C Fletcher - A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World

There were no footprints on the sand other than mine behind me, only paw prints that Jip had made ahead, and I followed him towards the looming jumble of structures surrounded by the rollercoaster.

We both stopped by the open doors of the _AS_NO which other smaller signs explained was a casino. I knew what that was too, and wanted to see what a place where people had come to be glamorous and lose their money looked like, but there was a smell of something powerfully dead in the lobby. Jip turned away from it and again, I followed him back out into the clean air. Things die and things rot. And you don’t always have to go poking at them.

The enclosure that the rollercoaster ran around was a Pleasure Beach, and there was more sand on the ground to prove it. There was also a wall with a huge skull wearing a Viking helmet three times the height of me snarling a warning at us as we approached. It was probably funny to your people. And I knew that. But to me it seemed a grim snaggle-toothed presence, full of real malice. The Pleasure Beach was a strange village full of grotesque things like that skull. There were oozy-looking gingerbread houses built purposely askew to loom alarmingly over you. There were all manner of metal cages and decaying machines—most with once bright but now weather-bleached plastic seats hanging off the end of them, things presumably meant to hurl people around, though that looked like it’d be torture and not pleasure at all. There was a lot of broken glass and so I trod carefully. Moving so slowly let me creep up on an animal I hadn’t seen before, and I nearly put an arrow through it until I realised it was a half-buried teddy bear.

I saw a pair of giant birds like ostriches standing very still among some greenery and though I quickly realised they were made of plastic I still nearly jumped clean out of my skin when I looked slightly to my right and saw a giant lizard the size of a horse crouching amongst some ratty shrubs, watching me with an evil look on its face, showing just enough teeth to promise a nasty end if it leapt for me. I instantly went very cold and still. Jip walked up to it and cocked his leg on its tail. It was only then I saw that it was just another statue, made of concrete. The look Jip gave me seemed to say “so much for dinosaurs”.

It hadn’t been real. Of course not. Dinosaurs are even deader than you are. But the shock it had given me was. I walked over to the base of the giant tangled-looking fence where there was more light, and that was where I found the sign that explained that it was a rollercoaster, and it was while I was reading it that I felt Jip go hunting-still beside me, and that was when we saw the hare lollop out of the bushes and pause to twitch its nose towards the sea.

Once I’d shot it and hung it off my pack, Jip got very interested in following its scent trail back into the undergrowth that had invaded this corner of the Pleasure Beach, while I climbed the rollercoaster. To start with, I only meant to go a few feet above ground to see if I could watch his progress, but it was sturdy and didn’t move at all as I went higher, so I kept going. I climbed onto the track and walked very carefully up the thin footplates that made a flight of steps alongside it. Probably not the most sensible thing I could have done, but I always kept a hand on the rail. Things built sturdily in the old world have had a long time to start coming to pieces again in the After, and I did not want to end my adventure by falling through something broken. And yes, it was an adventure. I was still determined to get Jess back, but even though that fierceness was in me, I was also excited to finally be putting my hands and my feet and my eyes on a world I had only read or heard old unreliable stories about. And the higher I climbed, the more I felt that streak in me begin to open up and breathe better in the newer, cleaner air. It came to me that I hadn’t known I had been being less than I could have been until then, when I saw there was so much more of the world for me to be myself within.

There was a carriage parked on the very top of the rollercoaster. If there hadn’t been, I might have turned back before I got there. I don’t think that would have made a difference, but it might have. As it was, I looked up at it and thought it would be good to get to it and sit there and rest a moment, looking out at the view opening up before me.

Jip was back at the base of the rollercoaster, barking up at me, eager I should see the rabbit he had lying on the sand in front of him. I waved and told him I’d be down in a minute. The wind had picked up again, and the sky was darkening, but I was really concentrating on looking at the step in front of me and then the next one. I didn’t need to look at the clouds gathering behind me; I could feel there was a good chance of rain coming, smell it even. I’d just sit at the top and rest a moment, then come down before it started. Mainly I was trying not to look down, because then my balance wavered a bit and I felt queasy. Like being seasick on solid ground.

I got to the top and that’s where I found him. Slumped on the floor of the carriage, a rattle of old bones themselves weathering away to powder in the rags of what had once been his clothes, strands of long grey hair coiled like a nest by the skull. There was one rubber boot, cracked and perished with a leg bone still in it, and a backpack. The pack was thick plastic, black and with a roll top. The straps were gone but the pack itself had been designed to be very waterproof. Maybe because it had been stuffed under the seat and was protected from the worst of the weather it seemed to have survived with its contents inside.

There was also a gun on the floor among the bones.

The weather had rusted it into a useless lump, but it was there. So were the holes in the skull. Small one in the bottom of the brain pan where the muzzle would have pressed against the top of the mouth, and a big chunk blasted through the scalp. It told a sad but clear story. He’d climbed up here for a last view of the world and then blown himself out of it.

I told the bones I was sorry, and then opened the pack. It cracked stiffly as I did so, and then I saw I was wrong. It was full of photographs, a lifetime of pictures—but on top of them was a lipstick and pots of make-up and a small mirror and a hairbrush. There was also a sort of metal urn, which I thought might have something interesting in. I opened it and found it didn’t. It just had ashes inside, grey and gritty. I could understand why this woman would have decided to die with her best face on, looking good for whatever came next. There was a sort of defiance in it that I could admire. But I didn’t know why she would have climbed all this way carrying something as meaningless as an urn full of ashes. I hefted the canister. It wasn’t light. And she must have been old, from the grey hairs she’d left behind. I don’t think I’d have made better sense of it if I’d had time to sit there and think about it, but I didn’t even have that luxury.

Something made me look behind myself, back up the mile of beachfront to the tower. Even at this distance and from this height you could see how much taller it was than the rollercoaster. It seemed to be almost touching the grey clouds closing in above it. It was only dwarfed by the black cloud rising off the sea below it.

Except it wasn’t a black cloud. It was smoke. And at its base was a fire, and the fire was the Sweethope .

I should have run down the steps, except I could see that in the time it took me to run the mile back to the jetty it would be too late, way too late. I sat down and stared at the disaster.

Because that feeling I’d had about being watched? Maybe some of it was imagination. But one part of it had been real. I’d come looking for Brand. But he’d found me.