holocene-dawn

For Ian Malcolm, the nightmares came at least once a week. The scene was always the same: he was in the car in the dark with the rain pounding outside. At first there was silence, but soon he felt them – the steps that shook the earth and made the car tremble. He knew that he was next to the beast’s lair, only now there was no fence at all. The footsteps grew louder and closer. Then the flash came, blinding him, and when he saw again it was in front of him! It was free, a huge black shadow between the cars, and when it roared the thunder clapped like a bomb, rattling the windows and going through him like a shockwave. His head sn

Amina crawled forward on her hands and knees with her stomach aching and her head pounding. She fought the urge to vomit at her own stench, the matted, greasy curls of her self-cut hair stroking her neck like Death's waiting hand. She was hungry...so hungry. Straining to peer through the cracked window, the sweltering August afternoon smothering her haggard face, she saw what she already knew – they were still there, watching, waiting. Flashes of images and sounds came back to her: the first time that she had been woken up by the artillery batteries that had pounded the mosques, and the hospitals, and the shops; the booms of the petrol

None of them could have said what life was like before the war. They recalled the first news of the invasion, and the retreat into the forest; now it seemed to have become their entire lives. That two out of four had been city-dwellers seemed distant and alien now; the dense greenery had become their home, a hard and unforgiving abode from which they pillaged and harried the enemy. Hours, days, weeks, months – such measurements were meaningless. They only counted their ammunition, and how many of the fascist invaders they maimed and murdered with it. Every shot fired was one less person to rape, murder, plunder and burn. Each day they