Extinction

by J. T. Brannan

  She saw a group of people – an unruly, violent mob – moving across the broken shelves and bodies to get to her, and she turned for the door to the staff exit, just feet away now. Sprinting forwards, she barrelled a man out of the way who had decided to block her path, kicking through the door just as the first hands were starting to reach her.

  Then she was through into a whitewashed concrete corridor, and she pivoted on her heel and slammed the door shut behind her, sliding the locking bolt home even as the door bulged inwards from the weight of the ferocious crowd behind it.

  She turned and fled down the corridor to the fire exit at the far end. Pushing through it, she heard the inner door break behind her and the flood of people rushing down the corridor in pursuit of her – their mind operating as one now, their only desire to track down and kill the jumping woman. Why?

  Why not?

  As Alyssa gulped in the clean night air of the service alley, she knew she didn’t have much time before they would be upon her. She turned back to the minimart and looked up. The building was four storeys high.

  She pulled off her shoes and threw them into a garbage bin opposite, then hauled herself up into a boarded-up window frame, her fingers and toes reaching for the ridges and depressions that would give her the purchase she need to climb.

  Within seconds she was on top of the window frame, and then started on the harder part, her fingers and toes feeling for the gaps between the brickwork, using the tiny ridges to give her leverage to haul herself up the exterior of the old building.

  By the time the first rioters broke out into the service alley, she was already two storeys up, but she didn’t stop, she just kept on climbing, her mind focused on nothing else. Adrenalin coursed through her body, sharpening every sense; she could see the brickwork in exquisite detail, her fingers and toes probing the tiny gaps and depressions as she hauled herself upwards.

  She could hear the shouts far below – Where’s she gone? – Where is the bitch? – Come on, down here! – Let’s get her! – and realized that they had never looked up; and now she was so high, she would be almost invisible in the dark.

  She kept on climbing, until finally she pulled herself over the parapet of the roof; drained, exhausted, the breath simply drained from her.

  But she’d done it. She was alive.

  Alyssa spent the next few hours on the rooftop, watching with increasing horror the scenes around her.

  The fighting and looting continued, spreading out from the minimart to engulf other shops on the street. And then innocent bystanders were pulled in, beaten, robbed of their money and jewellery. Cars and vehicles were set on fire, and then the shops too. Mercifully not the minimart – Alyssa felt safe on the roof, and didn’t want to come down – but several other shops and business units on the street were set alight, some with people still inside.

  And then the riot police descended on the scene and moved in with shields and batons, while water cannon and rubber bullets were used as suppressing fire from the rear.

  The violence was terrifying, and surprisingly lengthy; the rioters held out for quite some time, despite the advantage of the police unit’s weapons and equipment.

  But slowly and surely some semblance of order was restored; the street was cleared, and Alyssa counted fifty-four people being loaded into the back of the police vans. Hundreds more fled across the city.

  Finally, she felt confident enough to climb back down the building. She collected her shoes from the dumpster and made her way just two blocks further to her own apartment building. She avoided the police; she knew they were doing their job for her protection but if she’d gone to them, she would have been taken downtown as a witness, and she had no idea how long it would have been before they took her statement. Hours? Days?

  But she was home now, finally; although – as the magnitude of what had happened to her began to sink in – she had to admit, she no longer felt safe anywhere.

  11

  OSWALD UMBEBE GRIMACED as he took a sip of sweet tea. The pain in his chest was agonizing, yet he knew that it was a not a problem with which he would have to concern himself for much longer.

  He had been diagnosed with the disease just six months ago, after refusing to visit a doctor about the pain for several years. And by the time he went, it was inoperable; it had already spread from his lungs, outwards through his body. He knew he was going to die – the doctor had told him as much on that first day – but this didn’t trouble him in the least. Everyone was going to die one day. And Umbebe knew something most other people didn’t – that day was coming sooner than they thought.

  He was the High Priest of the Order of Planetary Renewal and it was his firm belief that the world was going to end very soon. At least, the world in its present form was going to end, to make way for another to rise from the ashes. That was the beauty of it.

  This wasn’t just a way to cash in on the current situation, to part fools from their money. The order didn’t ask anyone for money, they never had, not once in their thousand-year history.

  Their philosophy was simple. The world had to periodically renew itself in order to survive. It had to cleanse itself, to cure itself of the malaise it periodically experienced. Catastrophic incidents had occurred on several occasions in the earth’s four and a half billion-year history, and the ancient scientists who had established Umbebe’s order had charted these events, discerning a pattern amongst the seeming randomness.

  According to the ancient scholars, this year was due to see another Apocalypse, another renewal of the world’s finite energy. Umbebe was thrilled that he would be presiding over the order during the time of final upheaval. It was an honour of the highest magnitude, and he had worked hard to build up the order, until now membership stood at over eighty thousand across the world. Not that they would have any sort of reward; they would perish along with everyone else. But they would die knowing that their deaths had purpose, and that was the real difference.

  The year, however, was fast running out, and there was nothing on the horizon – no planet-ending comet, no tectonic movement presaging a gigantic earthquake, no sign of any catastrophic tsunami. But he wasn’t without back-up plans. Years before, one of his most loyal brothers had come to him with news of some secret government research, and Umbebe’s true mission in life had become clear to him in a moment of exultant revelation.

  It was too much for him to expect to just sit back and let the world destroy itself. Technology was so advanced now that the earth might need assistance to cleanse itself. The world was testing him, he began to understand that. And so he had started planning.

  The phone beside him rang, the electronic handset obtrusive in the otherwise natural, wood-panelled setting of his private office. My update, he thought, wincing with pain as he picked it up.

  ‘Yes?’ he answered expectantly. He listened as his agent informed him of the latest occurrences, grunting occasionally in acknowledgement. When the man had finished, Umbebe asked simply, ‘But how long until it is ready? Truly ready?’

  As the man answered, many thousands of miles away, Umbebe smiled, the pain in his chest all but forgotten. It was a matter of great fortune that he had a loyal man deep inside such a project. Although, he had to admit, it wasn’t entirely luck – Umbebe had spent years recruiting people; they were spread throughout the world for just such a time as this.

  Yes, he thought happily. The time is almost here. And our order will usher in a new dawn . . . with the destruction of the earth, and everyone in it.

  PART THREE

  1

  ALYSSA GLADLY ACCEPTED the steaming hot drink from the stewardess, then turned back to stare out of the airplane’s small window.

  The ground below was a complete white-out, although apparently the weather had much improved over the past few days, when commercial flights hadn’t even been running. It made her shiver just looking at it out there, and she took a comforting sip of her drink.

  After the trauma of her escap
e, she had barely slept at all, constantly checking the streets below for rioters or any other violence. She had been a bag of nerves, wired on caffeine and adrenalin, but had eventually managed a couple of hours of fitful sleep.

  She still had to rise early that morning to meet up with Jamie. She’d checked out of her windows first and seen that a police barricade had been set up, which was cutting off and protecting the residential blocks. Would she be free to leave?

  In the event, the police had let her pass, and the presence of a National Guard cordon on the streets even meant that the taxi sent by Rushton was able to proceed to the office at more than a snail’s pace. And when she’d got there, she’d been relieved to see that he had received her message about the hair dye that she’d lost during the riot, and brought her in three bottles.

  Jamie had had little to offer in the way of hard information about the base; he had never managed to get close enough to investigate properly. But the HIRP base scared him, that much was obvious. She didn’t tell him that she was going, but he warned her off anyway, saying that he’d heard enough stories about people trying to get into the place and then never being heard from again to be wary.

  She listened to the warnings, and would heed them – to a certain extent, at least. Nothing would deter her from going, but she would be careful. Jamie had told her about a man called Colonel Anderson who was responsible for security at the base, and his unsavoury reputation. Alyssa wondered if he’d had anything to do with Karl’s assassination, and the attempt to kill her. She feared what would happen if she was recognized, but the simple change of hair colour, different wardrobe and thick spectacles changed her appearance entirely, and Rushton had provided her with identity papers. There was little more that could be done.

  When Anna had died, Alyssa had volunteered to become an embedded reporter with the military forces in the Middle East. It had been her way of running from what had happened, of trying to escape. When she thought back on it now, she wondered if she hadn’t perhaps been slightly suicidal; the survival rate of embeds during the worst part of the war was often as low as fifty-fifty. But she had made it through the shelling, the suicide bombs, the riots, the death and the mayhem imbued with a new sense of purpose in life. Reporting, showing the world what was really going on, had become her salvation.

  As she stared out at the frozen wastes below her and felt the plane start its descent, she wondered what was really going on at the HIRP base.

  2

  BACK AT THE base, Colonel Anderson surveyed one of the large antennas in front of him. The radar field, known locally as the Ionospheric Research Array, was the real heart of the HIRP operation. It consisted of fourteen rows of fourteen separate antennas, each nearly fifty feet in height, laid out in a grid spread over a huge area of land. It was an incredible sight. The array amounted to a vast radio transmitter, beaming concentrated rays of pure radio-wave energy into the upper atmosphere at regulated frequencies. Each antenna was separated in its own square fenced housing, a small portable control centre nestled underneath each one. Each unit could pump out thirty million watts, meaning that the entire transmitter array had an effective radiating power of nearly six billion watts. The ionospheric research that the base was officially scheduled to carry out typically required only a fraction of the field’s potential, but Anderson knew that Spectrum Nine would need it all.

  Dr Martin King was the man in charge of the radar array, and one of the base personnel briefed on every aspect of the programme. He stood next to Anderson, arms folded and stamping his feet to keep warm.

  ‘Welcome back,’ King said through chattering teeth. ‘I hear your trip didn’t go too well.’

  Anderson’s stare cut King dead, and the scientist instantly regretted baiting him. ‘Nothing we can’t handle,’ Anderson said calmly, the cold not seeming to affect him at all. ‘Just make sure you’re concentrating on your own job. How are preparations coming for tonight? I understand the aurora will provide excellent conditions for our test.’

  ‘Absolutely,’ King replied. ‘Superb conditions. Do we have the authority to go ahead?’

  ‘Breisner is dealing with that as we speak,’ Anderson replied. ‘But if we get the go-ahead, I need the system to be immediately operational. Understood?’

  ‘Yes, Colonel. It will be ready to go.’

  ‘Good,’ Anderson said and turned to walk back to his jeep.

  He checked his watch. Damn. He would have to hurry if he was going to meet Elizabeth Gatsby at the airport.

  ‘Do you wish us to proceed?’ Dr Niall Breisner asked General Tomkin over the secure telephone in his private office.

  ‘Yes,’ said Tomkin at the other end of the line, three thousand miles away. ‘Secretary of Defence Jeffries and I both authorize phase three testing of the device, as previously discussed.’

  ‘The target?’ Breisner asked reluctantly; the science excited him, but he preferred not to think about the real-life ramifications.

  ‘Again, as previously discussed. You are authorized to go ahead with a full-power test, to the coordinates you have already received.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Breisner responded mechanically. ‘But there is . . . a problem of sorts,’ he ventured carefully.

  ‘What sort of problem?’ Tomkin’s voice was cold.

  ‘We have a civilian visiting tonight. Karl Janklow’s sister, coming to collect his personal effects.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve already spoken to Colonel Anderson about her. We’ll just have to ensure that she doesn’t see anything. You and Anderson will have to deal with her if she does. Are we clear?’

  Breisner swallowed hard. ‘Yes, sir. Understood,’ he managed to say with more conviction than he felt.

  ‘Good,’ Tomkin said. ‘Because nothing must get in the way of this. Nothing, and nobody.’ There was a pause on the line, before Tomkin spoke again, his voice grave. ‘Good luck, Dr Breisner. Don’t let me down.’

  And with that, the connection was broken, leaving Breisner to sit there and wonder, not for the first time, what he had agreed to.

  3

  ALYSSA OPENED THE door to the Bear Tavern at just after six in the evening, local time, the sun already long gone over the horizon.

  Now she was here in Allenburg, she didn’t know what the protocol was. She had half expected a military escort to meet her at the airport, but there had been nobody there. She supposed that she shouldn’t have got her hopes up – her presence was probably just a nuisance, and they weren’t going to go out of their way to be welcoming.

  She had ordered a taxi from the airport, but when they passed the bar – an old, decrepit building in a decidedly ramshackle part of town, well off the tourist track – she asked the driver to stop. It was the same tavern listed in the HIRP newsletter as the meeting place for Karl’s Adventure Club, and she thought she might learn something. If Karl’s club had met there, maybe it was a hangout for HIRP staff generally.

  When she went through the door clutching her travel bag, a dozen heads turned to her, cold eyes appraising the newcomer. Typical small-town reaction, she thought. Outsiders were seldom welcome. The men – there were no other women here, she noticed – turned back to their drinks, and Alyssa approached the bar.

  Half an hour later, she was sitting in a booth surrounded by faded wood and worn velvet, having finally found someone to talk to. Lee Miller was a local man, and the town drunkard by the look of him. But to Alyssa, this only meant that he might be a good man for information.

  A group of men lined the bar, chatting to the humourless bartender; across the room, another half dozen men sat drinking round a card table; two more booths were occupied by loud drinkers, whilst another held a solitary man. Handsome and seemingly out of place in this rough tavern, he had come in just ten minutes after her, ordered a drink and sat down by himself. Someone with troubles, she’d thought instantly.

  Miller leant towards her over the small, scarred table. ‘Ma’am,’ he said gravely, ‘you don’t wanna be asking quest
ions about the base around here.’ He held her gaze, and it was clear he meant what he said. ‘You see those guys at the bar?’

  ‘Yes,’ she confirmed.

  ‘Four of ’em are base security. The six at the table playing cards are staff. This place gets crawlin’ with ’em. The guys at the bar come here to keep an eye on things, make sure nobody’s talking out of school, know what I mean?’ He gestured to the barman for another drink.

  ‘And what if they find someone who is talking?’ Alyssa asked.

  Miller shrugged. ‘Hell would I know?’ he said grumpily, accepting the glass placed before him by the bartender. ‘Only thing I know is that they don’t come here any more after.’

  The barman paused at the table. ‘Is old Lee here bothering you, lady?’ he asked gruffly.

  ‘No, not at all,’ Alyssa replied.

  Leaning closer, the barman said, ‘You just be careful. We keep ourselves to ourselves here.’

  The threatening tone of voice was all too clear, and Alyssa meekly nodded her head. Satisfied, the barman walked away.

  Alyssa waited until he was back behind the bar.

  ‘Lee,’ she said quietly, ‘what sort of things would these people have been saying? You know, before they stopped coming here?’

  ‘Oh, the usual.’ Miller grinned. ‘The base has got some sort of secret programme, nonsense like that.’ His eyes went glassy and he stared off into space, making Alyssa wonder how much alcohol he’d consumed before she arrived. ‘One couple came in here, spouting off about how the radar field zapped a laser beam right up into the Northern Lights, they said it ain’t never looked like that before, you know? All sorts of different colours, damn crazy stuff. Course, I seen some pretty weird stuff myself,’ he continued, finding his flow now, glad to talk to someone who would listen. ‘The lights happening during the day sometimes, or else maybe just shutting off altogether, just halfway through. And then there are the birds,’ he said cryptically.