Revolution

It was the weather. It
was fog. It was humidity; it was lightening and tornadoes ripping through
housing estates. It was terrorists and mad scientists. It was Porton Down and
Rendlesham Forest and all that creepy UFO stuff going on down there. It was
Montauk and Orford Ness. It was Watson-Watt, Tesla and Death Rays. It was
When
Worlds Collide.
It was Velikovsky and
Worlds in Collision
. It was
Nostradamus and Satan had finally arrived. It was greed. It was poverty. It was
Gaia fighting back. It was the night and it had something to do with the days,
too. It was endless pure bloody murder and grief, and everything switched off.

It was the
middle of summer and the night sky at its clearest when the lights went out.
Streetlights wavered and flickered a few times before blinking off completely.
House lights were next, then fridges and freezers, then televisions. Plasma
screens whimpered, and faces screamed into meltdown, into thin white dukes from
nowhere, and lines became monsters transformed into things of the night
bringing darkness that stayed.

Mobiles
transformed into backyards of junk, and landlines dying sealed the fate of
communication — everyone lost power, no medium, no talk. They were lost. We all
lost in a sea of pitch and silence.

Amalgams melted,
fillings dropped out and evaporated. Braces buckled and buckles rusted as
wheels burst and eyes of glass shattered in orbit. Struck numb and dumb we
stood around like eyeless marionettes, an endless, thoughtless mass of wireless
puppets.

Nowhere to
go, nuhin to do.

Computers and
Internet faded like old radio shows, nothing but static coming and going,
sounds sinking, screens dying, then all off. Cars and busses and trains and
planes, anything with an engine in it, ground to a halt and was left where it
was. Lifts jammed and dumbwaiters stayed dumb and kept their traps shut
en
masse
.

It was the
homos what done it, and them there drag queens, and the whites and the blacks
and the liberals and libertines. It was the breeders and men and women and
children for daring to breathe. It was a genetically modified conspiracy. It
was bird flu and measles and mumps and rubella. There was too much of
everything and not enough of anything. Whatever it was, it was always someone else’s
fault, for someone else to fix, and fix it damn quick or I swear to God I’ll...
I’ll... But a bullet in the head stopped her and no one blinked or gasped and
they all drifted away in rags from riches into a fertile brew of plutonic
lethality.

Dialysis
machines were hand-cranked until nurses' arms grew too tired and their patients
died before their eyes. The relatives and friends beat the nurses and doctors
to a pulp with threats and crankshafts for not trying damn well hard enough.
Ventilators ceased to function and doctors and nurses struggled to force air
into lungs too sick to breathe, until, through tears and exhaustion, fear and
loathing and knives and guns at their heads, they all stopped. Everything
stopped. Dead.

#

We watched a
sea of souls rising each year, but we all turned away and didn’t do a damn
thing to stop it, even when its rot wafted us cool in purulent waves. The signs
had been quickening quicker than before. Eddy’s mother one more domino in a
long line of dolls, a yo-yo of sine waves strung out on statins and Moclobemide.
Another pill, another push over the edge, and another to yank her back on a
chair-o-plane ride. Losing faith in instinct, she became a monster, an NHS
junkie imploding on suicidal impact, or was it medicalized murder? Who can tell
when a victim’s victory is to torture loved ones with taunts of her own demise?
She won and she lost on measure for measure, equal on none, leaving a
motherless child.

My son, my
life, it was never easy to be a hawk in a dove. I watched over my child, and I
looked on a world hungrier for highs ever higher than before.

We aimed for
the coast, sea breeze and ozone. I don’t know why. Safer in the thought that
life had crawled onto the edge on such shores, who knows? And with us enough
oil, lard and wax to keep things alight.

Eddy saw the
cave first, high up on the cliff, so high I thought he had lost it being in the
dark for so long. With the last of the batteries in the night-vision lenses, I
saw it too. High enough to feel safe from immediate danger, but high enough to
kill us getting up there.

Eddy took
over. I was exhausted. I crashed down on cold and damp rocks. Eddy tied
together old rags and scrub-grass and dipped it in oil. The cave glowed. We
looked at each other. I had no idea if my face was as grubby as his. We
laughed, so I guess it was. I felt safer in that I could sleep, and he held
onto my back, each feeding the other warmth. Just don’t let me walk in my
sleep.

"Eddy?"

I bolted up,
rocks punching my back.

The light was
gone.

I pushed
myself to my feet, stumbling on rubble.

"Eddy!"

A light
flared.

"Jesus,
Eddy, don’t do that!"

"What’s
wrong," he asked walking past, nonchalant.

The nightmare
was wrong. The dark and the danger were wrong. Everything was wrong. Didn’t he
know? He looked away from me, holding a chalice of fire.

"Why didn’t
you answer?" I asked.

"You didn’t
give me a chance."

He crouched
down, laying rocks in a circle, dumping twigs into a pile.

"You
went down there/" I pointed at the opening, the maw of the cave.

"Yes,"
he beamed.

He pulled
eggs out of a bundle of rags like it was a peace offering.

"I found
these," he said.

I lurched. He
jumped.

"I
thought you would be pleased, Dad."

I grabbed his
shoulders. The egg dropped and smashed.

"Don’t
ever do anything without telling me. You could have been killed."

He pulled
away from me and sat down at the back of the cave, face hiding in his arms.

"Eddy, don’t..."

"I can
look after myself," he blurted.

"What
would happen if you never came back?"

But the
innocence of youth was fermenting into adolescent brew.

"You’re
the only thing I have, Eddy. The only thing that matters."

I sat beside
him, pulled him close. He tried pulling away, but gave up after a while.

"I just
wanted to..."

"To show
your old man that he’s too old and you’re growing up too fast."

I said sorry.
We made a pact. Never go it alone. He showed me where he’d found the eggs. I
nearly died seeing how far up it was. But I didn’t say anything, except, maybe let’s
find things a little closer to the ground.

It’s been two
months now. At least we think it’s been that long. We have no way of telling
since every time machine has stopped and rusted on wrists and walls and even
plastic has evaporated into the ether. There is no sun. No stars or moon.
Nothing moves through the celestial gloom. Nothing to measure time by but
instinct.

As civilized
as we like to think we are, people have reneged on their humanity, and
sentience has become a sweet and sour fuck-all thing, a no sweat, no worries, and
fear-in. Soon enough everyone has turned into a savage just to survive. |No
longer is money enough to buy. You got it, whatever it is, I need it. End of
story.

Murder,
mayhem, old grudges and new, have bubbled like lava over the lip of a nuclear
reactor. No Lawmen no more. No control and no nothing to bash sense into
knuckled-heads using rules and regulations and polite soft spoken language that
means nothing in the need to survive – fuck that! The whole country has shut
down. The borders, the coastline, have turned into no-goes, lucky for Eddy and
me, and there is nothing but endless sea all around fading into black anyway.
No big birds with Rolls Royce engines have ever returned. No boats, no ferries,
no cruise liners either.

A few brave
souls in junkets took their chances and left on that glass-smooth Styx. But no
one came back. No great expectations were deluded.

The
temperature fell, darkness stayed, plants died, animals starved.

Allotments
were raided, their owners mugged, stabbed or just plain shot.

Groups came
together and nodded in agreement, and looked for soothsayers to tell their
worried heads what they wanted to hear. Then they fought amongst themselves.
War broke out all over the place, and people and pets were flattened or
firebombed or both in revenge. And if a pet was still standing, well, that was
hamburger stew.

We escaped
the city. But the countryside had become a swamp of the mad, bad and downright
dangerous. Desperate monsters had escaped from cages whose walls fell in a
crumble of dust. Bedlam threw up every madman from hell.

The sick and
the dying were left to get sicker and die. And thank God, some said, and thank
God again, because the suffering was over on both sides of the seesaw at that. No
pills, no potions, and insulin and heparin dried up too. Ain't no nuhin no use,
because needles are blunted and buckled and rusted anyway, man.

Pounds of
flesh broke out in spontaneous combustion, and funeral pyres rose higher until
their smoky entrails sailed over rooftops sinking and crumpling down. Slate
slipped and sliced through the air, through the stink of it all, and bugs and
bats, and cats and rats died in a Hell’s Kitchen genocide.

Weeping
stopped and weeping acquiescence in rivers of putrescence swilled around ankle
deep. Parents killed their children and children their parents, everyone
blaming everyone else for the situation, the happening, the whatever you liked
to call it. New-borns became victims for taking up too much effort and air, and
the adolescent hacked his parents to death for having the sheer downright
arrogance in having him born into this, this fucking shit – their fault, man,
their fucking generation caused this. And for that they had to die.

The
government helicoptered itself into the black oblivion above and vanished.
What
a surprise.

We were on
the run for an enemy we didn’t know. We took to underground dwellings, tunnels
and caves, whatever there was to feel safe in. Then after a while we’d move
along. We lugged around rucksacks, our survival on our backs. We tried to be
smart, we tried very hard. But he was only twelve and I was scared shitless for
him. What happens if I’m not here? And I’d think of the difference between
muscle and axe, of a big heavy blade whacking down as I tried to defend
my
son my son my son
, unable to hold him, to shield him, to hide him from the
madness.

"Will
things ever get back the way they were, Dad?"

Eddy was
following me along the beach, me the old man poking a stick into the sand,
looking for what? Turtle’s eggs? Here?

"I don’t
know, Eddy."

"Okay,"
he said, walking past me, not looking back.

"Just,
okay?"

"Uh huh,"
he sighed. "Just, okay."

"Don’t
you miss things?"

"Mom... Sort
of."

Pandora, do
not be with me here on this one, I thought, but I flicked the latch on the lid
before I knew what I was doing.

"Like?"

"School."

"School?"

He looked at
me. "I miss Mondays. I miss knowing it’s Friday. I miss weekends. I miss
time. I miss Johnny and Jimmy..." his voice began to crack.

He lumped
down on his rear in the sand. I could tell he was crying. "I miss mornings
and nigh times, Dad."

I was a
powerless failure for my own child and all I could do was sit on the sand
beside him. Nothing was happening. Nothing was changing, forever black.

"I was
thinking," I said. "Maybe we could go back."

He looked at
me then. "Where/"

"The
city. Maybe we could find your friends, Jimmy, Johnny, and maybe I could find
some of mine too."

He looked
away from me. "They’re dead."

"You don’t
know that, Eddy."

"They’re
all
dead."

And Santa
claws too.

#

Fat and thin
men sat around the table, collars open, ties loose, and jackets long abandoned
were hanging weary on the backs of chairs.

"Will
someone answer me?"

"We don’t
know, is the answer." The man rubbed his fat neck.

"A whole
country
cann
ot
just disappear! Now tell me again. Where the hell
is
it?"

An
embarrassed hush fell over bowed heads and shifting eyes that looked
everywhere, anywhere, at everyone else — avoid the eyes. Don’t look at the
eyes.

"Will
someone answer me!"

"That is
the answer," one brave soul said, leaning on the sacred table. "There
is Atlantic, there is North Sea, there is English Channel, but no England."