Sean E. Britten

I’ve always been inspired by music (I know, super original!) and music has always been a part of my writing. Way back in the days of burnt CDs, my mates and I used to put together CD mixtapes and I came up with the idea of a series of short stories based around pieces of music. Mixtape is all short stories sharing their titles with different songs and inspired, to various degrees, by their lyrics, artists, and vibe.

Currently Playing: Grateful Dead – (Nothing But) Flowers

Nature has turned on humanity, plants, animals and insects banding together to wipe them from the face of the Earth. The only people able to move around in overrun areas are quislings, traitors, recruited to do the things that the forces of nature can’t do. It’s a way of survival but for Carter nature has plans that could change everything.

======

Nothing but flowers stretched the length of the street. Beauty wasn’t the word that came to mind. Anarchy was more like it. It was hard to believe it had all grown over the course of only a few months. Young saplings and ferns clawed at broken cracks in the pavement. A riotous battleground of flowers, vines, ferns and branches exploded from yards and draped across buildings. Another suburban street transformed into a living jungle.

Carter knew he should be used to it but he felt almost overcome by stimuli. Reds and oranges and purples and blues and yellows against green, so much fucking green, he was glutted with it. Drunk on it, but not pleasantly so. End of the evening drunk, staggering around and looking for a place to puke. He missed greys. He missed beige. But even overwhelmed as he was, he could read the signs the plants were sending him. Flowers painted the way like neon arrows. Leaves whispered wordlessly along the path he was supposed to take.

Thorns snagged the legs of Carter’s jeans, tucked into his hiking boots. On top, he wore a thick, brown jacket with reflective stripes across the torso and sleeves, his backpack hanging over one shoulder. A buck knife dangled from his left hip but he didn’t carry a gun or any other weapons. A firefighter’s tool, a halligan, hung loosely from his right hand. He’d found it in an abandoned fire station along with his jacket. A long and heavy bar with a pronged head on one end, like a crowbar, another head like a chisel and a curved spike on the other, ideal for the kind of work he did now. The kind of work he had to keep doing if he wanted to stay alive.

Weeds and vines and mats of grass choked the driveway and front path of the house that the flowers led Carter to. He could almost see them growing before his eyes. The house was a heavily built McMansion with a wraparound porch. Bars covered the windows. A reinforced screen covered the front door. Before everything happened this was a nice neighbourhood so it appeared the owners had been on the paranoid side.

Carter attacked the front entryway. The screen and front door weren’t easy to get through but the security measures were really only meant to discourage thieves, they weren’t meant to stand up to indefinite assault. There was no one around to call the cops on him and even if there was there were no cops to call. He hacked and chiselled and wedged the pronged end of the halligan between the door and the jamb, wriggling and forcing it deeper before applying his shoulder to the bar. The screen hung in a battered mess. Wood splintered and the locks crunched before the door swung open.

Wet rot slapped Carter in the face. He choked and stepped outside to take a couple of deep breaths before covering the lower half of his face with a bandana. He was used to it now, so many dead, but hated coming across them in enclosed places.

“Hello?” Carter shouted into the empty house. “Is anyone there?”

No human voice answered but he did get a reply from the back of the house. Birdsong twittered through the dimly lit rooms and corridors. Carrying his halligan, he hurried through an abandoned living area and past a large and expensively appointed kitchen. Along the rear of the house was a sunroom overlooking an overgrown backyard. A pool reduced to a murky swamp.

Bars covered the sweeping windows along the rear of the house. And another, smaller cage sat by the windows. Two tiny songbirds flitted inside a domed birdcage not much bigger than a microwave. The cage’s seed dish had long gone empty. The water dish was dry. The birds must have been trapped and unattended by their owners for months.

Luckily for the songbirds, tiny, blue-black, flitting things as tall as his thumbs, one of the windows near their cage had been propped open for fresh air. A couple of tender green vines had negotiated their way past the bars, pushing through the screen, and grown through the bars of the cage itself. Their tips delivered dew and budded seeds, enough to keep the songbirds alive until Carter arrived. With all the extra security, nature hadn’t been able to free the birds. That was where his opposable thumbs and tools came in handy.

Carter knocked out the screen before unhooking the cage door and sliding it open. Twittering, the birds immediately shot out. In blurs of colour, they circled one another, spiralled, and flew between the bars of the window. After months, well, a lifetime of captivity, they were free. Free to wind up as dinner for a wild cat or a hawk or something else perhaps, but free, that was the way nature worked after all.

For good measure, Carter made a circuit around the house. He opened doors, broke windows, exposing as much of the interior as he could to nature. That was what he did mostly, provided openings so the plants and animals could break things down more quickly. In the kitchen, he scooped some canned goods out of the cupboards and into his backpack. In the bedroom upstairs, he found the house’s former residents. They appeared to have killed themselves. A shotgun nestled in one corpse’s withered claws while dried blood and brain matter covered the cratered wall above the bedhead. He held his breath, broke open the windows, and left the bodies where they were.

It had been weeks since Carter had seen another living human being. Nature had well and truly taken over since turning against humankind. Plants and animals, insects, even the weather banding together to wipe them out. Nature had started small, reports of pets attacking their owners, orcas attacking boats, even plants acting in strange and unpredictable ways, but then things escalated. Storms in coastal regions, animals of every kind attacking in unison and killing every human they could find, and the less said about the insects the better.

There must have been people living in places far enough removed from truly dangerous nature who were still surviving. In arid desert regions, on small islands without populations of large animals, atop isolated mountain ranges. And then there were urban centres that had fortified against the worst of nature’s attacks before it could get its red teeth and claws into them. Manhattan, for example, Carter had seen videos before the internet died of the military destroying or barricading all entry points onto the island. Central Park and all other patches of greenery were razed. He’d watched footage of running battles in the street against hordes of sewer rats and filthy, grey pigeons. But even so, he wondered how long they could hold on once their supplies started to run out. They couldn’t fish or hunt without being hunted in return. Crops and other plants had begun to turn themselves inedible or even poisonous all over the world. Soon, the only thing those people might have to eat would be each other.

But now, in the areas that nature had hit hard and fast and ruled without question, there were only people like Carter. Quislings, traitors, who had read the signs that nature tried to communicate and betrayed their species to save their own skin. Nature, whatever collective or intelligence that now controlled its actions, spared them to hasten the process of its takeover and do the things it struggled to do.

Carter spent the next couple of hours working his way down the street, breaking down doors and shattering windows. Stripping cupboards and the contents of warm, rotting refrigerators, he scattered precious calories that would otherwise be locked behind metal or plastic across gardens for plants and insects. Potted plants that had exploded with unnatural life across tabletops and living rooms but remained trapped inside tiny vessels he freed by uprooting and dumping on open ground. He didn’t need to waste effort replanting them, they would either find space to rebury their roots themselves or they would rot into mulch for other plants. To the collective that gave Carter his orders, it didn’t seem to matter.

A pack of wild dogs eyed Carter with suspicion and blunt hostility but passed him without posturing. All of them were once domesticated, some still wearing tattered collars, yet they had a touch of wolfishness about them. Even the smallest among them, some kind of terriers, had started to look shaggy and lean and long in the snout. Among the trees, former housecats ignored him entirely. The cats now hunted birds and rodents and lizards that they would have allied with when they first turned against the humans but like wild animals they only really hunted for what they needed to eat rather than slaughtering every small animal they came across like domestics that had gone feral or been given too much freedom. Plants whispered among themselves. The neon colours of their flowers looked like the warning signs of toxic creatures. Among the leaves and undergrowth was the buzz of mostly unseen insects. It was those that disturbed Carter the most.

“Anything?” Carter asked the air, the plants, the lingering creatures. “Anything else?”

When he didn’t receive an answer, Carter turned and hiked back the way he’d come. He continued down the centre of a main road choked with abandoned cars and swollen with plantlife. There were bodies in the weeds already eaten down to the bones.

Carter was staying in an abandoned McDonalds on the edge of a massive shopping complex. He felt strange about staying in people’s homes when he was meant to be destroying them. By the time he got back, it was getting dark. Even in the service of the forces of nature, he didn’t feel safe walking around after dark. Unlit, golden arches stretched  above the dark building. There was no sign of artificial lights or power in any direction. Sitting on a bench outside the main entrance was a statue of Ronald McDonald himself, smiling broadly, one arm slung across the back of the bench.

“Hey, Ronald,” Carter said in passing. “Another day in paradise, am I right?”

Carter travelled light. He added the few supplies he’d collected that day to a small pile in the corner. A battery lamp threw a circle of colourless light. The restaurant smelled like old grease and harsh cleaning products with a hint of rot. Hungry, he ate a can of cold spaghetti then an entire block of chocolate that he’d found that day.

Nights were the worst. Seeking distraction, Carter thumbed through an old fantasy paperback but couldn’t concentrate on the words. After pushing through thirty pages, he couldn’t remember a single character or identify a single plot point in what he’d just read. He set the book aside before folding up his jacket and stuffing it behind his head. He missed his phone, idle, mindless scrolling that let the brain turn off for a while. He missed television, he missed video games. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a McDonalds burger but he missed them, or at least missed having the option to have one any time he wanted along with a hundred other, better cuisines. He missed bars, he missed music, he missed sport. He missed people. He wasn’t some survivalist type who’d dreamed about being the Omega Man in some infinitely more likely apocalypse than the one he currently found himself in. He didn’t even like camping. He hadn’t had a problem with being alone most of the time but months of nothing but his own company was too much. He didn’t know what qualities the forces of nature had looked for when picking out their human henchmen other than a venal willingness to betray their own kind but sometimes he wished they hadn’t found those qualities in him.

xXx

Over the next few days, Carter worked at tearing down the shopping mall as best as he could manage. Off to one side was a construction site where either the mall or its parking area was being expanded at the time of nature turning on mankind. None of the vehicles had been run in months, and he’d never operated a bulldozer before, but he managed to get one of them moving. The sound of its rumbling engine travelled a long way in the quiet. After figuring out the controls for the blade on the front of the dozer, he used it to tear furrows and gaping potholes in the asphalt of the parking lot. With the raw earth exposed, nature could take root and gradually pry apart the rest of the lot at its own inexorable, irresistible pace.

Using the bulldozer, Carter caved in some of the mall’s entrances and shattered storefronts. Gaining access to the rooftop, he smashed skylights with his halligan. He found some kind of water main attached to the mall’s fire suppression system and broke it open, flooding as much of the lower level of the mall as he could. While he felt ambiguous about the destruction, he worked at it tirelessly. Eyes were always on him. Weeds poking through cracks in the pavement. Birds wheeling overhead. Always there were insects somewhere.

At the end of the day, Carter returned to the McDonalds dirty and exhausted. Sitting outside the entrance, he found himself talking to the statue of Ronald McDonald.

“You remember when you guys switched to paper straws? Like that was supposed to do anything?” Carter said. “Little bits of pointless bullshit to make us feel better, to feel like we were a little bit in control of things. Like buying carbon neural whatever-the-fuck, taking the bus instead of driving. Liking a fucking Facebook status. Meanwhile, corporations like you kept polluting and dumping and doing whatever the fuck it took to squeeze out a few more dollars.”

Ronald didn’t answer. His painted smile looked strangely helpless to Carter, as if he would have no answers even if he could talk.

“And yet what I wouldn’t give for another cheeseburger right now, so whose fault is it really, huh?”

Carter patted the clown on the shoulder as he walked back inside. Part of him wanted to punch it instead but he knew he would only hurt his knuckles. Inside, he ate another cold meal and sought distraction before giving up and going to sleep.

The next morning, Carter could tell nature wanted him to move on. Birds wheeled in a too-perfect circle directly overhead, shrieking for attention, and then darted off toward the hills. He could see flowering vines out by the road beckoning like long, green fingers. He packed his supplies and for good measure tossed a couple of cinder blocks through the McDonalds’ windows. The statue of Ronald McDonald stared at him as the echoes of crashing glass faded away. He imagined it many years from now, the rest of the building collapsed or draped in greenery, the statue peeking out like some forgotten god of an extinct race.

It started to rain as Carter hiked along the highway and then onto the backroads winding into the wooded hills. He shrugged the collar of his jacket higher, a waterproof hood covering his head. His backpack and the rest of his clothes were soaked. There were no abandoned cars once he left the highway. Unlike so many apocalyptic shows and movies where people fled to nature to escape the ruin of cities, conveniently cheaper and easier to film in than cities as well, when the real thing happened it was the exact opposite. Branches bowed as if to point the way while animals and insects chittered in hollows out of the rain.

Eventually, the road led Carter to a locked security gate. Wirelink fencing topped with coils of razors stretched into the woods to either side and security cameras on tall poles, blind now, peered down on him from more than one angle. Along with his halligan, Carter carried a bolt cutter in his pack. He unfolded its handles and used it to cut himself an entrance in one of the gates.

As Carter continued up the access road, he began to hear water roaring. It gained strength and drowned out the sound of the rain. He came across some temporary offices and a clearing that led to a steep ravine. Branching across the ravine was a vast wall of concrete. Curving inward, it held back a tremendous mass of water. Further down the wall of the dam were outtake pipes that spouted foaming geysers into a narrow river below.

“The dam, you want me to destroy the dam,” Carter said.

Rain clattered against the dam as Carter moved closer. A road curved across the top to the other side, barely wide enough for two cars side by side. On the reservoir side, water brimmed almost to the top of the dam wall. Rain drummed the surface although a lot of the water was full of downed trees, branches, and other refuse. Water piped out the other side. It was no Hoover Dam but the sheer curve on the other side, stretching unbroken to the river below, was tall enough to induce vertigo. Beyond the ravine, he could see the highway, and a vast sprawl of suburbia built, he realised only now, on an alluvial floodplain.

“Destroy the dam, destroy all that at once,” Carter said.

Carter lingered for a little while, studying the dam and thinking about how he could possibly bring it down. It was so much bigger than anything else he’d destroyed. It wasn’t like he was some kind of demolition expert either. Trees and floating debris piled up on the reservoir side but the outtakes gushed water so they mustn’t have been blocked.

Carter retreated away from the dam but then stumbled to a stop. Another human figure moved through the grey curtain of rain. A woman, about the same age as him and similarly outfitted with a waterproof coat, hood pulled over her head, and a large backpack. She was obviously as surprised to see him as he was to see her. For a few long moments, they stared at one another. Suddenly, she turned on her heels, tensed, as if about to run.

“Wait!” Carter held up his hand. “Wait, don’t go!”

Against her apparent better judgement, the woman stopped. She regarded him with wide, frightened eyes. Carter would say she looked like a deer or some other prey animal but none of them looked afraid of people anymore.

“It brought you here, right?” Carter said. “It, nature, whatever it is. I think it wants us to take down the dam.”

Carter took a look back at the monstrous curve of concrete. Rain still hazed the air. The woman didn’t run.

“Maybe it thought the job was too big for just one of us? I haven’t seen anyone else in ages.”

“You’ve been working for it too?” the woman asked, the first human voice he’d heard in weeks other than his own.

“That’s right, my name is Carter.”

She hesitated. “Amber, I’m Amber.”

Carter looked around, shoulders drawn in as he tried to look non-threatening. “Do you want to get inside and get dry?”

Carter circled to the nearest of the two offices, a white trailer mounted on concrete blocks. Amber, eyes wary, followed him through the doorway. She looked ready to bolt at the slightest provocation. Carter put some distance between them, crossing to the furthest part of the office, setting his bag down, and sitting on the edge of a desk. The office was cluttered with flimsy furniture and cabinets, powerless computers and stacks of paper. Both of them dripped on the thin carpet.

“You said Carter, right?” Amber said.

“That’s right.”

“You’re by yourself?”

“Since all this started. I mean, I’ve seen people, talked to them, but not for a few weeks now.”

Amber considered his answer, staying ready to run by the doorway. “You think it wants us to blow up the dam or something?”

“Blow it up? Sure, I guess, something like that. I don’t know how much water it’s holding but if you look down you can see the highway and hundreds of houses. Bringing it down would wipe all that out in one go.”

Weak sunlight filtered through the windows but Carter pulled the lantern out of his bag and switched it on. He could see how uncomfortable the woman was and hoped the light would help.

“You’ve been working for, it, whatever, since the beginning?” Amber asked.

“That’s right, since the first night when things really started to happen I guess. You too?”

Amber nodded. “You were working over at the mall the last few days? I heard the engine.”

“That’s right! You heard it?”

“I tried to avoid it.”

“How come?”

Amber gave a nervous laugh. “A woman, all alone in the middle of the apocalypse? I mean, I’ve tried to avoid running into anyone else.”

“Right, of course.”

Amber set her bag down on the desk closest to the door. Still wary, she perched on the edge of it with the open door behind her.

“Do you have any idea how to do it? To blow up the dam?”

“No, not really. I was going to sit here and think about it, I guess.”

The two of them regarded one another and listened to the rain. Carter had wanted someone to talk to but now that he had the opportunity he didn’t know what to say. That compulsion to keep moving and doing what he was directed to do without thinking hung over him. And there was a sense of shame between them, he could feel it in Amber almost as keenly as he felt it in himself. When alone, he could concentrate on the work before him without making many judgements. Sometimes, it almost felt like he was doing something good, like stopping food going to waste, planting things, or helping those birds he’d rescued the other day. But having another person right in front of him reminded him of his status as a traitor and a pariah for what remained of the human race. The two of them had betrayed their kind in the most fundamental way. It made him question what kind of person he really was, and what kind of person she was as well.

“I saw something down on the highway that might help us,” Amber said eventually. “One of those big fuel trucks, you know? With the big tank of gasoline on the back?”

“Oh, right, we could park it on top of the dam and blow it up? Is that what you’re thinking?”

Amber shrugged. “I don’t really know, do you have any better ideas?”

“No, no, that’s good. How far away was it?”

“If we hike back down to the highway, I guess it was about an hour’s walk from there?”

Carter looked at the heavy rain. “It’s too late to find it today, it’d be dark before we get back to the highway. What if we stay here tonight and go tomorrow morning?”

“I suppose so,” Amber said. “In that case I’ll take the second trailer.”

Amber started to collect her things. A crowbar, much like Carter’s halligan but smaller, was strapped to the side of her backpack. Carter started to rise but then stopped himself.

“You don’t have to go! You could stay here a while,” he said.

Amber gave him a thin smile. “I’m pretty tired, but we can talk more tomorrow.”

Taking her things, Amber returned to the rain. Carter did nothing to stop her, worried what she might think of him if he did. He watched through the office windows as she crossed to the second trailer and broke down the door. He got a sense of her moving around inside and thought she might have been shifting one of the desks into place behind the busted door as a barricade, and he tried not to be offended. She didn’t know him. Worried that she’d see him studying her through the window he sat back down and tried to distract himself.

xXx

The next morning, Carter rose with the dawn, as was now habit, drank some water and ate a quick breakfast, and then went to find Amber. She was already awake and ready to leave with her crowbar and a smaller pack on her back. It had stopped raining overnight but the ground squelched underfoot.

Both Carter and Amber left most of their supplies in the trailers, taking only what they needed for a couple of days as well as her crowbar and his halligan. Together, they hiked back past the gate and down the winding road.

“Did you live near here? You know, before?” Carter asked.

“Not far,” Amber said. “I’ve been walking, you know, since it all started, but sometimes it’s like it’s leading me in circles.”

“Me too, I’m originally from Chesterfield but I’ve been walking from place to place.”

Carter tried to engage Amber as they walked. Her answers were to the point and she didn’t follow up with questions of her own. He knew he was bothering her but once he started talking he couldn’t stop. Small talk didn’t last long, however, and too many questions that would have once been standard, such as those about family or relationships, were too sensitive to ask now.

“What do you think caused all this? You know, all this?” Carter gestured at the surrounding trees, foreboding and dripping with last night’s rain.

“I don’t know,” Amber said, and she took a long pause before continuing. “I think, maybe, things just reached some kind of tipping point. We pushed it too far and some kind of, I don’t know, defense mechanism kicked in.”

“But it’s intelligent, isn’t it? Could it always think? Was nature always watching, waiting, or did we wake it up all of a sudden?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it doesn’t really think? Maybe it’s like an ant farm, where every little ant has its job to do, it doesn’t really know why it’s doing it but it does its own thing and somehow, all together, they build tunnels or a hill and build bridges or whatever.”

“Why do you think it picked us?”

“Maybe it didn’t pick us, maybe we, volunteered, somehow.”

Carter didn’t want to go down that road with her just yet. They walked in silence for a little while longer. Eventually, they reached the highway. At Amber’s direction, they set off back the way Carter had come the day before.

Abandoned vehicles choked the road. They saw no one else brought to the same stretch by beckoning stands of nature. In some places, massive, dead trees crossed the highway. They were a common sight, trees that had sacrificed themselves, or been sacrificed, uprooted and fallen across roads and highways to block humanity’s ease of movement or escape. Their rotting trunks were thick with fungus and flowering vines. Along the way, Carter realised with a little discomfort that they were walking through the path of destruction the dam would create if it was taken down. He looked to the hills for a roaring wall of water sweeping trees and rocks out of its path as it thundered down on top of them. A great flood ready to drown the world.

They walked for over an hour until Amber pointed at the road ahead. The sun peered from behind banks of cloud and sunlight gleamed off something slaloming across two lanes of traffic. It resolved itself into a petrol tanker, an orange truck rising above the other vehicles and attached to a pill-shaped tank presumably full of fuel. It looked enormous, monolithic, and for some reason Carter felt his heart start to beat faster.

“Do you think it’s really full of fuel?” Carter asked.

“There’s only one way to find out.”

The truck’s driver door was open. As they got closer, Carter could see what looked like a patch of dried blood down the side. He took the lead and climbed into the cabin. It was almost shockingly roomy, with deep bucket seats for both the driver and passenger and a narrow passage between them leading to what was obviously a small sleeping and storage compartment. Some of the controls and dials in front of him looked like something out of a plane or space shuttle. The keys to the truck, along with a hefty bundle of keychains, dangled from the ignition. When Carter tried to turn it over, however, nothing happened. Looking around to see if there was some kind of button or lever he was missing, he tried several times but the engine remained silent.

“I think the battery is dead,” Carter said. “We could give it a jump, or find another one?”

“We should check that it actually has fuel first,” Amber said.

A ladder stretched up the side of the tanker. Carter again took the lead and climbed to the top. Inset in the spine of the tank was a round hatch shaped like a sewer manhole. Stiff as it was, he used his halligan to loosen the latch holding it closed and pried it open. The stench of fuel slapped him in the face, bringing tears to his eyes and singeing his nose hairs. At a glance, he could see amber liquid pooled inside the truck within easy reach.

“Yep, there’s gas alright,” Carter said, slamming and latching the hatch again.

First things first, they opened the truck’s manifold and puzzled over the guts of its engine. The battery was easy to identify but if they needed a replacement Carter had no idea where to find the same make and model. And if it wasn’t the battery, if it turned out that something more complicated was wrong, then they would be totally lost. He missed the days when finding answers was as simple as fishing your phone out of your pocket and Googling it.

It took Carter and Amber the better part of the day to first find jumper cables, smashing car windows and opening trunks, and then to find a vehicle with keys that could still turn over, and then negotiating that vehicle, a large pickup, back to the truck itself. Red to positive, black to negative, they bound the vehicles together. Amber turned the pickup on first, letting it run. Nervous, Carter tried the ignition up in the cabin of the truck. At first, there was nothing. And then, he sensed a rumble in the truck’s electrical system. With another careful twist, the engine caught. A Christmas tree of lights ignited across the dashboard.

“It works! It worked,” Carter shouted. “We can do this!”

They disconnected the jumper cables and let the truck run for another twenty minutes. The pickup they reversed toward the centre of the highway.

“That’s great, now what?” Amber said.

“Now, we take it back to the dam.”

It was easier said than done. The truck was huge and unwieldy, neither of them had any experience driving one, and both sides of the highway were crammed with abandoned cars and wreckage. Bit by bit, they had to clear stretches of road for the truck. They thought nothing of driving their tools through the windows of locked cars. Removing the parking brakes, they would shove the cars off to the sides of the road until at least one lane was clear and then move the truck forward. Bodies were scattered among the vehicles.

Their progress didn’t look like much by the time night started to fall. The original site of the tanker truck was still visible from where they stopped but the two of them were dirty and tired. Carter was pleased to find that Amber was warming up to him once she’d figured out he wasn’t going to attack her out of nowhere.

They decided to both spend the night in the truck’s cabin. Another encouraging sign, Carter thought. Stars spread across the velveteen sky. They could see the shadows of bats flitting between them and the sky. Insects chirped in the trees. Amidst the rows of abandoned cars, packs of wild dogs or hunting cats moved almost silently.

“Is the air cleaner, do you think?” Carter said. “The stars, they look different since it started, don’t they?”

Sharp and hard, the stars looked like grains of broken glass. Their light smeared on the windshield.

“I think it’s the lack of light, you know? Light pollution,” Amber said. “There’s no more light from towns and cities so we can see more. This is what it was like if you went way out into the countryside.”

“I guess I never did any camping or whatever, back then.”

Inside the cabin was only the sound of their breathing. Carter was careful not to do anything to make Amber uncomfortable. That didn’t mean he wasn’t aware of the closeness, even the warmth, of her body within arm’s reach.

“You can take the bed, you know,” Carter said. “Back there in the sleeping compartment, if you want to?”

“That’s alright, thanks,” Amber said. “You can use it if you want. Too much like a little apartment back there for me. Like someone’s bedroom. I don’t like sleeping in other people’s houses since all this started.”

“I’m the same!” Carter said, and realised his tone was too excited. “I mean, yeah, I don’t like sleeping in other people’s spaces knowing that they’re dead now.”

“Exactly, you wind up thinking about their lives, about how they might have lived. And how they might have died.”

“I know just what you mean.”

xXx

It had taken a bit over an hour for Carter and Amber to walk from the end of the dam’s service road to the spot where they’d found the petrol tanker. It took them three days to get back. Clearing a stretch of road could take hours. One abandoned car knocked into another and into another like dominoes. Some didn’t want to move at all. Then, they would inch the truck forward as far as it would go. In a couple of places were the trees that had fallen to block all lanes of traffic. They would need chainsaws and probably a crew of people to really remove them but with the vines and fungus growing all over them neither wanted to chance cutting them anyway. Instead, they cleared space and then used the truck itself to shove the trees backward. Working slowly and carefully, they managed to push the trees just enough for the truck to squeeze through.

They reached the exit to the dam road shortly after nightfall. Along the way, they’d collected some other supplies. They decided to stay with the truck at the bottom of the hill and drive the rest of the way in the morning. As had become routine, they sat in the front seats of the truck’s cabin and stared through the windshield at the sky as they waited for sleep to come. Amber had opened up to Carter over the last few days, talking to him about her old job, her family, her friends, but for a while the two of them lapsed into silence.

“We could just keep driving,” Carter said suddenly, without prompting. “We’ve got the gas, we could just keep going.”

“Where would we go?” Amber asked.

“I don’t know, we could just keep moving.”

“We can’t outrun nature.”

“We don’t know that, we don’t know how it works. How it talks to itself.”

“But there’s nowhere we could stop.”

“Mexico, maybe, or Alaska? The desert, or the cold.”

“Definitely not Alaska, it’s full of bears. It’s not too cold for them, I’m sure they probably wiped out a lot of people.”

“What do you think we’re doing then? We can’t just keep doing this, it must have saved us for something,” Carter said.

“To break down the things it can’t. To do the things it can’t do, not quickly.”

“There must be more to it than that. There’s got to be, like, some kind of reward or something.”

“I don’t know, I definitely don’t think it thinks like us.”

“Why us though? How did it pick you? What happened? It must have had a reason.”

“I don’t know, I really don’t.”

Amber’s voice started to sound husky. Carter badly needed to reach out and touch her but he wasn’t sure how it would be received.

“How did it happen for you?” Carter asked. “How did you start, you know, working for it?”

Amber thought about her answer for a few long moments. “My roommate had a lot of plants all around the apartment, especially in her bedroom. Even in the bathroom. She thought they, like, cleansed the air. I didn’t really care either way to be honest. She took care of them every day, watering them, wiping their leaves, talking to them like babies. She loved them.”

Amber trailed off. The two of them stared into the darkness. Carter was wondering whether he should say something when she spoke again.

“The first morning, when it all started happening for real, you remember how crazy that was? I was watching TV, talking on the phone, watching all these crazy stories happening. I didn’t even think about all of the plants everywhere but eventually I wondered why the hell Shayna wasn’t getting up. I went into her room, and they’d strangled her. Choked her, it was insane. They’d somehow overgrown their pots and forced their way into her nose and mouth while she slept.”

“They killed her, they didn’t kill you,” Carter said.

“My room was the only one without plants everywhere so I assume they couldn’t. But seeing that, I panicked and threw them all outside. I didn’t smash them up, but I threw them into the garden outside our building. Not because I cared, it was just the first thing I thought of. Maybe that’s why it kept me alive, because it thought I was helping them right from the beginning when really I was just freaking out. I stayed in my apartment, with her, with Shayna, for a long time after that, until nature came knocking.”

“That makes sense, I suppose.”

The two of them sat with the weight of the story, staring at the stars in silence. Carter could hear Amber crying softly but trying to stifle it.

“What happened to you then? When it spared you?” Amber asked at last.

“Chimpanzee,” Carter said.

“What?”

“Chimpanzee, I woke up to one in my room. I’d only been living in Chesterfield for a couple of years, on the edge of town in this trailer park. Just down the road was this little zoo, do you remember that show ‘Tiger King’ on Netflix?”

“I miss Netflix.”

“Me too, the place was a lot like that. I only went there one time on a date, stupid date idea, and it wasn’t very big. A few lions, tigers, bears, in these little cages that looked too small for them. And some monkeys, chimpanzees, a little petting zoo. I guess one of the chimps got free right away, maybe it tricked a keeper or something. It set loose some of the other animals but it couldn’t get all of them so it came and got me. It woke me up in the middle of the night, dragged me out of bed, so strong, and marched me back to the zoo. It was pretty obvious what it wanted so I found some keys on this woman’s body and I let the rest of them free.”

“That sounds terrifying.”

“Those animals, the tigers, the bears, they must have killed so many people. So many people.”

“That’s not your fault, I mean, you really didn’t have a choice.”

“I could have let it kill me. After I let them all free, they just ignored me and I walked home. I realised when I got there, that chimp had broken into every single other trailer before it got to mine and it killed every other person that lived there in their sleep. It should have killed me too, I should have made it kill me.”

“It’s not like you could have really even understood what was happening.”

“I lived with my girlfriend at the time. Before it woke me, that fucking monkey bit her throat out without making a sound. Without even waking me. She was dead right beside me.”

“Jesus.”

“I was too afraid to go after it though, too afraid to go after any of them. And when the birds came, and the bugs, and plants, I just did what they told me to do, basically. I thought I must have been saved for a reason.”

xXx

Next morning, they rose with the sun. The truck’s engine turned over without issue and its noise rumbled into the morning quiet. Carter wound it past the last of the abandoned cars and up the exit ramp. The road ascended toward the dam.

“Here we go,” Carter said.

The journey between the highway and the dam was uneventful. They’d both become familiar with the tanker and its multitude of gears over the last couple of days but kept it moving uphill at not much more than jogging pace. Reaching the clearing with the two office trailers and the dam laid out in front of them, Carter brought the tanker with its dangerous load to a stop.

“Now we have to figure out how we’re going to make this work,” Amber said.

Naturally, Carter and Amber had discussed what to do with the tanker once they reached the dam over the last couple of days. The plan was obviously to blow the truck up but the question was where. They’d thought about placing it next to one of the dam’s main supports but Carter worried they might be too reinforced. Amber suggested they park it in the exact centre of the dam, at the furthest possible point from the two supports, but Carter still wasn’t convinced.

“Have you ever seen that movie, Armageddon?” Carter asked.

“No, I haven’t.”

“You’ve never seen Armageddon? Well, there’s this scene, they talk about how, if you put a firecracker in your hand it will just leave a burn. But if you hold it in your fist, it’ll blow off all your fingers.”

“So we put it inside the dam? How do we do that?”

“Maybe not inside it, but we’ve got to concentrate the blast.”

On the reservoir side, a steep bank ran from the clearing down to the water. Water that was thick with logs and branches. Walking the dam, Carter could see a spot where the tanker might reverse down and slot in right between the bank and the wall of the dam. It was probably the most concentrated they could get. He explained the plan to Amber and she agreed.

Pirouetting the tanker around the clearing, Carter gradually and carefully lined up the back of the tank with the desired spot. Then, with aching slowness and Amber’s directions, he reversed toward the dam. A fence cut along the top of the reservoir’s bank. The rear wheels of the truck pushed through it.

Suddenly, the tanker’s back wheels slipped. Carter was ready for it, his door open in case he needed to leap free of the truck cabin. His heart raced. Tearing furrows in the earth, the wheels slid down the steep bank. The other wheels couldn’t handle the weight and started sliding as well. The truck’s cabin bucked. Amber let out a panicked yell. Carter’s foot nailed the brake but he didn’t expect to stop the process, only to slow it down. It was exactly as they’d planned. The tanker full of fuel tumbled and slid and its back end hit the water. Slaloming sideways, it crashed into the dam with a sound like the bonging of a tremendous gong. The connection between the truck and trailer snapped, a tube coming loose with the hiss of compressed air. Wheels on the left side of the truck’s cabin left the ground and it continued to slide backward at a slanted angle. Carter was thrown against his chair.

With a crunch and more splashing, the tanker came to a rest. Its huge, pill-shaped body lay angled down the side of the bank and pressed snugly against the dam itself. Its cabin stood, buckled and precarious, at the top of the bank. Carter crawled out, hand over hand, and negotiated his way to the ground.

“Well, that part worked,” Carter said.

The next part was even more difficult and neither of them had fully anticipated how dangerous it would be. The hatch on top of the tanker was still accessible but to get to it Carter had to crawl from the dam to the tanker itself. He wrapped and tied some rope around his torso and Amber helped keep him steady. Underfoot, the tank was steeply slanted. He used Amber’s crowbar rather than his longer halligan to batter at the hatch’s latch. As soon as he cracked it open, richly stinking fuel began to gush from the opening and slicked the metal skin of the tank. He hurried not to get caught by it. Clearly, with the tank now at an angle, the fuel was in a position to spill through the hatch.

“Quickly, the sheets!” Carter said.

The pair of them had raided a Walmart along the highway a couple of days ago and come away with a small mountain of sheets. End to end, they’d tied the sheets together as if making a rope and then soaked them with gasoline. What they had, in effect, was an enormous fuse. Amber threw several loops of it down to Carter and he stuffed one end into the hatch before closing it again. He scrambled to get upright and back up the dam, nearly tumbling down the tank and from there sliding into the water. The two of them moved away from the dam, laying the sheets behind them.

“We have to hurry, we don’t want to lose too much fuel,” Carter said.

“We still need to do this safely!”

“I know, but I didn’t really think about how the gas would spill to be honest.”

Tied end to end, the sheets extended past the two offices. Beyond them, near the road, was a natural trench. There, they hoped, would be far enough away to escape the blast.

“You should light it, I’ve got gas all over me,” Carter said.

“If you’re sure? Get ready to run.”

Amber produced a lighter and sparked it. The little flame danced in the fumes wafting from the gasoline-soaked sheets as she bent over. The material caught immediately. Orange flames tinged in blue raced back along the sheets they’d laid across the ground, back toward the dam. Snapping the lighter closed, Amber straightened.

“Run!”

The two of them ran for the ditch. Carter spurred Amber ahead of him. The fire moved fast along the makeshift fuse but there was no risk of it outpacing them. They reached the ditch, turned, and hunkered down while it was still burning its way down the road. With the tops of their heads peering over the lip of the trench, they watched the fire reach the dam and then make its way over the low concrete wall, out of sight, toward the open hatch of the fuel tanker. There was a pregnant pause as they waited for something to happen.

“Did it w-,”

The explosion didn’t register as sound, just pure physical force. They felt the pressure wave ripple through the air even as they buried their faces into the dirt. It hammered the earth like a falling meteorite. For one demented moment, the long, silvery pill of the tank itself inflated before giving way, ripping open and dissolving into shrapnel and fire. The truck was launched into the air, shedding wheels and other pieces as it spiralled, and fell, and exploded as it hit the ground. The dam wall quivered, shaking off clouds of dirt and concrete dust and sending it showering down the recurved wall on the side opposite the reservoir. Bits of broken trees, blasted into wooden confetti, expanded across the water. The spouts from the outtake pipes stuttered. All the glass in the windows of the two offices shattered and their walls swayed with the force.

Covering his ears, Carter felt the pressure wave and its echoes beat down on his head. His skull rang. Heat washed over him, hot enough to singe his hair even from a distance. When it finally felt safe, he peered over the ditch and saw a bloated, greasy column of fire roiling toward the sky.

The flames died down quickly, falling and spreading and belching oily smoke as black as charcoal. Some of them spread into the grass but it was still wet from the recent rains and didn’t burn for long. Most of the inferno and smoke retreated to the gap behind the dam, wreathing the twisted remains of the tanker. The corner of the dam, meanwhile, looked scorched, blackened, but still in one piece.

“Did it work?” Amber asked.

“I’m not sure,” Carter said.

The two of them picked their way out of the trench and crossed the clearing. Some patches of grass were still burning and bits of debris dotted the ground. The central fire threw off shocking amounts of heat even as it died down. Mincing, Carter and Amber moved so they could see the face of the dam.

“It didn’t do anything,” Carter said.

“No, look! Down there!”

A jagged fissure marred the concrete wall directly opposite from where the truck had exploded. As they watched, it almost seemed to slowly unzip, lengthening at both ends. A mist of water began to hiss from out of the crack.

“It’s happening!” Carter said, as more water forced its way through.

Piece by piece, bits of the dam fell away. Water gushed from within the cracks. With an explosive crack, the fissure lengthened into a lightning bolt. Another crack nearer the middle began to grow. The whole dam verged on a structural failure, rapidly escalating to the point of no return. Carter and Amber stumbled backward. The ground vibrated underfoot. Another section of dam the size of a car, with the weight of the reservoir behind it, tumbled free. It crashed down the wall of the dam, causing further damage as it fell, and a new waterfall roared through the gap with tremendous force. Carter and Amber celebrated, the two of them lost in the joy of having accomplished a difficult task without really considering any of its consequences.

“We did it! We did it!” Amber said.

Snatching Carter by the front of his jacket, Amber pulled him toward her and kissed him. Her mouth pasted itself to his. Carter’s eyes widened and then closed as he surrendered to the kiss. A fresh hunger overwhelmed him with as much force as the water from the collapsing dam and in seconds his hands were on her body, tearing at her clothes.

House-sized chunks of concrete fell away behind them, tumbling and landing with deafening booms. The water smothered them moments later, thundering down what remained of the dam, filling the chasm, pulling away more sections. At the base of the dam, the water pounded and rapidly engulfed the narrow river that hadn’t dealt with such a volume of water in decades. At the nearest bend, it annihilated the bank and thundered toward the highway like a tsunami.

Amber broke away. “Come with me.”

The two of them retreated across the clearing toward the office trailers. Rather than go inside, however, Amber picked out a patch of grass. Carter forced himself to slow down. He wanted to simply crush himself to her. To pour himself into her. He thrummed with desire but he broke away and first stripped off his jacket to use as a blanket. Amber climbed on top of him and they collapsed. He was stunned to realise that in spite of her initial reticence she must have wanted this as much as he did.

They made love under the open sky. Behind them, most of the dam’s remains drowned under the water of the reservoir as its surface rapidly plunged. It thundered over roads and cars and houses below, swamping and smashing and washing them away across the ancient floodplain. The ground under them quaked with shockwaves but they were too engrossed in one another to notice.

Afterwards, Carter and Amber lay naked and coiled in one another’s arms as they stared at the sky. Streamers of grey cloud moved in. Breathing deeply, they could taste the encroaching damp in the air.

“What happens now?” Amber said, “Do you think it will let us stay together?”

“It has to!” Carter said. “It must see what we can do together instead of separately! It put us together, and it’s got to be happy with us now.”

Carter sensed an unfamiliar splash of colour in the corner of his eye. Sitting up, he looked around and marvelled.

“Wow!”

In the time they’d spent making love, flowers had exploded across the clearing. Waves of purples and blues and reds and yellows, as if they’d sensed the humans’ pleasure and erupted into life like fireworks to celebrate it. A deep and desperate joy swelled in Carter’s chest. Amber sat up behind him, one arm idly covering her breasts.

“This is it, it’s sending us a message!” Carter said.

Carter’s eyes were drawn to one particular tree at the nearest edge of the clearing. Its leaves glowed with health. On its branches, budding fruit, red and glossy like apples, swelled into ripeness before his eyes. With mounting excitement, he climbed, naked and unashamed, to his feet. He waded through the flowers.

“This is what it saved us for, it wants to start over!” Carter said. “You and me, and of course there must be others. It wants us to start over!”

One of the tree’s branches bent almost into his hand. Carter reached up and took the largest of the fruit. Its skin shone. The stem broke free with a satisfying snap.

“Carter, I don’t know,” Amber said.

“Look at this!” Carter returned to her holding the apple. “It’s like a message of peace! It’s a gift, an apology, I don’t know, but it forgives us and it wants to start over!”

Carter’s teeth broke the apple’s skin with a crunch. Juice flooded his mouth. Crisp and fresh and as sweet as any apple he’d ever tasted. He chewed it, savouring, and swallowed before offering it to Amber.

“Are you sure?” Amber asked.

“Try it, it’s so good!”

Amber accepted the fruit in both hands. Wanting to believe, she raised it to her mouth and bit off a small chunk. Moving it around in her mouth, she swallowed and took another bite before offering it back to Carter.

As Carter reached for the apple, he suddenly felt very aware of the blood in his veins. Arteries and other tracts seemed to stiffen and turn sluggish. At the same time, his pulse grew louder in his ears. His fingers were numb and uncooperative. Instead of taking the apple from Amber, he knocked it out of her hand to the ground.

“Carter?”

Carter’s throat began to close. His heart became a hot lump, throbbing in his chest. The pain and sudden terror must have shown on his face because Amber’s features fractured into fear.

“Carter!”

Carter collapsed to his knees, his chest and veins burning. The last thing he saw before his vision started to go grey was Amber succumbing to the same symptoms.

Soon there was no sound across the clearing except the roaring water making its way over the collapsed dam. Wind stirred the grass. Nothing moved but flowers.

======

Sean: The idea at the core of this story has been in the back of my mind for probably the better part of twenty years. In my late teens I listened to a lot of Grateful Dead for a while there. Around the same time I had the original idea for ‘Mixtape’ and I thought of a story in a post-apocalyptic environment where nature had taken over, and the protagonist would be helping it along. Not much more than a concept but it did include the scene of them rescuing a caged bird like at the beginning of this one. Given this was the only idea for the series to stick with me for this long, I thought it would be appropriate to kick off the whole Mixtape theme!

This one might be a successor to my story I Am Waiting, spiritually at the very least. Maybe the beginning of this one picks up where that one left off.

More Mixtape is coming, as I mentioned in the announcement I was hoping to update with a new story every two weeks for the rest of the year so please do keep coming back! Remember, you can find the growing Mixtape mixtape on Spotify for a taste of what’s coming and for other updates you can find me on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and Instagram.

Next Track: Chris De Burgh – Don’t Pay The Ferryman