Society: After It Happened Book 3 (22 page)

EXTINCTION EVENT

He found Marie sat in Ops, waiting for their return.  Ash was with her and his face lit up with excitement at seeing his master return resulting in a rhythmic thud of his tail on the floor.  Dan twitched his head outside and walked back out, unlocking his Discovery and climbing in to warm the engine and flicking both front heated seats to high.

Marie had wrapped up in a large parka and climbed in without a word.  He drove.  The cab had heated before she said anything.

“Something’s pretty bad, isn’t it” she said.  A statement; not a question.

He slowed and stopped, tiredly flicking the selector into park.  He got out and hauled himself onto the bonnet where he lit a cigarette and breathed deeply. 

Laid out in front of him was a crisp, undisturbed landscape.  Marie joined him.

“Tell me” she said

Dan explained about the group they had found, only then realising himself how perilously close they were to the former Bronson’s reach if they had strayed into the urban areas.

“And?” she prompted, her patience running thin with the mystery revelation she was expecting.

“And they’ve had three stillbirths with double that in miscarriages” Dan said quietly.

They sat in silence.  Their own two could have been a coincidence.  For other groups – the villagers and the one that the now dead King of Wales had mentioned – to all have the same issues was too much to accept as mere coincidence; it was a pattern.

Emma’s words haunted his mind all day. 

“We all have it” she had said, but couldn’t say how it had left some people alive or what change it had made to them.

“What if Emma is right?” he asked Marie, voicing his thoughts.

For once, she had nothing to say.  She hugged his left arm as she sat beside him, resting her head against his shoulder.

“If she’s right” she said in a subdued tone “then this really was our extinction event”

She hugged his arm tightly as her tears began to fall.

“It can’t be” she said quietly “I’m having your baby”

EPILOGUE

Leaves blew across the pitted concrete, swirling them up and around inside a large empty barn.  Not strictly empty; the bones and decayed pelts of cattle lay undisturbed save for the scavengers who had long ago picked them clean. 

A Land Rover lay on its wheel rims, tyres long weathered away, and sat listing as the green film on it tried to obscure the symbol of vehicular dominance recognised all the world over.  Where once the sound of lambs competed with the pigs, chickens and cows there was now only an eerie silence.

A mile away lay a ruin of concrete, metal and glass.  Greenhouses became tin skeletons as all their glass panels had long since been blown in by the elements.  Some were no longer even recognizable as their contents had grown so tall in their confined space that they looked ridiculous and completely obscured the frames imprisoning them.  The wood and plastic sheeting that had made the polytunnels was gone; only the occasional shred of exposed rubbish hinting at what used to be there.

Down the hill from the empty farm a tree lay strewn across the rough driveway, its branches wilted and leaves gone.  The trunk showed signs of rotting as it had lain there through the full turn of seasons.

The grand façade of the beautiful house was streaked with dark green from the blocked and damaged guttering; the once proud solar panels were covered in leaves.  Water dripped from cracked glass and pipes, rendering the impressive feat of engineering useless and somehow spoiling the skyline with deformed additions to the architecture. Nature had encroached; thick vines dug their deep and insidious grip into the stonework gaining a beachhead on their long campaign to bring the building down and reclaim the materials once stolen to create it.

The large front door lay broken on one side, its hinges gone and the interior opened up to the elements.  To the right, the remains of a cat lay on the floor under a shelf in a dusty office; twisted and grotesque.  To the left, evidence of humans existed in the damaged door frame, laying bare a room filled with boxes of bullets and the guns to fire them.  Thick layers of damp dust had warped and discoloured the cardboard, showing tarnished brass where it was exposed.  Peeling paint and collapsed ceilings ran throughout the ground floor and water dripped incessantly from a dozen obvious leaks.  The remnants of what looked like a makeshift hospital lay deserted; cupboards of medicines stood untouched.

A large dining room stood empty and dark; children’s drawings now faded and fallen from their places on the walls where they had been displayed.  Abandoned cups and plates were strewn across the room which had at one time seen many decisions made and the direction of many lives dictated.

Upstairs, more decay showed as floors creaked and bowed.  Rainwater ran down walls, taking paint with it as the inexorability of gravity dragged everything man-made down to the ground.

Back outside, another vehicle was barely visible under the heavy canopy of a willow tree.  Strips of what used to be chrome showed up dull in a shaft of light, and all four chunky tyres stood flat and useless.  Once a proud example of status and intent; now just metal and plastic, never to move again.

To the rear of the big house was a lake, although it was overgrown all around and a haven for the teeming wildlife that called it home.  Unchecked by predators, the animals ran riot as they competed for the abundant food sources.  In the long grass of a field to the side of the lake lay the wreckage of a large machine.  Heavy, long blades hung limp where they had not sheared away, and it was impossible to tell whether it was abandoned there or had crashed.

Nature was taking back what once belonged entirely to her; the existence of humans would be erased from this place by the passage of time.  The desperate struggle to survive by the last residents would not be documented here; would not be discovered.

A row of small mounds of earth, headstones already long gone, disturbed the continuity of a patch of grass in the sunlight.  Perhaps the only evidence of the fight to survive would be found there, one day, long after it happened.