Incinerator

A new story, at long last. This one is a little over a thousand words, so it's a quick read.

Incinerator

The alarm chimed for a third time and immediately a dark orange flame sprouted from the huge concrete pipe. The tower of fire raged for a few seconds and ten abruptly shut off, a lingering smell of ash it’s only remnant.

Barker hadn’t even looked up. His window was stained and darkened from the constant smoke and he had seen it hundreds of time before. The loudspeaker buzzed and announced closing time. With great care, Barker placed the final lading bills into his filing cabinet and adjusted his tie.

He pulled down the blackout blinds on his window and locked the heavy doors to his office.

A few minutes later the yard was noticeably quieter. The men didn’t hang around after their shift was finished and the reddening sun showed only a huddle of figures around a tin hut.

Barker pushed a small button on the side of the hut and the primary floodlights winked out. The orb of the sun sank below the line of mountains to the west and darkness overtook the facility.

‘Uh, Boss, I don’t think Marks is leaving.’ Barker peered over at the tall, thin man standing next to the guard post, his metal lunchbox in hand. Absently he looked at his phone and sighed.

‘Fuck, what’s he waiting for?’ Barker was nervous. They only had so much time to do this and they couldn’t afford another witness.

To his immense relief, a sedan pulled up at the checkpoint and Marks hurried into the front seat. His wife backed up and drove off, leaving the empty factory in black silence. Barker let out his breath.

‘Lucky we wrapped this up properly eh?’ said Isaac anxiously. Barker shot him a dark look. The body was starting to…well seep wasn’t the right word but it was the one that kept flashing across his mind.

‘Shut the fucking boot.’ He grunted, swallowing the bile at the back of his throat.

Barker composed himself and said ‘Here, drive it up to the service entrance over on the other side and I’ll see about the furnace.’

‘Whuh-what’ll I do?’ questioned Isaac, ‘sir.’ He added.

‘Just uh…keep and eye out for um…well for anyone.’

Barker hopped into the passenger seat next to Derrick, who hadn’t said a word in hours. He regarded Derrick as they rolled across the facility. He’s just pulled into himself, he thought, locked all the doors and hung up a do not disturb sign.

There was an unopened pack of smokes gathering dust on the dashboard. Worrying.

‘You mind if I take one?’ said Barker, eyeing the cigarettes. Derrick turned his head slowly, and he could see the blankness, the shock in his eyes. He shock his head absently. Barker lit up and took a long pull.

‘God damn.’ He mumbled, after a few seconds.

The car radio was on so low it was only audible because of the pervading silence between the two men. An old rock song played on a classics station.

‘….go and say goodbye.’ The singers words were whispery and the guitars no where to be found. Barker turned it up so there would be something to fill the quiet.

‘That was one I haven’t played in a long time. You’re listening to one-oh-three point five, the songs your dad can’t even remember.’ Derrick stopped the car just before the ladder leading up to the second furnace.

‘Derrick, you’re going to have to carry…uh…carry it on your back, there’s no stairs.’ He expected him to complain but he just pulled the stiff corpse onto his shoulders and started climbing the ladder.

By the time Barker reached the top, Derrick was already unscrewing the panel on the side of the huge furnace tower. The hole was small but they managed to force the body into the vent. Barker tried to ignore the crunch as it hit the surface, stories below.

‘Uh…Derrick…you go to the control room and fire up the furnace, we can say it was a cleaning exercise or something.’ A blank stare. He finally nodded and started his descent down the ladder.

Barker lit up another cigarette and leaned back against the concrete. He was going to see this done tonight and maybe tomorrow, he thought, he could check out flights to Australia, or Thailand or somewhere.

He was lost in this thought when he spied a car pull up next to his sedan and an elderly looking man get out. The man flicked on a torch and waved it over the open car door. Then he shone the beam up at the gantry, passing a few feet from where Barker shrunk back against the tower.

Barker’s mind raced. The night watchman might not bother climbing all those rungs to reach him. Damn, damn, damn. There was another ladder, heading further up the furnace. Nothing for it.

***

Derrick sat in the worn swivel chair of the furnace operator. He had activated the burner, it was injecting the fuel and would vent in a minute or two. He cupped his face in his hands and started to silently shake. After only seconds Derrick stopped. His face had reacquired a blank look as he pushed open the outside door. The wind was picking up and this high up it was downright dangerous.

***

.The top of the catwalk was blackened and unstable. The yawning pit of the furnace gave off an uneasy feeling. Barker pulled out his mobile and found Derrick’s number.

‘Hi this is Derrick, I can’t take your call at the moment but please leave a message and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.’

***

‘’This is 999 emergency, what assistance do you require?’

‘I need…I need an ambulance quickly. My name is Harold Sloop, I’m at 32 Docklands Avenue in East London. There’s a man here who…’

Had the watchman been looking behind him he might have noticed a faint shape moving at speed away from the facility. Had he exceptional eyesight he might also have noticed that the figure was limping slightly, and had he truly superhuman sight, he might also have noticed that he looked, if not burned, then at least slightly singed.

History

Hello there all, Have a look at this, a short story I wrote recently. It now has a title, too. So here I present: History.

The stag tensed, sensing a disturbance, and the moment was lost. He cursed as the deer bounded out of sight. Picking up his bow he ran noisily after it, crashing through the dense undergrowth. The signs of the animal’s passing were clear and he had wounded it already. Surely it must be running out of steam now, he though.

Daid’s legs burned and a pool of sweat was collecting between his shoulder blades. If he didn’t catch the beast soon he’d run out of strength himself.

Without realizing, Daid burst into a clearing, devoid of even the meanest of plants, the tree line shorn abruptly as if by design. The soil was sandy and loose, great clouds of it were blown up by his and the deer’s racing strides. Squatting in the centre of this incongruous desert was a wide structure of some unknown rock, so unlike the wood and metal constructions of Daid’s village.

The roof of the building was almost entirely absent, but it looked as if it had been blown open from the inside rather than succumbing to the elements, as the weathered facing showed it had endured.

Was it some kind of temple? He wondered. There were odd markings above its rusted door, a circle with three distended rectangles pointing inwards. The language under it was strange but he recognised one word: Danger.

He approached the entrance with some anxiety. What if it were a temple? He thought. Would the Gods be angry with his trespass? Curiosity won, as it so often does, and he stepped up to the crumbling portal.

He slowly inserted the point of his spear into the crack in the door. The metal inside was degraded to an extreme degree and the only thing holding the structure together was a smooth yellowed frame of some type. Applying a little pressure caused the door to bend and then crack. The remains of the entrance collapsed in a heap of dust and fragments.

Upon entering the structure he immediately noticed yawning, roughly circular chasm that spanned almost the whole of the floor. There were no interior walls on this level, either they had decomposed into nothing with time, he decided, or this space had been an entrance hall.

When Daid had been nine years old, his father had taken him to see the great temple in New Karrans, but he had only been able to see the topmost entrance, a small, heavily fortified concrete slab. While the temple exuded protection and safety, the last savior of his ancestors, this now place gave off a feeling of vague unease, as if it was designed to keep something in rather than out.

As he unslung his pack and removed the braided rope, laboriously fashioned from horsehair into a strong but light cord, he considered what he was doing. The buck was almost certainly long gone by now and he faced the prospect of returning to his village empty handed. Still he had never seen the like of this place and it was worth the loss if he found something of use among this aged, broken ruin.

He tied the rope to a solid looking stone pillar, though he was hard pressed to find one that did not crumble at his touch.

The second floor down was unremarkable. The damage to the centre was just a severe and all that remained were a few pieces of interior wall, bleached almost smooth by the elements. Once again Daid wondered what had calamity had caused this destruction. He even briefly considered that it might be the enemy, but he quickly dismissed this thought. There had been no trace of the enemy for hundreds of years now, and the great temple had only survived because of its location in the side of a mountain.

The fourth floor was illuminated only because it was noon, and the sun was directly overhead. The floor was intact but a thick film of watery mud coated it. Daid supposed that the sun never shone long enough here to dry it out. Some sort of foreign metal boxes lined one wall and puddles of this same metal and rare glass were burned into the stone on the ground walls. More signs lined this room all bearing the same moniker: Danger.

Most interesting to him however, was a tiny room contained in a hard stone cuboid. The ground inside appeared somewhat unstable but he stepped in anyway.

He wondered what the purpose of this odd room was. Along one wall was a dirty panel. As he brushed the muck and grime off he could see a series of small buttons and a number above each one. Almost without realising he pushed one of these experimentally.

The entrance to the room closed with a screech. At once a rumbling sound could be heard and the room began to noticeably drop. Daid crouched, awaiting the impact. Instead of a crash the room simply slid to a halt, dozens of metres below its original position. The doors slid open, a little more easily this time. A little shaken by the violence of the descent, Daid tiptoed carefully across the new room. The only illumination came from the tiny light inside the square and a small blinking dot on a glass sheet on the other side of the room.

“Welcome” said a hidden voice. There was a long pause, long enough for Daid to examine the glass panel now in front of his face. The symbols were unfamiliar, and the only recognizable section was a small face in the upper left corner of the screen.

“Welcome” the voice repeated. The face on the screen moved in line with the word, and Daid jumped back in shock.

“I’m really glad you’ve come”. The voice sounded genuinely eager. Daid realised he was holding his breath and let it out all at once. His body shook hard, more due to his terror than the cold. He had never seen anything like this.

“Please sit, I have no chair for you, and I apologize.” Daid steadied himself and said “Who are you?” His voice was thick and his words came out in a rush. He wanted to turn and run, but he had no idea where the exit was.

“Who am I?” He wasn’t being facetious; he actually seemed to be considering the question. “My name is Gordon”.

He appeared to be puzzled as how to continue the introduction. “I am a computer”

There was no word in Daid’s vocabulary that corresponded to this term. The word sounded like the phrase in the old language meaning ‘thought maker’ or ‘idea maker’

“Wh-why am I here? Where is the exit-how can I get out?” Again he rushed his statement, the fear etched into the sentence.

“You want to leave? But there’s so much to discuss.” The computer’s voice sounded sad and a little desperate. There was no malice in Daid, and despite his terror he felt a little compassion for the creature. Whoever he was, he must have been stuck here for a long time. A long time without anyone to talk to, or to listen.

“Uh…uh…no” he quickly amended. “What did you want to talk to me about?”

His voice became animated, as if he had been practicing this for a long, long time. “Many things, Mr, uh?”

“Daid. Just call me Daid”

“Daid, then, many things, the history of this world. I know so much about this world. Your history and the history of your forbearers. Their rise and their downfall.”

Daid wasn’t really in a hurry, he supposed. He sat on the ground, which was warm and strangely soft. The light from the screen bathed the area around it in a soft glow and Daid felt a lessening of his fear. The computer paused a second, and then began.

“It began a long time ago, far from here.”