Glorious Power
Hiccup & Eleanor - Part 1 - Chapter 1
Introducing Hiccup & Eleanor, book two of The White Age, which I will be releasing as a serial - with one chapter per week - over the coming months. You can also preorder the book here.
Book one, Absolution, is available for purchase on Amazon, or you can catch up here.
i)
London, England
8th November 2062
The whistle of the wind through the trees seemed a melancholy call for the return of the birds who had long since abandoned this place: scattered to the wind and the icy seas that seemed to encase the land; a rigid and glum mass of rock. The silence they left behind was robust and unfaltering; it was the rolling away from the shore of the sea before a tidal wave puckers its lips and bumps its way toward land, as though the salted water requires an intake of breath prior to its reflexive battering of all that sits before it. Feathers and abandoned fragments of nests remained, in clumps and clumsy communes, that would never become home. The birds had vanished and England lay waiting; lonely and expectant for the retort to the ominous departure.
ii)
Jon Cave kissed his wife’s hand. It was cold and the touch of it made him shiver, though it thrilled him. The lines of wear that gouged themselves into her flesh were as familiar to him as his own; he could trace them with his eyes closed. He remembered each morning they had lain on a bed and held hands, just as they did now. It was a reflection of this moment. As though each of these moments had been a retrospective echo of what was to come; a rehearsal. Hera turned to him and smiled. It was a smile of pain and sadness which broke Jon’s heart but he knew she was glad. Glad in spite of them waiting here to die.
This is the only way it can end. Should end. At least we are dying together.
The Thames was quiet, surprisingly so, but that was more fitting for the occasion, as far as Jon was concerned; it was perfect for them to enjoy each other’s company and to subside into nothingness side by side. Their rowing boat warbled slightly and guttural, slapping sounds rose up from the hull, as the murmuring waves from a passing motorboat made them dance. Hera’s grip tightened on his own to assist in maintaining her balance and he leaned forward to brace his body against the rocking. They smiled into the darkness in silence, grateful for their loneliness and mesmerised by the calm.
A house party in an apartment at the riverside emitted a cheer over the faint grumble of their music and Jon’s mind wandered to what it might mean: a successful completion of a drinking game; the arrival of another non-evacuee; or a disarming of the incoming missile.
Surely that would be impossible. He felt a wariness at the thought that this might not be the end, which surprised him. What then? Where would we go from here. He was now resigned to the fact that this was their final day on Earth and was unable to see beyond it. This is my end, with Hera, and for that I am grateful. All that were left were the wasters and those that missed their slot on the planes or the boats, and even they might have travelled north to Scotland, where they would be relatively safe. Relatively. It is all coming down around our ears regardless, and moving a few hundred miles is just a delaying of the inevitable. It’s the end. Let’s just face it. Hand in hand and side by side.
Hera opened a bottle of white wine, a Sancerre they had been saving, and poured them both a glass. She checked her watch for what seemed like the hundredth time and turned to Jon, a look of loss on her face. It felt like there was everything to say and, at the same time, nothing at all. They had chosen for it to happen like this, in their quaint, silent peace, though there still lingered the underlying bluster and rage of indignation at what was to come. Jon had calmed Hera before, on many occasions. She had punched his chest and soaked his shirt with tears; clawing for a reason or a justification for any of this. He placed his hand on her cheek and she leaned against it with her eyes closed.
iii)
23rd August 2062
“What are you going towards?” He had shouted, his voice rasping with the weight of the words.
“Life. Our lives. Isn’t that more than enough?” Her hands were shaking and so she clasped them tightly across her midriff and threw her head back as she inhaled her tears and anger.
“What life will we have? One of rage and illness and violence.”
“You cannot just give up!”
“No, but we can. Together. We can give up.” Jon could see her gaze soften and her hands unfurl from one another before she embraced him with rambunctious love.
We can do this. We can let go. Just us.
iv)
8th November 2062
The wine was freezing and hot chocolate would have been more appropriate in their early winter, but wine seemed more fitting, more in keeping with their focus of abandon and release. Drunk; we shall fade into the winds.
There was ice in the air that swirled in great loops around them, settling on their skin and clothes before disappearing forever. It was a wild, synchronised dance, a robotic ballet, and they were mesmerised by its beauty. As a final feat of daring and unrestraint, they had stolen a small rowing boat from the end of a pier. With soft laughter they had asserted their nihilism onto the world as a final gasp of control, clambering aboard and tumbling against the current. The moon was high and partly visible through stubborn cloud; the boat they had stolen lulled against the current that flowed into London’s heart, with steady and forlorn grace.
They had tethered the vessel to the strut of a collapsing pier and the water coursed past them as though they were not even there. Jon watched the black water that glistened as it churned and he wondered how death would feel, how his senses would accommodate the data being received; the absolute, boundless data of destruction. It was tempting for him to reach for God and to believe that this moment would bring him closer to the almighty in which he had always believed. But that was dangerous. He had to move his mind away from the faith he had disowned. The White Age had denounced religion and tainted the meaning of faith. Jon didn’t want to consider the possibility that a good God existed, in his final moments, as it would undermine all that had happened before. All that had led them to this place in time.
“How long?” Hera asked, her wide, blue eyes damp and shining in the moonlight.
“I don’t know.” Jon checked his wrist but his watch was not there; he had left it in their flat, one of the fragments of their lives that would be eviscerated into the future nothingness. Hera nodded and leant against his shoulder. Jon kissed the top of her head and then refreshed their wine-glasses. Anything to soften the blow, to ease this pain, is welcome.
v)
24th August 2062
“Are you ready?” Hera asked Jon, as the radio blared in the background with the same monotony of imperative and despair.
“I think so.”
“No regrets?” Hera’s smile was a rarity and Jon knew he should treasure it. He kissed her, first soft and then again hard and pushed her back into the sofa cushions. He could feel her smiling all-the-more from his reaction and she embraced him tightly.
“Not with you, no.” He spoke into her eyes and kissed her forehead. “Never.”
vi)
8th November 2062
“Music?” Hera’s voice was barely a whisper in an attempt to mask the emotion in her throat. Jon smiled and leant over to their makeshift hamper that lay open at the hull of the small boat. Within were some supplies for their sustenance in their final hours: cheese; bread (soft from having been recovered from the freezer that morning); a second bottle of Sancerre; a bag of mixed fruit and nuts that Jon despised; and a small CD player. It was an antique they had stored away in the loft for years and finding the correct batteries had been an arduous task.
They had one CD, Ultimate Sinatra; their favourite. It had played at their wedding, throughout the wedding breakfast, and they often had it on as an accompaniment to lazy Sunday mornings. Now it would be the music that would see in the apocalypse. Jon checked the CD in the moonlight and, frowning at the scratches it had stoically collected over the last eighteen years, placed it into the mouth of the machine. The lid clicked shut and the disc whirred into immediate action. He clicked play and All Or Nothing At All crackled its way into the air between them like a ghost from a lifetime before.
vii)
31st August 2062
“Madam, do you have a passport?” The noise was almost too much; a racket of anger and confusion as people pushed and shoved and railed against all that remained. Hera was blinking into her handbag, as though in a daze, as though a million miles away.
“Sorry?” Hera’s voice was lost in the milieu and her wide, blue eyes gazed at the dishevelled lady behind the counter.
“Your passport, madam. I need to see it.” The woman looked at her over the rim of her glasses with a look of equal parts impatience and maternal concern.
“I don’t have it.” Hera knew it wasn’t in her bag. She knew that it was still in the drawer beside her bed, in a gaudy, red leather case she had received from her colleagues at the office two years before.
“Well I’m afraid you need it. You know you can get fast-tracked out of here? You just need to fill in this special form?” The woman was shaking her head, flustered by some shouting in the room behind Hera. Hera was oblivious. She simply stared at the woman as she brandished a pink form and began waving it through the partition in the glass screen between them. “Madam? Go and find your passport and fill in this form. There’s still time.” Hera pushed her short bob of blond hair back behind her ear and smiled softly as tears gathered in her eyes. The woman behind the glass continued to wave the form as Hera turned and left the building, leaving the shouting and chaos behind.
viii)
8th November 2062
“I swear to goodness you can't resist her
Sorry for you, she has no sister
No angel could replace
Nancy with the laughin' face”
Jon and Hera swayed to the music as they sat side by side in their small boat; the waves seemingly partaking in their slow, sombre dance. They had dressed for the occasion: Jon in a tuxedo, though he had now undone his bowtie and left it to hang loosely around his neck; and Hera in a glittering, black dress. “One can never look over-dressed for oblivion, darling.” Hera had declared, with a faux-sophisticated ring, two days earlier.
If we die like this, now, then do we repeat this moment forever? It was hard to believe but it would be perfect if it were true, and he decided to cling to that idea. He knew Hera would screw up her face and chastise him if he vocalised it, saying something like, “don’t be so saccharine! We’ll be fish food in a matter of hours.” He smiled at her imagined impatience and squeezed her all the more tightly to him.
This might just be perfect.
ix)
31st August 2062
“Hera.” Jon opened the door with bloodshot eyes that betrayed he had been crying; his voice a croak of confusion.
“It’s me.” She didn’t want to smile, to undermine the bold, romantic gesture, but she felt her cheeks tighten and her teeth reveal themselves in slow, awkward staccato.
“What happened?” Jon was shaking his head, unsmiling; apprehensive. “What are you doing here?” His eyes darted from left to right, from one of her eyes to the next, trying to find the joke, the error, the mistake that had led her back to him.
“I decided to watch the end of the world with you, Jonah.” She smiled again; he hated being called Jonah. His reserve broke and his doubt wavered and he smiled in return, stepping back to let her inside their house.
“Don’t call me that.”
x)
8th November 2062
They opened the second bottle of wine and tossed the first into the impatient river as they sang along to I’ve Got You Under My Skin. Hera could barely sing a line before she fell into fits of teary giggles, sending the boat rocking precariously and causing them to cling to one another for support. Jon laughed as he glanced up at the moon, rolling pendulous before his eyes in a jet black sky; when is this going to happen? He wondered, not wanting anything to end.
xi)
27th October 2062
“You know I’ve never believed in God, don’t you?” Hera asked as she lay with her head in Jon’s lap, him gently stroking her hair.
“Yes, I do.” Jon replied without breaking his stare out of the window at the London City skyline beyond.
“Do you think that makes this easier or harder for me?”
“What do you think?” Jon met her eye and frowned as he spoke.
“I don’t know, really. I just wondered.”
“I used to think you were crazy, although now I’m not so sure.”
“Do you know what I really want to do? More than anything else?” Hera said, sitting up and turning to face Jon.
“Tell me.” His look was blank, unsmiling, receptive.
“Just watch it all end. You and I. Watch it all end and laugh as it happens.” Hera closed her eyes and imagined the beauty and the majesty of it all as she spoke. She could feel Jon’s eyes locked on her face.
“Why’s it funny?” His voice was a murmur of concern.
“Because I have you. And nobody else ever will.” She opened her eyes and met his, his frown disappearing as she did so. “And that’s hilarious.”
xii)
8th November 2062
It has to be now. Jon’s patience was waning. He wanted to know. He needed to know when it was all going to be over. He needed to know if his glass of wine was enough to last him until the end. If this Sinatra album would see them through. The not knowing was too much. Too much anticipation. Too much fear. He had not known himself to be scared. He was the brave one. The one who had said this would all be okay. But now he was losing faith in himself: should we have left when we had the chance? I should have made her go. Is this all a great big waste of the beautiful thing we have together. The thing we have created.
And then the sky was split in two.
A burning star punctuated the blackened expanse beyond the clouds. The moon’s brightness seemed to fade as the black grew into a deep orange and then the clouds followed suit. Within seconds, the sky was aflame, as though the sun had not risen but simply fallen through the ceiling of the world.
Hera and Jon stood, hand in hand, both standing agape at the scene above and beyond them. The London skyline was lit from above; a night-light for the metallic, hollow city that had once been thriving. The line of fire and smoke descended, only increasing in its luminosity as it went. Jon was stunned by the sheer size of it. The volume of it. The unstoppable weight.
“…I’ve been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate…”
Sinatra sang That’s Life over the silence that swelled across all that they could see. Nothing else had the audacity to make a sound; the water, the wind, the softened beating of their engrossed hearts.
“…a poet, a pawn and a king…”
The flames were visible now; licking and scratching at the blackness beyond and sending their orange essence into the air with malice and hunger. A terrible roar began to heave its way into their heads which sounded like the waking groan of a terrible beast.
“…I’ve been up and down and over and out…”
Jon downed the remains of his wine and tossed his glass over the edge of the boat in the water that was now a pool of raging lava. He began to click his fingers along to the music that was beginning to fade beneath the roar of the impending apocalypse. Just listen to the music, keep hold of the music.
“…and I know one thing…”
Hera pulled Jon close and kissed him hard. Their eyes open as they stared wide-eyed into the glowing, fired majesty of each other’s gaze. This is it. It’s been fun, my love.
“…each time I find myself flat on my face…”
Hera closed her eyes tightly. They had spoken at length about this moment. How the bomb goes off before it hits the ground, so as to cause the most destruction. But still they waited.
“…I pick myself up and get back in the race…”
Frank Sinatra was a distant, warbling distraction that Jon suddenly despised for its incongruity; its brazen levity.
“…that’s life...”
Jon placed his hand on the swollen belly of his wife; he could feel the throbbing of the fully formed baby beneath the taut skin and fought the urge to cry. We would have given you a great life if the world was worth hanging around for. I hope I see you both on the other side. Wherever that might be.
The bang was immense, louder than anything Jon could have ever fathomed, and then the world exploded.
xiii)
23rd December 2062
I’m afloat.
“Jonah. Can you hear me?”
Yes
“Good. Perfect.”
Am I dead?
“No. Not at all.”
You’re not God?
“To some. To you I can be.”
Where’s Hera?
“She’s gone. I’m sorry.”
…
“You can trust me.”
What is this that I am feeling?
“That’s what I am going to try and find out.”
Who are you?
“Your salvation, if you allow me to be.”
Of course. Let’s go.