I look out of the window towards the hill to the north; it seems almost as it had been before. The other houses are gone, swept away by the waves; the squatter shacks on top of the hill appear normal, although I know that they are in ruins. It’s the sheet of ice just beyond the peak of the hill that makes the view different; that crystal wave quick frozen by the deep cold before it could crash over the hill into this small valley beyond. The cloud too. This fierce African sun is shielded from my sight by that thick, black cloud; a nearly permanent thing although reminiscent of the quick, furious storms that visited of a summer evening before. The valley is no more as it had been; the destruction is nearly complete, the stench when the wind blows from certain quarters definitive of death. Certainly I haven’t seen anyone; alive, that is, since the catastrophe settled down to this weary attrition. Getting out isn’t easy; getting about once off the premises is a trial, but there are still stores to be had; enough for my simple needs. Looking the other way; down the long valley to the south where the big coal-fired power station had been, the view is of total destruction. There had been more houses and squatter shacks on the lower slopes and hillsides; all gone. From there had come the waves for the most part, sweeping over hills and dales, huge and deep this far from the ocean. And the valley is very far from the ocean, brine though these waves had been. I shudder at the memory; the big wave that had stopped just short, sweeping up the valley, clearing the houses before it, to be brought short by the property wall. It had tried the wall, found it to be too much, then swept back, taking those close houses and their screaming occupants with it, leaving a clear view to the south. And the screams; the only screams I remember of the events, did not last long. The next wave, reticent but more famous by far, saw to that. The tides, apparently, were not as huge as they had been during the transition, though they were terribly far more than they had been before that ugly pebble had settled into the sky around our world. Ugly, unworn, the new moon was no creature of sedate and calm measures. The tides spoke of that; they were a quarter of a mile between high and low tides, two furlongs; this I have heard before the silence came. Silence, of course is a relative term. Certainly the wind and storm were far from silent; and the wind blew nearly without let. I knew this because of the wind generator I was cobbling together; it wanted a good hour or two of still air so it could be mounted onto its frame; an hour or two of which I could not avail myself; due to wind and storm and perpetual rain. One is never keen on making electrical connections in the rain, not if one wishes to remain healthy. I would look through the trees that still protected the property at the sweep of the wind and rain up the fells on all sides, the vicious tornadoes that always seemed to go somewhere else; the wind was frightful in its power, the darkness a grim and threatening thing; surely the plants knew no love for that time. However, they grew, and the berries, a little sour for the lack of sunlight, grew and ripened in the cage, out of reach of the birds who would have stripped the branches if they could. The cage was old; six yards by seven and five yards high; enough space free of the birds for my modest requirements, had there been enough sunlight. Today’s harvest was half a handful of raspberries, a peppermint tip and four small lemons. There is more; but I have learnt not to be greedy. Perpetual though it is, the wind is not as fast or as hard as it had been. Things move; branches no longer break in the furious gusts; the wind treads lightly, looking for the path of least resistance as it should, rather than crushing all that blocks its way. The storms, continuous as they are, do less damage and bring more beneficial rain, some to ease the filth that covers everything. The roof is clean now, not covered in dust and mud; the gutters, after I had cleaned them, once more overflowing into the catchment tank. Dust and mud; bricks and rubble cover the roads to and from the property; not that there are any automobiles to try their mettle on these damaged roads. The only transport yet working are the old horse-drawn carts; an old automobile chassis or two axles under a wooden box, hitched to one or two horses or donkeys. They worked as long as the horse was willing; this not long in the trying conditions and the roads cluttered with rubble. Often it is easier to go over the damaged properties than it is to follow those roads. All the oil was gone; gas and petroleum and whatever; it made the automobiles worse than useless; and the donkey carts creaked and groaned like old women going up the stairs. There was wood for fires; if one cared to face the bees, who were guarding the trees so nobody could cut any branches, green or otherwise. The rain didn’t help; all the wood was wet; and a person needed a fire to dry out the wood so it would burn. The rain keeps coming down from the night-black sky, the oceans with their exaggerated tides getting deeper by the day. That crystal wave, huge and high over the hill; each time I look at it I feel that it is shrinking, to add to the cold and dark, that sea that creeps closer all the time. There is wreckage as far as I can see; quite far with my trusty field glasses. Tumbled houses, shattered buildings, roads and bridges, the death and destruction of civilisation. However it is gentled now. There is a mist of green over the tumbled stones and broken walls as the moss, grass and brambles swiftly take over. And that mist is no gentle, ephemeral thing. Some of the seedlings are already roof height, where roofs existed. The high levels of carbon dioxide are being accounted, and some of the plants seem to be in a hurry to reclaim the land. I had always wanted to live in a forest; to the extent that I had planted my own few trees around the house; but now indeed the forest was coming into its own, doing to death the works of man; here at least. Elsewhere I could not say, now; the wells of information had run dry with those colossal flashes of lightning and solar flares; the electronics were no longer available to the world; to serve and enslave as they once had done. The small direct current motor from a gate automation kit was the key element of my wind generator; connected electrically to the lower stage through two co-axial copper pipes, one within the other and separated by a plastic conduit. The pipes were central to the rotating neck of the device. I had made the base and stand some time ago; now it was time to make the mechanical head and steel frame to support the monstrous contraption. I had to rethink the design several times; light and strong being the key words. Finally I bent four white conduit pipes onto the spindle, glueing them with PVC cement. I put the metal frame together, motor with the tiny bicycle sprocket, the large sprocket on the spindle and the chain in guides so it wouldn’t slip off. I used single duvet covers to go over each conduit blade, pinned and tied into position. Then the whole bizarre contraption was hoisted up onto the frame and slotted into the hole at the crown of the framework. The wires leading down from the tiny motor and the copper co-axial rotating neck were connected to the solar charge controller, otherwise little used since the solar panels had seen so much shade. Slowly the weirdly coloured blades of that frightful thing started to turn, the long tail keeping the blades into the wind. And wind there was in plenty, coming from the north-west, to turn the fan and convince the solar charge controller that sunlight had returned, to be packed into the batteries long starved of charge. The advantage of a wind generator, even such a makeshift one as such I had contrapted, was that it would sail with the wind, no heed of night or day, something that could not be said of the now redundant petroleum gensets that had so polluted the air. The solar panels too; they would work if they had sunlight; their response to input was guaranteed. Open energy systems were designed that way, unlike the older technology. Even so, it was still, I found, better to use the energy as it came in, rather than pack it away in the batteries. It’s nice to be able to store electricity, but I knew that there were losses that could not be avoided. Rain had been rather scarce before the meteors had passed by; one to lock into orbit around the world, the other to melt and come down as water. Now there is distinctly too much rain, to the extent that packets of soil were being washed away in the floods. I had put seeds down as far as I could, but without clear sunlight, a lot of the tiny green people simply didn’t make it. I had found seeds that had not been modified; and those that grew were strong and healthy, productive in the gloom. Few were the days now when I would walk far afield and return empty handed. I would also return wet, soaked to the skin with squelchy shoes, but it was worth the trouble. Cutting wood for the fire is another interesting exercise; I had a store of saw blades and enough wood from trees and branches that had fallen, but it was definitely not an easy task. I had to keep the fire on to dry the wood stacked next to it, and that stack often did not dry quickly enough to keep the flames fed. This is another of the myriad delicate balancing acts I am performing; so the addition of wind energy to my store of power is a good bonus. The wind never stopped, nor so the rain; the punishing cold just goes on, even though the initial damage is fading into the past. The garden close by; within the property walls, did what it could. I had lights; and turned them on in the ubiquitous darkness for as long as I could each day; but the plants are not impressed by this display. Certainly the little blue bumblebees, frequent visitors to the flowers in the garden, provided almost as much light as the solar powered lamps. The bees were slightly more consistent; I am certain that they have a hive nearby; maybe with an excess of honey. Faria bees, the blue bumblebees that so cut back the numbers on the seething face of the world, are however bees with whom a person is wise not to take liberties. Unlike the old honey bees, now so scarce, the Faria bees can sting with impunity, and they are not hesitant about taking advantage of this. I notice with humour that people writing end of the world scenario books; or any other books; tread lightly around the matter of sewage and human excrement. And yet thrust into this situation as I have been, I have found that sewage is a key detail that it is hazardous to an extreme to neglect. The problem seems to be obvious enough; a toilet with no water is an evil and dangerous obstruction; but the solution is simple. Sewage is part of survival; if dealt with correctly. The solution I decided to adopt was obvious enough; I built a digester for the sewage, and piped off methane gas from the tank, to supplement both heat and light within the house. It was a messy prospect, but by keeping the tank off the ground, up on a small brick structure, I could drain and clean the night-soil in at least a semblance of convenience. It wasn’t impossible to do, but it was a task to which I never looked forward. Thirteen months was the usual interval between cleans, by which time the bio-digester clogged up and required attention; and it was two weeks before it was up and running again, even with the addition of plant wastes to speed things up. The use of plant wastes to the bio-digester had the benefit of making the night-soil a bit closer to true compost; good for the garden and all that. Nevertheless, I made the point on disposing of the night-soil a good way from the house, where wild plants benefitted. I had, after all, learnt not to do it on my own doorstep. Travelling away from the house; mostly to get materials needed to keep the house running, was never a pleasant exercise. At first, there were the bodies; too many by far; and soon there were the scavengers, sent by the good offices to clean up all the rotting corpses. Both were dangerous; and the scavengers were often damaged by the gold jewellery on the rotting corpses, live and radioactive yet. I was no nearer understanding why the gold had become radioactive; one of the key attacks against society, and the one that had done vast damage before the danger had been identified. It had taken one of the much longer trips for me to acquire a working Geiger counter, but this was a toy I took with me every trip thereafter, to find and avoid the places where abandoned gold lay in heaps; and other, new sources of radiation. Where would a soul find a Geiger counter? Where are these complex machines used as a routine, that they can be found for the taking by a scavenger such as I? It’s an interesting problem, compounded by the maps I have available; no longer accurate enough for any but general directions. It’s all very well to talk about uranium and thorium mines; but they are hardly marked out on most maps; and once found, derelict as the mines now are, they are still no pushover for the casual thief. The mine I eventually found was a huge place, after several long and difficult days on a bicycle; and the Geiger counters were not laid out to make stealing them easy. Not that there were any people to steal from. The other difficulty was to make sure that the new toy, compact and neat, actually worked. How does one find radiation sources for to test a brand new stolen Geiger counter and be assured that it is doing it’s little thing? Fortunately there were enough dead people in the office of the mine, blue and putrefying, for me to test the counters in peace against the known value of the gold jewellery they were all wearing. I selected one of the units, and a bag full of new batteries, to take home with me as a souvenir of an interesting trip. Most of the dead had been stung by bees; the blue bumblebees that had joined me in the darkness. But that initial frenzy is over, and the blue bumblebees are peaceful creatures now. One is used to sharing a grin with a skeleton passing by now; the horror has faded and but a melancholy gloom remains. And race is gone. There are very few marks by which a skeleton can be racially classified now, not to the casual eye. Certainly, when possessed of their skins their race was obvious enough; and the bees had senses that perceived through any deception; but it is past. The skeletons grin, though there is no humour to them now. The past has settled into the past, and it is the future that concerns me now, stuck in this grim and bleak present as I am. Adapting two hundred and twenty volts alternating current LED lights to run on twelve volts direct current is an interesting exercise, especially when a chap realises that the LED chipset is designed for twelve volts direct current right from the outset. One then needs to modify the distribution board of the house to accept twelve volts direct current; and modify all the low current appliances that use car chargers to work off an ordinary three pin plug. Once this has been done, life becomes a tiny bit more comfortable; but behind this is that huge crevasse; the realisation that one has taken another unanswerable step away from the hectic civilisation that now is no more. And yet, most small appliances will work off batteries , with the higher voltage stage added on as an afterthought, as if these appliances were actually meant to survive an end of the world scenario, with civilisation but an obstacle on the way to some new world that the dark forces of doom were preparing for. I am reasonably sure that this current new world wasn’t the one they were anticipating, though naturally I am grateful for their foresight and consideration. I had found and brought home a wealth of solar panels, some inverters and sodium batteries; no easy task. I had also borrowed a steel windmill and electrical generator set, part of a green home electrification kit. This too was no walk in the park to get home, the panels were large and the windmill kit cumbrous and heavy. Cement, stone and sand were also required; and holes to be dug. It was a sure source of electricity, but it wasn’t much fun to install. I had taken the inverters as they returned the option of the higher voltage, but I was not in favour of using it unnecessarily, as the system as a whole generated a lot of radio noise that I wasn’t sure I needed. I had the feeling that I was in fact in hiding; a sense that has grown since the disasters spread around me; and I took measures from that time to be as covert as my resources allowed. There too was the factor that batteries lasted longer if they weren’t powering the inverters; and making my resources last was my foremost consideration. The higher voltage and high current appliances weren’t much use anyway. The fridge wasn’t much use as things were far too cold to begin with. Kettle and electric stove had been replaced with the ubiquitous wood stove and a small gas burner. The television and computer, with no signal and no network, saw only limited use, more for stores reference and research than anything else. I didn’t spend much time watching videos, as this had always struck me as definitive proof that people weren’t very clever, and I didn’t derive any voyeuristic pleasure from watching dead people walking. The cellular phones had uses beyond being interesting ornaments, though I can’t say that I was expecting any calls. The radio, being a two-way vox system was potentially useful; I just needed someone with a matching set somewhere else. I did listen now and then, in case there was something being said far away, but I didn’t have high expectations there either. I also realised that the sky above had likely been swept clear of satellites by that monster passing by, sucked up and spat out by the New Moon as it settled into orbit. Or maybe not; I certainly had no way of discovering that little item of useless information, although the nett results were only too painfully clear. I find that the blue bees are fascinating; I was aware of how dangerous they were, but they seemed to pose no danger to me; I was tolerated as they went about their duties. We left each other alone, and both were happy with the arrangement. On occasion they would allow me the privilege of supporting one or two in my hand; a wary fascination I took with ginger and spice and the subtle fragrance of danger; but they would perch on my hand quietly, or walk on my palm and fingers, looking for flowers. Their tiny feet were equipped with claws, and their striped bodies were far and broad. I took the opportunity once to look at one fat, blue-striped tummy with its weird markings; but the bee didn’t care for this treatment. I only had a glance at the four squarish letters in some strange script; but I have seen that word somewhere before. It made me cold to recognise the writing, on a little blue bee’s tummy; and I let her fly away without protest as the implications sank in. I didn’t know how the word had arrived there; who had been responsible for penning those impossible letters; but it made the whole incident much more clear in my mind. At least now I had some reason for why it had been done; and a ghastly sentiment of by whom.