Black Walkways and Fleshy Things

Black Walkways and Fleshy Things




It wasn’t long after the learning of the apocalypse that the sky turned a nicotine-stained yellow and cast an unhealthy sepia over the world below it, just as the prophecies foretold. The seas were just as terminal, and soon became poison. Those who drank from them, or from any other untreated water, died a slow and convulsing death.

The rain spat viciously. It became acidic, potent enough to reduce a man to a steaming pulp if he were unlucky enough to be caught in a field in the middle of a downpour. Buildings eroded. Some fell, others waited to. Trees lost their life, reduced to wooden, jarring skeletons that stabbed at the air with pained arms. Statue’s faces melted down to formless lumps, their features unidentifiable as the tributes to the great humans they had once been.

The acrid water also gave birth to a disease. Those who had survived being caught in a downpour, no matter how little they had been exposed, soon succumbed to Bonerot, the mother of all deaths.

Bonerot began in the skin, yellowing it like the sky, before turning deep-water blue. It would spread to the muscles, chewing through them and melting shut veins and arteries in its wake. The sufferer would be in immense pain, so much that those who became affected would always scream for euthanasia, and always be granted it. The first of the affected, back when the condition was a new horror and not a constant source of anxiety, experienced its final effects; the weakening of the bones until they became like soggy paper, and the gurgled screams from their own throats as their body folded in on itself under its own weight.

Those who survived the onslaught (both physically and mentally) gathered together. Those with disorders and problems were discarded, left to rot in the skeletons of towns while those who were deemed healthy were consigned to protection from the outside elements in the enormous Iron Fortress, a city made entirely from blackened metal, its perimeter a twenty-foot tall jagged wall. The metal, Cadavium, was impervious to the acidic fall, standing tall where everything else had melted down. Well, almost impervious. The metal had originally been a clean white colour, like that of a pristine hospital ward, or of a new child’s tooth, untouched by all external poisons and pleasures. The substance had been stained dark by the rain, a sign that in time it would fall, a reminder that it would - but for now, for maybe a hundred years, the survivors would be alright.

The city clattered with a thousand machines, its black factories hard at work to keep the survivors alive, emitting thick black smoke that burned away at where the ozone layer had once been, and where the sun had once shone through. Machines rasped and choked, died and were fixed, and sometimes spat flames. Plenty of people had been killed by a faulty machine, simply on their way to work, or on their way to visit a friend or relative.

Amber lights lit the walkways, tinting them a diseased brown. A roof of metal covered the paths between buildings, shielding the inhabitants from the influence of the sky. Sometimes something large would land on the metal from the outside, bounding with heavy feet, and those underneath would simply wait in anticipation and hope that it wouldn’t tear through and take a handful of them to eat, because sometimes it did.

That’s right. As though atmosphere and weather weren’t enough, creatures now roamed the abandoned world, hungry for anything unlucky enough to be left alive. There were different kinds of things, some of them drooling and skinless, their muscles glimmering in the yellow light for all to see. There were ape-like creatures out there, their insides opened and on full show, sometimes falling out and having to be scooped back up and replaced by an oversized hand. Sometimes they would die as a result, sometimes not. Sometimes they would run in circles, pulling at the exposed tissue, overrun with madness, screaming into the open air. There were also slug things that snaked their way through dead forests and made their cocoons between the shells of trees. They were pink and throbbing, phallus-like, and moaned as though they were in a state of constant stimulation, of morbid ecstasy. This cry was irrationally human-like, it was a cry that haunted the dreams of children and adults alike, a cry that you would hear if you were unlucky enough to find yourself trapped in one of its feeding webs, the fate of many people before.

Most terrifying of all was the giant, the thing that reached down from the clouds with a huge hand and took what it wanted at will; cattle, water, people, children. It was a hand of authority, and one that could not be stopped. Thousands of people had been lost in the great battle to try and take it down, all eaten, crushed or driven to screaming madness; lost to the forests, and ultimately the rain. Bullets, fire, missiles and sharp edges made minor flesh wounds, brought blood to the surface, and a deafening scream to its gigantic lips, but it was not enough; a giant arm proved this, sweeping across the battlefield and claiming half the human army in a single stroke.

People lived in fear, but they got on. Children went to school, adults went to work. Adults conversed and fucked and bullied as they always did; always waiting for the next attack, for the next announcement of the dead through the crackling speakers that graced every corner of the city.

The Iron Fortress had been built hastily, but that did not mean that its construction was weak or rushed. The walls were indestructible - almost indestructible - its buildings strong and sturdy. A government existed, though not a democratic one. A permanently elected leader, Sir Adrian Maxfield, the man who designed the place and opened its doors to the sane of mind, sat in the largest and most luxurious of the buildings and counted what passed for money. Some of the citizens would curse him. Though thankful for his city and the protection it offered, many darkened minds would sometimes hope that the giant would bound over, reach into his palace, and toss him into its mouth. Thoughts like this became common, though many did not speak of them openly. The acrid stench from the rain done more than was realised, some would say, blackening the mind and blackening its containing thoughts.

The soldiers would sometimes stop the monsters with their weapons, sometimes send it running and coated in blood, but other times families would lose a loved one to its fleshy grasp. Ammunition was running low, so the soldiers would sometimes ignore the alarms and let the things have their fill, saving their supplies for real attacks; sieges and attempts on the fortress; the situations that could mean the end for the human race.

There had been three great battles in a continuing war against the growing evil. The Battle of Icarus Plains, where thousands were slaughtered trying to bring down the giant; The Battle for the Gate, where the creatures unified and unsuccessfully attempted to force their way into the main body of the city; and The Battle That Must Not Be Spoken Of. Three battles, spread across the forty years that humanity has had to huddle together in a pathetic attempt at survival. There would be more to come, some said. And they would no doubt be right.

It was no longer a question of if humanity would survive, but rather for how much longer?