‘There aren’t any protocols for this,’ I said. ‘My dad ranted about it enough for me to remember. There’s no way to prepare against something like this.’
‘What should we do?’
I moved away from the window, crossing to the couch and collapsing onto it. Luke slid down against the wall by the front door, holding his head in his hands.
We stayed like that for a couple of minutes before I was finally able to form some coherent plan of action in my head, no matter how rudimentary it was.
‘I need to get to Helen,’ I said, ‘she’s out there and I have no idea what’s happened to her… I don’t even know if she’s alive.’
‘She’ll be fine, Sam. The plane came down on the other side of town.’
‘Still,’ I said, shaking my head and looking up at him, ‘if this is what we think it is… And seeing as a plane just fell out of the fucking sky, I am going to assume that it is an…’
I took a deep breath, gripping the arms of the chair.
‘… An electromagnetic pulse, and a worldwide one at that, then we need to get out of here. The city is the last place we need to be right now. Things are gonna get ugly fast.’
‘The government can’t even deploy the army or even declare a state of emergency or anything like that, either. Even if they could get in contact with the forces and give orders, everything’s gone dark. Weapons, vehicles…’
‘We need to figure out what’s still working, if anything, and what we can use.’
A few seconds later we were in the kitchen. I opened the fridge door, looking about in the dark contents by the light of one of the candles. I snatched up the four or five bottles of water from the rack, setting them down on the counter as Luke tried the faucet.
I had never been so happy to hear the sound of rushing water.
‘Still works,’ he said, plugging it up and letting it fill. ‘Don’t know how long it’ll last, though.’
‘Fill it up as much as you can,’ I said, returning to the fridge. ‘Some of this stuff will be rotten in a few hours, most of it within a day… We might as well get through the important stuff now rather than let it go to waste.’
‘What do you mean by important stuff?’
‘Not junk food. Here.’
I passed a pre-packaged box of fruit to him and picked one out for myself – I usually packed them for my lunches, the kind of things you could buy readymade in the refrigerated department.
I expected a moment of confusion from Luke, but instead he ripped the plastic seal off, as did I, and we started digging into the fruit.
‘I keep thinking something’s gonna come down on us at any second,’ I said. ‘Fuck, that plane… All those people.’
‘If this thing is worldwide… Even if it’s countrywide, hundreds of them will have fallen out of the sky… Thousands, maybe. I can’t imagine how freaking terrifying that must be, to have all of the electricals on board just randomly fail and just start in rapid descent, knowing that you were fucked…’
I didn’t want to think about it, but the thought inevitably invaded my mind.
We finished the fruit and turned to the sink, taking up glasses and scooping up of water. This was what I had come in here for in the first place – it had only taken a complete failure of the electrical grid and the potential end of modern civilisation to finally get me a glass of water.
We drank down plenty, as much as we comfortably could, before scooping up all of the usable consumables we could find. Water, some bread that would last a day or two, packaged biscuits filled with carbs, and a few pieces of whole fruit.
It’s only in the wake of everything turning off that you realise how much you rely on electricity for absolutely everything. Briefly, as I filled up a rucksack with all of the food we had, I thought back to all those stories about cults who entered caves six months prior to when they assumed the end of the world to be approaching, or those people who stocked up on canned goods, water and weapons because they thought that everything would go to shit one day.
My Dad was one of them.
Turns out he had been right.
Those who were prepared for this were ahead of us all… But I knew more than most.
‘That’s all the food,’ Luke said. ‘What’s next?’
Just as he asked the question, as if the world had been listening in, there was the sound of smashing glass outside.
We both hurried to the window, looking down at the street below. On the opposite side of the road, past the sidewalk and onto the storefront, a small group of people were making their way through the broken window into Harold’s, the small grocery store that I had been to for hangover cures more times than I could remember.
They were good people, he and his wife, and now this is what it had come to.
‘I need to know now, Luke. It’s fifteen blocks to Helen’s building, and I can’t stay here. You can stay here if you want – you can keep half of the food, that’s fine by me. I’m not staying here, though. I know this has all happened so suddenly and I’m as scared as you are right now, but we’ve got to act fast if we’re going to get through this.’
Luke drew a long breath, looking at me in the candlelight of the room. Despite our friendship, I knew that there was something about him that he had always kept to himself, some side that he kept hidden away. He wasn’t adjusted to the modern world, and neither was I. We were both adaptable – I think that was why we had composed ourselves so quickly as the world had begun to fall apart outside of our window.
Now half of his face was shrouded in shadow, the other half barely illuminated by the flickering candles on the other side of the room. He was another man to me now. I had known him as an easy-going guy, that was how he had always appeared in my mind if I had to think about him, but now I was friends with something else, something that had adapted to the situation.
‘I’ve spent this long with you, there’s no way I’m going to abandon you now,’ he said, a smirk rising at the edge of his lips despite everything that was happening. ‘Besides, I figure if I leave you to go out there by yourself you’ll get yourself killed in no time.’
I couldn’t help but laugh, even with the chaos occurring just outside of our window.
There was so much still racing through my mind.
‘Christ, our parents… My mom and dad… What do we do?’
‘Your parents live in the suburbs, I’m sure they’ll be fine. Besides, they come from a different generation – they know what it’s like to live without power and go through outages like this. They’re cast iron. They’ll be okay.’
‘What about your dad… Wait, why am I even asking this question?’
‘I think he’s our best bet. He’s only fifty miles away, and I’ve got a feeling that the house is more like a bunker now.’
‘My parents are on the other side of the country… I’m with you if we’re doing this.’
I nodded in agreement, smiling.
‘I appreciate it, buddy,’ I said candidly, patting him on the arm. ‘Guess we should get going… Wait…’
‘What?’
‘Look at it out there.’ We both gazed onto the street below for the nth time that night. People were still pillaging through the grocery store across the road, others ran past, smoke billowed from the apartment window and the crash site in the distance, and screams and shouts were in abundance. ‘It’s a warzone out there. We can’t exactly head out unarmed, can we?’
‘Yeah, you’re right… I’ve got a baseball bat in my wardrobe.’
‘That’ll work,’ I said. ‘I, uhh… I’ve got…’
I thought quickly, trying to determine what I had in my possession that I could use to defend myself. Nothing specific came to mind, until…
‘Wait here,’ I said, pushing the bag of provisions onto Luke and pacing off to my bedroom. In the bare light of the flickering candles that occasionally made their way into the room. I returned to the wardrobe, fumbling towards the back, before finally finding wha
t I was looking for, leant up against one of the corners.
I grasped my hand around the steel barrel, carefully pulling it through the mess of clothes before looking down at the silhouette of the rifle as I held it in my hands.
It had been my Dad’s once – it was the very same one that we had used during our hunting trips when I was younger. A few years ago he had transferred it to me, along with the license, too.
Now I would be relying on it to save my life.
I retrieved the shells from the same spot on the floor where the butt had been, and returned to the living room.
‘What the fuck is that?!’
I wish you could have seen the look on Luke’s face – in the overarching seriousness of everything that had happened it helped to lighten the mood just a tad.
‘A gun.’
‘I didn’t know you had that.’
‘Well, now you know.’
‘You know how to use it?’
‘Yeah.’
‘You can walk in front, then… What’s the plan here?’
‘Get out of the apartment, find Helen and get out of the city.’
‘Simple enough,’ Luke said. ‘We’re gonna need to make this up as we go along, aren’t we?’
***
After changing into more suitable clothes – jeans, boots, a t-shirt and a beat-up jacket for me, and a similar get-up for Luke – we stepped out of the front door into the corridor, locking it behind us.
It was like stepping over the threshold from one world into another. When I had arrived home from work the evening before I had come in under the impression of a quiet night of drinking and playing videogames, followed by a weekend of hanging out with Helen.
Now I could have been leaving the apartment behind forever, and I was setting out to go get Helen – assuming she was okay in the first place.
We paused in the hallway as I took a deep breath.
‘This is fucking insane,’ Luke muttered.
‘Me and you heading out there or the fact that we’ve just been hit by an electromagnetic pulse?’
‘The second one, but heading out there comes a close second.’
My heart raced even as I stood still.
Suddenly, from the right side of the corridor a few doors down, one of the apartment doors opened.
I froze up, and about a second before the figure appeared in the doorway, leaning out, I realised whose apartment it was – in the chaos I had completely glazed over that fact.
‘Is that you, boys?’
‘Hi, Mrs Mavis,’ Luke said, waving through the near-dark.
‘Goodness, what’s going on out there?’
Mrs Mavis was an elderly lady who lived a few doors down from us – a sweetheart through and through, and the traditional grandmotherly figure, even in the midst of this pseudo-apocalypse.
‘Are you all right, Mrs Mavis?’
‘I’m fine, I’m fine, boys. There’s so much noise coming from out there. None of my lights are working, neither.’
‘We know,’ I said, ‘it’s just… It’s just a bit of trouble.’
I headed along the hall with Luke in tow, eventually coming to stop by her side.
‘Don’t you worry about it,’ I said, ‘Just head back inside and light some candles. Lock the door, too, and make sure you’ve got plenty of water.’
‘Righty-o, Sammy... You two were always such good boys, helping me with everything.’
‘Don’t fret on it for a second,’ Luke said, waving her away goodbye as she headed inside, shutting the door behind her. ‘Shouldn’t we tell her? About everything.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘There’s no sense in it, she’ll be worried sick. She’s safer in there with the door locked than being concerned about any of that…’
We stood silently for a few moments, hearing nothing but the hellish sounds of bedlam outside the building.
‘Ready?’ I said, half-asking myself as well as Luke.
‘Let’s go.’
Chapter Five
You Just Begin
The elevator was out, so the stairs it was. We bounded down them one at a time, hurriedly, I with the loaded rifle held tightly in my hands while Luke followed with the bag of provisions and his baseball bat. We had figured that if anybody confronted us in the streets then I would need free reign over the gun in order to defend our possessions, rather than being incapacitated somewhat by the straps of the bag.
As we took the steps in the stairwell, rebounding along the floors over and over until we approached the ground floor and the fire exit, I couldn’t help but dwell on two things – the thought of the elevator, and the fact that I was about to walk into a public street with a loaded weapon in my hand.
What if anybody had been stuck in there when the lights had gone out? What if nobody knew that they were in there at all? I had heard on a crime show once that just one of the four cords that were connected to an elevator could hold it up in the air, but that wasn’t the thing that would worry me – it would be the fact that, if we were right about this whole thing, that the lights and everything else that the electricity powered had gone out for good, that they would be stuck in there indefinitely.
The brief thought of it made my skin crawl, and to reason with my decision to disregard investigating it I focused on the thought of Helen, and the notion that somebody else in the building would help.
That, and the fact that as I reached the bottom of the stairwell and looked ahead at the locked shared entrance door a few yards away, that I was holding this loaded rifle, cradling it in my hands.
What would the police be doing? Would they be making any effort to stop what was happening outside? What sort of authority did they have in a situation like this, when chaos reigned?
Looking out at the glass door, seeing people running past and the flickering light of faraway flames, I reconciled with the fact that we truly were going to be making this up as we went along.
‘Let’s go,’ Luke said, nodding over at me, and with that, we headed to the door, I struck the door release to let us out, and we stepped into the chaotic world that awaited us outside of our apartment block.
The assault upon my senses almost knocked me to my ass.
The darkness, while easy to see through thanks to the various fires that had been set off, did not match the myriad of sounds that seemed to attack us from every direction. People were running in both directions of the street, a haphazard selection of cars unmoving, some with their hoods open. It was evident that a few people had made a desperate effort to get their vehicles to work, but to no avail.
Most of them had been abandoned. If nobody had been able to do anything about them… Well, it was becoming more and more plausible that our theory was correct.
It was an EMP.
The windows above were all dark, save for the occasional flicker of a candle from those who had had the same ideas as Luke and I.
In some untraceable location, there was a scream followed by a rush of gunfire.
Across the street at Harold’s, people were still making their way in and out through the smashed glass of the window frame.
‘We need to go check if they’re okay,’ I said. Luke unanimously agreed, and we set off across the street.
Stepping off the sidewalk and onto the tarmac of the road felt like how I imagined going over the top would feel during a war. I had never been in a situation like this in my life, and my heart began to race impossibly as we arched around cars. I kept the gun low and close to me, hoping that if I kept a low profile nobody would notice it.
Within a few seconds, though, it became evident that just about everybody around me didn’t care. In a situation like this everybody was looking out for number one – themselves – or those closest to them, just as Luke and I were. While a gun might have posed some threat, just about everyone wasn’t paying much attention at all to me.
We were invisible until the weapons actually started going off, or the bats started swinging.
We
stopped before we reached the sidewalk, watching people head in and leave. From within there was a scream, and a woman came running out, jumping between the frame with her hand over her mouth before taking off to our left.
‘Sam?’ Luke said from my side, nodding towards the window. I took a deep breath to try and ready myself for this illegal act I was about to commit – I supposed that was just something I would have to get used to – and set off forward.
I stepped up onto the small ledge, being careful not to come into contact with any broken glass, and landed onto the floor of the small store. Every one of these actions that I had to bring myself to carry out was a terrifying new notion to me, but when the chips were down and your life was on the line you just had to fucking deal with it.
‘Mr Dempsey?’ I shouted out through the darkness. I could only see the silhouettes of the shelves and the counter, those soap-flavoured cherry lip candy things that Luke was addicted to scattered about the floor amongst all the other things, the newspapers and the magazines, the packs of cigarettes and the odd little curios and souvenirs that he had had lining the shelves. ‘It’s Sam Johnson. Sammy, you know? And Luke? We buy candy and beer from you…’
I remembered something that somebody had told me once, although the person in particular had faded; it could take a lifetime to put something together but only a few minutes, perhaps seconds, to bring it all crashing down.
Suddenly, to my right, somebody came stumbling out from behind the shelves on the opposite side of the small store. The place was perhaps half the size of our living room, so we were in close confines. I could only make out a male figure, but they stopped and stared right at me for a moment. Luke and I both stared back as his chest heaved up and down, his head turning to look at us both with increasing distress.
Then, quite suddenly, he turned and ran through the shop window, taking off into the night, becoming just another part of the chaos.
I honestly wasn’t sure whether or not it was him that had killed Harold and his wife, Betty, but when I saw the outline of their hefty, well-fed bodies, one strewn over the counter and the other caught down by the side of the flip-exit, my breath caught in my throat. I heard Luke go quiet, and there we stood for just a few moments.
The Solar Pulse (Book 1): Beyond The Pulse Page 3