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A meeting.

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“Ooh a storm is threatening my very life today.  If I don’t get some shelter, Ooh yeah I’m gonna fade away.”

Rolling Stones �" Gimme Shelter

As he paused on the crest of the hill, he saw the open door. He didn’t want to stop, but he had been running as hard as he could for most of two days.

Bent double and wheezing, he raised his head to scan the valley beneath him for signs of life, but found none.

He grunted at the blue-black sky and tried to wipe his stuck cheeks with his shirt. The tears had long-since run dry.

It had been many dark hours since he had last taken water, from a muddy brook he had only seen whilst focusing for a moment on the horror behind. He knew that he was now dehydrated almost to the point of collapse. Faint purple shapes danced across his splintered vision.

He rubbed his raw and reddened eyes with his knuckles, and took as long and measured a breath as he could manage.

He choked on the air, coughing and sputtering until he was on his knees. Regardless of physical sensation, he knew he had to keep moving.

Summoning every gram of strength that remained within his battered frame, he began to stagger downhill. Raising his eyes, he tried to concentrate on what lay before him.

Before the bombs and shells began to fall, this looked like it could have been some kind of stately ancestral home. An entire wing and all of the ceiling had caved in from a far corner, but the building still retained a little of its former magnificence. 

To the East, beyond the blast wounds scorched across a distant field of swaying wheat he could see the remains of a small cottage, just a pile of dour red bricks, collapsed in on itself.

He remembered that the first bombs had fallen over two days ago, so it had to have been less than that since these houses had been blow in on themselves.

He looked again. It didn’t seem possible for that to be true.

He lost himself a moment and pondered the strange passage of time since he began running. He felt for his anchor, his wristwatch, and checked it. It soothed his frenzied soul, and brought him back to here and now.

He was headed from the West, and on his side of the mansion the door lay open; although perhaps it would be better to describe what he saw as a hatch. It looked like the entrance to a coal cellar, but had clearly been adapted to a new use, several years having passed since the last rock of coal had been burned in this country.

As he got closer, he saw that this door was unharmed by the blast which had decimated the rest of the building. He hoped it would close behind him, and headed for it in as straight a line as the uneven farmland would allow.

He began to entertain the notion that whatever had hit these buildings was not the result of an atomic blast. Thick bullet-hole scars littered the lower fields; some together but mostly in long gouges drawing straight lines across the hills and ditches. It reminded him of his vaporised family and his obliterated town, so his detective work ended there for now.

He stared down at the door, and once more he headed towards it.

He stumbled over a far-flung brick and tumbled to one side. Rolling a few metres, he landed on his back.

As he recovered, he realised that the small of his back was wet. He momentarily ignored the feeling, assuming it to be sweat, but realised that this could not be. This damp was cooler and more abundant than anything his body could produce at this stage.

His hand went searching and he felt the ground wet beneath him. He stared at the clouds above and arranged his thoughts.

It had not rained since the first night of the war, he knew that, and he didn’t think he had travelled far enough to be somewhere that it had.

He pulled himself upright and looked around.

A few metres away sat what he had been hoping for. A thin rocky stream flowed down the hill away and to the South. He had failed to see it due to a cleft in the hill he had descended.

He crawled towards it, and dipped his head in like a ravenous pig at its trough. The cool murky fluid slipped easily down his battered throat and rejuvenated him for a moment.

With a few deep breaths, he was back on his feet and moving. He wished he was carrying a water-carrier, but he was not. It didn’t matter now; all he wanted was somewhere that felt at least temporarily safe where he could rest.

He moved faster now, on his heels, gaining solid purchase on the scorched heath.

Soon he was at the base of the valley, and curiosity led him walking around to face the ruined home at the south-eastern corner, the point hit most severely and directly by the unknown blast. Windows and roofs were gone, but many walls remained.

He skirted back around the front of the building, heading back for the basement. As the question of how �" or why �" the door lay open was formed in his mind it was answered.

He stood perfectly still.

Just above the lip of the door sat a pair of staring eyes and the top half of a terrified female face.

The last human face he had made eye contact with was that of his girlfriend. But Gloria was dead now, and the lack of movement in this new face made him assume the same thing.

Then she, this new, alien she, she blinked.

His heart called out for words to express this feeling, but the guilt wrapped around his mind held them firmly out of reach.

He attempted to smile.

If anything. this increased the terror evident in her expression, and they stood in silence, neither one having the courage to speak yet.

She stood and reached outside for the door handle.

His entire being sunk a few degrees, believing that he had lost his chance at being somewhere safe at last.

She looked him up and down. Then she nodded assent, and motioned him inside with her head and neck and eyes.

As he slipped inside she quietly closed the door behind him and drew across the dead-bolts.