by Sean Dempsey
“At the beginning of a fine May day, a svelte equestrienne, mounted on a sumptuous sorrel mare, was riding, in the middle of flowers, the lanes of the Bois.” – Joseph Grand (Camus)
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After the Trilogytes attacked, the earth stood still, weeping at the indescribable carnage.
Bitter and anguished cries shook the landscape of the now barren rock with an inexorable vibration of loss. Millions and millions were dead, their bodies warped and disfigured beyond recognition. Billions more were just gone! Missing…stolen by a faceless enemy using technology we knew nothing about. Entire cities of stone and glass and metal were decimated by an onslaught of airborne weaponry; our civilization was reduced to piles of lifeless sand, ground into wisps of fading memory as if they never existed at all.
The cloud-laden ashen sky, once a living tapestry of motion and color, collapsed into a dull, unmoving shroud of ash. It hung low and oppressive. When it cried out, as was common, it rained caustic and unforgiving sulfuric dark liquid upon the earth, as if God Himself desired to pour salt in the wounds of His dying enemy. A fine, gray powder drifted endlessly upward and downward from the sky, coating everything in a wretched soot. It filled the cracks of broken earth, settling into useless and deformed things, such as the hollowed eye sockets of the dead where they had fallen; it laid upon the jagged edges of what remained of the world. There was no wind to carry it away. No clear water sought to cleanse it. The haze sank and sat motionless so complete that it felt deliberate, much like time itself had recoiled in horror and now refused to move aside.
Where The Great City once stood in proud defiance of nature there now sprawled vast fields of blight. Twisted steel jutted from the ground like the ribs of a colossal beastly carcass, blackened and bent in unnatural shapes. Glass had melted and reformed into grotesque, frozen waves, catching what little light remained and scattering it into cold, fractured reflections. Roads led nowhere, vanishing into craters so deep they swallowed the horizon. In some places, the ground itself had been fused into a near smooth, glassy crust. And those souls fortunate enough to still possess half-working eyes now beheld that the surface of their broken city had been cauterized by fire in a vain attempt to stop its bleeding.
Yet not all bitterness was counted in ruin or in bodies; some was measured by what was lost or, often, just barely visible below the surface. Half-buried in ash of the broken center street lay a single child’s shoe, small and soot-stained; its strap was still fastened as though some careful hand had secured it not long before the world ended. Nearby, a toy rabbit sat collapsed upon itself, one eye gone, the other staring madly upward into a sky that rained naught but acrid cruelty. A dented lunch pail rested against the splintered frame of a doorway; its painted colors blistered into unrecognizable smears. No voice called for these things. No small hands returned to claim them. They lingered instead as quiet indictments. Proof, perhaps, that someone had been held, had been fed, had once been loved in the soft, ordinary ways the world once allowed. And their stillness, beneath the slow and ceaseless fall of ash and acid rain, rang of a brutality more awful than all the horrors of the war.
Stillness. That was the singular word to distill the world. For the calm following the misery was sublime. This silence that etched its vile name across the scarred surface of our world was far, far worse than the pitched screams and reckless, tortured misery. This Deadly Quiet was what the few who remained called it. No birds. No distant hum of life. Only the occasional, hollow creak of shifting debris, or the faint collapse of some long-dead structure surrendering its will to gravity. Even the cries had faded. What remained was quieter, more unsettling…an endless, echoing void where humanity had once bellowed with purpose. Death, it appeared, was not a roaring cacophony; he was a lecherous mute.
And the quiet of his ruined people was more miserable than any seething enemy.
In that dark tranquility, what remained of humanity moved like shadows that had forgotten their owners. A blind old man wandered slowly through the silent ruins, his feet dragging across the ash and broken glass, without any sign of pain or understanding. His dead eyes, pale and useless, stared into nothing, yet his hand reached out from time to time feeling for walls that were no longer there, for doorways that had long since collapsed into dust. Not far off, a bereft mother with no child left to care for lay curled upon the hardened earth, her breathing so faint it scarcely disturbed the gray powder that was settling mutely upon her parched lips. She did not weep. She did not call out. She simply closed her eyes, as though sleep might succeed where life had failed her. Others drifted in the distance. Thin figures wrapped in rags, moving without urgency, without direction, without even the pretense of hope. No one spoke. No one called another’s name. They passed one another like ghosts already acquainted with the mute devil, each quietly surrendering to him in their own time. They subsided, as if the world had not ended in violence at all, but had instead simply grown tired of them, and gently, indifferently, let them fade away into the reckoning night of day.
Time slipped by in this desolate fashion. The wraiths and bitter embers of humanity quietly departed the somber world still wrapped in silence. But, eventually, there came forth the biting, scraping, malicious dregs of fell mankind; these desperate scavengers, much like carrion circling an emaciated and starving beast beneath a desert sun, picked at the rotting bones of the cadaver of the world. Blood and mayhem, pillaging and murder followed the Deadly Quiet. Yet this was more typical and therefore understandable in the minds of the dispossessed; it was man versus man. Those not plucked away or blown apart in the nameless battles against the Brood soon turned on each other. Cannibalization of the young or defenseless shook the wasteland with soft, anguished cries in the ceaseless night. Madness consumed most poor waifs left abandoned in the fierce hellscape. Those who held onto their sanity fell victim to despair or rampant hunger. Want was the currency of this shattered residue. A dreamless troupe of night- and day-walkers filled what remained of the withered void. They were forgotten creatures without souls; they were feral animals without a future.
In their hunger and unmerciful brutality, they learned to unmake what little of themselves remained. Faces once capable of kindness grew slack and vacant, their eyes dulled not by death, but by the slow erosion of all that had once made them human. Men bartered the marrow of their own blood for one more day’s breath, and when the blood was spent, they bartered the bodies of those who trusted them. Mothers turned from their children not in cruelty, but in a terror too deep to name, lest love itself betray them to the gnawing ache within. In the night, fires burned low and secretive, not for warmth, but for what was laid upon them. Flesh carved in silence, consumed without prayer, without memory, without even the decency of shame. The weak were not mourned; they were watched, waited upon, and taken when their strength at last abandoned them. There were no names spoken, no graves marked, no sins confessed. What remained was only the quiet, methodical undoing of man by man, until even the notion of mercy seemed like some distant and laughable fiction the world had long since forgotten.
Meanwhile, the slow decay of time limped on unmercifully. Years. Perhaps a decade or more. No one counted the seasons, and far fewer cared. But then, silently, insidiously, a demon least desired by all began to creep into the barren landscape and fester in the sunken minds of the soulless who still deigned to trot upon the crust of the mortally wounded planet: a beast nefarious enough to be called hope. It arrived on a still hot wind one day when no one was looking and laid a seed that stubbornly refused to die.
So, as it came to be, near the tail end of what perhaps was the year 2462 or 2463, the tired husk of a barren world took a long, measured, gasping breath, clutched its fists in gritty defiance, and humanity began to remake itself and slowly rebuild…
