Global Cooling (The Time Bubble Book 2)

by Jason Ayres

  Finally by one of the tills she found a dented tin of peaches that someone must have dropped. It had a ring pull lid, which was fortunate as she didn’t have a tin opener with her, but when she got it open it was to discover that the contents were frozen solid.

  She decided to head out to the back of the store and see what was in the stockroom. This looked a little more promising. There were quite a few cases on pallets that looked like they might contain food.

  She was just in the process of trying to get the wrapping off one of them when she heard a noise behind her and a voice.

  “Hold it right there.”

  She spun round to see two men in Army uniforms, both holding guns. It was Colin and Neil, but she didn’t recognise them. She didn’t visit the store that often, having lived on a diet of takeaways most of the last couple of years.

  “Didn’t you see the notice outside?” asked Colin. “It says no looters.”

  “What are you going to do then, shoot me?” asked Lauren, sarcastically. “Come on then, get it over with.”

  Colin and Neil said nothing. “No, I thought not,” she said.

  “We’re not going to shoot you,” said Colin, “but I think our boss is going to be very interested in you. You’re coming back to our base.”

  “Am I fuck!” exclaimed Lauren.

  Neil pointed his gun at a pallet of toilet paper and fired. The gun made a huge noise in the enclosed space and ripped a large hole in the packaging. He then pointed it directly at Lauren. “I think you are,” he said.

  The unexpected shot had unsettled Lauren and she didn’t want to risk calling his bluff. Suitably chastened, she had no choice but to comply. They led her out the back of the store, bundled her into the back of their Land Rover, and drove her back to the base.

  Ryan was on guard duty at the gate when the Land Rover drove up. Colin wound down the window to speak to him.

  “We’ve got a special delivery for the captain,” he said.

  Ryan looked in the back of the truck, and instantly recognised Lauren. “Well, well,” he said. “This is going to be a nice surprise for him.”

  “What are you doing!” she shouted, eyes ablaze with anger. “Playing toy soldiers? You’ve got no right to kidnap me like this.”

  “Take over the gate,” he said. “I’ll take her in myself.” Colin got out of the driver’s seat and Ryan got in. It was only a couple of hundred yards back to the main complex. He parked directly outside Dan’s office, went round to the back of the truck and opened the back door.

  “Help me in with her,” he said to Neil, and they grabbed hold of her on both sides.

  “Let go of me,” she protested. “I can walk there by myself, thank-you.”

  Dan was busy in his office, sticking pins into a large map of the local area. He was marking where all the petrol stations were, planning to send teams out to drain them dry. The door opened behind him, and Ryan shoved Lauren into the room. Dan was delighted when he saw who Ryan had brought him.

  “Well, look what we’ve got here,” remarked Dan. “Ryan, you can go. Shut the door behind you. Lauren and I are going to have a little chat.”

  After Ryan had gone, Dan locked the door and pocketed the key.

  “What the hell are you doing, here, Dan? You’re not in the Army.”

  “But the people out there don’t know that,” he said. “Law and order has broken down. People need someone to protect them, feed them, and keep them warm. That’s where I come in.”

  “You, look after other people?” asked Lauren, incredulously. “You’ve never given a toss about anyone but yourself.”

  “But that’s where you’re wrong, darling. I am their benefactor, their saviour. I’m the man who allows them to go on living, under my gentle guidance.”

  “You sound like you’re trying to paint yourself as some kind of saint. Don’t think for a moment I believe you’re doing all this for the good of other people.”

  “Well, it’s true, being in charge does give me certain benefits,” he said. “In return for my generosity, they give me total loyalty. I only have to ask and I can have whatever I want. Or whoever, come to that.” He looked directly into her eyes, leaving her in no doubt as to what he meant.

  “Well, you’re not having me,” she said.

  “Are you sure about that?” he asked. “Do you remember what you said to me a few months ago? That you’d never sleep with me? And I said, you never know what the future might hold? Well, guess what, sweetheart, the future just arrived.”

  He moved closer to her, and attempted to lean towards her and kiss her. She could smell his rank breath from yards away and, as he tried to get closer to her, it became overpowering.

  “Get the fuck off me,” she yelled. “Or I’ll scream the place down.”

  “Scream all you like,” he said. “It’ll make no difference. I’ve got total power here. No one will dare to question me.”

  “What are you going to do?” she asked, as she backed away towards the corner, suddenly beginning to feel very afraid. “Rape me? That’s just about your style, isn’t it, because you can’t get a woman any other way? Will that make you feel like a man?” she taunted.

  He lashed out with the back of his hand and caught her clean across the face. He was at least twice her weight and the blow made her fall backwards into the corner. Now he had her where he wanted her.

  “You always were a little prick tease, even at school,” he said. “Did it give you a kick all these years, putting me down while you were opening your legs for every other bloke in town? Well, it’s my turn now. It’s payback time.”

  He reached down to where she was sitting on the floor and tried to grab her, but she had one last defence up her sleeve. She lifted her leg and kicked him squarely in the bollocks. He screamed in pain and doubled up in agony.

  “Over my dead body”, she cried, and jumped up, heading for the door, forgetting that he’d locked it.

  “You bitch,” he shouted as he staggered to his feet. She rattled the handle and banged on the door, but there was no response. Then she saw the gun on the desk. He was coming towards her once more. She reached for the gun, but he was too quick and grabbed hold of her once more. Again he tried to force his lips onto hers, but, in one last act of defiance, she spat in his face and tried to wriggle free.

  As she did so she lost her footing and crashed backwards, hitting her head with a sickening thump on the desk, sliding slowly to the floor.

  Still reeling from the fight and the pain in his nether regions, fat and unfit Dan was panting for breath. He sat down on the floor and looked at her. She seemed to have passed out, and was motionless next to the desk where she had fallen.

  He crawled across the floor towards her, and rolled her over. A small puddle of blood was forming beneath her head on the cold stone floor and he could see she wasn’t breathing. With a shock, he realised she was dead.

  He sat in shock, trembling with fear and guilt. “Over my dead body,” he could hear her voice saying over and over again in his head. He’d never meant to kill her. He’d never meant to kill anyone.

  He was a coward, a bully and a failure. Everything he’d done up until now, playing at soldiers, enjoying his power trip, none of it was real, it had just been a big game. Now he had a dead girl in front him and suddenly it had become very real.

  He hated himself for what he had become, and sat on the floor, weeping over her body.

  It was deathly quiet in the room, and he couldn’t hear any noise from outside. Nobody had come to see what had happened. Hopefully that meant nobody had heard the struggle.

  No one from the base had heard the struggle, but somebody else had seen it. Dan looked up and thought he saw someone at the window, the vaguely familiar face of a middle-aged man whom he couldn’t quite place. He blinked and it was gone.

  He rushed over to the window and looked out, but there was nobody there. Was he imagining things now?

  This was no good. He had to pull himself togeth
er. He couldn’t let the others know what had happened. This was a step too far. But he still had Ryan. Devoted loyal, Ryan: yes, he would help him. In fact, he would help him more than he would realise. Dan wasn’t taking the blame for any of this.

  His brief feelings of remorse and guilt faded away, as a new plan began to form in his mind.

  He looked at the gun on the desk, and wiped it down thoroughly with a cloth. Holding it with a tea towel, he placed it gently back down on the desk.

  He could see through the small window of the room that darkness had fallen outside. He pressed a button on the telephone on his desk. Although there were no external telephone lines, they had managed to get the internal phone system operating.

  “Send Ryan in, would you?” he said into the receiver. A few seconds later there was a knock at the door. Dan opened it cautiously. “Are you alone?” he asked.

  “Yes, it’s just me,” replied Ryan.

  “Come in, and shut the door behind you.” He let him into the room, and Ryan immediately saw Lauren’s body slumped on the floor.

  “Oh my God, what have you done?” he asked, horrified. “Is she dead?”

  “It was an accident,” replied Dan. “She slipped and hit her head.”

  Ryan wasn’t quite as stupid as Dan took him for. He could see from the state of the room that this was no accident. But he couldn’t bring himself to question his leader. After what had happened with Jack, he was afraid of Dan, and he had no desire to end up lying dead on the floor next to the dead girl.

  “What are you going to do?” he asked.

  “It’s more what we are going to do,” remarked Dan. “Now, no one else saw her come in here, did they?”

  “Only Neil and he’s gone over to the mess hut.”

  “Right, well, here is what we are going to do. We are going to leave this room now, go over and join the others, and eat our evening meal as normal. I will lock the door behind us. Later tonight, when everyone is asleep, we will come back, load her body in the truck and take it out into the woods and dump it. Who’s on guard duty on the gate tonight?”

  “Colin, I think,” replied Ryan.

  “Well, that’s fine. We’ll just tell him we are going out on an errand and off we’ll go. He won’t ask why. No one would dare question me.”

  So just before midnight, they brought the Land Rover round to the front of the building ready for the grisly task of lifting her body out to the car.

  “Hang on a minute,” said Dan, just as they were about to lift her body. “Have you got your gun?”

  “Not on me,” said Ryan.

  “Better take mine,” said Dan. “Pick it up for me, and put it in the truck, will you? – just in case we run into any nosey parkers.”

  Ryan took the gun and put it in the Land Rover, and then between them they carried Lauren’s body out. Neither of them had ever seen a dead body before, let alone touched one. Both felt queasy. It was one thing blasting people to death playing computer games, but this was something else altogether.

  They covered the body with a sheet and eased out towards the gate. Dan wanted to get as far away as possible, but outside the base the roads were not easy, even with the snow tracks on.

  About two miles away they stopped on the side of the road where it ran through some open woodland, close to the cottage where, unknown to them, Hannah and Jess were holed up for the winter.

  “This will do,” said Dan. They got out of the car. Unseen by Ryan, Dan lifted the gun with a cloth they used for clearing the windscreen and tucked it into his coat pocket.

  Between them they dragged the body far enough into the woods that it couldn’t be seen from the road. There was no question of trying to bury it in the frozen ground. All they could do was dump it behind a tree.

  Snow was falling again all around them, and Dan figured it would not be long until she was completely covered in snow. She probably wouldn’t be found for months.

  “We tell nobody about this, OK?” said Dan. “No one.”

  As he spoke, unseen by Ryan, he dropped the gun onto the ground behind her body.

  Ryan nodded. They turned and made their way back to the Land Rover, as fresh snowflakes fell onto the dead girl’s body.

  Chapter Twenty-Two – 1st January 2030 (1.00am)

  Kaylee cradled her newborn baby in her arms as Charlie, looked on, a proud look on his face.

  He had been born just after midnight, making him the first baby born on the island not only of the year, but also of the decade.

  They had been on the island for two months. Phil and Cathy had been only too pleased to have their children staying with them, but things had been a little crowded.

  After a couple of weeks, they’d managed to rent an apartment in the same block, and Charlie had even managed to find some part-time work as a waiter. With that and support from their parents, they were managing to get by.

  They had still heard nothing from their friends back home. The weather had continued to be atrocious across the UK, but things were gradually becoming more organised in the cities. With the help of the US Army, some power had been restored, but London remained under a state of martial law.

  Most of the refugees who’d arrived in the city from other parts of the country were living a life in sleeping bags on school hall floors, relying on soup kitchens for food. The TV pictures they had seen looked unremittingly grim. They reminded Charlie of old films he’d seen portraying life in the USSR during the Cold War.

  Charlie had been lucky to get work, considering the lack of British tourists on the island, but there had been plenty of arrivals from other parts of Europe looking to escape the cold.

  The climate had returned to more or less normal in the Canary Islands, and they were able to dine outside on the balcony on Christmas Day. Kaylee was heavily pregnant now and wondered if she might have a Christmas baby, but all remained calm. For only the second time since she found out she was pregnant, she allowed herself a small sip of champagne as they made a toast to absent friends back home.

  Her waters broke at lunchtime on New Year’s Eve, and her father drove her and Charlie to the hospital in Puerto Del Carmen. As the rest of the island celebrated the end of one of the most eventful and unusual years in recorded history, Charlie held her hand tightly as their baby boy was born into a world with an uncertain future.

  They had talked about possible names for the baby and hadn’t come up with a firm choice, but as she cradled him in her arms she thought of Hannah and Jess back home, and realised what she wanted to name him.

  “I want to call him Peter,” she said.

  “Perfect,” replied Charlie: Peter Adams, born 1st January 2030. Speaking of which, the other Peter will be coming out of the Bubble in a few days’ time.

  This was a fact of which Hannah and Jessica were all too aware, but Hannah was getting increasingly worried about how she was going to get to the tunnel to see him, let alone get him back to the cottage.

  Up until Christmas, the weather had been on and off, with the sun breaking through only occasionally as the dust in the atmosphere continued to block out its rays. Every time it seemed there might be some sort of thaw, increasingly frequent and severe snowstorms put a stop to it.

  As she and Jess looked out on Christmas morning at the snow-covered landscape, she reflected that she’d got the one thing she’d always wished for: a white Christmas. The old phrase “Be careful what you wish for” came into her head. She would gladly trade this white Christmas in for a bit of normality now.

  Between Christmas and New Year the weather worsened and it snowed incessantly for the first week of January, the snow piling up higher than ever before.

  Two days before Peter was due back, it finally relented, but by then the snow was above the downstairs windows. It must have been six foot deep at least.

  The next day, there were less than 24 hours left until Peter was due to emerge, but it was snowing again. She’d talked the situation over with Jess and they’d agreed that Ha
nnah would have to go to try and get to him by herself, leaving Jess alone in the cottage.

  Going out of the front door was impossible, so she had to climb out of the bedroom window and make the short drop onto the surface of the snow below. Although she was only going about a mile and a half to the tunnel, she looked to all intents and purposes as if she was going to climb Everest. She had thought of everything.

  In addition to ensuring she was dressed for the occasion, she’d also filled a rucksack full of clothes for Peter, plus two days’ supplies of food and water in case she got stuck. She’d also brought a shovel. She would like to have taken more, but driving was out of the question. In fact, she couldn’t even see the car anymore: it was completely buried under the snow.

  The snow was so deep that it was quite hard to work out exactly where she was going. Roads no longer existed. All that was visible now was a huge, white blanket, with a few trees sticking out here and there.

  She could, however, make out the outlines of the buildings of the town, in particular the church, which she made a beeline for. As long as she headed directly towards the church, she was going in the right direction.

  Her heart sank when she finally reached the embankment. Where the path to the tunnel should have been was just a solid drift of snow. It had filled the path where it cut down towards the tunnel and drifted. It must have been at least fifteen feet deep, and the entrance to the tunnel was no longer visible.

  Night was falling, and he wasn’t due to emerge until an hour or so before dawn. She tried to dig down into the snow where she figured the entrance to the tunnel might be, but it was hopeless in the falling snow. She managed to dig down a couple of feet, but it was tough going. She couldn’t stay out here all night, even kitted out like this: she’d die of exposure.

  She walked back the few yards from the embankment to the first house on the estate, broke in, and tried to grab a few hours’ sleep in her thermal sleeping bag.

  Long before dawn, she got up again and headed back to the tunnel. There was a howling wind outside whipping up yet another blizzard. With despair she saw that the hole she had dug the previous evening had already been filled in again by the drifting snow.