by Ryan Casey
“Yeah, well,” Holly said. “We’ll be at my place soon, anyway. I’m sure Dad will be able to help.”
“Good to know you’ve got a lot of faith in him,” Harriet said, sarcasm cutting through her voice. “I mean, at this point, I’m pretty much expecting Superman.”
Holly stopped, then. She didn’t usually stand up like this, or bite the bait. But the stress of the situation and everything else made her turn around and face Harriet, square on. “What’s your problem?”
Harriet raised her hands. “Hey. It’s not me who brought us out here on a wild goose chase.”
“Ladies,” Kumal said, stepping in as per usual. “Please. We’re friends here, okay? We can’t let ourselves get driven apart by our own battles. Right now, we don’t know a lot about what’s happened. The best thing we can do is stick together. Right?”
Harriet muttered something under her breath. Holly thought about grilling her, asking for the truth. In the end, she bit her tongue.
“Looks like the hospital’s in the shit,” Benny said.
Holly didn’t know what he was on about at first. It was only when she looked around that she saw the chaos—and it hit her hard in the chest.
The hospital was up ahead. It was never a quiet place. But right now, it was in crisis.
There were people queuing up outside. Some were banging on the doors, which had been closed. Others were smashing windows trying to get inside. Ambulances lay vacant in the car park. People on stretchers, some alive, some dead. Other people comforted one another, inconsolable.
“And this is a place that should have backup generators,” Kumal said. “Doesn’t look so orderly and together to me. Does it you, Harriet?”
Holly looked at Harriet. And for the first time, she had to admit that she actually felt sorry for her. Because it looked like she was realising the severity of events for the first time. And that wasn’t nice for anyone to witness.
“All the people on critical care,” Benny muttered, eyes wide. “My nan. She was on there once. If she’d been in there today…”
He didn’t finish. He didn’t have to. They all knew exactly what he was implying, and how serious this all was.
They walked on further. But as Holly walked, she couldn’t get the image of those desperate people outside the hospital out of her mind. And the worst thing? The darkness. The darkness surrounding that hospital entrance. It’d been nightmarish. The shadows over the dead. The way people feared the dark anyway, and how horrible it was that they’d been thrust into this mess.
She just hoped that everyone she cared about was okay. That all her friends were okay, all her dance mates were okay.
And that Dad was okay.
She thought about Dad. How guilty she felt for the way she’d spoken to him when she last saw him. He’d been an idiot. But he’d tried. And he was in a bad way. He wasn’t the man he used to be when Mum was alive. She had to see that much was true.
She was about to keep going when she heard a smash.
“Wait!” Benny said.
They stopped. All of them stopped.
Because up ahead, they were witnessing something awful.
Two men had emerged, balaclavas over their faces. They approached one of the stationary cars in the road. Smashed the windows while a woman sat in the driver’s seat, baby by her side, screaming.
They reached in and grabbed the woman’s handbag. Then, even worse, knife to her neck, they made her take the baby out of its booster seat and took that, too.
“Why are they doing this?” Gina whispered.
Holly swallowed a lump. “Because it doesn’t take long for things to turn to chaos,” she said.
“Holly’s right,” Kumal said, as they watched the looters, helpless. “Think about the London riots. It started as an uprising against a death. Then it descended into looting. And that was when the lights were still working, when the power was still on. Money doesn’t matter while the lights are out. Everything is currency now. When people panic… they do whatever they feel they have to in order to survive. It’s just self-preservation.”
Holly glanced at Harriet again. She looked traumatised. Like her entire world was falling apart. And while she felt a smug satisfaction at seeing that smartarse looking so dire, she felt for her.
“We’ll be okay,” she said.
Then when the looters had gone, they carried on their walk.
They kept moving. Passed more cars. Passed more confused people. Passed more arguing people. Even passed a Christian preacher claiming the world was over, that judgement was here.
But the weirdest thing was just walking down streets she’d known for her whole life, and for the first time, realising just how unsafe they were.
That was when they got there.
She stood outside her house.
Heart racing.
Chest tight.
And she swallowed a lump in her throat.
“Well,” Benny said, half-smiling. “Here goes nothing.”
Holly nodded, took a deep breath, and walked through the front gates towards her house.
It felt like her journey was ending.
Little did she know, it’d only just begun.
Mike
When Mike heard the pained cry, his whole body went numb.
More flashbacks. More memories of his past. A fragment from his past that he didn’t want to recall; didn’t want to remember.
But there was no denying the reality of what he was hearing. No denying the inevitability of the pain he was about to come across.
There was a person here. A person struggling.
And one way or another, Mike needed to find a way to help them.
Alison looked at him, bewilderment on her face. “What was that?”
She didn’t expect an answer, Mike was sure. She already knew damn well what it was.
All the pair of them could do was turn towards the alleyway by their side.
All they could do was hold their breath, suck up their tension and walk towards it.
When Mike stepped into the alleyway, he didn’t understand what he was looking at. Not at first. It was dark, after all. The thick of night. The walls of the buildings either side of this alleyway made it seem like some kind of concrete jungle; like the buildings were looking down at him, watching him.
He started to hope, as his heart raced, that perhaps what he’d heard was a part of his racing mind, somehow. Post-traumatic stress, they called it.
Mike had been through enough past trauma to know it was a thing, that was for sure.
But then he heard it again. Softer this time, but definitely there. A gentle wail.
And when he heard it, Mike’s body went cold.
He could see movement up ahead. And his first instinct was to be cautious. People were at loggerheads already. A lack of communication was sending people mad. He needed to get some supplies gathered and he needed to get out of the city, that much was for sure.
But this movement. This pain.
He wanted to turn away from it.
Instead, he found himself walking towards it…
At first, it wasn’t totally clear what the source of the movement was. It looked like there was somebody slumped against the wall at the side of a rubbish bin. And then the closer Mike looked, he realised there were in fact two people here.
No. Not two people exactly.
There was a man and a dog.
And that’s when it hit him.
The man was sitting on a dirty little blanket. He was wrapped up on his bottom half with a sleeping bag, which was torn and in a state.
By his side, a Siberian Husky, looking up with its bright eyes and giving a whine as Mike and Alison approached.
“Oh God,” Alison said.
It wasn’t Mike’s immediate reaction, because he was still taking in the scene, still wrapping his head around it.
But then he saw it.
The man was covered in blood. There was something wedged in the side of hi
s neck, and in his shoulder. Something metal.
“A drone,” Alison said.
Her words confirmed Mike’s thoughts right away. Through some awful mischance, a drone must’ve been flying above this alleyway when the EMP struck—which was looking more and more likely by the second. It’d fallen apart. Smashed against the man’s skull, judging by the blood pouring down his bearded face. A sharp piece of the metal had wedged into his neck and shoulder.
Mike’s first instinct was to turn away, to run. Because that tension was here. That threat of a return from the torture of his memories.
But then he shook that trepidation off. Because he was here, he had to try and help.
And that instinct to help took over completely.
“Hey,” Mike said.
He walked over to the man. Put his hand on his. It was cold, dry, covered in sores.
He looked at the wound. Shit. They were going to need something serious to remove the metal from him. They didn’t have any disinfectant, other than the half-empty vodka bottle by the man’s side.
“This—this is going to hurt,” Mike said, as he lifted the vodka bottle, poured some on the man’s shoulder.
The man squealed with pain. But when he did, it just made matters worse, as more blood pooled from his neck.
Mike’s heart pounded. Because every second that passed by was a second wasted. This man was in a serious state. If he didn’t get some kind of proper medical attention soon, he was almost certainly going to die.
“Can’t we get him to a hospital or something?” Alison said.
“There’s no point,” Mike said. “The hospitals will be bad places to be right now. There might be some fuel left in their backup generators—if they even have any—but not enough to last. No working machinery and a lot of angry and grieving people. We have to find another way. We have to…”
But as Mike spoke, he felt the homeless man’s hand tighten on his. He looked at him. Saw that he was glaring right into his eyes. His dry, cracked lips were moving, like he was trying to say something.
“Arya,” he said. “Take… take Arya. Look after Arya. Look after Arya…”
And Mike didn’t understand what he was saying, not at first. Just that this gripping of his hand and this moment of total intimacy between the pair of them took him right back three months ago.
Beside Caitlin’s hospital bed.
Holding her hand, promising her everything was going to be okay.
“You aren’t going anywhere,” Mike said, fighting off the emotion. “You’re going to keep fighting and we’re going to get you out of this mess.”
And then the homeless man did something that broke Mike’s heart.
He half-smiled, blood covering his lips, and he shook his head. “My journey’s over. But Arya. Arya…”
His hand tightened even further. So tight now that if he wanted to let go, Mike wasn’t sure he could. His eyes started to close. Blood bubbles spurted from his lips.
“Don’t give up,” Mike said, eager for this not to end. “Just… just hold on in there. Hold on.”
He did.
For just a few seconds longer.
Then, his grip loosened, he let out a final, forced breath, and the man was gone.
Holly
The second Holly stepped inside her home, she knew something was amiss.
It was always quiet in this house at night, usually. The only thing that tended to wake her was the accidental clinking of one of Dad’s beer bottles or the sound of him creeping up the stairs in the early hours after falling unconscious for a while. Before, it used to be the sound of Mum’s giggling when Dad made one of his funny jokes or something like that.
That was a kind of noise she longed for. A kind of noise she missed.
Right now… total silence.
Her friends were waiting outside. She’d told them she wanted to go in here and check it out for herself. She’d seen people breaking into houses already. She couldn’t believe how quickly things were falling apart. It was like the leash had been taken off society, like people were finally free to do whatever they desired—even if it was just for a short period of time.
She hoped her friends would be okay, out there on the street waiting.
But the only thing that seemed to matter to Holly right now was finding her dad.
The worrying thing?
She got the strong feeling that Dad wasn’t home at all.
She checked the lounge. Saw a few beer bottles on the floor, on their side. She usually picked them up, took them to recycling. She didn’t want to have a go at Dad for leaving them there. He was having a hard enough time as it was, and she wanted to make sure she was there for him, that she was strong for him.
She remembered what her Uncle Norman told her at the funeral. She’d never really liked her Uncle Norman. He was too serious, never showed any real interest in her or even in Mum—not until she died.
He came back. Acted like he’d been there for Dad—his brother—all along. And then he’d approached Holly when she was on her own. Put a hand on her shoulder, looked into her eyes.
“You’re going to have to be strong for your dad,” he said. “Can you do that?”
She’d nodded. And those words had stuck with her. Because the idea of being strong for Dad seemed weird back then. What about her? Who was going to be strong for her?
It was only in the weeks since that Holly realised that she did in fact have to be strong for Dad. He was the one who needed a rock beside him.
She moved on from the lounge, shifting the beer bottles in the process.
The kitchen was empty. The kitchen where Dad and Mum used to cook, where they used to laugh and joke. The kitchen where they’d all eat breakfast together, even when Dad didn’t have to be up early, and when Mum had days off. Breakfast time was always family time.
Since Mum died, Holly and Dad didn’t have breakfast in here all that often together.
She saw movement, then. Movement in next door’s garden. It was Barry. He’d set up some kind of fire and was cooking kebabs over it. He looked strangely content. He was a nice guy. And Holly wondered if maybe he was happy about what was happening after all—or maybe he just didn’t expect the chaos to last all that long. Maybe it would. Maybe it wouldn’t. That was the hard thing. Nobody knew.
She walked away from the kitchen, up the stairs. As she climbed these steps, she felt the floorboards creaking underfoot. And she grew more and more convinced Dad wasn’t here. That he was out there somewhere. He’d been drinking when he got to the ballet hall. She just had to hope he’d got to wherever he’d gone okay.
She looked in her bedroom. And then the toilet. And then she found herself freezing up as she made her way towards the bedroom at the end of the corridor. Mum and Dad’s room. The room she used to run to on a weekend morning and lie in bed with them for a couple of hours, just laughing and joking.
The room she hadn’t even dared look at since Mum died.
She walked to the door. Put her hand on it. Went to open it.
Then she stopped.
She could tell Dad wasn’t in there. She couldn’t hear him—no sense of him whatsoever.
She stepped away from the door. Because going into that room was still a tender wound. It probably always would be.
And then she walked back down the stairs, back into the kitchen. Back over to the notepad, where they all left notes for each other. Nipped to shops. Will get myself a Galaxy ;) Things like that.
She pulled open the notepad and put pen to paper. But she didn’t know where to start, where to begin.
So in the end, as the tears welled up, Holly decided to just be honest.
That’s all she could be.
That’s all she could do.
She finished writing the note. She didn’t want to read it over because reading it back just made it all the more real; all the more painful.
She just had to be grateful that it was done, now.
It was done. And as much
as she wanted to stay here, as much as she wanted to wait, she knew Dad wasn’t coming home.
It was time to do what she knew Dad would want her to do in this kind of situation.
It was time to go get some supplies.
It was time to move into the country until this passed by.
It was time to start surviving.
She wiped away her tears, took a deep breath and stepped outside.
Benny looked up at her, eyes wide. None of them said anything. They didn’t have to. They knew. They all knew.
“What now, then?” Gina said.
Holly swallowed a lump in her throat and listened to the gentle bustle of confusion, of voices, of distant chaos.
“Now, we start surviving,” she said.
Mike
“I’m not taking a dog with me. I’m sorry, but it’s just not happening.”
Mike felt cold when he said the words. He felt even colder when he saw the way Alison was looking at him.
“You have to take the dog,” she said.
“I really don’t.”
“I mean, if you don’t… that pretty much makes you evil.”
Mike raised an eyebrow. “Evil?”
“Well… look at him, for heaven’s sakes.”
“Her,” Mike said, shooting a glance at Arya. “Arya’s a girl’s name.”
“See. You even know the gender before I do. There’s obviously a connection there.”
Mike looked at Arya as she sat there by her dead owner’s side. She was staring at him with those beautiful bright blue eyes. She was whining.
He had to admit she was a good looking dog. Beautiful, in fact. But Mike had never been good with pets. He got too attached to them, which always made it a problem when their time came to pass away—which they always did, and far too soon.
“Anyway,” Mike said. “Why don’t you take her if you like her so much?”
“Oh, we’re still doing that, are we?”
“Doing what?”
“This whole ‘going our separate ways’ thing.”