Chapter Seven
Thief
‘What are we gonna do, Sam?’
A few minutes later we had somewhat recovered from the fight. We had made our way in silence to the end of alleyway, and, seeing that there wasn’t too much commotion in the next street, crossed through it. There was some silent agreement between the two of us that we didn’t want to head into another alleyway right now – whether it was for fear of this happening again or because it reminded us of that absolute fuck-up of an event that had just occurred… It didn’t matter.
‘I’m sorry,’ I finally said. ‘I just couldn’t do it. How am I supposed to just kill somebody like that?’
‘They took our stuff, Sam. I don’t care about you not wanting to shoot someone. We’ve been friends for years, d’you really think that I’d be pissed off with you for not killing someone? Or at least… Fatally injuring them? I care that we just lost our entire supply of food. What are we gonna do? Will Helen have much?’
I knew without even answering. She didn’t drink bottled water, and usually bought food on the way home – not takeout, but she worked long hours and usually didn’t have time to plan her meals. The most she would have would be some jars of curry sauce, milk and some junk food in the cupboards over the sink.
‘No,’ I said. ‘no, probably not… What are we going to do?’
‘I don’t know.’
We ducked into the alcove of an untouched flower shop beneath a veranda. It seemed to be the only place in the city that we had seen so far that wasn’t sullied by the riots.
In our own way, we had now brought the semblance of violence to this odd, undisturbed piece of land, this precious little thing that had not been exposed… Yet. The flowers inside would continue to grow for some time, perhaps – they would last a lot longer than many of the people in the streets of this city, and in the more populated areas… Presuming fire didn’t consume them or somebody looking for trouble didn’t make the deluded but conscious decision to go running inside and smash them all to pieces, just because they could and there was nobody around to stop them.
We were not the violent ones, but we had experienced it, in the alleyway and in the fire, in watching the plane and in hearing the gunfire. We were not a part of it by intention, but by necessity.
That was when the thought struck me. I couldn’t tell whether it was just a thought or some viable, enormous change in my mind set, but as we stood there in silence and I chased the thought up, I realised that it was the latter.
‘We need to find something,’ I said, staring straight ahead while Luke did too.
‘I know that, Sam, but where?’
‘From a little store, or something.’
‘Are you crazy? They’ve all shut up shop.’
‘I know. That’s why we’re going to steal them.’
This was the point at which Luke looked over at me, and I kept on staring straight ahead at some unimportant location up ahead. Nothing relevant – my mind was just set on this notion.
‘You want to break in somewhere?’
‘We need to,’ I said, turning to look him in the eyes. ‘Look, I know that we’re trying to maintain some set of morals here, but we need to be realistic. Honestly… I think it’s only after you have this whole situation, or the reality of this whole situation, shoved in your face that you end up realising how serious it is. It’s every man for himself out here, and we need to look after ourselves or we’re never going to get to Helen’s. We’re halfway there and we’ve already been mugged, caught in a fire and shot at.’
‘The first one wouldn’t have happened if you’d just gone ahead and shot that guy…’
‘Don’t fucking pull that shit on me, Luke! It’s not just some simple task to shoot someone even if they are stealing something from you.’
Luke went quiet for a brief moment before looking away and running a hand through his hair.
‘Yeah… Right, look… I’m sorry. It’s just frustrated me, that they could just go and take something from us like that.’
‘I know… I’m sorry I couldn’t bring myself to do it.’
‘It’s okay. We’re both still alive, that’s the important thing.’
‘Yeah.’
‘So you seriously wanna do this? You want to rob somewhere?’
‘We’re not gonna rob it, all right? I don’t wanna smash the place up and drag half the contents out into the street. All I want to do is take what we need. Water, some food for the road, any useful canned stuff. It’ll only take a minute, and if we go to somewhere around here nobody will know. We’re just looking out for ourselves. What could go wrong?’
***
In the distance, billowing clouds of smoke continued to rise over the skyline. I had seen videos of planes crashing on the internet, back when the internet was a thing – I remembered thinking how, even though a standard carrier was pretty huge, the plume of smoke that they created when they struck the ground nose first was utterly baffling. That much fuel, though, and all of it being set alight in an instant?
Who was to say what it had crashed into? It could have wiped out entire apartment blocks before finally coming to a stop. The casualties would be vast and innumerable, never fully recovered or counted. The worst part, though? This was probably happening all over the country, or all over the world. How many people had been wiped out by falling planes? How many had drowned, clinging to each other in freezing cold water after they had landed in the ocean?
My stomach turned at the notion but quickly subsided – the fact of looking after myself, Luke and Helen, and then getting out of the city, became the only priority in my mind.
We dashed hurriedly to the next street along the roads, seeing that things were similarly quiet here – they were bound to be in some areas, just by sheer chance. It all depended on a series of factors, though – whether people had decided to stay indoors in the hours since the EMP, or whether the appearance of the plane crash had finally caused something to click in their minds that everything was not okay, and that they needed to get out of the city.
Densely populated areas would be the worst – more resources would be available, sure, but those resources would be fought over by many more people. In the countryside, amongst the farms and the suburbs, there were fewer people, but here the propensity for mass hysteria was much higher.
We were right in the middle of it all.
Herd mentality also occurred to me. People from entire buildings or floors might be leaving together, or staying together. If one family from one apartment decided that they were leaving, others might join them. Most people wouldn’t have ideas or theories of their own as to what to do - they wouldn’t have even considered what the outcome of their actions might be – and yet they would jump on whatever bandwagon seemed most appealing to them.
When the media goes dark and there are no screens or papers to tell people what to do, everybody starts looking to the most charismatic leader with the most conviction in the nearby vicinity.
That’s how dictators get elected in times of great distress.
I shunned this trailing, intrusive thought aside along with all of the others that weren’t relevant to the moment.
We were six blocks away.
It wasn’t long before I saw somewhere suitable, and felt some part of me changing as my heart raced faster at the prospect.
It was a store set back into one of the fronts on the street, a tiny place that you head if you were intent on spending your week off holed up in your apartment, only leaving for whisky and junk food. Spots like this existed all over the city out of pure necessity for the city-living human condition.
‘There.’
We stopped directly across the street from the store, staying still as we looked over at it. The paranoia of doing something that, the day before, I had never even remotely dreamed of doing, caused me to look with burgeoning analysis up and down the street in the event that a police officer might come running.
We were getting closer and clos
er out of the city, and as an end result the bare sources of light – the candles really being the only thing, were becoming scarce.
‘Is this gonna work, Sam?’
‘I don’t know… But what could go wrong?’
‘We get shot by some excitable shopkeeper who’s just waiting for someone to break in. Everybody has a gun hiding behind the counter. Haven’t you ever seen those security footage cam shows where some gunman gets beaten up with a bat or gets a gun turned on them?’
I looked him up and down and, without saying a word, and seriously considering what he had said and the possible options that laid ahead, set off across the quiet street.
We were all alone.
I approached the window and looked inside, still holding the gun in my hands. A vague awareness of it registered to me as my mind attempted to find a way to get inside.
‘How are we gonna-’
With little apprehension, and still somewhat high on the events that led to us losing our original provisions in the first place, I raised the gun back and struck it against the glass window set into the front door.
The little Sorry, we’re closed sign fell away to the ground inside, along with the shattered glass as I turned my head away to avoid anything flying in our direction.
‘Jesus Christ, Sam.’
‘I know. But desperate times, buddy.’
There were no alarms, no sirens, and no shouts beyond those that we had already heard or could hear at the time. I expected the cavalry to come running from all directions, but there was nothing.
I couldn’t see a damned thing, and it took some serious care to make sure that I didn’t snag myself on any broken glass as I reached through and turned the handle from the inside. I felt beneath it for the lock and turned it, clicking it open before turning the handle. The door gave and opened, and I looked at Luke once more before stepping inside, finalising our route into criminal breaking and entering.
Just like when we had stepped out of the apartment hours ago, stepping through the door frame was like stepping into some alternate dimension. I felt like somebody else was doing all of this, breaking the window, entering the store, and now looking about this place in the near complete dark.
‘Water and any long-lasting food we can find,’ Luke said. ‘Within reason.’
‘Yep.’
It was only a small store – perhaps the size of our living room back at the apartment. For a moment I thought back to the grocery store across the street, where I had seen Harold’s body lying on the floor. All of a sudden the copious events of that night that had already struck us came rushing back to me, as if I was experiencing them all at once, and I found myself halted in my tracks. My heart pounded and my head suddenly felt heavy.
I had more to worry about right now, and I didn’t want my friend to see me like this. I could barely register his movements about the shop. He was being quiet but his footsteps still tapped between the few rows of food on the floor.
Somehow I managed to regain some control over myself. I took a few deep, quiet breaths, thought back to the memory of Helen’s face, and clenched my hands tightly. It wasn’t anger – it was a blistering need to get to her.
She was no damsel in distress, but I needed to know that she was okay. In the midst of that moment it briefly occurred to me that she might be doing the same thing as Luke and I. She might have grouped up with someone and set off in our general direction. The one thing I could have used to get in contact with her was now just a useless piece of metal, fractured and broken. It could have resolved all of this, these hours of chaos and bloodshed and crime. People just wanted to know if there loved ones were all right. Phones could let us coordinate and communicate, and know what was happening.
It baffled me how there was no back-up for this, but nobody on Earth ever feels responsible for running these things, unless they’re paid to do it. There’s always somebody out there, we assume, to come and save us, to resolve the situation and take us back to our old comforts.
Until there isn’t.
‘Sam?’
‘Yeah…’ I said, shaking my head back into the room. ‘Sorry, I was just thinking about something else.’
‘I got a few things… Is there anything on your side?’
I looked about in the darkness, trying to make out the labels and items and general objects upon the shelves. All were untouched. I picked up a few tinned goods, knowing the vice of all of this – it was the most precious thing in this situation, but it was also the heaviest in comparison to the food that lasted only a few days.
Everything has it’s pros and cons.
‘Water over there?’ I asked.
‘Yeah.’
‘I’ll grab a few tins, we just need to worry about the weight is all. We need to sort out a new bag as soon as we can. Holdall.’
‘Let’s get going. This place is creeping the shit out of me,’ Luke said.
My senses felt heightened on this side of the door. I could feel the coldness of every steel tin that I picked up, the smell of the air, the warmth of our surroundings in this, the dead of night. By my best guess it was probably 1 or 2am. People would be disoriented and confused even if the world hadn’t gone to shit.
The thing was, though, that even if my senses weren’t heightened during all of this madness, it didn’t take a whole lot for me to see the flashing of a generated light just across the street, and the sound of raised, heated voices between several people whose silhouettes moved about at the steps to an apartment building.
Chapter Eight
Generator, Generator
The light shut out no sooner than we had seen it, and in the dimness that I had grown accustomed to I could see a single man stood at the top of some steps leading up to the front door of the building.
At the base of the steps were five people, a mix of men and women that I could tell from first glance. They were raising their voices, while the man stood at the top.
We held our ground across the street, on the other side of the broken glass now, and listened to every sound, watching every movement.
‘Man, come on,’ one of the men shouted with a gruff desperation. ‘We’re in the freaking dark up there. There’s no water, and I’m guessing if you’ve got that light working then you’ve got other stuff, too?’
There were a few loud words of agreement from the people around him, but the man at the top of the steps didn’t say a word for several moments. He didn’t move, simply standing there and looking about them.
I didn’t know whether or not they could even see us.
Then, he spoke:
‘My business is my business. I’ve seen you people about before, going about your days. You seem like a nice group of people. Betting you all do good work, and wouldn’t harm anybody unless they harmed or threatened you first. But let me be clear and say it once again – my business is my business. This is my apartment. My wife and I keep ourselves to ourselves, and you have no reason to be coming up to my door and causing trouble. Please go back to your homes.’
It was immediately evident that he was somebody who was in control of himself, and who was trying to maintain some control over his situation. From his weathered voice I could also tell that he was probably in his 50s or 60s.
‘We ain’t going anywhere, old man. You’ve got stuff up there that we need.’
‘Need?’ The older man laughed.
‘Yeah.’
‘I don’t care if you need it. This is still America, even if the grid has shut down, and this is my property. Now, I’m not gonna tell you again – get out of here.’
The group of men and women looked at each other, before that gruff voice from the front said;
‘You gonna make us?’
It was that subtle, underhanded reference to physical altercations that had resulted in so many fights, and it was exactly what this guy had done just now. He had hinted at the act of himself, or the older man, pushing each other and resorting to violence.
This
is how people got each other killed.
‘If the occasion calls for it, son,’ the man said. ‘But I don’t wanna have to. Leave.’
That was when the leader of this group stepped forward.
It was immediately evident what was going on just from listening to this conversation. This man had probably been up in his apartment, and in the midst of all of this, somehow, these people knew he had some resources stashed up there.
He had had a light… How had he managed to do that if everything was dead?
‘You stay the fuck down there!’ The older man shouted suddenly. I heard Luke swear quietly from my side, and just a few moments later, as the lackeys at the leader’s side looked about at each other, they all began to make their way towards the man.
‘What do we do?’ Luke said.
I had to think quickly about the situation at hand, but even that went out of the window when the group awkwardly went for the man, all trying to attack him as he batted them away. He looked as if he could hold his own, but against five people?’
‘Fuck this,’ I said, setting off hurriedly towards the scene. I thought back to the fire and the burning building, to the man lying dead behind his door after his pacemaker had likely blown up in his chest.
Luke, ever faithful, followed me, and I suddenly realised that I was still carrying this gun.
I stopped at the steps.
‘HEY!’
I had no idea that I had the ability to shout that loudly, so when it escaped me there was a shocked expression on my face – a good thing that it was dark, because my resolve would have been questioned by the assailants immediately.
Good thing my control on the gun was steady.
Slowly, one by one, the fight came to a stop, and they all looked around at me – even the elderly man. They all looked with terror and apprehension between me and the gun.
They didn’t know a damn thing about me.
Sam Johnson, copywriter? Or Sam Johnson, ex-navy seal, black ops agent?
Sam Johnson, dumbass holding a gun.
‘Get the fuck away from him.’
With a similar slowness, they all steadily drew away without saying a word. I waited there for a minute considering my options as we all stood in silence, before finally deciding on the best course of action.
The Solar Pulse (Book 1): Beyond The Pulse Page 6