14 July 2012
Watching the chaos unfold from my window, I knew there was nothing I could do. The sky was changing; flashes of burnt orange streaked across the horizon as an all too familiar haze descended upon the city. I sighed, closing my eyes. Was this the end? The blackened landscape seemed to stretch for endless miles in every direction, tinted a sickening shade of green as the structure of everything, even existence itself, collapsed around it. This world was alien to us now. “How much time do we have?” A trembling voice came from beside me, shattering the icy silence that had for so long contradicted the fires erupting just outside the glass. I didn’t even have to look to give my answer. “Not long.”
In the distance, the Big Wheel was still turning… but for what purpose? Its cabins had been abandoned long ago, when the fires first began, leaving nothing but the warped and blackened skeleton of what was once the centrepiece of a bustling city. I thought back to the last time I’d seen the Wheel, how I’d walked by on my way to work and heard the laughter of children in the queue as the structure towered above them, shining majestically in the early morning sun. It was a shame that I’d never see that sun again.
The dew covered grass in Piccadilly Gardens that had once glittered under its light now lay charred and lifeless, the pavements surrounding it smothered under a blanket of dust. Footsteps that had once resounded off of its solid surface were now muffled, and people ran in a silent land. A little further away lay the station, which had been a shelter for survivors in the first few days. The doors hung off their hinges, glass gathered in piles beneath the shattered panes that they had once called home, and trains stood lonely on their withered tracks. Shops and stalls had been ransacked, everything of value snatched as people clung desperately to the only fragments of normality that remained, and nothing was left untouched.
As the days had passed, our makeshift shelters were no longer of adequate protection and, one by one, the city had been silenced. I was one of the only ones that remained. I’d kicked my way through the debris filled streets and watched as the last rays of light touched the windows of the tallest buildings in a sad goodbye. Then the darkness came, and the sun sank below the horizon forever.
Everywhere I looked was a picture of desolation. Not only did trains litter abandoned lines, but buses and trams lay broken on almost every street. Some were missing wheels, and many had windows broken and money stolen from the driver’s seat, as if our desperation had transformed ten pence coins into solid gold. And when the rain fell, acid lakes formed in jagged craters on what was once a smooth tarmac road, and an air of hopelessness clung to my skin.
My favourite places and their familiar roads were now alien to me. The Printworks stood in ruins, the clock that had perched proudly atop it now in pieces by the door. Its largest hand stuck awkwardly out of the tarmac, and I was forced to clamber my way over it to gain entrance to the building. More debris blocked my path, and in a rare gust of breeze an empty popcorn bag brushed against my leg, muddied and torn and looking as though it had seen thousands of years in a matter of seconds. I imagined that was how many of us felt, animate and inanimate alike. Even so, many people had tried to escape even after most had lost hope, searching the greyscale streets and running along the rail tracks as though the bleakness would suddenly give way to the bright world we all remembered, but the darkness seemed infinite and wasn’t long before the searchers fell. Lines of transport had been broken long before the trains and trams had grown weary, with bridges crumbling and falling rubble breaking power lines almost as soon as the end began. We were trapped in the shadow of a city long gone, and all we could do was wait.
So we searched until we found shelter, and made our way to highest floors of the one building that was left standing – the Beetham Tower. It was from here that we watched, and from here that we waited.
And it was from here that I was asked, “How much time do we have?”
Not long.
Apocalyptic Manchester • Opuss № I