I awoke with the memory of sweet scent and a chill wind against my bare chest. The rocky ground I had lain on was warm where my body had made contact. Wiping the sleep from my eyes I looked around the scorched surroundings, remembering how decimated this world was when we first arrived. I then realised that she was no longer with me. My eyes scanned the barren land in search for the white lady. Her glow could be seen for miles but the horizon remained a sooty red. Red, like blood. The effect of the devastation that had blasted this world into total ecological collapse. No life could be found anywhere on the planet, no life could ever survive in such an environment. This world will remain dead for all of eternity.
Wearing only a pair of tattered jeans, I can stand on the frozen surface without feeling any of the harsh elements that would kill a mortal man in seconds. I am the only sole survivor of a once stubborn and greedy race. Humans. By pure luck I survived the Armageddon that had wiped out the rest of my kind.
I had been working as a janitor at a medical facility that was researching some radical new medical treatment. They were assured it would make anyone completely immune to nearly all forms of disease. It worked by strengthening the outer protein wall of all the cells in the body and reprogramming their DNA structure to adapt to any new disease they might encounter. It was administered by an injection then activated by bombarding the entire body with some sort of safe radioactive wave.
I had inadvertently volunteered for the first test run by walking into the room where they were discussing about who they would test this new treatment on. They asked me in passing as I emptied the bin if I was up to being their guinea pig. I shrugged and replied: "Why not?"
I wouldn't have said anything if I had known that their funding was being cut if no new breakthrough was presented. So I was marched to the bombardment room three days later, still scratching at the shoulder they had injected the serum into me an hour after I had agreed into testing the procedure.
Lying on the bed I waited for the gigantic machine that surrounded my body to finish it's sequence. It was then that a war had begun and an atomic bomb fell on the city some 20 kilometres away. The shockwave ripped through the facility like it was made of paper, completely destroying it. What had saved me was the machine, acting like an armoured shell and protecting me from the majority of the devastating blast.
Counting my luck I crawled up to see what had happened, taking in great breaths of scorched air. Looking out towards ground zero I realised that the nuclear down fall would kill me in hours. So I waited, not knowing that the core of the machine had leaked, radiating me with its steady flow of strange rays.
A few days later I walked out of the blasted creator, the cuts and bruises I had received had completely healed. The treatment had worked, although to a degree that was far beyond what the scientists had ever hoped for. My body was invincible, no matter what kind of damage that was dealt, it would rapidly heal itself and leaving no trace of it ever been touched. I also found that my body needed little or no sustenance, the cells feeding off the nutrients from the very air itself! I was amazed at how much my body could take.
But I couldn't test myself completely for the war had dug its claws into the citizens of this world. I never knew who started it all, but I did know how it ended. Every country, believing the other had fired the first shot, retaliated with their own deadly arsenal.
Within a week, Earth's had lost 80% of its population. The surviving strands of humanity slowly died out less then half a generation later. With the atomic attacks pounding its surface, the world fought back, sending radioactive dust high into the atmosphere and scattering it on erratic winds. What had once been fertile land became a deserts of radioactive dust, quickly killing plants and animals. The sun was blanked out behind a choked sky and the weather became unpredictable and cold. A perpetual winter cursed the surface, killing millions in just one year.
My enhanced body survived the onslaught that the dying world had cast, suffice to say I felt every pain I received in such a climate. Wandering through the bleak and ruined terrain of a forgotten country, I had found the last human half frozen and driven completely mad by hunger and cold in the shelter of a ruined building. He was a boy of about twelve years and from his inane babbling I deduced he was the survivor of a desperate caravan of eight searching for food.
One by one they all died until he was left alone, cold and half dead from malnutrition to wander aimlessly on the dead surface. And now he was following those last survivors into the blissful sleep of oblivion and I watched as I held him in my arms as his eyes closed for the last time, never to open again.
I never mourned for the loss of humanity, instead I blamed its destruction on itself. Humans as a whole had always been a stupid race. Arrogant, selfish and completely lacking in self preservation, it had started the fatal wheel of genocide with the production of weapons of mass destruction.
How I loathed at being who I was and tried without success to end my life numerous times. But my cursed body stubbornly healed and replenished itself, making me a solitary god and forcing me to wander without reason over a dead planet.
Countless years passed and my body still refused to relent, suspending my ageing process indefinitely and keeping me alive in a place that held no value for me. One day as I wondered, more for the act of moving then any other reason, I saw something streak across the sky, leaving a flaming path in its wake and landed some distance away with an impact that shook the very ground. I decided to investigate, for what else was there to do?
Reaching the creator the missile had made I was completely stunned at what I discovered. That was the day my life had truly changed, for that was the day I met Ariel.
I searched the horizon again but this time with my mind, sending my thought wide over the landscape. I had learned to awaken my dormant ability of telepathy from Ariel. From the moment she opened her eyes and looked up at me as she lay comfortably in the middle of the creator she had created, she had used her mind as a primary medium of communication. She came to earth in no spaceship or pod but instead in her natural nude form, her body, unlike my own, was unsusceptible to any type of physical harm. I don't believe she can even feel pain.
I was rewarded then with the warmth of her thoughts flooding my own. I could never overcome the awe I felt at the eternal knowledge that is her mind. I smiled as her thoughts turned to me and beckoned me to her. Spreading my feathered wings I obediently followed her thoughts.
My wings. Black feathers, soft and smooth, covered the pinions that protruded from my back. It was a few hours after Ariel had awoken, her initial greeting still echoing in my mind, when she asked me why my wings had not yet sprouted. We were talking about the destruction of my world and what had started it all off when she suddenly faced me with it.
After a few moments of trying to reply through a shocked, half choked throat she reached across the space between us and gently both placed her hands on either side of my head. Her touch was cold, like ice but it filled my mind with a comfortable warmth as she reached in and opened the doors that were once firmly locked. As her mind bridged across to my own to help me better understand what I needed to know, I sensed in her a mind that was so vast and so incredibly strong I felt overpowered just by briefly touching it.
