Maggie’s Farm: With the scientist’s sperm, can the English race survive in a post-holocaust grave new world on Maggie’s Farm?

Maggie’s Farm: Science Fiction

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BLURB: Maggie’s Farm

Cody and Carolyn Redford enjoy a carefree lifestyle in Kent County, with friends Gavin and Melanie Maynard. In Cornwall, the Redfords encounter a soothsayer predicting a bleak future for mankind. The foursome then notes some unexplained changes in the behaviour of wild animals and migrating birds, giving credence to the prediction. When a terrorist outrage in South Africa leads to further major atrocities in Israel and India, détente finally fails. Global nuclear war is sparked off by an unforeseen source, resulting in the superpowers exchanging H-bomb punches like drunken boxers. In the midst of survival, Cody Redford becomes aware of the artificial insemination and incubation (AI2) programme, an initiative hatched in the Cold War years to store the sperm of prominent scientists with the objective of using surrogate hosts to factory farm children in a post-holocaust world.Though appalled, nonetheless, he resigns himself to supporting the programme, unaware of the significant down the road consequences to the nature of human life.

EXCERPT: Maggie’s Farm

Ubiquitous over the sleeping cities, the ICBMs left no room in the sky for the moon and stars. Avoiding electro-magnetic counter measures and immune to surface and air-based defence networks, they journeyed to their designated marks, the great Siberian white wind relentlessly blowing them on.

Then came a lightening flash; a jagged edge of lethal destruction, gone before its victims stopped breathing. Instants after, a rumble followed, speedily mutating into a roaring typhoon and a raging inferno. Contemptuous of metal and brick, flesh and bone, its quicksilver rhythm hugged the ground, its spread functionalised in shape by anything it passed over and consumed, its electro-magnetic pulse disabling every vehicle and any device reliant on electro-motive force. Contingent on ignited chemicals, expanding gases and blazing skin tissue, its bi-product mutated into a nauseating electrostatic odour, bleaching the air and blanching the landscape of all fragrance.

Caught, as if accidental tourists in some foreign field, dripping in acidic juices, people staggered about, bewildered by the ferocity of the onslaught. Attacked out of the dark and menacing gloom, incapable of escape, it cut them down as they stumbled and stuttered for relief. Each random move led further into the fray, the unseen enemy anticipating its victims’ every shift of direction. Consistent with a giant whisking soldiers off a battlefield with one swipe of his mighty arm, it mowed them down. Concocted from a blinding nuclear exothermic reaction, the stomach-churning libation filled their lungs, drowning them in nitrates condensing into burning ammonium.Slicing them neatly and cratering their bodies into moon crust shapes, it sucked them down onto its undiscriminating blade. Beyond their worst nightmares, beyond the trenches, beyond Owen’s Dulce et Decorum Est,it left them wretched in abject misery. Consumed without sorrow or favour, they were obliterated from the record and bequeathed to nothingness.Such an undignified assault, flimsy in vindication, enacted by a chilling set of knaves and fiends.

Beneath ground level, the Earth remonstrated at the rapacious daggers tearing at its rind. Quaking and quivering, it collapsed and crushed from within, fighting back at the unwelcome interloper. Mountains shook, valleys folded, the oceans erupted into gargantuan whirlpools. Giant waves smashed cargo carriers and ferries into coastlines, crumbled chalk cliffs and swamped harbours. Crippled aircraft fell from the sky, motor vehicles were tossed around like Dinky toys, millions of utility pipelines ruptured, transmission pylons snapped from their moorings, roads and railways concertinaed about as if by a ringmaster flexing a whip.

One black angel of death fell silently on the submarine pens at Chatham dockyard, crashing through centuries of productive toil, and bursting into sudden flower. For a trice, the television skies over Hempstead were brighter than Phoebus the sun god.

Cody turned to Carolyn to make their get away, but hypnotised by the illumination, she brooded, unable to move. He too froze, his wits fully aware of unfolding emergences, but his legs at odds with mobility. As shivers crept and multiplied up his back, he felt a new-born monster on the loose; no escaping its furnace, no pitying relief from wave upon wave of pulsating energy bursting into conflagration, only the choice of ground for expiration, the lovers sealed in a dimensionless volume of increasing heat and noise. Splitting from transfix, Cody tried to find sanctuary from the outlandish foe, but all exits were buffered by fresh flammable adversaries cloaked in impenetrable armour, invincible to protest, dispassionate to bravery.

When the main blast and heat wave came, their summer house turned to tinder in less time than it took to blink. Only a tick earlier, the ornate pond had been calm, with gentle ripples radiating to its boundaries. Half of its water vaporized in one hundredth of one tenth of one second. Their Hempstead home creaked and crumbled, its roof partially dragged off, its walls split asunder.

Spellbound, Carolyn delayed, unable to shift, speak or scream out. Finally, Cody found sway, stretching his hands out towards her. But before he could make contact, adecimating bête noireascended from hell, enveloping her whole being. Rapid physical transfiguration instantly followed, layers of her disintegrating skin needlessly peeled away, harsh as the ravens beating wings. Remarkably, he could see right through her body and into the garden, her entire form opaque segueing into translucence. When her eyes opened involuntary, darkness was upon them. She crumpled into a rag doll, tearing and splintering into a thousand pieces then dissolving to dust. She had gone. It was truly a murderous sun.

Still frozen to the spot, Cody screamed and screamed her name, his anguish, the worst he’d ever felt. Closing in around him vexed with intent, the nightmare hunted for a fresh casualty. He’d be next if he failed to move. Pinching his flaking arm, he kick-started sensory control, fear becoming his best friend. Fleeing the decimated house, he ran out onto the common, still howling at the loss of Carolyn.

Stopping with a sudden thud, he watched in awe as people and houses and cars and politicians were vaporized in every direction. Corresponding to taking hotels off a monopoly board, a rolling ball of washed-out hot metal ploughed across the terrain, knocking down everything in its path. Imploding from within, the sky turned crimson red, creating mini-black holes where light and shade once cast shadow. As if the sun had come out displacing the moon, crimson modulated into lurid yellow, giving way to white light, whiter than translucent magnesium. Low frequency rumbles raced across the landscape, the secondary blast wave still levelling everything in its path. Drawn up into its trail like discarded paper, Cody found himself carried along, arms and legs flailing trying to find an anchor fulcrum. Pinned against a lazing up-rooted lamp post, he came to an abrupt stop. Passingly, blackness descended on him, but not unconsciousness, and no release from blistering pain.

Beyond unbearable with every inhalation, the heat increased, making his lungs feel as though they were on fire. Overcome, he slumped into a melancholic malaise, but his life did not flash before him. Instead, the disquiet cultivated into a trance, as though conjured up by a master magician. Apparitions in his subconscious turned into strange Blakean envisions, at last a world realised he’d tried to emulate in his writings, without success.

Deviating into a measureless cyclorama of glowing chromatics and low-pitched sounds fading from afar, the corporeal illusion insulated him from the horror of the physical world. It felt warm and cosy, no monsters creeping up his back here. So shocked by the depictions sent down the optic nerve, his mind refused to accept his body pain. Instead of issuing commands to provoke the nervous system, it generated more hallucinatory icons. Floating away, he pitched up on a limitless ocean of crystalline bubbles and silky, dimorphous shapes then an infinite concourse of psychotropic contours and patterns came for him. Melding into the soothing, psyche penetrating canvass, he plummeted away from hammer blow pains, daydreaming he saw angels. Ridiculously gratified, he wanted to stay in the singularity of the collective release forever.

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LINKS

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