Black Blood Cells.
Jul. 23rd, 2014 10:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
edwardshttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0i3cEdaM6y4
All you need is a fast car, with thick doors and small windows. Take mine.
"But what will you do".
He lifts his arm. The black veins fought like worms to get beyond the ragged tourniquet. He drops the keys into my cold, clammy palm as I fight the urge to hold him.
"Me? I'll fade out, like the rest. You can wait if you want, if you think this chance merits mercy. But if I were you, son, I'd run and run now. And take her with you."
At first, it seemed a safe place. The machinery still whirred, though surely the people that once tended to the beating heart of Compressor Station 13 would have succumbed by now. Better to be safe than sorry though. We had a full tank, a fast car, and had to get out by nightfall.
In the distance, a hint of a cry. We look. Foxes? Or a child? The fences looked intact, uncompromised. Could someone have gained access to the compound and found shelter.
Too late. You ran to the trunk and tried to get the gun, but the electronic lock had engaged, and the trees rustled with far too much depth, weight to be a Fox or a child. I struggled with the key, but the last I saw was your hand dragged into the undergrowth. As I pulled the door shut, kicking the brake off and selecting drive in one move, the cries of the child were drowned out by your screams.
They'd stay with me for as long as I lived.
Not too long.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCYnTK9GvZc
We'd found that spot years ago. "Take me to where the fire burns daylight away", you said, and we watched the sun drawn into the abyss, singeing the canalboats and livestock red across the fields, burning embers that would remain until the morning relit them. A tiny phoenix in every scene.
Sounding drunk, yet with consummate precision, Lux Interior declares that you look, taste, smell good. I agree.
Like you, he's dead now. Yet immortal. Ghosts that haunt this ship as it plies ever emptier tarmac seas, in search of the last life, the last fuel... the last breath.
Today is about surviving the apocalypse.
Being able to chase that glowing red ball, swearing at the treelines, until something else strikes the eye and the story comes together.
Not the last.
During the day... before they come out... if I leave the windows down, I can hear them.
Others.
Maybe they didn't fight, or maybe they hid just long enough.
Maybe they fought too well.
They find old radios. If I switch it to Shortwave, I can try to trace them... a hint, between the old automated numbers stations.
The real ones faded a long time ago
All just repeating
15
15
15
15
then silence.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98ZA7XqwXLY&list=PLQcH1mT1S1FIwRqYORu_BAOFf0VOVljW5
Most lasted a week.
But those robotic voices still broadcast, loops of tape, old circuits.
And God, or whoever, help anyone out beyond those stars that follows that siren call, that echo of humanity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ty1kAz7gR0
Because 7 billion became 1. And then few.
And this planet's most life-giving element. The thing that we all came from... took us back.
China and Japan were first.
They consume so much seafood; it wasn't the big things - the whales had it as bad as we did, but we weren't to know.
But the plankton...
Long chains, mercury and polymers from all the waste... mutated the DNA.
It spread like a cancer in the blood, white cells becoming toxic, like oil. That's why they were black... but the worst thing was, the body knew it was under attack.
More white cells... more mutation.
People just began to fight. Stress. It was slow... like they wanted to keep their daily routine?
But were doing it under such pressure inside.
Little things. Office chairs thrown. Kettles poured over misbehaving children. Each step a little closer to feral survival.
Some couldn't handle it, and jumped, took their own lives.
I saw my own family fall apart. My granddaughter thrown like a doll as my daughter in law couldn't handle one more tantrum.
Then my own son.. he had a gun. He shot them both.
Sometimes it spread through sex; the whole dock of Leith in Scotland was gone in a month.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BgOTxKHsHLE
The crematorium was running full time, before the staff threw themselves in, contaiminated.
I still don't know how some of us survived.
Well...
Maybe me.
Cheeseburgers were a vice, they said.
But washing the meat in ammonia, nothing natural could survive that.
Vegans, vegetarians, junk food addicts.
And then they began to fall too, tending the dying.
In LA, driveby became an act of mercy.
They say Chicago barely changed, but they're wrong. It's safer now.
But around Lake Erie was where it hit America
Once it reached the Eastern seaboard, that was it. Niagra is a mass grave now, the flesh torn from rotting bodies and strangely white, washed skeletons left behind, I hear.
The radio keeps playing, after all.
I keep thinking, there must be life in the dustbowl. Surrounded by thousands of miles of land, acrid, dry red dirt.
You can't eat an Oklahoma rose.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DlHmoYP7V4
But neither can the carriers.
Epilogue:
Oklahoma City was deserted by the time I got there. Ashes to ashes, dust to dustbowl, but whipped clean by the winds. The Crystal Bridge was overgrown with dry, dead plants, no buzz of insects. I pulled the car into the parking lot at Westin Tower and took to the tunnels - the shops still stocked.
Cockroaches and Twinkies.
There's no-one left. No voice in the wires now. I wonder who else is out there... and where. Somewhere the army, the Government, must still have operations - hermetically sealed, bunkers...
There's no fuel, The cars are gone. The stickers were wrong - I guess the Rapture takes not only the flesh machine your soul travels in, it takes the metal one too.
Won't find me in here, though.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9IFs5ROcBc
All you need is a fast car, with thick doors and small windows. Take mine.
"But what will you do".
He lifts his arm. The black veins fought like worms to get beyond the ragged tourniquet. He drops the keys into my cold, clammy palm as I fight the urge to hold him.
"Me? I'll fade out, like the rest. You can wait if you want, if you think this chance merits mercy. But if I were you, son, I'd run and run now. And take her with you."
At first, it seemed a safe place. The machinery still whirred, though surely the people that once tended to the beating heart of Compressor Station 13 would have succumbed by now. Better to be safe than sorry though. We had a full tank, a fast car, and had to get out by nightfall.
In the distance, a hint of a cry. We look. Foxes? Or a child? The fences looked intact, uncompromised. Could someone have gained access to the compound and found shelter.
Too late. You ran to the trunk and tried to get the gun, but the electronic lock had engaged, and the trees rustled with far too much depth, weight to be a Fox or a child. I struggled with the key, but the last I saw was your hand dragged into the undergrowth. As I pulled the door shut, kicking the brake off and selecting drive in one move, the cries of the child were drowned out by your screams.
They'd stay with me for as long as I lived.
Not too long.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCYnTK9GvZc
We'd found that spot years ago. "Take me to where the fire burns daylight away", you said, and we watched the sun drawn into the abyss, singeing the canalboats and livestock red across the fields, burning embers that would remain until the morning relit them. A tiny phoenix in every scene.
Sounding drunk, yet with consummate precision, Lux Interior declares that you look, taste, smell good. I agree.
Like you, he's dead now. Yet immortal. Ghosts that haunt this ship as it plies ever emptier tarmac seas, in search of the last life, the last fuel... the last breath.
Today is about surviving the apocalypse.
Being able to chase that glowing red ball, swearing at the treelines, until something else strikes the eye and the story comes together.
Not the last.
During the day... before they come out... if I leave the windows down, I can hear them.
Others.
Maybe they didn't fight, or maybe they hid just long enough.
Maybe they fought too well.
They find old radios. If I switch it to Shortwave, I can try to trace them... a hint, between the old automated numbers stations.
The real ones faded a long time ago
All just repeating
15
15
15
15
then silence.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98ZA7XqwXLY&list=PLQcH1mT1S1FIwRqYORu_BAOFf0VOVljW5
Most lasted a week.
But those robotic voices still broadcast, loops of tape, old circuits.
And God, or whoever, help anyone out beyond those stars that follows that siren call, that echo of humanity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ty1kAz7gR0
Because 7 billion became 1. And then few.
And this planet's most life-giving element. The thing that we all came from... took us back.
China and Japan were first.
They consume so much seafood; it wasn't the big things - the whales had it as bad as we did, but we weren't to know.
But the plankton...
Long chains, mercury and polymers from all the waste... mutated the DNA.
It spread like a cancer in the blood, white cells becoming toxic, like oil. That's why they were black... but the worst thing was, the body knew it was under attack.
More white cells... more mutation.
People just began to fight. Stress. It was slow... like they wanted to keep their daily routine?
But were doing it under such pressure inside.
Little things. Office chairs thrown. Kettles poured over misbehaving children. Each step a little closer to feral survival.
Some couldn't handle it, and jumped, took their own lives.
I saw my own family fall apart. My granddaughter thrown like a doll as my daughter in law couldn't handle one more tantrum.
Then my own son.. he had a gun. He shot them both.
Sometimes it spread through sex; the whole dock of Leith in Scotland was gone in a month.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BgOTxKHsHLE
The crematorium was running full time, before the staff threw themselves in, contaiminated.
I still don't know how some of us survived.
Well...
Maybe me.
Cheeseburgers were a vice, they said.
But washing the meat in ammonia, nothing natural could survive that.
Vegans, vegetarians, junk food addicts.
And then they began to fall too, tending the dying.
In LA, driveby became an act of mercy.
They say Chicago barely changed, but they're wrong. It's safer now.
But around Lake Erie was where it hit America
Once it reached the Eastern seaboard, that was it. Niagra is a mass grave now, the flesh torn from rotting bodies and strangely white, washed skeletons left behind, I hear.
The radio keeps playing, after all.
I keep thinking, there must be life in the dustbowl. Surrounded by thousands of miles of land, acrid, dry red dirt.
You can't eat an Oklahoma rose.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DlHmoYP7V4
But neither can the carriers.
Epilogue:
Oklahoma City was deserted by the time I got there. Ashes to ashes, dust to dustbowl, but whipped clean by the winds. The Crystal Bridge was overgrown with dry, dead plants, no buzz of insects. I pulled the car into the parking lot at Westin Tower and took to the tunnels - the shops still stocked.
Cockroaches and Twinkies.
There's no-one left. No voice in the wires now. I wonder who else is out there... and where. Somewhere the army, the Government, must still have operations - hermetically sealed, bunkers...
There's no fuel, The cars are gone. The stickers were wrong - I guess the Rapture takes not only the flesh machine your soul travels in, it takes the metal one too.
Won't find me in here, though.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9IFs5ROcBc
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no subject
Date: 2015-03-10 01:59 am (UTC)