Revelations End: Abaddon

ROAD

Chapter 3

"It is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness"

Chinese proverb

Kane stared into the distance, his eyes unfocused as a swarm of competing thoughts passed jumbled through his head. The small tent behind him was pulled low, hugging the ground, set below the crest of the hill to lower its profile against the skyline. The few hardy patches of grass that shone through the snow around him were laid flat and beaten by the cold northerly wind, and below him the A92 stretched from the city he'd left on the west to the east, its focus lost to the distance and the fields that bordered it. Across it the silent houses of Monifieth lay like watchman, standing guard against the encroaching sea below; its silver shine at monochromatic odds with the silhouetted suburban monoliths watching it pass from above.

Across the Tay, barely discernible through the frigid misted air, Tentsmuir lay barren. The erosion always inherent from the river and in the air, fought for so many years, now lay waste to the forest, and the wan light filtered through the matchstick remains of once proud pines that had lost the battle against the salt laden sea and incessant cold.

To his right the city loomed across the horizon, its lightless profile a permanent headstone to grief and death. It had had its phoenix moments over time; its prominence on the Tay, its superficial majesty on the slopes of the Law Hill masking the creeping cancer beneath the surface. A city made rich on whale and jute, it had been slow even then to recognise its death throes when those markets vanished in the face of progression, hanging doggedly on to the jam and journalism that remained, trying desperately to carve a name for itself in the games, art, and contemporary spaces; 'The Coolest Small City in the UK', a strapline at one point. A source of pride, but a pride belied by the social deprivation of so many other cities... pride carried only so far on the fragile wings of its past, dead and gone in an instant like all the others.

Light slowly seeped into the sky, serving only to highlight the dense cloud scudding before the wind over the landscape. It had taken him a day and a half to reach this little distance and his limbs ached with the stress of his journey through the concrete and steel wilderness to his west. Hunched up inside the sleeping bag, he kept his fingers tightly clenched around the pocket warmer within, its meagre heat barely registering above the constant of the icy climate.

The last few days whizzed through his head in a nonsense blur of sensations and images and he clenched his teeth against it, trying to force some coherence back into his mind. Frightening thoughts still throbbed darkly at the edge of his vision, undiminished despite flight and fatigue; but they gave purpose to his being, purpose he had lacked for two years beyond the need for his immediate survival. Still in his head doubts burned.

Was it really an angel? How was this possible?

The rational part of his mind stubbornly fought the conclusions he had reached; frantically throwing even remotely less impossible rationalisation at him- alien invasion, toxins in the air, insanity...

But this wasn't some made for TV fantasy, a twisted Stephen King plotline, or the latest teen angst go to story line: No- the Rupture, Cataclysm, Ragnarok, End of Days, Worst Monday Ever, whatever the fuck you wanted to call it, had happened, that was a cold hard fact.

They had all been too slow though, all across the globe; relegating the beginning of the end to just another news story...another Ebola, SARS, bird flu story, something happening somewhere else to someone else; the latest twenty-four-hour curiosity in a world gorged on a glut of information and memes.