The Ghost and the Darkness Volume 1 (The Fallocaust Series Book 2) by Quil Carter Read Free Book Online Page A

burn of the tea washed it away, and what confused thoughts remained the scenery helped distract me.
    It was empty here, a desolate shell, so much rock and the ground here... a bowl of ash littered with loose rocks and chunks of concrete from buildings long since burned or dissolved in the rains. This area was completely void of humans, mostly since there seemed to be nothing to scavenge. It was a void, even of abandoned buildings.
    Elish had told me the stories Silas had shared with him about life before the Fallocaust. It was after our hours of love making had died down, when I was in his arms, the darkness around us only broken by a faint warm light, when Elish was mine and no one else’s. Where he would tell me stories, answer my questions and even ask me ones in return. I ached for those times with a thirst that no other sensation could quench.
    It hadn’t happened in a long while, since this all started.
    I remembered one such night, when I had thought he had fallen asleep. Only then could I gather the courage to ask him. He was behind me, with his arms wrapped around my chest and my naked body pulled tightly to him.
    “What did he tell you it was like, when he ended the world?”
    And with the smallest intake of breath he had painted me a picture. Ash that stung your tongue like poisoned snowflakes and breaths of air that burned your lungs without fire. To this day those cities were uninhabitable. Nothing but graveyards of charcoal and ash, pounded to sediment under the hammer of time.
    Then he would tell me of the fire. Of a world where everything was covered in white hot ash. From the cinders of thousands of burning buildings, to the bodies of already dead men baked in their carbonized skin. Some of the sestic radiation had been so concentrated it had made whole cities erupt into flames.
    The hounds of hell had descended from a sky baked red from whole cities, twice the size of Skyfall, erupting into a white inferno as far as the eye could see. The heat was so powerful coming from the cities that they melted even the metal frames of skyscrapers.
    When the fires finally cooled twenty years later nothing remained but pools of melted steel. Soon ash covered these phantom remains and now their locations changed from traveller’s tale to traveller’s tale.
    But the flames of hell that wielded the power to melt cities struck few and far between, for the most part everything stayed the same.
    Well, unless you were living.
    The sestic radiation that Silas had let off had killed or driven insane everyone that wasn’t on what would become Skyfall. It mutated the animals, clouded the sky and stifled the rain. It killed the plants and trees, or condemned them to an existence of stunted despair. It sucked the life out of all living things leaving them either dead or broken shells. Little grew in the greywastes but corpses and even the greywasters harvested those. They ate friends and family alike without hesitation. Most too mad from radiation to do more but steal from and murder their fellow man.
    Elish’s cold voice had been so smooth like he was reciting poetry or singing me an old song. It had made a frozen shiver run up my spine. I hung on his every word.
    “Why did he end the world?”
    “The world had already ended itself; they just quelled its suffering.”
    “They? Silas and Sky?”
    “That’s correct.”
    “And the sestic radiation did all of this?”
    “That and the scars brought on by the war. Many bombs were dropped before those two had had enough.”
    “How did he cause it? Was it inside of him or a machine?”
    I had turned by then and I had been facing him.
    Elish’s purple eyes were glistening gems but I saw he was relaxed, set at ease by our love making. As soon as he left our room he would become my cold statue of white marble, but as for now, his body and mind were mine.
    “It was him, but how he managed to kill the world I do not know – he never wanted us to know.”
    I felt the invisible