The Darkest Place: A Surviving the Dead Novel by Cook James

Author:Cook, James [Cook, James]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Published: 2015-02-07T16:00:00+00:00

THIRTY-THREE

Full dark, and the stars came out.

I lay on my bedroll, eyes open to the brilliance of the sky. Sophia was a warm, heavy weight next to me.

“I’ve never seen it like this,” she said. “The night sky.”

“You mean without a roof between you?”

She slapped my shoulder. “No, asshole. I mean bright. Like this.” She pointed a finger heavenward.

“It’s because the power is out,” I said. “No streetlights, no city lights, no light at all. Light pollution obscures the sky at night. Drowns out the stars. Must have been very disappointing for all those photons.”

“Disappointing?”

“To travel billions of years only to fizzle out in a smog-choked haze.”

“You say it like the stars actually care. Last I heard, they’re just big burning balls of plasma.”

“We’re made of them, you know. Human beings. The dust of stars given life.”

“What?”

“The fundamental elements, the components, the building blocks of life. All deposited on this planet by stars, flung across the universe as they died.”

Sophia was silent for a while, then said, “There’s a kind of beauty in that, I think. The lifeless given life.”

I turned my head and gazed over the edge of the white metal roof. The distant moans of infected drifted to my ears. “The lifeless given life. It supports the duality, I suppose.”

Sophia shuffled closer, lips brushing against my neck. “Now I understand why you don’t talk much. You don’t make a bit of fucking sense.”

There was something wildly erotic about the way she said it, our warmth nestled together under the coldness of an indifferent sky. “It’s beauty and corruption, Sophia. Light and dark. Life and death. For every point, a counterpoint. We, the human race, are the defiance. The struggle of sentience in an ocean of oblivion. Those things out there, they’re a corruption of us. An abomination of something beautiful.”

Another silence, then she said, “You really think people are beautiful? I mean, with all the things we’ve done to each other? War and murder and all the rest of it?”

“I think life is beauty, Sophia. And while there are as many tragedies as there are people in the world to live them, those tragedies don’t diminish the importance of our existence. Think of how far we’ve come. It wasn’t all that long ago we were lying on bare ground, fires burning next to us, wondering what all those bright spots in the big wide dark were all about. Now we know. Now we can draw their chemical components on computer diagrams and replicate their energy in small scale. Ever seen a plasma torch cut through two inches of steel in less time than it takes to say it?”

“No.”

“It’s a thing to see.”

I lay in the dark and tightened my arms around Sophia and wondered what was wrong with the night. The hot starkness of day no longer assaulted us; the warmth of the metal under my back had faded hours ago. There was a gentle breeze, a stirring of leaves flush with the green blessing of late spring.

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