Fiction: The People of the Walls

Based on a dream I had last night...

A young professor of archeology stood in the sand, a hand raised to prevent the sun from burning his eyes. Around him, scientists were dispersed throughout the clearing. The sound of chisels on rock, brushes, and indistinct chatter echoed through the area.

They were gathered in an ancient neighborhood, unseen by humans for thousands of years. Here lived a civilization undocumented by the history books. Yet, it had the strangely familiar characteristics of a modern society.

In the center of the courtyard, the professor slowly spun a 360, gazing up at the imposing buildings encircling him. Without machinery or steel, they managed to construct humanity's first high-rises. They were colossal structures, 20 stories tall.

The buildings of sun-bleached pastel colors were set into the walls of the rock, forming almost a full circle around the courtyard. The height of the buildings was limited only by the landscape itself. Mere feet above the towering rooftops, a shelf of earth provided shelter from the elements. However, the courtyard remained open to the sky. Standing on the edge of the ring of land above, someone never would have guessed that thousands of people lived in the walls of this pit. The natural, geographic design alone was awe-inspiring for the scientists as they hypothesized on its origin. Were they in the caldera of an extinct volcano?

As they worked away the afternoon, uncovering tiny hints about the lives of the long-gone inhabitants of these buildings, there was a sound. It was almost like the sound of bubble wrap being popped by kids in another room of the house. It was faint, and the professor wasn't sure if he was imagining it; an auditory hallucination brought on by the desert sun cooking them inside the earthen stock pot. Then more scientists began to notice the sound, looking up from their work.

With a sudden explosion of sound like the roar of a huge beast, the ring of earth collapsed. A shockwave of dust radiated inward above the center of the basin as the shelf hit the rooftops of the apartment buildings. For the briefest moment, silence. Then, chaos as the apartments began to buckle under themselves from the weight of the earth. In all directions, the neighborhood—the ring of 20-story buildings—was destroying itself.

The scientists began to run as falling debris rained down on them. Some structures collapsed downward, but others fell forward, crushing the fleeing scientists. Huge chunks of wall the size of cars flew through the air as if they were weightless, then hit the ground with the force of a semi-truck falling from an overpass.

The sound was deafening. They were in a hurricane where the courtyard was the eye. The professor looked around in horror as his colleagues were flattened under the falling buildings. His position was relatively calm compared to the destruction of the outer edge of the circle. Still, rocks whistled through the air from all directions like bullets.

He crouched behind a fossilized tree trunk, his hands covering his ears, his head tucked between his knees. He sat there waiting for the storm to pass while bits of small debris tore gashes into his exposed shoulders and ankles. Branches of the dead tree exploded above his head when they were hit.

Amid the cacophony of destruction were the screams of his colleagues; a hundred individual voices. Then, the sickening void that followed as another life was abruptly extinguished by the falling rock.