the crier and the watchman
Ash is played by [email protected]
Last update 27/12/00
The sunset was a faded pink glow, and so dusted was the sky that the wind had substance. Any stars that managed to peek through the tepid atmosphere seemed erroneously placed, sometimes winking, but more often than not fading out all together.
Grey covered the planet, the sun, that once friendly orb now remote. It was colder too, a kind of cold that ate right into the bones. Ozone filled the nostrils, and the other, a sickly sweeter smell of corpses rotting in their beds, their hideaways, their houses, their cars, their barracks, their bomb shelters, and finally where they lay where on the roads and fields, in varying degrees of decomposition.
Those that did survive - more luck than any kind of human attribute - were scattered far and wide. If perchance, you met another, more often than not their eyes were wide and vacant, as shock devoured them, initially. Some said they walked with the spirits of the dead, while their bodies carried on automatically, eating, drinking, bathing, staying alive. Others still gave up completely. Sitting or standing in the one spot until they starved or dehydrated to the end.
But humans are gregarious creatures, and though the corpses of these monsters, these machines also made a component of the debris, a rusting metal reminder of the horrors that still remained hidden, and that threat still looming. Anytime anywhere.
But for now, in downtown San Francisco, that threat seemed to be gone. The world as it once was, never to return, but remnants of life were slowly emerging.
A man, with a horribly scarred face - his lips sliced off, and rictus set in to pull them in a permanent and ghastly grin would walk past Ash's shop everyday, yelling at the top of his voice.
"...the machines shall come back the machines are in my head there are bees in my head they will come back power power oh the machines are in my head the machines live in my head the machines are on my head the machines are will come back the bees are in my head the machines are in my head..."
Day after day with the same monologue, the shouter would walk past. Until, that is, one morning, when Ash looked out of his window, he could see the shouter across the mall. He had been crucified on a cross made out of two telegraph poles, and glass... no, it couldn't be, glass instead of nails...and his eyes dashed from his head. Horribly, they were open, and the vacant sockets seemed to mock Ash from afar, while his perpetual rictused grin seemed even wider.
Ash felt the tattoo of the crow on his left shoulder tingle and he knew immediately that this man had some kind of injustice done to him. Ash slipped into the memories of the years that had passed in the company of the Shamans. They had told him many things, which at the time he didn’t believe at all. As of late however, he was beginning to believe more of what they said for he himself could see the signs.
The Shaman who had done the tattoos for Ash had been named Mark (Running Fox) Jones. The others had taken Ash to see him when they saw the end time in a ceremony. Running Fox had placed several different tattoos upon Ash.
“These will protect you in the end time. The crow represents the Sacred Law that we must follow. The Wolf is the guardian of your dreamtime, The coyote is the trickster, The raven is magic, and last the dragonfly for it is illusion. You may call upon any of these animals to help you through the fight that will become yours.”
There was a flash of pain in Ash’s’ chest as the memory of the dog soldier ceremony entered his head. He stood on the dirt floor of the house and watched himself spin in slow circles as the eagles’ talons that suspended him above dug into his flesh. He was outside of his body now entering what the shamans called the vision world. The only sound he could hear was the constant beat of the drums below him. The pain subsided and the animals that were his guardians came to him and spoke in the ancient tongue telling him of what he was born to do.
Ash shook his head coming back to the present day and looked again across the street at the man. “The Crier” stared with empty sockets at Ash and his office. He searched for meaning in the act of crucifying the man but found none. He was a victim as was everyone else on this planet. “Why kill another victim hadn’t there been enough killing already?” Ash pondered this as he walked across the street. “Maybe this was done to show me that there is someone watching me. But who and why would there be someone watching me?” Ash thought as he stood before the man.
“I have no idea who you really are but I can not allow you to remain there.” Ash said to The Crier.
He tore a piece of cloth from the mans pants and wrapped it around his hand. He then reached up and pulled the glass from first one hand then the other. He didn’t try to catch the man he simply let the body fall to the ground. He thought for a moment of going through the mans clothes to find money or some other type of valuables that he could sell. He decided against this, as this would be disgraceful to his people.
Ash reached down to take the Crier’s’ hand in his and as he did so he felt the tattoo of the crow burn hotter. Ash dropped the hand and thought for a moment. This man has had some injustice done to him so therefore I must correct was has been done but I know nothing of him. I don’t care about him or his family they mean nothing to me.
“All right Crier, it seems that we are destined to do this thing. So as you were the town Crier I must play the town Watchman.” Ash said flatly as he rolled the man over onto his stomach with his boot. Ash went through the pockets of the dead man with ease. Death meant nothing to him; it was a simple fact of being alive.
Closer examination of the man revealed, apart from his missing eyes, a peculiar wound to his left temple. It was very small, no more than 5mm in length. His fingers were bloodied, and the wound ragged. This one looked to be self inflicted.
The hands had been pierced right through the center, the glass had sliced neatly, and little, if any blood had exited the wound. The Crier was not a large man, by any means, but it would have taken some strength to push glass so neatly through bone and skin.
The man's pockets contained very few items. A thick bundle of hundred dollar notes (worthless now), a number of dried rations (standard military issue), a St Christopher medallion on worn silver chain, and a very strange looking computer chip. It was covered in dried blood.
As he examined what he had looted from the man's pockets, there was a slight sound behind him, as wind moving, then an almighty shattering sound.
The windows to his shop had been broken, shattering into a million pieces. There was no one, and nothing in sight. The fine hairs on the back of Ash's hair began to rise, but was it just adrenaline? Or did it feel like some kind of force hovering in the air, growing even fainter as he concentrated on it? He couldn't be sure, and eventually, whatever it was, had gone.
Another sound, this time a more mundane one, and the tattoo on his shoulder felt for a second as if someone had held ice against it.
There was a crow on the eave of his small shop, seemingly watching him and cawing.
“So tell me my feathered guardian am I to search out what this means?” Ash asked the crow.
The crow cocked its head slightly as if listening. Ash went back to
examining the body. Somewhere inside him there was a feeling that he needed to do something. He left the body there on the street and walked around the area picking up detritus that had been strewn there. Anything that would burn he picked up all the while he recited under his breath the ancient death
prayer. Ten minutes passed and Ash paused to view his work the pile upon the Crier was now ready.
Ash walked slowly and deliberately across the street to his office. He watched and listened as he went carefully taking notice of the surrounding area. Although he didn’t feel the presence of whatever had crashed through his windows he wasn’t sure it wasn’t still lingering around. He walked through the door without opening it and the crunching glass beneath his feet
sounded sickening to him.
He walked through eyeing the office that was once his last vestige of reality now smashed and broken. Anger creeped into his heart and he fought the urge to scream aloud. Ash walked to the closet and retrieved the kerosene he kept there. He stopped for a moment looking at the laptop on his desk and thought about trying to connect to the Internet. He decided he should wait and walked past the desk and back into the street. Looking up over his shoulder, he saw that the crow was still watching him.
“Crier it is time for you to go and walk among your ancestors.” Ash said flatly as he poured the kerosene carefully over the debris.
He then bent down and lit the debris ablaze with a single strike from the lighter he carried. The fire caught quickly sucking oxygen from the lungs of Ash as it flared into life. He sung a low death dirge for the Crier while he knelt beside the pyre then stood and walked away. Leaving it for the world to consume. Ash walked back to the office and threw the medallion of Christopher down on the desk with the computer chip. He then placed the kerosene back into its place within the closet and removed his gun and ammunition. He went back to the desk and loaded the weapon as he examined the medallion and the chip.
“What does it all mean? Ash thought to himself. St. Christopher is the patron saint of travelers if I remember correctly. Then there’s the chip that the man pulled from his own head where had it come from?”
Ash picked up the chip and examined it more closely now. He looked for any details that might tell him where it was made or where it came from.
The fire burnt fiercely: the heat was almost tangible through the smashed shop window. It hit exposed skin with a rush, like sudden sunburn, a hot desert wind.
The Crier, upon the burning pyre, had stared his last, his empty sockets seeming to search out Ash even as they, and his mouth filled with fire. Perhaps an expression of gratitude, or one of anguish, or maybe simply the blank expression of the dead. The small self inflicted wound on his temple spouted fire, a particularly viscious flaring, glowing green for just a second, then slowly succumbed to the other raging fire, the manmade one that Ash had built.
His totem, the crow had disappeared as he had entered his shop, yet he could hear it calling to him, even as it wheeled higher into the sky, a harsh, yet utterly familar farewell.
The chip and the medallion, both strangely alluring, in the human's never ending quest to explain things away, bore up to Ash's intense examination hugging their secrets close to them. Then as his keen mind compared the two artifacts, things began to unravel themselves.
They were both mysteriously made mainly from the same material, and they both had numbers on them, almost too small for the human eye to read. Squinting, he was able to make out on the bottom edge of the chip 104.9. The same numbers were under St Christopher as he stared benignly from the small medallion, really a pendant.
Ash sat and stared at the medallion and the chip and thought for moment that it may be some type of code but what kind.
Better yet who was behind it at all and why? A radio station maybe? Ash went to his car in the back of the shop and got in and tuned the radio to 104.9 "Well if this doesn't work I'll just have to go for a walk and see If I can trace the crier to where he came from", Ash thought to himself as he turned the dial
He sat in the car, with both the medallion and chip in his hand, switched the radio on. It would be difficult trying to get petrol from the stations now: mostly all electricity had been disconnected, and the pumps wouldn't work. The radio held nothing but static and white noise right now.
A small amount of paperwork sat on the dash, and as Ash's movements caused a slight movement, they began to fall over the radio. He struck out to catch them with the hand that was holding the artifacts retrieved from the Crier. As his hand passed near the radio, did the noise suddenly changed, from white noise, to the howls of what sounded to be....humans....
But it was too fast, his hand was quickly out of radius as he repiled the papers and set them on the dash once again.
His crow tattoo itched again, a white hot burning feeling.
Ash then sat for amoment and tried to think of a way to find the radio station that had caused such a disturbance and who would have done such a thing. The only thing he could now due to the current electrical problem of everyhting being out was to try and trace the Criers steps up the street. He collected the rest of his belongings from the now smashed office and walked up the street looking for a radio tower. He doubted that it would still be standing but he had no choice...or did he.
Ash walked three blocks up and stopped and looked into the sky for the crow. There was no sign of it so he sat down cross legged and concentrated on the animal itself. He was told by the Shamans that he could gain access to the animals but he never knew how.
At this point in time however he didn't have a choice but to try. He had no idea what to expect as he sat there. He simply sat down cleared his mind and waited...
In his trance, the smell of ozone filled his nostils, his senses felt enhanced, heightened, like he'd just smoked a joint, but he was aware, very aware.
Ash sat in the middle of the street, a postcard tribute to the dead world, where cars were rusting quietly. Who knew? In fifty years, perhaps the natural world may over take the dead technologies, and these cars would be sitting in a field. Not likely with this level of pollution. It would take fifty years just for the earth to work this poison out of it's system.
Ash's perception rose, and in his mind's eye, he could see himself from above, his powerful black wings beat rhythmically to keep himself aloft, then he was off, through no impetus of his own, into cleaner air, into a world that no longer existed, above the desert, into a research facility, where masked scientists played God with bacteria and machines. He saw as skin was grafted onto machines, trying to create the superhuman, he watched the infant AI, where computers, once our slaves could beat the scientists in chess, in knowledge, in seduction and the like. He watched programs take joy in their winnings.
He saw a vial, behind lasered security, in a clear perspex safe, a drop of clear liquid in it, labelled, 104.9.
Abruptly Ash was himself once again, sitting on the warm tar of a deserted street, mourning the loss of the wind under his wings.
Ash raised himself up and thought hard about what he had seen. Had he seen it before? Where in the desert was this place he'd seen? He went back to his office and picked up the fe wremaining items that were there. His laptop and other things. He thought to himself this won't do much good but at least I'll have them if I need them. He walked out and took a deep breath of the burnt air. Then looked across the street.
"Crier I know you suffered injustice and I will do my best to right it."
He uttered a small prayer of his own in his native tounge and began walking towards the desert hoping to find something that would be a clue.
Navigating his way out of the city was not easy. The world hadn't neatly ceased to run, and many times, Ash was forced to go around a semi that blocked both the road and the footpath, or a wall that had tumbled, or to take a side street because the stench of death coming from another was too great.
The sounds of his footsteps were his only companions until he neared the outskirts of town, and eerily through the stillness came the sounds of a happier world.
"Weeeeellll, the little things you say and do
Make me want to be with you
Rave on it's a crazy feeling
I know you got me reeling
when you say I loooove you..."
The old rock'n'roll song continued to play as he walked, then at the end, there was a second's silence before it immediately began again.
Closer still to the source of the music, Ash knew it was coming from a house with a closed in flywire verandah. Through the mesh, he could see an older man than he, sitting up taking the occasional swig from a bottle, and listening to the songs with a long gun propped between his knees. When he saw Ash, he sat up.
"Gosh darn, are you real?" he asked increduously, scratching his balding head. "I 'bout thought i was the only one alive on this god darned earth."
Ash wathces the man cautiuosly and walks slowly up towards him never taking his eyes off him or his hands. He smiles and waves at the man as he approaches.
"Yeah, I am real and you?"
"You betcha boots I'm real, sonny jim", he hobbled down off the porch, taking another swig from his bottle, then offered it to Ash. "The whole gosh darn worlds dead, and the alcohol is a-running free!" The bottle contained OP Bourbon.
"I've been here by myself for gosh, how long now? Perhaps a month? I buried my dead, and I was asitting here drinking and athinking perhaps I should be amoving along, and then gosh darn, yous come along. It must be fate." He leaned a little closer to Ash, his eyes brilliantly blue in the gloom of the day.
"An' theys come out at night, they're getting stronger and braver..."