Shards of darkness (watty awards 2012)

Ana: From a dying world...

The sky was a vortex of heavy clouds, furious purple, inky black, bruise yellow, festering red. Scaring the Eve and shrouding the thin pale halo that was the sun in a blanket of pollution. No birds lived to fly in the sweltering autumn heat of day or the frozen waste of night. The sky’s only host; an air ship, a black silhouette against the vibrant unnatural shades of hells pit, was laboriously flying across the horizon. The ocean below was a sludgy brown. Stagnant. Lifeless. It had been devoid of life for so long that even the bones of the creatures that had once inhabited the waters had long since turned to dust.

It was cold tonight, bitterly so. The yellow moon regarded Ana with distain, watching her as she crept along the streets of ruined Earth. It was her sentinel to the endless torrent of darkness. Her only light. In all her 18 summers, she had never seen it so dim. So lifeless. The sun was fading and the moons reflection did also. Once, thousands of years before her time, it shone bright and yellow and could grant heat to burn a back brown. Ha, her pale milky skin almost glowed under the great lunar eye above, her hair was bleached white by the vileness of the atmosphere and hung lank and matted down to her neck and chemicals had turned her eyes into bulbous dishes of unnatural pale blue. She used these to survey her surroundings.

The sky was livid with anger and purple fumes drifted up to the heavens. A storm was brewing. She had to find cover, but where? No one would shelter a begging child if she knocked on their doors. Not even to save her from the glowing green fumes and the vile acid rain. Stuck in the open she would surely die. She scuttled down Plague Street, keeping to the shadows so not to disturb the dead the night concealed. The air here was stale and musty, air that had once been the breath of the now forgotten in their tombs. Plague Street had sunken into the ground.

It was about five hundred years ago, or so she had been informed, that the first of the cracks appeared. No one knew why. They were just there. Plague Street had fallen then the beast came and slaughtered all survivors of the fallen road. No one lived here save for the beggars and robbers that stalked in the night. It was the perfect place to be in an acid storm. Ana walked up to the largest of the semidetached apartment buildings. She tried the door. It was locked with rust. She swung a bag from her hip and brought out a twisted piece of metal pipe that she had salvaged from a rubbish tip.  She weighed it carefully in one hand. Her cold-numbed fingers were slow to respond.

 She gritted her teeth and looked up at the sky. An air ship flailed at the mercy of the storm that had clutched and dragged it into it’s grasp. Ana watched with beating heart, she knew with dread that the pilots were dammed. The storm hurled the airship to the ground. Ana watched, her anticipation growing. At the point she thought they surely would crash, then they were up in the air again, determined to fight back against the wind. The storm laughed with a peal of thunder. Like a cat playing with its prey, It let the airship get just out of its grasp before the final strike of lightning. Ana watched as the airship burst in to an inferno. Cruel were the elements tonight. And as gravity cast the debris to the ground, it began to rain.

Ana gathered her senses. The acid was surprisingly dilute and she barely felt it on her skin. Even so, she still needed shelter. When she swung her weapon at the lock the moon came out from behind the mask of clouds. As it did so, it revealed things that she wished the night to hide. She stared, and the eyes of the numerous dead stared back but it was not this that set her a’ trembling. No, what did was that all of the corpses were not the former inhabitants of the street who had died nigh 300 years ago. No. These where the robbers and cut throats and beggar boys. And they had died recently, very recently. Their mutilated bodies still shone with blood.

A howl caught the breath in her through. She turned round and watched in muted horror as the floor boards under the house in which could have been her shrine, ruptured and smashed. Out of the hole from which it had made, came a monster.