A World Long Since Dead

Chapter 9: Hopeless

Panting and frightened, he returned to Jade, thankfully still carrying the loaded backpack over his shoulder.

She was awake, but still lay crumpled in a heap like the detritus of this world.

She had put his jacket on, and crawled to a corner of the ruined tenement that they were in. She barely acknowledged him as he walked in.

“Jade? He said, and she groaned in response.

“Got some food here, you should eat!” He said, instantly realising that he had no can opener.

“Damn” he cursed, and briefly glanced at the grey snow.

“My belt” Jade whispered. “In my belt”.

Mason slid his hand inside the coat and searched gingerly. He felt her faint but reassuring warmth as his fingers brushed her midriff.

“Mmm…” Jade moaned.

“Sorry…” Mason replied.

He quickly found Jade’s pocket knife, a switch blade.

“Should have known” he thought.

Mason used the blade to saw roughly through the lid of the can, and offered it to her.

It was a tin of peaches, and the ripe fruity aroma seemed to revive her.

She ate carefully at first, and then more ravenously as the food restored her energy.

Mace was stuck with a can of prunes, but wolfed them down without complaint.

He had, of course, forgotten to bring any water back, and feared drinking the grey snow, but the cans had plenty of juice so his oversight wasn’t yet a problem.

“Where are we?” Jade asked. “Or when…” She added.

“Hell if I know” Mason replied.

“I was hoping you would? Since you’re in this Syndicate, and all?”

She shook her head weakly.

“Fuck no. We’re through the looking glass now Mace, this is way beyond anything I’ve ever seen”.

Pausing only to cram their meagre meal into their waiting mouths, the two chatted like old friends.

“How did you get back to our reality last time?” She asked.

“Well, I just pressed this silver button on the watch, but…”

Mason removed the broken fragments of the watch from his pocket, and told her about the bullet and his hand injury.

“Ah… So we’re stuck here?”

“Yeah, I guess, unless I can repair it…” He said.

“Can you?”

“Well, my grandfather owned an antique shop, we did repairs, if I had the right tools, maybe?”

“What sort of tools?”

“Well I’d at least need a pin and screw driver set to even have a chance? Mason’s dismayed.

“Funny, isn’t it?” Jade grinned through a mouthful of peaches.

“Funny? How could any of this be funny?” Mace retorted indignantly.

“You were shot, but the bullet hit that watch.

You have a broken watch, but you grew up in a watchmakers shop.

You need tools, and I…”

Jade pulled a small black leather pouch from a hidden pocket of her skin-tight jeans.

“What are these?

“Lockpicking tools. Don’t ask. But they should do the job.” She winked at Mason as he carefully opened the leather pouch.

“Yeah, I guess they will?” He agreed

“But, why do you need a screwdriver set to pick locks?”

“They’re for electronic locks dufus, access panels. And I said Don’t ask!” Jade chuckled despite her admonishment.

They fell asleep in each others arms that night, both exhausted, and craving the warmth of human touch.

The early morning, if that grey dawn could even be called such, woke Mason after an interminable sleep.

He had no idea how long they had slept, but the mottled snow had stopped falling.

Unnatural grey clouds still hung thick and low over the rubble and it was bitterly cold.

“I’m going to go look for some more supplies” Mason said to the still sleeping Jade, after a tin of what pleasantly turned out to be pineapple.

The phase shift seemed to have taken more out of her than him, Mace wondered why.

He didn’t dare go back to the department store, for fear of that entity, and so scavenged for scraps around their tenement.

After an hour or so he had found enough to start a small fire, with the aid of his lighter.

“Not sure about the fire Mace” Jade said, wakening to the sound of crackling and the rush of heat.

“Those things hunt energy, you know? It’s like food for them”.

“They mostly look for bio-organic energy, but still, I wouldn’t risk it…”

“It’ll be fine Jade. I could sense that… thing, when it was close. I don’t sense it now. Besides, I can’t fix the watch if my damn hands are shaking with the cold!”

“True enough. How long do you think it will take?” She asked, eating another can of peaches.

“I don’t know. Days, maybe weeks?”

“Don’t fancy being here that long” she grimaced.

“Me either, but I will do my best”.

–

“Mason… Have you seen the sky?”

He had lost himself for hours in the finer workings of the ancient timepiece. It was the first time he had taken it apart, and he was astonished by its intricacy, and complexity.

It was difficult working on the watch with just one good hand, but he persevered. In his minds eye he was back in his grandfathers shop, fixing antiques and listening to the old man ramble on about this or that. How he missed those simpler times.

There was no sign of the source of its arcane powers, but the workmanship was far beyond anything he had ever seen before.

“The sky?” he said, his eyes peering intently into his work.

“Come and look” Jade said ominously.

Mace climbed over the ruined wall of the tenement, and joined Jade outside.

The clouds had cleared, and night had fallen early. It had only been light for a few hours. Even for winter, that wasn’t long.

Mason saw the stars, twinkling like diamonds in the black night.

But beneath them was a silver trail of dust, shimmering, an astral trail that led into the stars themselves… and disappeared.

“What the…” he breathed.

“Energy, Mace.”

“The greymen are draining the bio-organic energy from our world, pulling it little by little into their dimension, killing us to sustain them”.

“You don’t mean…”

“Yes. That’s us up there. Human life, animal life, all organic life, reduced to pure energy, and… stolen away to charge some alien battery.” She spat her words, her earlier grim humour replaced with resignation.

“My god…” Mason could think of nothing else to say. What could he say? Seeing his entire race being reduced to twinkling dust in front of him.

“There’s something I haven’t told you Mason” Jade said, and reached under a fallen sheet of aluminium.

“I thought we said no more lies between us?”

“I didn’t want to scare you” She said, handing him a torn stack of paper.

“A newspaper?” He said.

“It was pressure-sealed inside a safe, that’s how it survived. I found it in the building next door while you were out scavenging. Look at the date.”

“Oh, Jade, No…”

The date was 2075.

“21 years? All of this… All of this happens in just 21 years?”

Mason collapsed to the ground, the paper flapping uselessly beside him.

He had understood that they were in the future, but in his mind he had imagined a far more distant one.

The sun burning out, the earth running out of resources, nuclear war, all of these were distant possibilities, but this?

The end of all things… Happening in his own lifetime?

He gazed at the silver, speckled sky.

Each flicker of light, he realised, was a life, a soul, being extinguished.

How many?

How many had died? How many were left?

They didn’t care about the fire that night.

They build it hot enough to chase out the cold and bright enough to hide the sky.

They didn’t care about the entity that Mason had seen in the shopping mall.

They held each other silently when sleep refused to come.

There was nothing to be said, but they knew their thoughts were the same in the flickering firelight.

The next morning, Mason got to work on the watch again.

He worked mostly to give himself something to do, and not because he had any goal in mind.

It didn’t seem to matter if he succeeded at all really. Either he and Jade died here, in the cold and the loneliness, or they returned to their own time, and waited for the inevitable end with the rest of their race.

Maybe one day he and Jade would be up there, among the twinkling stars, their life force being siphoned off to fuel some malevolent alien creatures?

It was hopeless, he realised.

Repairing the watch had turned into an allegory for the future of his world.

Bent metal and specks of shattered glass littered the crude table he had built for himself.

With Jade’s basic tools, and no spare parts, he was out of options.

Mason removed a paper-thin circular ring from the watch. It was spotless, not a hint of rust, despite its age.

On the back, he found lettering, electro-pencilled in minute detail.

It read: 2-0-7-5.

A year.

This year…

–