Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF

by Mike Ashley

  I left Margery blustering and went back home. Halfway there I took a detour towards the corner shop. Perhaps it would be wise to get a few provisions in, just in case. Unfortunately, half the neighbourhood had the same idea. There was a crowd outside the shop and people were wheeling away their purchases in the trolleys. I edged towards the door as one of the staff was tacking a handwritten notice on the door. It said: CASH PURCHASES ONLY.

  "We've had a call from head office telling us not to accept credit cards or cheques," she said to me as we squeezed into the packed shop.

  Deftly dancing around the suffocating aisles, I managed to extricate half-a-dozen microwave Chinese meals, a bottle of milk, some whisky and a packet of bourbon creams. At the till it was like a rugby scrum. One man had pretty much the entire contents of the meat cabinet in two big trolleys, and he was waving his Barclaycard at them.

  "No plastic!" shouted the woman behind the till. "I've told you, cash only!"

  The queue snaked around the shop. I waved my purchases at the girl who I'd seen putting the notice on the door, and gave her a twenty pound note. She cast a glance over my basket, nodded, and stuffed the twenty in her pocket. "Do you mind if I take the basket?" I asked.

  She shrugged. "You can have it for a fiver."

  I only had a ten so I gave her that and picked up a copy of "Country Living" from the cardboard display bin that had been knocked over near the tills.

  As I left the shop, glad for a bit of fresh air, a big 4x4 squealed to a halt just in front of me. There were four men wearing balaclavas and carrying baseball bats. One of them looked at me as they climbed out. "Give us your stuff!" he snarled.

  One of the others pulled him away by his jacket. "Leave him. We'll get what's inside." He paused, as if re-considering, then held up his baseball bat. "Give us your money, though."

  I fished in my pocket and pulled out another tenner. He snatched it off me and shoved it into his jeans. "Right, inside. Tinned stuff, bottled water, powdered milk. Twat anyone who gets in your way."

  I hurried back towards home. The main road was now choked with traffic, cars inching along and beeping their horns. I spotted Bob and his wife, their Rover loaded up with stuff. Bob wound down the window.

  "Off on your hols?" I said.

  "We're getting out," he shouted. "I'd do the same if I was you."

  "Where are you going to go?" I said, looking at the long line of traffic stretching off out of sight.

  "The Lakes, probably. Bit of high ground. Clean water."

  I nodded. Bob's wife slapped him and pointed forward, where the car in front had moved ahead three or four centimetres. Bob waved and began to wind up the window, then stopped and brought it down again. He rummaged in his jacket and tossed a set of keys at me. "If you're staying here anyway, you wouldn't do us a favour and turn the engine over on the MG, would you? It's murder if it doesn't get a few revs every couple of days."

  I picked up the keys and waved as the Rover jerked fonvard again. I wondered if I'd be able to sneak Bob's MG out for a spin while they were away. A lovely little car it was. British Racing Green. They don't make them like that any more.

  I got home just in time to watch the space shuttle taking off from Cape Kennedy.

  On the fifth day before the end, most of southern Japan was destroyed in a nuclear conflagration. I had to admit, things were starting to look a bit bleak. I'd had another largely sleepless night, mainly due to the traffic on the main road, a constant stream of cars and vans crawling along with bad-tempered honks. I wondered how far Bob had got.

  Apparently a bit of sponge or foam had fallen off one of the space shuttle's engines as it orbited the earth, waiting for the asteroid to come into range. This had played havoc with the steering and the computers had gone all bonkers, plunging the shuttle back into sub-orbital space and sending it spinning down towards Japan. It had hit the ground and the nukes had gone up, several miles south of Osaka. The city and most of the surrounding area had gone.

  The Russians said not to worry, they were sending a rocket full of nukes up as well. That wasn't much comfort to the Japanese, though. Someone with a beard came on the news and said that he believed the whole asteroid business was an elaborate con and that the United States had planned to bomb Japan all along. Exactly why, though, he couldn't say.

  Some of the TV channels went off, mainly the digital ones. Channel Five stopped broadcasting as well, but hardly anyone noticed. ITV and the BBC just had news on all the time. Channel 4 played music videos, while BBC2 was given over to re-runs of seventies' sitcoms, which had a strangely soothing quality about them. I watched a couple of episodes of Terry and June, but couldn't get the pictures of the deathly quiet carnage in Japan out of my head.

  I took a stroll. Most of the cars had gone wherever they were going and the road was pretty quiet. Since this morning there had been a tank parked at the bottom of our street, following on from reports of looting and violence closer to town.

  I'd never seen a tank close up before. It was a pretty grand beast. Katy would have hated it. She was a pacifist, was Katy. Still is, probably. She'd not be coping with all this. I hoped there was no rioting near her house. I hoped she was okay. I considered phoning her again, but didn't really know what I'd say. For some reason I thought about Blackpool. Katy had loved going to Blackpool, loved the prom and the noise and the sweet smell of candyfloss on the air, the clatter of coins in the one-armed bandit trays and the insane laughter of the automated clown at the Pleasure Beach. One year we'd been there someone had made a huge sand sculpture of a tank on the beach. Katy had wondered why the artist couldn't have made something less ugly. All the kids seemed to love it, though.

  There was a soldier sitting on top of the tank, the real tank at the bottom of my street, a sub-machine gun in the crook of his arm. He regarded me coolly.

  "It's okay," I said cheerfully. "I'm not going to pinch your tank."

  He didn't laugh. Didn't even smile. "Did you hear the Government's gone?" he said.

  "Gone where?"

  "Just gone," he said. "Half of them have left for some bunker in the Home Counties. Some of them are dead. Westminster is burning. No one's in control any more."

  I thought about this. "So who's paying your wages?"

  He looked at me and blinked, as though he hadn't considered this before. He leaned into the turret of the tank and had a brief conversation with his mate. I hung around for a bit but the soldier ignored me. I wandered out on to the main road and over to Alan's cul-de-sac, but his house was all boarded up. I knocked but there was no answer, so I nipped round the back and borrowed his hedge trimmers again. When I got back to my street, the tank had gone. Mr Raines from number eight, who was in the Territorials, was standing in the road as I approached. He had a sub-machine gun exactly like the soldier in the tank had.

  "Where did you get that?" I asked.

  "Squaddie gave it to me, just before he pissed off," he said, his face set in a grimace. "Look, there's no Army any more. No law and order. We're going to have to organize ourselves into a ... a Civil Defence Group. Do you have any weapons?"

  We both looked at the hedge trimmer. I supposed it could give a pretty nasty cut, so long as you were within fifteen feet of a plug socket. "I'll have a look at home," I said.

  I phoned Katy again but got their answer machine. "We've got a Civil Defence Group in our street," I said proudly. I paused. "I love you," I said, then put the phone down.

  Katy had left me because I wasn't exciting enough. Because, after my parents died, I just wanted to sit in their old terraced house and go to work and come home and watch TV. But what she failed to take into account was that I wanted to do all that with her, that all that was exciting enough for me. I wondered if she was finding all this exciting now she was with Steve.

  A minute later I picked the phone up again and left another message: "I've got some Chinese ready meals and the electrics are still on here, so if you wanted to come over ..."

  Later o
n I helped Mr Raines and some others block off either end of our street with some cars.

  "What if we want to go somewhere?" I said.

  "Where's there to go?" said Mr Raines, his face in that grimace again.

  Looking at the news later on, commentaryless pictures of London burning and riots in Birmingham and Manchester, I had to concede he had a point. I wondered how Bob was getting on in the Lakes.

  On the fourth day before the end, a huge lizard attacked Tokyo. As if Japan hadn't had enough problems. It was exactly like a dinosaur, 200 feet from nose to tail. It ran with a loping gait, head down and tail up, its spine almost perfectly level. It was something to do with the bombs that had landed on Osaka, they said. Either a normal lizard had been mutated by the radiation and grown to monstrous proportions, or an ages-old beast had been in some kind of suspended animation below the surface of the earth and had been awoken by the blast.

  It was amazing how people were prepared to accept just about anything these days.

  It was quite gripping viewing. The news pictures showed them trying to evacuate Tokyo, but there was nowhere for the people to go, pretty much the rest of Japan being an irradiated wasteland. The monster rampaged across the city, flattening buildings and flipping cars with its tail. I caught myself more than once thinking it's pretty realistic before realizing that it was real. Eventually they brought it down with fighter planes and it flopped, dead, in the street. The newsreader said the Japanese authorities had started to slice it up to use as emergency rations.

  That afternoon looters kicked the kitchen door in. There were three of them, kids about eighteen or nineteen, and they all had baseball bats. I was in the kitchen at the time and they booted their way in, pushing me against the wall.

  "What do you want?" I said.

  One of them slapped me. "Everything," he said.

  They took all the money they could find, which didn't amount to much. They didn't think to take the food, but one of them manhandled the TV off its stand.

  "We'll take this as well," said the ringleader, slapping me again and ripping the stereo power lead out of the wall socket.

  "What are you going to do with them?" I said. "The world's going to end."

  They looked at each other uncertainly, then the ringleader punched me in the stomach, winding me. Then they left.

  I boarded up the door with some wood I found in the shed and went upstairs to bring the portable telly down from the bedroom. While I was rooting in the wardrobe I came across my dad's old airgun and a box of pellets. Might come in handy.

  We had a meeting of the Civil Defence Group in Mr Raines' front room. Half of the households in the street had already deserted; gone to Scotland or the Lake District or to be with family. Mr Raines approved of my gun. The water had gone off earlier in the day and the drains were getting backed up; there was a problem with rats but Mr Raines didn't want us to waste ammunition on them. A rat-catching division was set up, consisting of Wayne and Stu, who had got fed up of being barricaded into their house and had come down to live in one of the deserted terraces in our street. We still had electricity; a lot of places didn't.

  By dusk Wayne and Stu had killed enough rats for Trevor the butcher to begin skinning them. There was a big pot put over a fire in the middle of the road and we had a bit of a street party. The rat stew wasn't too bad; I'd been getting a bit fed up with Chinese. A dozen bottles of gin were found in Mrs Hughes' house; her daughter had come to collect her two days ago. Everyone suspected Mrs Hughes liked the odd nip, but not to that extent. It was quite a jolly evening, until someone said that a girl at the top of the street had been raped. A Civil Defence Group meeting was called and Mr Raines led a small group of volunteers off to apprehend the most likely suspects. I left Wayne and Stu throwing up in the street and went to bed.

  On the third day before the end, a tsunami swamped the western seaboard of the United States. The last thing that I saw on the portable TV before the power went off was a wall of water engulfing the Golden Gate Bridge, then a roaring sound and the cameraman was swallowed up. It cut back to the studio at the BBC, the only channel broadcasting now. The presenter looked like she hadn't slept for a week. She wasn't wearing any make-up and she had tears in her eyes as she reported that Los Angeles and San Francisco were now under water. Halfway through the report she looked up to someone off-camera and said: "What? Wait. Where are you going ... ?"

  She sat there for a while on her own, and the lighting slowly faded. Then the picture went blank, and didn't come on again. I supposed that was it for the TV, then.

  I was a little surprised that the electricity was still on. The gas had gone off two days previously. Either they had some kind of automated system still powering the national grid or there were some very dedicated people working to keep the country energized. And just as I was thinking that, the lights went out. That buggered it for the microwave readymeals, I thought. Rat stew from now until the end.

  In the middle of the night Mr Raines and his Civil Defence Group commandos "arrested" Roy the bachelor from the end house and strung him up from the lamp-post for the rape of the girl. Roy had always had the finger pointed at him whenever there was anything funny going on, and once the News of the World had published his name in a list of paedophiles and he had dog-muck pushed through his letterbox. They apologised and printed a retraction a couple of weeks later, saying it was another Roy in another town, but by then the damage was done.

  I was a bit shocked at that but as Mr Raines said to me, desperate times require desperate measures.

  I found a load of candles under the sink and dotted them around the sitting room. It was quite cosy. I finished the bottle of gin I'd pinched from Mrs Hughes' supply and picked up the phone. It was dead but I dialled Katy's number anyway, told the blank, empty air that I loved her, and cried myself to sleep on the sofa.

  On the second day before the end, the hungry dead rose from the cold, damp earth. The popular assumption that they would be mindless, shuffling husks with a craze for human brains did, fortunately, prove to be unfounded. They were, however, largely very grumpy.

  The first sign was in the small, dark time before dawn. No one was getting much sleep any more. In the quiet moments you could always hear the far-off sounds of violence. We had patrols in the street pretty much constantly, and there was always someone chasing rats or wailing. I'd done my bit and patrolled with my dad's gun for a couple of hours in the night, chasing off a couple of kids who were trying to sneak along the ginnel behind Mrs Reagan's house, so was trying to get a bit of kip. I'd just dropped off when there was a low rumble. I sat up in a blind panic, thinking that the asteroid must have hit Australia but the shaking wasn't in the ground, it was in my gut. It became a sustained, single note, rising in pitch. I assumed someone had got hold of a trombone or such-like. It lasted about fifteen minutes, and then stopped. There was a long silence. Even the sounds of gunfire faded for a moment.

  Taking the opportunity to get my head down again, I was just drifting away when there was a hammering at the door. God, what now? I picked up the gun from the side of the bed and staggered downstairs.

  "That's mine," said a voice as dry as autumn leaves. "Give it here."

  "Dad?" I said.

  It was indeed. And Mum as well. Looking ... well, looking exactly as they did the day they died. Dad was in his black suit, his fob watch tucked into the pocket of his waistcoat. Mum had that blue dress on that she had used to wear for dancing.

  "I thought you were going to paint the window frames," said Mum.

  I looked out of the door. There were more people in suits and dresses - and one or two in shapeless white gowns -staggering up the street, stopping at doors. At the houses they used to live at.

  "That sound this morning ... " I said slowly, finally understanding.

  "The Final Trump," said Dad, wearing that self-satisfied face he always used to pull when something was going against him. Only happy when it rains, my Dad. "And me not even baptized."r />
  Mum was rubbing the flaking green paintwork on the windowsill. "The last thing you promised me was that you were going to do these windows," she said.

  At the top of the street I could make out the corpse of Roy the bachelor twitching and kicking at the end of his rope. "I didn't do it!" he managed in a choked voice before the noose cut off his air supply and he died again. Within seconds he was dancing about again and shouting. I hoped someone would cut him down soon.

  Dad pushed past me. "You going to leave us standing on the doorstep to our own house?" he said. "What have you got to eat?"

  "A couple of microwave Chinese meals," I said. "There's been a bit of a problem with food the last few days."

  Dad sat down in the armchair while mum started picking up the dirty dishes and tutting at the layer of dust on the coffee table.

  "I can see we're going to have to take charge around here," said dad.

  There was a hammering at the door.

  "That'll be your grandad," said mum.

  Dad had died of a heart attack two years ago and mum had gone quietly nine months later. I suppose they were lucky; Old Mrs Potter had been hit by a bus last Christmas and she'd turned up at home in a right mess. It was a bit of a shock for her husband.

  The return of the dead raised all kinds of questions in people's minds. Presumably this was Judgment Day, then. The Civil Defence Group set up a big prayer session in the street. It was quite eerie, watching the living and the dead come together and stand there in silence while Mr Ogden, who was a lay preacher, read from the Bible. At the point where he asked that we all be forgiven for our sins, Roy the bachelor coughed loudly but no one could meet his eye. They made Mrs Potter stand at the back because she was a bit upsetting for the kiddies.

  Come sunset there was great excitement; the asteroid was finally visible to the naked eye. It looked like a very slow-moving comet high in the night sky. I supposed the Russians hadn't been able to blow it up then, and that expert on the TV who had said it would burn up in the atmosphere had been wrong. I wondered what they were doing in Australia right now.