by Calum Kerr
At least she had finally seen sense. Okay, something weird was going on here, but he didn’t need a flashing neon billboard to see that. He just didn’t see where that was his business. He had places to be and people – well, person – to see. Really, what good could they do by hanging round here? He hadn’t done any first-aid since that one year in Cubs, and she had the sprog to look after. Even if she turned out to be a nurse, what was she going to do, leave the kid at the side of the road while she tended to the wounded? And there was no way he was going to look after the kid. All that screaming and moaning and whining? No thanks.
So, finally, thankfully, he’d convinced her to get into the car, and it looked like he would be getting a useful lift and be back on the road soon as. As much as he could be, with his car in flames, Tony was happy.
Okay, so the demo was going to be less impressive with the MFD currently charring in the backseat of his Audi. And he would have to go shopping for clothes before tonight. He couldn’t exactly turn up to his date with Susanne dressed in his work gear and with no over-night bag. But, it could have been worse: at least he had his phone.
As they climbed into the car he started typing. There was a really strong signal just here, which was a blessing, and he needed to let the client know that he might be late, and then he needed to do the same for Susanne. In fact, he would include details of the terrible accident and his miraculous and heroic escape. That might speed things along. Especially when he told her about the woman and her child that he had saved from their car just before it blew up.
He was half-way through his mail to the client when his phone suddenly shut down. He shook it, but nothing happened, so he turned it over and started to prise at the battery. It did this sometimes and he had to take the battery out, put it back, turn it on again, and it would be fine for a while.
He’d just got the battery out when he realised they had drifted to a halt and the woman - Nicola, did she say? – was turning the key in the ignition over and over with no result. He sighed. “What now? Is it out of petrol?”
She turned a sharp gaze on him. “What? No! I filled up when I set off.” She carried on turning the key. Nothing. Just the dry click of the key turning.
“Battery?”
The sharpness when she looked at him had turned to scorn. “No. New last month. It’s something else.”
Tony’s sigh was even louder as he undid his belt, opened the door and stepped from the car. He walked around to the front, flicking his hand at her to open the bonnet. She did so, then got out to join him.
He opened it and started looking around for a loose connection. He didn’t really know what he was looking for. Engines had never been an interest of his. But he was sure he would do a better job of finding a loose wire than any woman, especially an ignorant American.
He poked and prodded, taking care not to burn himself on the hot engine or to get dirt on his shirt sleeves. He couldn’t find anything. He glanced over at Nicola and saw that she wasn’t even looking at the engine, she was staring away from the car to the other carriageway.
She glanced back at him and then pointed. “Look.”
In their short journey in the car, they’d moved far enough to draw level with the front of the queue which had formed behind Tony’s wrecked car. Some people had left their cars to watch the fire, but many more had initially stayed in safety. These people were now getting out of their cars and opening their bonnets, looking at the engines. Others were standing holding mobile phones in the air and waving them about, much as Tony had been doing just a minute earlier.
He stood up, trying to work out what she was going on about. Okay, it was strange, but he couldn’t see what it had to do with them.
“Listen,” she said.
He did. He couldn’t hear anything, and started to say so.
“Exactly,” she cut in over him. “Nothing. No car engine noise, no music playing, no mobile phones ringing. Nothing at all.”
He hated to admit it, but she was right.
“What the hell’s going on then?” he asked. She seemed to know the answers, so maybe she had this one.
She shook her head. “I’m not sure. It seems like everything has gone dead at the same moment.”
She turned to him, but her gaze was drawn up and over his shoulder. Her eyes went wide. He started to turn, but then realised he didn’t need to as five fighter jets flew low overhead, their roar trailing behind them. In an instant they were gone, leaving behind a rush of wind and an almighty noise. He watched them head out over the fields, bank sharply and head straight back. He tracked them, raising his hands over his ears to baffle the noise of their passage, and watched as trails of smoke detached themselves from under the wings of the planes and sped away. Moments later there were several explosions in the distant field beyond the place where the helicopter had come down. The noise reached him first, and then the trees bent towards them and a hot, smoky wind rushed over him, making his eyes sting and the air rush from his lungs.
He heard Nicola coughing next to him, and tried to open his eyes to see what was happening.
He eased them open a painful crack and saw that the trees which had screened the field from view were now denuded and on fire. Tiny tinkerbells of flame drifted towards him as the leaves were consumed. Beyond them he could see nothing but fire engulfing the whole landscape.
Tony didn’t stop to think. He didn’t say a word. He simply turned and ran.
Seven
As Nicola stood, holding Alyssa’s hand and looking at the silent cars, she could hear nothing but the crackling of flames from the still-burning truck and the confused voices of deprived motorists, a phrase went through her head: Electro-magnetic pulse. It wasn’t the kind of thing she would normally know. She was a historian, not a scientist. But Rob had watched enough sci-fi and action movies for her to have picked up the term. Hell, the concept was now so mainstream they even used it in Ocean’s Eleven. It was what happened when a nuclear bomb went off. It sent out a kind of wave that fried electrical circuitry. Normally it wasn’t an issue because the circuitry was fried in other ways too, or so irradiated that no-one would want to use it for thousands of years. That would be one way of getting brain cancer from a cellphone, she mused. Even as she was thinking this, she marvelled at the fact that she was standing in the midst of the insanity that her day had become and was still thinking so clearly.
Tony was asking her what had happened and she was saying she didn’t know even as these thoughts were going through her head. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to tell him, it was more that she had the feeling that he wouldn’t hear her if she did. He seemed like a nice enough guy, but – No. Actually, he didn’t seem that nice. He reminded her a lot of Rob. He was so caught up himself that he didn’t care about anyone else.
He had started ordering her around, telling her to abandon the wounded, telling her to give him a ride to a rental place, and she had simply acquiesced. She had slipped back into the person that Rob had moulded her into without so much as a thought. She hated that it had been so easy for her to give in to him. And even more she hated that it had felt comfortable, like slipping into old shoes.
So, maybe she wouldn’t tell him what was going on. Maybe she would keep it to herself and let him work it out if he could. Let’s see how capable he was without other people around to look after him.
She turned to him, intending to press him for answers, to make him take some responsibility for what was happening to them, but her words were stillborn. She watched as an arrow-head of planes swooped low over the trees and passed over their heads in a deafening rush of wind. She felt Alyssa snatch her hand away, needing both of them to cover her ears. Nicola did the same, swivelling to watch the planes flash out over the countryside and then turn and race back towards them. As they passed back over her head she saw rockets strapped to the underside of the wings. Even as she noticed them, flames sparked at their rears and they left the planes behind in the wake of their exhausts. Moments
later an almighty explosion rocked the world, causing her to stumble to her knees and clutch at Alyssa who, in turn, clutched at her mother.
A flash of flame dimmed the sun, bared the trees and threw cindered leaves at her on a hot fist of wind. She bowed her head and waited to be burned alive, but there was no further blast. The missiles had impacted far enough away to not kill them, just for them to be caught in the wash. She lifted her head, squinting open her eyes at the heat.
Fall had come early and all the trees were lit in shades of yellow and orange, the black silhouettes of their branches playing host to a raging fire. Behind them the field looked as though it contained a new type of rape which was more than just yellow, it was alive with light. And beyond that? What was that?
She was aware, even as she knelt there and held Alyssa tight into her chest that Tony was no longer beside her. She looked round, concerned, and saw him once more vault the central barrier. He continued across the road, down the bank, and disappeared into the trees on the far side. Some of them were starting to smoulder, but they had fared a lot better than the ones on her side.
She turned back and looked through the burning, aware that the heat was growing. She tried to see through the flames and shimmer. There was something there, something moving on the ridge. She could only imagine it was whatever the planes had been shooting at. Whatever it was, it was huge and didn’t seem to have been in the least bit bothered by the missile strike.
But she couldn’t see it clearly and now the heat was too intense, she could feel her skin tightening as it started to burn. She picked Alyssa up and, more slowly and with extra care for her daughter, she followed Tony.
The crowd on the far side which, like her, had been gaping at the transformation of the landscape, were also starting to back into the relative safety of the trees. She hoisted Alyssa over the rail, climbed over, then picked her daughter up again. As she reached the hard shoulder on the far side she looked back. The trees were starting to fall, bringing burning branches and trunks down onto the carriageway. As she watched, a long branch crashed onto her car. She stood, transfixed, as her people-carrier started to go the same way as Tony’s Audi, and might not have moved even when it exploded and the fire started to creep across the road, if someone hadn’t taken her arm and started pulling her towards the relative sanctuary of the woods.
She looked round, to find the owner of the hand on her arm. It was a man not that much older than herself, early-forties at a guess, his face covered with the same black streaks that she supposed she was adorned with. He was giving her a confused but soothing smile. “Come on, love,” he said, his voice only just audible over the crackling blaze. “Time to get somewhere a little safer.”
“But… But… Just what the hell is going on?” she asked him.
He shook his head. “Fuck knows!” He grinned at the look of shock on her face, then pulled on her arm again. “Come on, we better move before the cars start to go up, and the trees on this side of the road too, maybe.”
She nodded, glancing back one last time to where her car was now lost in a ball of fire. She felt a moment of guilt, wondering if her wish to be rid of the Queen CD had precipitated all this, then dismissed such a silly thought. With Alyssa held in her arms, head tucked into her mother’s neck, Nicola followed her saviour into the cool of the woods.
Eight
Tony ran into the woods, the smooth soles of work shoes slipping on the grass and detritus. As soon he was under the shade of the trees he felt relief from the heat that had been rolling off the burning field. The image of it was still floating before him, imprinted on his retina, and as he ran he careened from trunk to trunk. His earlier care over his shirt was forgotten as moss and dirt created a new pattern over the blue pin-stripe, but his Blackberry was still clutched in his hand. Despite his fear and panic he peered at it every few steps,, focussing on its black screen through the burning haze obscuring his vision, hoping that it would come back to life and somehow transport him from all of this.
Finally, inevitably, he tripped over a root, or a log, or a pine cone, or nothing at all, and sprawled on the ground. His breath was coming in gasps which sounded in his ears like sobs. He tried to calm, to breathe normally, but he no longer seemed have control. He bowed his head and let out a series of loud moans.
He didn’t hear her come up behind him, so he squealed and scrabbled away when he felt a hand on his shoulder. The owner of the hand screamed in response, took a step back and fell onto her bottom with a yelp. Tony peered at her in the darkness. It wasn’t Nicola, it was someone else. She was young and blonde and slim.
“What?” he asked her, unable to articulate more. “What?!”
She leaned forward, reaching behind to rub where she had landed. “I- I’m sorry,” she said, still rubbing and emitting little hisses when she touched a particularly sore part. “I just wanted to see if you were okay; if you’d been hurt. You sounded like you were in pain.”
Her voice was soft, but not breathy or girlish, and it calmed him. He felt a sheepish grin form on his lips, only a shadow of his normal charmer’s smile, but a step back towards normality nonetheless. “Yeah, sorry, I guess I’m more out of shape than I thought.” He saw her quizzical look and explained. “I was wheezing, you know, from running. I wanted to get away before. Well, before whatever happened next.”
“What did happen?” she asked.
“I have no fucking idea. There was a helicopter which, I think, blew up a truck. And then all the electrics went down – and, and I still don’t know how that happened.” He lifted his Blackberry up again, pressing all the buttons and shaking it, trying to find the combination of button-presses and agitation which would resurrect the dead device. “And then fighter jets flew in and blew up a field.”
There was silence for a moment and then he laughed. “Now that was a collection of words that I never expected to hear myself say. ‘Fighter jets flew in and blew up a field’!” He laughed louder, ignoring the rise of his gorge and the sting of tears that he could feel accompanying it. The girl started to laugh too, but a little more uncertainly. Tony just laughed louder. “They must really hate the countryside!”
His laughter was howling now, and he was aware it was going on too long, but he couldn’t stop it. Eventually it caught in his tightening throat and he started coughing.
The girl came to his side again, slapping his back, and when he could breathe properly again, the laughter had gone and taken the urge to cry or vomit away with it.
He looked up at her and smiled, aware that his eyes were watering, but not caring as these were from coughing, certainly not crying. He was about to ask her name when other people started to appear through the trees. They were walking, rather than running, and some of them had started to talk to each other, comparing their experiences, trying to work out what was going on. Some of them spotted Tony and the girl and a group formed around them. It seemed, for the moment, that everyone felt comfortable being this far inside the forest, and many of them sat down on the ground until it started to look like some bizarre family outing.
Although they were all talking about what they had just seen, no consensus could be formed on what was happening. The subject of the electrics was mentioned and Tony heard a voice say, “I think it was an EMP: an electro-magnetic pulse.” He looked up to see who it was who had silenced the group, and saw Nicola. “It’s one of the side-effects of a nuclear bomb.” Tony heard somebody gasp at this, and saw Nicola turn her head to look at the culprit like a teacher with an unruly student. “It wasn’t a nuclear bomb, of course, or we’d all be dead. But that’s where they’re usually found. It knocks out all the electrical equipment in the vicinity. So no cars will work, no phones, no radios, nothing.”
Everyone was silent for a moment after this, absorbing the information. Many people slipped phones which they had been holding, or fiddling with back into their pockets or bags. Tony held onto his. He wasn’t quite ready to give up on it yet. After all, maybe this Ameri
can woman was wrong. Maybe it just needed a few minutes rest.
“Can they do that sort of thing?” a man at the edge of the circle asked Nicola.
She shrugged, and it was only then that Tony realised that the dark shape in her arms was her daughter. “I thought it was just a thing on movies, something good to move along the plot. They used it in Ocean’s Eleven. But, obviously, it looks like somebody can.”
“Somebody? Who? Are we being attacked?” asked another voice, and then everyone seemed to be speaking at once.
“Is it the Russians?”
“The Chinese?”
“Aliens?”
A few people laughed at this last one, but again Nicola shrugged. “Who knows? Could be.”
“Yeah, right!” Tony was surprised that this last voice was his. “Aliens are going to come down and attack rural Oxfordshire. They really hate wheat and barley. No, I know, the colour of oilseed rape offends their eyes so they have come to wipe it off the earth!”
“Oh, shut up,” a man nearby told him, weariness in his voice. “There’s no need for that!”
“Isn’t there? Well, who died and made her the leader?” Tony was on his feet, pointing his phone at Nicola as though brandishing a weapon.
Nicola looked at him blankly. “Leader of what?”
“Of… of…” Tony looked around, trying to work out what he had meant, but it seemed to slip away from him. He sank back down onto the ground, and continued pressing the buttons of his phone where he held it in his lap. The blonde girl, who was still next to him, gave him a reassuring pat on the knee.
The man who had told Tony to shut up, then turned to Nicola. “So, he asked her. What do we do now?”
Nine
Nicola gaped. Why was he asking her that? Hell, why was he asking her anything?
She had just pointed out to Tony that there was nothing to be a leader of. They were just a band of people who had been caught up in a terrible accident and were taking shelter in the woods to escape a fire. Soon enough there would be police and ambulances and fire engines and people to tell them where to go, what to do, and who to claim from for their insurance. She wasn’t the leader of anything, as there wasn’t anything to be a leader of.