by Moody, David
‘Just curious.’
‘And what about you?’ Roger asked, turning the question around. ‘You’re not from these parts, are you?’
Steven felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end. For the first time in weeks, he felt a shiver of cold. He shifted awkwardly in his chair. Shit, was there something in the food? Have they poisoned me? Are they going to eat me? ‘I’m from Cambridge,’ he told them. He paused... looked at them both again... swallowed hard, throat drier than ever. ‘What do you want from me?’
Roger and Sandra looked at each other, blank. ‘Nothing,’ Roger said. ‘Don’t you trust us?’
‘I’ve had a hard couple of days... I’ve seen and done some things I never thought I would... it’s been a bloody nightmare and I just...’
‘Sandy’s sister lives in Borth,’ Roger explained. ‘We kept thinking this was all going to blow over. We left it too late to try and get down to see her. There’s nothing more sinister going on, if that’s what you’re wondering. We just kept thinking if we waited a couple more days everything would start getting back to normal.’
‘It still might,’ Sandra started to say, but a look from her husband silenced her.
‘We’ve talked about this, love,’ he said, talking to her and her alone now. ‘You’re always doing this.’
‘I’m just trying to look on the bright side is all.’
‘There is no bright side. You have to accept that.’
‘I don’t have to accept anything of the sort. I keep telling you, Rog, someone somewhere will sort this mess out, I’m sure they will.’
Roger shook his head and smiled. He leant across and squeezed his wife’s hand. She wiped her eyes again. Roger turned to Steven. ‘Honest, lad, Sand and I are just trying to sit this out as best we can. Crikey, though, things must be rough if you think we’re up to anything we shouldn’t be.’
Steven was embarrassed, ashamed he’d thought what he’d thought about these people. Sandra’s baseless optimism reminded him of his mother. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Exactly how bad are things out there then?’
‘It’s taken me two days to get this far. I should have managed the whole journey in about five hours, maybe six. The world’s tearing itself apart. Your car packed up because of that last energy pulse. It’s knocked everything out... everything electrical.’
‘That’s what I thought,’ Roger said sadly.
‘What do you think’s going to happen?’ asked Sandra.
‘I’ve no idea. There’s no reason to think anything much will change, is there? It’ll keep getting hotter, and the energy pulses will keep on hitting us until there’s nothing left.’
A moment of quiet as they considered the implications of Steven’s words. ‘Never say never,’ Sandra said suddenly. ‘It might not be as bad as all that. The temperature might start going down again... we might even see some rain. Imagine that...’
‘Come on, Sandy...’ Roger warned.
‘From what I’ve seen, I think it’s probably too late,’ Steven told them.
‘What do you mean, lad?’
‘We’re too far gone now. There’s nothing much left out there. I can’t see a way back from this.’
24
SUNDAY 19 OCTOBER
When Steven woke up the entire building was shaking. Dust was falling from the brickwork and searing, impossibly bright light was pouring in through every crack and every window. He’d fallen asleep in his chair by the fireplace with his feet up on a stool. Christ, how long was I out for? Roger and Sandra were still there with him, though Sandra was on her feet, screaming as she scuttled around the room, frantically trying to avoid the shafts of burning light which crisscrossed the hotel bar. Steven’s mind was all over the place, dulled from deep sleep, nauseous from this rude awakening. Frightened thoughts cut through the confusion: Where am I? Am I too late? Is this the end?
The air was filled with an ominous dull roar, as if the largest plane imaginable was flying just inches above the roof. Brick and plaster dust fell like snow, thousands of swirling motes illuminated by each individual spear of light. Roger tried to grab hold of his wife but she fought against him, traumatised with fear. Steven saw that she was still screaming, but the noise in the hotel was such now that he couldn’t hear her. Behind the bar glasses and bottles were being shaken from their shelves. They shattered on the stone floor but their cumulative crashes were barely audible over the relentless din of everything else.
Steven held onto a concrete pillar, wrapping his arms around it, feeling himself burn where the incandescent light coming in from outside struck his skin. He clung on in terror as the conditions continued to worsen. It was so hot he couldn’t breathe, so loud he couldn’t hear, so bright he couldn’t see... if it wasn’t for the fact he could feel himself panicking he’d have questioned whether or not he was still alive. He didn’t know how long he would be if this continued.
But then it began to subside.
The wind and noise faded a fraction. Though his eyes were still screwed shut in desperation, he became aware of the light outside beginning to fade. A few seconds longer and he allowed himself to look.
It was difficult to see anything much, the sudden change in light levels making it hard to focus. Shapes first, then blurs of movement, then detail and distinction. He saw Roger on all fours, crawling across the room to get to Sandra who was sitting with her back against the bar, hands over her head, still screaming in terror. Steven grabbed his hat and sunglasses and made for the door. ‘Don’t,’ Roger shouted, but he wasn’t listening. He pulled the door open and stepped outside.
The heat was incredible, everything scorching hot to the touch. The sky overhead was more white than blue, drained of almost all its usual colour, sickly pale yet intense. The sun itself was higher than he expected, hanging directly above, and Steven realised with utter horror that it was already mid-morning, that because of his exhaustion last night he’d slept for hours longer than planned.
On the other side of the road, above the tops of the trees, he could see clouds of smoke rising up from what was left of the dry forest. He could see flames all along the horizon too, though their source was far less clear. In fact, he realised, everything now appeared far less clear than yesterday. A combination of heat-haze and smoke-haze made it difficult to see in most directions.
He took a few more steps away from the hotel, still shaking with nerves, then looked back. The wooden roof of a grey-stone outbuilding, separate from the main part of the hotel, was burning fiercely. Steven found himself wondering how strong the next pulse might be, and when it would hit? Would it be the one? He knew now beyond any doubt that before long the increasingly powerful waves which continued to batter the planet would be too strong to survive. For a moment he was rooted to the spot with fear, imagining himself out on the road alone, walking into the next wave with no shelter or protection, his skin and hair burning away as the air turned to fire. Each subsequent pulse was a step closer to Armageddon.
He couldn’t stay here a second longer. The heat was unbearable and the soles of his feet were beginning to burn, but his desire to move on was driven by something stronger than physical pain. He was running out of time. The gaps between the energy pulses were reducing, the strength of the waves themselves increasing... the longer he spent here, the less chance he had of seeing Sam again.
He went back inside, another sudden shift from light to dark making it difficult to see. He took off his shades and saw Roger and Sandra clinging onto each other for support. ‘I have to go,’ he told them.
‘You can’t,’ Roger said. ‘It’s suicide, lad.’
‘I don’t have any choice.’
‘You do. Of course you do. You can stay here with us.’
‘You know I can’t. I need to be with my wife. You’d try and do the same if you two were apart, tell me you wouldn’t.’ Neither said a word, they just looked at him. ‘The sooner I go, the better my chances. I don’t think it’ll be long before th
e next wave hits. A few hours, maybe longer.’
‘Take whatever food you need, some fresh clothes... anything,’ Sandra told him. Steven thanked her and grabbed his rucksack and began to fill it, desperate to get away.
✽✽✽
He was on the road within twenty minutes. He didn’t take much, because there wasn’t any point. As much food and drink as he could carry comfortably, a change of T-shirt, and a wide golf umbrella was all he had. That was the most important find of all, he decided. He wished he’d found something like it sooner. It would keep the sun off his back while he endured the final few miles slog into Criccieth. According to Roger, Steven had about ten miles left to cover. A few years back he’d have been able to run that distance in under an hour and a half, but not today, not in these conditions, not in the pitiful state he was in. A steady, careful, considered walk was the only way he’d get there in one piece.
He thanked Roger and Sandra and wished them both well. They watched him leave and he looked back and saw them waiting until he’d disappeared from view. He knew he’d never see them again. He’d never come here again. All the roads he’d driven or walked along to get here today... he’d never drive or walk along them again. His increasingly dark train of thought continued: he’d never see his home again, never reclaim his abandoned car, never shake his dad’s hand or hug his mom or his sister... It’s always the last time now. Everything I see, everything I do... always the last time.
Despite the intensity of the conditions, he found the walk easier than last night. For once the light helped. He used landmarks in the distance to measure his progress and made himself focus on how far he’d come, not how far he had left to go. He came across road signs for Porthmadog and Criccieth but he paid them little attention. Keep a steady pace, he ordered himself. Don’t stop. Just keep moving.
25
Porthmadog. He’d skirted around several small villages with largely unpronounceable names and had barely seen anyone in all the time he’d been outdoors. A short while back he’d given a couple of bottles of drink to a family he’d found cowering together in the garden of what remained of their home, clinging onto each other in the shadows of their largest tree. The timbers of their house and the embers of everything they owned were still smouldering, having caught light in the last energy pulse. The parents remained stoically positive for their three children, reassuring them that everything was going to be okay, and that they’d go and find somewhere else to get out of the sun as soon as Mummy and Daddy had got their breath back.
The world otherwise appeared strangely empty for the most part, no one else outdoors, as if it had been evacuated. Steven hadn’t wasted time looking for people, but his curiosity got the better of him on occasion. He saw folks hiding in their homes in vain. Some had their doors and windows open to try and dissipate the heat, others had everything shut tight, perhaps hoping the protective tinting of their uPVC double-glazing might reflect away the next deluge of searing light. He’d seen one enterprising old guy taking an unexpectedly low-fi approach to the coming firestorm, harkening back to the days of the Cold War. He’d greeted Steven with a very casual ‘afternoon’ as he’d tried to paint the windows of his home with thick white emulsion paint. He hadn’t been having much success. The paint was drying on the brush as he tried to apply it.
And then, suddenly, from out of nowhere it seemed, people. Quite a few of them, in fact, braving the conditions and climbing a steep hillside to try and get into a slate mine, scrambling over hot, dusty rock and brittle vegetation like ants. Once an important industrial focus for the region, the pit had been little more than a tourist attraction for many years now, yet the logic of trying to get there was immediately obvious. Museum or commercial hub, it was still a bloody great hole in the ground. The temperature would be relatively constant down there, and folks would be out of the relentless sunlight too. There was a part of him that wanted to join them. Maybe, if time allowed, he could try and bring Sam and Norman back here? Who the hell was he kidding? He cursed himself for allowing his mind to run away with itself. Sure, the caverns and passages might provide some shelter, a temporary respite, but it would only prolong the inevitable. Hiding underground wouldn’t help anyone when the air turned to fire. Christ, he thought, imagine that... being trapped underground and burned alive alongside hundreds of other people... He tried to distract himself and think about something else, but it was becoming increasingly difficult. There would be variations in the timing and location, but unless something miraculous happened, whether buried deep underground or out in the open, before long the same fate would befall everyone left alive.
Finally arriving in Porthmadog felt like a huge achievement. It meant he was as good as done; his desperate slog across the baked countryside almost complete. One more burst of effort, a final couple of miles, and he’d have done it. And yet, the closer he got to Criccieth, the more uncertain he began to feel. Will she want to see me? Will she even recognise me? He caught a glimpse of himself in a dusty window and even he had to look twice. He looked like a crazy man: dark tanned skin, hair gone wild, painfully skinny. His clothes seemed to barely fit anymore, flapping around his bones. The wide golf umbrella he hid behind added a final touch of ridiculousness to his bizarre appearance.
He walked into the town along a long, silent road which he’d almost always known to be busy with traffic before today. A very tall grey brick wall to his left temporarily blocked out the worst of the sun and allowed him to put down the umbrella for a while. It was a welcome chance to rest his arms. They were almost as tired as his legs.
This elevated stretch of road ran along one edge of a wide expanse of water called Afon Crigyll, a flood plain. He remembered how it had looked when he’d last been here: a vast swathe of green-blue water with an abundance of reeds closer to the town, so much vegetation in places that the water had looked like land. Today he couldn’t see any green. Today there was nothing more than an apparently endless expanse of sand-coloured mud. The vegetation was all gone – dried out and burned up – and the water had evaporated away to nothing, leaving a dustbowl in its place. He risked the sun momentarily and left the shade to lean over the wall on the other side of the road. The corpses of fish and water birds lay everywhere. He thought about the variety within and between all these different species and breeds. All gone now. They were all the same: flaps of leathery skin, sun-dried skeletal shapes, ghostly outlines of what they used to be, all reduced to the same few shades of brown.
Porthmadog was a stark reminder of how much things had changed in the two days he’d been on the road. In his mind as he’d approached this place, he’d pictured it as it always had been, not even paused to consider how far things might have deteriorated. Even if he had thought about it, he’d surely have underestimated the scale of the grim transformation. It made him wonder what the cities would look like now. Would there be anything (or anyone) left standing in London, Manchester, Edinburgh or Cardiff? What would home look like? If he’d gone any deeper into Birmingham yesterday morning, would he have made it out again alive?
The town centre of Porthmadog had always been a clean, well-kept and picturesque spot. Popular with holiday makers, he’d always known it to be a relaxed place and had spent many hours killing time here to avoid going back to his father-in-law’s. Lined with local stores and missing many of the usual high street chains, it had always felt wholly disconnected from the urgency of most of the rest of the world, one foot firmly rooted in the past. He’d understood why Norman had wanted to live near here. Time moved at its own pace in this area, lagging behind the rest of the world, stubbornly refusing to play catch-up.
Today, however, Porthmadog was as heartbreakingly desolate as everywhere else. He felt distinctly uneasy as he walked along the main street. He’d have gone a different way, but he didn’t know the back roads as well and this was definitely not the time to start experimenting. Imagine if he got himself lost at this stage in the game... even if he was delayed for just minutes, m
aybe even seconds, it might mean all the difference between seeing Sam and not.
He was being watched. He sensed them staring at him; ears pricking up at the sound of his dragging footsteps, eyes following his every move from the relative safety of the shadows. His instinct was to pick up his pace, but he had nothing left to give. He consoled himself with the thought that there was nothing he had which could be of use to anyone else now. For a moment he remained concerned, picturing in his mind the kind of post-apocalyptic barbarism he’d seen in so many films, but even if the population of this desolate town had regressed to such levels, surely they’d still leave him alone? A random kill for sport, as far-fetched as it sounded, would cost the killer more than they’d gain. A few seconds euphoria at their easy domination of this dehydrated, exhausted man would be more than off-set by the effort any attack would inevitably demand. It just wasn’t worth it. He just wasn’t worth it.
He walked on, heading into the shimmering heat-haze, keen to get out of here as quickly as possible. Flies buzzed around a mangy mound in the gutter by his feet – the dried out husk of a dead cat – and in the entrance to an alleyway he passed, he saw something even worse. A person’s leg was jutting out onto the pavement, the skin burned and blistered where it had been left exposed to the relentless sun. His sun-addled brain couldn’t understand why they hadn’t moved, and he altered course slightly to investigate. It was a girl. A teenager, perhaps, maybe early twenties at the outside, slumped against a wall. She was dead. Her face was grotesque: a hollowed-out mask with a rictus grin burned on. There were other shapes visible deeper into the alleyway, some still moving way back from the road, but he didn’t hang around.
There was utter silence here, not a single sound other than his tired footsteps and laboured breathing. Further on he saw people sheltering inside other buildings, way back from the windows and doors, doing all they could to keep away from the light. They were alive, though this was no life anymore. They sat in small groups, together but alone, desperately clinging onto the little time they had left. Inside one relatively large store halfway up the road (it had been a Woolworths once, Norman had told him) he saw the biggest mass of people he’d seen since the tented village in the middle of what had once been Lake Bala. There were perhaps twenty people gathered in the shop, and he felt himself withering under their collective gaze. As he passed, their heads followed him in unison. Were they worried he was going to loot what was left of their town, or that he might have been driven mad by the sun, about to attack. No, he decided, it was nothing like that. They’re thinking, what the fuck is he doing out there? It made him question himself, but he knew what he was doing was right. More to the point, it was the only thing left he could do.
