The Zone

He had planned to go back into the Zone tonight, to continue his search. He would try and get to the Central, take up his position again and wait, wait for a glimpse of her, wait for a plan to evolve. He had to feel he was working to combine their destinies again. Sitting in his studio was intolerable.

The blue-pale sky had darkened into indigo shot with fringes of neon-pink. The stars were appearing one by one, softly dimming and shining deep within their ethereal silence above the growing activity within the Zone as, in a steadily rising chorus of mounting energy, the noises of the night began to drift towards him. The noises came regularly from the west of him, towards the Broadway area where he had found his access. There were sounds and voices interlocking one with another through the darkness, their spiraling echoes meshing disjointed, riding the night air like the tattered cloak of a dark, wild horse-borne warrior-god set against the tossing wind. With the setting sun the great bonfires would be lit one by one, like holes burning through a matted, blackened landscape. And Jade was in there.

Thrown against the darkened sky the tableau of images discharged themselves, fragments of the once-proud skyline of the centre of the City, their disarray gigantesque and imprisoning. The shapes of the mannequins cast atop the piles of debris looked eerily alive in the wan cast of the moonlight, regarding him with a sinister tranquillity, their limbs broken, their smile fixed. The colonnaded white marble piazzas of reception lobbies with their soaring, sculptured pillars and the vaulting grace of a Baroque church were now transformed into amputated stumps protruding a convulsion of stark intensity raging blasphemy against the quiet, open void of the night sky. The smooth-rounded alabaster side of one of the silver-filigreed fountains that had once played roundelays through limpid tropical greenery and changing colours in variance with celestial-sounding chords now glinted in innocent travesty of themselves, half-buried in the moonlight. The towering shards of concrete and broken stone images along his path dwarfed him as he moved, dwarfed his courage, captured his breath and froze his resolve.

From the surrounding blocks and like a growing incursion upon his isolation a tide of noise rising, then a flash of light a short distance away, illuminating a punk in full regalia. The mounting tide was engulfing him in wave upon wave of encroaching voices unrestrained and liberated, voices expressing an energy that surged around him like a spirit freed but still soured from lock and subjugation. Threads of madness ran through the voices as they wove one through another in an ever-intensifying game of pursuit, a game that exerted a strange, disquieting pull on him. A moment’s silence, then a low, wavering moan. At the same time a thud and the crash of something against the side of a building close to him. Fading steps, then a slow, dying wail, then the electric silence again. Out of the nightmare choreography a call, raising itself, cutting across the silence with an eerie tone like a flatted, damaged musical note, joined by other calls falling into formation like drops of hot lead and locking into a tight chant; the chant intensified as its pitch rose higher and higher, building itself within a framework of long, measured beats until, in one climactic burst, it exploded into a crescendo of crazy laughter. The soft, dull thump of running footsteps. . . .

He faded into an alley that was airless and fetid and bounded by the stark walls of buildings mounting black and windowless on either side. He slid down against a wall and looked into the imperturbable depths of the night sky, at the few dim stars obscured at intervals by a passing cloud. He breathed her name to allay the trembling of his heart and the creeping prickles across his skin. "Jade! I don’t want to die here!"