Extinction Event (4)
> they won't move 'til they're dragged away kicking and screaming> Andy had written in his e-mail, along with a half-joke that an invite to come and stay with Ray would be only too welcome right now and was there any chance....? Ray had laughed and replied that Yes, right now there was every chance because his Mum was feeling so guilty about how much time her new job was taking up she would probably let him have an elephant for a pet if he asked at the right moment. Ray asked if Andy had spoken to his friend at NASA and was told no, the NASA friend seemed to have dropped off the face of the universe and perhaps he had strayed too close to the hole. His theories seemed to have gone down the plughole with him. Andy was scared. He had skipped school three days in a row because suddenly he was a target for every kid bigger than him in the whole school and that was a lot of kids. >They'll have to go when the factory gets sucked in> Ray had typed optimistically but Andy hadn't replied to that one and Ray had to wonder if it was because he was afraid his parents might be in the factory when it succumbed. >Don't worry>, Andy had written back >I'll be out of here before they are> Ray was disturbed by that. It wasn't the first time Andy had talked about running away. His life was shit, they both knew that. He and his sister were strangers and his parents were no better. He was the disappointing weakling of a son who would never make anything of himself according to his Dad, and to his mum he was an endless expense who filled his room full of strange things she didn't understand or value. Never had a better case been made for the possibility that Andy's mum and dad were aliens as far as Ray was concerned. His own Mum could be an ogre sometimes but at least she wasn't a xenomorph like Andy's folks! The probe mission came to nothing. The crew lost contact with mission control three hours after hurtling into the darkness and for no particular reason that anyone could see. By the following day, Thursday in England and Friday night for Ray, the Government had to accept that they had lost the ability to control and defend the area around the hole. Ray's town was gone, the hole was devouring great tracts of farmland and all the villages between and the cities of Nottingham, Stoke on Trent and Birmingham were starting to be threatened. The government declared a state of emergency and began to evacuate the Midlands. Andy and his whole family, along with most of Ray's relatives were suddenly refugees and the e-mail messages stopped coming. Now Ray was forced, like everyone else, to follow the story on the news. By that weekend, it was all the news there was. The hole was eating up the ground at a rate of feet per minute rather than inches per hour. And its speed was increasing. By Sunday night, the entire midsection of England was nothing but a yawning hole going nowhere. On Monday, they fired a nuclear warhead down it in the hope that the detonation might close the hole, but it didn't, so they fired another one. It made no difference. The hole was an insatiable monstrosity which was indifferent to the efforts of man. It continued to grow and the theories around its existence got wilder and wilder. The exodus from the British Isles continued. It looked as if they were going to evacuate the whole country. And then what? The world? Where was everyone supposed to go? On Tuesday the entire world waited with baited breath as the edges of the hole raced towards the Bristol channel. Lives were being lost now, some people escaping the police cordons and the abandonment orders and staying in their homes in the hope the hole might just pass them by. Several fire trucks were caught napping on a back lane near Evesham which left them nowhere to go and all forty men on board had been swallowed. An entire hospital, emptied of patients but still containing a number of security staff had been sucked up and Birmingham's infamous Bull Ring was now nothing but a distant memory. But the sea? What would happen when the hole reached the sea? Would it stop there or was it just the British mainland which would suffer this appalling catastrophe? The answer came after dark, which made it somehow more terrifying and forced the nation to sleep with their fears. As the hole reached the Bristol Channel, swallowing the city before it, it did not stop, did not just draw its walls in and close up like a zipped dress, it merely moved down the channel swallowing the water as it went. Ten minutes later the eastern rim of it broached the coast at Kings Lynn and the same thing happened. By the morning, most of the water in the Atlantic ocean was gone, as well as the contents of the English Channel and the North sea and the hole was threatening the Continental coastline. This problem was not going away. Panic struck then. Suddenly the entire population of Britain just had to get as far away from home as possible. The air terminals were suddenly under siege. Boats were no use because the channel had become an impassable gorge of treacherous sands and wrecked oil tankers. There wasn't a lot of water to float on. Every means of transport known to air travel was engaged to move the population. On Thursday a fleet of four hundred hot air balloons left from Lowestoft to cross to France. It really was that desperate. Australia felt very far away from it all and although the local kids did talk about it as they lounged on the beach after sunset next to driftwood fires downing tinnies and passing joints, it just didn't seem real to them. They hadn't seen it of course. Ray tried to remember that, and if he hadn't seen it, would he have taken it seriously? It wasn't that hard to forget about it during the day with these carefree kids in this beautiful place, but the fear was in his mothers eyes when they passed each other on the way to the bathroom night and morning. They never spoke of it, but he knew it was close to her mind too. Her parents had called from a reception centre in France. They were frightened and being moved again the next day. The hole had begun to encroach on the French coast and was rushing towards them at a rate of a mile an hour. She had begged her parents to fly over and join them but there wasn't a single flight with an empty seat for weeks. They would wait, they said, for the government to take care of them. They were sure that the government would take care of them, had lived their whole lives under that proviso, all of them had. They would wait. They were sure it would be all right. His Mum had come off the phone and cried. Ray had never seen her do that before, not even when his Dad left. His Dad, on the other hand, was one of the wise ones. Frightened for his son, he had bought a ticket out of the country the day after his flat was swallowed by the hole. He arrived in Perth that Sunday and Ray's mum went ballistic. Ray, ecstatic that his family were once again together, no matter how grim the conflict, had left the apartment to allow them room to scream at each other and headed for the Cyber cafe further down the sea front. Here he was gratified to discover that Andy had finally managed to get him an e-mail. It was two sentences long and contained a file attachment. >I'm okay. Only allowed one minute to use computer - please read attached file. A. > Ray downloaded the file and opened it there and then. It was a mail from the guy at NASA who Andy had always talked to. It gave the calculations for the black hole and offered a conclusion that Ray found too astonishing to believe. The guy at NASA was certain of his findings but had been silenced because everyone knew you couldn't fight a black hole. They didn't want the world to know it was doomed. Ray read the report and realised, right then and there, that life as he knew it was about to be over. An uneasy peace had fallen over the apartment when he got home. His Dad had managed to persuade his Mum to go out to a restaurant, according to a note propped on the kitchen table, but the air still reverberated with the tension they had left behind them. Even so, Ray was relieved. It was both reassuring and unnerving to have his parents seeing eye to eye. Things must be bad. They got back after he had gone to bed and so when he looked out of his window the next morning and let out a short strangled scream at what he saw, he was marginally surprised that it was his Dad who stuck his head around the bedroom door to see what was wrong. "The sea's gone." He said bleakly and, with shock taking over his face, his Dad looked where he pointed and saw that it was the truth. Beyond the beach a moonscape stretched as far as the eye could see. No rippled water, no heaving swell, no flat, reflective calm remained. Had they been explorers, they might have been able to walk all the way to Asia. "It's all finished isn't it Dad? Everything? It's over, right?" His Dad had no words to comfort his son, but he put an arm around his shoulders then and they stood that way, staring out at the strange landscape as the city of Perth woke up below them and realised that the hole was coming their way. Watching it on the TV was a bit like watching an election or a nuclear war. "It's got New York" was the catchphrase of that day. Or, "I hear it will take Moscow by tonight.", or, "Budapest is gone, Rio is gone, Toronto is gone. How long before it gets here?" No one else had any other interests. Half the world had disappeared into nowhere and people had stopped running away now. There was simply nowhere to go. It was on the Friday night, a week after his Dad had turned up, three weeks after arriving in Perth and only six weeks after finding the hole in the first place, that Ray coldly realised this was going to be their last night on Earth. The hole had swallowed most of Asia, all of North and South America and Canada. Only part of Alaska remained and the easternmost edge of China. Australia was all but isolated because the rest of the world had stopped sending messages. There was nothing to be said or done, nothing that could be salvaged or stored for safe keeping. There was nowhere to send the children or the sick and old. All and sundry had to just sit and wait for the end to come. TV was surreal, constant news reports, followed by hastily retrieved reruns of all the best programs ever made as though the nation needed a last fix of popular culture before it was devoured by Infinity. The kids Ray had started to hang out with had all gone home and the street outside was deserted. Ray looked out of the windows and thought that, at least for a week or two, it had been nice to live near the sea. Shame it was gone. Shame it was all gone. The next morning, he, his parents and half the community went out and sat on the beach. There wasn't much chat, no radios playing, no beach volleyball. No one brought surfboards or boogie boards. Everyone just sat in morose little groups, watching the skyline. Sydney, Melbourne, Victoria and Darwin had all gone during the night. The hole had consumed Alice Springs at dawn. It was going to be a race to see whether it got them from the east or the west. In the end, it came from the west. There was a gasp through the crowd as they saw it breast the horizon and race across the exposed sea bed towards them, a whirling hurricane of absolute nothingness that simply consumed everything that touched it. It flew toward that waiting beach and no one said anything. They simply sat, quietly together, some crying, many hugging children, lovers, friends, and as the edges reached them they all just slipped quietly into the night. Ray, hugged tightly within his parents embrace felt the ground disappear beneath him and they fell as one into the vortex with the screams of the lost ringing in their ears. As the edges of the hole reached around the world and the last few feet of the Planet earth were swallowed up, the atmosphere around the planet was sucked in also, the clouds, the ozone layer and all the satellites and space junk that orbited above. And then there was nothing.
Copyright © 2000 Carey Lenehan |