James Axler – Gaia’s Demise

Frowning, Clem withdraw a plug of tobacco and bit off a chaw. He had seen a hundred different kinds of chilling, but nothing resembling this. The hooves of his stallion were already thick with the dust of the land.

A sergeant checked the bulky rad counter they had found hidden in Overton’s room at Cawdor Castle. He worked a few dials and tapped the meter. The needle swung about but didn’t enter the red area. “Reading clean,” he announced. “No rads.”

“Didn’t think it was a nuke.” Clem chewed thoughtfully. “And it sure as shit wasn’t acid rain.”

A soft breeze from the mountains moved over the annihilated fields, the plants crumbling into dust and blowing away. Then a section of the castle broke part, the bricks and mortar separating as the masonry tumbled to the ground.

“Well, lightning didn’t do it, either,” a private stated firmly. “I seen lightning hit, and it don’t do this.”

Sliding off his horse, a lieutenant knelt on the road and reached out to take a handful of the black soil. He carefully inspected it before daring to take a sniff.

“No smell of fuel or black powder,” he said, standing and tossing the piece of dead earth away. “Hell, ain’t no chem burn I know. Not napalm, thermite or even willy peter.”

Shifting in his saddle, Clem translated the term in his head. “Willy peter” was slang for white phosphorus. J.B. had told him about the predark chem. It burned ten times hotter than a Molotov cocktail, but was controllable, unlike thermite. Once you ignited that stuff, all a man could do was run away fast, or fry like a chicken on a spit.

Thunder rumbled, and the man glanced upward to see fiery streaks of orange slashing across the purplish sky, a billowing array of dark storm clouds ravaged by the endless hurricanes of the upper atmosphere. Nothing unusual there.

Glancing down, he noticed the line in the soil where the strange effect stopped and the green grass started once more. The boundary was sharp, as if a line had been drawn with a sharp knife and a string. What weapon could do that?

“Dead,” a sec man whispered, making the sign of the cross. “All dead.”

“Whatever it was happened fast, too,” Clem added, jerking his chin. Off to the side lay the still body of a horse, half of the mare within the circle of destruction, the rest on cool green grass.

The lieutenant went into the woods and returned with a long green stick. Placing the tip against the black soil, the sec man pressed downward, and it easily sank all the way down until his hand almost touched the surface. Withdrawing the stick, he examined the length of the sapling.

“No resistance,” he rumbled, coughing to the taste of the bitter ashes. “Whatever did this penetrated mighty deep into the earth.”

“There’s lava over there,” a young sec man said hesitantly. Impulsively, he reached for his blaster, then released the weapon. There was nothing here to shoot. Whatever battle had been fought was long over. “Mebbe it was a volcano? I heard of them from my ma. Mebbe the ville just got cooked with steam.”

Spitting out a long stream of brown juice, Clem frowned deeply. “Let me tell ya, kid, no steam nor lava did that,” he stated as a fact.

“Don’t like this,” the lieutenant muttered, cracking his knuckles and stepping onto the strange soil. He sank to his knees and quickly stepped back onto the road. A rat scurried by, and he resisted the temptation to shoot it out of sheer annoyance.

“Mebbe Overton…” the corporal started.

Clem snorted and glanced around at the hellish vista. “Can’t be. If his coldhearts could do this, why not just show us and declare himself baron? Who would be crazy enough to try and fight this with blasters and knives?”

“More likely it’s removing potential enemies,” the sergeant said gruffly, fighting to keep his horse calm. The animal was very unhappy and wanted to leave the moment they had arrived. He didn’t blame it a bit. “Chill before getting chilled.”

Nobody spoke for a few minutes, thinking seriously about that possibility.