A Solar Winter

by Ryan Casey

  And that’s what made her realise just how much she’d changed; just how different she was.

  She used to be all about the wider group. She used to be all about other people.

  But this world had broken her old self. And there was no fixing it.

  She stopped after a while out the front of a shop. She cuddled up inside what little clothing she was wearing, shivering away, teeth chattering. It felt like tonight might finally be the night it ended; tonight might finally be the night the life slipped from her body, stolen by the cold.

  And what a way to go out.

  What a time to go.

  She tried to sleep, but with little success. She must’ve got some sleep, though, because one moment it was pitch black, the next, it was light.

  Her throat was dry. Her lips felt almost frozen. She was shivering even more violently now, and it felt like a cold was taking its grip as snot dribbled down her face, the taste of it salty on her lips.

  But she had to get up.

  She had to find safety.

  She had to find other people, and she had to reinvent herself, if that’s what it took.

  She thought about going back to Alison, but it felt like that door had been closed. Alison had seen the monster inside her. She’d seen the old her.

  As much as she’d miss her, she knew there was no going back.

  So she looked at the road ahead. Looked at the fresh snowfall. Looked at the winter sun.

  There was a whole world out there. A world she didn’t have to be like her old self in. A world she could be new in.

  She took a deep breath, trying to shift aside just how grim and ill she felt.

  And then she started walking.

  It wasn’t long before she saw someone.

  There was a little girl in the distance.

  She was facing something, standing right outside a house. The closer she got, the more she realised what the thing she was looking at actually was.

  It was a dog.

  There was something else about this girl, too.

  She was holding a gun.

  Holly didn’t really speak before she said the word.

  “Hey.”

  The girl spun around. Dread on her face. Fear on her face.

  She was skinny, gaunt, much like everyone in this world. She had a cut across the left side of her face, or a scar. She barely looked into her teens, Holly would guess. But this world made it hard to tell.

  She turned the rifle and pointed it at Holly.

  Holly lifted her hands. “It’s okay. I’m not going to hurt you. I just… What’re you doing out here on your own?”

  The little girl kept the rifle raised. “’Cause we have to be on our own. ’Cause people are bad. They do bad things.”

  Holly felt a strange familiarity upon hearing the girl’s words. They echoed what she felt, deep down. But she noticed how they made her feel, too. And the kind of regret they sparked inside.

  She couldn’t just accept that people were growing into a world like this with that kind of view.

  “I used to think like that,” Holly said. “And part of me still believes it. But… but it’s not true. Really. There’s goodness in this world. You just have to be brave enough to see it.”

  She saw the look of curiosity on the girl’s face. She realised she’d been thinking aloud rather than speaking to the girl directly.

  “What do you mean?” the girl asked.

  Holly cleared her throat, took a few steps towards her.

  “What’s your name, love?” she asked.

  The girl didn’t say anything. She just kept the rifle—which looked a lot like the ones those foreign soldiers carried—raised.

  “Mine’s Holly,” she said. “I might try and guess your name. Is it Emma?”

  “Yes.”

  Holly frowned, surprise on her face. “Wait, really?”

  Emma nodded. “Yeah. How did you know?”

  Holly raised her eyebrows, baffled herself that she’d managed to guess Emma’s name in one. She was getting good at this. “Wow. My mind reading skills really are growing.”

  “You don’t mind read. Nobody mindreads. That’s what people tell others when they’re trying to treat them like babies.”

  Holly smiled. She walked up to Emma. Emma’s rifle was still raised, but she didn’t feel the same level of threat, not anymore.

  “Emma, I’m looking for a friend. Someone to join me on the road. Someone I can find somewhere safe with. Would you like to be my friend?”

  Emma paused. She hesitated. She kept that rifle raised.

  Then, just when Holly was about to say something else, she lowered it and nodded.

  Holly smiled. “Good,” she said. “Then we’d better get going, hadn’t we?”

  They walked together as the sun reflected brightly against the white snow.

  They didn’t see the thick clouds emerging ahead…

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  If there’s one thing Mike wasn’t expecting today, it was to be speaking to a small group of foreign soldiers who didn’t seem to want to slaughter him.

  Made a pleasant change.

  It was getting late. He was sitting around a fire with these soldiers. The leader was called Yuri, and he spoke damned good English. The others—Sergei and Andrei—didn’t speak the language great, but they seemed reasonable and amicable enough.

  And of course, Mike had his struggles trusting them. He’d seen what they’d nearly done to his daughter once, after all. Captured her. Possibly killed her if the pair of them hadn’t acted as quickly as they had.

  But these people. The second they’d got back to their camp—which wasn’t much more than a couple of tents and a fire around which they were sat—they’d stitched Kelsie up, cleaned her wound with some supplies of their own. They couldn’t promise she was going to be okay. But with rest, they figured her odds looked good, mostly because the bullet hadn’t penetrated deep at all.

  For helping Kelsie alone, Mike had to trust them a little.

  Kelsie was in one of the tents sleeping right now. And as he sat there beside this crackling fire, the stars beaming down, Mike could only think about what Yuri had said when he’d first encountered him about the “catching up” they needed to do. What was he talking about? Because he was a foreign soldier, at the end of the day. It sounded like he was hanging out an olive branch.

  But why?

  “You should drink that, really. It’s the most expensive damned booze you’re going to get, maybe ever again.”

  Mike’s stomach turned when he looked down at the cup of vodka in his hand. He’d almost coughed up his guts when he’d taken that first sip. It was fiery, burning.

  “I think I’d rather stay sober, for now.”

  Yuri chuckled, translated what Mike had said to his friends, which seemed to tickle them, too. “They say you’re a typical Englishman. Think you’re a big drinker. Then you taste the Motherland, and you realise you’re nothing at all.”

  Mike had to laugh. He agreed, in all truth. The people of this nation liked to make out as if they were so strong. Yet you only had to look at how the vast majority had reacted to the EMP to realise just how lacking they actually were.

  “You might want to drink up,” Yuri said. “It might soften the blow of what we’re about to tell you.”

  Mike looked at Yuri. He looked at his thick Viking-esque beard, and the jet-black circles around his tired, bloodshot eyes. Then he looked down at the vodka. “Try me,” he said.

  Yuri sighed. He took a deep breath, scratched the side of his head. “So we were deployed here with the intention of occupying territory. Our country, they activated a few EMPs around the world directed at Britain and its allies. And for a while, we had the upper hand.”

  “But?”

  “But then something happened. We can only put it down to… well, either an accident or retaliation. Whatever the case, we’ve been cut off from our homeland. We haven’t been in contact for a long time. We
thought it was just us at first, but then we heard from other camps. Camps like our own. The same thing—no contact. One of them, they claimed another helicopter landed. Said they’d lost comms too, but the last thing they heard back home was that the skies were raining planes. That people were dying in the streets. It might be true. It might not. But we’ve no reason not to believe.”

  Mike frowned. “What're you trying to tell me?”

  Yuri cleared his throat. “I’m trying to tell you that as far as we know, it isn’t just the western nations that are in the black right now. It’s us too. It’s the entire world.”

  Mike felt the news hit him hard. All along, he’d had that feeling that there had to be something out there. A place where things were normal; an end-goal, so to speak.

  But hearing that the world had suffered because of the EMPs… that changed things.

  It made him feel so lonely. So disconnected.

  And yet at the same time, in a weird kind of way, he felt more connected to humanity in general.

  “So what you’re saying is, you got stranded so you decided to stop slaughtering our people?”

  Yuri puffed out his lips. “Slaughtering? That wasn’t our order. That wasn’t our goal. Occupying territory was our goal. Spreading influence was our—”

  “I saw a pregnant woman hanging from a tree. I don’t care whether it was your goal or not. It’s the reality of what your people were doing in this country.”

  “And your people were doing things just as bad if we’re going to generalise in such a way. The truth is, all of us have done bad things. All of us have done crazy things. Sure, my country’s intentions might not have seemed pure to you, but our orders were just to occupy territory so we could restore order. Nothing beyond that. How do you know there weren’t troops of your own in our country? Just think about that for a moment.”

  “Really?” Mike asked.

  Yuri looked the image of seriousness. “Really.”

  Mike tried to process the news he’d learned. By the sounds of things, the whole world was in the same position. The foreign soldiers weren’t sent here to invade—they were sent here to restore order, but some of them had naturally strayed from the clear cut path, just like Mike had seen his own troops do, just as he heard about all the time back when he was in the army.

  “What’s the end-goal then? You just wander around the woods killing people you think are bad?”

  “The end-goal? There’s no long-term end goal. But there is something.”

  Mike shuffled forward, closer to the fire.

  “There’s a place,” Yuri said. “A base about fifteen miles from here. A place where there is order being restored by a coalition of troops. I hear there’s Brits there, Americans there, Russians there. Everyone banding together.”

  “Sounds too good to be true,” Mike said.

  “Don’t let the bad things you’ve seen shape the future,” Yuri said. “There are bad people in this world, sure. People who thrive in this chaos. But don’t mistake them for the majority. Most people want to move forward. Most people want this chaos to end.”

  Mike looked over at the tent. Then he looked at the woods, over in the direction of the Grey Lodge mental health facility, which he’d run from. Which he’d seen overrun by those people.

  He wanted to believe in the world that Yuri was talking about. He wanted to buy his optimism. But he just wasn’t sure.

  “If this place isn’t what you say it is,” Mike said.

  Yuri smiled. “Then we make another one.”

  Mike thought about the relatively idyllic life he’d been leading the last few months. He thought about just how easily it had fallen apart.

  And he felt a reluctance to risk that loss all over again.

  But what if?

  What if?

  “We sleep tonight. We hunt tomorrow. We make a plan. And then, when your girl is feeling ready to go… we travel. Are you in?”

  Mike swallowed a lump in his throat. “She’s not my daughter.”

  “Really? Well, may I say, the way you care for her. You’d make a good father.”

  Mike thought about Holly. “Thanks.”

  Yuri leaned forward, raised a glass of vodka. His two friends did the same. “So what do you say? A drink to the future?”

  Mike looked at the vodka in his glass.

  He felt the tension pulling him back, the reluctance holding him back.

  Then he lifted it, tapped it against Yuri’s, and brought it back to his mouth.

  “To the future,” he said.

  He took a sip of the drink.

  Felt the ghastly burning seep down his oesophagus again.

  In the thickness of the trees, the animals stirred, like someone was in there, watching.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Ian tried to understand his surroundings, but they just weren’t making sense.

  First, it was the realisation that he was moving. That he was travelling in some kind of vehicle. Which meant it was working. It meant the EMP hadn’t fried it, somehow. It had survived.

  Which meant that wherever he was, things were… different.

  He jolted to the right. Realised he was tied to the back of this vehicle. He’d lost sense of where he was. He remembered he’d been out there, looking for who he thought was Holly. He’d seen someone in the bushes, readied himself to do what he had to do to her to make himself feel better—to get the vengeance he deserved.

  But then someone else had been there. A girl. A dog.

  The girl had done something. Shot something at him. A sedative dart, something like that.

  And now here he was.

  He struggled against the cuffs around his wrists. The more he struggled, the more he realised the inevitability of his situation. He was stuck. There was no getting out of this. No matter how much he tried to wriggle free, he was along for the ride, whether he liked it or not.

  He thought of Sofia back at the house. He didn’t even know how much time had passed, how long she’d been waiting there. And he felt guilty. He’d left her alone there. He hadn’t even taken the time to bury Tommy.

  He’d left Sofia alone with her grief, all over again.

  He thought back to when Corey died. The days he’d go off, drive to the most abstract and random of places. Sofia used to call him time after time, asking where he was, begging to find out.

  And when he finally got home, he’d apologise. But still he’d go off out the next day. Still, he’d run from his demons, all over again.

  He just had to be on the move. He just had to keep on going, or the thoughts of what’d happened would catch up with him.

  But unlike back then, there was no running away now. He was stuck here. Trapped here.

  Trapped with his thoughts.

  There was something else bothering him, though. As much as Sofia used to tell him he was a loose cannon, he could see how eager she was for revenge too, when Corey died. She just went about it differently. More ruthlessly.

  Ian’s grief blew up in a short-term blast that needed to be satiated.

  But with Sofia… it just kept growing and growing.

  And the scariest part was, she couldn’t see it herself.

  He thought about the sense of revenge that had bubbled inside him. The desire for revenge over Holly that he’d felt. Because she’d taken so much from him. So much that he was never, ever going to get back.

  But at the same time, he’d looked into her eyes. He’d heard her argument. It was a mistake, apparently. It was a rash, spur of the moment thing. An action out of fear.

  And as much as Ian didn’t want to see it, as much as he didn’t even want to entertain the possibility that was the case… what if it was true?

  What if Holly hadn’t really intended to hurt anyone after all?

  He felt a tear roll down his cheek. He tried to suppress the tears as he travelled in this vehicle, but he just couldn’t. He’d lost his boy. And there was no going back.

  He’d gone off in
search of revenge, and he’d found himself torn apart from his wife just when he needed her most.

  He felt the vehicle slow down. Felt it come to a halt. And as he sat there, listening to the door open, listening to somebody step out, he readied himself. He prepared himself. Whatever was coming his way, he had to be ready.

  He had to be strong.

  He held his breath as the back of the van opened up.

  Light beamed in.

  But then he saw them standing there.

  Saw her standing there.

  Dog by her side.

  Siberian Husky.

  The girl looked at Ian, and a smile stretched across her face.

  “Awake already? Sorry for that, really. You were supposed to sleep through the journey. When we get to where we’re going, you’ll understand. Seriously. Trust me. I was sceptical too, at first.”

  She walked to Ian’s side, started to untie him from the back of the van, sedative gun visible in her hand.

  “Who are you?” he asked. “And the van. What’s—what’s happening?”

  The girl smiled, sympathetic. “My name’s Gina. This here’s my friend, Arya. Welcome to the new world, sir.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Theo looked at the bodies lying around him and felt sickness surge through his body.

  It was night. He’d come out in search of his people, worried about where they might be. They’d gone off in pursuit of Mike and that girl, Kelsie.

  But they hadn’t come back.

  But now he could see them on the ground. Gunshot wounds. Bleeding out. It looked like they’d been sprayed with ammunition.

  And that wasn’t fair. He hadn’t been trying to kill the girl. Sure, the man was… problematic. But perhaps they could’ve come to some arrangement where Theo could’ve provided him with the least painful death possible.

  But this. This was a slaughter of his people.

  And that was the key word her. His.

  There was no sign of the man. No sign of the girl.

  Which meant whoever had done this had to be on their side.