Phoenix

Switzerland, 2029

Crisp snow crunches under the woman’s boots. It’s almost unbearably bright – the white plains of the lower alps reflecting the sun’s glare. It’s warm, though it’s meant to be the dead of winter; the ice is melting, the rivers surge through the Old City like they’re being chased.

            She ventured off the path in the woods near her home today, climbed the slopes up out of the shadows and emerged to this aching light. Sweating beneath her woollens, she opens her coat, lets the air in around her sides and takes a deep breath, watching it billow from her as she exhales.

            Bruno has run ahead, excited by the change of scenery, all the new smells to investigate. She follows the Shepherd's footprints across a rise and stops on the crest to catch her breath. His prints trail down the slope, towards the Giants. Tourists used to come in summer to stand at their roots, take selfies with them, each trying and failing to capture the size of those ancient earthly monuments. But there are no tourists anymore, not since Year Four of the pandemic. Only cautious locals are left to visit the ancient ones. They stand before her now, pointing to the heavens, their peaks above even the tallest of the mountains in this region. It’s been years since she's come to see them, which is absurd – they're essentially in her backyard. She trudges on down the slope, following Bruno’s track until she reaches the snowless forest floor. The strain on her eyes vanishes as she steps into the darkness of the towering canopy. She’s amongst the massive, gnarled roots, digging into the earth like the fingers of Gaia.

‘Bruno!’ she calls, smiling because she can feel the dog’s elation for this adventure – he usually doesn’t let more than ten metres stretch between them, but the scenery made new again has him breaking boundaries. She scans the ridges of the giant roots, like a living wooden maze, and spots his tail, a black flag waving.

            She climbs over the thick roots, walking the distances between gazing up at the tree’s thousands of rungs, spiralling up like ladders to the sky. Hello, she thinks at them, wondering if they can sense the lack of humans crawling around their bases. Then she comes upon Bruno, backside stuck up, digging and sniffly furiously beneath one of the roots. ‘What have you found?’ she asks.

            But then she sees and goes still, skin prickling, a chill crawling beneath her sweltering clothes. ‘Bruno, come away,’ she commands, panic gripping her chest. But the dog doesn’t follow as she steps away, urged back by some inner force. She wants to turn and run, but she can’t – can’t seem to turn her back on what’s before her, tucked between earth and root. ‘Bruno!’ she shrieks as her panic overflows, and in a scramble she turns, clambering back the way she came.

            She leaves the dog – he’ll come home when he’s ready. Her mind is a cold splash of thoughts, sharp and fast, and she’s too shocked to make sense of them. What should she do? Call the police, she knows that – but say what?

A face, a body in the earth, but… not human.

She closes her front door and locks it behind her, takes a measured breath for the first time in forty minutes. Why? Why had she gone so far from the track today? She goes to the kitchen and clicks the kettle on, as she always does when things are getting too much.

There’s no hurry, the thing is dead, has been for a long time by the looks of it – it’s not going anywhere. Unless Bruno digs it up completely... no, he couldn't - it was too big. She does the only other thing she can think to do before calling the police. Opens her laptop, finds the search bar and types: strange skeleton in Swiss alps. Perhaps someone has found this before – perhaps this is old news.

No, it wasn’t a goat. And it wasn’t another Ötzi, although, it did look oddly human. But she’s sure - and she’s positive it wasn’t just some strange angle or trick of her mind - that it had wings.

She stares out over her dormant garden at the glaring ridges towering over her town, and the spiny tips of those monstrous trees beyond, black against the bleakness. She makes the call, tells them exactly where but not exactly what. Bones, she says, not those of an animal.

Bruno returns at dinner time, reeking of earth, paws damp and matted with dirt. Every time she catches a whiff of him a knot twists in her middle, takes her mind back to that dank place, the dead face beneath the roots.

She reads until her eyes are heavy, but with the light off the dark is crawling and her thoughts move like shadows, images that now seem so surreal she begins questioning herself. Had she really gone off the track today? Had she really seen that… that thing? How the night plays tricks on the day.

A sound in the house jolts through her. Eyes wide in the dark, listening, she peers over the side of her bed. Bruno's shape is there, and he's snoring - exhausted. Then that smell wafts up under her nose – damn dog. She turns over, concentrates on the softness of her sheets, her warm, comfortable bed. This is ridiculous, she thinks. You’re a grown woman.

The light turns on.

Suddenly every corner of the room is lit up and after a second of drousy confusion, fear bolts through her. She sits upright, breath arrested, staring.

He’s leaning casually against the drawers opposite her bed, fingers still on the light switch, gunmetal-blue eyes fix on her.

She wants to scream, but she’s too shocked. ‘Who are you?’ she shrieks, hand flying to her throat horror-struck. He’s young, but a fully grown man, wearing military blacks, a utility belt kitted to the hilt and a gun strapped to each upper thigh.

Bruno wakes and, late to the party, senses a presence. Claws scraping he scrabbles to his feet, leaping forward with hackles raised as he erupts with great surging barks.

The man doesn't flinch at Bruno, doesn't even look at him. He simply presses a button on a small bullet-like device in his hand, and a piercing tone fills the room, making Bruno squeal and recoil. The dog shrinks to the furthest corner of the room, silenced. The man takes his finger off the button, and Bruno whimpers, conflicted, wanting to bark and defend his human, but too scared to prompt that painful sound again.

‘What do you want?’ the woman manages, too frightened to move.

The man hasn’t taken his gaze off her. Despite being an intruder, he doesn’t seem in a hurry, or anything other than perfectly calm. And though it’s the middle of the night, he looks fresh and alert, focussed. He says softly in Swiss-German, ‘Who will you tell of what you saw today?’

The woman frowns. ‘What?’

He repeats himself, slowly, clearly. There’s something about his accent that trips her, an intonation – Swiss is not his mother-tongue.

‘What are you doing in my house!’ she demands.

‘I’ve come to speak with you, to find out who you are going to tell about what you saw today.’

‘Who are you?’

‘It doesn’t matter who I am.’

‘You are in my house!’

‘And I’m not leaving until I know what I came here to find out. If you don’t tell me, I’ll have to make up my own mind.’ He straightens, and his hands, which have been clasped before him, now shift to his sides, his right resting purposefully on the handle of his gun.

Is this man death, come to claim her? Though he's fair and built like a statue of a god in a museum. He's beautiful, in an unnerving, predatory kind of way. ‘I’ve done nothing wrong,’ she says.

‘Not yet,’ he replies.

She suppresses a sudden urge to cry, an unwelcome side effect of fear. This man would be half her age, and yet here he is, in her home with absolute power over her. She wants to plead, beg, but pride reins her in. ‘What was it? What was that thing?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he says blankly.

She nods, only now fully realising her position. Her life depends on her next decision. She looks at Bruno, sitting nervously in the corner, looking frantically between her and the man. He’s all she has left. Everyone in her life is dead. ‘I have no one to tell,’ she says. ‘I am alone in the world now. The virus has taken everyone from me.’

He holds her gaze for moment, like stone, reading her. His hand leaves the gun. ‘You are safe,’ he says, almost gently. ‘No one will come here again. No one will harm you. Unless, you tell anyone of what you saw today, or of me being here. Then someone will come, but you will not see them. Do you understand?’

She nods, because what else could she do?

In another moment, he’s gone, and she is left alone, sitting up in bed like a child, staring at the open doorway. She throws her fear aside and gets out of bed, moves swiftly through the house flicking on lights. Bruno stalks the rooms, growls rumbling from him, disturbing the woman even further. The front door is open. She slams it closed and fumbles with the lock - her hands are shaking, her heart stammering.

In all her fifty-something years, she’s never known the world like she does tonight. How can she be this age and have stumbled into something so strange and unknown? For the longest time there has been routine, even in the ever-evolving chaos of the greatest global pandemic in human history – her little corner of the world has always made sense. This morning everything was normal, there was peace. Tonight there’s a new world, dark and crawling with nightmares and threat, and it came into her home.

She returns to the kitchen, pulls the curtains she always leaves open, shutting out the blackness, and flicks the kettle on.