Gareth L Powell — Entropic Angel
For four days it snowed. On the fifth day, the angel came. As light dawned, the Reverend Christina Pike saw it squatting like a gargoyle on the tallest of the village’s wind turbines, its shoulders hunched over and its radiant face raised to the sky.
An hour later, that turbine failed. A few minutes later, the one next to it did likewise. Watching through binoculars from the window of the vicarage, she said: “It’s an angel all right.”
Around her, the hastily-convened members of the village council muttered to one another. They knew what lay in store. They’d seen the lights dim around the Estuary as each of the other towns fell in turn to the depredations of the angelic host. With their own eyes, they’d watched civilisation sputter like a dying candle.
They’d spoken to refugees and army deserters and knew things were bad all over, that without power they were doomed to freeze, and there was nothing that could be done to save them.
Pike lowered her binoculars.
“Maybe I could talk to it?” she suggested, but the council leader, a retired colonel, shook his head.
“Far too dangerous vicar, I won’t hear of it.”
And so Pike stayed by the window watching helplessly as, one by one over the course of the day, all the turbines on the wind farm slowed and screeched to a halt, until by sunset nothing moved, and stripped of their electricity the houses of the village fell into darkness and silence.
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