Chapter 747

The sky this morning held a strange stillness. Not the tranquil stillness before a sunrise, but a muted, heavy quiet that pressed down on Jerusalem.

Gideon, stirring awake in his small apartment, noticed it before he even opened his eyes. The usual distant city sounds – the early morning traffic, the calls of vendors preparing for the day, the general urban murmur – were absent. A void had replaced them.

He pushed himself up, the worn springs of his mattress groaning in protest. Yawning, Gideon padded to the window and pulled back the curtain.

What met his sight wasn't silence alone; it was a visual anomaly that made his breath catch in his throat. Arched impossibly high over the city, a structure of impossible blackness dominated the skyline.

It was a wall, a curve, a barrier that seemed to originate from the very edge of the horizon in either direction, plunging down to meet the earth some distance away, effectively sealing off Jerusalem, and as he soon understood, the entirety of Israel, from the rest of the world.

Panic didn't erupt immediately. Initially, there was confusion, a collective disorientation that rippled through the city as people emerged from their homes to point and stare at the colossal structure.

Gideon, phone in hand, frantically scrolled through news feeds. The internet was a torrent of fragmented information and speculation.

Reports were flooding in from around the globe – identical structures, impossibly vast and uniformly black, had appeared over almost every country. No exceptions. No explanations.

The first theories were predictable. Military exercises gone wrong. Some elaborate, coordinated prank. Extraterrestrial arrival.

The Israeli government, like every other government, issued carefully worded statements urging for calm, promising answers, pledging to investigate. But their words rang hollow against the sheer, undeniable presence of the barriers.

They were solid, impenetrable, and silent. No sound echoed from them, no light reflected off them. They simply existed, impossibly black against the blue of the sky, cutting off nations as cleanly as a knife through paper.

Days bled into a week. The initial confusion morphed into something darker. The eerie quiet from the first morning never truly lifted.

It settled into the city, a pervasive hum of unease that vibrated beneath the surface of daily life. Supplies began to dwindle. International trade had ceased, of course.

Israel, like every other nation, was abruptly, irrevocably isolated. Supermarkets, initially crowded with frantic shoppers, started displaying empty shelves. People rationed, conserved, and waited. And the black barriers remained, impassive and inscrutable.

Gideon spent his days like many others: glued to any source of information he could find, even the increasingly unreliable social media channels.

He'd call his family, his parents and sister in Haifa. The calls were always strained, filled with forced optimism and unspoken dread.

"We're okay," his mother would say, her voice tight. "We have enough for now. Don't worry about us." But the worry was all there was. It permeated everything, coloring every thought, every interaction.

One afternoon, Gideon ventured out, needing to see the barrier up close. He walked for hours, heading towards the edge of Jerusalem, where the city faded into scrubland.

As he approached, the structure loomed larger, its impossible scale becoming even more apparent. It wasn't just a wall; it was something else entirely, something alien.

The blackness seemed to absorb all light, to suck in the very air around it. Standing beneath it, a chill seeped into Gideon's bones, a cold that had nothing to do with the temperature.

He reached the point where the barrier met the ground. There was no seam, no join. It simply was. He reached out, hesitantly, and touched it.

The surface was smooth, cold, and utterly unresponsive. It felt like touching polished obsidian, yet somehow… dead. Lifeless. He pressed harder, pushed, even kicked at the base of the barrier. Nothing. It stood unmoving, unyielding, a silent testament to its absolute impenetrability.

Returning to his apartment that evening, the city felt different. The initial shock had worn off, replaced by a heavy, suffocating resignation.

People still went about their lives, in a fashion. Stores were open, but with limited stock and long queues. Restaurants served what little food they could procure locally.

But the vibrancy, the energy of Jerusalem, was gone. Replaced by a muted, gray existence lived under the shadow of the black walls.

He met up with his friend, Noam, at a small cafe that somehow still managed to brew coffee. Noam, usually boisterous and optimistic, sat slumped, stirring his coffee listlessly. "Did you see it?" Gideon asked, settling into the chair opposite him.

Noam nodded, not meeting his eyes. "Went out to the highway. Tried to get as close as I could. It's… insane, isn't it?"

"Insane is an understatement," Gideon replied, taking a sip of his lukewarm coffee. "Do you think they'll ever tell us what it is? Or why?"

Noam shrugged. "Governments? They barely know more than we do, probably. They're just as lost." He looked up then, his gaze filled with a bleakness Gideon had never witnessed before. "What if they don't know? What if nobody knows? What if this is just… it?"

The words hung in the air between them, heavy and unspoken. "Don't say that," Gideon said, though his own heart echoed Noam's fear. "They'll figure something out. They have to."

But as weeks turned into months, the hope began to dwindle. The outside world, once a constant, reassuring presence, became a distant memory.

The news, initially focused on the barriers, shifted to domestic issues – food shortages, rising crime, the slow, grinding erosion of society. People adapted, in their way. A new, claustrophobic normalcy began to take hold.

Gideon found himself spending more and more time alone. The vibrant city he knew was shrinking, becoming a cage.

He'd walk the same streets, see the same faces, feel the same oppressive presence of the black barrier looming on every horizon. The silence, once a subtle background hum, grew louder, pressing in on him, amplifying the isolation.

He started having dreams about the barriers. Not nightmares, exactly. But strange, unsettling visions. He would dream of touching the black surface and feeling a profound emptiness, a sense of something missing, something lost.

He would wake up with a lingering feeling of dread, a sense that something fundamental had shifted, not just in the world, but within himself.

One day, he received a letter from his sister, delivered by a local courier service that had sprung up within Israel to compensate for the postal shutdown.

Her handwriting was shaky, almost illegible. His mother was sick, she wrote. A fever, persistent cough.

The hospitals were overwhelmed, resources stretched thin. She didn't say it, but Gideon understood. The barriers weren't just isolating them; they were trapping them in a slow, quiet decline.

He tried to call, but the phone lines to Haifa were down. Panic surged in him, cold and sharp. He had to see them. He had to go to Haifa. But travel between cities, once simple, was now a logistical nightmare. Fuel was scarce, checkpoints sporadic and arbitrary. Still, he had to try.

He managed to secure passage on a truck heading north, ostensibly carrying vegetables but willing to take passengers for a price.

The journey was long and arduous, winding through back roads to avoid checkpoints. The landscape outside was barren, dry, the same monotonous scrubland stretching endlessly towards the black horizon. The barrier was always there, in sight, a constant, oppressive reminder of their confinement.

Haifa was worse than Jerusalem. The sense of decay was more pronounced, the air heavier with despair. He found his family's apartment building run down, paint peeling, the communal areas unkempt. He climbed the stairs, his heart pounding, and knocked on their door.

His sister opened it, her face pale and drawn, her eyes red-rimmed. She pulled him into a hug, a silent, desperate embrace. His mother was in bed, weak and feverish. He sat by her side, holding her hand, watching her labored breathing. She was frail, her once vibrant eyes now dull and unfocused.

"Gideon," she whispered, her voice raspy. She squeezed his hand weakly. "You came."

He nodded, tears welling in his eyes. "Of course, Ima. I'm here."

He stayed with them for days, caring for his mother, helping his sister. He scavenged for medicine, for food, for anything that could ease their suffering. But it was a losing battle. The sickness was relentless, and resources were simply not available. His mother grew weaker, her breaths shallower.

One morning, he woke to find his sister weeping silently beside their mother's bed. She was gone. The quiet of the morning was broken only by his sister's sobs and the heavy, suffocating silence of the barrier looming just outside the city.

The funeral was small, somber. Just Gideon, his sister, and a handful of neighbors. They buried her in a small, overcrowded cemetery on the outskirts of Haifa, under the unyielding gaze of the black wall.

As they lowered the coffin into the ground, Gideon felt something break inside him. It wasn't just grief for his mother; it was something deeper, more profound. It was the realization that this was it. This was their world now. Confined, isolated, slowly fading away under the shadow of the barriers.

He stayed in Haifa for a few more weeks, helping his sister, trying to find some semblance of normalcy in their shattered lives. But the grief was too heavy, the despair too pervasive. He knew he had to leave. He couldn't bear to watch Haifa, his family's city, slowly wither.

Returning to Jerusalem was like returning to a tomb. The city felt emptier, the silence more profound. People moved like ghosts, their eyes hollow, their faces etched with resignation.

He went back to his apartment, to the same worn furniture, the same view of the black barrier that had become the defining feature of their world.

Days turned into weeks, weeks into months. Gideon lived a solitary existence. He worked odd jobs, bartering for food, for necessities.

He rarely spoke to anyone. The world outside the barrier was a forgotten dream. The world inside was a slow, quiet decay.

One evening, as the sun began to set, casting long, distorted shadows under the barrier, Gideon walked to the edge of the city again. He stood before the black wall, its immensity dwarfing him, its silence consuming him. He reached out, touched the cold, smooth surface. This time, the emptiness wasn't just in the barrier; it was within him.

He closed his eyes, remembering his mother's smile, his sister's laughter, the vibrant energy of Jerusalem before.

They were fading memories now, becoming as distant and unreal as the world that lay beyond the black walls. He opened his eyes, staring at the barrier, at the impenetrable blackness that had become his horizon, his cage, his world.

And in that moment, a different kind of fear washed over him. Not the fear of the unknown, not the fear of societal collapse, but a deeper, more personal terror.

The fear of forgetting. The fear of losing the memory of what had been, of who he had been, before the barriers came. The fear that one day, he would look at the black wall and see not a prison, but just… nothing.

That the world before, the world outside, would fade completely, leaving only the silent, black emptiness of the barrier and the hollow echo of his own existence beneath it.

And in that oblivion, he would be utterly, irrevocably alone, not just in the world, but in his own memory, lost to a silence deeper and blacker than the walls that held him captive.

The barriers hadn't just separated countries; they had walled off time itself, trapping him in a perpetual present of fading memories and encroaching oblivion.