by Ryan Casey
“Everything okay, Sophie?”
Sophie swallowed the lump in her dry throat. She realised she was shaking. She wanted to tell McDonnell everything was fine. She didn’t like letting her boss down. After all, he’d shown such belief in her. Such faith.
But she had to report the truth. She had a duty to report the truth.
She walked over to his desk and, without saying a word, she planted the print-offs in front of him.
His eyes darted down, then back up to Sophie. He took a few seconds before reaching for the print-offs, then studied them, one by one.
She saw him going progressively red. Like he was trying to figure out some cryptic puzzle or something like that. And the longer he spent studying, the more his eyes narrowed, the more Sophie’s concern grew. Had she really seen what she thought? Was this really happening?
After an eternity of studying, he glanced over the top of the papers at Sophie and frowned with his big, heavy eyes. “Can you confirm what I’m looking at, please?”
Sophie was hoping she wouldn’t have to speak. After all, McDonnell would know exactly what he was looking at. He just liked to make sure he had someone else to confirm his suspicions audibly. An echo chamber, of sorts.
Sophie really didn’t want to have to confirm what she was looking at.
But that was just the reality of the situation she was in.
“I’ve picked up evidence of solar activity unlike anything I’ve ever seen.”
The second Sophie spoke those words, she saw the colour drift even more from McDonnell’s cheeks. Almost as if he hadn’t wanted her to confirm his worst fears.
“Are we looking at a series of solar flares? Or…”
Sophie cleared her throat. She knew she was going to have to cut in and finish McDonnell’s train of thoughts for him. “There have been a series of flares. But this is different. It appears there has been an enormous, record-breaking release of plasma and magnetic field from the solar corona.”
“A coronal mass ejection,” McDonnell said.
“This is on a serious scale.”
She pointed to the photograph of the sun amongst the printouts she’d put on McDonnell’s desk.
“Usually, this red colour here is the colour of the sun when a solar flare is emitted.”
“But all of it is red,” McDonnell said.
Sophie swallowed a lump in her throat. “Exactly.”
McDonnell looked up at her. His eyes were bloodshot as he tried to wrap his head around exactly what was happening. “You’re telling me that the entire sun is covered with serious solar activity?”
“Not only that,” Sophie said, detaching herself from the reality of the situation as much as possible. “A mass ejection from the sun is rapidly heading towards Earth. Usually these things take time. But this… this is moving quicker.”
“And what do you expect the fallout to be, in your honest opinion?” He was clearly avoiding asking the main question; the one that Sophie had tried to lead him to with her last offer of information.
She looked at the mass of papers on his desk. “Major outages to communications and to all things electrical. Damage that has the potential to last weeks. Possibly… possibly worse.”
“Worse?”
“We haven’t seen anything like this before. We’re dealing with something unprecedented. The sheer force and speed of this CME. Sir… I don’t know how to say this but we’re heading into uncharted territory. And I’m not sure we’re going to get out the other side.”
McDonnell paused. He leaned back on his chair, hands behind his head, like he was relaxing more than absorbing the body blow of information Sophie had just offered him.
Eventually, he did speak. “How long do we have?”
Sophie didn’t want to share this information. She didn’t want to be honest. But being honest might just keep her alive.
That’s really what it boiled down to now, scary as it was.
“We haven’t seen anything like—”
“Be honest, Sophie. How long do we have?”
Sophie looked at her feet and she sighed. Then she looked at the clock above McDonnell’s desk.
“We’re talking minutes,” she said.
McDonnell’s body seemed to slump, then. He went to reach for his phone, like he was contemplating calling his family. But then he ignored his phone and moved over to his drawer. He pulled out a bottle of Scotch, poured two glasses, and brought one over to Sophie.
“What’re you doing, sir?” she asked, as he held the glass out to her.
He smiled. “This is my form of praying. You should find your own way too. Because the world’s about to change forever. And there isn’t a damned thing we can do about it.”
Chapter Three
I sat in the traffic on the way home from the office and tried to wrap my head around what had just unfolded.
The interview had been a total disaster. The independent interviewer, Sally, wasn’t only disgruntled by the fact I hadn’t held the lift door for her. I’d also scratched her car in my rush to get there, something which I tried to spin as an eagerness to fulfil my career duties. Naturally, she didn’t quite see it that way. I’d agreed to pay for the paintwork to be done, of course. And part of me had hoped that maybe paying for the paintwork to be redone would be something of a sweetener.
But no. If I thought I was getting that promotion, I was an idiot. And it was all on me.
I held my phone to my ear as I sat in the standstill traffic. I knew I shouldn’t be on the phone while the engine was running, but nobody was moving so technically I wasn’t going to cause any harm, or get caught for that matter. Besides, I’d already caused enough chaos as it was today. What harm was a little more recklessness?
The sun seemed even warmer right now, as it beat down on the windscreen. I had all four of the windows open and the sunroof raised, but that didn’t seem to be making any difference to the stuffiness right now. Damned air con. Needed to get the bloody thing fixed. That’d teach me a lesson about putting jobs off.
“Hey hun. How’d it go?”
When I heard Sarah’s voice on the phone, I felt a weight lift from my shoulders.
“Hey,” I said.
“Oh. Oh no. That doesn’t sound good.”
“It wasn’t good.”
“I mean, you don’t know that for certain yet, right?”
“No. I do. Trust me.”
A pause. And in that moment of silence, I knew what question was coming next. My wife knew me too well.
“What did you do this time?”
If I could count the amount of times my wife had said those words to me in the eight years I’d been married to her, then I wouldn’t have much room in my mind for anything else. As far as she was concerned, I had an irritating knack of getting myself into troublesome situations, mostly down to my own attitude. I always found excuses. I mean, there was always a reason for my misfortunes—a reason outside of my control.
But Sarah didn’t see it that way. She didn’t have much sympathy for me where my own actions were concerned.
“I kind of scratched the paintwork of the independent interviewer’s car.”
Sarah sighed. She didn’t even respond in words. If I needed any outside confirmation that what I’d done had definitely absolved me of any opportunity of getting the promotion, Sarah’s sigh was definitely it.
“Accidents happen though, right?”
“I cut down the outside lane when I shouldn’t have.”
“Oh Alex.”
“And then I didn’t hold the lift door for her because I thought I was going to be late.”
“Did you tell her her mum was fat while you were at it?”
“I might as well have done. Wouldn’t have got me in any more shit than I’d already got into.”
“You know what I’m going to say.”
“‘It’s your own fault.’ Right. I don’t really need to hear about that now.”
“Some things are more important tha
n the job. Like… like common decency.”
“I was just trying to make you proud. To make Bobby proud. To secure our future.”
“Was that a dig at me?”
“A dig at you? No. I was just—”
“I’ll be back at work in time, Alex. You know that as well as I will. It’s just… it’s not been easy, you know?”
I wanted to say something. But really, I didn’t know what to say. That’d been something the pair of us had been struggling with.
Our marriage had always been rock solid. Sure, I was a pain to live with and I knew it. But despite our disagreements and despite our arguments, we’d always found a way to pull through.
The miscarriage Sarah had three months ago was different. It’d put us through a time of severe struggle. Sarah wasn’t sleeping at night, and she didn’t want to spend time with me—or anyone—in the day. She insisted she was fine, she was getting over the death of what would’ve been a little daughter—a little sister for eight-year-old Bobby—in her own way.
But I couldn’t help but worry about her.
“Anyway,” Sarah said. “Bobby’s here and he wants to speak with you.”
I smiled, the traffic still not moving. At least I had time to speak with my boy. Nothing made me feel better in life. “Hey, kiddo.”
“Mummy says the interview for the big new job went bad. Did it?”
Despite the frustration with the situation, I couldn’t help but laugh. “Yeah. Yeah it did.”
“How did it go bad?”
“Well. Think of it like your tests at school. Dad got, like, the worst mark you can possibly get. And spat on the teacher in the process.”
“What happens now you failed the test?”
I took a deep breath. I hadn’t really thought about that, in truth. It felt like my whole working life I’d been building towards that position at the crime desk, and now I almost certainly wasn’t going to get the post… well, who knew what the future had to offer?
“I get back up again,” I said. “I don’t let it get me down. Besides. There’s more to life than tests anyway.”
“Can I tell Mrs Rawlinson that?”
“No. No I reckon you should keep that one secret from Mrs Rawlinson. And, um. Don’t spit on her, either. That was just me being stupid.”
I chatted with my son some more. And as I spoke, the sun still beaming down, car horns filling the standstill, I realised that I was okay as long as I had my son. I was okay as long as I had my wife. They were all that mattered to me, truly. When I looked past the superficial need for a promotion, they were the most important people—the most important things—in my life. And I was going to do everything I could to look out for them.
“Anyway,” Bobby said. “Mummy wants you again. Something about the chickens—”
The phone went dead.
I felt a nasty shock at the side of my face and a sharp tingling on my fingertips.
I threw the phone to the other side of the car. Shit. What was that? Some kind of static shock or something?
I went to pick the phone back up when I realised something didn’t feel right. The car. It was… I dunno how to even describe it. But it was like that tingling sensation that I’d felt from the phone hadn’t come from the phone at all.
Like it’d spread.
I looked up out the window and I saw something remarkable.
People were getting out of their cars. Literally falling out of them. Some of them were screaming. Crying.
In the space of a second, chaos was unfolding right down the length of this gridlocked road.
I opened the door and went to grab my phone again.
But the phone was still buzzing with energy, so much so that I dropped it on the floor of the car.
I fell out of the car. I closed the door, looked around at the building chaos, listened to the screams, and wondered whether this was really happening—whatever this even was.
And then I saw something else.
The telegraph pole right beside me.
Electricity clawed its way along the wires, then right down the pole itself.
When it hit the road, there was an explosion right underneath the telegraph pole.
The pole came hurtling down towards me.
I closed my eyes.
Held my breath.
And I did all I could to throw myself out of the way, as that pole fell nearer and nearer and…
Chapter Four
I heard the telegraph pole crash just metres beside me and I knew I’d had a close call.
I didn’t want to open my eyes, as I lay there on the road. I didn’t want to look up and face up to the reality of whatever was occurring here. It didn’t seem real. It was dreamlike. Totally dreamlike. And it’d all just unfolded in a matter of seconds.
One second, I’d been speaking to Bobby. He’d said something about the chickens.
The next…
That electrical current.
Then the whole car felt like it was buzzing with electricity.
But the worst thing?
The worst thing about all of this?
The sight of those people in front scrambling to get out of their cars, some of them screaming in agony.
Proof to me that it wasn’t just an isolated incident.
Something was happening.
I didn’t want to look. Of course I didn’t want to look. My heart raced. I could taste vomit at the pit of my throat. The air was ripe with the smell of burning… and I knew what the source of that burning was.
Flesh.
But I couldn’t stay here, either. I was in danger. Every second I spent here, the more risk I put myself in.
I lifted my head, slowly.
When I looked up, I wished I hadn’t looked at all.
People were screaming. Some were sitting in their cars holding the steering wheels as electricity ravaged their bodies. Some people were lying on the road, various limbs dismembered. Faces had been burned. Blood was everywhere. Babies crying, dogs barking. Sheer panic, as people ran around, screaming, burning.
I looked up at the sky and I saw something. I could only describe it as… light. Light so bright that I was having to squint just to see it. I couldn’t stare for long. And weirdly enough, even though the sun had been beaming down so strongly just moments ago, I couldn’t place exactly where the sun was anymore. The whole sky was illuminated. And I didn’t think it was the sun doing the illuminating.
Something was wrong.
I tried to gather my thoughts as my heart continued to race. I couldn’t lose my shit. I had to be as rational and logical as possible.
I walked over to my car. I’d try calling someone. The police? No. They’d already be on their way. Home? What could Sarah do about this situation, anyway?
Still, I needed my phone.
I needed to get in touch with someone.
I reached for the handle of the car.
Then, I went flying back across the road.
I slammed into the side of another car, my neck cracking against the door.
I rolled forward, head spinning, ears splitting with pain.
“Shit,” I said, hands shaking. I looked back up at my car. “I just got frigging electrocuted.”
I said it aloud mostly because none of this seemed real. Speaking the words aloud made it more real. Less nightmarish.
And yet it had the paradoxical effect of making it more nightmarish at the same time, mostly because it crystallised it in reality.
I stood up and I walked over to the car in front, eagerly trying to find a phone I could use.
In the first car, I saw a man gripping onto the steering wheel. Smoke was rising from his body. He had been fried.
Nausea took a grip of my body. I leaned over and threw up. I’d spent my whole life away from terrors like this and all of a sudden I’d been thrown into somewhere worse than a war zone. It was a tough one for the mind to adapt to.
I stood back up again, wiping my mouth, and moved on to t
he next car.
I saw a woman sitting there, window down. She didn’t seem to have been affected by any weird electrical activity. And she was messing around with her phone.
“Mind if I borrow that?” I asked. “I just need to make a quick call.”
She glanced over at me, a twinge of fear in her expression. “You can try,” she said, turning the phone screen towards me. “Not the slightest bit of battery. And it was fully charged just minutes ago. In fact, my charger isn’t even working in the car anymore. Nothing is.”
I looked away from her car, back down the mass of cars that had come to a standstill. So clearly not everyone had been affected so violently—but everyone had been affected in some way. And I realised something else. The silence. The lack of engine noises. It was like something had cut all those engines out. The same thing that had cut the phones out, and blown up the telegraph poles, and made some of the cars spark with electricity.
I looked up at the sky and I felt my stomach drop.
The light in the sky.
The cutting out of electricity.
Could it be?
Could it actually be?
I stumbled down the road, not heading in any real direction anymore. I thought about the research I’d done on EMPs—electromagnetic pulses. It’d become something of a hobby of mine, trying to create a more self-sustainable home, not really because of any legitimate fear of disaster, but just because it was interesting. Sarah found my interests hard work, but I’d learned a lot—at least I hoped I had, anyway. As for our home, self-sufficiency was a major passion of mine. We had a generator, a few animals like chickens and dairy cows, plenty of fertile soil and land that we grew vegetables on. Our hens provided us with a regular batch of eggs through the year, and the cattle did the same with milk. We even did a bit of bartering from time to time in order to trade supplies, something I’d grown particularly fond of.
But this. This looked to me like an EMP—and an extreme one at that.
I wasn’t sure how ready I was for it.
Besides. I was miles away from home.