Endworlds - Nicholas Read [53]
As they paddled in the shallows that bright morning, that last morning, the girls clutched buckets in hand and picked through the bobbleweed and jellies, a thousand nesting rooks and gulls spinning like daisy seeds in the cobalt blue sky above.
The morning had been warm, she remembered, and her girls darted away from each burst of incoming tide with perfect pink faces and girlish gales of laughter.
All the survivors remembered where they were that day, and what they were doing in the moment when the canopy had burst. She had been there, on the white sands, with the girls.
A flash, a thunderclap, and the first drops fell from a clear sky.
Let’s go inside girls. Quickly, it’s going to rain.
Pales of sandy treasures in hand, they were stepping around the rockpool when drizzle turned to downpour.
But where are the clouds?
Another flash followed as they reached the path that wound up the cliff-face to their home, a converted lighthouse cottage on the bluff, which once signaled warnings to mariners in their outriggers, but held no signal for the disaster to come.
Above, a sound struck unlike any other heard before by human ears. It stopped all people in all nations and drew gazes skyward.
Some remembered it as the grinding of metal, others said it was the snapping sound, like the creaking fibers of a felled tree, a mournful groaning that shook the very air as the hydrosphere cleaved apart on the outer edge of their atmosphere. All had watched, open mouthed and shaken to their knees, as the blue sky parted like a curtain and exposed them to the vacuum beyond.
Those facing spaceward saw ink and stars for the first time, a black eternal gullet opening before them. Those facing toward the gas giant that Earth orbited in those days fell in terror as the red-orange bands of a tiger’s eye peered unblinkingly down.
Then came the winds, spiraling upwards in inverted cones, reverse tornados sucking hungrily from the surface as atmosphere vented from a punctured world.
She had managed to hold tight to her girls as sand, sea-grass, rock and palings tumbled with them into the sky. Round and round they had spun, one of her arms thrust up the back of Avril’s cotton top, long fingers clamping down on the girl’s shoulder, pressing her grimly to her breast. Her other hand jabbed through Salamay’s belt line and curled up tightly under the girl’s ribs.
Stay with me, babies. Stay together, stay together! Builders Above, what is happening?
She didn’t remember if it was the violence of tumbling or the maelstrom of broken debris lashing their heads that stole consciousness from her ragdoll body. Maybe it was the thinning air as the ground fell away. Or the crashing sheets of water that slammed them Earthwards again as the High Sea of the hydrosphere fell, all four billion cubic kilderkins of it.
She had woken groggily several times and finally long enough to tip the balance in favor of staying awake, though her first movement threatened to send her back to the dark. One arm still worked, but all other limbs were bent at odd angles, short breaths being all she could manage.
Turning her head to where water lapped into her ear and sprayed chokingly across her face, she found herself adrift on a heaving ocean, impossibly snagged on what may have once been a shingled roof, the flotsam of a flooded world stretching to all horizons, land nowhere to be seen as the heavy sky bore down.
With a torn swatch of fabric looped around one hand, the other empty, it took a moment to register what she should have been holding tight, then another to recover from the spasm of trying to use limbs too broken to hold her weight as she pushed furtively up for a visual search.
Splashing back to the boards, completely alone, pain became fear, fear passed through guilt, and erupted as the perfect anguish of a parent’s greatest loss.
Her heart spilled out through clenched teeth,