archives

Replay

by Carmelo Rafala

Scene: scroll image 333-453321-33a. Camera quickly pans to a wide shot of a far wall. Image shifts back and forth, tilts fifteen degrees, shoots up toward the high ceiling. Halo fuzz around the distant white light, then down to look at a pair of hands, palms open. Enhance.

      He sits on the hard floor of this prison cell because he’s been denied a chair, a table, a bed, anything of any comfort at all. A dim light burns in the centre of the room, suspended from a high ceiling. Morning has long since broken, and they’ve denied him a meal for the third time. He picks at pieces of leftover food, trying to make it last.

      He knows he should be frightened as he sits in their prison, terrified, for in a few hours they are going to execute him—again. But oddly enough he feels a strange calm, like cool waters upon a placid lake. He sits, expectantly, as shuffling sounds crawl behind that steel door....

Scene: scroll image 333-443320-12a. Replay. Camera pans back and focuses on a riverside, water at low tide. Audio picks up voices. Camera moves in to get a shot. A woman moves into the frame. Enhance.

      Karyn’s yellow, sun-bleached hair wraps around her neck in the wind like a scarf. A baggy uniform does little to mask the curves and softness he knows are under there, had felt the night before, wants to feel again.

      “Parliament has broken up,” she says, forcing a small smile.

      He nods gravely and looks at the deep well of sky, at the stars coming out now against the fading blue. They point at him, as if accusing him of some dark tragedy. He winces.

      “I see,” he says flatly, not so much to her as to the sky.

      Off in the distance, by the now sleepy shore, the remnants of London stretch, charred, broken, in ruin, yet still used. He can just make out the thin smoke columns of fires, burning steady against the rising evening wind.

      He sucks it in, the wind, lets it caress his face this one last time before he must give it all up to the Dhijad, the wind, water, the asphalt jungle he calls home. He curses his artificial eyes for the clarity of memories.

      “I suppose the order comes effective immediately,” he says, going through the motions, knowing the answer.

      “Yes,” Karyn replies. “Navy transports are gearing up for the evacuation.” She walks over and places her hands on his shoulders. “There is no other choice, Jon. Can’t rebuild properly in a city full of refugees. The authorities need space.”

      A bird cries overhead. He considers it for a moment.

      “There are always choices…”

      Karyn continues, unhearing, his words falling off her like leaves. She brushes a hand over his face and meets his eyes with a look of quiet longing. “Thanks to the new Skylight defences, those Dhijad clans are having a hard time of it,” she says. “Anyway, I’ll be leading the first group away from London at midday tomorrow.” She pushes her softness into him. “But now your favourite dinner is waiting, and more,” she whispers. “Let’s make it last.”

Scene: scroll image 333-443320-12b. Shadows and silhouettes of ruins scatter the view of the shore. Moonlight casts doubtful shadows, blankets rustle. Enhance.

      The memory of London is haunted for him, and there is something, something he can’t explain that laments the city’s broken back, voices echoing into the night where only the spirits of the dead now wander. He can feel it in his heart and in his bones, a swirling band of sadness and peace, as elusive as the evening mist, yet as perceptible as a fever.

      Fires twinkle in the city, while the stars shine hard and silent like sentinels in the sky. From inside a burnt out block of flats he can hear the water licking at the shore, the thrum of a vehicle down a dark and narrow street. The air seems pensive. How long now? How long would it be before they come? This time he tries not to remember...

      Karyn shovels a fork full of food into her mouth from a plate near their makeshift bed. The candles are still burning and wiggling in the moving air, casting an eerie glow and producing quick shapes his eyes could hardly record properly.

      He can hear them, his eyes, the tiny machinery whining and clicking in his sockets.

      Karyn lies flat on her stomach, her legs entwined in his, the plate on the floor. “The last time I will see these stars with you,” she says, eyes fixed up, her back to him. “And then we’ll meet down in Kent...”

      He smiles inwardly. “Why don’t we take the boat out tonight onto the Thames? You and me under these stars?” He’d always secretly wanted to, that night, to let it all slip away, fall behind him as if he’d never been a part of it. The Great Burning.

      She carries on as if he hadn’t said a word. She sits up, and he sees the smooth skin of her back, reaches out and touches it.

      “Karyn...” he breaks off.

      She turns to him, soft eyes betraying concern. “Why do you do this to yourself?”

      “I don’t know,” he says, wanting to pull the eyes out of his head; the eyes they had given him. But his brain remembers as well as his eyes. “I guess I expect to rewrite it all. Or to push delete and wipe it all away.”

      “Everything must play itself out,” she says. “Just as it should.”

      “Should it?”

      She smiles somewhat wickedly. “Just for you, Jon.”

      Her face resumes the composure it had before the shift in conversation, the way it had been that night. She gets up, the blankets rustle down, exposing her flesh to the moonlight, cold and pale and ghostly. She walks to the window. She glances back over her shoulder, eyes hard, accusing.

      “Karyn, I wanted to tell you...I wanted to say...”

      He closes his eyes and keeps them shut. But he can never keep them shut for long.

Scene interrupt. Scroll image 333-443320-12c. Replay.

 

      He hears the boats rocking in the docks, the soft groaning of the hulls in his ears. He opens his eyes. The water glows silver in the pale light of the moon in a remarkably crystal sky. He sees her form on the quay, silhouetted and haloed in a ghostly moonlit aura.

      And he can feel them out there, hidden behind the velvet of dark, ready to come bursting forth from the quantum bubble and set fire to the night. He shivers.

      He had been there, in Birmingham, when they had come, set fire to it, let it burn. And he had seen Manchester reduced to ash and steam from a distance as those clan ships hurtled away from the bloody massacre.

      He squeezes his eyes shut and shakes his head. (Scene interrupt...) He opens them, wet, glossy, tired. So very tired. (Scene continue...)

      He suddenly grows cold, shivering. “Karyn,” he says. “I want to hear you say it.”

      “I’ve got us a place on a navy frigate. They say the Canaries are nice this time of year. War didn’t reach them, they say.” She winks. “Playas las Americas.”

      “Karyn.” His heart pounds. The moment is fading.

      “It would be nice,” she says, her smile distant in the moonlight. “To finally stay somewhere together for longer than a few weeks. You. Me.”

      “I need you to say it.”

      “I’ve got a little secret,” she said, smiling. “Want to hear it?”

      “Oh God, please say it!”

      “Before the internet when down, I spied out a little place by the shore for us,” she says. There is a crashing in his brain. “Just for us. You like the sea, the boats.” She reaches out for him to join her for a walk on the quayside, like she had done that night before they had come, unannounced.

      But he was supposed to help stop it all. Wasn’t he? That’s what they used him for, right? And these islands were to be spared by capitulation. Spared. Left untouched.

      The knowledge of his actions came to him the day the Dhijad knocked out those new defences, defences known to them through his eyes...

      “Say you forgive me,” he whispers to the air.

      “A little place for us,” she continues.

      “Yeah,” he relents, chest caved in. “Sounds real nice.”

      “My gift to you, Jon.”

      He quivers slightly and remains where he is, takes a long, deep breath and awaits the inevitable, the lightning crashing to earth. Again.

      “Goodbye, Karyn,” he says.

      She doesn’t hear. She watches the stars.

      But he swears, swears that this time as she looks back, hand still outstretched, before the night becomes day and the water in the Thames boils and the little shanty towns built upon the ruins blows away in the fire wind, that she is smiling at him. Smiling.

      And he waits for the scene to fade, for the vision to smudge and swirl into base colours and finally turn black.

      Through the replay he can hear shuffling sounds behind that steel door...

      And he waits, longingly, in the dim light for that promised peace that seems to never come, that final resting peace where at long last he can relinquish countless hours of replay.

      Peace.

      The peace of the dead.

Carmelo Rafala's stories have seen publication in British publications such as Jupiter magazine, Forgotten Worlds, Neon Literary Journal, as well as the anthology The West Pier Gazette and Other Stories, edited by former Interzone production editor Paul Brazier (due out in hardback this Christmas). He has also had stories podcast by the award-winning podcast company Variant Frequencies. His most recent story, "Mother Tongue," was the fourth most popular download.

An American by birth, he lives in England with his wife and daughter.

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