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The Levelling

Jaeger Dominus

The Wine Factory's manufacturing center exploded. I wasn't there for work, but my immediate regrets seeped in like alcohol into the bloodstream.

It came first as the striking of thunder, the rumbling of the earth, the rattling of my squirrel-ears. The tufts flicked back, and my windows shattered in my home, a cabin built on the outskirts of town. Glass clattered upon the floor onto the kitchen sink, the tattered tapping of diamond dust on a steel bowl. I smelled alcohol immediately, and if the glass and explosion didn't catch my ear,the smell of wine had. It burst through my home like an unwelcome guest without a shower, those mangy Hastark mutts that called themselves people. They were gone, now. All those poor workers, running the factory without me. I was sick, had a case of minor pinksnot, where your nose bleeds as you sneeze. This one brought no fever, before or after. I was supposed to be there. But then I knew I survived where others had not.

No one would have known our town was lost, or who survived. Upon stepping out, I saw the telegram and telephone lines snapped by the force, the thinner poles bent like reeds in the wind. I had a sinking feeling in my gut, my teeth chattered in fear. If anyone were to find out, it'd be in the silence, not in the noise. The trees had a thorough shake through them. Most of them were deleafed and deflowered. My vest I wore to bed, my pants too, my fur matted from a hot summer night: I was a mess. I was exhausted but felt better - though with a runny nose of pink, running down my maw. I could taste the iron. With the explosion and the illness, my mind felt heavily disoriented. How long was I out there, staring at the disaster in front of me? When did I notice, from my hillside spot that I had to have wandered up to, a leveled town in the distance? Only Mary-Belle's store stood, and even then, the explosion had battered it.

I dared not look further. I felt nausea for the first time, and I didn't know if it was me being sick or disgusted with myself. I should have been in work that day. I should have joined in the levelling. But, to rectify this with myself, I had to go into the town, to see the damage. My claws were fully extended in fear and panic, any touch to my body was a scratch, every grasp had my hands stuck in the wood I touched, the dirt I sat in, my own clothes, sometimes my red fur.

I needed to start.

There was another man who survived the levelling, one that I did not know the story of until I met him. His name was Jeffery Powson, a shipment-man, and a deer-man in the distribution industry of The Wine Factory. From what he told me when I met him, he had a shipment of the finest wine we made so far using our brand-new pressurizers. He used a mini train, ran it out of the town limits before he found himself with an extra tailwind. A strong one, actually: he found himself going faster than forty miles an hour, almost twice his expected speed. Then he heard a scraping. Upon looking back from his solo-conductor's spot, he saw the damaged shipment of wine, shattered in their containers, dropping onto the tracks into shreds. Then and only then did he see the town.

"Mother of Polk," he said to himself, slowing the mini train to a stop. "What can I even do?"

Given that his only shipment for this month was destroyed, and that he most likely would have to explain why he didn't stop to make sure he recovered his shipment - or, possibly, why he didn't help any survivors of the explosion - Jefferey stopped the machine entirely, headed to the back, and tried to get his trailing freighter off the line, or at least balanced back up to where he could run it backwards. With his steam pump, he lifted the wheel slowly, before shunting the freight car back onto the line. He reconnected, and reversed the wheels, taking himself back into town.

I reached town at that point, walking through the places that were devastated. I was too distraught to think of who was to blame, but instead on what I could do. So many Hastark dead. The Jarvin house, an inn for the Jarvin expatriates, completely levelled. A few people were left as charred corpses, their fur ripped from their skin, leaving flayed bones and dissected husks. Already the smell was bad, the alcoholic scent of the manufactured wine mixing in the air along with the stench of death. Death had a smell of guts, blood, and singed hair. It was something no person, no Hastark even, should ever come into sight or smell of. I wouldn't wish it upon myself ever again, no matter what foul deeds I had done.

Something nagged within me, a deep voice from the abyss my mind formed. Nothing requested from the void, but one thing - an answer. Nothing replaced it, either. It only summoned forth a desire to understand, a desire to not grow ill, a desire to move on. I felt my pinksnot run down my throat, a sign that it was both hot outside on this summer's morning and that the worst of the disease had passed me. But new horrors replaced it. Oh, did they replace it.

The tracks eventually became too mangled for Jeffery Powson to travel upon. He stopped the engines, ground to a halt, and stepped out of the mini train. Inside the freight car he found the scent of alcohol indistinguishable from outside. The only thing he could do in that awe was his root functions, to unload the car and carry whatever he could with him. The pallets were made for Hastark to carry by themselves one at a time, multiple with aid, all of them with a team, entirely upon your shoulders. He carried one crate upon his back, collecting any bottle he could. Why he did that was beyond him, even when I asked him in his talk to me. It made him comfortable, the weight of the bodily carriers on his shoulders. It made him feel as if he helped someone besides himself. A little weight on your shoulders brings out the best in you, I've heard often repeated by many books and stories. But he physically needed it to, to calm himself down, but why was something he didn't understand.

Jefferey Powson made it into the center of the factory a while later, and he rubbed his brown maw. His ears flicked and he felt the beating sun upon him. He hated warm weather, that's why he moved further north than the desert band he used to live in with his Jarvin brethren. He, too, was an expatriate of the horde, and for all I could care he was welcome here. He looked through the wreckage of machinery, the mixers of the various juice tanks with alcohol to make the wine people loved drinking. From my understanding, it was easier to portion the alcohol that way, than in the traditional method of fermentation. What we essentially made, besides our other produce, was liqueur, but it still had the taste of bitter grape and weaker content. But that was the past. The factory, for all intents and purposes, was gone, and most of the documentation to reconstruct the process with it. It was a company secret. Funny, how things can disappear through secrecy. One slip, and the most beautiful things we can create disappear.

When I passed by the bar's wreck, I thought I heard a voice. Mary-Belle, the shop owner, ran the bar without a trace of wine. Don't get high off your own supply, it seems, even though the town made the wine right there. She would brew her own moonshine - it was legal in this county to do so, as long as you had a license- that the workers raved for. They would drink, drink, the stuff running down their lips until it stained their shirts in drunken pride, then with the aphrodisiac go home and please their wives whether they wanted it or not. I never wanted to touch the stuff because of those animals that claimed they were people. Not all the workers were like that, but my fennec boss Matron Pariant was, and proud of it, and would love to claim how many children he forced his wife to have.

"Twelve," he had said, "all conceived in the moonshine."

I never liked to hear his stories of how he bred well, given that his wife was also his first cousin. Their children seemed cursed with the moonshine taste in their mouths, stumbling around the streets with misshapen faces and ears from incest. One worked in the factory, in the Hastark resources, making sure bad workers were punished. But they worked that day, both of them, and he brought his family to see his accomplishments.

I felt disgusted with both my hate and their loss. The loss hurt first, then the realization that I enjoyed that single man's passing, and his family's, too, brought me a deep disgust to the core that not the rotting bodies under the sun could match.

Jeffery looked into where the old docking stations were. He was loaded up there just hours ago. Now it was completely empty, without a single soul in sight. Then he saw his first worker, or rather their leg: the limb, left severed, sat on one of the tables where workers stayed. Blood trickled from a fallen roof. He knew where the rest of the body laid, and where they were laid to rest for the rest of their existence. To be taken out not by an obliterating explosion, but by the sky falling... that was a fate worse, at least to Jefferey. To Jeffery, a quick and unnoticeable death was better than a crushing.

I went into the bar's wreckage. The smell of blood came through strong, and it wasn't the pinksnot. Someone still bled, which meant they were still alive. Or they were close enough to death. I didn't want to think any further on the subject.

Again, a weak voice beckoned me in.

"Help, help!" it said.

It was Mary-Belle's, the corgi-woman I was once sweet to. I didn't wish to see her, but if I could rescue her, that would make the gore and horror worth it. Any life worth saving would be hers. I stepped through the carnage of the collapsed roofs, the unlucky patrons smashed to paste, and headed up a set of decrepit stairs. The building's structure stood well, despite the blast. Stone would do that, and Mary-Belle's bar was the only stone structure in the town. I could see all around, all the sticks and broken roads, torn up by the blast. What could have done this? Sabotage? No, it couldn't have been. Alcohol was explosive in the right situations. We knew the risks, but we never knew they'd occur. The workers probably didn't realize the risks were nonzero before they signed onto the job.

"Hello?" I asked.

"Marconi!" she cried. I heard her voice now rasp, something caught her on her chest. She might not have been able to be saved.

Then I saw the trickle of blood.

"Marconi?" she asked, shuddering evident in the wavering of her voice.

"I'm coming!" I cried. I bolted to the source of the bloody stream.

Jeffery mentioned the orange sky a lot. He couldn't help but stare at it. It takes guts to notice something that you'd never notice before, simply being used to it for decades. He remembered the quiet over the once-bustling factory, the amount of cleaning material piled by his packing bay, the liquors and liqueurs we also made. To think they all exploded, gone... some drunk in the rural provinces was going to lose their mind. That's what bothered Jeffery the most, out of all this. Like those that see the great disaster in front of them, their mind cannot cope properly; they think of minor things. Some drunk would enter a coma through withdrawal. Some other drunk will beat their wife or husband because their favorite wine wasn't in the shop and would possibly never be again. And that's simply not mentioning the shock that he already felt. But he couldn't cry. He needed to find survivors. Time later would be used for crying, he knew. His body felt solace in that.

His uniform had blood on it, he noticed. Not blood, wine: the boxes he carried began to drip. Not even what he could salvage could last. The weight of the world was too much for itself, but not enough for him to mishandle. Or did he mishandle the only good package?

He threw the weight off him in a rage. The boxes, hefted off his shoulders, crashed to the floor and obliterated itself with its own gravital force. The bottles shattered, the wood splintered, the silence broke, the silence returned.

Mary-Belle was dead after I saw her. She saw me, smiled, and her body gave up the soul. She had strength no longer.

I remembered visiting her shop when I was hungry, ages ago. She had a unique menu, and her specialty was "barstool sandwiches". A beef burger, cooked as a patty, on top a slab of goat cheese and a slice of bread, with sauerkraut and a rosemary vinegar sauce. She was really proud of that one. She also was proud to have me in her bar, and she claimed, "now everyone worthwhile in this town went through here." I had blushed, I remember, and she invited me to her home the next day.

I couldn't keep her forever, though. I knew, one day, that either her or I would die, and I didn't want to break her heart and soul without seeing it. I wouldn't be able to live without her, either. But now I had the worst of both worlds: we had broken up and I lost her. My selfish foolishness made me lose her, and a cruel act of Legalis cursed me with losing her forever. If I had been any less sickly, I would have gone to her home, beg her to let me come back, and if she accepted, I would never let her go again, and she said no I would have found closure. But I drifted away, a ghostly coward. I ghosted her, avoiding her shop and avoiding my usual paths whenever I ran into her. That was only a few days in practice. Maybe my sickness was to punish me. Maybe all of this was to.

I cried out in anguish, on the top of the building, and as if in response something crashed in the factory. Of course, it did.

Jeffery, however, did notice my cries. It was like the ancient Hastark, in the times before. A cry of anguish wasn't to alert the predators, since we were the apex predator: it was to alert others of our loss. In any way, a loss like that affected us all. No number of tears could fix a problem without another Hastark's help. We cried to tell others our needs. My need was heard.

"Hello?" he whispered, not knowing why he did. Silence dominated the orange skies. No response. I hadn't heard him, especially since I was so far away. If he wasn't behind the foundation of the factory, where we docked the mini trains, that could have been a different story. But he figured where the sound came from and headed that way.

On his way out of the factory, Jeffery Powson passed the machines I maintained on a regular day. The mixers, the scrubbers, the juice storage tanks. They were colored brown with oxidation, their bright red wine mixtures now colored like fertile dirt, being anything but. He passed the filtration devices, to purify the alcohol to its strongest form, the ceramic filters to bring out the 100% for more accurate mixing. The brewers, the yeast containers, the pressurizers -

The pressurizers were completely ripped to shreds, their inch of steel torn apart like a tinfoil wrapper. So weak, so wasteful, all from the explosion. He didn't think another thought of it, but the fact that the lower section and upper sections were both there gave me pause during his story - they survived. To him it was another casualty of the devastation, another tool made worthless, someone's time brought to waste by other's negligence. Such was life. War, famine, pestilence, death... all four were caused by negligence and lack of action, the fool's work - and lack thereof. Some we couldn't figure the right action, none of us could, but for the others we knew full damn well how to avoid them. "That's a strong explosion," he said, noting the thickness of the metal. Some of it melted with the blast, warped beyond repair as well, slag of metals mixed every wrong way. The scent of alcohol was strongest here, and ozone caught the air as well. The insides were a dark smoldering red. I noted, then, that Jeffery had a way with calmness. He kept a level head, despite seeing the worst of society, its magnificent failure.

At this time, I wept next to the corpse of Mary-Belle, frantically trying to release her body to the horizon, as my more 'heathen' friends called the releasing of strength. I didn't know what she believed, all I knew was that she loved through my inexperience and enjoyed my newness to the craft of carnal pleasure. I didn't know her much at all, and like a coward I fled from her, at precisely the wrong time.

My fingers bled as I had dug her out. My claws were extended, yes, and that meant the sheaths were taut, brought to their most fragile state. I could've clawed the poor corpse or ripped her bodice. But panic didn't tell you until you made any mistake. When my tips bled, I retracted, thinking I hurt her. I put them to my cheeks, clawed my face, and I felt a deep bleeding.

"AAA!" I cried a second time.

"Hello?" I heard a cry question.

Another survivor.

Jeffery heard my second scream and didn't whisper to himself that time. My ear caught his, his caught mine, and with instinct we went to meet each other. While I climbed down from the bar's second-floor wreckage, Jeffery gathered bottles. He thought to himself _If I find another soul, I might as well celebrate. There's so much death and decay already that some order of cheering ourselves up would be needed._There was another shipment, and he grabbed that one, putting it upon his shoulders once more. With vigor he walked out of the factory, onto the city streets.

I felt an utter panic, myself, while he gathered those bottles. Someone was here. Did they do it? Who was responsible for the explosion? Was it a sabotage from the Ansini people? A Jarvin expatriate, angry with their treatment, decided to take the world with him? Was it this person? Why would they choose to live after doing something so terrible? I wouldn't. But I headed out of Mary-Belle's bar, onto the streets. The brick shook out of its holding, standing upwards in some places like a thick square reed in a marsh. We took pride on our brick streets, they were a sign of pride, but like everything else we let ourselves down with one failure.

Through the lonely torn streets I wandered, headed to the factory. Jeffery, meanwhile, headed to the source of my voice. We almost missed each other until Jeffery dropped one of the bottles on accident. He cursed light enough for no one else to hear, as if he would be docked pay for losing the bottles. It wasn't his fault, but the distribution managers out of town wouldn't know that. Then he wondered why he cared. He'd be fired if they were truly cruel, and if they had an ounce of Hastark within themselves they would commend him for his actions. I turned to the sound, and I saw the deer-man trying to pick up the bottle with the lifting container on his shoulders. "Hello?" I asked.

He stood there, the few bottles he carried with him that he found. He smiled, despite the destruction of everything around us. "Powson," he said, introducing his family name. A common, standard greeting. He was an Expatriate with manners of an Aturian native and showed his kindness above both. He lowered the crate to the ground, picked out a bottle of wine, and waved it to me.

"Farsi," I replied.

"Do you have a story to tell?" he asked. "I sure do. Let me tell you what happened today.

I nodded, although I still had that fear. I went his way, sat on the shoulder crate, and listened to his story.

He uncorked one of the bottles, after telling me his side of the incident to me.

"Terrible, huh?" he said. "I never thought that all these people would be gone. All erased. Teaches you something about life. When it can be taken away at any time, enjoy it while you have it. You won't regret it."

I nodded, though my claws were still extended. It was a tic of mine. Most people developed control over the sheathing and unsheathing of their claws by the time they were a teenager, puberty unlocking the rest of their bodies. I never had that happen. When I still had parents, they sent me to a doctor, who simply told me I would have to go to an infirmary for claw removal. That's like taking a gun from a soldier, the thing that kept people so peaceful in the streets was the fear of reprisal. And I loved to walk everywhere, even as a kid. So, I kept them and avoided the doctor for the rest of my life.

"You're scared of me?" he asked. "Your claws are out."

"No, it's because I'm still in shock," I said, rubbing my face. I felt a nick on my cheek from a claw. "It's a tic of mine."

"Right, right," he said. He took a sip of the wine. "Wow, this is strong stuff for a wine." He looked at the label. "Yeah, it's a wine."

"Strong?" I asked. "We make light wines here."

"That's why I'm surprised," he said, and touched his tongue to the roof of his mouth over and over again. "Have you noticed it's been this strong?"

"That's only if the pressurizer gets overfilled, which is dangerous -"

The realization dawned on me.

"I was supposed to fix that!" I cried. I put my hands to my face, my claws dug into my cheeks. "It was on my workload for this week. I thought it was minor! It levelled the city!"

Jeffery nodded. "Well, what are you going to do to fix it?" he asked.

"Fix it? _Fix it?_The city is gone! I can't fix anything anymore, there's nothing left!"

"No, no," he said, "I meant with yourself. How are you going to justify whatever happened to be a learning experience, and take control of your life once more?"

His voice, despite coming right next to me, sounded so far away. I found myself rocking where I stood, fear in me, my red fur flushing in color from the blood under my skin. I had a fear, a fear of the world, a fear of failure. Both came true, the disaster I caused--

Wine poured all over me. The voice of Jeffery came back into my ears.

We sat down, stared at the remains of the town I used to call home, where Jefferey used to call work.

"Now what?" I asked. "What do we do in the face of such a disaster? We are alone, without--"

He cocked his deer ears to me. Despite the death and destruction, he smiled, and sipped his wine from the bottle.

"We live now, for those who couldn't. We live with our regrets and find new things to regret. That's what all this is about. Life is meaningless, but I find meaning in the story I tell myself before I go."

I sighed.

"But why me?" I asked.

"It could have been anyone, really," Jeffery said. He took another sip, looking disgusted that time. "But it was you and me. It's time to find the meaning in this. Come on."

He stood up and walked away. I followed him.