Tim Lebbon - Bar None

Copyright 2009 by Tim Lebbon
This edition of Bar None 2009 by Night Shade Books
Cover art by Eric Fortune
Jacket design by Darious Hinks
Interior layout and design by Ross E. Lockhart
All rights reserved
First Edition
ISBN10: 1-59780-097-X
ISBN13: 978-1-59780-097-6
Night Shade Books
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http://www.nightshadebooks.com

Novels

The Map of Moments (with Christopher Golden)
Mind the Gap (with Christopher Golden)
Fallen
The Everlasting
Dawn
Berserk
Dusk
Desolation
Until She Sleeps
Face
The Nature of Balance
Hush (with Gavin Williams)
Mesmer

Novellas

The Reach of Children
A Whisper of Southern Lights
Pieces of Hate
Changing of Faces
Dead Man's Hand
Naming of Parts
Exorcising Angels (with Simon Clark)
White

Collections

After the War
Fears Unnamed
White, and Other Tales of Ruin
As the Sun Goes Down
Faith in the Flesh

Six months after the end of the world, the air up here is amazingly clear. If I close my eyes I can smell spring on the breeze, and new rose blossoms, and the tang of the distant sea, and if I open them I believe I might be able to see forever. So I keep my eyes closed for a while, trying to isolate a different scent with every breath. Forever is no longer very far away.

Sometimes, when the weather is just right, I stare through rainbows and believe the world is still alive.

I smile at the meaty aroma of turned soil. Jessica is down there in our garden, preparing to plant the seedlings she found in the greenhouse. They were almost dead when we congregated here; drooping and pale, they resembled our own condition, but water brought us all around. I never believed there was any good left in those insipid green shoots, but Jessica is determined, and Cordell says to let her plant them if she wants to. His voice is dismissive, but I see the hope of greenness deep in his eyes.

I stopped to talk to her on my way up here, as I do most mornings. And as is the case most mornings, she looked refreshed from sleep and ready to tackle another day, while my eyes were puffy from crying and grief was a stone in my heart.

"Do you think they'll grow?" I asked.

Jessica shrugged, clapping her hands and sending dirt spraying.

"I dreamed of my wife last night," I said.

Jessica sighed. "I'm sorry."

"Don't be. It's still raw, even after six months. I think it always will be."

She looked at me evenly, eyes giving nothing away.

"You know I'm here to talk," I said, as I had a thousand times before. I was still desperate to discover hidden depths to Jessica's apparent lack of grief.

"I'm fine," she said, as she had responded as many times. "I had nothing to lose, so I can't see this as the end."

"I wish I were you," I said, and Jessica grinned. She startled and shocked me in equal measures.

I breathe in again, enjoying the smell. It reminds me of long childhood summers working on the gardens of the many new houses my parents seemed to have. Whichever place we moved to they wanted to change, and we always seemed to move in the summer, and they always preferred hacking down bushes and planting new shrubs and vegetables than stripping wallpaper and painting doorframes already hidden by decades of successive tastes. They would allocate me a particular corner as my own. I would clear it of weeds, turn the ground, pick out grass roots and the thicker cores of long-dead bushes, and then my own planting would begin. My own planting...

My memory leaches colour and fades to grey. I frown, unable to recall which had been my favourite plant. A flower? A tomato plant? A vegetable, and if so which one, and why?

I open my eyes, disturbed by the fragmenting of the memory. I need a drink.

Jessica believes that the air seems cleaner because we are eating better than we ever had before the end of the world. She says it boosts our senses. We're eating basic, that's for sure. I'm thinner than I've been since I was thirty, and I feel fitter than ever. Cordell is more pragmatic, attributing the clearer air to the sudden lack of pollutants being pumped into it, day and night, by the abusive humanity. Six hundred million cars fall silent, he says, and the world can breathe again.

I think it's a bit of both, and something more. Our diet is fine, and the air is purer than I have ever seen, no longer brown and hazy above the dead city to the south. No rumble of cars, no grumble of jets cruising the stratosphere, no violent expunging of fumes from skeletal factories. But I think more than anything, our changed perception is down to the drink.

I look out from the tower. A couple of hundred meters down the hillside sits the Manor, an old grey stone building that was once home to a famous architect. I've forgotten his nameI always do, no matter how often Jessica reminds mebut I know that three hundred years ago this tower was his folly. He built it to the love of his life, and doubtless brought her up here on days like today, impressing her with the view, the air, his richness of taste. I suspect he told her he loved her. "I love you," I say to the breeze, and for the first time in a couple of weeks I smell the dead city.

I frown. We all knew this time would come. Cordell maintains that most of the corpses will have rotted away by now, and that the stink of their continuing decay will be an undercurrent to the summer breeze, nothing more. But Cordell has lost no one, or so he keeps telling us. I was my own man, and I still am, and that's why I'm strong enough to survive this.

I think Cordell's a fool. If he really is his own man, why has he remained here with us for six months? And really, I can't believe he thinks survival is even an issue. It's obvious that this is the end.

I breathe in again and the scent has gone, but it was there for sure. "I love you," I say again, mimicking that long-dead architect's exhortations to his lady love. Now I smell turned earth, young blossom, water from the stream running around the base of the hill. No death; no corruption. I hope the tower likes the feel of my words across its stone, words it might not have heard for a long time. When we came to the Manor six months before, its owners had fled.

I wonder where they are now. Where they lie; where they rot.

"Time to go back down," I say. Nobody answers me. I've always been comfortable in my own company.

I circle down through the tower and emerge at its base, pausing to look at the graffiti that decorates the outside of its heavy oaken door. The words are mostly modern. They are the first lines of the first book written about the end of our world, and I promise myself that one day I will come here with a pen and paper, write them down, keep them safe. One day.

Mark SI'm trying to get to Mother's in the grey. Hope to see you there? I wonder about Mark S, and what the grey is, and why whoever had left him this message found reason to end it with a question mark, as though unsure whether or not Mark S would even want to meet him or her at all. It has been carved into the door and then written over with indelible ink. A message designed to last for a long time. Sometimes I expect Mark S to emerge from the city and crawl up the hillside, but after six months I guess he's either made it to Mother's, or not.

I fucked Lucy on top of the tower