Gabriel’s Watch - Book One: The Scrapman Trilogy Read Free Page B

another achievement to slip under her belt. But, as for me, there was a nice soft bed at the end of the hall, a place where I could drift away for a few short hours.
    My room, like the rest of the shelter, was plain—little more than a mattress and a series of random supplies. After stripping down to comfortable attire, I reached up to release a slide-latch to unlock the only steel window just below ceiling level, then lifted it an inch or two. The small window was positioned in such a way that it granted me a very narrow view at ground level, just enough to glimpse the wasteland beyond.
    In the moonlight, past my home and the debris of the previous world, I could see two thin strips of raised earth in the distance, each marked with its own small and simply constructed wooden cross. There in the thick and stale night air, with the world collapsing around us, I blew them a kiss and wished them goodnight.

3
P ARTING G IFT
     
    I t is the darkest chapter of our civilization ... it’s an ominous sensation, recounting the events that have come to challenge the foundation of my once unshakeable reality, events that have forever altered the fate of the damaged world in which we now reside. I have seen the horrors of war, have found her blood across my doorstep, and have stepped over countless bodies claimed by her hands.
    You’ll notice that I’ve referred to war as if it were a woman, just as the ancient Greeks paid tribute to their goddess Athena. I assure you this is not an accident, for war is the vile mistress of men, and one with whom we’ve grown increasingly intimate.
    But it was within the sheer terror of an instant that I witnessed my reality crumble, an instant I’ve been doomed to relive for as long as it sees fit to visit me in the dead of night.
    It ended only when the war lit the horizon aflame, sending huge plumes of ringed smoke billowing toward the upper atmosphere. It was then, after the years of global destruction, that the war finally burned itself to the ground. But her aftermath, comprised mainly of the ashy deposits of fallen debris, can still be found deep within the city’s many structural skeletons or scattered throughout the surrounding streets. And there are parts of the city, I swear, still saturated by the stench of smoldering flesh.
    Our copious society, once a thriving heap of healthily selfish individuals, was honed to only several pathetic pools of inner- and outer-city survivors. We were all that remained of the immediate devastation.
    But surely someone would be coming for us, surely someone was busily scouring the impacted areas, airlifting those that had risen from the muck. For days we waited, watching the skies for any sign of hope, but it wasn’t long before a dreadful realization descended upon us:
    No one is coming, because no one is looking.
    Further questions followed:
    Has the city been quarantined because of the chemical attacks, the radiation?
    For Christ’s sake, did they just leave all of us here to die?!
    But those questions were lost upon the remaining and resounding silence, never quenched by the hum of a distant helicopter, or resolved by a searchlight in the night’s sky. And in that silence an animal awakened within ourselves, a primitive beast that seemed to grasp the bleakness of our situation long before we’d allowed the rest of our minds to fully comprehend it.
    Our previous enemies, which could be found at the opposite end of nearly every tumbling sea, were now of very little concern to us. A newfound rival was arising, replacing the foes of old with one that was much, much closer.
    Some began to go their separate ways, gathering what they could as they headed for various homes and shelters, while others formed into larger groups in which stronger individuals inevitably fell into the roles of early dictators.
    There must have been a few hundred of us at that point, numbers ever dwindling, when I looked out into the hopeless abyss that was our sick and