Blood on the Motorway, #1

by Paul Stephenson

  'Let's go,' Patch said.

  They headed back down the corridor, a wave of numbness spreading over Tom. A crowd had gathered by the door, and Tom had to fight past their questions to get outside where he could take great deep lungful's of air. People pushed him, trying to find out what was going on. He looked over at Patch, but the big man stared at the floor, colour drained from his face. Voices chattered around him and he felt his head spinning until Leon's voice cut through the others.

  'Alright, for fuck's sake, give the man some room!'

  People backed away from him.

  'Nobody go in there,' Tom said.

  'Why?' someone asked. He tried to focus on the floor to stop the spinning.

  'Butchered,' he replied, his voice struggling to make it out of his mouth.

  There were gasps around him. He noticed blood on the soles of his shoes and vomit on his jeans.

  'Who has?' Susan asked.

  Tom shook his head. Enough questions.

  'Where are they?' came another voice. Petr headed towards him, fists clenched by his side, double chin wobbling with rage.

  'Who?' he asked.

  'Baxter's men,' he replied. 'Where the fuck are they?'

  'You don't think?' Tom asked.

  'Of course I fucking well think,' Petr yelled. 'You'd have to be a complete fucking idiot not to think it. They wanted payback.'

  'Now, wait a second,' came another voice. It was Patch. It was as though everyone suddenly realised he was there. The crowd around him dispersed. 'I didn't fucking well…'

  'You fucking liar!' a woman yelled.

  'Wait a fucking second,' Leon said behind him. 'Patch was with us last night, and the other one,'

  'Ralph,' said the angry woman, her eyes full of hate.

  'He was in one of the other houses, right?'

  Tom tried to remember who Ralph had gone off with last night, and to see if he could see any of them in the crowd. Everyone was casting about looking for them.

  'Oh, Jesus,' someone said to nobody in particular. Tom tried to count up who was there, but there was too much noise in his head. Had he made a terrible mistake? He looked over to the doorway of the house where they'd found the bodies, his stomach tying itself in knots. Sure enough, there were two bottles of wine outside the door.

  He tried to remember when he and Patch had given out the wines. Tom had stopped to speak to quite a few people along the way, could Patch have had time to go in and commit such awful atrocities? He was a professional soldier, God knew what he could do given such a short window of time.

  Another door opened and everyone turned. Ralph and two women emerged from the house at the far end of the street, each wearing a confused expression. They were still walking over when Petr turned to Patch.

  'What did you do?' he asked, getting right up to Patch, who held his hands up to indicate he didn't want any trouble.

  'Nothing,' Patch replied. 'I drank wine and went to sleep.'

  'Is everyone accounted for?' Susan asked, but nobody answered her. They were too busy glaring at either Patch or Ralph, who’d arrived with the two women and seemed to be cottoning on that something bad was happening.

  'What's going on?' one of the women asked.

  Before Tom could reply, Petr lunged forward at Patch, catching the soldier unawares. Patch fell back awkwardly, with Petr following him down. They hit the ground and Petr started punching Patch, delivering furious blows to his head and body. Patch was trying to defend himself but evidently didn't want to retaliate, his arms trying to block the blows, but not returning fire.

  Tom and Leon leapt forward and tried to grab Petr's shoulders, but he shrugged them off, before winding back one of his arms and throwing his not insubstantial weight behind another punch. Patch managed to throw an arm up to block it, and having had enough, threw a punch of his own, which sent Petr sprawling.

  Patch sprung up, his face covered in blood, an ugly cut above one of his eyes. He loomed over Petr, who was struggling to regain his composure.

  'Stay the fuck down,' Patch bellowed, and the man complied.

  Everyone stood rigid, waiting for the next move.

  'Look,' Tom said, his arms outstretched. 'Patch was with us last night, evidently Ralph was in his house. We need to calm down a second.'

  'Just because you three have forgiven these bastards doesn't mean the rest of us have,' a woman called out.

  'Just because you haven't forgiven them doesn't mean they did anything,' Susan replied.

  'Sorry,' Ralph said, 'what's happened? What am I supposed to have done?'

  'There's been a murder,' Tom said.

  'Who?' Ralph asked.

  'Stacey and Neil,' a woman said. 'We think, anyway.'

  Tom's stomach turned. Two more dead on his account, two more whose names he hadn’t known. 'There are two bodies,' he said, and the woman who had called out the names sobbed.

  'Where were you last night?' the angry woman asked Ralph.

  Ralph opened his mouth to answer, but nothing came out. The reverberated crack of a rifle shot echoed through the street. There was a gaping hole where Ralph's throat had been, and blood splattered over everyone stood around him.

  There was a moment of stunned silence, until another shot punctured it.

  Somebody screamed.

  Everybody scattered.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  As Each End Looms and Subsides

  The sound of birdsong brought Jen out of her sleep. She opened her eyes and saw a ray of bright morning light bursting through the crack in the curtains. She wasn't fooled for a second. Outside the window there might be birdsong and sunshine, but there was also death, misery, hardship, and pain.

  Every bit of her ached as she stretched her muscles and sat up from the sofa. She looked on the floor at her two companions. They'd started off separately in makeshift beds on the floor, but sometime in the night Mira had crawled in with Sam, the two of them curled up together.

  For the first time in days, she thought of Daniel. She missed waking up next to him and wondered if she'd ever wake up next to someone again. Daniel seemed like a lifetime ago now, but still she reproached herself for not having thought of him more.

  Her two charges stirred and woke as one, and Sam looked surprised to have Mira nestled in with him.

  'Good morning,' the young girl said. She smiled.

  Jen felt like an intruder on their intimacy. She started to get up, intending to leave them alone, but then Sam remembered she was there and sat up, his face flushed with embarrassment.

  'Morning,' Jen said. 'Don't get up. I'm going to see what the breakfast options look like.'

  She gathered her discarded jeans and pulled them on, which served only to heighten Sam's embarrassment. He looked away, his cheeks reddening. She stood, flashed them both a smile and went through to the kitchen, shaking out her limbs as she went.

  The smell in the hallway was still pretty bad, but the broken window in the front door had at least allowed a little bit of fresh air to mingle with the stale.

  The cupboards they had picked bare the night before had not magically replenished themselves in the night, but she looked anyway, hopeful the daylight might illuminate some hitherto unseen treasure trove of food. No such luck was forthcoming. The best the cupboards yielded was a tin of pine nuts and half a bag of flour.

  'Isn't it infuriating when people don't stock up for the apocalypse?' said a voice behind her, making her jump.

  She whirled around. Behind her, perched on the counter with the bravado of a man holding a crossbow, was a man holding a crossbow. The arrow contained within pointed at her chest. He was curiously anonymous looking, bedecked in as bland a jumper as Jen could recall ever seeing. A smirk of satisfaction played across his face.

  Stay calm.

  Instinctively her hand went to the knife drawer, but before she even got halfway to it he raised the crossbow slightly to let her know the error in judgement she was about to make.

  Well, he has
n't killed me yet. That's a start.

  'What do you want?' she asked, trying to keep as even a tone as she could.

  'Me?' he replied, laughing. 'Nothing. Well and truly nothing. I have the whole world. Seems enough to me. Sit.'

  He motioned to a chair. Jen moved slowly over to it and sat, never taking her eye off the bolt in the crossbow.

  'Good girl,' he affirmed.

  'Okay,' she said, trying to keep the battle between fear and anger internalised, as well as an irritation over the good girl comment. 'So, why are you chasing my friends and I across the countryside with a crossbow?'

  He smiled.

  'My friends and I? Bravo! I was beginning to think there was nobody else who appreciated the English language.'

  'You're killing people because you're a grammar Nazi?' she replied.

  The smile left his face. 'A man must have a hobby,' he said.

  I don't like those eyes.

  He smiled again, but there was nothing happy behind it.

  'You see,' he continued, 'the end of the world has given me the opportunity to finally pursue my life's dream. I like killing people. Well, I always assumed I'd like it. All that trying to live in the world got in the way, but ever since I knew the end was nigh, I've been getting stuck in. It's a lot of fun, I have to tell you.'

  The smirk was back. Jen's stomach turned. She willed Mira and Sam to stay in the lounge, but at the same time she knew the only way she was going to survive this conversation was to keep it going as long as possible.

  'Why?' she asked.

  'That's a good question. What's your name, by the way?'

  'Jen.'

  'Well, Jennifer, I'm not sure exactly. From a biological standpoint, I assume I have some kind of chemical imbalance, the figurative "screw loose" in my head. Whether it's born of some kind of genetic disorder, emotional trauma, or a good old-fashioned blunt force to the head as a child, who knows? The long and short of it is that I get an immense satisfaction from watching others in pain.'

  Jen's stomach lurched again.

  'Of course, before the storm I could only dream of indulging my fantasies. I tortured the odd animal, but nothing more severe than that, save for a predilection for a certain shade of adult entertainment. But once I knew what was coming, I was free.'

  'What do you mean "once you knew what was coming"?' Jen asked.

  'Ah, you caught my little baited hook there did you?'

  A wide, smug grin spread across his face, and Jen became so furious at him she forgot for a second he was a murderous psychopath and not just some odious little toad.

  'Oh, you mean I picked up on the blatant fishing for a question that you dangled in front of me? Yes, as a matter of fact I did, you little prick. Now are you going to tell me what you meant?'

  The grin disappeared.

  'I'd be careful if I were you, Jennifer. I've killed people for a lot less.'

  They stared at each other for a second, his dark eyes holding hers like a tractor beam. Her heart pounded until finally he broke off contact and smiled.

  'What do you know about coronal mass ejections?'

  Jen recalled something from a documentary she'd seen last year that had talked about solar flares, but she figured the man in front of her wasn't expecting her to know anything about it, so she shrugged.

  'Solar flares, in the more common parlance,' he said. 'You see, before the storm I was a physicist, not too far away from here. My job was to watch the sun, looking for solar storms. They can really fuck with electrical systems you see.

  'In 1989 a solar storm wiped out power to Quebec. The power station there got overloaded. As you can imagine, the more dependent on technology we became, the more paranoid governments were about solar storms. Our planet has been battered by solar storms for its entire existence, but most of the time we barely notice, unless you happen to be watching the Northern Lights.

  'I was part of a team at the University of York trying to find ways of predicting solar storms, which, I can tell you, was fascinating. But two days before the storm I started to see something… unprecedented. The ancient Chinese astronomers a thousand years ago reported sun spots far in excess of what we've seen in recent years, but not even they saw anything on this scale. Usually a sun spot you'd see on the surface would be massive in our terms, between five and ten times the size of Earth. Not all of these become solar storms, but some do. You can imagine my surprise when I saw a sun spot which would register as around a thousand times the size of Earth. If you had known about it, you could have walked outside and seen it with your naked eye, although you would have gone blind if you looked too hard.

  'As you can imagine, the scientific community went into meltdown. It was building to a coronal mass ejection of unprecedented scale, and if it came to Earth, who knew what havoc it would cause? People were talking in hushed tones of a return to the Stone Age, but I knew it would be even more severe than that.

  'I saw my chance. Once the CME burst out and it was clear it was coming, I knew I had one chance to, well, shall we say, "live the life I was meant to live". What would it matter in the long run, anyway? Everyone was almost certainly going to die.'

  He laughed.

  'How could you know that?' Jen asked.

  'Call it instinct. I went to go and speak to a priest about it, but, well, he annoyed me. I figured I had around twenty four hours to indulge my fantasies, and I tried every dark whim that had ever taken me.

  'In the process I felt a power, an incredible feeling that all this, everything that was about to happen, was for me. I felt like the butterfly breaking out of his chrysalis, except it was the whole world that broke apart to allow my rebirth. In that case, how could I be killed? I knew I was to be spared.

  'As the storm came and people dropped like flies around me, I survived. Once the storm had passed, the Lord saw fit to give me back just enough people to keep myself entertained.'

  He leaned in, his eyes sparkling with life now.

  'You see, this is my world now.'

  A shiver ran down Jennifer's back.

  You're about to die.

  'I didn't catch your name,' she asked.

  'Ewen.'

  'Do you smoke, Ewen?' she asked. He looked puzzled for a second.

  'I…'

  'Do you smoke?' she asked again.

  'What does that have to do with anything?'

  'Do you?'

  'I… yes, as a matter of fact I do.'

  Jen gave a little laugh.

  'You weren't chosen by God, Ewen. You smoke. Everyone who has survived so far is a smoker. You survived the storm by sheer coincidence.'

  Ewen stepped back and looked at her in horror. She felt sure she'd feel the weight of his rage any second. She hoped Mira and Sam would make a run for it and get away from this lunatic. Instead of pulling the trigger, he gave a hollow little laugh.

  'Well done, Jennifer,' he said. 'You've solved the final part of the puzzle.'

  'Good for me,' she replied.

  He ignored the sass. 'Those of us who knew the storm was imminent were entranced by what would happen when it did. There were so many crazy theories from rational scientists that it was as though the whole scientific community started sounding like the crazy people you'd hear on the bus.

  'Some said the seas would boil, some said the atmosphere would burn clean off the planet and we'd suffocate. Nobody envisioned what actually happened, but you've made sense of it.

  'Human beings are electrical systems at our core, and the storm acted like a giant electromagnetic pulse, blowing every single electrical appliance in the world working at that moment. But, as I suspected, it also overloaded the electrical system that is the human brain.

  'I couldn't work out why anyone had survived at all, but it was the smokers who survived. Addiction, especially nicotine addiction, alters the pathways of the brain. It alters the way your brain works, and it meant the storm gave us headaches and not much more.'

  He gave another little empty lau
gh.

  'I don't know which the greater tragedy is,' Jen said. 'The fact you're killing people with impunity, or that you're arguably the one person who could solve the mystery for everyone out there who has survived, and lead us out of this nightmare to start to rebuild. But instead, you're pissing it away so you can live out the idiotic fantasies of a killer.'

  A darkness crossed his face and he moved forward, getting close to her.

  One step closer and maybe I'll try to take that crossbow off you.

  'Rebuild?' he snarled. 'Rebuild what? The decaying bloated civilisation of man? The world of cruelty and pain and loneliness every single one of us had to struggle through every day of our wretched lives? The civilisation hell-bent on destroying the planet we inhabited with no thought to the billions of other species forced to share an existence with the most perverse, greed-ridden plague?'

  He leaned in again, and Jen realised the point of the crossbow bolt was inches away from her throat. She looked into his eyes and saw nothing behind them.

  'Have you noticed how much of the animal kingdom survived the storm, Jennifer? This was no random attack of chance. This is the second great flood, and I'm Noah.'

  'Which is it, Ewen? Is it divine providence, or the electrical network peculiar to the human brain?'

  'God moves in mysterious ways.'

  The door to Jen's right burst open. Sam stepped into the kitchen. His eyes went wide at the scene before him. He'd no doubt heard raised voices and had rushed in, but before he could even take a step into the room, and before she could start to form a warning in her throat, Ewen turned to Sam.

  There was a flash of movement.

  Sam stopped. He looked down at the shaft protruding from his chest. His eyes filled with panic.

  His body slumped to the ground.

  'Sam!' she screamed.

  Jen whirled around, but Ewen was already gone, the back door closing behind him. Rage exploded through her veins. She wanted to give chase, to find him and beat the life out of him until it ran red over the field, but instead she turned to Sam, fell to her knees and held his body.