The Street Had No Name

Chapter 6

SOMEWHERE, Now

Father Peter Vicarel walked alone the road. It was a different place. No longer the Philadelphia Street he had entered that little while ago. Now it was different; now it was somewhere else.

He walked slowly, the road was a track by any other definition, pitted and pocked like some lunar landscape, deep ruts suggested that some form of wheeled vehicle had driven it prior and by the depth of the tracks, it was either very big or very heavy.

He stood for a moment, absentmindedly wiping his blood stained hands on the sides of his coat and the legs of his trousers; in the manner of a man not prepared to accept that fact that they were blood stained, in fact, not prepared to accept much of this at all. He felt the shock he had skirted earlier growing stronger in this weird juxtaposed place but decided consciously that he was going to stay in charge.

This was the 21st century after all. His order was one of teaching and he was a teacher of science, something that often tickled the wry side of his humour. His charges leaving his science class and trouping to morning mass to have the doctrines of the Christian antiquities pushed in alone side the work of Oppenheimer, Edison and Einstein, wondering which would seem the more awesome.

Mrs Fischl’s words still rang in his ears. He had to find The Scroll, had to retrieve it from the; God in Heaven, what were they? He had seen them, looking like something from Dante’s dreams of the 7th Circle.

He should have felt scared but he considered himself a practical man (practicality is a strange trait for a man of God he was sure) and it had stood him in good stead, so, on he walked, wherever this was.

What did he know of The Scroll? Nothing, he hadn’t even known it existed prior to this evening. Rabbi Tillermann had shown him the holy things at the Synagogue. The Scroll was not one of them. Yet, this night, as the old man burst into the boarding house Peter called home; it was all he carried.

He looked like death, the society was crumbling and he seemed one of the crumbs. For days, the world had been running amok. It was the 10th day since the Crash the day the economy of the world stopped; order just disappeared the morning the systems died.

All the predictions of all the events that would lead to the end of civilisation, as it was known, had most often ridden alongside the horsemen. Plague, pestilence, famine, war and the wrath of God were the popular beliefs sounding a little like one of those ridiculous “Best Five Ways To” things Letterman does. No one could have foreseen what would happen when a group of religious Zealots took it upon themselves to manufacture a number of small but effective nuclear devices and then, on the dawn of one day, explode them in all the major commercial capitals of the world.

New York, Tokyo, London, Sydney to name just four of the seventeen nuclear instances alone with a number of other less powerful but equally destructive; their targets were the commercial and banking districts and communications facilities. So sophisticated was the attack that they did more than just explode devices, they made sure that they would destroy the systems that controlled the financial world.

Targeting computer systems and communications centres, in two hours, the world’s accounting was gone. Since, 10 days seeming like a year; the world had gone to hell in a hand-basket. The events culminating in Peter watching the old Rabbi die at his feet while creatures of some old drunk’s Delirium Tremors stole an old scroll that Tillermann had given his life to try to save.

Given the alternatives, and given his being a practical man, Father Peter Vicarel, Jesuit Teacher of the Philadelphia order walked on. At least he now felt he had a job to do again. As jobs went it was as good as any.

It was strange he thought how walking in the direction he was seemed the right thing to do. Stopping for a moment he turned his head and looked back along the track. Shapes of things were all he could make out. Looking up the sky was a deep crimson; the whole place had a deep red glow. To the sides of the track was a rough spinifex grass that grew in tussocks, the soil sandy and then gravely between.

It was about now that he noticed the noise; a rumble in the distance, coming towards him from beyond the horizon that was now glowing for the first time with the morning light of this strange place. The ground seemed to growl with the approach of whatever it was. Vicarel was not sure of much at the moment but he was sure that he should not be seen. He moved off the road and through the spinifex until he found a clump that was a little larger than the rest behind which he crouched and waited. The noise grew louder.

Sitting in the half light of the dawn, in a place beyond his world, waiting for something he knew he should hide from. He felt like a character in that novel he had read a while ago, the one by Clive Barker about the different worlds, dimensions, goodness he could not think of the name “Imagination”, no “Imajica” was that it? Looking down at his hands, he noted that they still showed traces of the blood he had swum in prior; this was no work of fiction. This was real.