Black Feathers

66

The moment Megan steps over the city’s threshold, the sun is swallowed by cloud. The warmth is snatched from the air as dark, malignant clouds spread across the once-bright heavens. Her skin contracts.

At first the ruined structures are well spaced but their sharp edges and flat walls press in on her. The dwellings she is used to are built with easy, natural lines and curves or circles. These houses, if that is what they once were, exude conformity even in ruin. Tumbled walls, collapsed roofs and blind wind-eyes do not rob the city of its order. The basic template is the square, beginning in bricks and blocks, repeated in walls and wind-eyes, echoed in the cubiform structures. The dusty, rubble-strewn ways between these shattered buildings feel like runs, like traps. They give no choice about which direction to take; they seem to lead somewhere specific.

Movement flickers at the limit of her vision. She glances to the right but sees nothing stirring in the dead wreckage where more people than she can count once lived. She thinks she hears the sharp call of a wren but there’s nothing to see. Nothing but a long-deserted dwelling, its neat lines unpicked and unmade by some terrible event, grey and silent like everything else around it.

The idea that someone walks in her footsteps, close enough to grab her hair, increases with every step. She turns often to find nothing but space behind her, no second pair of footprints in dust that has been undisturbed for generations. Not wanting to go a single step farther but knowing she can’t turn back, Megan walks faster to leave the feelings of pursuit behind. The deeper into the city she goes, the more flickers she sees to left and right, but even when she stops and stares, there’s nothing to see but derelict, unoccupied destruction.

Darkness and gloom press down over the city from above, making the surroundings indistinct. Megan sees more shimmers of movement on either side but she hears nothing. All she can do is hurry on.

She begins to come across carriages without horses or oxen to draw them. All of them are furry and flaky with rust. Cars. Inside, their seats are skeletal: springs and frames. Some of the cars contain collapsed piles of bone. She skitters past these, panic rising from her guts to her throat.

The path broadens and the feeling of being trapped eases. But soon the remains of the buildings to either side grow in size until she is hemmed in by towering walls of devastation. As she passes a building that looks mostly untouched by the cataclysm, she hears a clatter and the snap of old timber. She staggers away from the noise. The roof of the building caves in. The walls on which the roof sat sag inwards and fall. The weight of them hitting the upper floor collapses it, and once this pattern is in motion the whole structure implodes. Rubble spews from the lower windows and doors like dry slurry and dust billows outward. The crash is loud enough to make her cover her ears.

Megan realises she has pressed herself against another wall and she staggers away from it now. No structure in this place can be trusted to stay standing. The ghosts of the razed building, roiling clouds of brick and mortar particles exhaled like a final breath, spread out in every direction. Megan hurries away before she is engulfed in the dust. A gritty hiss accompanies the dust cloud but that hiss soon dies, and with its passing the silence of the dead city returns, louder and more threatening than before.

The womb that had shielded Gordon from rain and wind and cold had also saved him from the bucking and heaving of the furious land. He did not want to leave it. In the short space of time he had made the cave his home, he had fantasised at times about an old man who lived there, a man with a long white beard and thin white hair. The man was always warm and dry in his cave and always ate well on the bounty of the land around him. The man had forgotten everything in the world that was painful and goading. The old man was him.

As he gathered his belongings, packing them with care, he was on the point of tears and couldn’t understand why. This time, however, he did not cry. It was an act of will. He shouldered his emotions the way he shouldered his backpack and the responsibility to his kin.

When he stepped out of the cave he left a single black feather at its mouth.

“Thanks for your shelter.”

He left the ravine the way he had come in, rising from its protection until he was once again a tiny figure on the vast, changed high country. His minuteness and exposure made a target of him – there was no cover anywhere. In every direction the land, certainly broken and altered, possibly lifeless, was silent. Gordon feared for its green mantle, for its animals and for its people.

He descended from the plateau of hills.

Where once there had been a damp green shimmering skin to the world, now there was upturned earth, vibrated from clumps and clods down to marble-sized baubles of soil, almost perfectly round. Damp from the rain, they stuck to his boots, making every step a trudge.

The landscape below the hills was darkened by the exposure of the earth beneath the vegetation. Areas of green remained, and seeing them was enough to make Gordon’s eyes water. He kept the tears in check. The damage was far worse than the preservation. Here and there, parts of hedges and trees emerged, only partially swallowed by the quake, but most features of the land had been taken all the way under leaving no demarcations, only vast tracts of exposed soil. Larger trees and areas of woodland seemed to have survived better, perhaps their networks of roots having worked together to save them from sinking. The largest trees standing alone in the landscape had also managed to avoid sinking completely, though many of these looked stunted now, as though the earth had risen like flood waters.

For a long time he didn’t notice the total absence of buildings, farm outhouses and dwellings. He was on level ground, the hills far behind him before it struck him. There were no roads, only occasional parallel ridges of hedge where a road might have been. Everything had sunk, the quake so severe that its vibrations had liquefied the earth.

Clods of soil clinging to his soles, Gordon stumbled over the shaken, reordered land. The only sound was the labouring of his lungs as he fought the weight of his boots. Trying to clear them was useless; within three or four paces they were completely clogged again. As annoying as this was, it didn’t tire him. It merely slowed him down. His newfound strength persisted, aiding him through all this. It gave him a sliver of hope; perhaps he belonged in this new landscape. Strong enough to survive, strong enough to navigate the aftermath, perhaps he was meant to be here. The idea kept him walking, made the idea of finding something, someone or even somewhere more believable.