After The Pandemic - Smith: The End of the World (4) (1128 hits)
Category: NoneLabels: After_the_Pandemic Smith
Rating: 1.96 on 22 reviews (Rate this item) (V)
Submitted by Jack McCallum (View user info) at 2005-06-30 17:24:16 EDT
Related Tales...
ATP - Intro http://www.ubersite.com/m/61238
ATP - Background
-Corrigan http://www.ubersite.com/m/61296
-Variant C http://www.ubersite.com/m/61350
ATP - Smith tales
-Archangels 1 http://www.ubersite.com/m/61513
-Archangels 2 http://www.ubersite.com/m/61755
-Archangels 3 http://www.ubersite.com/m/61985
-Archangels 4 http://www.ubersite.com/m/62289
-Archangels 5 http://www.ubersite.com/m/62570
-Smith in D.C. http://www.ubersite.com/m/64167
-Smith at Sea http://www.ubersite.com/m/64857
-Smith: The End of the World (1) http://www.ubersite.com/m/66658
-Smith: The End of the World (2) http://www.ubersite.com/m/68176
-Smith: The End of the World (3) http://www.ubersite.com/m/69626
=(4)=
Night.
Daric was alone in St. Margaret's Chapel.
Around the chapel was Din Eidyn, Edinburgh Castle. Under the castle was the great rock at the center of the city.
Hidden in a dank chamber deep in that rock was a woman named Trina Klozy.
Daric was trying to decide if she should live or die.
The chapel was very small. A dozen people inside at the same time would feel the old stone walls closing in on them. The chapel had stood on this spot, in one form or another, for nearly a thousand years. It was the oldest building in the castle, most of the fortress having been destroyed by Robert the Bruce in 1313, as he would rather the castle be a ruin than a stronghold of English invaders. The chapel was also the oldest building in Edinburgh, a tiny structure atop a great volcanic plug of basalt.
Four hundred feet above the city, Daric sat with his back against the simple wooden altar.
A voice caressed his ears.
Let me go... please.
Daric shook his head.
He hoped that he could sleep through the coming day. Even before he had captured her and imprisoned her in the dungeon, his sleep had been disrupted by dreams. By Trina.
The dreams had led his soldiers to her home in Penicuik, south of Edinburgh. The soldiers had brought Trina to Daric after killing her only living relative, her grandfather, and burning out the hidden cellar that was their home.
The dreams had told him she was Romany, perhaps the truest of all those ancient wandering peoples. The dreams told Daric that Trina's parents had been born in Romania, the child of a land called Transylvania. Her father had been of Wallachian blood. Her mother was a true gypsy Rom, descended from the peoples who went north from India one thousand years ago. Her parents had fled north away from the Zombie Invasion that came out of the east and spread across the Continent twenty years before.
Trina spoke with a local accent. When Daric had first seen her in person, he asked her where she was from and Trina had replied, "I'm a penny-COO-can." She had bright blue eyes. She had hair like polished obsidian. Her skin was as white as milk, but the shape of her nose could be seen in the features of faces carved into Hindu temples erected before Christ was born.
The dreams that had started his quest for Trina were still with him, some images recurring again and again.
In one dream, Trina walked across a barren landscape with a lean, dark-haired man beside her. The man was covered in the marks of battle, missing a finger on his left hand, and one eye. A patch of white hair grew from a scar that ran from his jaw to his hairline. In the dream Arrows and knives and spears and bullets flew through the air like wind-whipped rain. The weapons hit the man, not Trina, and he kept walking at her side, his face a grim mask. Trina walked with a gentle smile, and in her wake, where her bare feet touched the lifeless earth, arose flowers and grasses from which there emerged bees and birds.
Daric awoke from these dreams bathed in sweat, his heart racing as if nothing but a stake could ever slow it.
The other dream he experienced with great frequency allowed him to watch himself walking with Trina across fields of green. She was crying. Daric was grinning, and lofty trumpets sounded his coming. Where he stepped pools of blood rose to the surface, and a vast hoard of follows behind him bathed and drank in what he provided for them. Trina was hugely pregnant in this dream, and she clutched herself as if denying the child entrance to the world, for she knew she carried Daric's son, and Daric sensed that this child would change the world forever.
The dream that had brought Daric to the chapel this night was a new one. In it Daric was walking in gloomy chambers under the rock when a man's tired, stern voice said, "Hey. Asshole. Look at this." Then the whole of the rock was removed over his head and Daric was standing under a greatly expanded sun that began searing his flesh. He awoke screaming.
There was something special about Trina Klozy. Not only was she a seer, like he was, perhaps filled with the ancient, mythic powers of her gypsy ancestors, but blood tests had shown that she was what not what she appeared to be, and she might be more than any of Daric's people could imagine. Daric wanted to lock down the land and bring it under his rule. He wanted to be King. She could have been his queen. She wanted nothing to do with Hemophagists.
Daric felt that Trina's physical anomalies and her mental abilities made her very special. He felt that if he were to father her children, those children would be a new race.
He also felt there was something unusual about the man with Trina in the dreams. He feared that if she had this stranger's children, the children could pose a threat to Daric and his people. A threat to homo nocturnus
His advisors urged him to kill her.
He wanted to go down to her cell and force himself on her.
He was afraid to do either, and he felt time to choose one option over the other was fast running out.
Daric leaned back against the altar, aware that daylight was coming, and wondered why he felt so comfortable here. Was this his destiny? Was it meant to be, that an Englishman would once again conquer the Scots and take over their ancient seat of power, this time enslaving as both work force and food source the survivors who remained?
An Englishman.
Nearly half a century had passed since Daric thought of himself that way.
Once, he had been Darren Crosse, a young man of no distinction, working as a bicycle messenger in London during the day and taking calls for a psychic hotline in the evening. He hated the day job, always choking on petrol fumes and getting banged up in traffic. The hotline job had been just a bore... until clients routed to him from the head office (a computer on a student's desk in Oxford that routed calls from the numbers advertised in the Mirror to as many as a hundred so-called psychics a day) began ringing back... and asking for more insight into their futures. They asked for 'more' insight, because Darren's visions, his uninspired descriptions of whatever silly imagery popped into his head while on the line, were coming true more and more often, and the clients loved his matter-of-fact, embellishment-free delivery of this information.
That time was followed by the years of unease as first Asia and then America started falling apart, succumbing to bird flu and becoming the source of outrageous tales too foolish to be true. Before the end of the new millennium's first decade, the United Kingdom had fallen to the Pandemic as well.
Lord Daric was born after the island fell into a second dark age, when vampire lords fought for power and he was able to use his foresight to his advantage, defeating enemies of all species.
Now he felt he was on the verge of attaining great power, or suffering complete loss.
He had to decide what to do soon.
The end was coming.
*
"I'm coming," Smith called to the man above him, pausing to catch his breath.
Two days of walking brought the band to a hilly region, spotted with fields and forests.
They encountered a group of munchers. They lured the zombies into a tight ring of trees and then set fire to the trees and the undead.
They saw two large black cats that looked for all the world like panthers. They let the cats pass unhindered, the orange tabby (who had since been christened Pint after Hungee said to her, "Yoor a wee pint o trouble!") hissing and arching her back. Keef told Smith that there used to be legends of big black cats roaming the island's remote areas, commonly thought to have escaped a circus. Smith asked Keef what a circus was and the Geordie admitted he had no idea.
They came across a great trough torn in the earth long ago. The trough was filled with wildflowers, a spray of color. There was a heap of rusted wreckage at the end of the trough. A great metal fin rose up, letters on the weathered paint reading GIN AIR. Part of the wreckage was nearly intact, a long tube crushed at both ends, with what looked like seats inside, all of it obscured by weeds. Rabbits had made the tube into a warren.
"We camp 'eere," Snatchbinder had said. He had started up a hill, calling out, "Smith, come wi' me."
Smith followed the foul-smelling man up a steep rise, slipping once on smooth grasses. The rise was topped with raw rock. Smith was out of breath, and that bothered him.
The sun was just beginning to burn off the early morning fog moving along the lowlands like rivers of milk. Patches of mist dampened their skin and hair, and left curious tastes on their lips and tongues.
Even though he washed his wounds every day and changed his bandages often, Smith was alarmed by redness, swelling and pain where the brock had bitten and scratched him.
His wounds also tingled and prickled from time to time, and headaches would swell and recede like a red surf inside of him.
He was sick.
"Tis roit there," Snatchbinder said. "Yer woll, as promised."
Smith looked.
The mist churned, parted, and revealed gray stone.
The wall was as high as a redwood Smith had once seen in the American northwest. It wound up and down over hummocks and into valleys. Just before it disappeared over a larger hill, it curved north, and revealed that it was as wide as a river.
Smith said nothing. His teeth clicked as he settled hard onto his ass. He felt his strength and hope dissipating like the morning mist as he looked at that great wall and thought of all the miles beyond, leading to the girl and the castle.
User Reviews
Submitted by Fey (user info) at 2008-06-29 16:09:32 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by zakalwe (user info) at 2005-10-05 14:08:37 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
din eidyn? is that proper gaelic? normally it's dun edin or some (ahem) variant.
Submitted by Falconer (user info) at 2005-07-28 18:45:56 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by Supreme_Overlord (user info) at 2005-07-21 22:39:30 EDT (#)
Ranking: -2
shite
Submitted by Benny (user info) at 2005-07-18 23:06:01 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by notyou (user info) at 2005-07-13 18:05:21 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by LadyPlural (user info) at 2005-07-01 00:37:29 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
MORE!
Submitted by Jack_McCallum (user info) at 2005-06-30 23:52:48 EDT (#)
Ranking: 0
Submitted by omnifica (user info) at 2005-06-30 22:10:06 (#)
Ranking: 2
maybe i need to get in on this ATP thing. there's so much other reading to catch up on if i want to make sure my tale would fit in the scheme of the greater story. it's a daunting task.
--
You could go easy on yourself and start small... pick a time frame OR a location no one has used yet, and go for it.
My advice for catching up? Print 'em out and read through them while taking a long, leisurely dump.
Submitted by supadupapupa (user info) at 2005-06-30 23:46:18 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
I really liked this one
Submitted by thecaes (user info) at 2005-06-30 23:09:42 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
SWEET-ass!
I particularly liked the description of her nose. Nice work, especially for something you did at work.
Your descriptions are sparse but very efficient.
Submitted by omnifica (user info) at 2005-06-30 22:10:06 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
maybe i need to get in on this ATP thing. there's so much other reading to catch up on if i want to make sure my tale would fit in the scheme of the greater story. it's a daunting task.
Submitted by Jack_McCallum (user info) at 2005-06-30 20:37:28 EDT (#)
Ranking: 0
1- I've done the same, man. Used to be only your first rate counted. Now we are back to all of them counting.
2- ALL action without substance would be a little too 'summer-movie,' and although that stuff has its place, I want to tell a whole story, not just post vignettes.
3- Picked up some Molson Canadian on the way home in hono(u)r of Canada Day. No harm in getting an early start. For an 'average' beer, I forgot how good it was. I suspect I will have a rough morning at work tomorrow... but more beer will help throughout the weekend and into the Fourth. Born in Canada. Now an American. Two celebrations in one.
Submitted by MyNameIsTim (user info) at 2005-06-30 20:10:39 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
last one
Submitted by MyNameIsTim (user info) at 2005-06-30 20:10:28 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
making up
Submitted by MyNameIsTim (user info) at 2005-06-30 20:10:21 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
well fucking whore. i did zero last time.
my bad.
this was good, but it felt...different somehow.
maybe just because i'm drunk, or because it lacked action, but not as good as the others. still an awesome read however.
keep em coming.
i gotta say...the fact that the other smith type character, case i think his name was, was a spy threw me for a loop. didn't see that shit coming at all.
well, i'm going to get drunker
later negrisimos
Submitted by MyNameIsTim (user info) at 2005-06-30 19:53:53 EDT (#)
Ranking: 0
wait a sec...didn't you just post one of these yesterday?
AWESOME!
Submitted by Phinch (user info) at 2005-06-30 18:33:36 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
more.
Submitted by yermom (user info) at 2005-06-30 18:15:58 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
here is your +2 now more please
Submitted by dodahdave (user info) at 2005-06-30 18:04:54 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Awesome as always.
Please keep 'em coming.
Submitted by Revolutionman (user info) at 2005-06-30 18:04:24 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by JonnyX (user info) at 2005-06-30 17:27:15 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
coolness
Submitted by Jack_McCallum (user info) at 2005-06-30 17:25:39 EDT (#)
Ranking: 0
This one is short, just banged it out at work today.
More is revealed though, and there are lost of teasers of things to come. Enjoy.