by Casey, Ryan
Max walked through the city centre and saw all the signs that this wasn’t just as bad as he first feared—it was worse.
It was pitch black, and it was freezing cold. He didn’t know exactly what time it was anymore because no phones were working. His watch wasn’t working. Nothing at all was working.
It didn’t matter, though. Not really.
What mattered was the events unfolding all around him.
He saw cars, completely stationary. People trying to get their phones to work, as much as they could see, everyone else was in the same boat. He could see burning. Flames. Smoke. And he could hear lots of shouting, too. Lots of screaming.
Somewhere in the distance, he heard a bang. A real earth-shattering bang. He’d seen something hurtling towards Earth. Thought it was a meteor at first. But it wasn’t. It was a plane. A burning plane, crashing down towards Earth.
And all the signs were there. Signs he didn’t want to accept. Didn’t want to face.
But signs he couldn’t run away from.
This was an EMP event.
He kept his head down as he walked down the street. His heart raced. He didn’t even bother getting his car. It was an older Land Rover, but not old enough that it wasn’t computerised, so it would be fried. Older cars would probably survive an electromagnetic pulse. He had another car in the garage that was mostly his hobby car, so he could give that a test when he got back.
But right now, in the city, a car was useless anyway.
He saw the chaos and disorder.
Burning buildings.
Screaming people.
He saw pockets of police trying to get the situation under control but failing to do so. Because they were frightened, too. They were scared, too.
They didn’t know what the hell was going on either.
And it was only going to get all the more chaotic and confusing as the day went on.
He swallowed a lump in his throat. He’d read about the potential impacts of an EMP event a long time ago or a coronal mass ejection from the sun. There’d been plenty of CMEs throughout history. The most notable one that actually hit was the Carrington Event in 1859. A powerful coronal mass ejection hit Earth’s magnetosphere and caused the biggest geomagnetic storm ever recorded.
Auroras were visible globally. They were so bright in the Rocky Mountains that they actually woke up the miners, who thought it was the rising sun. Telegraph systems all over Europe and North America were fried, some of them giving operators nasty and sometimes fatal electric shocks.
A solar storm of a similar scale today was always tipped to cause widespread, mass disruptions. The closest near miss was in 2012 when a solar storm narrowly missed.
But those lights. The talk of the lights.
Lights like the ones Max and the citizens of Preston had seen this evening.
He remembered the rumours of an oncoming solar storm he’d heard and how little attention he’d paid to the news. The news was always sensationalist. Over the last few years, Max’s faith in mainstream media had plummeted. Preferred to live his own life without worrying about what he was told to do, about being scare-mongered by forces with their own intentions and motives.
But this… it seemed weird that it’d occurred, right on midnight.
It made him wonder if this was some sort of attack.
Some sort of coordinated attack made to look like it was a solar flare.
There were plenty of countries capable of exploding an EMP device. Both allies and enemies. And the impacts of a foreign aggressor getting an EMP in their hands was devastating.
First, the initial wave of deaths. Planes falling from the skies, 5,000 over America alone—and that was just America. Two million passengers dead in an instant, and not including the poor sods on the ground beneath them. Hospitals unable to operate, and ICU units wiped out in an instant. Cars slamming against one another. People with pacemakers in particularly strong blasts, dropping dead in an instant.
And then there were the longer tail problems. The looting, which would start pretty quickly. The stockpiling and the violence the battles for supplies would cause. An inevitable attempt at a military coup to maintain control and the disorder that would prompt.
The strongest surviving. The weakest dying.
Survival of the fittest gone mad.
Max swallowed a lump in his throat as he continued to walk. As much as he saw all the signs around him, he still clung to the belief that this would resolve. That it wouldn’t play out like fiction predicted. Or like the experts predicted.
That humanity wouldn’t lose its shit.
But he saw the panic already. The panic of being cut off from social media and from the news.
He saw the severed chains of connection crawling behind everyone’s throats.
And it scared him.
He looked back at the city. Looked at the fire over by the train station. Looked at the smoke.
He thought of that child.
The baby in its mother’s arms.
Finding them both lying there in the smoke.
Leaving the train, then hearing the cries.
And then he thought of David.
Help him, Max. Save him. Please.
Rushing into the bedroom.
Finding him with the knife to his throat.
And…
He gritted his teeth.
Tensed his jaw.
Kathryn was gone.
David was gone.
There was nothing he could do to save them now.
There was nothing he could do to save anyone now.
He looked at the rising smoke once more.
Then he took a deep breath, tensed his fists, and walked.
He had to get home.
He had to get the hell out of the city.
He had to get to safety.
And he had to do it alone.
Chapter Eighteen
Aoife saw the plane hurtling towards the street, and she knew she had to get the hell away from here.
Fast.
She saw people running past her, tumbling in the road. She heard shouting. Screaming. People banging on doors, urging their neighbours to get out and get away. She heard children crying. Heard people protesting, not wanting to leave.
But all that time, the fireball got closer.
Closer and closer and—
She heard the shout from the bus, clear as day.
“Help! Help me! Don’t leave me! Please!”
She heard that voice and right away, she knew it was Harry. And she wanted to go back there. She wanted to help him. Or at the very least, be with him in his final moments.
Because that’s what they were.
That’s what she had to face up to.
By walking away here, she was condemning Harry to death.
She felt someone bump into her. A man holding his daughter, who screamed, racing away. The fear in the eyes of these people as they faced up to the reality that soon, they wouldn’t have a home.
Aoife didn’t know what was happening. She didn’t understand any of it.
But she knew one thing for sure.
She had to get off this street.
She had to go.
She’d done everything she could.
She looked back at that plane.
And she could clearly see it was a plane, now.
Hurtling closer and closer with speed.
She gritted her teeth and turned around.
And then, with all the strength she had in her body and being carried by adrenaline alone, she ran.
Her leg hurt. Not as bad as she’d expected, but bad enough that it slowed her down considerably. At least it wasn’t bleeding as bad as she was expecting it to. That was something. A small victory.
She wanted to stop by the bus. She wanted to check on Harry. She wanted to make sure he was okay.
But she didn’t have time.
She didn’t have time at all.
And she didn’t want to look at the bus.
She didn’t want to see.
She didn’t want to accept that she was leaving him here.
She was condemning him to his death.
She felt the heat from the bus. And inside there, she thought she could hear someone crying.
“Please, Mum. Please.”
And that whimpering broke her.
That childish innocence broke her.
Because as horrible as he’d been to her, and as bad a guy as he seemed… he didn’t deserve this.
Nobody deserved this.
She looked back around.
Wondered if there was time to act.
And then she saw that plane getting closer, too close for comfort, and she knew her time was up.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”
She looked away from the bus, and at that moment, that instant, she focused on one thing and one thing only.
Running.
She ran. Ran as fast as she could, as fast as her sore leg would allow. She wasn’t going as fast as she could, but far faster than she should be able to, courtesy of the adrenaline.
She knew she’d be doing some damage. She knew she was only going to make the sore leg even worse.
But a sore leg wasn’t a bad thing when there was a fucking plane hurtling towards the street.
She saw people alongside her, running for their lives, like a flock of sheep fleeing wolves.
She heard the cries and the shouts. Watched people tumble over, then clamber back to their feet.
She looked around.
Saw it getting closer—
Tripped.
Slammed against the road, cutting her hands.
“Fuck.”
She pushed herself up, heart racing. Steadied herself. Then she ran again. She figured there wasn’t long left. That plane was getting far closer, far faster than she was expecting.
She had to keep running.
She had to keep…
She saw her, then. A girl lying on the road. Her ankle looked like it’d cocked over.
She saw her, and she knew she had to help.
She couldn’t just leave her.
Couldn’t just run past her.
Not like everyone else.
She ran over to her. “Here,” she said. “Take my arm. Quick.”
The girl shook her head. “My ankle. It’s so sore—”
“It’ll be a whole lot sorer if you don’t take my hand right this second.”
The girl nodded. Grabbed onto her.
“Right,” Aoife said. “This might hurt.”
And then she dragged her to her feet.
The girl screamed with pain. But she ran. She ran with Aoife as Aoife dragged her along. And Aoife held on to her. Held onto her for dear life. Because she wasn’t going to let someone else go. Wasn’t going to let someone else die.
No.
You did everything you could for him.
Everything.
She ran further and further. She could hear the plane getting closer like it was tearing through the atmosphere. Everything felt hotter. Like she was in an inferno.
“It’s getting closer,” the girl cried.
“Focus ahead,” Aoife said.
“But—”
“Just focus ahead.”
She focused on the road ahead.
Dropped into her mindfulness practice as best as she could.
Let adrenaline carry her along.
Kept going.
Kept running.
She always kept going in times of trauma. In times of pain.
She had to just keep on putting one foot in front of the other, and—
It all happened in slow motion.
First, losing her footing.
Tumbling to the road.
The girl beside her falling with her.
And then, right behind her, a crash.
And an almighty blast.
Chapter Nineteen
Seth knew something was wrong the moment the lights went out.
It was crazy in here. Everyone was losing their fucking minds. He could hear them shouting, banging on the doors of their cells, screaming out. Always the way when there was a power cut. Lunatics, that’s what they were. Lunatics and savages. He was glad to be away from them, stuck in solitary confinement. Only way he could get a minute’s peace in this place.
But there was something he noticed when those lights went out that made him think that perhaps something, well, different, was going on here.
It was the lack of alarm. Weird thing to notice, sure, the lack of something. But it struck him right away. When there’d been power cuts in the past, the lights usually went out briefly, and an alarm sounded, loud as hell.
But right now, Seth didn’t hear a thing. Nothing but the shouting of the inmates. Banging against their cell doors. And the shouting of the prison guards, getting louder, louder, louder…
And it made him wonder.
Was something different here?
Was something truly wrong?
He sat on his bed, which wasn’t exactly Ritz quality, but it was comfortable enough. Probably more comfortable than he deserved, after all. He’d done some horrible things in his life. He wasn’t going to sit here and pretend he’d been hard done by. He really had done some nasty shit. Burglaries. Robberies. Beaten more people up than he could remember. Tortured a fair few people, too, some unnecessarily.
But the crime he was in for…
Shit.
He smirked when he thought of it.
When he thought of her screams.
When he thought of his little sleeping face.
And then the look in the eyes of the husband when he came back in, desperate as anything.
Seth shook his head. He knew he should feel bad about what he’d done. But at the end of the day, he didn’t really feel much. He’d accepted he wasn’t quite screwed up right, up in the head, a long, long time ago. As a child, he started pulling the legs off insects and watching them stumble along, so determined to escape, to survive. He once pulled all the legs off a spider and was fascinated by how it just sat there, trapped in its own little body. He kept it for a while. He was never sure whether it was alive or dead, but he’d throw flies in there for it, just to give it a chance.
Just so he could keep it longer.
He remembered the first time he’d stepped up to killing a cat. It was a stray. One he saw wandering along the street. Nudged up against his leg. He remembered the feeling of power he felt. The feeling of complete control. The way the cat trusted him. How it saw something good in him.
And then picking it up and breaking its neck in one fell swoop.
The poor little thing never knew what hit it.
So he guessed it was only natural he’d ended up murdering somebody. Two people, in fact. Although he’d never planned on “graduating” to people. Mostly it was for revenge. Revenge against the guy who took everything away from him, right when his life was going so, so well…
He thought of the look on the man’s face as he stood there in his son’s bedroom. The panic and the horror and the grief.
And it reminded him of that spider all those years ago. Trapped.
He heard more shouting up above, in the main cell area. Still no alarms. But it sounded like shit was really hitting the fan. Like there was rioting going on up there. Primates, they were. Scumbags with barely a brain cell between the lot of them.
But Seth was different. He was intelligent. Sure, he hadn’t exactly achieved much in life. But that’s because he saw what a cacophony of bullshit playing the game of life really was when you really thought about it.
Why spend life living by somebody else’s rules? Why follow the boring, inane path of capitalism, of commuting, of a hamster wheel to a retirement you’re probably not gonna enjoy anyway because you’ll end up contracting some rare form of cancer probably attributed to the years of stress you’ve faced working for somebody else? For the years spreading your arse cheeks and being fucked by the system,
repeatedly, right to your grave?
Why do all that when you could just have fun and be, well, human?
Truly human?
Seth stepped up to his cell door. He listened to the shouting above. The bangs. Stood there in the darkness and breathed deeply. He’d dreamed of this moment. He didn’t want to sound superstitious, but he had. He’d had dreams before that he’d woken up in the middle of a riot, all the lights out.
Walked over to his cell door.
Pushed against it, and…
Freedom.
Free as a bird.
And the best thing?
The world was a playground out there for him.
As soon as he finished what he had to do.
As soon as he concluded the business he’d started, three long years ago.
He lifted a hand. Realised he was shaking. Because this felt just like the dreams he’d had. This felt so real. To the point he wondered if this was a dream.
There was only one way to find out.
He put his hand against his cell door.
He swallowed a lump in his throat.
And then, expecting nothing, but excited nonetheless, he pushed.
The door swung open.
The corridor to solitary confinement was empty.
He stared out at that corridor, and a smile stretched across his face.
A smile that grew wider when he thought about the woman, Kathryn.
The boy, David.
Killing the boy and stabbing her.
All in revenge for what her husband, for what the boy’s father, took from him.
He thought of the husband—thought of Max, the police officer who ruined his life—and he smiled.
Seth’s work wasn’t finished.
He took a deep breath, stepped out into the corridor, into the darkness.
Then, free as a bird, he flew.
He had unfinished business to attend to.
Chapter Twenty
Aoife slammed against the road and heard the enormous blast erupt behind her.
For a moment, night became day. The darkest, blackest night she’d ever encountered, suddenly illuminated to levels of brightness she’d never before witnessed. Her ears rang and rang, and it felt like they were going to burst, to explode. She wasn’t sure if she was in pain or not. She couldn’t tell. She’d lost all sense of her body, of her surroundings.