VISIONS OF THE EARTH THAT WAS

The explosions tinged the sky with an orange color and the airships flew through the air with a strident hum. He felt the heat of the stone on which he had leaned, scorched by the fire that had razed that block of buildings. He saw shadows crouched among the ruins across the street, beyond the charred skeletons of the cars. He raised his gun and fired several rounds blindly.

There was no shouting, no return fire, no reaction to disturb the rumble of detonations and the distant rattle of automatic weapons.

He heard a whistle at his back and another whistle answered him on his right. He leapt over the rubble and a hundred more figures instantly imitated him. He shouted hoarsely as his throat burned from the charred air and chemical agents.

He broke into a run on the uneven ground of the old street, his boots unable to take two steady steps in a row. His legs ached, his chest burned and his arms weighed like lead as he gripped his assault rifle like a madman. Kill. Kill or die, that was his life now. No questions, no hesitation, no remorse.

Defensive fire swept through their ranks like a scythe through a field of ripe wheat. Many more moved on, toward the figures hiding in the rubble. He began to make out details. A gas mask, a cap, stripes, eyes wild with panic and lack of sleep.

They fell upon their enemies like vermin, his bayonet doing the work of a butcher. His heart beat like a drum pounded by a madman. Bloody offal covered the ground and he was still breathing. Victory.

A second later, screams from the floor above and hurried footsteps descending the staircase. Cursing, he adopted a defensive posture and waited. He didn’t even see the first flash of the bomb. He felt the heat on the back of his neck and the impact of the shock wave made him stagger. He tried to react, out of the corner of his eye he saw the large mushroom rising above the ruins of the city and knew he was dead.

All his life fell upon him in that instant and his last conscious act was to cry. The cries of his comrades filled his ears.

The screams filled his ears and made him wake up suddenly, agitated, sweaty. He was disoriented and confused, breathing heavily. Those images still burned inside his retinas.

The first thing he did was to look at his hands, but he didn’t have that metal club that killed from afar. Nor those strange clothes so heavy and uncomfortable, those boots with iron that hurt his feet. And the gray burrows with holes covered with glass? And the metallic birds that flew through the sky howling and releasing fireballs? What place was it that he remembered, but had forgotten?

His head hurt and he couldn’t explain any of it. He grabbed his temples for relief and grunted. He threw aside abruptly the animal skin that covered his naked body, jumped up and stood for a second staring at the embers of the smoldering fire that had warmed the cave until his breathing calmed down again. He felt the coolness of the cave’s interior on his skin, contrasting with the burning he had felt moments before. The air was clean, not poisonous. He breathed in sharply to fill his lungs.

Then he heard the screams again and knew what had brought him out of those night visions. He grabbed by pure instinct the large stone hammer that was leaning against the wall and ran towards the entrance of the cavern with all his muscles in tension.

As he stepped outside he saw, below, the great communal bonfire and in its light a mob of raiders with sinister red masks and stylized straight horns. For an instant his dream, so to speak, came back to his mind and he saw again those rubber masked warriors lurking among the stones. Somehow he knew that this too had happened right there, in those lands they now inhabited. But was it a memory of eons past, or the harbinger of a distant future to come?

Dismissing such useless thoughts with a grimace, he clutched the primitive mace in both hands. He gave a great leap with his powerful muscles to fall among his enemies, emitting a roar more of a wild beast than a man. The masked brutes, casting aside the easy victims they had grabbed by the hair or carried on their shoulders to take to a life of slavery, turned to face this new threat they had not counted on.

Kill. Kill or die, that was his life now. No questions, no hesitation, no remorse.