The Children of Men Pt.2

XV

Dalli told me her mom was a painter, and loved art. I looked at her paintings; she was immensely talented. Very mathematical about her landscapes. Her finished works are like a dream. One of her sisters was a year older than her, and liked to listen to music, and played violin. The one younger didn't do much, but she was always playing with this radio in the room beneath the surface satellite dish. Their father died trying to protect them three years ago. They've been collecting materials from the village at night ever since. She said nothing made her father sad. That made me feel pretty bad about myself in comparison.

I've been scrounging the village for curiosities. It's really all I can do to keep my mind off of things. I found a little round table and two chairs to go along with it. I put that out front of the bunker and I usually drink coffee there. Sometimes I'm attacked by a zombie or a bot. It's worth it, if I get to stare at the city for the first hour of my day.

The fogs work very systematically. In the morning, everything is terribly enveloped in the stuff; everything is a solid grey shape in the distance. The city still sparkles all the same, though; two towers around the pyramid, surrounded by mountains. The sun rises directly left of the city, facing it from the bunker door. As the fogs start to dissipate, they form into huge columns, and settle in enormous puddles on the ground. The puddles are anything like a few meters wide and about a foot deep at most; but they're hundreds of meters long, arrayed in almost perfect rows. Then, some clouds meander through the air in wisps only about fifty feet off the ground, and soon everything is clear and covered in dew. The world is colorful and bright for about ten minutes - then, the silvering of the day begins.

XVI

The clean water well works now, so we've been showering plenty. That's all I have to say about that, really.

I looked over her memorabilia of her father. There's a whole table loaded with pictures and items that belonged to him, with huge dusty candles on them, all on a bright red embroidered fabric. He's smiling in every one. It's the sort of smile that makes someone ugly, but that sort of folds in on itself, because it's clearly a happy thing. They buried him in the town cemetery. He had blue eyes and brown hair, and he always wore sneakers. Dalli asked me if I wanted to wear his old shoes. I said they weren't for me.

The way I see her sitting and doing something - knitting something, or drawing something - she seems unnatural, or awkward. There's something wrong; it's obvious, what it is. I wish I had never seen a girl who had to see these things happen. Nothing will ever be right again. My present efforts are all I can do to try to fix her. It's only a little better for me, because I'm doing just fine.

XVII

Two nights ago I dreamt of a war. I guess it was between the humans and the machines. All of it struck a deep nerve of fear in me; it was almost constant horror. The men were put through as many gunshots as they could survive; women had their flesh torn from their bones; children were brutally beaten and dismembered alive. And I was one of the aggressors. I saw the emaciated forms of children at my feet. I watched women with no skinn crawl around on the ground. I saw houses on fire with flaming human figures running out of them, and I had started the fire. I watched myself put a gun to the skull of a kneeling child and pull the trigger. Their heads exploded in blood and their eyes popped out. I cut off a woman's head and threw it to the pigs. There was a courtyard littered with stains of coagulated blood and human remains. I jumped awake as I found myself laughing and beating a line of hostages' faces in with a hammer.

I was sweating profusely. Dalli had left her room and come to sleep beside me; as I jumped awake, she flew out of the bed and huddled in the corner. I said I was sorry and she came back to bed; I told her I just had a bad dream. Having been woken up, I went to the kitchen to get a glass of milk. When I came back, I fell asleep, but had an even worse dream.

There was a grid of warehouses somewhere in the plains, on a beautiful day in the spring; we were herding naked, starved, diseased prisoners into them by the score. They had been drugged so heavily that they were ready to obey any order. Thereby, we had decided to run some experiments in testing the human will. We stood them up on bleachers and posed graphite blades in front of them. We asked them to jump forward, and their necks connected exactly with the blades. All of them were beheaded at once, and their bodies fell limp over the stands. Another group ran straight into a bar holding out blades, that their bodies slumped to the ground and their head fell after them. We repeated both experiments multiple times.

The dream shifted, and suddenly I was apparently someone else entirely. It was me and three other people hunting for some kind of horrifying animal. Imagine a small alligator that has fur instead of scales, a nose like an anteater, white skin underneath and enormous black pupils. Its fur is stiff and dry; the creature itself is disgusting. We hunted them with rifles and stowed them in a shed we had put on wheels. After about a few minutes we were happened upon by a thin, silver robot that was about thirty stories high, and had a hunched and collected sort of head and boney, metal fingers. It trapped us in it grasp, and I blacked out in the dream.

Still in the dream, I "woke up" in a horrible confusion, in some kind of churning pile or pool of screaming, raving animals. I made my way to the surface and beheld the single most horrifying sight of my life: thousands of screaming, raving, rabid, frail, panicking animals of all kinds in a vat that was a thousand feet across and probably a thousand feet deep. Everything was scratching and killing and trying to make sense of things. Some humans were caught in the disarray. The noise, the sanguinary screeching, far exceeded disturbing. It was all around me. Some snipers up above were picking off the humans. I tried to look for my friends, but their skulls popped as I pointed them out of the fray. At last, I found the last of my partners, but he was being grappled by one of the beasts we had been hunting. I grabbed a flashlight from my belt and beat it in the face until it was dead, then pried him loose.

We dashed over the mess, operating on sheer adrenaline. As we flew, I noticed that there were four immense panels leaning down into the bowl; they looked like four huge cheese-graters. But there was a human head sticking out of each hole, like they were seated in them. All of them were adjusted so their heads fitted the requirements. A bunch of gibberish sounded over a phantom intercom, and a lever was apparently pulled. A blade flew down the bottom side of the grater and beheaded everyone who sat inside. Their heads rolled into the bowl, and their bodies slid beneath. My friend and I reached the edge as a horrendous rumbling occurred, and we climbed onto a catwalk that reached over the bowl.

As we hung from the railing, we witnessed the jumble of creatures begin to shrink into the whole as a terrible grinding sound shimmered from the deep. We watched thousands of animals sink into a fifty-foot garbage disposer. Before the stewards came out again, we followed the catwalk in a frail rush to a ladder and climbed down, into a hallway with a light at the end. We sprinted to the end in primal fear, and soon met with the same woods in which we walked earlier.

Our running slowed to a heaving breathing and collapsing upon the ground. I was wide-eyed, watching the sky. My partner walked a few steps ahead, pulled the handgun from out of his belt, and shot himself, I suspected out of irreparable mental distortion. I woke up from the dream, and it was day. I had coffee as normally goes out front, and killed three feral robots.