by Amy Cross
Then they ask me about the anarchists. They ask if there were really no anarchists in the days of electricity. I tell them that it's true, there were none. The anarchists came after the electricity left, and they came because there was nothing to stop them. I still think, ninety years later, that the anarchists are the most deathly evil things I have ever encountered. They are evil because they choose to be, because they delight in causing agony to others. I can't comprehend how their mind works, what drives them to do the things they do to their prisoners. Or perhaps I can comprehend it, but for the sake of my humanity I have to pretend that I can't.
When I talk of the old days, I'm always saddened when I remember friends who are no longer with us. I remember particularly a girl named Emma, who I met two or three times. She was always looking for a boy named Pierce, saying she had to find him. That was all she could talk about by the end: I must find Pierce, I must find Pierce, I must find Pierce. She wept at the thought of what she had done to him, and she felt a terrible shame at her betrayal. I think she blamed herself for abandoning him, for letting him down and for allowing him to become what he became. She was always trying to find a new way to save him, to bring him back, even as she got older. It was a tragedy in so many ways.
I'm tired, and the light is fading. I'll have to stop writing for now. Every time I get tired and go to bed, I wonder if this is the end for me. But my memories seem to keep waking me up afresh each morning. That's good. I'm not quite ready to die yet, not until I've written down everything that happened all those years ago.
There's a certain irony to the fact that I'm writing this tonight, of all nights. For one thing, I feel I am going to die in the next few hours. Don't ask me how, I just feel it in my bones. But the really important thing is that just as I enter my own personal darkness, the world is due to emerge into the light.
Chapter Two
“Finally,” says Pierce, the guy who lives next door, as I open my eyes and sit up. He's about my age, hot with messy, longish blonde hair and dark, intense eyes. We've lived side by side for five or six years and barely ever spoken, mainly because he's always seemed like a bit of a loner. Up close, though, he looks friendly enough, and he smiles as he stares at me. “I was fighting the urge to peek a look at your boobs,” he continues, “I think I was gonna give in soon, so it's probably a good thing you woke up when you did. You're Emma, right?”
I blink a couple of times and look around. I'm back inside the house, in the kitchen, but I can instantly tell that the whole jet crash thing wasn't a dream: the windows remain smashed in, and I can hear shouting and screaming outside. There's a smell of burning rubber and gasoline in the air.
“What happened?” I ask, checking my head and feeling a lump and a sore, tender area right on top.
“Short version,” Pierce says, taking a deep breath, “is a fucking passenger plane crashed down the road. Totaled about twelve houses. Still burning. Lots and lots of people almost certainly dead in very fiery ways”. He frowns. “It's quite exciting out there, you wanna come and see?”
I stare at him. “What's the long version of the story?”
He shrugs. “No-one knows,” he says darkly, fixing me with a determined stare. “Fucking thing just dropped out of the sky like a stone. Now stay still”. He wipes some tissue paper against my forehead, taking away a little blood. “I'm no expert,” he says, peering at the wound, “but I don't think you're dead or anything like that”.
“What?” I ask, trying to get up.
“Stay still!” he says, forcing me to stay where I am. “You hit your head, I don't know if you need stitches. You might be delirious. You might be lots of things”.
“Since when were you a doctor?” I ask.
“Since never,” he replies. “Therefore I don't know if you need stitches”. He sits back. “There. You probably won't die, and if you do, my conscience is clear. I did my best. It won't be my fault”.
We both stand up.
“What's happening out there?” I ask, looking at the back door.
“Like I said,” he replies, “there's a fucking huge jet that's smashed into a load of houses. Bits of it keep exploding. I guess that's the fuel tanks or something”.
I turn to him.
“Based,” he says sheepishly, “on my admittedly shaky expertise when it comes to such things”.
I walk to the window. From here, all I can see is thick black smoke covering the whole neighborhood. “Is anyone dead?” I ask.
“Well duh,” Pierce says, joining me at the window. “Hundreds,” he says, “maybe more. It was a big jet. I saw it come down, it was a double-decker. If you include the people on the ground, maybe thousands are dead. You should have seen the explosion. It was massive. Like a fireball, like 9/11 times ten”.
“Fuck,” I say.
“And you know the spooky thing?” he asks.
“There's something spooky about it?” I reply.
A grin crosses his lips. “It's been almost an hour since it happened,” he says, his eyes fixed on the horizon.
I stare at him. “Okay,” I say, not sure what he means.
“Listen,” he says.
I listen.
“I don't hear anything,” I say.
“Exactly,” he replies. “This shit went down an hour ago, and no-one's turned up to help. No police, no medics, no fire crews. Nothing. No sirens. No help at all. It's like... we're in this bland suburban neighborhood, and we're all alone. Apparently the rest of the world doesn't care about any of this”. He turns to me. “Isn't that cool?”
Looking out the window, it's like we're in the middle of a war-zone, like we've fallen through the laptop screen and ended up on CNN. I've never been abroad, never left America, but this is what I imagine it must be like: scary, uncertain, dangerous.
“Someone'll come,” I say. “They have to”.
“Not if they're dead,” Pierce says, smiling.
“Don't talk shit,” I say.
“What if,” he continues, warming to his theme, “there was some huge apocalypse and everywhere on Earth was destroyed and we're all that's left? What if...” He pauses for effect. “What if we have to repopulate the species?”
I turn to him. “You're enjoying this,” I say, disgusted.
“Me?” he says, looking surprised. “I'm not enjoying anything. I just think it's funny how much faith you have that we're going to get helped here when we're blatantly not”.
“They're coming,” I stress to him.
“Who are they?” he spits back at me, suddenly angry. “God? Angels? The government? If they were coming, they'd be here by now. If they were coming, we wouldn't even be having this conversation”. He pulls his phone from his pocket and thrusts it into my hands. “Call someone. Go on. Call someone for help. Anyone. Try it”.
I glare at him for a moment, then I flip open his phone and immediately see that it's blank. I try to turn it on, but it doesn't work.
“How can I?” I ask, handing it back to him. “The battery's dead”.
“It's not,” he says. He walks over to the other side of the room and flicks the light switch a few times; nothing happens. “Nothing works. The lights. The phones. The internet”. He grabs a torch from the side and flicks it on and off, except there's no light. “Nothing”.
“So there's a power cut,” I say. “The plane probably hit a power cable”.
“The plane landed after the power cut started,” Pierce says. “About two minutes after, to be precise. And a power cut wouldn't explain why the torch doesn't work, or why my fully-charged phone won't switch on. It's like -”
We're suddenly interrupted by a cry from outside, from the back yard.
“Help!” shouts a man with a muffled voice. He sounds like he's being strangled.
We rush out and find the old man from across the road staggering towards us, clutching his chest. At first I assume he's injured from the plane crash, but there's not a scratch on him as he collapses at our feet. Kneeling down, we ro
ll him over. His face is flushed and red, and he can barely breathe.
“Call help!” he splutters. “Call someone!”
“We can't,” says Pierce.
“Call help!” the old man says again, looking up at us desperately, turning even redder.
“You're having a heart attack,” Pierce says with the confident tone of voice of someone who seems to actually know what he's talking about.
The old man shakes his head. “Pacemaker,” he rasps, pulling open his shirt to reveal a chest with lots of white hairs and, beneath them, the distinctive lump of a pacemaker under his skin. “Pacemaker not working, need...” He gasps, like a fish out of water. “Need help. Call them!”
“There's no-one to call,” Pierce says. “The phones are dead”.
“Don't listen to him,” I say, interrupting. I keep my gaze on the old man, and I try my hardest to smile. “There's an ambulance coming,” I say. “They're on their way. They're gonna help you, I promise”.
The old man nods, but he's clearly not got long left. He can barely breathe, and he's clutching at his chest.
“What's your name”? I ask him.
“G... G...” He can't get the sounds out. “Gary Evans,” he eventually manages, with the kind of forced formality that you usually get from a kid on his first day of school.
“It's going to be okay, Gary,” I say.
“There's no -” Pierce starts to say, but I elbow him in the ribs and he falls back. I didn't mean to hit him so hard, but I'm not entirely sorry that I did.
“When are they gonna get here?” Gary asks, his voice fading, his eyes starting to glaze over.
“Soon,” I say. “Soon, Gary. Okay?”
He reaches his hand up, and I take it in mine, and then he stares at me for a moment before his head falls back. He keeps his eyes on the sky, then he breathes out slowly, and it takes me a few moments to realize that he's dead. Fuck, he died right in front of me, he died... I look down at his hand in mine. He died touching me! I let his hand go, freaked out by the whole thing.
“Why did you lie to him?” Pierce asks, still sitting back after I elbowed him.
“I don't know,” I say, shaking my head.
“Seems pretty cruel, lying to a dying guy,” Pierce continues.
“I wanted to give him hope,” I say, reaching down and closing Gary's eyes.
“False hope,” Pierce says. “They aren't coming. They can't come. Something's seriously wrong”.
“It'll be okay,” I say, staring down at Gary's dead face.
“Oh,” Pierce says, “you keep saying that “.
“It'll be okay,” I say again, this time more forcefully.
“Think about it,” Pierce says, sounding surprisingly calm. “Lights don't work. Computers don't work. Phones, batteries, fucking pacemakers don't work”. He comes closer and leans right in to my face. “A fucking aeroplane fell from the sky, and no-one came to even take a look. Don't you get it? It's not a power cut. It's more like... Electricity has stopped”.
I turn to him. “What?” I scowl.
“Nothing electrical works,” he says. “Even stuff with stored power, like batteries. It doesn't work. It's just stopped. It's like the concept of electricity just ceased to exist. The whole theory of how electricity works has just suddenly become false”.
I stare at him for a moment. “That can't happen,” I say eventually. “You're full of shit. Completely full of shit”.
“Am I?” he asks, staring me in a way that unnerves me because it's clear that he really believes this. “Whatever makes you feel better”. He pauses, his eyes fixed on mine. “But I'm totally, totally right. One hundred per cent, no doubt about it. And you know what else? I knew about two hours ago that this was gonna happen”.
Extract from the diary of Lydia Hoff
The first question, obviously, was a simple one: what happened? How could we go from having electricity one moment to having none the next? Where did it go? Everyone wanted to know, but no-one had an answer. It was as if it had just vanished. But eventually we started to hear rumors, and after a while these rumors started to seem like fact. I'm still not entirely sure what happened, but I have my suspicions.
A man came to our town one day and told us that there had been a solar flare that neutralized all the electricity. Well, that's not quite right: what it actually did is it prevented electrons from functioning in their old ways, so we were no longer able to generate electricity because the basic scientific principle behind electricity suddenly changed. We were thrown back a couple of hundred years in terms of scientific development.
Of course, there were others who said that this was an act of God. Many religious groups sprang up in the first years after the disaster happened, all claiming to understand what we had done to anger God and how we could possibly beg his forgiveness and mercy. I laughed at them at the time, but now that I'm old I find myself wondering if perhaps there was some truth to that. I'll tell you something that my own mother told me once: at the end, as they die, everybody believes in God. Everybody.
I have never believed in God. But now I wonder, when the end finally comes...
Chapter Three
“If my laptop worked, this would be so much easier,” Pierce says, sketching out a bunch of circles on a piece of paper as we sit in the kitchen of my parents' house. “I'd have 3D models, animations, the works. As it is...” He draws another circle, and a squiggly line connecting them. “There,” he says. “That's what happened”.
I look at the drawing and try to make sense of it.
“Okay,” says Pierce, “that circle is us. Earth. And that circle is the Sun. That squiggly line is a high-intensity electron storm that the Sun belched out earlier today. It's done it before, but this time it was huge. Huger than ever. And it was fast. There was almost no time for us to react. And I'm pretty sure that it neutralized electricity all over the planet”.
I stare at the drawing.
“How long for?” I ask.
He shrugs. “I was trying to work that out when the power went. Best guess is, it could be twenty, thirty years”.
I look at him. “No electricity for twenty or thirty years?”
He shakes his head.
“Can't be,” I say. “That can't be right”.
“Why not?” he asks. “Because you don't want it to be right?”
“They would have warned us,” I say.
“For fuck's sake,” he replies. “Who are they? Who's this mysterious 'they' who you keep thinking are gonna come and save us? No-one had enough warning about this. There's nothing 'they' could have done to stop it anyway. And 'they' ain't coming to pick up the pieces of that plane that crashed, or the pieces of any of the others that I'm damn sure crashed all over the country. All over the world”.
I stand up and go over to the window, looking out at the street. It looks pretty normal if you only look in one direction, but if you look the other way there's still a huge plume of black smoke coming from the burning plane and the burning houses beneath it.
“We should get out of here,” Pierce says behind me. “That plane isn't exactly clean. The fumes from the fire are gonna get more and more toxic, and there's no-one to put the flames out. It's gonna spread. Can't you feel how hot it is? It's gonna get hotter. Give it a few hours, the flames are gonna be on our doorstep. We have to go”.
“I'm not going anywhere,” I say. “Not until my parents get home”.
“Where are they?” he asks.
I swallow hard. “California for a conference”.
“California?” he repeats, clearly amused. “Fuck you, that's the other side of the country. They ain't getting back home any time soon, okay?”
“They'll be here,” I say.
“How?” he asks, coming over to join me at the window. “No planes, no trains. How are they gonna get here? You think gas is still gonna be on sale? Even if it is, you think the pumps'll still work? What do you think's gonna happen, everyone's gonna just be calm?”
/>
“They wouldn't leave me here,” I say, turning to him.
“It doesn't matter what they want to do,” he says. “They have no choice. If they set out now, to get from California to New Jersey would take them years. Fucking years”.
“The government will -”
“Fuck them!” Pierce shouts. He's getting angry. Just when I was starting to think that maybe he was okay, he's turning into a bundle of rage. “They can't help us! They have no more power than we have, and if they did, you don't think they'd be a little bit busy dealing with the potential fucking nuclear apocalypse?”
“What?” I say.
He sighs. “There are 104 nuclear power stations in the United States, okay?”
“Okay,” I mutter.
“Okay?” he says louder, shaking me. “Are you listening here?”
“Yes!” I shout back at him. “I'm listening! What's your point?”
“104 nuclear power stations,” he continues, “all of them now without electrical power. All of them. No cooling systems. No safety systems. Minimal back-ups. And no means of recovery whatsoever. Do you understand what that means?”
I sigh. “104 nuclear explosions in the next day or two?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “Not explosions. Meltdowns. Not up. Down. Get it? Huge blotches of land across the country, impossible to enter and impossible to avoid”.
“Impossible to avoid?” I say. “Why?”
“Because they're each about five miles wide,” he says, shaking my shoulders like I'm some kind of idiot. “And I don't know about you, but I sure as hell don't have a map of where they are, do you?”
I push him away. “Fuck off,” I spit at him. “I'll just find out by going onli...” My voice trails off. I turn and look at my laptop, and a heavy sinking feeling hits me. “Fuck,” I say softly. I turn back to Pierce. “What do we do? How long before they... start melting down?”
“I don't know what we do,” he says calmly. “And it's too late, they've already started. But we can't stay here because of the flames. We have to get out of here, go somewhere where there's something better”.