Among the Fallen: Resurrection (14 page)

Alex was walking for about an hour when noticed something really strange, the road appeared to look like it was coming to an end.

Was there a hole in the road?

Already, she started thinking of alternative routes. Through the fields and forest was pretty much the only other option but would be pretty torturous on the feet. As the dark area of the road drew closer, she noticed all the trees at the same point onwards were all dead and wilting. She approached the murky area and realized that it was not a hole at all, the road was made of, or at very least, had turned to a rusty metal. The rusting and dank blistered iron and rotten steel was rough and cold, it felt almost frozen, yet peculiarly, she felt homely and an eerie warmth from within; as if she were home; or it was somewhere where she belonged, something immersed, deep down inside her.

As she walked on the cold metal her flat feet slapped and the air became heavy, her heart sunk and a strange sense of foreboding came over her like a shroud of fear. She continued to walk down the road looking around her and sickened by the sight that gradually loomed around her. Dead trees crept into the sky and people hung from them by their throats, their eyes and mouths sewn shut, arms and legs bound with barbed wire and cable. Vast cages of rusty scaffolding strangled the trees and breached the night, clear plastic blood splashed sheets flapped and warped in the icy wind.

She gawped around as she walked further and further into the industrial nightmare, the trees choking for life and the dead decorated them like twisted wind charms. Walking briskly, her eyes were centred at the horizon; trying to avoid looking at the poor hanging victims that littered both sides of the road.

As she wandered the ghastly iron clad road of death, she noticed some areas were fleshy and they pulsated with a very faint heartbeat. She approached one of the fleshy areas and examined it. It looked as though the metal had flawlessly blended with the rusty looking muscle, smelling foul of rotten meat and oxidized iron. There were small channels filled with blood that slowly ran off into the horizon or branched off into walls. Some of the metal plates were missing and the space was covered in a metal grid covers, vents and fans that slowly turned, dripping with blood and oil. Alex looked down all around her at the platforms that dropped into darkness and machinery, their surfaces carved with symbols and mysterious writings, the very same, if not almost similar to the markings on her suit.

Alex walked to the edge peered down into one of the grid protected holes inquisitively. Under it there were cogs and machines that slowly grinded and hissed under the road, huge fans and turbines that spewed steam and smelt of burning oil. Greasy looking pipes and tubes entangled the framework and scaffolding, pumping blood around the surfaces and high above into the metal structures almost as if the whole area was feeding itself from the dead.

She frightfully walked to the edge of the road and stared up at one of the hanging corpses, the wind blowing and whistling through the scaffolding as the plastic sheets rustled and flapped. The corpse was suspended to a pole, naked wrapped in place by barbed wire as flies danced and played merrily on its grey blood encrusted dried skin. She looked away with a gasp and approached another, then another, each telling a deeply personal history of pain and butchered with alarming creativity.

Some hung by their necks, others by their feet. Some had limbs missing and others were just a morbid looking torso. Hundreds of them all littered along the scaffolding and metal panels as far off as the eye could see.

She held her face as the cadavers simply stared across the road at each other mercilessly, their empty and tortured gazes staring blindly over the gothic horizon. She continued towards the city clutching her arms in cold and fear as the twisted road finally ran out, yet the poison metal and muscle that polluted the ground clearly spread a lot further than she first thought; leading off far into Blackwater City. She looked in bewilderment and horror at the once proud cityscape that laid in ruin, a vast backdrop of metal scaffolding, hanging corpses, iron panels and buildings that had rusted as if they were centuries old; their surfaces bleeding, cracked and decayed. The city looked far from inviting and as she looked down the vast hill of concrete giants down towards the lake and she realized this was home, in some form or another.

Alex just stood still as her jaw dropped at the sight, her eyes flicking left to right at the nightmare before her. Buildings burned and cars were piled up at either side of the road like giant walls of scrap metal, the dead hanging from their windows and crushed between vehicles; their scarred paintwork cracking and burnt, the cindering remains glowing with ash as they cooled, paving the way into the apocalyptic city. Car alarms screamed out in the distance and crows soared across the sky, thousands of them scrambling and hovering like vultures, picking at the corpses as they lay dead in the street. Whole skyscrapers spewed smoke into the air and some had even fallen on their side, held up by the unfortunate building next to them, their struggling foundations ready to buckle.

What actually was going through her mind was a mystery even to her, the sight was so shocking and nightmarish that her mind erased itself almost instantly; she just stood staring into the land of the dead without thought or emotion. She gazed at the ground as her eyes followed the trail of the dead into the city, sprawled over the ground and littered like trash, leading far into Blackwater and strung up on the walls; scattered through the streets as they rotted and festered. As Alex took in the sight before her, the one burning question in her mind was not the question of what happened to these people, but who did this to these people?

Was it these Fallen that ripped the city apart?

Had they strung up these people like some weird sick and twisted trophies?

She took a deep and fearful sigh and shut her eyes for few moments. The smell of decaying flesh and smoke filled her nose and her eyes watered almost freely as she breathed in the foul air. As her eyes slowly opened, she walked the last half a mile into the city as it stood before her burning. The Toll booths were smashed and wrecked, cars were burnt out with blackened bodies sitting at the steering wheels, frozen solid and fused to their seats; charred and putrid with their white teeth petrified in their mouths in agony. The bodies of the dead laid in the road without pattern as the crows and flies fed upon them mercilessly and without shame, picking strands of flesh and guzzling it down as the insects crawled over the pale tight faces of the innocent. She walked through the sea of bodies with her hand tightly held over her mouth, her eyes streaming with nowhere to look without seeing somebody either strung up or slaughtered, stepping in-between them as she slowly made her way to the mouth of the city.

She knelt down and prized open the fingers of a young woman, gagging and looking into the air as she took a mobile phone from her hand. She stood immediately as her stomach heaved and repulsed, wiping her face as she looked at the phones screen clearly confused. It appeared to be working, but the screen readout was jumbled and full of weird looking symbols that flashed and changed, the signal dead and the phone unusable. She looked over the bodies and picked up another, then another, all scrambled and unusable. Suddenly, she looked around at the street lamps and traffic lights, peculiarly they were mostly off; yet a few of the buildings were still lit; so there was definitely still power running through the city. As she stepped over bodies and around burnt out vehicles, the crows soared across the sky in their thousands and stray dogs merely stood staring at her from the shadows. Military personnel and their vehicles lay rotten and slain, their weapons cold and without purpose. Glass fragments littered the streets, red with blood and corpses lay clutching their valuables and loved ones at the roadside. The Toll booth’s overhead signs flashed warnings of waiting times and inevitable queuing, flashing away with nobody alive to take neither notice nor even care. As glass and bullet casings crunched under her feet and blood oozed between her toes, Alex just held her mouth in undeniable sympathy and heartbreak as the people of all ages rotted under the night sky. She turned and looked into the mouth of the forest from which she arrived and then back towards the city in front of her with fear and anticipation of what yet to come. Looking down at the corpse at her feet she just stared into its painful blood splashed face, trying to find some sort of peace within herself, some way of numbing what she was seeing. No matter how hard she tried, how hard she battled her emotions, every face she looked at was deeply personal and affected her on every level with the worst yet to come. As hard as she struggled, she just couldn’t work out what had happened here. Where had the strange scaffolding and structures come from?

It was literally everywhere. As Alex finally entered the city she shivered and hugged her arms, waiting for the next horror to befall her eyes.

Chapter Eleven: Numb Streets

“And now the LORD Almighty says: Because you have not listened to me, I will gather together all the
armies of the north under King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, whom I have appointed as my deputy. I
will bring them all against this land and its people and against the other nations near you. I will
completely destroy you and make you an object of horror and contempt and a ruin forever. I will
take away your happy singing and laughter. The joyful voices of bridegrooms and brides will no
longer be heard. Your businesses will fail, and all your homes will stand silent and dark. This entire
land will become a desolate wasteland”.
Jeremiah 25:8

Alex entered the city and gasped in shock at the sheer sight, once proud and celebrated, now chilling and desolate; silent and corrupt. The buildings were covered by iron scaffolding and tatty clear plastic blood stained storm covers, people hung from the sides of buildings and the dark red and bleeding metal skin covered every road, building and statue for miles around, heaving under the red sky as it glimmered with blood. Crows leapt into the sky and dogs wined within the shadows as she passed, the glowing red clouds high above circling with swarms of vermin. All the lights were gone except for a few random street lights that buzzed with electricity as they faltered, flies dancing around them inexorably and casting tiny shadows through the ruined streets. Wet sodden newspapers and rubbish littered the roads, windows were broken and burnt, shops sat looted and cars were trashed beyond repair. The horizon was surrounded with black trees for miles around the city, far off in the distance on the red heavens the lake was a mere dark shadow at the bottom of the city. Strange bridges of pipes, cables, cages, chains and iron went from rooftop to rooftop, decorated with the dead they cast sickening shadows into the streets below. Doorways and alley entrances were barred up or meshed in metal, chains hung from flyovers and cables high above, their ends hooked and bloody as they swung gently in the wind. The bodies of the dead lay in the street without respect, dignity nor peace, their faces scarred with expressions of grief and pain.

Alex drifted in amazement at this
new
city, recognizing streets, shops and even peoples cars, but none of them looked how she remembered, the city was putrefied and poisoned and the walls bled and wept like a living entity. Veins and arteries crawled like vines up the walls of the buildings and along the ground as thick as cable. The city was dying and crying, rotting and decaying; yet displaying a tougher more ghastly persona that had no place except for in rule-less nightmares.

Alex approached a makeshift wooden wall that hid the eyes from a construction yard behind, plastered with thousands of posters of the missing and presumed dead. Men, women and children displayed with photocopies of happy faces but presented sad and lost words as candles and bouquets of flowers laid dead underneath; their petals and leaves dragged away by the wind, floating in puddles of water and blood. She walked along the lengthy heart-breaking wall for ages as if it never ended, the wind blowing through her hair and the fur of blood stained stuffed toys as they sat remembering lost children and their absent parents. Her eyes were suddenly drawn to a page of text, splashed in dried blood making some words unreadable.

Page on the wall of the Lost – Smiths Street Avenue

Revelations 16:8-11, 17-18

**** ***** ****** angel poured out his vial upon the sun; and power was given unto him to scorch
men with fire. And men were scorched with great heat, and blasphemed the name of God, which
hath power over these plagues: and they repented not to give him glory. And the fifth angel poured
out **** ******* upon the seat of the beast; and his kingdom was full of darkness; and they gnawed
their tongues for pain, and blasphemed the God of heaven because of their pains and their sores, and
repented not of their deeds. And the sixth angel poured out his vial upon the ***** river Euphrates;
and the water thereof was dried up. And the seventh angel poured out his vial into the air; and there
came a great voice out of the temple of heaven, from the throne, saying, ** ** done. And there were
voices, and thunders, and lightnings; and there was a great earthquake, such as was not since men
were upon the earth, so mighty an earthquake, and so great.

Alex shivered frostily. She was never really a religious person to say the very least, but she soon was looking to change an opinion or two on life itself as she was presented with such a vile and apocalyptic sight. Despite having her own money, cars and easy life style; she never really embraced her life because of the emotional starvation from her father. But as she looked into the faces of the lost and dead, her life seemed like a memory of wasted opportunity and happiness, a soul she took for granted. She looked up at the Clock Tower and frowned as the giant hands slowly made their way around the face.