He felt a pang of cramp in his calf and finally had to give in against the hill and dismount from his bike. He stretched his leg out, the curve of the top of the hill still in sight. No animal or person occupied the intervening space. Those he had passed would be small specks in the distance if he was to turn around. Trees lined the edges of his vision and the grass grew long and unkempt. It was as a serene a sight as he had seen since living in London. It seemed very foreign to him. The wildness of it seemed so out of normality. The expansiveness so unnatural.
In front of him, the ground lit up in a split-second flash. For that moment, he could see every blade of grass, every groove of bark on the trees as if in higher definition than his normal vision could provide. Time stretched out as he tried to process the image in his mind. His thoughts seemed scrambled as though he was trying to flick too fast through an unbound book and, instead of finding his page, he was simply splaying paper all over the floor.
It finally clicked a few seconds later, a bright light must have gone off behind him. He instinctively turned, and as he caught the light still waiting for him near the horizon, he slammed his forearm over his eyes and hunched forward. His skin prickled on his forearms and lower legs, extending as they were, bare from his cycling shirt and shorts. Tariq moved his arm from his face slowly, first looking down at the ground, which now looked dull and drained of colour, but for a purple tint of flash blindness. He ignored the burning sensation on his skin and lifted his eyes towards the source of the light. Where he expected to see the crooked skyline of inner London, he saw just dust. A tall, slender cloud rose up, expanding into an elevated dome of thick dark cloud. The sight forced Tariq to lose his balance and half lean, half fall back against the grass. The sensation on his bare skin grew but he was too dumbstruck to be concerned in that moment. He just sat in stillness, mouth hanging open. No fight or flight reflex, no panic, just serenity. And stillness.
He couldn’t tell how long it had been that he had been still. The world seemed paused. All sounds seemed to blur into one. His brain couldn’t engage with any of his senses.
He snapped back to reality as a warm rush of air pressed against him. It heated his skin like the rare equatorial south wind he remembered from his childhood home. It was this familiarity that eventually snapped him back to reality.
Chapter 16
Mina awoke in panic, blinking wildly at her blurred surroundings until the edges finally became a crisp resemblance of her kitchen as viewed from the floor. Her blinking slowed, each time she did her vision blurred over, taking time to return to normality. She lifted herself up, clutching the side of her head against a headache that seemed to be on both the inside and outside of her skull. As she righted herself, her stomach rolled and churned. She slowly let herself back down onto her back and stared up at the ceiling. She kept her eyes open, not letting her eyelids touch more than fleetingly when she had to blink. She suspected that she may have hit her head and had heard that it was not advisable to fall asleep with a concussion. Maybe that was just an urban myth, but being on her own made her cautious.
The telephone call she had just had flooded back in her memory, but in a dull haze. She spoke softly to herself. “He must have been high,” she pronounced to the empty room. She shivered against the cold floor and gently lifted her head up again. “But why did my phone cut out? Or did I imagine that part in shock?” She rolled onto her front and pushed herself up slowly as to avoid a sudden rush of blood to the head. When she got to her knees she picked up the phone to hear no dial tones. “Was he right about the planes, the bombers? Would bombs in London cut the phone lines across the country? I suppose they could.” She suddenly wished that she had either the internet or a mobile phone to see what had happened. She felt isolated, helpless in the moment. Her heart picked up its volume in her chest, enough to make her ears feel like they were ringing with the sound. “Fuck,” she said calmly as her body exhibited all the signs of a panic attack. She battled with the thoughts about having passed out on her own. The realisation that she could have hit her head even harder instilled a heavy fear.
The battle flowed through her. She remained kneeling on the kitchen floor trying to focus on the inanimate objects that surrounded her and made up her home. The sanctuary that she created alone, for herself. She reminded herself that it was her valley. She tried to comfort herself with stillness.
Shannon broke down crying and sat herself down on the grass with the steep slope of the barrow gathering up the weight of her rucksack. Leighton eventually sat next to her after scanning the rest of the sky. The dark grey cloud lingered in the east. The top of it pushed northward, giving it the look of an inkblot smeared by a listless thumb. Leighton pulled Shannon close, her head falling onto his shoulder. Zeke reached a hand up and bashed it playfully against his mother's cheek. Failing to receive a reaction he started to sob along. Leighton rocked him, but his focus was all on Shannon.
“There's nothing we can do for them, Shannon.” He pushed her hair back a touch. “Remember, all we can do is make a life for our little gentleman to live. Have a sip of water, I'm going to head back to the top and make a decision on where we head from here.”
“Pass him to me, he's hungry.” Shannon wanted his warmth against her in a vain hope that responsibility would provide her control and that his innocence could mend her soul. She stared as his puffy cheeks worked for her milk. His wide eyes looked up into hers. The sight of him made her feel a slight sense of security and reassurance or else at least the feeling that she needed to portray those emotions for his sake.
Leighton's mind worked as he made use of their vantage point. He had shed his bag and made use of a retractable telescope from his inner jacket pocket. With the planes coming from the south-east, heading north-west was going to be best, but that would take them straight towards more built up towns. North would take them too close to the motorway by the time it was dark and lay too flat to get a good snapshot of surroundings that they would benefit from. A wooded set of rolling hills lay around ten miles to the west, but they would have to avoid villages and towns on the way, just in case more attacks were to come. That would make closer to a fifteen mile walk in all. He caught sight of the town that had provided their home and shuddered at the destruction, before sitting alongside Shannon breastfeeding further down the barrows.
“There's a spot on the nearside of a hill, covered by woods and at least three or four miles from the nearest settlement. We can get there before dark and set up the tent for the night there. It's the safest we can be for now, I reckon, though the walk will talk a good few hours.”
Shannon merely mumbled an acknowledging syllable.
“I wish I could work out what has happened. No news coverage and phone signal is lost.” Leighton said, flinging the phone on to the ground away from where they sat. I just hope the people that made the decisions on this suffer too. I hope they can't return home either. I wonder if other countries have their news reports on what has just happened. The reality of it. Do you think whichever country that sold or built those planes is going to send us an aid package? Do you think this might just be it? Great Britain, a crippled and broken empire finally put down in bad health.”
Shannon remained silent. She focused all her attention on Zeke. He looked peacefully up into her glistening eyes, drinking his fill of her milk. Leighton wondered if he could possibly know what was happening. Shannon was already in acknowledgement of the difference the world he would develop in was from theirs. The difference between most generations was rarely as stark as theirs would be to his. Usually it wouldn't be realised until the child was older, but at least she felt like sooner was better in this instance. If this thing was to happen at least in his early months he would not know any different. They had to deal with knowing what the previous way of life had been like. They would have something to miss and Zeke wouldn’t. The thought gave some condolence to Shannon.
Tariq looked around him. He was completely alone. Ahead he could see
the mushroom cloud being pushed to the left and leaning over imposingly in his direction. The city itself was obscured through a thick brown fog that looked stationary.
His skin felt hardened as if sunburnt, which was not a familiar feeling to him, but he recognised it. He put a hand onto the back of his forearm and released it quickly as it sent a stab of uncomfortable pain through him. Closing his eyes, he took a deep breath and thought about his situation. His only knowledge of nuclear attacks came from movies and books and of that information, which was only a little, there was not much he could rely on. Tariq recalled those weather-like maps from the films that showed fallout spreading out and causing more death in the surrounding areas. It must travel on the wind. A wind that was currently blowing somewhere near his direction from the blast.
“I need to move,” he said aloud to no-one. He stood, plucking some grass as he did so and dropped it out in front of him. It flew easily off past his left hip. “I need to go that way,” he said, pointing west. “And hope the wind doesn’t follow me”.
He felt flustered, returning to his bike which looked exactly as it had a few minutes before. He didn’t know why he thought it wouldn’t and he straddled the top tube. His throat was bone dry and he took a few gulps from the bottle attached to the frame. He pulled up his shorts so that the bottom hem wouldn’t rub against the burnt parts of his legs and pushed on, over the short grass. He prayed as he went. He gave thanks for the foresight to leave the city, he hoped that he would get away quick enough and he hoped over and over that he would avoid a puncture.
He occasionally followed along narrow concrete paths that wound along the flatter slopes of the hill, but as they turned too far north or south he broke away and kept his direction true. After a short time, the ground fell away and he caught sight of the motorway up ahead. The junction just within view was jammed with cars in all four directions and along all the connecting slip roads, but in the direction he was headed, it looked clear. He supposed that any cars free of the block would have turned around given the situation. Unnatural fires cropped up among the still traffic. Tariq decided to stay clear and headed slightly further north to ensure he didn’t come into sight of what may be happening there.
He met with the motorway at a dip in the road, clear of traffic on both sides and both directions. He dismounted and carried his bike over the barrier. His instinct still led him to jog over all six lanes. Although empty, it felt that lingering was not a safe option. Once on the other side he was on the edge of a farmed field. The dirt was churned up and the rows of planted wheat made sure he had to carry his bike to take it further.
He crossed two more similar fields before a sudden sickness arose. He was hungry. Very hungry. He had only had a few oat bars since breakfast and even that had been before he set out and before the sun had broken the darkness of the early hours of the morning. He almost threw his bike down on its side and rummaged hastily through his bag for his pasta salad with tuna that he had prepared the night before.
Mina eventually rose slowly and opened the top corner cupboard and pulled out some left-over Tramadol from it. She pushed one out on to the counter and it skittered and bounced erratically. She analysed the pain in her head for a moment then pushed out a second. She flicked on the kettle and waited patiently. Her body was still, but her mind raced on, flicking rapidly through imaginings of Drew, of bombings, of destruction and of Rebecca. Her heart continued to race, each beat reverberating around her chest cavity. She took her shirt off, carefully placing it on the back of one of the wooden breakfast stools and allowed the fresh breeze from the open window cool the sweat on her skin. She breathed deeply and focused on the rumbling of the kettle. She felt sudden urgency and turned back to the corner cupboard. She pulled everything out and spread it on the counter, turning each foiled packet over in turn. She found the one marked with Meprobamate 200 and popped out two tablets that bounced skittishly, coming to rest somewhere near the Tramadol on the counter.
Mina poured out a white instant coffee, and not waiting for it to cool further, took small sips to help her swallow the tablets. She shuddered as the hot liquid burnt her throat and blew desperately across the surface of her drink as she walked outside. She placed her feet carefully with each step, her legs still shaking and her shoulders hunching over as she walked. Mina picked up a blanket and her tobacco tin from the bench out on her porch and continued to walk towards the tree-line on the steep, north side of the valley.
Out this way she found her swing. A neglected front tractor tyre was tied by four ropes into the thick, lower branches of the tree growing out of the valley side. Mina place her mug and tobacco tin on a flat stump and reached to pull the hanging tyre up the incline with her. It eventually met with the ground and she managed to hook it on a thick, broken root that stopped it from swinging away. She rolled herself two cigarettes and downed her now-cool coffee before she took a perch on the swing. As her bum settled into the hole of the tyre and her body relaxed, she felt a warm wave pass over her and the pain in her head dulled appropriately. She lit her cigarette and once confident it would stay that way, she kicked her legs out and shifted the tyre on its long swing out. The ground descended rapidly as she went out over the decline and she held on tightly for the first swing. At the height of the swing she felt the unnerving additional motion of the heavy branch above her head bowing with her momentum. She reached around twenty feet above the ground before gravity took her back the other way. Looking over her shoulder, the ground seemed to rise too fast and a bump at the opposite zenith seemed inevitable, but the trailing blanket she wore over her was the only part to touch the ground and only brushed it gently. As it slowed, she took another smoke on her cigarette and settled into the pendula motion. The Tramadol and Meprobamate coursed into her blood stream and relaxed her into a fine rhythm, with her mind now solely focused on the child-like joy that the long swings through the air offered her.
An hour must have passed them by in silence near the top the barrow. The sky returned to emptiness and no people crossed their path. Intermittent sirens echoed in the distance. Leighton reminded Shannon that they must get to their safe point in time to set up the tent for the night. He offered her the choice to try the house again, that there would be no point destroying the same town twice. It could be the safest place to be, he thought. She replied that she did not want to linger in an opaque memory. They moved on. Leighton's first instinct seemed to be the safest in theory.
They moved north-west until they met the edge of the river, too wide for them to cross, but merely a tributary. It wound a path through the woods and then edged farmland. It was open to the sky, but existed without nearing any settlements for some way. They started to get close to a large town that encapsulated the river and they turned further west to get around it. They feared to enter the town for what they would find. Safety came in solitude right now, even if the skies were currently clear. They kept walking, even while Zeke breastfed at times and was carried temporarily by Shannon. The tent needed to be set up by sunset. That was the goal. It kept them walking with their tiring muscles under the strain of so much extra weight.
Eventually they reached the area that Leighton had picked out from atop the barrows. He looked up to the east and could just see the top of the barrow in the distance. It was the only sign of human intervention in the otherwise covered landscape. To the rest of the horizon they could see, any other signs of human life were covered by trees and wooded growth and hedgerows obscured any nearby roads. They set up the tent half a mile from the stream that turned into the tributary they had followed further down-stream. The silence and the lack of other human interference became shocking, their heavy breathing mixed with the sound of the wind carrying the occasional bird call. The lack of the sound of cars at what should have been rush hour was a daunting realisation. They felt it was best right now to keep a distance from any signs of human life.
Chapter 17
The tyre had stopped its deep swings long before Mina
woke up again. When she did so, it was merely rocking gently against the breeze. She looked out to her right, towards the opening of the valley. The clouds were starting to break under the midday sun that beat down above the other side of the valley. The light that hit her was broken up by the fluttering leaves of the tree in which she hung. Her body hung limply, faint pins and needles pinched at her toes and finger tips. She tried to reconnect with her limbs and pull herself up, but the exertion required was too much. Her body felt like it was in the process of re-growing her nervous system before she would be able to control it from her position deep inside her own mind. She could still feel the tramadol in her system, her vision distorting slightly as if viewing the world through a film of slowly undulating oil.
Once she had enough control of her hands, she smoked her other cigarette, which complemented nicely the waning effects of her medication. It burnt out quickly and she eventually lowered herself through the centre of the tyre until she was holding on by just the lower, inner rim. She swung her legs forward and back gently until her feet touched the bank of the valley at which point she let go and flumped into the dirt.
She gripped her hands tightly into fists and stretched out her fingers repeatedly to fight the tingling that remained in the tips. Before she entered her house, she looked out down the valley in the direction of town. It was obscured from her sight, but her look lingered. She debated journeying down there to see if anyone might know more about what had happened, but the thought of the walk or the cycle conflicted with her brain that refused to balance her or focus her vision properly and felt as though it had been stuffed full of cotton wool.
Ousted: A thrilling debut novel of survival and humanity Page 9