaced filled the outermost aspect of the circle, with the interior blank. “The heavies are the dots. We have surveyed them numerous times. The bright lights come, and the heavies appear more and more toward the outer wall. Recently they have appeared closer and closer to the centre. They are less numerous, but everyone is worried that if they become too common, we will be cut off. Travellers will be trapped either in the centre or near the wall.”

  “What’s at the centre?”

  “The city,” the mayor stated. “It’s where most of the people live.”

  “Are they concerned?”

  “No.” The mayor hung his head.

  “Why?”

  “Much of the city is filled with people who still scavenge. There is no law like in the villages. Here we are civilized. We have a council. We have people to enforce the law and keep problems away from our doorstep.”

  “Is it safe?” Tony asked.

  Dave recognized the look; a plan was forming in the man’s head.

  “No. Not safe at all. We rarely go to the city. It’s better to stay out here.”

  “By the sounds of it, you won’t be staying on the outer edge for very long.”

  The mayor nodded. “Many of us recognize the risks. We are gardeners. Farmers. Families. We have been for generations.”

  The doctor stepped into the doorway, eyeing the group. “The people in the city are cutthroats. Thieves. Their way is different than ours.”

  The mayor nodded. “I have to speak with the council about your arrival, and you can’t spend the night here, but if you would like, you can rest up at my home.”

  “Think you can move with that?” Dave asked Tony.

  “Should be okay if I take it slow,” Tony stated.

  “Come with me then.” The mayor tugged on his patchwork clothes and stepped out the front door, waiting for them to follow.

  With a little assistance from Dave, Tony limped his way out the door and down the cobblestone street.

  Dave considered how the thin main street reminded him of an Old West ghost town he had visited once. Save for the absence of boardwalks, and second floors it would have been at home in some cowboy movie, with hops and homes on either side.

  The short walk found them at a conservative one-storey house overgrown with ivy. It was nestled between a bakery and a general store.

  Inviting them in, the mayor led them to his living room, adorned with ancient sagging couches and carpeted with numerous throw rugs. Easing Tony down, Dave sank into one of the nearby chairs.

  “I will send messengers to gather the council members. You can tell them what you have told me, and we might be able to come up with a solution. Please stay, rest, eat, get your strength back.”

  After a moment a young woman appeared with a tray of tea and cheese. Almost equally as quick, people in the familiar quilted garb began filtering in. They eyed Dave and Tony suspiciously as they found a seat in the room.

  Dave couldn’t tell at what point the council had officially arrived or which of the crowd comprised the city leaders. For what seemed like hours they were quizzed by the people about what the outside world was like
and why they were there. The discussion seemed to never cease in an incessant barrage of constant questions. Only after questions began to repeat themselves did the mayor subtly call an end to the grilling. Satisfied, the crowd rose one by one and moved on, as slow and meandering as they had arrived. Each seemed relatively satisfied that their questions were answered. They left the mayor and a few others behind.

  The mayor sat across from Dave and Tony on the couches of his living room. Somehow, the old man who had found the two in the field had stayed behind and was snoring quietly, sitting up in an overstuffed chair.

  The mayor addressed the two men. “We sent people up to look for the tunnel entrance but couldn’t find it. Maybe in the morning you and I can go back up to look closer?” he asked Dave.

  “I’d be happy to,” Dave said. “I think that the entryway is the key right now. I don’t know how we survived the blast or got here, but we need to get back to the other side and finish clearing the tunnel. We might be able to do that from here.”

  “I’m not convinced that we have the time,” Tony stated.

  Dave shook his head. “If we have a few days, at least we can see if there is a way to get out the way we came in. If we can do that, we can get people out of here. Maybe they can survive. If what you say is true, they… we are going to die if we don’t do something.”

  “True, but what can we do?” the mayor said.

  “It doesn’t matter if we get people out. Even if we somehow got everyone out. Everyone will likely just die.”

  Dave turned to his friend, holding up his hands in frustration. “We can deal with the cause later. When we get back, you can bring in people who do this sort of thing.”

  Tony shook his head. “Remember the house fire analogy?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Once the house gets to a point, it collapses. This house fire is going to explode with enough force that it will likely core the planet.”

  Dave’s shoulders slumped.

  “We need to find the centre,” Tony said. “It was what we were going to send the team in to do once a safe entry point was set up. They were supposed to find the centre of the bubble and identify the source.”

  “What kind of source?” Dave asked.

  “They thought that that the field was being generated by something. The theory is that the Black Dome is actually a sphere. An energy field projected around something. We can’t break through it because it is energy. Pure energy, but because it is using very specific matter from our side of the field, it leads us to think that it was for transportation.”

  “Transportation? Like teleportation?” Dave asked. The look on the mayor’s face betrayed confusion as he tried to keep up.

  “No… more like a jet engine. The theory is that if the field were passing through space, it would consume any matter it passed through. Like a cannonball that instead of pushing material out of its way would eat it and use it as fuel, generating more speed. There is material in space. It’s not a pure vacuum. Hydrogen is sixty thousand times more common than iron in our universe. It’s loaded with energy. That means that the field can run off the hydrogen molecules from water evaporated in the air a million times more efficiently than the diluted hydrogen in the depths of space.”

  “So why didn’t it punch a hole in the Earth?” Dave asked.

  Tony shook his head, throwing his hands up. “Your guess is as good as mine. A safeguard during a crash? May it stopped to top up its fuel source? Maybe it’s something completely different. Either way, everything I have read, and all of the experts who we have on staff, say the same thing: it’s going to move again, soon, and when it does, we all die. It wipes us out the moment it does whatever it was designed to do.”

  “How can we stop it?” the mayor asked.

  “Right now I’m not sure. We need to get to the centre and look for the cause,” Tony said.

  “That may be difficult,” said the mayor.

  “Why?” Dave asked.

  “Well, it’s important for you to understand that we have a very fine balance here between us, the colony, and the city people.”

  Tony shrugged. “So? They need to know this too. Once they do they could help. I think they would understand once we tell them that everyone will die.”

  “Maybe. I suspect that the followers might simply kill or convert you.”

  Dave shifted in the sofa uncomfortably. “What?”

  “The queen runs a sort of colony. Their followers are a cult. Do you know the word ‘cult’?”

  “I know what a cult is. You’re telling me that there is a cult down there that will kill us if we go to talk to them?” Dave asked.

  “Most likely they will convert you.”

  “I doubt I can be convinced,” Dave stated.

  “When they dust you, you will see differently,” the mayor said, his face falling. “The followers are made up of people they take from our communities to replace those that die working. Sometimes we get raided by a group. They drag people off. Feed them the dust. They become lost. Forever…”

  “How many are there?”

  “Hundreds,” the mayor stated. He sipped from his cup of tea, looking out the window. “My daughter was taken in of one of those raids. She was my only child. They infected her. I haven’t seen her since. It’s entirely possible she has been worked to death by the queen. The taken never have a very long life.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Tony stated.

  “We use to look the other way, thinking it was something that happened to others. We were complacent... but after she was infected with the other children that were taken, the village chose to pay the local militia to protect us. Her followers are usually kept at bay. The militia works very hard to keep them back from the outer edge. Here on the grass, they are usually easy to spot. Easy to pick off. We are safe here, but not if we go toward the centre.”

  “Are they safe in the city?”

  “For the most part. The ground between the city and the outer grassland is rotten and infected with them. They hide in the basements during the bright hours. Come out to hunt at night.”

  Tony sighed. “We need to cross that area to get to the centre.”

  “Your ankle’s wrecked. You’re not going anywhere,” Dave said, standing up.

  There was a lull, and Dave realized that he had eaten and drunk too much.

  “Where is your bathroom?” Dave asked.

  “If you need to bathe, we can warm water for you. I will call the water boy. It may take some time,” the mayor said, turning to see if any of the servants were nearby.

  “I need to piss,” Dave clarified.

  “Out through that door. There is an outhouse just a few paces down the trail, or you can use the basin by the back door. Take the lantern on the table; it will provide some light for you. There is paper out there if you need to do anything else.”

  The mayor turned to Tony. “Is it true that you use indoor toilets?”

  “Yes, and we have running water from pipes.” Tony laughed.

  “That must be very unhygienic. Doesn’t it smell? Defecating inside your house seems like it would be very… upsetting to everyone else who lived there.”

  Dave ignored the conversation and walked out the back of the small one-storey house, down the hallway past the rooms for the mayor’s family and servants.

  Picking up the small lantern, he fiddled with the wick to turn up the light and stepped out the back door. He could smell the outhouse more than see it.

  Following the short path, he wandered into the darkness. He looked up, searching for a familiar sky. Only a pitch black hovered above him. No stars or Moon showed themselves.

  Inside, the outhouse was a pristine toilet; clean and polished white porcelain greeted him. A pale of water just inside the door appeared to be for rinsing everything down. Dave had expected the worst but should have guessed that the mayor’s toilet would have been well furnished.

  Stepping inside, he hung the lantern, swung the door c
losed behind him, and followed the golden rule: check for paper first. As luck would have it, the walls were filled with books, and there were stacks of old newspapers nearby.

  After a moment he became settled and completed both of the tasks at hand, using a few dry pages of an ancient trashy tabloid to finish up. He wondered if the mayor read the books rather than tossing the pages down the hole. His hand reached for the top book when his eye caught dirty fingers sliding around the opening of the door.

  “Sorry, occupied—” he started, but the door exploded open and three wraith-thin figures stood there looking at him. Their heads bobbed up and down obsessively, looking at him. They stood there before two turned toward the house, and the one charged silently into the outhouse, reaching for Dave.

  His fist came up instinctively. All his brain could process was the irony of this being another bathroom fight, and he was caught with his pants down.

  The first blow landed on target, and the jaw of the skeleton-like man clicked to the left, dislocating. The skeletal man was pushed aside by the sheer force of the blow.

  Dave stood quickly, bringing his fists back, pounding on the man’s head again and again until he was still. Dave took a moment to pull up his pants, buckling the belt, watching the form lying on the ground.

  He realized that Tony was inside and there were two more.

  Stepping over the downed wraith, he felt it reach up and grab his ankle with an impossibly strong grip. Hung up, Dave stepped back inside the outhouse to kick loose from the clinging grip. He raised his free leg to stomp the man’s head and finish the matter for good.

  Billowing dust rose up, exploding into his face, and he slapped at it. The stinging motes filled his nose and mouth. He had gotten his eyes closed in time. Unwilling to open his eyes to the pain his nose and mouth were feeling, he staggered for a moment, knowing he was at a severe disadvantage.

  Raising his boot, he brought it down on where the anorexic man’s cranium should have been and felt the curved bone crush inward. The grip released. Stumbling out of the wooden shack, Dave felt like his skin was on fire. It burned through his skin into his muscles, contracting them in spasms. His knees buckled under him. He struggled to stand, something grabbed him, and he swung out, landing a blow against the body, hearing the puff of exhaled air. Something tackled him from behind, and bodies weighed him down as he fought.