The Fall of Man

Part III chapter 10

Chapter 10

A rock is stuck in the sole of her left shoe. It makes a crystal-clear ping with every other step she takes on the perforated metal treads that ascend the Wall to one side of the gate. When her head eventually rises over the battered parapet, the devastation surrounding the city is laid out before her. Pausing atop the rickety staircase for a moment to catch her breath, she sets her water bottle down with a clunk. Even half full, it is heavy and awkward to carry.

From this vantage point, she sees clearly the slow meander that brought her from the edge of the river across the desolate plains to the silent, isolated metropolis. She wonders where her father finally came to rest; tossed downstream like so much flotsam, his bloated body jammed beneath a rocky undercroft, floating face down in a still section of water, or perhaps silently drifting out into the wide expanse where the river meets the sea...

Turning her back on the glittering line of water far away, she faces the sombre facades of the lumbering buildings that huddle around the gate. Lording high over these squat forms are the giant high-rise edifices that Eve first saw from such a distance on the horizon, as she floated peacefully in the small dinghy with her father several days earlier. He had described on countless occasions how the tallest structures march across the city in jostling lines, balanced belligerently against one another. He had explained at length how they seemed positioned just close enough that if one were to topple like a titanic domino, it would surely begin a destructive chain reaction, carving bold new avenues across the entire city. Only now, Noah’s wondrous horror at their epic scale makes sense.

In contrast to the decay she has already seen close up, it is impossible to judge from afar how these giant structures have weathered the passing years; they all stand remarkably straight and true. However, the towers have lost the human pulse described so colourfully by Noah. The long crane booms are static - frozen like spears in a snapshot of tribal melee. The windows are dark; empty eye sockets in a million grinning skulls. However, it is the filler in between each of the lofty towers that forms the meat of the city – a sea of blocks, ten or fifteen storeys high, spread thick like butter across the urban landscape to make full use of every available nook and cranny, and all of it apparently lying empty and crumbling. These are the fossilised remains of a dead city – an empty shell with all the life removed.

In the fading evening light, it takes Eve a few moments to identify the place where she first saw the beacon – a tapering black obelisk with two pronged antennae; it stands head and shoulders over most of the other towers at the very centre of the city. Locating the source of that beacon, however tenuous, is the only course of action left open to her.

The approach to the dark tower is littered with glass fragments that crunch under her mismatched shoes. With its expansive windows shattered, there is no clear boundary between inside and outside, other than the oversailing edge of the entrance canopy. At some point she sets foot inside the lobby. A crocodile of shopping trolleys snakes its way around the curved veneer of the reception desk. The last dregs of daylight glisten off their metallic frames.

Eve skirts around the twisted wheeled cages and into a tunnel of a foyer. Polished stone lines the walls and floor, and a bank of eight lifts frames either side of the space. Their doors are panels of tarnished steel. They each bear the creases, dents and folds of years of abuse. Two have been jammed open, and the shafts beyond are dark, but in the failing light Eve can make out that each is piled high with rubble and debris. A pair of battered vending machines languish at the apse of the foyer. They have been tumbled onto their sides and their glass fronts shattered. Eve is suddenly gripped by an urgent hunger. She squats down beside the machines and hunts carefully through the exposed carcasses. But their steel coils have been picked dry like the sad, skeletal remains of two long-dead beasts.