Chris Pourteau - Tails of the Apocalypse

Of course, we’d have to go into the cities eventually. We had a full roster of passengers, some with brilliant minds, others not so sharp. There were engineers, musicians, teachers, salesmen, you name it—the entire spectrum of knowledge was represented, thousands of years at the best schools in the world amassed between us. And no one could agree how long we’d have to wait before it’d be safe to venture into what had been civilization.

As we went into that first night, it was hard to believe that the sun would still rise the next day. But it did.

Some of us didn’t make it through the first week. We’d lost fourteen people by the end of the first month. I think it was the reality of life in a post-nuclear world that killed them. All the things we’d taken for granted, those precious status symbols we’d paid over-the-top prices for because they had a glowing apple for a logo, our cell phones and laptops, all were suddenly worthless. Our social network was reduced to the faces around us. The only tweets were from the birds in the trees. The only music we made ourselves, though we didn’t have much to sing about. It was hard to believe that it was all gone; not just generations of learning, but entire civilizations’ worth of understanding. Lost to the world.

We focused on shelter at first. Gutting the hulk of the plane to make sleeping bays. We each had a blanket, which wasn’t nearly enough to see us through winter. I didn’t have many friends in the group. I’d been on the flight alone. My family was back home in Epsom, a little town just south of London. We’d lived up on the Downs in a little cluster of two hundred houses called Langley Vale. I say we; I mean my wife, Em, and our best friend, Buster, a soft-coated Irish Wheaten Terrier we’d nicknamed The Terrorist. He was nine months old when the vodka-swiller pushed the button. Buster had barely started living. I thought about trying to walk home, but six hundred miles in the fallout might as well have been six thousand.

I wasn’t sure it would even be possible.

I thought about heading to the east coast of Scotland and trying to steal a boat. The water would’ve kept me away from the worst of the radiation. But I never took that course because deep down part of me knew Epsom was only seventeen miles from London. The blast radius of a one megaton nuke was about six miles.

The Tsar Bomba, the new Russian nuke, was a hundred megaton bomb. It had a fireball radius alone of two miles, meaning there was no City of London left. The radiation circle was nearly five miles wide with an expected 90 percent mortality rate from radiation sickness in just the first month or so. The air-blast radius came in two tiers. Within eight miles of detonation, the winds were forceful enough to tear down huge concrete-and-steel structures, rendering the devastation absolute. Up to twenty-one miles from the heart of the explosion, the nuclear winds were still damaging enough to demolish most buildings. As far as fifty miles away, people would experience third-degree burns to all exposed skin. Flammable material, like clothes, would burn away. It would have been like hell on Earth.

And that was the real reason I wasn’t thinking about trying to go home. I could only pray Em and Buster hadn’t suffered.

That was an odd thing, too. Suddenly I was thinking about religion, but I wasn’t religious. I’d always been a non-believer. A lot of the survivors, though, were born again in the wake of the world’s end. They kissed the ground and thought about everything in terms of prayer and miracles.

People were getting superstitious, too.

That happens when you’re reduced to firelight. It takes you back to a more primitive existence, and with it come primitive fears. We’ve never really grown out of them as a species. They’re still there, all of those old caveman fears we thought we’d left in the Stone Age. They’re hardcoded in our DNA, just waiting for disaster to reawaken them.

It didn’t take long before the first of the survivors started seeing things in the moonlight, shapes circling around the ruined plane. Out there. Watching. They rarely came close enough for us to get a good description, and everyone seemed to see something slightly different. Different sizes, different shapes, coloration, but one thing everyone agreed on—the phantoms moved on all fours. Piecing their different stories together, it sounded like everyone was describing their own version of a pack of stray animals, some dogs, maybe wolves, some more exotic; there was even a horse among the sightings. I didn’t think they had wolves in Scotland, but I didn’t want to stake my life on it.

What I didn’t tell anyone was that I’d seen something out there, too. A shape. Low. Golden fur matted with ash and dust and dirt. Nosing around in the undergrowth. It never came closer than maybe five hundred feet from the crashed plane, but that was close enough for me to recognize what it was.

A ghost light.

I kept what I saw to myself, but some people in the group must have worked out that everyone was seeing something similar flickering out there in the darkness of night.

Those dogs were a curse.

To see them was to know you were dead, even if death hadn’t caught up with your body yet.

It was only a matter of time.

I wasn’t ready to go. Nothing was going to make me give up my grip on this life until I was ready. I hadn’t survived a nuclear holocaust to give over my fate to phantom hounds. I’d leave, but on my terms. Though I had no idea what those terms actually were.

I started to look for a purpose, beyond the obvious, in living. I wondered if it might not be worth going on a pilgrimage, trying to find some of the old relics, maybe venturing over the water into Europe, try to find the Spear of Longinus or the Shroud of Turin, some kind of holy artifact that survivors could rally behind. Was that my hope I was looking for? Maybe the mainland hadn’t been hit as badly as Britain? That was something to cling on to, wasn’t it? The notion that old enmities had made us a target, but that somewhere out there, life was almost normal.

I thought about the old legends, about Glastonbury Tor and ley lines and the legends of Arthur, the Once and Future King, who was supposed to return in the hour of our greatest need. If ever there was a time for him to show up, this was it, wasn’t it? I thought about Saint Patrick charming the snakes out of Ireland and the old forest gods that predated modern faith. Herne the Hunter, Puck, and Robin Goodfellow. I thought about our warrior queen, Boadicea, and our Lionhearts and bravehearts and broken hearts. The landscape, sour now, reminded me of the burned monasteries and kings buried in carparks.

Surely, in all of this ruin, there must be some sort of symbol, something that could be used as a beacon to shine its light in our dark time?

Yusef, an old IT programmer with no useful skills in this broken new world, was the first to volunteer to become one of my Grail Knights. Hejdur and Heldur, two brothers from Iceland, offered their strength—and with both of them close to six-five and built like the proverbial brick shithouses, they had plenty of that to offer—and Priya, a mother of three from New York who’d lost everything just like me, completed the circle. Five of us from the original 418 survivors broke camp and set off south, walking out of the mountains into the nuclear winter.

I don’t remember the first time we noticed the shadow moving through the trees, but it was Yusef who saw it. He pointed through a gap in the skeletal limbs toward a deeper darkness he claimed was back there, but I couldn’t see it. Neither could the others. We believed him, though. It was one of two things: a dog, hungry, driven out of the shadows to follow us and find food, one that none of us could seem to get a fix on. Or Yusef’s days were marked.