I've been working on a new story these last few weeks - years, actually, with all sorts of gaps and delays for all sorts of reasons. But the end is coming into sight. And since the writing takes up nearly all my concentration at the moment, I thought I'd offer the first chapter here rather than try to come up with some thoughts about writing in general.
Before most of the characters in this story were born, a tree began to die in the north of England. Nobody noticed at first, because it was just one tree in a forest full of trees. But then a second one died. And a third. Only when all the leaves on all the forest’s trees had turned white and the branches and trunks had stiffened and dried into dusty husks did anyone pay attention.
But by then it was too late.
The whiteness spread. Nothing was immune. Grass, flowers and crops withered. Water turned the colour of milk and grew sluggish and oily. Cows, sheep and horses - all the animals we see each day in the fields around us – were led away to safer pastures.
The land kept dying.
Villagers left villages. Towns were deserted. The roads and trains filled up with refugees heading north to Scotland and south to Wales and the rest of England. Many people fled the country altogether. So many that France blew up its entrance to the Channel Tunnel, to stop the migration and the threat of possible infection.
That wasn’t the only border.
Scotland built a new Hadrian’s Wall. A line of towers stretching from Port Carlisle on the west to Whitley Bay on the east. Between the towers came posts. Between the posts, a wall of electricity that incinerated anything – seed, leaf, speck of dust or animal – that tried to pass through it.
England matched it with The Strip. From Liverpool to the Humber, the land was bulldozed, flattened and covered in a two-mile wide band of asphalt that smothered everything in its path. A fleet of drones patrolled both edges and destroyed anything living that tried to cross it.
By the time all this was done though, the White Wood – it had a name now – had stopped growing. Nobody knew why. Nobody could explain. All they knew was that it was no longer spreading. But the borders stayed. And the land the wood had swallowed stayed white, choked and dead.
Two impassable borders on either side of a deserted landscape. A landscape with a core of dead whiteness in which nothing lived.
Or so people thought.
No comments:
Post a Comment