Darkness Ahead of Us | Book 3 | Darkness Lifting

by Spencer, Leif

  Navid slept wedged between the driver’s seat and the steering wheel, his son, Daniel, sat on the passenger seat, head pressed against the window. Navid had covered the eight-year-old boy with a thick, woollen blanket he’d found in an abandoned house.

  Egbertyne lay on a narrow, inflated mattress next to my brother. Rick slid off it most nights, hardly a surprise, considering it had probably been designed as an inflatable toy for children to play with at the beach. He didn’t mind though, as long as his girlfriend was comfortable. At first, she’d asked for the passenger seat, mumbling that the boy couldn’t possibly need this much space, but Navid had insisted.

  Amira had been the last to pick. She’d built herself a nest out of insulation mats against the back door. She always slept upright, a bit creepy if you asked me, but nobody else seemed to mind.

  We were strangers, huddled together in an old vehicle, living on borrowed time. We all knew it, even though we didn’t talk about it.

  At first, ignoring it was easy.

  Then Lo died.

  It wasn’t as if her death had come out of nowhere, or as though we hadn’t known we were in deep shit, but it was the first time we realised it was likely we’d die.

  Actually die.

  At fourteen, Lo was only five years younger than me. We carried her all over town in search of a doctor, taking turns to shoulder her hot, limp body.

  After three hospitals, two of which had collapsed into piles of bricks and rubble, we’d found a doctor sandwiched between three comatose patients, unwilling to leave them and the otherwise abandoned hospital behind. She’d had a backup generator, but her machines were fried like everything electronic, and there was nothing she could do but wait for her patients to either wake up or stop breathing on their own.

  Unlike everyone else, she didn’t think running around panicking and setting London on fire would solve her problems.

  And she warned us the dying wouldn’t end.

  Something had happened to our brains. Sooner or later, we would all suffer from seizures, nosebleeds and burst blood vessels.

  Then death.

  Children first.

  No help was coming. Whatever had happened to us had also happened to the rest of Europe, possibly the world. If the other continents weren’t affected, why didn’t they send help?

  Amira believed the United States didn’t want to deal with the influx of refugees. She would know, after all she was from San Francisco and here in London to study biology and save the environment.

  But now there was nothing left to save.

  My brother’s speculation seemed a bit more humane. Rick reckoned experts were simply too scared of a medical disaster. London was covered in bodies. Picking up survivors meant picking up the plague, cholera, a new Spanish flu, or whatever was currently brewing in our midst.

  They’d come once we were all dead.

  That’s if the Middle East didn’t get here first. Or the Russians.

  If they still could.

  I didn’t think there was anyone left.

  We hadn’t seen a plane in the sky since 29th August. I’ll never forget the date. It was the day everyone on the surface dropped dead at exactly 11am.

  We’d all been stuffed into a stiflingly hot tube carriage at the time. The sudden deaths made for an unsettling exit at Bank.

  The station was dark; the escalators stood still. Murmurs travelled through the crowd, and I heard “power cut” and “bloody TFL.”

  The barriers at the exit didn’t work either, and amid the tutting we soon realised a sea of dead bodies lay behind them.

  Within seconds, screams filled the station, and we got pushed back down into the tunnels by the unfolding panic.

  Instinctively, Rick guided us towards a nook. “Better wait,” he said. “I’d rather not get trampled down.”

  A man slipped out from the crowd, an arm wrapped protectively around a small boy who held on to him with both hands. Fear flickered in his eyes as people continued to stomp through the tunnels. He pushed his glasses back up his nose. “I’m Navid and this is Daniel. We’re trying to find another exit. You’re welcome to walk with us.” His accent was thick, and he pronounced the k and c like he had a cold. He smiled, exposing stained, crooked teeth. “It’s easy to get lost at Bank.” His brown, curly hair looked unkempt, and I was surprised when Rick shook his hand.

  At that moment, a young girl—who would later tell us her name was Lo—pulled on Egbertyne’s wind jacket and asked, “Can I come, too?”

  Egbertyne’s panic-filled eyes darted to the girl, and her mouth worked wordlessly. She wasn’t going to hold it together for much longer. Waves of people collided with us as they ran past. A tall, young woman stopped and slid into our midst. She wore a shirt that said not a morning person in big fat letters across her chest, her dark hair tied into a messy bun.

  “I know which way has fewer people,” she said without introducing herself. Amira later told me we were the only ones not screaming, and she reckoned one should never face an apocalypse alone.

  That’s how our little group met.

  In hindsight, I couldn’t say why I didn’t panic. I remembered feeling surprisingly numb, like my head had been wrapped in cotton wool, and it had all happened to someone else.

  It took us several days to understand that whoever had been underground at the time of the Pulse survived—at least at first—but the closer to the surface someone had been, the more likely they’d succumb to whatever had happened within days, sometimes hours.

  Immediately after, London bustled with frantic people searching for family members and friends. Now, we could go for days without seeing a soul. The supermarkets were filled with the stench of rotten food—anything dried or in a tin had been taken by raiders. Small gangs shared the premises with the occasional rodent.

  Rats and cockroaches were the only animals I’d seen since it happened. Animals seemed much like children—their brains weren’t strong enough to withstand the Pulse, so they died first.

  I called it the Pulse, even though we didn’t know what had happened.

  There was no one left to tell us.

  It turned ugly, fast. The city went up in smoke and flames in a matter of hours. Soon after, the buildings began to collapse. Whatever or whoever had fried our brains and electronics must have weakened either the infrastructure or foundations.

  We found the VW camper a few weeks later. We attempted to syphon fuel, but it wasn’t turning on anyway. Nowadays, nothing worked without electricity.

  What I missed most was Google. I had at least a dozen questions for it at any given moment.

  How to purify water?

  Which ingredients are necessary to make natural toothpaste and soap?

  Is there a manual to build a radio from scratch, with images?

  What circumstances lead to a cholera outbreak?

  What kind of diseases do dead bodies spread?

  Etc.

  Was the Internet still up and running somewhere? Were people on Twitter discussing the fate of survivors in England?

  “They’d only bring over death and disease. Cholera is tough, man. It’s too dangerous. We have to think of our families.”

  “Agreed. We need to keep them out. If necessary build a wall and shut the ports.”

  “It’s our duty to help #livesmatter #saveeurope”

  Was Facebook offering a way to tag yourself as safe? Were people desperately waiting for Europeans to update their profiles? Did they add those silly frames to their profile pictures in honour of us?

  I sighed and sat up. Perhaps I was right, and there was no one left. Perhaps Facebook had died along with everything else.

  I crawled out of the van, careful not to wake anyone and stretched. School hadn’t prepared me for this. Just like I’d thought, Calculus really wasn’t much help after all.

  My headache eased now I’d escaped from the stuffy and sour air in the van, but I wasn’t deluded. Earlier that day, I’d found blood on my sleeve a
fter a sneeze.

  That’s how it had started with Lo.

  We were living on borrowed time, and it didn’t look like I had a lot of it left.

  Whenever I’d pictured the apocalypse, my imagination had run wild. Endless wastelands filled with radiation, collapsed buildings, traps, broken cars, and dismembered bodies. The whole shebang. Zombies, the plague, and nuclear fallout.

  I never thought I’d actually get to see the day. Well, minus the zombies.

  I looked at the sky. Now that light pollution was no longer a problem, the stars lit up the night like a thousand little suns.

  At some point before winter set in and buried us in snow, we’d have to find an untouched warehouse, one of those places where everything was kept ready to ship out all across the country within an hour or so, and then maybe we could stock up on proper mattresses, coats, thermal underwear, and blankets. I hadn’t seen snow settle for more than a few days in the south of England since I was a young child, but I knew that life was just cruel enough to make this the coldest winter in a decade.

  I remembered how hot that day had been. 29th August. We’d stopped just outside the tube station, faces glistening in the heat. We’d speculated about what had happened, more to distract one another from the bodies littering the streets. We didn’t agree, of course. Though, we all had opinions.

  “How could a war have started in just a few hours? Without warning, without announcement?” Egbertyne had asked, not for the first time, while holding onto Rick’s arm as if her life depended on it. “No one has been assassinated. No dictators had their feathers ruffled. Sure, things are tense in Europe, but they’ve been tense for years. What changed?”

  “Is there a war, daddy?”

  Navid tousled his son’s hair as the boy looked up at him with his big brown eyes. “I don’t think so, buddy, but I don’t know.”

  Amira cleared her throat, and we turned to her. She took off her glasses and rubbed her bloodshot eyes. “I personally think an alien attack makes a lot more sense than a sudden war.”

  “Aliens?” Rick asked, unable to hide his sneer.

  Amira lifted her shoulders in a defensive shrug. “We’re surrounded by dead people.” She turned to the road where cars and buses stood, drivers slumped over steering wheels, and pointed. “Everything stopped working. None of the billboards or traffic lights are on, which probably means we have no power. None of our phones work and no one knows what happened. What do you think is the most likely scenario?”

  “Terrorists?” Sarcasm laced Rick’s voice. Knowing him, Amira may as well have said she believed in astrology. My brother had no time for anything he considered nonsense.

  “Since when can terrorists take down an entire country in such a short time?” Amira asked. She wiped her glasses furiously with her shirt before putting them back on.

  Rick frowned. “We don’t know if it’s the entire country or just London.”

  “This place would be crawling with military if it were just London,” Amira pointed out. She reminded me of a scholar as she stared at Rick over the rim of her designer glasses.

  “I think it might have been the government,” I said, and everyone immediately looked at me, heads whipping around, as if they thought I was too young to have an opinion. “A NASA experiment gone wrong on the ISS. Or maybe someone at CERN pressed the wrong button.”

  “No.” Egbertyne shook her head. “This has to be the Russians or North Korea. Looking at all the blood leaking from everyone’s eyes and ears, I would have said some sort of chemical weapon, but that wouldn’t explain the power outage and the cars.”

  “Maybe a neutron bomb?” Navid suggested. “Whatever it was, it looks like we’re on our own.”

  We should be helping, I thought, my eyes darting from body to body. But how? Dread settled in the pit of my stomach. “What if it’s contagious?”

  Amira pressed her lips together. “Considering everyone seems to have died within a short period, I doubt it’s contagious. And if it is…” She shrugged. “It’s definitely too late for us to do anything but hope we’re immune.”

  Four days later, Lo died.

  I knew she thought what had happened to us was delivered by God. She told me as I pressed a cold towel against her forehead. Lo shivered, her skin covered with a thin film of sweat. “God is punishing us.” She grabbed my hand and held it tight as she stared at me with glassy, blue eyes. “We are all going to face eternal damnation.”

  It seemed adults were more resilient than younger ones, and after the first few days the dying appeared to slow. Egbertyne complained of headaches and nausea, but she soon stopped, attributing her symptoms to stress.

  None of the others mentioned any physical symptoms—unless you counted insomnia. It took me a long time to sleep for more than a handful of minutes.

  Navid watched Daniel like a hawk after Lo’s death. Whenever the boy coughed or sneezed he demanded to see his hand and checked it for blood. Rick did the same with me, only he tried to be subtle, so I wouldn’t notice.

  A little over a week ago, I woke with a stiff neck. Over the next few days, the pain snaked along my tender muscles until it reached my eyes. I wondered if Rick knew about the hammer in my head.

  End of Sample Chapter

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