Chaos Theories Collection

by Moody, David

  Last night on the motorway.

  Thursday afternoon after I left the office.

  At the pub with Sam the previous week.

  The only thing he knew with any certainty was that the gaps between the pulses were reducing. The next one could strike at any moment.

  ✽✽✽

  Foot down, Steven continued to make relatively good progress. He’d passed close to Shrewsbury a little while ago and although the roads had been far from empty, the traffic was light in comparison to the hell he’d endured on the A14 and motorway yesterday.

  He was distracted thinking about Roy, wondering if he should have done more to help him, then cursing himself for even giving that selfish fucker a second thought, when he took a sharp curve in the road then slammed his brakes on hard. The road ahead was full of tail-lights, an inexplicable traffic jam out in the middle of nowhere. The line of cars seemed to go on forever, and for a minute he remained in his seat, nervously tapping his hands on the steering wheel. He tutted and sighed but, with typical British reluctance and restraint, he did very little else, the gravity of the situation temporarily forgotten, negated by normality. He sat in the shadows of the dying trees at the side of the road. The brittleness of everything was distracting.

  Some people were out of their vehicles now. Other cars pulled up behind his. The longer Steven had to wait here, the more nervous he began to feel. What if another energy pulse hits now, how safe will I be? There was no sign of any movement up ahead. This traffic hadn’t slowed down, he realised, it had stopped. He got out and followed the people in the road. He had to find out what was happening.

  Some people talked to each other, groups forming around some cars, but most maintained a cautious distance from everyone else. Steven put himself firmly in that camp. There was only one person he wanted to be with now, and she was still a hundred miles away or more. He put that from his mind and kept walking. And it occurred to him that there was no traffic going the other way. He realised the road must be blocked.

  Constant twists and turns kept much of the road ahead hidden from view. When Steven rounded another bend, he saw that the queue of traffic stretched further away than he could see, a solid mass of one-way traffic. With little other option he kept walking, and the number of people doing the same alongside him increased the further he went. There must have been more than fifty of them now, maybe a hundred or more, loosely together but really alone, all of them looking strangely similar. Everyone was dressed in loose, short clothing, much of it stained with tide marks and sweat rings, unchanged for days. Their exposed skin was heavily tanned through weeks of unavoidable sun and they all looked exhausted with effort.

  He must have walked a mile from the car, he reckoned, but there was still no sign of the end of the queue. Up ahead now he could see a rise in the road, and on the top of the rise a crowd of even more people had gathered. He continued to follow the masses, not knowing what else to do, figuring he’d come too far to turn back without finding out what was wrong. He climbed up the rise behind a middle-aged mother with two small children. She carried one and held the other’s hand, her face bright red with effort and heat. And yet, despite her obvious physical discomfort, she kept singing and laughing for the sake of her kids, doing all she could for as long as she could to keep them distracted. She had to put the child she was carrying down when he became too heavy to carry. Steven caught her eye. As soon as she looked away from her children her expression immediately changed. Her face dropped. The laughter and smiles... all gone.

  A few minutes later, his legs burning with effort, hands on knees to push himself on, he finally reached the summit of the hill and looked down. He could see it now: an accident, still half a mile away or more, but the view was uninterrupted from up here and he could see more than he wanted to. A long blue and white coach had crashed and lay on its side, blocking the road. Other vehicles appeared to have tried to squeeze through the last sliver of space between the coach and the side of the road and had collided. More vehicles had gone into the back of them, creating a vast, impassable, inseparable mess of metal. And this had clearly happened at speed, too, because some vehicles had been forced up into the air. One car, flipped onto its roof, had crushed another. Two more were on their sides in a ditch, burned out. A truck was literally wrapped around a tree, the tree barely marked, the truck completely fucked. The longer Steven stared into the chaos, the more destruction he saw.

  In an empty field alongside the road, Steven could see the victims of the crash lying on the coarse yellow grass. At first he thought they were waiting for treatment, for attention from the emergency services which would likely never come. He was worried for them, thinking he should tell someone to get them under cover in case another energy pulse struck. It took him a while to fully accept that he was looking at dead bodies, left baking in the heat. They’d been arranged on the ground carefully, respectfully, spaced equidistantly. It made them easy to count. There were thirty-eight of them; some big, some tragically small. More were still being dragged from the wreckage by good-willed people visibly wilting in the sunlight. He thought he should maybe go help, but what was the point? They were dead. Tragic as it was, where they were left was of no importance now.

  The sheer scale of the accident was numbing. He’d never seen anything like it and he prayed he never did again. He was so consumed with the horror and the loss of life that it was several minutes before the obvious realisation hit home: the road was completely impassable. No way through or around.

  ✽✽✽

  The walk back to the car seemed to take ten times as long. He couldn’t find it at first. He’d naively expected it to be near the end of the queue of traffic, but it seemed not to have an end now: more cars had just kept coming. And in places the other side of the road was blocked now too. Some idiots had tried to overtake the inexplicably stationary line while others had made equally vain attempts to turn around and head back. Even if he managed to shunt his car out from between the one in front and the one parked too close behind, the net result would be the same: he wouldn’t get far. The vegetation and undulations meant that going off-road was impossible here. He knew that for a fact. From where he was standing he could see several folks who’d already tried something similar and failed spectacularly.

  It was too hot to sit inside, so Steven leant against the trunk of a nearby tree to consider his steadily decreasing options. He drank a little of the water he’d brought with him from home, because a little was all he had left, and studied his maps. Why he bothered, though, he didn’t know. It didn’t matter where he was or how far he had left to go, his car was going nowhere and neither was he. He might still be here when the next energy pulse struck. He might never leave this place. Christ, that was a sobering thought. Might I die out here on this road?

  The urge to get away was strong, but there was another complication, and that was the car itself and its contents. Okay, so it was in a bad state right now, knackered after two days of almost solid travelling, covered in dust and pockmarks, the driver’s window smashed, but that was still more than twenty thousand pounds worth of car and fifteen thousand pounds worth of debt he had sitting there. He couldn’t just abandon it, could he? And what about everything he’d been carrying? There was stuff in the boot that was irreplaceable, invaluable... for Christ’s sake, that was why he’d brought it all with him. The financial value was high enough, the sentimental value impossible to quantify. All his paperwork, all their personal details, his laptop, Sam’s jewellery, the fob watch his dear old granddad had left him... other than the house, pretty much everything he owned of any worth was here. He couldn’t just leave it all.

  But what choice did he have?

  He looked at the other cars nearby. Many of them had been abandoned and yet were still loaded up with stuff. He wasn’t interested in anything anyone else had left behind, so why would anyone be interested in his things? He could see more people reaching the same inevitable conclusion and leaving their vehicles t
oo. Families and individuals were scavenging from their own possessions, collecting the things they could carry which mattered most, weighing up the relative value of items they couldn’t bear to part with, then trudging back down the road in heartbroken, exhausted silence. Many seemed to be heading back towards Shrewsbury, the nearest town, but there was nothing for Steven there.

  He took what he could, every drop of water and every crumb of food, important papers, and as many of his and Sam’s things as he could fit into a single rucksack, and he started to walk.

  18

  For the first half hour or so he allowed himself to believe he might come back one day. He had the keys in his shirt pocket and he regularly checked they were still there. He daydreamed about coming back this way in the next week or two, visualising himself walking through the pouring rain, finding his car where he’d left it, alone like the last car waiting to be claimed in a once-busy car park, the glass smashed and the wheels up on bricks, all his stuff gone...

  It was the road atlas which helped him accept he was almost certainly never coming back. He’d carried the whole book of maps to begin with, an awkward, large-format publication designed for spreading out on car dashboards, not trekking like this. He started tearing out pages, first getting rid of the cardboard cover, then all the unnecessary fluff at the beginning and end of the atlas: the introduction, the index, adverts and the like. Then he reduced it still further, getting rid of all but the maps which covered the central strip of the United Kingdom, all the way from Cambridge to North Wales. Then he stopped again and threw away more, holding onto just the pages which showed the distance left from here to Criccieth. He was down to four pages which he folded up and shoved into the back pocket of his sweaty shorts. That was all he needed now; the entire world reduced to this one small corner.

  He tried not to think about distances. He’d worked out he was still some seventy miles from Criccieth, and even though he’d completed more than two thirds of the journey, the remaining part felt like an impossible distance. In this heat it would take him days, and he had the gruelling peaks and climbs of the Snowdonia National Park to deal with yet. And all that was assuming he wasn’t caught out in the open when the next energy pulse hit, or that he didn’t drop with exhaustion or dehydration first.

  He carried on along the road for a while, following in the footsteps of many other equally lost people, trudging back towards the crash. They looked like refugees on the run from a humanitarian crisis, like the kind of people he used to see on the six o’clock news with alarming regularity, walking miles towards borders to escape civil wars. And now he was one of them. It was a sobering realisation which made his already perilous situation feel even more precarious.

  Although still moving continually, he felt like he’d come to a stop. He thought back to this time last week and the long-lost normality of being home with Sam. Things had been far from perfect, of course, but compared to this...? The parched world he was walking through felt vast and it left him feeling small and vulnerable. He didn’t know how long it was going to take him to get to Criccieth, and if he made it, would Sam want to see him or was he too late? Had he burned his bridges? He cursed himself for having let her go, for being such a dumb, obstinate prick. What would have been easier, he asked himself? Having to endure this apparently endless journey, or to have just swallowed his pride way back when it mattered and talked to her about how he felt? To have tried to explain how losing baby Jack had made him feel... how lost he’d been, how much of a failure he’d felt, unable to do anything to help their child. It had seemed impossible at the time, but it would have been so much easier than this. And though nothing he or Sam could have said or done would have made even one iota of difference to what was happening to the world, being with her would have made the nightmare immeasurably easier to endure.

  He passed the bodies in the field which he’d already seen. There were even more of them now, he thought, but all rescue efforts had come to a halt at last. Where there’d been frantic movement last time he was here just hours earlier, now there was nothing. Those people who remained down there were hiding in the shadows, under trees and behind hedgerows and wrecks. Others like him picked their way through the wreckage, their voices silenced through a noxious combination of exhaustion and fear, tinged with respect. Occasionally he heard raised voices. Often he heard cries. Children, mainly; little ones exhausted by the heat and frightened, perhaps, because they sensed the parents who’d always protected them were as helpless as they themselves were.

  He saw someone trying to use their phone so he checked his own. He needed to conserve battery power but at the same time he wanted to speak to Sam because he knew that just one brief conversation with her, just a few snatched words even, would be enough to convince him what he was doing was right. It rang out but went straight to voicemail and he left a message, far from sure she’d hear it. His voice was so dry he didn’t recognise himself. ‘Sam, it’s me... I’m just past Shrewsbury. I’m on foot. I’ve lost the car and I don’t know when I’ll get to you. It’s about seventy miles, I think, but I’m going to keep walking, all day and all night if I have to. I’m coming straight to you and if you want me to turn around and leave again once I’m there then that’s fine. I just want to see you again. I need to talk and tell you all the stuff that’s been going round my head since last week. All the stuff I should have said ages ago...’

  ✽✽✽

  It was increasingly uncomfortable being exposed like this. His guts churned with nerves, anticipating the next energy pulse and not knowing what he’d do when it struck. At least after dark they’d have a little warning, but it was still several hours until sundown. Right now, with the mocking sun hanging almost directly overhead, he wondered if he’d know anything about it before the heat and light struck? Would he, and the rest of the people still trudging along the dusty road, not realise what was happening until their skin started to peel and their blood began to boil?

  Steven looked at his map for reassurance, and it occurred to him that this might not be the best route. He stopped beneath a tree to catch his breath and consider his options. The road here was still clogged with static traffic, the aftermath of the devastating crash, and countless refugees continued to drag themselves along beside the stranded vehicles, slavishly sticking to the tarmac. But if he could get onto another road, perhaps, he might be able to find a car and get himself back on track. He checked his map again, struggling to orientate himself with just the line of the road as guidance. If he was where he thought he was, he could hike cross-country for a while and he’d hit an alternative route before long. Whatever happened, he decided that while he was on foot he’d be better off trying to travel as the crow flies, taking the most direct route possible.

  Do it.

  He knew he was right, but there was something to be said for the security of sticking to an established route and following other people. As logical as his plan appeared, he automatically tried to convince himself he was wrong. If this is such a good idea, why isn’t anyone else doing it? Get a hold of yourself and just bloody do it!

  And he did. He glanced around to check no one was watching, cursing himself for still caring what anyone else was doing or what they thought, and then changed course. Maybe they’d just think he was looking for a tree to piss up? Or perhaps they were as disinterested in him as he was in the rest of them?

  The ground beneath his tired feet was immediately less even and as he disappeared deep into a dense copse of pine trees, Steven wondered if he might have made a mistake. Would the uneven ground slow him down and negate the benefit of any distance saved? He decided it didn’t matter. Walking through this forest had already brought some welcome relief from the tortuous conditions. It was fractionally cooler (though still unbearably hot) and the spindly branches overhead provided more shelter and shade than he’d been used to. The bone-dry detritus and leaf litter covering the ground was several inches thick in places, more like the remains of a garden barbecue
than anything else. Out of curiosity he stopped and knelt down to look a little closer. He stirred the arid topsoil with his fingers, remembering playing in places like this when he was a kid, how when he’d lifted leaves and rocks back then he’d always found damp soil with a distinctive, heady smell, moist even at the height of summer. He remembered peeling bark off rotting tree trunks and shifting heavy stones to reveal the frantic, scurrying movement of insects scuttling for cover... ants, termites, beetles, worms – whole other worlds, complex eco-systems hiding in plain sight.

  Today the ground was completely dried out. No signs of life. It was virtually rock solid under the powdery top layer, every last molecule of water sucked away by the heat. Maybe if he dug deep enough he’d still find damp, but he dared not think how far down he’d have to go. The forest today looked uncomfortably skeletal. He thought that if he touched anything else it all might crumble to dust. He stood up, brushed himself down, and started walking again.

  Footsteps.

  He spun around, sure there was someone behind him. At first he couldn’t see anyone, but then she appeared from behind a tree. He thought she’d been hiding at first, trying not to be seen, but he could tell from the way she approached that she didn’t care if he saw her or not. ‘Afternoon,’ she said warmly.

  ‘Hello.’

  She was a large woman in her late forties or early fifties, with a mop of curly blonde hair plastered down at the sides with sweat. She had a rucksack like his and used a large stick to help her along. She slowed when she drew level with him. ‘I’m trying to get home to Pant,’ she said.

  ‘Pant?’

  ‘It’s a village.’

  ‘What kind of a name for a village is Pant?’