Prologue


 

The brown sky rained dirty ash onto soundless trees denuded of life and flattened as if a giant fist had descended to pummel them from the gray and wintery sky. The horizon was blank; the most famous skyline in the world gone, leaving devastation, twisted metal and death.

There was a complete absence of color, life or warmth. The crushed horizon smoldered with a palette of black and leaden barrenness; benumbing and bone-crushing godforsaken loneliness.

The crumbled remains of the Bronx Zoo flinched under the sight of its once-proud sign, bent and misshapen. Precious wildlife reduced to ash. Minute bone fragments of the Womb’s proud creations scattered in the wind.

Yes . . . the premonition directed to a naïve Abby by the transformed Netty Doyle as an Elder of the Womb came to pass over six months ago. No longer just a premonition but a cold ugly reality. Bloody reality. Hopeless reality . . .

The evil death that rained down on the Earth from the very hands of man that had been entrusted to protect it had done its job effectively. Just as man had idiotically planned while stupidly believing the time would never come. What was the old cliché? Man plans, while God, the Womb, laughs?

No one laughed now. Those who survived the early bombings found death at the hands of the next waves of horror, mass hysteria, depraved lawlessness and disease. If the plague, revisited from the Middle Ages, didn’t get you, then dysentery, dehydration or starvation did.

Now that the population existed only in miniscule numbers that huddled deep in rare, clever concealments, human feces no longer littered every landscape. The smell of raw human sewage no longer carried on the perpetual wind that harbored its own invisible death to man and beast.

Yes, the wind that struck terror in the hearts of even the strongest, the most psychotic, and the most resourceful, carried invisible radiation along with the powerful spawn of dirty bombs. Even the most infectious microbes searched on the wind for unlucky hosts, the final death knell for the hapless humans and creatures in every corner of the once green planet.

What did the leaders of the most powerful countries in the world think would happen if one of them were foolish enough to hunger for absolute supremacy through the means of nuclear power? Did they think the world would come rushing to their feet in supplication? Only Homo sapiens would conceive of such a barbaric maneuver.

Yes, Homo sapiens: the species that, unlike any other creature, harbors a conscious ego. The ability to manipulate its environment and the complete disregard for the balance of nature and the other creatures that shared the formerly glorious planet.

And where now were the exalted leaders from the United States that bled their constituents so readily into poverty over the last 245 years?

Where were any authorities for that matter? How long would the politicians survive in their hunkered- down, taxpayer-funded concrete and steel monoliths in the ground? How many years would pass before their food ran out? Five years? Ten? Fifty? Could they hold out for one hundred years? If they could, what shape would the Earth be in? Questions, nothing but questions: long answered and prepared for by the most expensive experts taxpayer money could buy. For all the politicians in all the countries that assumed they would survive . . . the Womb laughed again.