The Fall of Man

Part III chapter 1

3

IMPERFECTIONS

“The world will undergo famines – hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programmes embarked upon now.”  Paul Erlich, the Population Bomb, 1968

Chapter 1

Evelyn opens her eyes gingerly, and scrutinises the thing that has been placed ceremoniously in front of her. It stands, quivering gently on its china plate, like a head-sized piece of alabaster clay cut fresh from the ground. An outer covering of thick wet icing hangs in soft white curls, and obscures completely whatever form the cake might originally have taken. On its top, sixteen flames flicker in the gentle draught that is pulling air through the room. As she watches, a tiny spherical bead of molten wax forms at the tip of each burning candle.

“Well? her father jostles her impatiently. Are you going to make a wish or not?”

“Come on, Dad. We’ve talked about this forever. You agreed that after my birthday, I’d be old enough to go look for myself.”

“YOU agreed, you mean. Evie, we’re safe here. I know it’s hard work, and I’m sure it must be very dull for a girl your age, but I need you here with me. So much time has passed since we left. We have no idea what’s there any more – the other people are probably all long gone…”

Eve spins on her heel and storms out of the room. On the other side of the small house, a door slams shut. Noah curses to himself. His mind wanders back to the city that was slowly spiralling out of control. Somehow, he finds his own assertions - that the inhabitants are extinct and the place is nothing but a ghost town - very hard to believe.

Thinking back, it doesn’t seem like sixteen years have passed since they fled. Undoubtedly, he is older now; at sixty five years of age, he has finally earnt some of the wrinkles and lines that he avoided by lying prone and unconscious for so much of his life. But he still remembers the night of their escape as though it were yesterday.

The moment Eve’s mother died, he decided that they must leave the city. It was a risky move – a move that he probably wouldn’t have contemplated if he had known what faced them beyond the city. But he did know that their period of grace at the hospital had run out, and that with Eve’s arrival the laboratory tests would never stop. Four days later, with Gwen’s funeral behind them, they headed northwards from the hospital compound towards the perimeter Wall. And all those years ago, he swore that if they ever made it to their safe haven, he would never go back…

Getting out of the city had been the easy bit. When darkness fell, he returned to the site of the North Gate. With some rudimentary supplies from the hospital boiler room, he started a small fire in an archive on the first floor of an office just across the street from the guarded barrier. The reams of old, dry paper caught easily and the blaze spread quickly from stack to stack. Closing the door on the hungry flames, he returned to the street and selected a vantage point on the Wall’s parapet high above the gate. There, he waited. Before long, a thick cloud pressed at the tinted office windows. A few more minutes passed before the first window pane cracked under the heat with a barely audible ping. Soon, a grey cloud of smoke began to billow discretely into the air above the street. With a gust of fresh air, the flames reared up against the inside face of the windows.

Sure enough, once the blaze took hold it brought people running. As it spread from one office to the next and threatened the densely piled apartments above, one by one the guards at the gate abandoned their posts to assist with the evacuation.