When the Bodies Fell Like Rain

We thought we lived in a utopian society.

Of course life wasn’t perfect. Life cannot be perfect, to preach it otherwise is to offer an unattainable lie. In New London, however, we were as close as it was possible to be.

Life expectancy was technically at a high of 150 natural years but of course that meant nothing. Once you became unhappy with how your body sagged and wrinkled, you ordered a cybernetic body to have your mind implanted into. Eternal beauty. Eternal life.

We had no wars; nations were happy and resource rich. We had no crime; everyone lived long enough to have everything they needed. We had no divides; everyone was truly equal.

There was one fatal flaw, however, that nobody had considered.

This beautiful balance was completely and utterly dependant on electricity.

I’m a paramedic by trade. With illness and age related conditions a thing of the past, I mainly respond to injuries. Crashes, trips and falls, accidents. There aren’t many paramedics required as New London is very safe but we’re on hand if the unthinkable happens.

Today was a busy day for once; this morning my partner and I had been called to a child that had fallen off a trampoline and hit her head and we were now on our way to a woman who had cut through her hand while chopping vegetables.

Air traffic was light so we didn’t bother with sirens, just flashing blue lights to alert the other vehicles that we were on a job.

Cars and cargo ships seemed to stand still as we sliced through the air beside them. Traffic was usually calm and ordered, so there was always a thrill of adventure when on a job as we wove through the traffic on our way to save a life.

You never knew, the woman could have cut an artery. Chances were she simply required a bandage, maybe a couple of stitches.

When I reflect back on that moment there was no transition. No way to predict what was to come. I can’t say that clouds drew in and darkened that day, or that the temperature dropped to chill the air, or that the atmosphere was charged and alive.

No, we were simply flying our ambulance to a job and then we weren’t.

If I had to describe it, I would say it was like flipping a swich. The blue light usually bounced off the shiny white bonnet of our ambulance so I noticed immediately that it had stopped. I probably noticed that first, then the horrible sinking feeling of free fall. Like somebody had turned off gravity.

We simply stopped moving forward and then the inevitable happened as we plummeted to the ground in our metal cage.

“Deke!” I yelled but he was already gone. A couple of years ago he had transferred his mind into a mechanical body, claiming that his knees were causing him too much grief and it was time to transition. His eyes were wide open and his face was blank; just like a cyborg body off a production line that had not yet been empowered with a human soul. Deke wasn’t in there anymore.

As the reality of the situation caught up with me, I screamed in vain. The seatbelt kept me anchored in place but the force of the fall was pushing me up, straining against the belt as my body fought to free itself from the restraints. I raised my arms to push against the ceiling, then drew them back, knowing what was coming next and not wanting my arms to be snapped off in the crash.

I was going to die.

The certainty was almost calming. For a moment as I looked through the viewscreen and watched cars, bikes and cargo ships falling with me I felt a strange sense of comradeship. Whatever was happening was happening to us all.

As a paramedic I’d been called to malfunction scenes before, where a car had plummeted from the sky due to technical issues. Nobody survives. The bodies are crushed, then charred from the fires that inevitably rip through the vehicle. If you’re really unlucky, you land on someone’s home. Or someone.

All of this ran through my head in a fraction of a second. The world whooshed past in a blur or blue and a whistling in my ears, with my stomach somewhere around my ears and my limbs desperate to float around like I was underwater.

As I prepared for death and sent a silent prayer that my family and friends were not hurtling to their own deaths, and were safe on terra firma, the ambulance crashed.

Too soon.

The impact rattled my very bones. I slammed hard into my seat, my head snapping back painfully, my jaw clamping shut and biting my tongue so that I tasted copper. My ears rang, my head pounded, my back was killing me. But I was alive to feel these pains.

Daring to blink my eyes open I stared out of the view screen. It was cracked; a large single crack like a river ran from top to bottom, with spider-web patters spiralling out. Through the splintered glass I could see the sky though and the cars were still on their descent, now far below me.

For I had landed on top of the tallest skyscraper in New London. It had trashed the ambulance no doubt and given me an epic case of whiplash. But I was alive.

As the adrenaline wore off the ambulance hissed and clicked around me. Gas was leaking somewhere and the rotary blades that kept us aloft were slowly winding down. Soon everything was still and silent. Too silent; it felt like my entire world was devoid of noise, like a vacuum.

Slowly my thudding heartbeat began to quieten and my body relaxed a little, not sensing any threat. I gave Deke a check over but his machinery was fried. His metallic body was still warm from the machinery that had been running only moment before but it was starting to cool. He was gone.

The door opened easily under my touch; for some reason I had expected to have to force it. I stepped out onto the roof of the high rise building and looked up. The sky was a brilliant baby blue, not a cloud in the sky. The sun was high, kissing my face with sun-drenched rays.

I had never seen the sky so empty before. All my life whenever I looked up I could see traffic above me, dark shapes winding past the tall buildings like a well-ordered flock of birds. Now the sky was completely empty of anything. It looked so wrong.

With a sinking feeling in my stomach I took a few tentative steps to the edge of the building. A chain link fence prevented me from leaning too far but it was enough to see the streets below.

My fingers curled around the delicate wire tight enough to break skin. My breath caught in my throat as the tiny faraway sounds of shrieking screams of pain and desperation reached my ears, hitchhiking up to me on gusts of wind.

It was surreal, almost as if I weren’t part of their world. The pain, the death, the destruction. It was all on the planet far below but not happening to me. Except it was. I had just fallen from the sky. Deke was dead.

People hurried about like ants below and it occurred to me what was missing; the wailing sounds of an ambulance, or fire engine, or police. There were no sounds of emergency apart from the screams of victims below.

Was this more widespread? Until now I was assuming that there was some kind of power malfunction but limited to this area. If there was no help coming, though, did that mean that this was happening elsewhere? Were there too many people for the limited emergency services to reach? Or were there no working emergency vehicles anymore? Were they all fallen, like my own ambulance?

I sank to the floor, unable to watch the screaming ants below any longer. The thought swirling in my mind like a lazy leaf blown on the wind, turning over and over and over…

What had happened?

Eventually, as the adrenaline diluted in my blood and the rationality returned to my brain, I remembered who I was. A paramedic. A saver of lives.

The back door of the ambulance yanked open with a horrific creak, not the usual well-oiled hydraulic swish. Inside I grabbed the forest green backpack kit and unzipped it, stuffing in a few more rolls of bandages and tape until it was full to bursting. Swinging it onto my back I closed the door again, not wanting anything to be taken. The door refused to lock without the power and I was on top of a skyscraper. Who would steal anything?

The lifts were no longer operational so I hurried down one hundred and fifty flights of stairs. I promise you it feels even more than it sounds. On several floors I paused to lean against a wall or sit on the floor to catch my breath. The heavy pack on my back made the journey more torturous physically. The knowledge of what I would find when I finally stepped outside tortured me mentally.

Once again the stillness of the air scared me. Although the lifts were broken and all the automatic doors were frozen in their position, either open or closed, no emergency sirens or lights were flashing. It was as if this were all normal.

Out of breath and pushing back sweat-soaked bangs from my eyes, I hurried across the marble front entrance of the building. There were a few people here, huddled by the reception desk trying to make a communication device or computer work. Everything was dark; all the screens were dead.

The double glass doors at the front of the building were stuck half-opened. I squeezed through and blinked to adjust my eyes to the brightness of the daylight after the dimness of the building.

What I found was the apocalypse.

Usually the streets are busy with advertisement. Every walkway is plastered with plasma screens flipping between various video advertisements or news updates. Today all the screens were black. It was eerie to be outside yet not see the vibrant colours around me.

The feeling didn’t last, however, a new distraction littered the streets. Brightly coloured lumps of burning metal half-embedded in the walkways below. The concrete had simply given way wherever an impact had occurred and the ground had half swallowed up the vehicles. They looked like mini eruptions, cracked ground and flames engulfing the wrecks.

Around each one were a handful of screaming, crying citizens. Some were trying to drag bodies out of the vehicles. Others were trying to drag bodies from under the vehicles. None of the dragged bodies looked like anything I had in my backpack would help.

I hurried toward the nearest; what had once been an ebony taxi cab. It was now a hunk of twisted, steaming black metal, the chassis had crashed in on itself, crushing the driver; a larger man with a grey-speckled beard and glasses. The golden rims were bent and the glass shards had pierced his eyes. Not that he cared; his bloody gaze was fixed in the distance, on nothing in particular.

His two passengers had shared his fate. They had clearly not been wearing their regulation seatbelts. Not that it would have saved them but their end may have been a little less dramatic. It looked like they had been a mother and daughter but it was very hard to pick them apart. The clothing was my only real clue.

The stench was horrific. Blood, bodily fluids, battery acid, all mixed into a tangy, metallic stench that had me crawling back across the pock-marked ground, with a hand clamped over my nose and mouth.

“My dog…” said a small, wavering voice.

I turned to see a lady holding half of a lead. When I followed her gaze to the taxi, the frayed end of the other half poked miserably from out of the crater.

“I’m sorry,” was all I could think to say. What else was there to say?

Shakily I rose to my feet and made my way from crater to crater, with my pathetic offer of bandages. The deceased don’t need bandages, however so I found no takers.

Eventually I stumbled across a man that had not been killed instantly. The car that had fallen on him had crushed only his legs. I heard him long before I saw him and with renewed hope I broke into a jog, following his voice.

“Please help! Please, please god help me!” he called, his voice rough and raw.

“Please somebody! Please!” cried another voice. Female. His wife? Girlfriend? Daughter?

Strange how when in such dire circumstances everyone suddenly begs. As I’d wandered the streets hearing from the survivors I had heard the word “please” so many times. Usually in vain. There was nothing I could do to help these people even if the equipment I had still worked. All I had were bandages and stitches.

I soon found the couple, her crouched holding his hand, him with his eyes squeezed shut and free fist pounding the pavement in agony.

His legs had been swallowed up by the burning hulk of a van.

“I’m a paramedic,” I said and even as I looked at them from afar I felt a fraud. What could I do here for them?

But the woman looked up with me with such relief in her eyes that I hurried to her side, falling to my knees and unzipping my backpack.

“Thank you! Oh thank you, I’m so glad you’re here. My phone doesn’t work, I can’t get help.” The words tumbled from her lips and melted together.

I focused on the man and the hopelessness of the situation truly sank in. I couldn’t lift the vehicle to free him. All I had was a pair of scissors to cut bandage, so I couldn’t even perform an amputation. And even if I did manage to either get him free or cut off his legs, I had no way of getting him to a hospital before he bled out.

“It was the strangest thing, did you see?” she continued. “They all just…just fell. The cars. They fell. And people. They must have jumped out? People fell from the sky like rain…” her small voice trailed off.

I unrolled a length of bandage and my hands hovered over the man.

His eyes were glazed with pain but he saw what I was doing and managed a bark of laughter. A crimson splash of blood erupted on his lips. “The hell are you going to do with that? Get me free woman!”

“I…I’m a paramedic,” I explained again, the bandage shaking in my hands. Or was that my hands shaking?

“Great. That’s great, I need medical help. My legs are god damn pancakes. So help me, paramedic!” he said, then threw his head back as a spasm of pain washed over him.

The woman cried out and cradled his head in her lap. When she looked at me her eyes were damp with tears. “Please help him. Please. You have to. Please.”

I looked down at the stark white bandage in my hands. Then I looked at the blood pooling under the man’s body.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

Carefully I re-rolled the bandage.

“No, please there must be something you can do?” the woman begged.

I slipped the bandage into my backpack and zipped it up tight.

“Please, we have money. I can pay you money?” She fumbled for her phone, hands slick with her husband’s blood. Her phone was dead. A choked sob escaped her lips. “I’ll find another way of getting you money. I promise.”

I stood up and turned away.

“You can’t leave us!”

Her cries of despair echoed around me as I walked away. Away from the dying man. Past the numerous shells of vehicles, burning solemnly. Past the vaguely body-shaped messes of victims that had jumped for their lives and failed in the process.

I was a paramedic but without the power that we relied so much on all I could do was put a sticking plaster on the gaping wound of New London.

In the years to come we would rebuild. The power never came back. A solar flare. We had to learn new survival skills. Had to learn how to live in a world that was once familiar but was now so alien.

And we had to do it all around the vehicles that now rot in our streets, as we cannot move them. Do not want to move them. They serve as a stark reminder of the universe’s power.

And how man is powerless against the universe.