- f u o c o -

The hole in the sky is our punishment.

After years of abuse, waste, neglect and carelessness, the world had its revenge upon us. It started slowly, and in time we grew used to its presence; the hole in the sky, the tear in the O-Zone layer, an unfortunate side-affect of our extravagant lifestyles. But that's not what it was. Many years after the second millennium dawned, the world pushed our punishment back through the hole in the sky. It was time for us to pay for the way we had treated it.

We thought it was a cloud at first; black smoke, like that which issues from the factory chimneys at night. Fuoco, it's name was. It wasn't a word that any of us knew, but one morning we woke up to find it burned into our eyelids. It hung there in the sky, a black ball of moving waste, bearing down upon us; it was pollution, it was filth, it was an entire country of misuse and neglect. It settled above us, and our sentence began. Everyone was afraid of it, and for good reason; on the third day of it's settlement, black streams poured down and began to cover our land.

The streams were lines of people...entire armies. A black army. They were just like us, the Fuocans; two legs, two arms, one head...but no face. They were faceless. They were black. They were horrible.

They are just like us, even now.

At first we thought we were safe. We thought we were sinless. Only the homeless and the terminally ill disappeared, entire wards emptying overnight at hospitals. We would learn later that entire African countries were found deserted, too. We were all relieved and hoped that the black mass would be happy with its takings.

Two days after the disappearances, Fuoco sent us our first message. It came down from the sky in the shape of a storm, and though no words were spoken, we all felt its meaning within ourselves.

We have taken the poor and sick to Heaven, it said. They are clean.

Tomorrow, we will take the children.

The children. Our little ones. The ones with so much to live for. The absolute desperation of everything bubbled to the surface after the message had passed, and madness ensued. There was panic. Riots. Fighting everywhere. Women clawed at their children, holding them close. Some even took their lives, one bullet for the daughter and one for the mother.

It is odd how love can drive you to hurt someone so much.

Many people went into hiding underground, sure that the Black Army wouldn't be able to find them there, pleased with their own wit. They slept with their children strapped to their bodies, wrapped around their waists, sure that they would see them again in the morning.

But it wasn't to be. When the sun came up and the clever underground mothers opened their eyes, they were to find empty lashings where their offspring once lay. All of the world's children had been taken. There was not a single one left. A heavy dread fell upon everyone, and the screams of parents could be heard everywhere.

It was another day before we heard from Fuoco again. This time, the message was sent with heavy snow fall. The very words were wrapped around the soft flakes as they fell upon our cold heads.

We have taken the children to Heaven, the message said. They are clean.

Tomorrow, we will take the animals.

Nobody fought this time. Nobody argued. There were no riots in the streets. Nobody touched their pets, held them close, or tried to protect them. Creatures were pushed out onto the streets; dogs scratched at closed doors, cats tiptoed along fences and rabbits were left outside in their hutches. The people in the houses did not try to keep them, or hide them. They felt no love for the animals now that their children had gone. They went to sleep with the sounds of yelping creatures filling their heads, knowing in the morning they would hear it no more. They felt little remorse by sunrise when they looked out of the windows onto silent streets. Empty hutches and jeweled collars were scattered everywhere.

Nobody wanted to hear from Fuoco, but the message came nonetheless. It came unaccompanied this time, the words drifting on a gentle breeze.

We have taken the animals to Heaven, it said. They are clean.

The world is now empty of the good and the innocent.

All that remains is waste.

Tomorrow, we will delete you.

Delete you. Like a program. Like something simple, and easy to erase. Like something we ourselves had created. After we had came so far, after all the history and wars and elections and fights and promises, we were to be deleted. Purged. Destroyed. Forgotten.

Women wept, as did men. The old and young walked together in the streets, hand in hand, staring at the black mess in the sky. Some gathered beneath it, waiting, accepting their fate. Others were cowardly and hid underground; I joined them, burying my head in the sand. We wasted our last night of life by crying and lamenting our lost children; we thought nothing of the world. We thought nothing of why Fuoco had been sent to us. We didn't consider whose fault it was. We were too selfish, even then, to realise how this could have been avoided.

The Black Army came at dawn. There were no alarm bells, no sirens; just heavy footsteps as the faceless ones began their onslaught. I don't know how many they were; hundreds, thousands, countless. They were everywhere. A human plague. A constant stream of revenge. A swirling mass of unwanted produce. They were our infection, our rubbish, our neglection, and now...they were our problem.

We smelled them before we saw them. Everything bad in the world was packed into that stench, back to back with our own failure as a species. It was rancid and unbearable and everywhere at once. Though they were human in form, they harboured neither morals nor emotion; they cut us down, one by one, with silent swords, until few were left who could stand. They killed men and women, the elderly and frail. In my bunker I crouched in the corner and watched as they slaughtered a young man, his face screwed up, with all the terrors of the world crashing upon him.

Even after the Black Army marched on, the putrid scent remained.

I didn't know why I had been left alive.

Part of me wished to be dead.

I thought one of them had looked at me during their rampage, but of course they had no eyes. They were eyeless. If only I were the same way, I thought, if only I could have been spared the sight of the other people as they were torn apart. Twenty of us had hidden in the bunker that night. One remained. I lay there in the bloody remains for hours, sure that the Black Army would come back for me, so afraid for my own life. I was selfish, still, even after this Armageddon had swept past me.

My white shirt was red and brown, saturated, clinging to my skin. I took it off. It was contaminated with the dead of this world. I needed to get out of the bunker, away from the young man and his endless terrors. I looked at him, his jaw hanging open, his eyes staring endlessly. I saw myself in that young man, and made for the door.

Outside. Clean air? The smell of the Black Army had faded, but a faint scent would forever remain scorched into my skin. I looked around. Nothing. Just houses. The same street, the same fences, the same cars parked on neat driveways.

Where was the bloodshed? Where was the carnage that I had witnessed in the bunker?

I found it. It was running down the streets in ruby rivers. My eyes watched as it made its journey through the gutters.

The red stream was heading for the drains. Into the sewers our lifeblood would go, and eventually into the sea. The world's oceans would soon be coloured red.

I looked up. Fuoco. Where was it?

It had gone.

It had left me behind. The black mass had finished its work, and had gone away. The Black Army had retreated victorious.

I wandered then, for days, weeks and months, taking food from houses along the way. I was afraid of the corpses at first, but I soon learned to step over them. I had a peg over my nose. It helped with the smell. The younger ones smelled worst of all.

I cried a lot, to begin with. I was lost. I wished that I was dead, that I had been taken away with the Army to be cleansed and imprisoned in Hell. I was sure that that was where the other people had gone; if children and animals were innocent, then the rest of us were condemned. We would never get into Heaven now, for whatever looked over us was angry; I had always thought of myself as a good man who did bad things, but now I knew I was not. I was a bad man who did bad things. We were judged by our actions. What we do determines who we are.

The very worst people, after all, were left behind. I was not clean enough for Heaven and not wasteful enough for Hell. The worst punishment of all was to be left here with the bodies and the smell. I am sure of it. The world has punished its people with death, and the vermin are likewise punished with life. I pray every night now. Nobody hears me.

I found two other people, after a while. One was a young girl, not quite young enough to be a child. She must have sinned quite badly to be spared. She told me that she was still in school, and was pregnant. I felt a flutter in my heart when she said these words. The Black Army had spared the pregnant ones? It made sense that they would not punish an unborn child. If the child was born, there was surely still hope for our survival.

But they did punish her, after all.

Three days later, the girl miscarried in the street.

She disappeared that day, and I suppose I know why. Fuoco knew she was no longer carrying. She was no longer clean; she was waste, like other people. She was taken to Hell now that she had no child to bear. I wondered why they didn't take me. I was more of a sinner than the girl had been; she had slept with a boy before she should have, but I had killed a man. Let out on bail. On the run for the past six months. I was the worst of them all. I could see no reason for me to be excused...why let the murderers live?

The other person I found was a vicar, elderly, needed a walking stick. He was a holy man even now, even now that the world had been deleted. He trusted God's judgment. I asked him about Fuoco, wanting to know more. He had it all figured out in his head. He said that he had been warning people of it for years.

“It is a disease that we brought upon ourselves. Everything that we have created over the years has helped only our own society; technology, medicine, food and money...we did not use it to help those in need. We left the third world in starvation and poverty because we believed it wasn't our problem; we believed we could do nothing about it. The innocent among them were taken to Heaven, because they had done nothing but try to survive. We were different. We didn't survive, we lived. We drove cars and drained the world of its fuel. We got by comfortably and pumped pollution into the air. All of our damage and greed seeped through the hole where God surely tasted it for himself. He thought us wicked. He waited for us to get to the point of no return, wanting us to repent and help those around us. He gave us a chance.”

The old man was crying, and wasn't to stop for hours after he finished speaking.

“We took no notice. God extended his hand to us and we ignored it, continuing with our war-mongering and biological advancements instead. We were more concerned with cloning a healthy person than helping a dying child. There was no saving our sorry souls. Fuoco was sent as punishment, as divine retribution; all of our centuries filled with waste, pumped back through the atmosphere. It was the world's turn to pollute us. The innocent and sick were spared a wicked fate, but they had done little wrong; children, after all, follow their parents' example. They cannot be blamed for their own ignorance. Animals, too, live only to live; they don't drive cars, or break the law, or hurt others intentionally. They must survive. They were saved because they had no bad intentions during their life.

“But we...we are wicked. We have lived in luxury while others die, and didn't care much more than giving a few pence to charity once a year. The soldiers that came out of Fuoco were living embodiments of all the harm we have ever caused. They wiped out the problem. In time, the world might start again. Life has been reset.”

But why are we left? I asked him, and I wondered if he knew where there were others.

“I can't speak for you,” he said, leaning heavily on his cane. “But I have lived and breathed God all my life. I am still a sinner, but I repent every day. Perhaps he spared me because he didn't think me polluted enough.”

I told him my story, about me killing a man. The vicar grew pale, and cried again. I found it curiously wonderful that he could never run out of tears for the world.

“Then perhaps only the truly awful people are left behind. You have killed a man out of spite, thus wasting the good in your heart. Maybe I have wasted my own life believing in the goodness of the world, and this is how I am mocked and rewarded.”

He walked with me, and stayed with me every day after that. We journeyed for hours each sunrise, calling out, looking for others as unfortunate as ourselves. When we came to the sea, we called over it, but received no reply.

The water was red and perfectly still. Fuoco had taken the moon. The tides pushed and pulled no more; I dropped a stone into the red ocean and it sank silently. Everything was so lifeless now, even the once-changing sea. Blood had stained the beaches pink. I walked barefoot over the sand and imagined I was walking on raw flesh. My own flesh. I was exposed to the emptiness of everything.

We resorted to raiding supermarkets for supplies, but much of the food was spoiled. Electricity didn't work anymore. Milk on the shelves had curdled and turned hard. Canned goods were safe, but you had to eat quickly after opening, and there was no time to cook; the stench soon settled into everything, ruining the taste. We ate quickly to make ourselves sick, hoping it would stop us from feeling hungry. It didn't always work.

I remembered, one day, whilst foraging through a bin, that I still had my mobile phone in the pocket of my jeans. I pulled it out and pressed a button. Nothing. I bashed hopelessly at its controls before throwing it to the ground. Phones didn't work either. All of our self-indulgent technology had been stripped from us. Everything we had always been dependent on was now gone. It was hard to live without it.

For food, we tried picking fruit instead, but only shriveled stumps now hung from the trees. Curled and rotting leaves covered the pavements and roads.

Even the trees were dead.

Grass had stopped growing and the once green fields were now brown and matted; there was nothing left. Fuoco had stripped us of everything we once took for granted. There was no beauty left anywhere; great monuments we had built now seemed worthless and ugly. Places that attracted thousands of tourists just a year ago were deserted and lifeless. It was awful.

This was my reward for murdering. My very own Hell. There was no way off this island, and I only had an old man for company; he would surely soon leave me too. I would live alone, slowly starving, waiting for the Army to come for me, longing for Fuoco to reappear, realising they hadn't quite finished the job. The thought of mankind's own armies and wars now seemed trivial and futile. Why did we waste so much time killing, when we could have been repairing the damage we had done to the world? We should have sewed up the hole in the sky instead of making it bigger.

I found a pen and paper, and wrote everything down. My thoughts about the world and how we had come to this eternal ending stretched on for pages. I cried at night, clutching the ink-stained sheets to me, knowing that no one would ever read it. Even if there were other survivors, they weren't with me; there was just the two of us now. Searching endlessly. Reminiscing and sharing our lives. Hoping one day that we might never wake up.

That is our real punishment, I think. Waking up.

The cleansing rites that the Black Army performed were merciless and horrid, but in a way it was generous. Their deaths were instant and kind. Ours is stretched out and painful. The inescapable truth is that it is all our fault. We could have helped save the world, but instead we thought only of ourselves. That is human nature. I know that now. I killed a man because I was thinking of myself. I hid in the bunker because I was thinking of myself. I came back outside because I was thinking of myself. I ask this vicar questions because I am thinking of myself.

The hole in the sky is our punishment for thinking only of ourselves.

I am so sorry for all that I have done.