Noah Read Online Free Page B

sand. Like time.
    Confused he rose to his feet. He looked around and realized that he was standing not in a valley, but in the center of a vast, black, dried-out plain. He wasutterly alone. There was no life here, nothing to see for miles but a blistering, silent emptiness.
    He wanted to scream. But he was afraid that if he did so, no sound would emerge from his mouth. He felt panic rising within him. He felt certain that the death of the land—the silence that lay upon it—was only a prelude to what was to follow. Next, the Creator would extinguish the light, and then Man himself would be no more. Noah would be the last of mankind, the only witness to the fall of Creation.
    He wanted to plead for salvation, and yet there was a part of him that agreed with The Creator, that knew Man was wicked, and that this judgment was a just one.
    And then a drop of rain fell. Noah didn’t see it, but he
heard
it. A single drop striking the ashen ground. He looked down and saw a bead of moisture shimmering for a moment, before it was sucked into the parched earth, leaving a tiny crater behind. It had been nothing more than a single drop, and yet all at once, to Noah, it seemed like a miracle. He looked up, into a blank and cloudless sky.
    After a moment he lowered his gaze. The horizon stretched forever. The earth was flat and dead and black in all directions. He turned to the north, to the south, to the west…
    And then he turned to the east, and saw a lone mountain straining toward the sky, a rising surge of rock. It was as if the Creator had reached down and pulled the rock from the dead earth like a man molding clay.
    Noah knew this mountain. He knew it instantly. A word formed in his mouth.
    “Grandfather.”
    Noah took a step toward the mountain. But as he did so he realized that something was wrong. He looked down and saw that the ground was wet. He raised his foot and was astonished to discover that his feet were bare. He was even more astonished to find that the earth on his feet was not black, but red. He looked around again, and suddenly it was as if he was seeing with new eyes. The ground was wet not with rain, but with blood.
    The blood of Man…
    Fear and panic seized him. He sensed something behind him, something vast and terrible rushing toward him, threatening to overwhelm him. He spun around. And suddenly, impossibly, he was…
    Underwater.
    His eyes opened wide as the naked white corpse of a man floated past, its eyes and mouth gaping open, hair drifting like reeds in the undersea current. He flailed in panic, twisting away from the corpse. He kicked his legs wildly, and all at once, his feet made contact with something solid.
    It was an underwater reef, a gnarled precipice of rock and coral, like a vast mountain beneath the sea. He planted his feet upon it and found himself looking down into a huge pit, where the whole of humanity lay dead and rotting. Millions upon millions of corpses, stretching as far as the eye could see…
    It was an appalling sight. The most terrible and terrifying sight imaginable. Noah screamed. Bubbles rushed out of his mouth, obscuring his vision. Though he could make no sound he screamed and screamed. The rushing, rising bubbles obliterated the awful sight that lay before him. They overwhelmed his senses with darkness. He felt a hand tugging at hisarm, and then another upon his leg. And then many hands were tugging at him, and although he was underwater and could see nothing, Noah knew that the hands were cold and lifeless, and that they were the hands of the dead. He was the only man left alive in the whole of Creation and the dead were angry and jealous. They wanted him to join them.
    He struggled, fought against them, but the hands became tighter and tighter. He felt the life being squeezed out of him…
    * * *
    Noah sat bolt upright in the darkness. He was still screaming. He could still feel the hands of the dead on him, and he tried to struggle against them, to pull away. But then