Penance

By J C Pereira

The world is changing. Faster than anyone could have possibly imagined. One man and his family, living in the rural countryside are caught up in the cataclysmic events. Without many choices available to them, they flee in the hope of finding help and safety in the cities beyond the mountains. Their journey there is arduous and filled with frightening and life-threatening dangers. On the way, a child is born who will become the last hope of all humankind. They and a band of misfit companions gathered along the path become his guardians, determined at the risk of their very lives to keep him protected from the rampages of Mother Nature herself. The outcome is not assured, even under the wise leadership of old Drake, grandfather to the boy, Ezra. With a promise given to his mother, Drake will do and become whatever is necessary to keep Ezra alive and prepared for the new world in the forming. The hardest thing in this is for humanity to keep its soul – sometimes, survival is not enough.

• Language: English
• Publisher: J C Pereira
• Release date: Mar 11, 2020
• ISBN: 9780463694992

J C Pereira

With a long journey of years and distance behind him, the author decided to follow his heart. He turned his hand again to what he loved most and brought him solace and joy in his youth – books. With his son grown and a new family around him, he graduated from reading into writing – an unimaginable step. His first attempt was ‘A Place to Belong To’. He has just completed and published number nine, ‘Dying Under an Empty Blue Sky’, a dystopian novel about the last remnants of humanity hanging on after the fall due to the Climate Crisis. Have we learnt anything from our misguided priorities? Will we survive or fade away from a world that has already dismissed us? We live through the stories we create. Let’s hope we can learn from them. The future remains unwritten.

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PENANCE

J C Pereira

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Copyright © 2020 J C Pereira

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All rights reserved. This book is a work of fiction, and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events, or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are productions of the author’s imagination and are used fictitiously.

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DEDICATION

To all of us who find it difficult to digest the relevance of scientific facts on Climate Change and merely desire to hear the human story that paints the reality and warning behind the message. Perhaps it will fire the imagination to do better.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Current events from all sources have been instrumental in providing me with ready fodder for attempting this book. An article from ‘The Atlantic’ titled ‘Getting Lost Makes the Brain Go Haywire’ by the author Will Hunt (2019) gave me invaluable insight into the effects of walking in the blackness of tunnels. I also found a quote from Martin Luther King Jr, ‘The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.’ These words succinctly sum up the essential traits needed not just for the main protagonist of this novel but for all of us in these testing times of our present world.

CHAPTER I

The sunrise was spectacular, beautiful beyond belief, and surreal. The vibrant red, amber and yellow sky over the distant horizon contrasting eerily with the blackened and shadowed silhouette of the nearby trees. Their bare branches, stripped naked, reaching like fingers into the burning heavens, a world on fire. It was the middle of winter. At least, that’s what his Grandfather said. Hard to believe, but all he had known for his fifteen years were these unpredictable, ever-changing weather patterns. Yesterday, the winds were cold and icily brittle. Today, you could feel the unbearable heat brewing — stifling and threatening- even at this early hour. The only thing that never happened was the rain. He had only seen it twice in his lifetime, and in a way, he hoped never to see it again. The ferocity and the churning, fearsome deluge with its unstoppable power still gave him nightmares. In the last one, which lasted for days, he had lost both his parents — father and mother swept away and buried in roiling mud in front of his petrified eyes — gone forever. The dry tears were much better. He could cope with that.

His Grandfather was a grim man. Unyielding as the sun-blasted granite rocks, unbreakable. Yet inside, as soft as butter. Sixteen years ago, he said, the world had had a timeless rhythm, but the scientist had got it all wrong. They knew something would happen, but they measured everything on an unravelling timeline. Even so, if the blind politicians, greedy for short-term gains and their space in the spotlight, had paid heed to their dire warnings, this might not have happened. In a matter of a handful of weeks, the world broke. Mother Nature had had enough. She needed to adjust to the abuse racked on her by the abomination she had birthed. We are the silliest of monkeys. Nature was still compensating for the injuries caused by our mischief, and we were paying the price, and it was a heavy one. The silence was deafening. You had to listen hard to hear between nothing. Behind where he sat on his bum, borrowing a pause between the dreadful, ravaging elements, lay spread a city of ghosts, crumbling and rusting, devoid of even weeds, sterilised. To survive, we scavenge and hunt for the most ferocious and hardiest of insects, digging them out of their crusted nests — the nice ones had already died out. Stinging, biting, poisonous bastards, but sure inheritors of the next cycle, Grandfather says with a bitter laugh, but we will eat a few of them first, eh boy? It’s food, and I know no other. I was born to be alive.

The first sign of what was to come was when the crops failed — shrivelling in dry, baked and cracked mud. What happens when the food runs out? Eight billion people fed directly and indirectly by three major edible plants — rice, wheat and corn — whatever they were. ‘Can’t even grow your own when the seeds of life refuse to germinate, eh boy!’ Never seen them myself, much less tasted them - never seen anything grow into anything useful. Never bit into the fruit of anything. Grandfather is always going on. In this world of emptiness, I spend a lot of time listening. All the Global Change Assessment Models didn’t foresee such a catastrophic unfolding of what was once an everyday occurrence. The seasons are in disarray. So fast, so bloody fast! Chaos! Scientists had suspected tipping points throughout the world, nudging events towards a possibly irretrievable escalation, but what happened, in reality, was a virtual and shocking avalanche on a grand scale. Grandfather’s tales are fantastic! They paint a picture of an alien world, pointed out from a battered landscape. I love his stories, told in a deep, hypnotic, deadpan manner, but I do not dream about what is gone. I am too busy living.

As if reading my thoughts, the horizon transformed itself in an instant. Where a panorama of burning bronze had lulled my senses into a place of calm and beauty, now seethed a maelstrom of brooding violence, racing across the barren and ruptured plain, tearing towards me with streaks of forked lightning ripping its fabric. The speed of its approach was daunting and terrible to behold. I had seen it all before. Still, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up in alarm and fright. It brought to mind a thunderstorm, but without water, more like a pyroclastic flow. Those I’ve seen plenty of, for the very earth was groaning and restless as if a molten, angry, fire giant was trying to crawl its way to the surface, inch by inch, fingers probing into every available crack, gushing from the bowels of a tormented monster. Mountains appeared where none should be, heaving mounds of steaming dirt and boulders like toys into a scorched and fretful atmosphere. Scrambling hastily to his feet, he scrabbled away, skidding down the steep slope on his bony backside. No grass left to soften his descent, only gravel-strewn soil, grating and painful. It was time to find shelter.

There were plenty of places left to hide below this scorched ground: dark, dusty, boiling, fetid man-made caverns in one breath, then in the next, cold, frigid hell holes. Change rules in this barren place we still call home, switching capriciously from one extreme to another in the blink of an eye. That’s the impression, anyway. Adapt or die. This mantra we hold unvoiced in our hearts. Those of us who still hang on to the vestiges of what made us human cling to it. No doubt, somewhere in this hell, ensconced in their luxurious underground bunkers, the deniers that instigated this catastrophic mayhem live on in splendid isolation, remaining hog-fat on their stockpiled delicacies. Grandfather says he would love to get his hands on the bloody buggers. I sometimes think this dark desire is the only thing that keeps him going, a kind of vengeful energy.

We are not alone down here. Savage beasts with nothing to lose share our fate. ‘We can’t even eat the bastards, can we, boy? Rip out your teeth. Nasty, rancid, stringy vermin! If you manage to swallow any of that tainted flesh, within an hour, you’ll be vomiting and shitting your guts out.’ Grandfather is right. Seen it with my own two eyes. It’s best to listen to him when he talks, especially when he curses. To think they were once our best pals. Fed from our own hands, if you can take Grandfather’s word on it.

Cats and dogs. That’s what we once called them. Mans’ best friends. Now, our worst nightmares. Lurking, slippery creatures, opportunistic, treacherous and vicious. Their bodies are small and wiry. Their coats are mangy and plagued with lice — aren’t we all? Bloody hell! They have no fear of our fires and sneak up on us while we sleep, snapping and slicing at any exposed flesh, their bite ripe for infection and snared with distemper — a frothing madness for which the only relief is the gift of death, granted by those who care for you and their survival. Living is a terrible business. The only good thing about these night horrors is that they spend more time at each other’s throats than attempting to take mouthfuls of meat from our unwary, exhausted bodies. Evolution is still alive and well, reacting with a speed that the theorists would have found unbelievable. Grandfather’s wisdom has no end to it. He is a living legend among us.

As he leapt into the jagged hole that led to his existence, he could hear the roar of the storm approaching, the sound of a freight train, his Grandfather said, although heaven knows what a freight train was. Yes, he showed me remnants of their tracks. They are lonely iron walkways slowly being buried, like those who still had the memory, by the blowing sand, devoid of all life. They mean nothing to me — they exist only in Grandfather’s mind — a persisting vision without relevance.

There are only ten of us left in our group. We once numbered twenty-five. Two to madness. Three to hunger and malnutrition. Four to rotting infection. Two to falls. Two to flash-floods. Two to an unexplained disappearance and undocumented oblivion. Grandfather remembers and recites their names every morning. Only two of these have resonance for me. Memory is the only luxury we have left, he says.

Still, even with this small number, we have no harmony. The taint of Satan still lies in our failing hearts, Grandfather says. Our souls are damned to extinction, but we still pretend to build empires out of dust and ruin. We cannot forget, yet we cannot learn. Short-sightedness and selfishness ride our twisted backs to the very end. Some of us see Grandfather as a threat to their dominance and continually work to form factions and divisiveness. They lurk, always in the background. Grandfather doesn’t care. He tells them to follow or not. Each man has his road, and choice will plague us till we are no more. Although bereft of everything, we still want to live, so we follow.

I know my path well in this perpetual gloom and grime of a civilisation forgotten. As if my feet have eyes, I find my way unerringly through the broken walls and ghostly tunnels to the place where the last of my people lay huddled in discontent and surrender. The only exception was Grandfather, who was busily fashioning something from a thin, crumpled metal piece. He hummed a low tune, a melodic sound he only made when he felt particularly challenged.

‘What are you humming, Grandpa?’ I asked him once when I had still not grown enough to reach his waist.

He had looked at me with those stone, grey eyes that seemed to penetrate your skull. Eyes that should not have belonged to that hue of skin. At first, he did not seem to know who I was, but slowly, familiarity came drifting back to the present.

‘It’s a tendril of hope that lingers from when the world was bright and full of song,’ he grated. ‘It was performed by a man named Patrick Hernandez. A frivolous thing, but it lends me strength of a sort, centres me to do what needs to be done.’

I followed the smoke of his tune, a lifeline laid down in the dark for those who are lost.

‘What’s going on, Grandad?’ I asked softly, sitting next to him and facing out towards the others. I knew how to survive.

‘Paul’s muscles are trying to tell him to flex his brain.’

His voice had no emotion or worry, just a statement on how things were. He never bothered about what he couldn’t change but worked tirelessly on his approach to every new situation.

His hands kept moving over the metal. What he was making, I couldn’t yet tell, but the writhing ropes of tendons snaking along his naked arms drew my eyes hypnotically.

The noise of nature, wrecking her displeasure, scouring and raking the surface with fury, severed my trance. As our underground nest trembled beneath the angry goddess, I glanced across at the glowering, low-browed Paul, who squatted in a corner by some rusted and unidentifiable hunk of machinery. Our eyes met for a split instant, and I felt his hate — poisonous radiation. Grandfather gave no sign of noticing, but I knew he had. He missed nothing.

Paul was a festering wound. He was always reaching for what he didn’t have, and when he did manage to get his hands on his goal, he made a mess of it. He lusted for what Grandfather had — respect — a thing he could not gain for himself. Sometimes, the others listened to him, fearing the brute of a man that he was. Most gave him enough to keep his hands off their throats, but no one wanted him to lead the way on a treacherous path. The few who had given him that scope were now dead — abandoned when they most needed him. He was well known for what he was, yet still, he would not leave. Paul is but a reminder of what brought us to the edge of extinction, Grandfather says. He serves his purpose.

Extinction. Most of us didn’t see it coming — heads buried in the sand carrying on with everyday life — a narrow perspective soothed by the balm of false education. Those of us who suspected stood split into the change and economic camps. The former pointed to the visible signs — the earth’s temperatures warming up, especially the nighttime mean temperatures and the noticeable heating up of our oceans, driving species in large numbers into foreign waters, leaving behind bleached reefs and mangroves, sterilised. It wasn’t just the changing habitats of the larger mammals, but literally an epidemic of invasive species on all levels, by sea and by land. Peculiar alien insects buzzed and chirped at night. Strange fishes were brought home in the morning catch, stifling, creeping plants that did not belong. And let’s not mention the poisons — all made by our genius hands for our convenience. Scientific report after scientific report became part and parcel of everyday boredom. People heard, but no one listened — we were habituated and fatalistic — technology will help our children to cope — a beguiling hope. Such things were too global for the ordinary man to influence. Today is what is essential. Let’s carry on. ‘Sounds just like now, really.’ Grandpa smiles when I reply like this. In the end, it all lined up like a fatalistic plane crash, and here we are.

The economic camp — our masters in all but name — pretended to be deniers, but they secretly planned for commercial gain caused by any potential disaster. If crops failed, the multinational companies working hard to market their genetically engineered foods, unpalatable just from the sound of it, sniffed avidly at this opportunity waiting to happen. Linked as they were with the all-powerful food industry and the bought political class, their strategy was assured. If disease increased, the drug industry, lords of their global domain, were also ready. They had already identified the most likely illnesses waiting to welcome us. Our fate was forever in their hands. Those corporations that professed to be convinced and invested in the new clean technology were merely preparing us to buy their new products. ‘The future of the environment is in danger. Buy, buy, buy now to save our world.’ There you have it! The perfect business model — an interim and long-term approach. Hypocrites! The one per cent could relax in their plush chairs with the assurance that their offspring would get even fatter as their slice of the cheese was passed on in larger and larger portions. They had not yet accepted it. The capitalist dream was dead. Mother Nature would not allow herself to be raped by her precocious, greedy, misguided offspring who suffered heavily from delusions of grandeur and hubris.

Grandfather’s voice has always been my eyes to see into the past. He has always sought to educate me properly — to learn, not to be brainwashed. The others could not read or write — useless pastime, they grumbled — won’t put food in your stomach. As for the past? What’s done is done. No use in rehashing. What else can you say to that?

A few years ago, while resting from our efforts from digging through a gold mine — the ruins of a pharmacy — where we found nothing salvageable, Grandfather turned to me and said.

‘Don’t say a word. I never said that what we once produced was without value.’

‘No, Grandfather,’ I replied seriously. ‘Grandfather?’

‘Yes, Boy?’

‘Sometimes you sound just like those commie bastards from the last war before the ending that you always go on about.’

Grandfather had chuckled. A resonant, warm sound that emanated from his wrinkled chest.

‘You’re clever, boy. Probably one of the last of the clever ones, but don’t let that get to your head. Cleverness can easily fall prey to foolishness.’

I have always thought long and hard about that one.

‘Keep an eye open, boy. Even when you dream.’ Grandfather’s voice brought me back to the present where I had thought I had remained.

A quick second glance at Paul, this time with more steel and determination. This action seemed to have deterred him from doing something dubious and threatening. Whatever it was, remained a mystery. I was no pushover. I was the youngest, but that was an asset in these unbearable times. I was also strong, stronger even than Paul, and Grandfather had taught me to fight — in ways that the others could not even comprehend. Paul hated Grandfather. He was afraid of him, for he knew deep down on some primitive level that he would cease to exist if he did away with him — a moment of triumph followed by quick oblivion. On top of that, he was wary of me. I wasn’t a leader like Grandad, but he knew my worth. We all realised, however, that his peevish resentment would one day get the better of him. We watched the bastard both day and night. Survival is everything, although Grandfather repeatedly says while shaking his head wistfully, survival is not always enough.

‘God, I long for a bath!’

Grandfather’s irritable mutter broke into my straying thoughts. For me, a bath was rubbing sand vigorously over my bare skin. Water was a luxury. Most of the time, we barely had enough to wet our lips. Water used in such a wasteful way filled my mind with horror, but somehow, to Grandad, it was the most delightful thing to imagine. He said it was like heaven, an oasis in the desert. What was an oasis anyway? I must remember to ask him the next time he mentions it. The rickety fog-catchers served our best efforts of capturing something to drink. They required constant maintenance due to the bastard weather, but we had to work with what we had. Every morning, as the mists burned away, they had to be re-erected or repaired, but they kept us on the side of the living, so the effort was worth it. We all