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What had been a watery rose colour, mere days before, now resembled the murky underside of a wet bandage – a dressing peeled from a wound inflicted upon the earth.
Tension, like a shirt one size too small, stiffened his shoulders.
Unable to shuck off a cape of guilt, tailored to a tight but heavy fit, Karl paused in the storeroom.
Morbid sadness haunted her brother’s eyes as he watched the distance grow between what he knew and where he was being taken.
‘They’re doing a sweep. Mopping up. The horrible white fuckers came first. Marines, yeah? Vandals. First wave. Cunts. Big red fuckers came next. Infantry. Bigger cunts.’
The man popped from the air as if he’d been a bubble.
It also struck him that they were nearly as prehistoric as the people who’d once lived on the moors ten thousand years gone. He and the boy were less skilled, yet still hunter-gatherers, roaming from cupboard to cupboard, wearing the clothes of others and blinking in fearful incomprehension at a sky that only pitiless, displeased gods could transform thus and make bleed.
What a luxury had been compassion within the chaotic mix of human traits. With a curious clarity that often follows terror, he thought how compassion had merely been the size of a candle on a child’s birthday cake, flickering minutely within the entire cosmos, end to end. Easy to overlook before all of this, but now it was about to be snuffed out for ever. On this dark outcrop of sand and grass, he felt as if their emotions were the only human feelings left in the entire universe.
‘Will you shut the anus in the middle of your face. The puckered ring-piece from which a lifetime of shit has poured. You’re not leaving here.’
The terrible collaboration of strut, rag, smoke and night unleashed another anguished wail. A cry that penetrated every surface within earshot, yet echoed into strange spaces around the unstable silhouette. And from its gradual forming, and as earth’s air embraced it, a foulness flowed in an invisible afterbirth. One of hell’s chimneys might have belched across the water. The stench of the thing was suffocating. An entire electrical grid sparking. A torrent of chlorine gas. The pungent rot of a rainforest corrupted.
guess what I was looking to depict was a kind of bewildering and swift alien damnation. And if something wanted an empty planet, I found the biblical approach resonated.
Responsibility, and the need for it, is something I like to write about. Forcing yourself to be better, against all the odds, to confront overwhelming evil and not contribute to it, is always worth writing about.
