Dark River: Part Two
The radio tower rises from ancient ruins at the end of the river, in Vietnam.
I am alone now, at the end of the world.
Around me the jungle is silent. Nothing emanates from the thick trees and dense undergrowth, no eyes watch in the darkness and no enemy hides, waiting for the right time to strike. There is only the emptiness and the silence. The day is drawing to a close now, although it seems to not follow any recognised pattern, the light hanging over the radio tower in a strange haze, while at the edges of my vision, there is only an impenetrable darkness.
The weapon they used must have worked, for there can be no other explanation for the world i now find myself in. Perhaps it worked too well. A bright flash, splitting the sky in two, rolling down towards the jungle, and the river. Then darkness.
The journey upriver was easy — smooth, silent. None of the usual hazards, the gunfire. Through the ever darkening sky, no gunships, no flares falling slowly with an ominous glow. Like the jungle, the river was empty. Several times I left the boat, exploring into the jungle, but just like before, there was no one around.
That’s not all, though. There’s something in the trees. Not a person, or a creature. Not even a monster. But instead, some shapeless, formless mass of darkness. It gathers at the edge of my vision, swallowing up the distant trees and overgrown vegetation. When I look back to where I came from, it is no longer visible. After that, I didn’t leave the boat again, but headed straight towards the radio tower — the only visible landmark sticking out of the jungle, and the place where the light was strongest, bathed in an orange glow that receded to a smoky red at the edges, before it too gave way to the darkness. The sky looked as if it were ablaze, that somewhere distant, a fire was raging in the jungle, casting its heat and ash up into the heavens, and yet there was no smoke in the distance, no burning trees. Just this unnatural light, already fading. A world that was wrong, and I was trapped within its strange walls.
It did not take long to reach the tower. I left the boat at the bank, bobbing slightly offshore, its guns pointed at nowhere in particular, a deserted fortress with no one left to fight. I climbed up through the trees, hacking away at the overgrown vegetation that concealed the ancient trail. It sat high up on a cliff that rose up from the riverbank, built on the site of some ancient and crumbling temple. Through the leaves and vines, traces could be seen of what once was — beheaded statues and crumbling stone steps. Up, then, through these ancient remains, where now and then modernity had intruded — strung up electric lights and discarded shell casings.
There were people here, and for a moment, my hopes soared. But there’s no power in the lighting, the shell-casings are half buried in the mud, and just like the rest of the landscape, there is only silence. Silence, and forgotten memories. The people who once passed through here are long gone, even before the weapons test. No, I am alone.
At the top of the cliff, the temple ruins are more substantial — whole buildings remain, the jungle growing in and around them, melding the two together. It’s a strange fusion, but it seems to make sense here, at the end of the world. If I look too closely at the trees, I can see the darkness behind them.
The radio tower rises from these ruins uneasily, a monolith of steel and concrete, a spire thrusting up from the squat buildings at its base, a low collection in a clearing around which the ruined temple sits. Beyond, the trees of the jungle, and beyond them, the growing darkness. No one answers my radio transmission, but I already knew that would happen. I leave it playing, looping endlessly over and over into the night.
Climbing the tower is a welcome distraction. It is a mechanical movement — up the metal ladder, one hand after the other. At the top, I bathe in the light — that fiery, orange glow. From the top of the tower, the world recedes into darkness. Only a small patch of light is left around me. I can see it shrinking already, closing in.
From below comes a great burst of static, drowning out my transmission, then a muffled, disembodied voice begins to speak. I can’t catch all the words, but the tone is triumphant. It speaks of a great victory — a new weapon, tested today — a success, the whole sector clear. The enemy, they say, have just…disappeared.
The voice doesn’t come from here. I know that now. For I know — I’m perhaps the only one — that knows what they did. What happened to me, what happened to us, what happened to this sector — and what the new weapon really does.
We did not disappear, not exactly. This weapon splits space and time and we are trapped on the other side. Each man trapped like me, in his own individual prison, his own empty world, his own apocalypse.
On the other side, nothing flesh remains, but it did not just disappear. No, it ended up on the other side, in a thin pocket of reality. Around me, the empty jungle is being consumed by a darkness that is not night. Up in the sky, no stars are visible, even in the void beyond the red glow that hangs about the radio tower. For this is not night, but instead, the limits of the reality I now inhabit. It is not a new world, but a fragment, a sliver of the other side. It is only a pocket of reality, and it is collapsing, falling back in on itself, dissolving.
The darkness is growing, the orange glow fading from the sky. Even the temple ruins are hard to spot now, the patrol boat already consumed. It courses through the trees, a uniform destruction of reality. Only the radio tower is left now. Soon, this entire pocket of reality will disappear, consumed by the darkness. It will take me too, folding me into its inescapable embrace.
And then I will find out what lies beyond. I have a feeling that, whatever happens, my journey is not over yet.