Who Will You Save? by Gareth L. Powell

Author:Gareth L. Powell
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781803368665
Publisher: Titan Books

ENTROPIC ANGEL

For four days it snowed. On the fifth day, the angel came. As light dawned, the Reverend Christina Pike saw it squatting like a gargoyle on the tallest of the village’s wind turbines, its shoulders hunched over and its radiant face raised to the sky.

An hour later, that turbine failed. A few minutes later, the one next to it. Watching through binoculars from the window of the vicarage, she said: “It’s an angel all right.”

Around her, the hastily-convened members of the village council muttered to one another. They knew what lay in store. They’d seen the lights dim around the Estuary as each of the other towns fell in turn to the depredations of the angelic host. With their own eyes, they’d watched civilisation sputter like a dying candle. They’d spoken to refugees and army deserters and knew things were bad all over, that without power they were doomed to freeze, and there was nothing that could be done to save them.

Pike lowered her binoculars.

“Maybe I could talk to it?” she suggested, but the council leader, a retired colonel, shook his head.

“Far too dangerous, vicar, I won’t hear of it.”

And so Pike stayed by the window watching helplessly as, one by one over the course of the day, all the turbines on the wind farm slowed and screeched to a halt, until by sunset nothing moved, and stripped of their electricity the houses of the village fell into darkness and silence.

The children cried. The men and women built fires in their grates and sat around them bemoaning their fate. Some offered prayers to appease the lace-winged angel. Others tried to hide from it. Some even contemplated sacrifice as a means of driving the angel away, but were stymied by their lack of conviction. They had nothing in their village worthy of sacrifice but goats and children, and they weren’t strong enough to make offerings of either.

Standing in front of the stone hearth in the vicarage behind the church, as the untapped winter wind blew in from the Severn Estuary, the adults argued long into the night; and all the while, silhouetted against the night sky, the angel remained as still and solitary as it had first appeared.

Then at seven in the morning, as a bone-coloured moon fell behind the Welsh hills in the west and a new day peered from behind the Mendips in the east, something stirred. By that time, most of the villagers had retired to bed and only a handful, Pike included, still clutched coffee mugs around the embers of their fires. They had heard of other communities blighted by angels. They were tired and desperate. Even so, not all of them heard the throaty roar of the approaching engine at the same time.

It came on like the buzz of a bee, starting as an irritation well below the threshold of conscious register. One moment they weren’t aware of it, and the next they were rubbing condensation from their windows, craning their heads, looking inland for the source of the sound.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.