Endgame
It took almost twenty-four hours to stop, and the light was so horrible, so painfully bright. It didn't hurt the eyes, it hurt all over, but that didn't really matter because the people that saw it - which was everyone - stopped hurting pretty soon after anyway. Presumably they stopped hurting. They went away. It took nearly a whole day.
And after twenty-four hours, he uncurled in the rubble and wondered where to go now. Not that that was terribly important, either, but he didn't feel like staying there any more. He found the first road out of the city, and headed in the direction of somewhere else.
Japan, as it turned out, had some interesting mountain scenery. Open country was best at this point; the cities and towns that he'd seen were all at least partially on fire, and although most plane crashes had occurred in the ocean, the ones ashore weren't far from what had been civilization. He stayed long enough to watch the next day's sunrise reflecting rinsed-out rainbow colours from the prettiest mountain ranges, then left.
The southern continents he'd all visited before, so North America turned out to be next stop. That had some good mountains, too, and vast flat sheets of nothing but wheatgrass and sky. Cultivation, the crops would eventually fade out. The mustangs - and other horses with nobody left to bolt their doors - would enjoy that. Further into the hills, grizzly bears fished uninterrupted, except by a motor-launch that drifted past one morning, current taking it lazily over the falls. He watched the machine crumple on jagged rock-teeth and then moved on, following a dirt road for a few days, barefoot, when flying got tiring. His shoes had been left somewhere, possibly in Wyoming; they were uncomfortable.
The dirt track, as it turned out, was actually part of a much longer road that lead to the coast. In a small tourist-trade settlement all the fires had gone out, so he wandered down to the ashy tideline and looked back at a promenade littered with brightly-coloured, empty shops. Seagulls were picking at unused fast food in alleyways, and mostly ignored him.
Following the coast - because it seemed as good a path as any - he eventually arrived at a place he'd seen on television once or twice, and considered it for some time. He flew up lazily to sit cross-legged on the Statue of Liberty's shoulder, but the view wasn't much improved for altitude, so he left there as well. After a detour just to see how the lawn at the White House was doing - very nicely, considering the amount of chemicals on it - he headed for Europe, accompanied briefly by a bored flight of sparrows.
The lawns of all the Oxbridge colleges, easily identifiable from the air, were doing well too. He carefully removed every sign that said not to walk on the grass, and switched off a strimmer that had been left still running. Ex lab and zoo animals roamed the town centres, tiger eyes glinting out between sequinned window displays, and camels spitting in the market stalls.
It was raining in Paris by the time he got there, and quite late at night. He perched on top of the glass pyramid outside the Louvre, and thought about where to go; the Mona Lisa was quite pleased to have something to smile at until the rain stopped, even if the lights were all out in her gallery. He parroted the smile back at her and tracked wet footprints all the way to the south coast. Cote d'Azur, was that it? Another series of grey-backed shopfronts vomiting neon colour out to sea. A cruise liner had run aground, unpiloted and without fuel, in a bed of palm trees that happened to be there. He ignored it and moved on, spending half of what might have been a Saturday wandering soundlessly across the Vatican Palace's marble floors. Pigeons from the square blew up like leaves onto the balconies, to watch. Smiling at them, he left through a side door and spent the night lying on a wonderfully unspoilt beach, one of Sardinia's tiny island coves. And then moved on.
It was, of course, a large small place in the scheme of things, Earth, and he had no intention of going everywhere, no idea of how long it took to get all the way around. He walked a lot of the African Savannah, Sri Lanka's rainforests, and the length of the Sphinx's back; flew over the Taj Mahal in disinterest, and alighted on the Kremlin's roof to watch a spider. The Great Wall of China was visible through an irritating amount of Asia, though the pandas didn't seem to mind, so he supposed that was alright. New Zealand turned out to be remarkably like his hometown, for the most part, but with less fog; he didn't visit the hometown, really, but occasionally thought of all its bizarre frontierlike houses and nebula of tiny lights at night, in relation to how other settlements looked. He touched a landmine in the Falklands, palm pressed against its edge, and watched it not explode. And then went back to the first place.
Not exactly there. Not to where all the debris and concrete wreckage was. Not the place that the loud voice of someone or other had been, saying, yelling, promising something he hadn't wanted to hear about because it wasn't true then and it hadn't ever been that he could recall and it certainly wasn't now. The face that had gone with it, he thought he had left somewhere in India, perhaps. Another face, older than the first, regretful and trying to teach, had disappeared in the Valley of the Kings. The one that seemed a lot like burned hair was around Moscow, and the rest had scattered over some ocean or another. He went back to the park.
The pigeons were still there, he was pleased to see; they never looked at him funny, even when nobody could see why they would. The park had escaped more damage than the rest of the city, but no benches were left, so he sat down on the grass by the pond. Several days later a ladybug crept across the back of his hand; he blinked and smiled at it, and waited until it hummed away to move again. Then he stood up and wandered slowly around the edge of the park, under an occasional tree; wild grass in some places was now long enough to sweep dew onto his coat-hem, whispering. Closer to the centre, the stems just murmured. He smiled at that too, gently, because that was how he always had reacted. Looking up, he noticed worker bees leaving a hive to start for the day, buzzing like traffic, like the wreckage of a bright red sports car across the street probably had till twenty seconds after its driver vanished. He watched for about that long again, and left.
Picking a way over the remains of a building - maybe two or three - wasn't easy on foot, so he flew the short distance, found the right place. The light became brighter, uncomfortably so, as the sun finally found a straight line over what remained of the business district.
He looked at it, curled up again - head under one wing - and died without complaining.
Hmm. How strange - feather-duster seems to have written a story in which there are few to zero horrible, horrible people. Don't worry, normal viewing will be resumed, um, at some point. This is another idea that's been buzzing around for ages (actually it kind of floated, but never mind). feather-duster sort of likes how it turned out and sort of doesn't, so she'd be glad to know what anyone else thinks. Except BEGA. She'd appreciate if they would stop making threatening phonecalls, and talk to her lawyer. Heh heh...
Review and I love you!
PS "Oxbridge", in case anyone's not sure, refers to Oxford and Cambridge, England's big university towns. feather-duster lives in one of them.