Fighting Darkness: A Post-Apocalyptic EMP Thriller (Fighting to Survive Book 2)

by Alex Knightly

“Come on, Dan. It’s me. Open up.”

  He hurried back through the house. His hands were shaking so hard that Terry had to gently push him out of the way and turn the key in the door.

  It was only then that he thought of everything that had happened. The whisky had done its job in that respect. For just a few hours, he’d forgotten all the shit that had happened with the neighbours. Now he was going to have to relive it all again.

  Even that couldn’t dampen his good mood now, though. Terry opened the door and a moment later Annie had thrown herself into his arms. He staggered backwards with the force of it.

  “I thought we’d never get back. Jesus, Dan, did you know the neighbours have put up a roadblock just before their house? What a bunch of assholes. It was a crappy one we moved in a few minutes, but still.”

  He exchanged a significant look with Terry. Was now the time to tell her? He didn’t know for sure.

  Annie pulled away from him and dragged him aside as Clive, Si and another older man entered the house. He was about to close the door when he saw another three people stepping into the porch.

  Annie took his arm. “It’s a long story. This is Pete, Josh and their mother.”

  “Linda,” said a rather sharp-faced woman in a grubby white top. “My name is Linda.”

  Dan half-smiled at them. “Hi. Hello. I’m Dan. Come in.” He shot Annie a quizzical look and regretted it immediately. If he was exhausted, she must be absolutely shattered.

  “Come on, everyone. Let’s go have a cup of tea, eh?”

  He looked down and his heart flipped when he saw Annie watching him with that look in her eyes. It told him instantly that she knew something was up. “Nothing,” he said in a voice that was far too jolly for the circumstances. He shook his head. “Nothing.”

  “Really?” She clenched her teeth the way she always did when she was gearing up for a confrontation. “Because it doesn’t seem like it. You didn’t even bat an eyelid when you saw those people. That’s not like you.”

  He shrugged. “I’m tired. So are all of you.”

  “And the roadblock. That didn’t seem to faze you either.”

  “Look, Annie. I don’t even know what’s been going on with you over the past four days. I can’t imagine it was very pleasant. You should get some rest. We can talk in the morning.”

  “Dan.” There was a clear warning in her voice.

  He sighed. He supposed he wouldn’t much like being kept in the dark either. “Okay. I don’t want to tell the others yet. We’ve had trouble with the neighbours, Annie.”

  “Really?” her eyes were wide but he could sense she didn’t realise what was coming; that she thought this was more pettiness rather than anything more serious.

  “It’s escalating, Annie. They killed one of the ewes earlier. Actually, that’s not quite right. Maimed her and left her is more accurate. I had to try and put her down as humanely as possible.”

  “Oh, Jesus.” Her hand flew to her mouth. Some of those sheep were more like pets than livestock.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Why the hell would they do that?” she shook her head. “None of this makes sense. The roadblock and now this. Why would they bother? What do they gain from this?”

  “I don’t know. But I can’t tell you how glad I am that you’re back. It’s been so frustrating sitting here and not being able to do anything about it.”

  Her expression hardened. “Well we’re back now. And you know what? I’ve had it with those neighbours.” She pulled a gun from the back of her jeans and held it up, her eyes sparkling with hate. “Fuck them. The cheek of them, coming here and thinking they can cause havoc. Like what was the point in that roadblock except to annoy us.”

  “Annie,” he muttered. “You’re not thinking straight. There’s more of them than there are of us. You can’t just go over there.”

  “Yeah don’t.”

  They both turned at the same time to see who’d spoken. As far as Dan was aware, the others had all gone to the kitchen like Annie suggested. Now he saw that one of the young lads had lingered behind.

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean to listen in. I wanted to talk to you about the neighbours. About Miles Sanderson.”

  Dan looked from the lad to Annie. “What’s all this?”

  She closed her eyes and shook her head. She looked dead on her feet. “Long story. Can I tell you tomorrow.”

  He nodded, eager to know but not wanting to push her. “Yeah. Let’s go get some tea and sort sleeping arrangements.”

  “Wait,” the lad said. “Please. Promise me you’re not going to go over there and start shooting people.”

  Dan scoffed. It was happening again. He’d stayed here while the others were on the road and because of that, he’d missed out on the experiences that had bonded them together. Not that he envied those experiences, but still.

  Annie wasn’t buying it this time, though. He could see there was a difference here compared to how she’d been with Si and Clive.

  “Just stop, okay? Not up for discussion.”

  By now she was slurring. He had to get her sitting down before she fell asleep on her feet.

  But the boy wasn’t moving. “Please. Just don’t do anything rash.”

  “Who are you?” Dan demanded, rounding on him. He’d never let anyone speak like that to Annie. It didn’t matter that she could defend herself. Who was this kid to tell her what to do in her own house? “And why do you think this is any of your business?”

  “It’s not,” he said, looking pained. “But it is. I know him, see. And all of this—whatever he’s done—I can tell you now it’s probably all been calculated to make you act. Think about it. If you go over there and kill one of his people, he’s justified in retaliating.”

  “He could just come here and shoot us all if he wanted to by that logic.”

  “No. He wouldn’t. He’s calculating. This is what he wants. He doesn’t give a damn about anyone but himself. He doesn’t care if you kill someone at his house if it gives him the excuse to come after you while playing the righteous hero.”

  “And you know this how?”

  “I work for the same company as he does. I know how he operates.”

  “With all due respect,” Dan said. “That’s hardly the same thing.”

  “Isn’t it? Now’s the time people show their true colours. I know him. I’ve watched him.” He turned to Annie. “Tell him. The only reason you brought us here instead of killing us is because I know him.”

  Dan gasped. “What? Annie, what’s he talking about?”

  “It’s true,” she muttered.

  Josh seemed to take this as a good sign. “So you’ll wait?”

  She shook her head. “Not for long, though. He’s not going to get away with this for long.”

  “Trust me,” Josh said gravely. “I think I know how to get to him. And it doesn’t involve you putting yourself in danger and going over there in the middle of the night.”

  Annie

  Annie led them into the kitchen, still frowning at what Josh had said. Now wasn’t the time to get into it. She was still livid about the ewe—how cruel were these people, hurting animals to make a point?—but she’d calmed down enough to see that Josh was right. She shouldn’t just go over there all guns blazing. Not when she was running on empty with hardly any sleep. They were back now. There were ten of them. They’d work this out.

  As much as she longed to collapse onto one of the chairs and sleep, she didn’t allow herself the luxury. She wasn’t going to rely on Dan to look after them. He’d been through his own battles. She’d only needed to take one look at him to see how exhausted he was.

  She took the kettle and filled it with water from the bucket. “The well’s holding up then?”

  “It is,” Dan said.

  Thank goodness they’d kept the old kettle. She’d thought about chucking it so many times. The whistling annoyed the hell out of her. They’d bought it for camping, but they rarely used it, preferring t
o fill a thermos with boiling water before they left the house and use that for tea. She’d held onto it on the off-chance that they might take a longer hiking trip—which they hadn’t—and she was so glad of it now. There wasn’t a lot that a nice hot cup of tea couldn’t put right.

  Dan had bought powdered milk and the thought of having a proper cup of tea made her ridiculously happy, considering everything they’d been through to get here.

  “Everyone for tea?”

  “Yes please, love. Can I give you a hand?” Olivia had emerged from her bedroom shortly after they got back. To say she was happy was an understatement: Annie had never seen her like this before.

  “No, Olivia. You sit down. You’ve been busy.”

  “I think we all have,” Terry said with a dramatic sigh that somehow brightened the mood in the room.

  Annie smiled as she lit the gas ring and put the kettle on top. She had the strangest warm feeling that this odd bunch of strangers might just work together and get through this.

  “No biscuits, I’m afraid,” she said, passing out the cups. She’d used the biggest teapot she had and even then she had to fill it four times, changing the tea bags each time. She held on to them to use later-—they had several boxes, but once those were gone, there was no way of getting any more so she planned to conserve them. Now just didn’t feel like the time for weak tea. “But I’ll look at making some soon.” She looked around the table. “Please tell me someone knows something about farming.”

  Nine blank faces looked back at her.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said with a smile. “I was joking. Right. Let’s figure out where we’re all going to sleep. I vote we leave the serious talk for the morning or when we’ve all had some rest.”

  Everyone nodded except for Josh, who was staring at her with such intensity that it was almost like he was looking through her.

  She looked away. What was it about him? She wanted to question him about their new neighbour, but she knew if she did it wouldn’t be a short conversation. None of them had the energy for that. They were looking at a good day of sitting around that table to get everyone up to speed and figure out what they were going to do.

  She knew what she wanted to do.

  She thought of the gun, still down the back of her jeans. Marching over there and shooting them was a bad idea. She knew that. She’d need to kill all ten of them to get away from there alive. She couldn’t even see straight at the moment.

  “Annie?”

  She shook her head. “Sorry. I was miles away.” She tried to focus on the logistics, but her concentration was gone. Her mind kept coming back to the neighbours. What was Josh planning? And was it a good plan or a silly one? She didn’t know him well enough to make an assumption about that. She worried that she was going to sleep on it and become optimistic only to find out he’d come up with something off the wall that would never work.

  “Josh,” she said. She had to put this out of her mind for the moment. “What we talked about. Can it wait until morning for us to discuss further or is it urgent?”

  He nodded. “I suppose it can wait.”

  “Well then. Okay. First of all. Does everyone know each other?” She cringed. It felt so wrong to be harping on like an over-enthusiastic holiday park rep. She mustn’t forget that despite her relief at being home they were still in the middle of the biggest crisis the UK had ever seen.

  Pete and Josh’s mother stared across the table at her. “Well, if being dragged out of a car at gunpoint counts as meeting, then yeah, I’ve met most of you.”

  “Mum.”

  “It’s true. You want to sugar coat it? I won’t. Terrified, I was.”

  “I’m sorry,” Annie said evenly. “We had to make sure it wasn’t a trap.”

  “A trap?”

  “Yes.” She frowned. Hadn’t her sons told her what was going on? “We’d have been in serious trouble if you had someone in the boot of the car waiting to attack.”

  “What, just because we’re from a council house, is it?”

  “No. It had more to do with the fact that if we hadn’t got to Si’s house in time, your sons would have brought her to Harry Harman. That doesn’t automatically inspire trust, does it?”

  Dan gasped. “What?”

  Clive groaned. “Annie…”

  She held her hands up. The warm feeling was gone, replaced by frustration. She’d wanted to keep this light, but the whole thing was so bloody complicated that it was impossible not to go down another conversational rabbit hole. “Sorry. But it needed to be said. I don’t care if you’re from a council house or a castle. If you’re willing to chip in and work together with us, you’re more than welcome. But that’s why we had to search your car, okay? I’m sorry if you were alarmed.”

  The woman said nothing, just nodded curtly with a sour look on her face. Despite her best efforts, Annie couldn’t warm to her. She seemed almost resentful that they’d brought her here. After all the effort they’d gone to to get her when the two lads could’ve just come in one of the other cars and avoided all the drama.

  She gritted her teeth. No. That was the tiredness talking. When she was tired all she wanted was to be alone. But she knew she didn’t really want to be alone. Nobody could survive alone now; not unless they were way up in the Scottish highlands or somewhere else where it was possible to be hundreds of miles from the nearest person.

  “I’m Annie. Married to Dan. Live here. Was on a contract in London when it happened.” She cleared her throat. It was so weird talking about all of this so casually, as if the last week and a bit were an anecdote and not the most harrowing time of her life. “Living in the same block as Clive, Olivia, and Terry. We met Si on the way north.”

  “Max owns the garage I work at,” Si said. “Which you know, because your prick of a boss had him kidnapped from there.”

  “Si,” Clive said quietly.

  “It’s okay. I don’t blame them.”

  “And you shouldn’t. They were locked up for most of the time I was there.”

  Josh bristled. “That was all my brother’s fault. “I’m Josh. This is my mum, Linda. And my brother, Pete. Dad left when we were babies. We grew up in an… well, it’s not a great area. Harry’s the local hardman, I suppose you’d say. Harman the hardman. Funny that. Nobody would dare say that to his face, of course.” He sighed, looking pained. “Not that I had anything to do with him before all this happened. I went to uni. Worked hard. Got a job in the City and commuted every day. Pete, on the other hand, thought it was great playing the hardman. He worked for Harry until not too long ago. When I told him that the power cut was no power cut at all but an EMP strike, what did he do? He went and told Harry. Which is how we found ourselves in this mess.”

  The room was silent. There wasn’t a sound.

  Annie looked at Dan. Anywhere but look at Pete, who looked like he wanted the ground to open up and swallow him. People were funny. She’d assumed the three strangers were a coherent little unit. The reality was far different.

  “Now’s not the time to air your dirty laundry in front of this lot,” Linda muttered.

  Clive exhaled loudly. “That’s one thing I think we can all agree on. Annie, why don’t you tell us where we’re all sleeping? We could all use a rest.”

  She nodded. She’d thought about rearranging so that there were female rooms and male rooms, but she couldn’t bring herself to do that. She was sharing with Dan and that was the end of it. If anyone decided that was selfish, well they could shove it. “We have three bedrooms and a storage cupboard. Max, is it alright if we put you in with Terry?”

  Max shrugged. “Unless Terry has a problem with snoring?”

  Terry looked unconcerned. “With the painkillers I’m on I could sleep through anything.”

  Annie just happened to be looking at Linda. The woman’s eyes lit up at the mention of painkillers. Annie looked away quickly as if she’d been caught red-handed doing something she shouldn’t. “Josh, Pete and Linda, you don
’t mind sharing, do you? The living room is big and the couches are comfortable to sleep on. We’ve got two more air mattresses. One for you, Max, and one for one of you three.”

  Nobody reacted. She looked at Dan. This still felt like a dream. A weird hallucination after eating too much cheese. Part of her sort of believed that she was going to wake up from all of this back in her normal life.

  She caught Terry’s eye and was strangely reassured by the troubled look on his face. So she wasn’t the only one who was troubled by all of this.

  He lingered back when they all wandered off to get the extra beds set up. “You don’t like this.”

  “No… it’s just… I’m tired, okay?”

  “You don’t have to like it. You’re not a saint.”

  “I never claimed to be.”

  “My point is we don’t know them, do we?”

  She sighed. “Josh knows that prick in the house next door. That knowledge could come in handy. And they begged us. They said Harry would torture them if he found them.”

  He opened his mouth to speak but then seemed to reconsider. Annie was too exhausted to push and find out what he’d been about to say.

  “Go get some sleep,” he said, after a few moments of silence. “I’ll keep watch.”

  “What? But you’re injured.”

  “I’m recovering. I’ll sit in the kitchen and call you if anything happens. Go on. Everything’s fine. Sleep. I’ll keep an eye on things.”

  Annie touched his arm and left the room, shaking her head at how much things had changed in such a short time. Back then, she’d despised Terry. Now he was one of the people she trusted most in the world.

  Pete

  Saturday

  Pete sat up and groaned. He’d been lying on the ground trying to sleep for hours, but he couldn’t drift off no matter how hard he tried to. The voices in the next room didn’t help. He rubbed his eyes. This all felt wrong, like they’d made a huge mistake. He didn’t know any of these people and it felt like they were imposing.