Tag Archives: apocalypse

Softly It Falls

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It started snowing and never stopped. Fat and beautiful, the flakes came from the grey skies and covered our cars, our houses, our cities.

We dug in like rats in warrens. We crawled in tunnels of packed snow between buildings where the pale blue of the distant sun’s light filtered through the miles of snow. We built hasty, pathetic fires that burned just long enough to melt our meagre supply of frozen canned food, extinguished before the carbon monoxide could kill us.

In the moments between searching for food and fighting the cold, we sat huddled in groups, wrapped in rags, never talking, always watching the light drift to night and back. Soon enough, even that was gone, that slightly reassuring frost of pale blue. Then it was always night. Who knew how high the snow went? How deep we were?

There was a creaking sound. It was not that it was a single sound, but a symphony of structural readjustments, of the very ice shifting. I imagined the hand of God pressing upon us, as if raising himself up from a slumber. There was a tremendous groan, with a crushing thunder of finality about it. Now cold, cold, our world bleeds away with our breath, and the end comes, not with a bang, but the stillness of flies in amber.

Tales of the Apocalypse: The Sergeant

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“A-at least I made a difference…” The effort sends blood flecking the boy’s lips. His lungs are slowly filling with blood spilling into Sarge’s lap with every cough. No, you fucking didn’t, Sarge screams, you’re just another useless fucking casualty. But the boy doesn’t hear. His eyes have gone out like the night’s last embers.

Sarge gets to his feet, the sack of meat slumping face down into the dust. He walks to the Command tent, passing rows of moaning men with filthy needles hanging from their arms. Brushing aside the tent flap, he takes out his pistol and sends a bullet into the General’s skull. A captain and lieutenant have their guns instantly trained on him. The lieutenant moves his gun hand away and shoots the captain in the stomach, his electric blue eyes inexpressive. Sarge’s moss green gaze flickers to the lieutenant’s bruised cephalic vein. “I shoot up with a saline solution,” the lieutenant says, going outside to see if anyone has heard the shots. He returns shaking his head. “We better get out of here. They won’t be too happy once they find out.”

“There’s something I want to do first,” Sarge says. He sweeps the ringstained maps from a trunk and takes from it a chunk of plasticine. The lieutenant looks at him for a moment before nodding. They arrange to meet at the outskirts of camp in fifteen minutes, and Sarge leaves for the doctor’s to cancel his prescription.

It was a maze of barbed wire and trenches stretching to the east and to the west. It smelled like a latrine. Sentries were fast asleep at their posts, guns pointed at the ground. A dog has died days ago, its bone etched flank squirming with maggots. When Sarge arrives, he finds the lieutenant with some guns, two packs of rations, and what little fresh water he could find. They look at the world their grandfathers left for them. Sarge spat on the ground.

“Let’s go north. I hear elk hunting is good at this time of the year,” says Sarge, pressing the detonator. At the center of camp the dwindling supply of heroin goes up in a pillar of fire, and the traitorous pair can hear the keening moan of the vast junkie army left without a fix. “The fresh air’ll be good for us,” the lieutenant says, smiling for the first time in years.

Tales of the Apocalypse: Anna

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Anna sank to her knees and brushed the dirt from a hidden plank. She put it aside and stared for a moment at the battered silver travelling case that nestled in the hand dug hole. She took it out, unslung the twine that had hung roughly around her neck for a long time, and fumbled at the small key attached. She inserted it in the lock, turned, and the case clicked audibly open.  Startled, Anna touched her dirty and tangled hair, then stroked it before letting her hands descend into the case’s open maw.

She withdrew a pair of jeans, turning it over slowly in the candlelight. She sniffed at it, brushed it against her cheek under tear bright eyes.  Kelvin Cleen jeans. She put it down after a final sniff and took a flimsy shirt from the case. Musa Commonwealth. She put it back. The shoes were Prana. A pair of underwear from Somebody’s Secret. Her mother’s faded October 2010 edition of Great Housekeeping. A packet of gum.  An unopened bottle of Cocko-cola, the caramel fluid inside gone flat. Some lipstick, dry with age. A cell phone, its display eternally dark, like the emptiness that yawned in her soul. Anna sobbed from the pit of her stomach, all the sorrow and pain leaking from her scrunched eyes, yet affording no relief. She carefully returned each artefact to the silver case, and as she replaced the plank and its coat of dirt, there was a knock at the door.

One. The door, corrugated plastic reinforced with duct tape and scraps of rags, shuddered visibly. Anna swept the hay back over the patch of ground concealing her treasure, and tore the sackcloth from her body, the circle of twine from her neck. Two. Naked, she sank to her knees and waited for the door to open on the third knock, trying not to cry.

Spaceman Blues: A Love Song

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The Count of Monte Cristo, or do I dare say, The Stars My Destination, loosely provides the framework of this entertaining romp of Pynchean scope, with riffs of Bradbury waxing lyrical amid surreal strains of M. John Harrison in which Wendell Apogee undergoes a transformation in his quest to find where Manuel, his lover, has disappeared to after leaving nothing behind but an apartment that is an literal hole in the wall belching flaming pieces of a life onto the next building.

Wendell finds that his lover isn’t who he knows when –through a colorful entourage of lovers, killers, thieves, ex-soldiers, madmen, drug runners, cock fighters, cult members, soccer hooligans, and all in all, simple men and women living large in so many small ways–Manuel’s portrait grows larger than life, until one could get dizzy just peering at its high reaches.

The novel is a kaleidoscope of the near future, where the outlook is no brighter, but humanity consists just the same, in its microscopic nature of day to day living, of people working, living, laughing, loving.

A strange familiarity runs the bassline throughout this story, and the surreality leaps at you when you least expect it. An apocalyptic doom hangs over the proceedings, but instead of dampening this absurd carnival ride, it adds to the jovial madness of being true to one’s self. The honest truth of being alive and completely yourself in a world gone amuck.

I love novels like this, that jump at you from the side when you choose a book randomly off the shelf, and you’re much more entertained than you expect. I hope Brian Francis Slattery writes more, and that they are just as good, if not better, as this book.

Spaceman Blues: A Love Song by Brian Francis Slattery