|
WRITERS EYES / ASCRIBER Uniting Writers Around The World Online Writing Group
|
by
Doug Prina
Lines of Reality Blur
Nobody foresaw the war, there were no reports. It just happened. I had been cycling since the Holocaust, never resting. The day had been a strange one. I hadn't imagined any sounds. It was as if I was finally accepting complete solitude. An empty motorway stretched out before me, two black scars converging, then diminishing to a pencil stroke near the horizon. Distances that had been programmed in my mind as trivial, through a car or aircraft window, now appeared vast. Everything was magnified. A bloated sun beat down from high in a huge and cloudless sky. Shimmering heat haze radiated from the tarmac. The arrow straight road began to wiggle, as if being erased, lines of reality blurred. I was a scurrying insect in a desert, roaming its nebulous path.
Plants and bushes inched their way imperceptibly across the hard shoulder. I imagined, fancifully I thought, that people were watching me from the dark depths of the undergrowth. Tall trees huddled ever closer, peering down, mourners over a burial trench. I appreciated their shade in the searing heat. Ranks of saplings had, by now, sprouted on to the central reservation, slowly grinding the concrete to dust, reclaiming their land. My idle mind willed them on. I had tried to obliterate my past life. It was a survival mechanism. But reminders surrounded me. Now I was willing nature to destroy the signposts.
Then I heard a noise, stopped pedaling and hit the brakes. I imagined I had heard a distant helicopter but now I was surrounded by a disappointing silence. It was not the first time. The sound hit me as the aural equivalent of a mirage. Now, without its imagined resonance, the silence seemed purer and began to unnerve me, bludgeon me with the vastness of solitary time. So I thought about time. The sun told me it was noon. It was probably August but I wasn't certain. There was no birdsong even though they had plenty to celebrate. No cars, no planes, no Humans, burgeoning nature. The weather was sultry, the nights intermediate. Yes, it was definitely August, I thought. But did it really matter? I needed to tear out those roots that anchored me to the certainties of the past.
Thinking I had heard a sound engendered a feeling of panic within me. But panic had become a benign emotion, merely a ponderous shadow pursuing me. I knew exactly what to do when being followed. Pushing off hard and pedaling fast I fled. With the rumble of tyres on tarmac and the breeze in my face I felt settled and free again. But I still had this inescapable feeling I was being followed.
As I coasted down a long slope I tried to be positive and list all the things I had escaped, that used to suffocate me. The first one was how opinions were thrust upon us and I recalled a mantra. It was the one repeated by The Media, the one that told us we lived in a dangerous world, because people were different. The Human population was nine billion at that time. Survival was outweighing death in by a hitherto unimaginable margin. It was the safest world in Human history. Then, for no discernable reason, we were force fed another opinion. The Media told us to make enemies. I can see the truth now. It was a dangerous world after all. But the opinion formers blinded us to the real and inevitable reason because they didn't want to see it. The danger was in the truth of numbers. They weren't qualified in numbers, or truths. They were only qualified in something that cannot be quantified. It was known as marketing, or self promotion.
My destination was the north of the island. A burning man had told me the bombs hadn't come down there. I was searching for imperishable, tins of food. Sell by dates meant nothing, another figment of the marketer's imagination.
I had programmed myself to think I was the only person left in the world. It was just another survival mechanism, one of my own. This new world was unimaginably dangerous but I felt safe, my survival clutched firmly in my own hands, safely out of a slippery politicians.
The Northlands were uninhabited. After three days I stumbled across a small town. The houses were intact but there was no sign of humanity. My survival so far had been swept along by the momentum of my past life, before the bombs, when I was functioning as modern man. I tried to believe I had been a hunter gatherer for what I imagined was five years now. It was a chimera. I was picking up scraps from a formerly organized world. I was not independent, merely a scrounger. Now I knew it couldn't last.
Picking up my bike I turned back, but pedaled without any conviction. As I rode back through the town, thinking, incongruously, of Western movies, I heard a buzzing sound. Looking up I glimpsed a CCTV camera scanning the vicinity, like a periscope on a metal post. It was only a momentary movement. At first I thought I was hallucinating. I stared at it for ten minutes. The camera was now still, statuesque, like everything else. It couldn't have moved for five years. I picked up a heavy rock and struck it in frustration. It disintegrated under the impact but, to my amazement, a brief flash of electricity sought earth from a trailing wire onto its supporting post. It was surreal. Where did that come from? Surely there was no generation.
My preserved life was coming to an end. I fled the town only stopping when I found the motorway. My last tin lay in the pannier, a final request. With a sharp flint I pierced its feeble shell. Cold baked beans flowed down my throat like nectar from the last flower in Eden.
I looked around me. The sun retreated behind a cloud. All colour became drab, then grey, finally monochrome. Everything was held in a weird kind of stasis, as if the bombs were about to return.
I heard that sound again, the one like the helicopter. I expected it to ghost away again, before my cognizance had registered it as anything more than an illusion. The noise heightened into something real. It became solid and continuous. Then I recognized the roar of a car engine, saw a trail of coloured smoke. A vehicle was speeding down the motorway towards me. I waited for the image to disappear, for silence to fall. It kept coming.
Instinct took over. I pulled my gun from the pannier and stepped behind a lamp post. A shot rang out, the bullet ricocheting off the concrete. I fired in return as if in a draw, a reflex reaction. The car went into a spin, disappeared from my view. A crash was heard and a plume of smoke billowed from the trees.
Silence fell again. I pedaled towards the smoke holding my gun. The car had crashed into a fallen tree. A figure was hunched over the steering wheel. Music was playing loudly from the burning wreckage. It sounded like a tacky game show theme tune. A tall figure, in shiny suit and brash tie, stood near the rear of the car. Without opening his mouth or moving, without doing anything, the man somehow managed to annoy me intensely. I immediately felt the urge to look away. He was unwatchable, sickening, like the flash from a hydrogen bomb. It was then I suspected he might be a television presenter. I glanced back and saw him rearranging his hair in the rear view mirror. Then I knew he was a television presenter.
I dismounted and walked towards the smouldering wreckage. It was then I caught the smell that brought it all back: the aroma of incinerating human flesh. It had surrounded me during the Holocaust, or what I thought had been a holocaust. That smell had tortured me for a year until my struggle for survival inured me to its memory.
“Why didn't you help him?” I shouted, pointing at the driver.
“The producer! He tried to shoot you. The traitor. He weren't gonna be on camera anyhow.”
A large pickup van pulled up. Three cameramen alighted and swarmed around me.
The presenter continued, oblivious to the burning car, “Congratulations. You've won the first series of Surviving Armageddon, the ultimate reality show.
“I've won?”
“Yes. I'm afraid you have. The last celebrity died yesterday. My producer wanted to shoot you, fly in a major celebrity to pose as the winner. But I decided to spare you.”
“Why?” I said, completely numb.
“The public voted for you. They found your will to survive truly awesome.”
“You are totally insane. Has the media completely taken over the world?”
“Yes it has. Celebrity is the new royalty. We at MainlandMedia control the Government now, we call all the shots. You really are the last survivor on the island. We flew out all the important people, the politicians, not the leftees…ha ha… and the self made rich, then wiped out the entire population. Then we dumped fifty celebrities, we have way too many, and picked them off one by one. It's like a cull. But we are a bit disappointed you've come through. We didn't know you were here. It ain't good for the ratings. But let's make the best of a bad job. Can you pretend to be a celebrity? Nobody'll notice. There are so many now. People don't know who the damn hell they are anyway. I've already written out a script. I want you to follow it…and can you act like you're excited and all, make plenny a noise, act real stupid. If ya find that kinda difficult would some cocaine help?”
It was then that I shot him. I lifted the gun in the folds of my threadbare jacket and shot a bullet through the bottom of the pocket. It went straight through his head. It felt as if I was pretending to shoot him, like in a film. I sensed no emotion, nothing. I just needed to shut him up, quell that stream of inane words, to do something in some small way to protest about the evil he represented.
I am sitting in my cell writing this. My solicitor has advised me to plea insanity. He thinks I will get off. Not because of the insanity plea but because of the boost I gave the ratings. When I shot that legendary presenter in front of the cameras , the inventor of Surviving Armageddon, viewing figures broke all records. Advertising revenue went through the roof. MainlandMedia feel they owe me. They call the shots.
Comments will appear here