Original -- Welcome

[tierfal]

Title: Welcome
Word Count: 2,742
Prompt: "Welcome to the Black Parade"
Warnings: language, the Apocalypse
Summary: He was alone.
Author's Note: I'm pretty sure that without eltea, I wouldn't exist. ♥


WELCOME
                                   Son of man
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water.
- “The Waste Land” - T.S. Eliot -

We’ll carry on; we’ll carry on
And though you’re dead and gone, believe me
Your memory will carry on
We’ll carry on
And though you’re broken and defeated
Your weary widow marches on
- “Welcome to the Black Parade” - My Chemical Romance -

He was in a meat locker when the world blew up.

Technically, he supposed, the world had been blown up, but transitive verbs were the absolute last thing on his mind.

Hours after the impact-hours after the crash, the boom, the shattering that had shuddered through his fragile bones-he staggered out into the hazy gray, having finally managed to shove the door open despite the rubble piled against it from the other side.

Panting, nursing the broad scrape that straining against the door had carved across his shoulder, he forced his way out into a hall, a room, a building he didn’t recognize. Everything was broken, crumbling, bent, singed, streaked with the prints of greedy ashen fingers. The air chafed his throat; something like a premonition made the hairs at the back of his neck prickle and stand to attention as he sidled towards the shattered front door. He coughed, weakly, and covered his mouth.

Old habits die hard.

The world had gone down easy.

Aidan Marchmont, twenty-eight-year-old health inspector, stepped into an Apocalypse nothing like he’d hoped.

This was like a movie. That’s what it was. A joke, a hallucination, a mirage, something in that corn-syrup-food-coloring vein. This was going to be hilarious any second now, when he woke up and the smoke cleared and the incomprehensible horror of this non-world dissolved.

He was alone.

No, he couldn’t possibly be alone-surely there were others. Somebody else would have been in a meat locker, in a refrigerator, fucking somewhere with insulated walls and some semblance of protection. Somebody else would have survived.

Really, though. The odds that a fairly considerable portion of the six billion inhabitants of the planet Earth-statistically-just-strength of numbers-there had to be…

Then again, statistically, those people were most likely to be in China.

Hell if he could get to China. He’d have to swim; the airports would all be rubble, and the streets were clogged with looming hunks of steel like unfinished sculptures. Capsized ships would litter the harbors, scattered cargo drifting, bobbing, rolling on unaltered waves; and inkblot oil spills would stain the shores, the opal-obsidian sheen of their greedy reaches broken by the carcasses of a thousand sea creatures washed up dead.

No phone lines. No computers. No traffic lights; no cars to heed them; no circulation, no communication to speak of or to speak through; no fucking plumbing, no running water-nothing. Nothing left. No modern world; no civilization; no retreat.

No home. Nowhere to hide.

This was all getting frightfully melodramatic.

Aidan swallowed the grit in his throat, locking his knees to stop their quaking.

It was the sheer magnitude of the destruction that struck him first-like a lead pipe to the face (Colonel Mustard, in the Conservatory). It was the skyscrapers, fallen and fragmented, raising shattered window shards to the hazy hush of clouds; it was the stop signs bent like candy-canes; it was the shredded pavement, crosswalk lines like scattered hyphens, interrupted, incomplete. It was the neon letters that lay in pieces in the ash. It was the finality. The fatality. The flames, queasy-slick and guttering low.

His knees quavered, and he sucked in another breath of smoggy air.

Move. Keep moving.

He had to concentrate, had to focus, had to force his feet to listen to him-had to coax the neurons down his calves, had to compel the muscles into motion. The panorama didn’t shimmer, didn’t even twitch, as he took the first step of many.

One small step for a man.

One pace closer to oblivion.

He wondered if this was what they’d felt like, on the moon, looking out over a landscape they’d seen from an astronomical distance, laid out before them now-a dream world to Aidan Marchmont’s overzealous nightmare.

He’d imagined it, but not like this.

With slow, unsteady steps, the footwork of a wanderer, he started down the wracked, ruptured sidewalk that stretched ahead.

Wind.

He hadn’t expected wind.

He supposed it was stupid to think that the endless grids and rows of buildings, blocks of iron, cement, and steel, could be removed without consequence-to think that they wouldn’t have been blocking something, holding something back, protecting, supporting…

That was that, then. Wind it was.

Invisible fingers clawed eagerly at his coat, and he pulled it tighter around him, fighting back. His shirtfront rippled, and his necktie writhed and danced as if it had been given all the life the explosion had taken away.

He scrabbled for the knot and tugged it loose, letting the fabric slither free, and then he released it to the wind. Away, away; a black banner; a stark slash of true nothing against the contours of gray; a strip of silk fading, fluttering, gone.

A discolored flag of surrender.

The nausea blossomed in the pit of his stomach before fifteen minutes had passed, if the slender, quivering hands of his wristwatch were to be trusted.

He staggered. “Planet of the Apes.” “The Day After Tomorrow”-today, in place of tomorrow; always, now.

Apocalypse now.

He’d studied the Cold War most thoroughly in the eleventh grade, though he’d usually spent the class counting ceiling tiles and drawing skulls and crossbones on his notes. Mutually-Assured Destruction-if one side pressed the button, the other would, to make it quick and painless, to obviate the months where a shaded sun failed to stop the remaining half of a dark world from withering.

Aidan had thought that that was bullshit. Sixteen, smirking, patterns and doodlings sprawling under the tip of his pen-he wouldn’t kill half the world just because their leader was a fuckwit. Just because they’d hit first. Just because there were five minutes before the mushrooms sprouted from once-fertile ground, and ruin rained from those strange-shaped clouds.

Just because there was time for revenge.

He wondered who had started this one and made those speculations, twelve years old and fading, cuttingly real.

But it didn’t really matter, did it? Someone had done it, someone else had followed, and the world had given way.

He stumbled; every limb went to jelly for a long moment, his head throbbing, the whole of him aching with a devouring feeling of fatigue. A telephone pole that had been snapped seven feet above the ground, tangled wires sparking lackadaisically around the half lying in the street, supported him, splintered wood beneath his trembling hand.

The worst of the vertigo passed, and he straightened to survey this portion of the waste. A vast field of rubble spread before him, chunks of cinderblocks and jagged chips of glass mingling, indistinguishable and unconcerned. He didn’t want to know what lay crumbled beneath the remnants of the toppled tenement that had hurled its bulk across the distance as if to hide the gathering below. As if to save the innocents.

Breathing raggedly, gasping in the smoke, Aidan started to climb. Perhaps he thought he could see from the top, detect some hope, descry some life, or maybe he just wanted to own this place.

Wood, cement, and plastic crumpled under his weight, fractured pieces skittering away from the scuffed soles of his dusty leather shoes. Black paint flaked and chipped from the steel bars that crossed and crisscrossed the swell of the disordered mound, and when Aidan gripped them for leverage, he drew his hands back stained.

Choking, clutching helplessly at his chest, he reached the peak.

There wasn’t much to see.

The chaos continued, for miles, for days.

He felt blindly behind him for somewhere to sit. A surface-cold, smooth-grazed his fingertips; he turned to look.

It was a bass drum. The bass drum of a drum kit, the rest of which was presumably buried deeper, buried with its owner. A perfect cylinder, stranded in this pandemonium. Black PVC gleamed, bordered around the edge with pictograph guns-fifteen white, one red.

Gingerly he sat; it gave a quiet creak but held his weight.

He couldn’t sing for shit, but his own dry-throated caterwauling would be the only music he would be able to find here.

Culture. Culture was dead, dead with the artists, with the lovers, with the fighters. Western culture, Eastern culture, every facet, every nuance, every overlap. Diversity, subversion, satire, opera, ritual, home-

Made his A-minus in U.S. history seem pretty pointless.

His teacher had taken three points off his final exam for drawing skeletons in the margins. Red-felt-pen slashes, reprimanding, so that his paper bled.

If she was alive, he would have liked to see her face now.

He would have liked to see anyone’s face.

Aidan looked down at his hands, at the white lines like cracks in the coating of ash on his palms. There was more of it still beneath his fingernails, and he scraped his knuckles against his slacks, trying to wipe them clean so that he could rub his eyes.

Didn’t work too well when the whole world was dust.

He heaved himself to his feet again, refusing to think about what was crunching under the soles of his shoes, and started walking again-kept moving. Carried on.

Some part of him knew, some part of him had known since he’d stumbled into the broken, graying sunlight that gleamed on the drifting flecks of ash that filled the air-some part of him knew that he would die of radiation poisoning in a matter of days.

He probably didn’t have long.

But he did have now, and that was something.

That was what he’d been thinking as he had slammed his shoulder into the blocked steel door, huff-shuffle-thump, until he was bleeding and then until it gave.

It took another half an hour to shift the rubble enough to slip through the gap, and then he’d finally wriggled free.

Free to wander hell until his flesh rotted from the inside out.

But that was something.

He squinted. There was something moving-something else moving-at the other end of this rutted, pock-marked street. There was something that looked like a human being.

Aidan didn’t care if it was a mass-murderer loosed from a shattered maximum-security prison, as long as he would be able to speak to someone. In this world, in this nothingness, confirming his existence, establishing his own reality, was more important than anything else he could think of.

He could probably come up with something violent to say if they needed some common ground to discuss.

As the man-for so he was-staggered closer, Aidan moved to meet him halfway, wanting to shout, to cheer, to greet this bloody-faced stranger, bound tightly to him by the simple fact of their shared survival, at the top of his lungs. It was exhilarating, exultant, not to be alone.

The gash on the man’s forehead could have done with stitches, but a crushed-cinder poultice seemed to be sufficing. Aidan looked into the pair of rich brown eyes set in the warm-toned, slightly weathered face, saw an agony a thousand times thicker and more potent than his own, and fumbled for his faculties of speech.

His newfound fellow was not so mute. A wet cough cleared the man’s throat, and a voice that would have been smooth, would have been honeyed, attempted, “C-Ciao?”

One other living human being on Earth, and Aidan Marchmont didn’t understand a word of Italian.

Ciao. Hello, goodbye-like Aloha. He didn’t know what it was about Hawaiians and Italians that imparted on both of them the desire to condense a pair of opposites into a single word. If every ending was a beginning, how did you know you’d moved at all?

“English?” he managed on his second try.

There was a new pain in those eyes, and a heavier weariness in the dark hand that swiped the latest crusting blood from its owner’s brow. Accented, struggling, the reply: “No… Sorry…”

“I’m sorry, too,” Aidan whispered, feeling it-feeling the apology cut into his insides like a cattle-brand.

He drew in a fortifying breath, choked on the polluted air, and tried again.

“How-” He shrugged to indicate his ignorance. “-did… you…” That one was easy enough. “…get… here?” He spread his arms wide for the whole of it, the whole of what remained, for the wreckage and rubble that made them kings.

“Un-aereoplano-” He pantomimed something-his hand soaring through the air.

“You were on a plane?” Aidan prompted, unsettled by the thought. To have survived such a thing-it explained the battered clothing and the blood, but to have survived a plane crash when the world was wrought with flame-that was obscenely unlikely, but the man-the Italian-was tangible. This was real.

All of this was real. That was the part that wouldn’t sink in and settle no matter how many times he tried to understand it. This was real, and this was all that was left.

Disregarding Aidan’s general incredulity, the Italian fought out his wallet and opened it to a small photograph of a woman with long dark hair, two children in her lap. He was gesticulating to it and muttering an explanation, presumably mostly to himself. There wasn’t time to muster up some sort of body lingual encouragement before Aidan’s latest-and probably last-acquaintance was sinking down onto the twisted shreds of the sidewalk, stroking his thumb down the picture until the glossy surface was streaked with ash.

Aidan was dizzy again-dizzy at the thought that it was all like this. The entire planet, every country, every place-every family torn to pieces; every bond broken; every life tossed idly to the winds, the brutal winds that screamed about the wilderness and fed the fires. Theirs was suddenly a world of widows waiting for a plane that would never land.

Aidan sat down, too. At his heels was a curb where taxis had used to stop, where people had used to gather, where rainwater had run in filthy streams, washing dust from the streets, ferrying it to some distant drain.

There were no taxis now. There were lumps of black-singed steel; there were hills of broken glass.

There was more dust than ever. There was carnage. There was ash.

His parents were dead.

His friends were, too.

All his exes; all his prospects; all the smudged-liner eyes and every stiletto heel.

Obliterated was such a textbook word.

Aidan registered, with a dull-graphite sort of surprise, that he was crying.

The Mayans had given them until two-thousand-fucking-twelve. This wasn’t right, this couldn’t be right, it couldn’t be over…

He wondered what the Mayan word was for “goodbye.”

He was so tired. He couldn’t remember ever having felt so exhausted in his life.

Maybe this wasn’t life. Maybe this was a dream, like he’d hoped before; maybe this was a dream, and it would end. Maybe he would open his eyes and push back the tangled sheets and scrambled to the window, and he would be greeted by a cloudless, flawless, faultless blue sky, immaculate and never-ending, and everything would be all right.

Everything would be.

The emptiness was the worst. The silence. The absence. The loss.

Aidan reached out an unsteady hand and set it on the Italian’s shoulder.

“What’s your name?” he asked, slowly, patting his own chest vaguely over his heart. “I’m Aidan.”

The Italian wiped his eyes and his forehead.

“Giovanni,” he returned. “Mi chiamo Giovanni. Piacere, Aidan. Aidan…” He turned his tongue around it, rolled it, let it loose. “Come questo è accaduto? Perché?”

Aidan shook his head, not because he couldn’t parse the words but precisely because he could-because he could hear them in the tone, could hear them creeping around his own mouth, wanting utterance.

“It was all bound to end eventually,” he answered softly. “Someday it had to fall apart.”

They sat, together, on the once-curb for a long time, looking, breathing, under the smoke of the sky.

Aidan wondered how much longer they had until night.

He wondered how much longer they had until the poison won.

It was slightly strange that even here, now, with a pale half-life of ruin and ash, he was terrified to die.

Giovanni set a heavy hand on his shoulder, squeezing gently, tear trails cutting channels through the blood and dust caked on his cheeks.

“Grazie,” he said. “Grazie, Aidan.”

Shakily, but undeniably, Aidan smiled. That was two words of Italian he knew.

“Grazie, Giovanni,” he said. “Grazie for being alive.”