[TCD]: The Pounds of Flesh - 9
Ruins
Nobody prepares you for how quickly something becomes a ruin.
There’s a false notion of creation and persistence that can trap and smother the idea of true change beneath the floorboards. It has existed; thus, it always will.
Such is true not of good or bad but simply existence itself: It Is, and thus it will Be. It will persist, and persist, and persist. It will never get better. It will never get worse. It will change, but in ways small. Unnoticed. It will always Be.
Change is the beating heart beneath the world’s floorboards. She sings a siren’s call from the deep, her voice etched into the very stone and soil.
The world whispers to those with ears to hear.
No such ears had blessed the young man who stood at the city’s edge that day. The buildings before him were silhouetted by a horizon aglow with red dust— the last light of day bleeding out over the spindly fingers of half-collapsed buildings reaching desperately into the sky.
Nobody prepares you for how quickly something becomes a ruin.
He was barely a boy when the ARNEN ships had taken flight, abandoning Mars and its inhabitants to the shambling infrastructure that remained without them. He didn’t remember the time Before, and what had come After had been his Always.
Though the ground thrummed beneath his feet, he’d never paid it any more mind than he’d pay a barking animal or a crying baby. Like all the sounds of the city, it simply Was, and there was little more to it.
The man was called Tower Twenty-Three. Since he was seventeen, he’d manned an abandoned ARNEN radio tower on a hill, where the lights of the city were just barely visible in the distance during the darkest nights.
When storm season had come, he lost contact with the city earlier than he’d expected. Cause for concern but not alarm. That which Was would always Be, in some way or another.
He’d hunkered down in his Tower as the dust blackened the sky just as it had before.
It was a sturdy building made to withstand years of weather, wear, and tear. Despite its original builders being lightyears away on distant worlds, their motives unknown, the building remained. Battered by the elements, but still it stood. Abandoned, but not ruined. There, he sheltered during the storm. Ate his rations. Counted the days until he’d seen sunlight again.
Then the dust cleared. Contact returned with distant towers, but the city remained quiet. At night, no lights dotted the horizon.
With no harriers in the area and a litany of concerning reports filling his ears, Tower Twenty-Three did the only thing he could think to do:
He’d grabbed a suit he’d kept spare for emergencies, packed everything he thought he might need into a bag, and he walked.
And walked.
And walked.
And finally, here he stood.
The broken biodome stood before him like the open jaws of some terrible creature, captured and fossilized in the throes of its final battle.
All that remained beyond it was a skeleton of what had been. No lights. No sounds. No people. A forest of silent buildings and empty sidewalks, all of it half-buried in layers upon layers of red sand blown in from the storm.
Nobody prepares you for how quickly something becomes a ruin. Not just abandoned but gone.
Its function pried from it, replaced not with another but with all consuming Nothingness.
It had gone from a city to a grave.
Swallowed by a world hungry for change. A heart prying itself from the floorboards. A truth crawling out of her deep well:
The Red would take its pound of flesh.
Hello and thank you for reading the ninth release in this anthology series based in the universe of The Cardinal Directive. I know releases have been rather spotty for the past year, and I’ll admit this one is shorter than I’d like. I’m hoping to get back into regular releases here, but I can’t really say what they’ll be about.
Thank you all for sticking with me this past year. It’s meant the world. I really want to get back on track with at least posting each week with something to get into the swing of regular releases again, so we’ll see how that goes.
The wider universe can be found [HERE] if you want to know the main storyline. Otherwise, check out the other installments of the anthology—