Under the Oak by Steven William Hannah

Author:Steven William Hannah [Hannah, Steven William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy, Fiction, Horror, Post-Apocalyptic, Science Fiction
Amazon: B0991XS9KT
Published: 2021-07-07T22:00:00+00:00

It seems emptier without Messenger. Bear stands next to Bee; next to his Captain, at the controls. Outside their viewport, Bear watches the curtains of snow part before them. Daylight is breaking through, early morning light, and it shows them the ruins of the South as if to welcome them.

“Jesus,” whispers Bee, staring. Bear puts a hand on her shoulder.

“It's bigger than I imagined,” he admits.

They are speechless.

The city must have once been incredible. There are impossibly tall buildings, sloped over, cut cleanly through and leaning on one another like drunks. A long, wide avenue is open before them, and it goes on straight as far as they can see. Crumbled old road bridges have long since collapsed into piles of concrete. All that was built has since collapsed. The glory of the old world has been cast down by mother nature.

“May, where are we?”

“Geographically, pre-cataclysm, this city was called Manchester. Most of the outskirts are beneath the snow now, of course. What you're seeing is what remains of the city's centre.”

“What happened?” asks Bear.

“The Catacylsm, Bear.”

“Same thing as everywhere else,” says Bee, sighing. “Hell. Gaia. The phenomenon. See those clean cuts in the buildings? Bet you recognise those kind of incisions, hm?”

“Those buildings - Dad called them sky scrapers. Must have housed God knows how many people.”

“They were usually places of work, Bear.”

“Oh? Seems a waste of good living space. I'd be terrified to work that high up. All those windows, too. Look at all that glass – you must have been able to see everything around you. No walls.”

“Dusty was here once, he told me,” says Bee. “During the cataclysm. Lot of people from further south came here, apparently. Heading north to get away from everything. Earthquakes. The land changing. Space breaking. All of that. Imagine waking up one day to find that all of your maps are wrong.”

Bear looks up and around. Nothing has survived. He remembers tales from his father, retelling stories from his grandfather and his great grandfather: the cataclysm, and what it did to the world.

He can see it, step by step, as Bee guns the Crawler and begins driving down that long snowy avenue. First came the earthquakes, his father told him, of a magnitude previously unseen. Tsunamis, and the flooding that came with it; volcanic eruptions across the globe, inactive volcanoes detonating in places unprepared for it.

A lot of these buildings would have fallen during that time. This part of the world never got earthquakes, his father once told him. Then the volcanic ash cooled the world, and it snowed for a long, long time. Crops failed without the sun, the rain turned to acid, roads and train lines were useless and broken, the sea was treacherous with constant storms and waves that would capsize battleships. Airplanes could not get through the ash clouds that coated most of the world.

There were wars for food and viable farm land, for what little of the old world remained habitable. Machines, industry; medicine and the means to make it, all fell away.

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