Authors: Gordon Mackay
Scott’s consciousness levitated
above him before heading off across the Atlantic Ocean like some ghostly spectre. Quickly approaching the opposite shore, he recognised the colossal and majestic Statue of Liberty, and although it was still standing it was no longer on an island. Its features looked tired and weary, resembling a skeleton whose foundry-cast ribs and bones were bleeding red, the colour of rust, frightening away any who might chance to pass instead of the welcoming statue it had once been to immigrants and visitors alike. Now appearing grotesque and threatening, it was no longer the domineering and protecting gateway guardian of a great nation. It was more of a hazard to any who dared approach. There were more than obvious changes to New York, noticed by Scott as he silently soared above the ruins. The city had fallen into a frantic state of disrepair, neglect and destruction, becoming a place of massive non-habitable concrete monstrosities. Many buildings remained, all standing like gigantic monoliths of a likeness, all seemingly camouflaged with clinging lichen and dirt. He recognised a few buildings, those that were different to the square or rectangular non-descript stereotypical skyscraper. There was the Palmolive Colgate block on Park Avenue, looking like it needed a serious amount of moisturiser to sort out its wide and painful looking cracks. The New York Times appeared in a sorry state in Times Square, where no papers had been published for many a year. The King Kong of an Empire State was in an even worse condition, where no self respecting animal would ever dare to venture up. The rest were just boring blocks of broken concrete with thousands of gaping holes. A few had actually toppled over, looking more like horizontal Needles, all discarded by an uncaring Cleopatra.
Cloud-high monstrosities they had been, sodden and drowned concrete hulks they had become
, he considered. None were spared the cracked and broken walls, with each open wound allowing the buildings’ guts and innards to be eroded by the elements. Most of them leaned perilously into the advancing oceanic waves that suggested the pounding water was steadily undermining the water-saturated foundations and supporting walls. The scene was one of utter devastation as Scott drifted across the flooded city before flying deeper and higher into the United States of America. More than just a few towns could be seen rising through the water where the level of ground was higher, but all were reluctantly abandoned by their inhabitants. Those few structures that were lucky enough to be above the waves had failed the test of time, collapsing into piles of debris and rubble. Less fortunate areas had long since been submerged, with roads and walls washed away to leave no visible trace of their past existence. Expansive beds of flotsam drifted uncontrollably across the watery wilderness like miniature Sargasso Seas, huge masses of floating wreckage, corpses and all kinds of plastic trash, completely bound together by intertwined weeds and fallen trees whose catching roots acted as inefficient drag-anchors. The vision flitted briefly out of focus, where London was the next sight to appear as an even greater and horrendous apparition. Its once tall and proudest buildings were not so easily recognised as those of New York. The all too evident destruction formed a circular pattern whose diameter was approximately a half to one mile, where every building within the circle was mysteriously gone. A fearsome release of energy had smashed its way from a central point of focus leaving a water-filled cavity in its wake. To Scott, the whole scene resembled a massive molar tooth, complete with rotten black and broken edges with an impeccably smooth cusp. The more distantly positioned structures tended to lean away from the central area, as if hit by a released pulse of penetrating energy. The buildings’ exposed walls were either shattered or collapsed and roofs simply didn’t exist. The area had been one of Victorian marble-clad splendour and modern plate-glass edifices; a wonderful concentrated mixture of ancient and new. Sadly, each and every building had been demolished in an instant, replaced by something that looked post-Blitzkrieg. The circular shape was easily discernable, a sheltered place where ducks and geese might feel at home, if they could withstand radiation poisoning. Scott recognised the area to have suffered from an explosion of great magnitude. An asteroid’s impact crater would have left a surrounding rim or at least a concentric ring structure at its perimeter, instead of a surface explosion’s flattened battlefield. Four main buildings had stood their unwavering ground at the cavity’s edge, all left stooping like a crowd of geriatrics desperate for their supporting sticks or zimmer-frames. They were St Paul’s Cathedral, Buckingham Palace, Marble Arch and Westminster Abbey; with each looking extremely dilapidated and ready to collapse from sheer exhaustion. The high outer walls of Parliament were only just recognisable, but without any sign of Big Ben or its accompanying towers. The desolate scene reminded Scott of an infamous Hiroshima photograph, a picture that graphically portrayed the tangled and twisted remains of a small building with a metal-framed dome. That bomb helped persuade Japan to surrender, thus bringing an end to the Second World War, he reflected. Rotating himself in a three hundred and sixty degree turn, he saw the London Eye had keeled-over to lie completely flat on one side. It was well away from its original site and half-submerged alongside Horseguard’s Parade, which was awash with silt and weeds. The Eye’s bent and buckled girders with missing gondolas was left looking like a sad and rusty old cartwheel, a buckled piece of engineering that would never spin on any axle again. Further away, towards the east, Tower Bridge was missing most of its superstructure, as were most of London’s other monuments and famous landmarks. No evidence of vehicles was seen and an absence of people was all too evident. It seemed to Scott that the centre of the explosion must have been very close to Trafalgar Square. Nelson’s Column with its guardian lions and splendid fountains were no longer visible and the statue-staining pigeons would have been baked and atomised before they could flutter a feather or blink an eye.
The terrain was a gigantic mess, where disorder had reigned harshly since the net of terrible destruction was weaved upon this once great and power-yielding city, redesigning its decor and decadence in a flash of destructive incandescence. Wide and solid supporting pillars of various bridges had stood their ground against all odds, standing proud and upright like soldiers without a purpose. The once-upon-a-time motor congested bridges were completely gone, wiped off the face of the map, leaving the Thames without a crossing-point for many miles in both directions. Nobody wanted to cross the river anymore; in fact, there was no one around who needed to. London was dead, sunk like a capsized ferry and partially buried with tidal silt. Park Lane and Mayfair appeared as canals with poles standing in regimented lines where small boats might tie-alongside. The poles turned out to be the blackened stumps of mighty trees whose once tough boughs provided a perch for birds and a vantage point for people during parades, celebratory marches or occasional riots. The bark-lacking trunks whose branches had been sheared-off and burned by a super-hot blasting wave were well on their way to rotting. They were succumbing to the elements and soggy roots,
each beginning to list like a famous Italian tower. Marble Arch resembled a mottled-grey coloured bridge gone badly wrong, its cracked and holed façade looked onto an area where Hyde Park now resembled a lake. Scott recalled getting a McDonald’s Big Mac burger close to the Park’s Corner, before enjoying it on the day following the huge fireworks celebration for Prince Charles’ and Diana Spencer’s wedding. He sighed at the memory, looking at what had become of such a splendid and historic place. Buckingham Palace stood alone like a lost child, crying in what seemed like its own shallow inland sea. Its exterior had taken on the neglected look of bedraggled bed-sits with smashed vandalised windows and missing doors, instead of the much photographed and grandiose royal mansion it had once been. The entire city resembled nothing more than a tangled mess of cracked concrete and twisted metal, a once busy metropolitan city now partly submerged in its own tidal basin. The stockbrokers and governmental figures had either been driven into exile… or blasted to Kingdom-come. Everything Scott remembered about this thriving city had changed. His attention was turned away as his mind steered itself towards a northerly direction. He wondered what had become of the royals with their head-bowing and boot-licking entourage.
Might they have survived the carnage of whatever had taken place?
He wondered.
Whisked away at great speed from that place of destruction and absent spires, soaring
ever higher across soggy chalk-coloured downs with an occasional church steeple rising from the encroaching sea, he began to see thin and broken dark lines through a haze of distance and pollution. Approaching head on and high above, he saw impossible to believe ranks of people trekking across the highest and driest areas of land, elevated positions where the risen sea had been unable to gain access. The ill-looking and bedraggled figures looked bent and broken as they marched with looks of despondency and hunger written across their drawn faces. Some were taller, many looked shorter, lots were limping and everyone appeared thin. A few had bicycles, not so much for peddling but to ferry the owner’s meagre possessions. Each person tagged along one behind the other like a crazy zigzagging snake. A few lucky souls were carried on a rickety cart, dragged over puddles on a muddy track by a single plodding horse that strained feverishly at its tethers and foamed grotesquely from its bit. Each and every individual in this line of destitution searched for safe refuge and something to eat, a place to live wherever they could find it. Makeshift tents and shelters had sprouted here and there, forming small communities along the edges of new riverbanks and tributaries. Thin wispy trails of blue wood-smoke could be seen rising from the centre of huts, with people actively scurrying around as if busying themselves with chores and urgent business. Hurriedly constructed barricades surrounded these little populated areas, all consisting of sharpened branches and sticks. They were designed to repel attackers, hopefully persuading any who might consider forcing entry to turn away. The fences encircled those who felt threatened, defending them against roaming gangs of lawless thugs. It had already happened in a few isolated places, as Scott had noticed by swooping lower. The blackened and occasionally still smouldering remains of former homesteads were becoming a common site; some with what looked like freshly filled graves nearby. Everything resembled something from a Mad Max apocalyptic movie, but this was in real time and without the glamour of photo-shoots, cameras, catering-vans and Mel Gibson as the swashbuckling head-bashing leather-clad hero. From the height of Scott’s observation, the land looked nothing like its former glory. This was something completely out of the ordinary, almost like Gondwanaland, he considered, but much colder and wetter. Gondwanaland is the name given to the separating prehistoric continent that drifted apart by the action of Plate Tectonics. Huge areas of the planet’s crust pulled away from adjacent masses, steadily moving apart with deep and widening gaps appearing as a result of geological movement. This allowed the sea to flood in to fill these new spaces, eventually forming new seas and oceans as these gigantic plates motioned further apart. A few crashed into an opposite, forming high mountain ranges as a result, such as the Himalayas and the Swiss Alps. The original single piece of land prior to the split was called, Pangaea. This was a single super-continent with an extremely dry, desert interior. But once divided by the tectonic movements, it was turned into the present-day continents and island groups. The sea had become a very powerful agent of change… with history seemingly repeating itself. The sea was once again intruding the landmasses. Only this time it was much higher than any so-called scientific expert had been bold enough to declare might be possible, with any prophesies of doom scoffed-at or censored by the world’s
head-stuck-firmly-in-the-sand
governments. These long since departed heads of state had hoped the worst possible scenario might never actually happen, while, in reality, they knew they would personally not be around to answer for their mistakes and errors of judgement. The intruding sea was not unique as some believed, it had already happened countless times before, and for many and varied reasons. This time was different though, this destructive flooding was due to the arrogant species that now found itself on the wrong side of nature. Gaia was fighting back, taking over from the eco-warriors who had tried in vain to persuade officialdom to consider what pollution was doing to the environment… and winning while wreaking a terrible sword of vengeance for the ills subjected to the planet by those she was slaying.
His soaring ethereal flight took off once again, heading
further north.
Scott recognised some of the
passing landscape from personal experience, particularly that of Nottingham City. The elevated Castle stood proud and aloof upon solid rock, its historic shape was unmistakable. With almost impossible to scale cliffs as its first line of defence against attacking hordes, the castle was now inhabited. Instead of the Sheriff of Nottingham or a present-day Robin Hood with his merry men, it was the stronghold of thieves and murderers. There was absolutely nothing merry about its new uncaring caretakers. Scott had visited the city on numerous occasions and studied at the university. He had enjoyed an occasional beer at the oldest pub in England called,
The Trip to Jerusalem,
with student friends
.
It had been built into the vertical face of the castle’s cliff many centuries before, exploiting a fault in the solid rock face. It was rumoured the Knights of St John had drank ale within
The Trip’s
confines before setting off to fight in the Holy Crusades, tanking themselves up for the battle against a most unchristian but worthy enemy. He sighed at its flooded disappearance, wondering if any sealed barrels of beer might remain submerged in its remains. The entire Trent Valley had become drowned from the effects of a rising sea level, forcing millions from their comfortable homes, it seemed. It now gave the impression of a wide and lengthy water-filled estuary that stretched halfway across England from Lincolnshire’s own lost coast. He suddenly understood that all the coastal cities, towns and villages, over the entire planet, were now presently beneath the sea, completely engulfed or destroyed. The former inhabitants of all these areas were now on the move, millions upon millions of homeless souls forever driven onwards by the will to survive. Any ground above the new sea had found itself inhabited by a new breed of person. The pretentiously green-wellington-boot brigade who would have walked their professionally groomed pedigree dogs with silly and ridiculous names across the dry-stone walled fields had been replaced by worn-clothed and soggy footed refugees. A dog under these conditions would more than likely be considered as a tasty dinner than that of a pampered pet. The dog’s pretentious owners would be considered even less! Surviving farms, towns and villages were indiscriminatingly possessed by those who felt their own selfish needs were greater. The original owners and occupants had been forced out of their homes by the advancing and angry tide of city slickers, with the disposed owners reluctantly joining the ranks of the homeless… or to die defending what was rightfully theirs. Property was a thing of the past, except for the new warlords. They were the latest product of a vanishing landscape and growing violence. These unscrupulous individuals proved to be nothing less than ruthless dictatorial criminals who grasped at an easy advantage over the desperate and the needy.