Introduction:
Ideas turn up, usually when there is paying work to be done and start dancing around with their sheer coolness. C’mon – work on me! I’m so much more entertaining than anything you’ve ever written so far! Sometimes you can ignore these or postpone them until after the paying work is done. Glow is a random idea that came from thinking about the Aurora Borealis and imagining kids deliberately electrocuting themselves and attempting my own apocalyse-style story. As a freelancer I have a lot of time to walk the streets in the middle of the day and it can be quite eerie. It’s quiet and you can believe you are the only one left. Except for the Core filth of course …
This is an unedited first draft. Note the overuse of the word “just”. I do like the idea behind this story but have no idea if I’ll ever finish it. Some ideas die before the story can be finished. This was written in about 2007 I believe.
Glow
Chapter 1
Oz breathes in deeply and says “I think we’ve definitely got a peppermint vibe going on here,” and I say “yeah, cool” as I strip the plastic from the cord to reveal the copper wires. Oz’s world of flavours and aromas is for me music and notes; for Tal it’s thuds and clicks and rhythms. I look out the window, watching out of habit although we’re miles away from a Core. The rule “ten miles and you’re safe” is still under review – all we need is one sight of a Flincher and there goes that one. Other dead rules:
They don’t come out between 3am and dawn.
If you wash the wound with alcohol right away you won’t get infected.
All batteries are a good source of power.
In the other room Tal is filling up a plastic tub with water and humming to herself, no doubt matching the rhythm she can hear from the wires embedded in the walls. “Nearly ready?” I call out, my stripped plug now prepared. She turns the water off and a moment later comes sloshing in with the tub filled up. She’s wet up to the elbows, droplets sparkling on her eyelids and hair, and the front of her top wet. “A little splashing incident,” she says as she thuds the tub down.
“What do you hear?” I say, although Oz has already said peppermint and his nose hasn’t been wrong before. Tal tilts here head and listens, nodding her head to the rhythm. “It’s a ticka-tala sweet juice as far as I can tell,” she says. “You?”
I walk over near the power point and duck down to place my ear to the wall. The soft light notes playing on the edge of hearing increase in volume and I hear the song of healthy happy power. We’ve already disabled the power-breaker downstairs and so we should get a good thirty seconds or more before some other fuse blows out. I plug my stripped cord in and stand up. “All sounding good to me.”
Having got the beautiful trio – peppermint, ticka-tali, and happy – we each place a naked foot into the tub, the warm water coming halfway up our respective calves. I drop the stripped end of the cord into the tub and then stand on it.
Before I flick the switch we say our own mantras.
“Screw the Flinchers,” says Tal.
“Fuck the Core,” says Oz.
“Damn them all to hell,” I say and then I hit the switch.
Ah, juice…
*
Ten minutes later we’re flying down the street with a major glow on. Oz is snorting huge lungfuls of air, tasting and smelling only 240V peppermint. Tal is clapping, stomping, clicking, chanting to the fading beat and I’m humming in every cell with the song. Three glorious minutes of juice before some local power breaker down the road got overloaded and fritzed right out. Streetlights flicker on as we pass, lighting up in the big ambiance and then dulling as we walk away. Normally we’d wait the mandatory twenty minutes for the first glow to fade down before heading out (being that streetlights, globes and practically any other electric thing turning on is like a big COME HERE NOW sign to any Flinchers or other Core-filth) but we’re easily fifteen miles from the nearest Core and so what the hell.
Oz zaps a letterbox to pieces with a fifty-yard ball and we’re clapping and laughing as splintered pieces of wood and metal clatter to the road. Yeah we’re into conservation, and in about ten minutes we’ll calm down with all this, but right now, stuffed full, dancing in the rain after the end of a drought we’re wasteful and too happy to care about a few balls getting flung. I tag a door from twenty yards, charring MIA RULES into its blue paint. “Nice accuracy,” says Oz and flicks two balls from his fingertips, adding umlauts about the A in Mia. “Showoff,” I say as Tal rolls her eyes at me.
Tal is rolling a ball, squishing it hard so it’ll firework with it hits when she suddenly stops, eyes wide and ears straining. “You hear that?” We stop laughing, walking, breathing, everything as fear sobriety hits. “It’s like a da-dum-da-dum-da-dum kinda thing,” says Tal. I listen hard but all I can hear is the faint notes of local power, the warm music of some underground cables and the occasional high chimes of batteries hidden in kitchen drawers, never to be used again, unless it’s by us or some other survivors.
“I’m still only getting peppermint,” said Oz, sniffing the wind.
“There’s no Core for ages,” said Tal, nervously swapping the ball from hand to hand. “They’re not going to go further than ten miles.”
“Yeah, and they don’t come out late at night either,” I say, trying to shut out all the local music. I can hear something faintly now, like a low E rising to A and then dropping back again. It sounds like an engine, something that definitely shouldn’t be ten miles plus out. We should be hiding, we all know it, but we’re also juiced and anything that turns up now is going to get fried before it gets close.
Then we see it – down the far end of the road a wheel emerges followed by the rest of the classic Tank body. But this one looks different…
“Is that cut down?” says Oz, squinting his eyes at the waist-high trundling machine. I pull out the binoculars and try to make sense of the shattered image through the cracked lenses. It is classic Tank but the edges are sliced open, making a grotesque bird cage around the soft pulsing muscle inside.
“You know what?” says Tal, lining up the machine with the hard ball. “Screw the Flinchers.”
“No wait! It’s not a normal Tank. They’re never open like this,” I say. “We should hide and see what it’s doing.”
“Or…” says Oz and holds out his hand. Tal passes him the ball, that by now is so squished down and hard it’s going to shrapnel like crazy. He layers it with a light shell to help him aim and then flings it in a perfect arc. “Or we can fuck the Core.”
The ball flies through the air like the most perfect baseball pitch you ever saw. The cut-down altered Tank doesn’t even have a chance to move out of the way before the ball hits in a giant shower of light. The hard middle of the ball bursts and the shrapnel shears the top of the Tank right off. Nearby windows break as debris flies in every direction, some hard bits of the ball still holding together as they slice through everything in their path. A moment later there is silence and then the moment after that – a scream.
A Flincher scream.
We all swear because a Flincher scream doesn’t mean it’s hurt or laying there shredded on the road. It means it’s alive and we all know that even half a Flincher, dragging itself along on hooks and hands, legs missing, blind and deaf and missing those pointed teeth is more than enough to kill.
Then we see it, careening around the corner, holding its bald head in its hands, running straight into a low front fence and toppling over with another scream.
“What the hell?” says Oz, rolling a ball between his palms. We’re all rolling balls, squishing and squeezing so we can kill the Flincher but it’s not running towards us. It’s not behaving like a normal Flincher at all. All grace and stretched muscle, twitching at every sound , the standard time between seeing one and having to kill it before it kills you is about thirty seconds.
“Maybe it’s shell-shocked,” I say, making my ball as sticky as possible. The Flincher stands up in the front yard and runs back toward the dead decapitated Tank. It crashes into the remains and goes down again. This time it doesn’t try to get up.
“If it’s just going to lay there then I’m just going to have to burn it to death,” says Oz, adding his final smooth layer.
“Yup,” says Tal and then we all aim and throw. Oz’s hits first, him being the fastest and most accurate. Mine and Tal’s hit a second later in a double explosion and the scream of the Flincher goes way up and then suddenly stops. “Nice burn,” says Oz, taking a deep breath. “Kinda mocha-coffee.” We all start rolling again as we creep up the street toward the glow of my sticky slow-burn. The Flincher is gone and they usually travel separate from each other but that doesn’t mean there won’t be some other Core-filth creature up there.
“Watch out for Scratchers,” says Tal, reading my mind. There’s probably none here – god knows they come running almost as fast as the Flinchers – but we slow anyways to quickly layer from the knee down. Scratchers, dumb crazed little disease carrying filth could have killed us all if only they thought to attack above the knee. A little more secure in our dull thin armour we move forward, the stink of the dead Flincher and the sliced Tank thick in the air.
“I can’t hear anything,” says Tal.
“Me neither.”
Oz takes a sniff. “Nothing Core around here.”
The Tank is essentially ruined, exploded into so many bits it’s hard to believe there was a living muscle inside it. The Flincher on the ground is so much charred bone and wiring. The whole area is less Tank and Flincher and more torn flesh and wrecked electronics. I do a quick futile inspection of what is left of the Tank, trying to discern a clue to the new look but it’s like staring at a pile of minced up powder and attempting to imagine it was once a statue.
“And now we leave,” I say. “We’ll throw back.”
We skirt around the wreckage and walk down the street, still wary. Once were about forty yards away we throw out balls back at the mess behind us. More explosions of light and the Tank and Flincher really are gone, mere unrecognisable flecks of green circuit board and meaty shreds. A single rain and the blackened hole where my slow-burner melted into the road will be the only evidence anything happened there at all. We peel the armour off and throw it on the ground, tiny particles of rainbow colour water-balloon bursting on the dark bitumen of the road.
As we look for a house to spend the night, one preferably easy for us to break in but then easy to barricade, the multiple images of the altered Tank seen through my cracked binoculars keep appearing before me.
A Tank. Miles, more than ten miles from a Core. With a Flincher. That didn’t try to kill us. That went crazy or something. An altered Tank touring miles from where it should be.
It was a list of impossible things.
But then, impossible things are what the last year and a half had all been about.
God damn them to hell I say to myself as Tal finds an open house and waves Oz and me in.
I don’t like impossible things. Impossible things end up killing you.
*
The mathematics of the Cores:
Six billion people-ish.
Three days = 72 hours.
Steps, about three metres wide, so about five people abreast can fit.
Steps down – unknown.
Divide six billion by 72.
About 80,000 an hour.
Number of Cores – worldwide, unknown. Melbourne – about thirty so far.
*
Canned food maths.
Expiry dates: 1-3 years.
What happens if you eat expired canned food? Vomit. Food poisoning. Possible death.
What happens if you don’t eat expired canned food? Hunger. Starvation. Very probable death.
So we eat.
*
Morning comes sliding along just like it was any other morning in the history of mornings. Of course this is all facade. The old mornings had cars and voices and food and traffic and people ebbing through the streets like blood cells in a vein. The new mornings have cars (rusting quietly), sometimes voices (glowers or Core-filth, screaming), food (scavenged), traffic (nope) and very few people who sure ain’t ebbing along all warm and relaxed.
Tal cooks us breakfast by glowing up an electric stove (we’re in a flat area now). Baked beans and then porridge, two mushy lumpy concoctions that I imagine getting gooey and mixed in my stomach. Urgh. Gloopy yes, but good for slow energy release. Perfect for running, hiding, glowing. Good for killing stuff.
Oz is marking up the map during breakfast. A little T and F for yesterday’s weird Tank and mental Flincher. I lean over and write a little “w” next to it.
“So we know it was a weird Tank,” I say.
Our map is covered with circles and letters, each new mark slicing the city into good and bad, healthy and sick, free and locked. We all look at it and I’m thinking it is our prison when Tal pokes a finger down on the map and determines today’s destination.
We’re out the door ten minutes later and walking down the street. Oz says it’s about nine o’clock according to his windup watch and that’s the best accuracy we can get right now. It’s about nine o’clock. Could be later could be earlier. It’s about a year and a half. Maybe a week or so more.
“Doopa doopa,” says Tal, apropos of nothing.
“Chicka-cha,” answers Oz.
I’m about to say “Badajoz Badajoz” to complete our made up word game when we walk around a corner and there at the end of the street is a giant black hole in the road, surrounded by tanks laying down shiny black panels.
Oz is the first to react; he grabs our arms and pulls us backward.
“Core. It’s a core,” says Tal, her face flushed, red marks standing out on her cheeks. She turns to me, her face knotting up. “I took us to a Core. I took us here.”
“Let’s burn it,” says Oz, reckless and crazy just like yesterday; just like fifty times before.
His lunacy shocks me back to language and I take a deep shuddering breath. I didn’t realise I had been holding it, my lungs locked down as a wave of cold adrenaline fizzed through me.
“It’s a Core,” I croak through my fear-tightened throat. But he’s already got a ball charging, a big half-basketball size that’ll lob slow and explode fast.
“It’s a new core and we can burn it out before it gets going. Maybe we can even get inside and see what they are doing down there,” he says, laying and squishing all the while.
“I didn’t hear anything,” says Tal, staring at the house blocking our view of the new core.
Oz’s glow is pouring into the ball and it is shining up into a good burn. I’m staring at it and trying to think our options through but the music pouring out of the ball is putting out arguments so loud I can’t keep my thoughts running straight.
“Ok, we burn but if anything comes this way we run. Oz? Ok? Tal – we need armour.”
Tal nods with her mouth open and starts making armour on autopilot as I glow up a slow sticky ball. Oz is shelling his ball as Tal layers us up a minute later. “Nearly ready,” I say and I glow as hard as I can and shell the outside of my ball.
“We go now,” says Oz, not waiting for me to finish. He steps around the corner and hurls the ball in an overarm lob. I follow him and throw mine a second later. Tal glows up marble-sized shrapnel and flings it right after me. One of the tanks spots us and swallows back its black tile. It shoots towards the hole in a jerk of tread and disappears just as Oz’s ball hits one of the other tanks dead on. The tank vaporises and Oz swears because it was meant to hit in the middle of the group. Shrapnel flies off, slicing through tread and metal sides but failing to do much. My ball hits with Tal’s marbles and another two tanks shred. The splashing explosion from mine slaps glowing light all around, burning and sticky.
“Showoff,” grunts Oz and flings another ball. This one is baseball sized and is a simple exploder. It hits. It explodes. Another tank stops. From the burning glow a tank comes roaring out, covered in flames of light. It screams down the road with indecent haste towards us. Tal throws a scattershot of marbles. Only one hits, a glancing scuff and bounces to crack on the concrete gutter.
The tank swings a flame-covered grasping claw out and the music of death begins to play. Jarring high notes, abrupt jolts, timing a human would never write. This song is short. So is the word dead. Oz squints his eyes at the smell of the weapon charging and throws a quick small golf ball. No problem with his aim. It hits the front panel and punches in but doesn’t break through. I’m glowing up a ball to blast the tank apart when there is a mechanical cough and grind and the song cuts out. The tread freezes and the tank jolts to stop. It’s burning with light and shuddering. We’ve step out of the firing line and back before I throw. The tank keeps burning but it’s not shuddering now.
