The shock of the grab sent the knife out of my grasp with the momentum of it. It fell, but the force wasn’t strong enough for it to puncture his skin. I heard it clatter to the side, and in a second he had grabbed me once again and thrown me to the side.
There was no way that my strength would match his. The anger from the groin-kick motivated him to clamber atop me, his hands scurrying for my throat and finding it quickly. I grabbed a hold of his wrists, trying to loosen his grip, but it was impossible.
There’s no more terrifying feeling than trying to take a breath and finding that none will come to you. The blood rushed to my face, my body flailing beneath his weight as if it was completely detached from my mind.
Boom.
The sound of a gun going off next to me couldn’t have been ignored. My attacker’s grip loosened, and my survival instinct kicked into overdrive.
We had both turned towards the source – it had been the final deathly motion of Dolores’ attacker, whose gun had gone off in his hand, flying only a foot or so above my head.
I resisted the burning temptation to grab my attacker’s wrists, reaching over with the loosened grip, fumbling for the gun
‘What-’
I raised the gun, pressed the barrel to my attacker’s head, and pulled the trigger.
The force of the explosion flowed up my arm, jolting my nerves. It lit up my view of the man’s head, or what was left of it as the revolver bullet – that must have been what I was holding considering the force – effectively blew up the top of the man’s head.
You’d be amazed how much blood the human body holds, especially the head. A little can look like a lot, but when it starts spilling from an open pipe it’s like pouring milk out of a carton. A splatter dropped onto my face and my neck, his body tensed as if he had been electrocuted, and I hurriedly managed to push him aside before he collapsed over to my right side with the help of me forcing him away.
Suddenly the attic was strangely silent. No grunting, no gunshots, no yelling – only the ringing in my ears and my desperate groans as I forced the man’s body from me and we laid there, side by side, not just I and the man but Dolores and hers, who had now stretched back next to me as she gasped for breath.
‘Fucking Christ…’ I muttered, gasping for breath as my ribs shuddered with every inhalation and exhalation. ‘What the hell was that…?’
We were four bodies stretched out next to each other, the only difference being that two of us still had heartbeats.
Chapter Ten
Stitch
‘Here.’
‘What is this?’
‘Gauze. Bite down on it.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I need to stitch up your shoulder and I don’t have any anaesthetic.’
I was sat on the kitchen counter in Dolores’ house, the shadows of every utensil flickering against the walls and the curtains like demons stemming up from the ground.
‘At least do me the honour of giving me a drink first, then.’
Dolores rolled her eyes and turned to a cupboard behind her, rooting through it before producing a half-filled bottle of off-brand vodka. She handed it to me and I uncapped it whilst she heated a needle over a nearby candle.
‘Honestly, I never thought that Gerry’s son would be such a gigantic pussy.’
‘Well I never thought that the people in this town would casually turn into murderers if you looked at them funny.’
‘Or pulled a gun on them in front of a group of locals. Men don’t take kindly to being humiliated in public. It’s a pride thing. Evolutionary. No matter how civilised we like to think we are, we’ll still make mad decisions when our reputation is put on the line, particularly in times like this when we become savages again.’
I took a swig of the vodka – I wasn’t usually a drinker so perhaps it should have burnt, but any weakness had been forced out of me after the events upstairs. I swallowed it down and took in Dolores’ words
‘You’ve thought about this a lot, haven’t you?’
Dolores retrieved a pair of glasses from a box on the counter behind her and placed them upon her nose, pausing briefly.
‘My husband died eight years ago. We’d been together since we were just kids in high school. He was smart but gentle. A doctor. Once a link like that breaks as early on as it did you have to adjust to a new way of thinking… Think about new things altogether. This is what I think about.’
It was the first moment of vulnerability I had seen from her.
‘Now I get why you got along with my Dad so much… Same situation.’
She nodded in a certain way, indicating that she wanted to end the conversation there. She didn’t want to talk about herself – in her mind the self probably didn’t have much of a place in a world like this. Survive or don’t.
‘Okay,’ she said, threading the needle and setting it down briefly before turning taking up the rubbing alcohol and dabbing it on a cloth. ‘I don’t need to tell you that this is gonna hurt, so bite down on that gauze.’
I made to do so, but a light laugh escaped my lips.
‘What is it?’
‘Nothing… I did this exact same thing for my buddy Luke at about 1am this morning. Never thought that I’d be having it done to me so soon after.’
‘What goes around…’ Dolores said, raising the sterilised the cloth and pressing it to the stab wound.
***
Five minutes of stifled groans of pain and restraining myself later and I was stitched and patch, Dolores patting down the edges of the antiseptic cover onto my skin. I had taken a cloth and a small amount of water from Dolores’ tank and wiped the blood from my face, coming back from the bathroom minutes later.
‘Change the dressing sometime tomorrow. I know there’s plenty of first aid supplies at your Dad’s house. Or just come back here.’
‘You got it,’ I said, taking another drink of the vodka. I replaced the cap on the bottle and set it down on the counter, reaching over for my blood-covered shirt that I had been wearing since we escaped the city.
‘You’re not wearing that again, are ya?’
‘I haven’t got anything else.’
‘My husband’s got some shirts.’
She returned a minute later with a replacement, a white t-shirt similar to my own. It was a little oversized but it did the job.
‘Good as new,’ she smiled.
‘Thanks… Shit, I really should have changed after we moved the bodies from upstairs.’
‘Don’t worry about that. It’ll take us hours as it is to get them buried. I’ll do it.’
‘What?’
‘I’ll get Rubin over here. He’ll give me a hand.’
‘That kid? He’s gonna help you bury actual corpses out back?’
‘He’s all right with that sort of stuff. Besides, he needs to learn, and you need to get back before your friends start worrying about you. It’s late enough as it is.’
‘All right…’ I said, nodding lightly and looking away, ‘I guess you know him better than I do.’
‘That I do.’
‘I just hope that nobody heard those shots.’
‘They will have done. But what is anybody gonna do? Come looking for the source of danger? Make a damned phone call? Those luxuries don’t exist anymore.’
‘Right… Hey, come back tomorrow, why don’t you? We can have another look for those drones, see if any get a little closer.’
‘You got it.’
‘And bring your friends, too. They might as well take a look.’
I nodded once again and headed for the door, before stopping.
‘I’ll head out the back. In the unlikely event that anybody’s watching I don’t wanna implicate myself.’
‘You always this paranoid?’
‘Yes.’
‘When it comes to killing people? Yes.’
‘Fair enough.’
I made to leave once again, but as I turned the handle and moved through the frame int
o the warm night air she stopped me once more.
‘Hey.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Have you done that before? … Killed someone?’
I stared across at her before glancing down at the ground, avoiding her gaze.
‘Once. Last night. Luke’s the only one who knows. And now you.’
‘Not exactly easy, is it?’
‘No… Why, have you?’
‘Of course I have.’
‘Who… When?’
‘I thought that’d be obvious. My husband, when his cancer got bad.’
There’s a certain shelter about big cities that comes with populated areas. Streetlights and cars offer a kind of community, a sense of witness and safety from anyone or anything that might pose a threat.
As I hurried along the back path and jumped a small, rotting section of fence and ducked into a lane just off of main street, I saw others. There were people in the streets, outside of their houses or shopfronts, lit by candles on their driveways or on porches. Nowhere to go and nothing to do but dwell on the absence of the old world that had made way in seconds for this one that we were now stuck in.
Every face, empty and pale, even in the orange light of flames, turned to look at me. There was no animosity but there was no sense of welcoming either. There was just… Absence. Vacant expressions and clockwork functions.
What did people do before TV? Before we had some white noise to block out the pressing, gnawing thoughts in our heads? What did they become when they had been used to it and had it taken away?
I kept my head down, picking up the pace as I got further out of the centre of town. By the time I was on the stretch back to the farm house I was moving at a heavy jog, sharply turning the corner onto the dried, dusty path that led up to the house.
I reached the clearing, my surroundings almost completely dark even with the adjustment that my eyes had made.
‘Woah, woah, hold it!’
I slid to a stop, almost falling onto my back in the process.
‘Who is that?’ I shouted.
‘What, you don’t recognise the voice of your best buddy?’
‘Fuck you, man…’ I said, a laugh pushing up from my lungs as I gasped for breath. ‘Scared the crap out of me…’
‘I’ve been pretty good at that lately, huh?’
‘Yep,’ I said, heading up to the porch and sitting down by him on the bench. ‘Where’s Helen?’
‘Living room. We’re taking shifts again. Still tired. What happened in town?’
‘Uhh… Not a whole lot,’ I blatantly lied, the only thing coming to mind being the attack in Dolores’ house. But then the thought of the drone came back. ‘Actually, there is something…’
I filled him in on the drone that I had seen from the roof of Dolores’ house, and everything that we had discussed – leaving out everything that had happened after.
‘Christ… And we’ve got no idea who deployed it?’
‘No. I’ve been thinking though… My only gripe with this whole theory is that if it was a foreign body that set these things off and is watching us, then surely the drones would have to have been in the country before the event happened… And they’d have to be sufficiently hidden away so that they wouldn’t be found… And they would need to be able to set off correctly. Do you get how much planning that would take? How many people? The money, the resources…’
‘Powerful entities will risk destroying the planet if it means being able to beat the other guy. This could just be the beginning of something bigger.’
We both fell silent, and he cleared his throat.
‘Get inside and get some sleep,’ he said.
‘No,’ I replied, ‘I’m wide awake. You go.’
‘You’ve been out all day while we’ve been playing cards and resisting rations. Go.’
‘How about…’ Helen’s voice suddenly broke through the open front door, almost sending us both jumping through the porch roof. ‘You both go inside and pass out. I’m done, anyway.’
Maybe we would’ve argued, but there was no point in doing so. The thought of sleep suddenly made me tired, and I didn’t care to try with Helen.
We went inside and took separate couches in the dark. I stretched back beneath a light blanket and drifted off. Despite everything, I slept more soundly that night than I had in weeks. No images of dead men appeared before me – just blackness, and nothing else.
Chapter Eleven
Abort
‘You saw it with your own eyes?’
‘Yes.’
We had regained our strength, slept well, and were now sitting in the living room of the house together. It was a little after 2pm the next day.
I had told Helen everything that I had told Luke so far. Now she was rolling it over in her mind as she sat in my father’s armchair.
‘You sure that she didn’t drug you? We don’t even know that this woman is who she says she is.’
‘I’m sure… Look maybe it would be a decent idea if you both came with me to see her. She could show you this thing for yourselves. It’s real, and I’m guessing you trust me, but you still need to see it.’
Luke nodded lightly before looking expectantly over at Helen, as did I. She was interested either way, but wary all the same.
‘She has a laptop,’ I said. ‘A working one. I’ve seen it. If you wanted to take a look at your thesis documents and check that they’re all okay then I’m sure she would be willing to oblige you.’
At that her eyes lit up, and she broke into an agreeable nod.
‘All right. But let’s take the guns.’
‘I don’t think we’ll need them, but okay.’
We were all in agreement – I just prayed to God or whoever was listening up there that Dolores and Rubin had cleared away the bodies by now.
An hour later we approached the front door of the house. Less than a day prior, in the attic of that unassuming house, I had killed a man for the second time in my life.
I brushed the thought aside, but not the notion that the evidence of my actions could remain.
I knocked on the front door, slowly but sharply, and waited. A short time later Dolores appeared, showing a weary, knowing smile that remained all the more innocent of any wrongdoing.
‘Sam. Back so soon.’
‘Yeah. I’m just here about… What we talked about yesterday, on the roof. D’you mind? If this is a bad time…’ I paused briefly, nodding my head so slightly that my friends wouldn’t see it from the back, ‘then we can come back in a little while.’
‘No, it’s not a bad time at all. Come on in.’
We made our way into the house, met with… A total lack of anything suspect. There was no sign that my wound had been cleaned in the kitchen, and as I held my breath at the top of the stairs, a similar lack of bodies, blood, or anything that fell into the category of bodily remains.
‘Jesus Christ…’ Luke said, looking about the equipment and supplies that lay neatly stocked and arranged in the attic. ‘You been, uh… Preparing for this, Dolores?’
‘You could say that,’ she responded casually, laughing with expert but well-meaning and necessary deception. ‘Better to have it and need it than need it and not have it, right?’
‘True.’
‘Do you still have that laptop?’ I asked.
‘Oh, of course. Glad that somebody can actually make use of it, actually…’
She fished it out of a cabinet on the far corner, removing it from it’s metallic case
‘So you were preparing for this.’
‘Much like Sam’s father, I had a lot of free time on my hands to prepare for strange situations.’
She handed the laptop over to Helen who cradled it like a child.
‘It’s like holding relic,’ she laughed. ‘Do you mind?’
‘Why don’t we head up to the roof again while you do? It’s a lovely evening.’
So that was what we did – and a few minutes later we were sat on the roof as I h
ad been yesterday with Dolores, as she surveyed the skyline with her binoculars for the drone once again.
‘Is it always out there?’ Luke asked, looking up at her.
‘Not always… But usually… Strange… I don’t see it…’
She continued to watch as Helen booted up the computer in her lap.
‘This has been a real rollercoaster ride,’ she said, watching the BIOS screen change.
‘I know...’ I muttered, looking out at the trees. ‘I still can’t believe all of this happened.’
‘You mean the pulse?’ Helen said, acting aloof. ‘Fuck that. I mean my research.’ She dug into the pocket of her jeans and retrieved that unassuming little USB pen. ‘I’ve gone from thinking it was fine to thinking it was gone to thinking that it was fine again, to actually being able to access it. That’s more of a rollercoaster than the end of the freaking world, I don’t care what you say.’
I shook my head and stretched out on the roof again, taking any opportunity that I could to rest. I watched Luke look about the view whilst Helen moved through the login screen, absent of a password.
She plugged in the flash drive and waited expectantly until the folder opened automatically.
‘Thank God… It’s all here…’
I sat up once again and shuffled over to her side to see it all, kissing her on the head.
‘I’m so happy for you,’ I said, running my eyes over it. ‘All of it?’
‘What?’
‘Is it definitely all there?’
‘Yeah, I’m sure… Wait…’
‘There it is,’ Dolores suddenly said. Luke leapt to his feet and crossed to her side, looking out into the distance until she handed him the binoculars and he searched for it.
‘Holy shit, I can see it…’ Luke said. ‘Sam, can you believe this?’
‘What is it?’ I asked Helen.
‘There’s… I don’t recognise this one.’
So she double-clicked it, that tiny little icon hidden in the folder amongst all of the other files.
A command box immediately sprung to life, streaming through a bounding list of thousands of lines of code before disappearing. A rudimentary command console program appeared on the screen with a blinking light in the centre, and a single word:
The Solar Pulse (Book 2): Escape the Pulse Page 6
