After the Major had brought us all to attention, Major General Horton came out of his tent to address everyone. He projected his voice loud and clear saying, ‘I have some grave news for us all. It seems that the Ether has been down for a couple of hours now, not just here but worldwide. I have just received fresh orders by dispatch rider. We are all being recalled back to Atlanton base, with immediate effect.’
‘I told you the Ether was out of action. Didn’t I,’ Tom murmured.
The Major General continued, ‘The whole of the army is on red alert. It is quite possible we may be at war with an enemy or enemies unknown at this time.’
‘I have to say my officers and I are very proud of what you have all achieved this week, and it seems we could be seeing active service much sooner than we thought. Your army needs you and with that in mind I hereby promote all trainees to the rank of Private. I have also completed the necessary forms to have all the Academy students, who have taken part on this course, conscripted and they too will be given the rank of Private.’ At that he told Major Rufuss to carry on and stepped back into the Command Tent.
Major Rufuss commanded us to pack up our tents and wait for transport. While we were waiting, Tom and Gerland were grumbling about being conscripted into the army. ‘I might have known they’d do something like this to us,’ Tom said. Ellie quite rightly pointed out to them both that we needed to see for ourselves what the actual threat was before passing any judgement on the Major’s decision.
A number of trucks arrived to pick up Blue and Green Troops. Unfortunately, there were not enough trucks to go round; they would have to take the others over to Atlanton and then come all the way back for us. However, Perkems could not wait that long. Apparently, he had noticed an old school bus near the entrance of the campsite. Taking a can of diesel fuel with him, he hitched a lift on one of the vehicles leaving the camp and managed to get the bus working.
Whether he wanted his people to benefit from the protection offered by the fortifications of Atlanton base, or whether he just wanted to get his sleeves rolled up and back into active service once again, I never found out.
There was a horrible grinding noise as the bus came towards us and stopped at our feet. Perkems opened the doors and told us to get on.
Wondering how this remarkable day was going to end, we set off for Atlanton leaving a cloud of thick black smoke behind us.
Chapter 8 - Disaster Strikes
I was pleased we were being taken back home in a bus. The big windows allowed me to drink in a glorious red sunset, with rose coloured clouds outlined and scuffed with gold. A full Moon was rising on the opposite horizon, framed in a deep purple sky.
However, the serenity of this vista was shattered as we left the dirt track and returned back into suburbia. The roads to Atlanton were strewn with abandoned vehicles. Auto-cars and delivery vans relied on the Ether for maps, road position determination, and hazard avoidance. Starved of the information necessary to guide them, they had all coasted to a full stop at the side of the road.
Just a few antiquated army vehicles remained operational on the road ahead, and our bus soon caught up with them: to join the rear of their small convoy.
As the light began to fade, it became clear that electricity distribution could not continue without Ether based monitoring and control. The towns and cities were in darkness. We all realised their glass domes would be containing, and neatly conceal, a steadily rising level of panic, fear and undoubted chaos. Without power most doors would fail-safe to their open position. The residents would have to defend their own property for the first time in living memory.
In the driver’s seat, Perkems was having to steer around several obstructions in the road. Flurries of raggedy people were spilling across the embankments, breaking into greenhouses, stealing produce and running back with as much as they could carry. With the Ether out of action, and without power, the street cameras would be off the air. There were no police patrols, or automated defence systems for the looters to worry about.
Up until that moment, all the evidence pointed to a major technical problem with the Ether, but then it happened. There was a bright flash of light in the sky. It was so bright the soldiers in front of us could tell the direction it came from just by looking through the canvas sides of their truck.
The fields, all around us, lit up for several seconds. Everyone on the bus was now staring at the Moon. Half the passengers were out of their seats, leaning over the other half, straining to get a better view.
I blinked and raised a hand to my mouth in disbelief. A massive fireball had erupted from the Moon’s left eye. Within a few seconds, a third of the Moon’s surface was covered in billowing dust clouds, partly obscuring turbulent flames beneath them. My heart leapt out to all the people living in our colonies on the Moon.
After just a minute or two the whole of the Moon’s face was obscured. There must have been winds raging at thousands of miles an hour destroying everything in their path. Sharp rocks and dust, propelled at high speed, would have punctured every spacesuit, every dwelling. No-one could have survived.
My mind raced. Surely there was no natural connection between the Ether going down and an explosion on the Moon. Was there? We had to be under attack. Could it be an alien invasion? These were the questions everyone on that bus was thinking and asking each other about.
This had to be the sign my father had told me to expect. I found my wallet and took out the gold cards he had given me. Keeping one back for myself, I handed out all the spare cards I had to the guys around me on the bus including Tom, Ellie and Gerland. I made them all swear they would not tell another soul about the cards. I asked them to keep close and to follow me when we arrived at the base. After gaining their respect during training, they trusted my judgement and as soon as we had disembarked they all walked with me briskly across the site towards the low hills.
None of us was in any doubt that the situation we found ourselves in was extremely serious. As we walked, I admitted I had a very bad feeling about what I had observed from the bus. I clarified my proposal, ‘Should the Earth be subjected to an explosion similar in magnitude to that we have just seen seen on the Moon, then there would not be much hope for mankind. The gold cards I have given you were a gift from my father, Aleq Goreman. I believe they offer us a way to survive what could easily be developing into a planet wide disaster.’
‘And how exactly can they do that?’ asked Gerland.
I offered my best explanation, ‘We are going to be allowed to shelter along with some of the military in Bunker 7 - I think. We may be in there for a long time - so long in fact they might have to put us in a deep sleep to conserve food, water and other resources. You had better hand me back your gold card and leave us now if that is a cause for concern.’
‘Count me in,’ affirmed Gerland, ‘I could do with a nice long rest.’
‘Sure you could,’ said Ellie.
A glance around the others, in my newly founded gang, showed they all approved of my plan, and that fact alone helped to put a spring in our steps.
As if I needed some more proof to convince my fellow classmates, we had to join the back of a long queue of army personnel when we arrived at the guard hut outside Bunker 7. The soldiers were expecting us though, and they were well organised.
While we were waiting for the necessary security checks, a Corporal slowly wheeled an aluminium tea trolley up the line. Everyone was made to drink two pints of thick, foul tasting, liquid from a plastic cup.
Ellie screwed up her cheeks, nose and eyes, ‘What on Earth is this?’ she asked.
The Corporal enlightened us, ‘It’s a salty laxative.’
On hearing this, Tom, who had not spoken a word up until that moment, simply uttered, ‘Oh.’
The Corporal gave a knowing smile whilst nodding his head. Then, before moving his trolley on to the next in line, he informed us that a kind of factory assembly line had been put in place, ‘There are a number of stages in the pr
ocedure. Men and women will be processed separately to start with, but you will be brought back together later on.’
The first stage involved walking in through the actual entrance of Bunker 7 past the huge, then open, blast doors. We continued walking horizontally into the hill, passing a number of cavernous vehicle and equipment bays: each with their own solid looking metal doors. I peered into one bay and saw rows of armoured vehicles. There was a white coated technician hosing them all down with a liquid foam that seemed to be expanding and setting in just a few seconds. I reckoned the technician would have to make a hasty retreat before long, because the entire bay would soon be completely filled with hardened foam.
We came to a fork in the tunnel. The men were directed one way and the women were sent the other way. Gerland blew a kiss at Ellie as she left us. Ellie ignored him.
At the next checkpoint, we had to leave all our clothes and other possessions behind. Rather worryingly, I noticed the bin we put them in was marked ‘For Incineration’.
Even more disconcerting, above the droning hum of large portable generators and water pumps, occasional bouts of muffled screams could be heard echoing up the passageway towards us.
Walking on a little further, the tunnel widened out into a larger space with bright lights on the ceiling. A long thin, prefabricated, single storey building had been erected in there. Along the walls of the building there were several whitewashed windows hinting at there being a number of interconnected rooms inside.
We were shown through the nearest door and discovered that the first of the rooms was a toilet block - where we did not need much encouragement to relieve ourselves. That horrible drink had worked its magic.
The next room turned out to be a white tiled shower block. After a good long hot soapy shower, we were treated to an all over blow dry. It felt like I had walked naked through a car wash.
In room three, a male nurse came and stuck a dark plastic patch onto our eyelids and told us to keep our eyes shut. Quickly leaving the room, he closed the door behind him. There was an intense burst of UV light. Moments later, the nurse’s voice came over a loudspeaker telling us to peel off and discard the eye patches. Everyone in the room, had turned ash white. The outer layer of our skin had been burnt off.
Our immediate instinctive reaction was to rub our forearms. With some relief, we found only a thin film of white powder that came off as soon as it was touched. But before anyone could comment, we were all simultaneously deluged by a blast of ice cold water.
That second shower was such a surprise. I don’t know who squealed the loudest: the men alongside me, or the women in the other half of the building. For a few seconds more, the air was blue: filled with several choice words and phrases.
Anyway, we were not left to freeze for long. This ordeal was quickly followed by another hot, hurricane force, blow dry.
In the penultimate room we were issued with some thin cotton pyjamas to wear. There were also some benches to sit on whilst we were waiting to be called into the last of the rooms, this time by a female nurse.
My turn came and I remembered she was the same nurse who had injected that tracer chip into my ribs the week before. As I might have expected, she lifted my sleeve and rubbed my arm with a cotton wool pad soaked in alcohol. I just had to deliver the obvious line, ‘We really must stop meeting like this.’ But now she was brandishing yet another hypodermic needle. ‘Just a slight scratch,’ she advised.
Reacting to the sting of the injection I involuntarily came out with, ‘What the heck is this one for?’
I think she really enjoyed her job, because she raised an eyebrow and smiled at me as she answered, ‘To steady your nerves.’ Then she opened the exit door and ushered me out to rejoin the others.
A large clear plastic tube extended out and away from the back of the building. After walking along just a few feet inside it, I could see a second tube connecting on from the female route.
Stepping into another brightly lit chamber, I joined the back of a queue comprised of both men and women, who like myself were clothed in cotton pyjamas. I managed to see that Ellie and Gerland were already in the queue. Purged of any jewellery or cosmetics, Ellie’s auburn hair was straight and shoulder length now. Gerland’s golden blond hair, although no longer spiked, still stuck up like a brush.
Whilst standing in that final line we all had a really good view of what was going to happen to us next.
The last stage of the ‘assembly line’ really did remind me of a factory conveyor belt. The chamber was full of single beds. Some of the beds had pyjama clad people, just like us, lying on them. The occupied beds were slowly moving, as though they were floating on a lazy river, through a narrow opening at the far end of the chamber. Through the opening, I could just see that the whole of the bed and its occupant were being vacuum packed. A sheet of thick translucent plastic material was being lowered over each bed as it passed through the aperture. The air was gently drawn out from underneath the bed and the plastic sheeting became tightly moulded onto the contours of the person’s face and body.
I might have panicked at that stage in the process; as it was, I was feeling rather relaxed and readily did as I was told when a doctor said, ‘Mr. Rhett Goreman. Please lie down on the next available bed, facing upwards, arms by your sides.’
He then administered one final injection into my arm and asked me to count to ten. I think I got to three.
That is all I remember of Bunker 7 and my time at Atlanton Base. In fact, that was my last memory of anywhere I could even remotely call home.
Chapter 9 – Surviving the Apocalypse
Across the globe, large scale panic, lawlessness and looting had been caused purely because the Ether had gone down.
Security cameras and electrified fences failed and the Ruffians quickly found they had free reign to take whatever they could back to the forests. The Authorities and police were powerless to stop them. Townsfolk and city dwellers alike had to barricade themselves in their homes and wonder where their next meal was going to come from.
Many had seen the Moon become a ball of fire and dust, but few could have imagined such a thing would also happen to the Earth. That was, until the first of several large balls of fire appeared in the sky.
The fate of the world was finally sealed, when those initial flares turned out to be merely outriders flanking the mother of all fireballs.
For just one minute, it was possible to witness this monstrous group of blazing torches, streak across the sky, billowing long trails of smoke and flames behind them.
People all over the world, young and old, Ruffians and technocrats, civilians and the military, stopped what they were doing to look at the sky and watch the spectacle. They were all united by their feeling of helplessness.
Seconds later, there would be no-one left alive to observe the phenomenon at first hand. A massive shock-wave preceding the meteors, travelled supersonically along the ground; bursting eardrums, rupturing lungs, smashing buildings, and flattening trees and people alike.
Then the 20km wide primary meteor, officially became a meteorite by crashing into central Asia where it gouged out a crater 500km in diameter. Solid rock was instantly vaporised and blasted, at great speed, high into the upper atmosphere.
The Asian continental plate was pushed downwards into the mantle, creating volcanic outflows that would last a thousand years, and triggering gigantic tidal waves, several kilometres high.
On the opposite side of our planet, massive tremors rocked the ground. This was closely followed by a wall of flame which pushed across the land. Those unable to find shelter were barbecued where they stood. The few remaining forests became nightmare infernos in the blink of an eye.
Unable to communicate with their superiors, hundreds of individual base commanders followed their standing orders to lock down the cryogenic and genetic archives in their charge. No-one knew when or even if those archives would ever be opened again.
Within hours, everything above gro
und was buried under a thick blanket of burning cinders.
Over the next few days, choking clouds of smoke and ash would cloak the entire globe, with acid rain slowly poisoning the already highly polluted oceans.
Surprisingly, a handful of civilians and military personnel survived for a year or more. They were the lucky ones who had taken refuge in the few deep underground mines and bunkers, that had not either flooded, or collapsed due to the tremendous earthquakes, and aftershocks caused by the impact.
Even then, only those who planned to be entirely self sufficient in electrical power, food, and oxygen would have lived on for any length of time. And many of those would eventually die of suffocation, their only means of escape buried under mountains of ash, or submerged under deep new seas.
Anyone finding a way onto the surface would have discovered a dark ice age, a global cold winter’s night; a night time that was to last for more than a thousand years.
All plant-life died out, as did any remaining animals whose food chain inevitably depended upon vegetation and sunlight. Even the hardiest seeds could not survive centuries of darkness and so life on Earth was knocked back to simple bacteria, clinging onto pockets of heat and boiling mud in and around volcanic caldera.
*
I dreamt of my natural parents, of walking along a river bank with them, of happier times when there was just one Sun in the sky.
I re-lived my graduation and saw how proud and delighted my new mother and father were with me that day.
Then I realised it must be have been a dream. My mother was dead now and my father was always missing, wrapped up in his work.
The words, ‘He is coming round. You can leave me with him now. Give me half an hour,’ floated around in my head. I heard a door close and I opened my eyes.
Everything was blurred. I turned my head slightly. My head ached. The room looked exactly the same in all directions. There was a pure-white ceiling and pure-white walls. Although the room was brightly lit, there was no obvious light source. I could just make out the shape of a figure cloaked in white; there was a face leaning over me. I felt the soft touch of a hand on my cheek.
Escaping the Sun Page 6