Early Warning (Book 1): Martial Law

by McLean, Angus

  ‘Leave him alone!’ she shouted.

  The guy turned and gave her a surprised look, then removed his hand from Alex’s face. He used it to belt Gemma across the side of the head instead, knocking her sideways and down to one knee. Satisfied, he turned back to Alex.

  Gemma shook her head and put a hand to the tender spot, cursing. There was no going back now, and she wasn’t giving up her bag for this jerk. She started to rise, but realised she was kneeling almost in front of the guy now, his body partially shielding her from the movement of the crowd. He had his legs braced apart as he wrestled with Alex, leaving his groin vulnerable.

  Enough was enough. Mark had always told her that if she had to strike, to go for three areas – eyes, throat and nuts.

  Gemma sucked in a breath and threw all her might into a straight right jab, burying her fist in the crotch of the guy’s jeans. She heard a gasping squeal from above her and he immediately moved. She gave it a second shot, feeling a satisfying squish against her knuckles as she hit home. Her bag came free and she pushed up, getting space from him. He was clutching at his jewels and had no interest in either of them now.

  ‘Come on!’

  She grabbed Alex’s arm and dragged him along, shoving her way through the crowd towards open space. They kept going until they were clear of the stream of people, and couldn’t see the bag snatcher anymore. Gemma pulled up by a fence and put her day pack back on properly, securing the waist and chest straps while Alex dabbed gingerly at his nose with a handkerchief.

  Aside from a few bumps and scrapes neither of them was injured, and Gemma thanked her lucky stars they’d escaped unscathed. She’d heard of people being crushed to death in football crowds overseas or at concerts, and that was what it had felt like in there – uncontrolled panic.

  They each took a moment to suck down some water before getting set to go again.

  ‘So,’ Alex said, putting away his bloodied hankie, ‘I guess the trains are out.’

  ‘Looks like it. I think we’re walking.’

  Twenty-One

  It was an hour of impatience before the tailback got moving again, and even then it was a long, slow process.

  The black smoke was easing off but still filled the cab of the motorhome with an oily stench, and after another hour and a half of bumper to bumper crawling they reached the site of the hold up. It was a five-car crash, looking like a head on between two cars and a pile-up of the other three. One car was still burning in the middle of the lane, one was on its roof on the opposite side of the highway, two were mashed nose to tail nearby and the last one was in the ditch at the side.

  The road surface was covered in shattered glass and plastic and pieces of debris, and several cars had stopped at the shoulder. People were standing around talking. As they crawled past, Rob could see the people there were in shock. He could see someone lying at the side of the road, unmoving under a blanket. A couple of others were leaning against parked cars, freshly patched up. An older man was sitting down, gingerly holding his ribs.

  There was not an emergency services vehicle of any sort in sight.

  ‘Where the hell is everyone?’ Sandy wondered aloud. ‘Where’s the ambulance?’

  ‘I don’t think they’re coming,’ Rob said quietly. He eased the campervan past the scene, avoiding the eyes of the people standing there. He tipped his hat to them for helping, but he had no desire to do so himself. He had others to worry about, not least of all the girl beside him.

  Picking up speed once they were clear of the crash, they drove in silence, the hum of the tyres filling the void instead. Rob was seriously worried now – any other day, a crash like that would have had all the emergency services rolling out and people would have been getting attended to.

  Help. It was rapidly becoming obvious that there wasn’t any.

  He leaned over and turned on the radio. Their usual easy listening station was all static, so he started scanning through the frequencies. More of the same, bursts of white noise that told the same story. Nobody was out there.

  Exhausting all the FM stations, he flicked over to AM and did the same. The second station he hit was a talkback station that he liked – although he knew it broadcast on both AM and FM, the radio hadn’t picked up the FM band.

  The announcer wasn’t a voice that he recognised. It sounded like she wasn’t working from a script, and Rob figured perhaps she wasn’t even an announcer. Maybe a producer or someone from behind the scenes.

  ‘…very little information is trickling in but I can tell you that, looking out the window here in downtown Auckland, I can see a lot of smoke and hear a lot of sirens. It looks like there’s a lot of fires out there and I’ve heard there may be a rupture in the gas lines somewhere in the city…as you can imagine, following the announcement from the Beehive, people have been very eager to get home and out of the city, and it’s just gridlocked out there. I’ve never seen anything like it before, I mean we’re talking a wet Friday night in the middle of winter with roadworks, but about ten times worse. The cars are not moving at all. I’ve been watching the same line of cars down there for more than an hour and they haven’t moved an inch.’

  Sandy glanced across at Rob. ‘I hope Gemma’s got out already.’

  ‘She got the message same as us,’ he said with a confidence he didn’t feel. ‘She’ll be okay.’

  ‘I can see cars have broken down, there’s at least two I can see from up here that look like they’ve overheated and pulled off to the side. Now, we’re not getting anything official from the Beehive, no change to the messaging there in the last couple of hours, in fact no contact at all. If anyone has anything solid they can give us, and we’re talking facts here, not speculation, please let us know.’

  ‘Good luck with that,’ Rob muttered, a sinking feeling in his gut.

  ‘I know that the power is out in some parts of the city, I don’t know what that’s related to, but it’s quite possible that we’ll lose the power at some stage here too, so don’t be surprised if you lose us all of a sudden.’

  ‘I’d say the power’s out in Wellington,’ Sandy said. ‘From the earthquakes.’

  ‘Could be,’ Rob agreed. ‘Hopefully it’s localised and not just the whole grid.’

  The announcer continued on in the background, and it was a few more minutes until Rob’s ears pricked up again at the excitement in her voice.

  ‘I can see it from here…people are breaking into shops down here. A guy has just thrown a rubbish bin through the front window of a shop, I think it’s an electronics store but I don’t have a good angle…yep, someone’s just come out with a TV…oh my God, these people are looting the store. They’re actually looting it…’

  ‘Fat lot of good a TV is, with no power,’ Sandy said.

  ‘I can’t believe what I’m seeing here…and they’re doing the same at the next store too…oh my Lord, this is something I never thought I’d see in our streets. And there’s not a police officer in sight…’

  Rob glanced sideways at his wife. ‘I dunno why that surprises her,’ he said.

  ‘Which part of it, the looting or the fact there’s no cops around?’

  ‘Either.’

  Rob continued to half listen as he drove, but his mind was bouncing between a hundred different things. The news on the radio certainly hadn’t surprised him, but if anything, it had reinforced one thing to him.

  Things were turning to shit fast, and nobody was coming to help.

  Twenty-Two

  I had been listening to the radio in the afternoon, scanning carefully between channels to try and find a broadcast.

  Problem was, the atmospherics in our area weren’t great and it was hard to get a decent reception at the best of times. And today was definitely not the best of times. After a frustrating hour or so I switched the radio off and put it away again. I went to the kitchen and turned on the hot tap to fill a pot. It was nearly time to get dinner sorted.

  The water was lukewarm. My heart sank as I t
ried the cold tap too – it was fine. The laundry taps were the same. I flicked the light switch and nothing happened. A check of the fuse box in the hallway showed me that nothing had tripped.

  ‘Shit,’ I muttered. I don’t know if I was more pissed off that the power was out or that I hadn’t anticipated it earlier.

  I found my mum and Archie on the deck, sitting in the late afternoon sun and watching the heifers grazing in the paddock. Jethro was sprawled at their feet and the cat, Pepper, was on Mum’s lap. It was a picture of rural domesticity and I was about to break the magic.

  Thinking better of it, I backed inside and set about getting torches and lamps out. That done, I filled a large pot with cold water and set it on the barbecue, ready to boil for washing dishes later.

  I cracked on with dinner and soon the beef stir fry I’d prepared for the frying pan was sizzling on the barbecue. I tossed a pack of Udon noodles through it and flavoured it with a good dose of my homemade sauce, leaving aside a no-sauce portion for Archie. He wasn’t as worldly with his tastes just yet and was happy to add good old-fashioned tomato sauce to pretty much anything.

  I served the food in bowls and we sat around the dining table inside, eating in the fading light with candles flickering. Archie thought it was pretty cool that the power was off but I could tell my mother wasn’t so sure.

  ‘Don’t worry Grandma,’ Archie told her, ‘we’ve got a spare torch for you. It’ll be fun.’

  She managed a smile, but I could see the strain in her face. It was nothing compared to what was going on inside me.

  There had been no messages on my phone, so I didn’t know where the McMasters were or what they were doing. I hadn’t heard back from Gemma’s sister, Carla. I couldn’t get online because the connection was down. My outgoing messages were backed up waiting to send, so I couldn’t update anyone or give them a hurry-up.

  Now the power was out and it was getting dark and Gemma wasn’t home.

  Twenty-Three

  Barely ten minutes after clearing the scene of the big crash, the McMasters were brought to a halt in another tailback.

  This one extended as far as the eye could see, and Rob wasted no time in killing the engine. No point in burning gas for nothing. They sat in silence while he checked the road map he kept in the glove box. Unlike GPS, a road map had never let him down.

  ‘We’re about here,’ he reckoned, marking a spot with his finger. ‘As the crow flies, we’re probably only about fifteen, twenty k’s away.’

  ‘How long by road?’ Sandy asked, twisting to see the map.

  ‘Normal driving, should take us about twenty minutes, if that.’

  Sandy sighed. ‘Well I can’t see this lot moving very fast.’

  ‘We might be here a while,’ he agreed.

  A noticeable smell of petrol was wafting through the air con and he closed off the nearest vent. He ran his eye over the map, looking for a side road they could take. There was one a few k’s back that took a meandering route towards their destination, or up ahead a couple more kilometres was another.

  With the traffic jammed up like it was there was no way to get ahead except up the shoulder of the road, but already he could see at least one broken down car pulled off to the side, blocking their way. The median barrier prevented a U-turn to get back around.

  Rob stifled a sigh and sat back to wait, just settling in when the sound of an approaching motorbike reached him. He spotted a road bike weaving its way back through the twin lines of traffic, coming towards him. The rider was taking their time, pausing every so often to speak to motorists.

  Rob climbed down from the motorhome and waited, waving to the biker as he approached. The bike pulled up and the rider lifted his helmet visor. He was riding a sleek red Kawasaki.

  ‘What’s the hold up?’ Rob said, stepping closer so he could hear. A surprising number of the vehicles around them were still idling, and exhaust fumes wafted about.

  ‘A fuel tanker’s flipped,’ the guy said, his voice muffled by his helmet. ‘The whole road’s covered in gas, about three k’s up. It really stinks.’

  ‘And there’s no way to get over the other side?’

  The biker shook his head. ‘Na. There’s a side road before it but there’s been a couple of nose-to-tails and the traffic’s going nowhere. Plus a couple of breakdowns. Nobody can get through.’

  ‘No traffic cops or fire service?’

  ‘None.’ The guy patted his handlebars. ‘Lucky I’m on a bike; you guys aren’t goin’ anywhere.’

  ‘What’s it like back behind us?’ Rob said.

  ‘Dunno mate, haven’t got there yet.’

  Rob sensed the guy wanted to get going, but he needed information and this guy could be the key to getting it.

  ‘You reckon you could do us a favour?’ he asked.

  The guy’s eyes flattened. ‘Depends. I’ve gotta get home mate.’

  ‘I appreciate that, and it won’t take long. That side road back a wee ways; you reckon you could zip down and see if there’s a way we can get back to it?’

  The biker hesitated.

  ‘I’d really appreciate it if you could.’ Rob indicated the motorhome behind him and laid it on thick. ‘The wife’s not well, y’know, I don’t think the stress is doing her any good and I could really do with getting her home, y’know?’

  He could see the resignation in the guy’s eyes. ‘I’ll be back shortly.’

  The bike eased off and Rob felt a lift in his spirits. It seemed to be an age before the bike came back and when it did, the biker wasn’t wasting any time. He manoeuvred around to face back the way he’d come and lifted his visor.

  ‘Traffic behind you is jammed up, there’s a three car crash a k back. Some arsehole knocked a motorbike over and the rider’s not looking good.’ The anger in the guy’s tone was clear. ‘I can’t see it getting cleared any time soon, but if it is and people start backing up, you could eventually get back to that side road and turn off, okay?’

  Rob nodded. ‘Got it. Thanks mate, I appreciate your help.’

  ‘Good luck.’ The guy gave him a thumbs up and moved off.

  Rob climbed back into the cab, getting an enquiring look from Sandy.

  ‘Settle in,’ he said. ‘Looks like we’re probably here for the night.’

  Twenty-Four

  By the time Gemma and Alex entered Cornwall Park it was close to dusk, and they were both tired and stressed and in need of rest.

  In the fading light they saw the odd person or small group, and the roads within the park were still heavily lined with cars. The car parks were more than half full and it appeared that some vehicles were providing temporary accommodation for the night.

  ‘A lot of people can’t get home, I s’pose,’ Alex said. ‘Maybe we should’ve stayed with Teri after all.’

  ‘What, and miss all this fun?’ Gemma tried to inject some humour into her voice, but she was hungry and thirsty and her feet hurt.

  ‘Where are we staying, anyway? Have you got a tent in there?’

  Gemma stepped off the roadway and crossed to a fence at the base of the mountain. It barely warranted the title, One Tree Hill seeming far more appropriate. Like many, she and her family had walked the park and hill numerous times, had picnics and flown kites and kicked balls around on the wide green fields. She knew the park well enough to know where she would feel safest for the night.

  ‘Over here.’ She climbed the fence and waited for him to join her.

  Alex looked dubiously at the sheep he could see past her. ‘What about them?’

  ‘I’m pretty sure they don’t bite.’

  Gemma led the way. The paddock they had entered was part of the rocky foothills, full of hillocks and crevices and gullies, home to the sheep that were cared for by the park rangers as well as rabbits and possums and who knew what else. Gnarly trees were dotted about.

  Once they were out of sight of the road, Gemma stopped and scanned. The bottom of the gully would probably be boggy and wet, s
o she climbed a small hillock and found an area near some bushes that was flat enough and seemed dry and sheltered.

  ‘This is us,’ she said.

  Dropping his bag, Alex took out a water bottle and drained it. He looked exhausted and his nose was puffy. He put his empty bottle away and watched as Gemma took a folded green tarp from her bag. She spread it out and rummaged in her carry bag, this time producing the tow rope she’d taken from the car.

  ‘Here.’ She passed him an end of the rope and stepped back, unravelling it.

  Alex looked around him. ‘Where do I tie it?’

  ‘The bushes beside you,’ Gemma said, busy looping her end around the trunk of a rotted tree that had fallen. ‘No, on the trunk.’ She watched him trying to figure it out for a moment, wondering how often he actually left the computer rooms. ‘No no no…Alex, the twig will break. Reach in and find the trunk or a solid branch…tie it off there.’

  His voice was muffled because he’d buried his head in the bush.

  ‘Right over left, left over right…’ she said. ‘Don’t do it too tight, but make sure it’s secure.’

  More muffled muttering before he emerged, straightening his glasses. A leaf was stuck in his hair and she would have laughed if he hadn’t looked so pissed off.

  ‘This is bullshit,’ he grumbled.

  ‘It is bullshit,’ she agreed. ‘It’s bullshit that we’re not home with our families, that’s what’s bullshit.’

  In normal circumstances there was no way she would share a sleeping area with a guy she hardly knew, but things were different now. Right now, she figured there was safety in numbers. Her gut told her that Alex was safe, and she had always trusted her gut.

  The smell of smoke was strong on the breeze and she guessed that fires were still burning in the city – hopefully not closer. There were a couple of dust masks in her bag but they hadn’t needed them yet.

  With Gemma giving the directions, they soon had the tarp set up as an A-frame shelter, pegged out at the sides. She put down the boot liner from her carry bag as a groundsheet and spread the picnic blanket on top of it. It wouldn’t be the most comfortable of beds but at least they would be insulated from the cold ground.