Collapse (Book 1): Perfect Storm

by Riley Flynn

  The question was answered when they took a look at the basement. Unlike the rest of the house, which still had a lingering traces of a regular family home, Timmy had worked hard on the basement. As they eased down the stairs, Alex could see the immaculate strip lighting. There were no shadows. The floor was perfectly flat, brilliantly clean. Alex joked about eating his dinner off it. Timmy was happy to try.

  The basement was split into set areas. Not outlined with cubicle walls, like their office. That would have been too obvious. Instead, the linoleum floor was marked with corridors and areas, distinct spots for distinct jobs. It was very organized.

  They reached the bottom of the stairs andthe wall immediately facing the pair was twenty feet long and lined with guns. The real meat and potatoes. There must have been two dozen of them, at least. All shapes and sizes.

  With the guns hanging carefully from the walls, behind a locked cage, Timmy had created a set of cabinets below. These were welded together and decorated with varnished hard wood. A real artisanal job. This was where the bullets lived. Each bullet, carefully organized by caliber and sitting beneath its parent, waiting for action.

  The first thing which struck Alex was all the guns. The sheer quantity of them. Once he was over that, the organization was a level above and beyond anything he’d come to expect from Timmy. His friend simply beamed like a proud parent.

  Though Alex had grown up on a farm, he knew he’d struggle with the technical details. To his dad, the guns were just the twelve-gauge, the rifle, the twenty-two. Stock names, but Alex knew what he was talking about. For Timmy, it was a whole other world.

  Alex watched his friend take a pistol down from the rack. A small lecture followed. It was ten years old, Timmy said, a classic. It wasn’t not vintage, he assured Alex, that was a whole other thing. The vintage guns are on the other end of the wall. One of the smallest was called a SIG Sauer. Timmy took it apart. The carefully machined pieces glided together, satisfying clicks and clacks as Timmy showed off the magazine and the action. Short reset trigger, Alex heard, just an utter pleasure. Em eleven A one. double stack. Alloy frame. Night sights. As the gun came apart, Timmy handed the pieces to his friend to hold.

  The words washed over Alex. He just held the disassembled pistol parts in the palm of his hand. There was a heaviness to them. Reassuring.

  Once Timmy had reassembled the SIG, he handed over the entire piece. Alex began to lift up the gun, feeling the texture of the trigger. Timmy grabbed his wrist.

  “Don’t point unless you’re gonna kill, man. Definitely not down here, either.”

  “What, the bullet bounces about in the basement?”

  “Nah, you’ll hit my plumbing. You want me to have a cold shower? I didn’t think so.”

  Timmy took the gun and placed it back on the rack. They walked through the rest of them. German this, Italian that. Some of them were historical, stretching back as far as the Second World War. Those came with a short lecture and a detailed itinerary of how the gun had come into Timmy’s hands.

  “You don’t take dates down here, Timmy?”

  “They should be so lucky.”

  “Just me then?”

  “Just you, my friend.”

  “What an honor…”

  As well as guns and ammo, the basement brimmed with toys and tech. Cellular jammers, lock picks, and GPS units. Timmy had taken most of them out of the box for a cursory inspection. Alex approached a sealed black box, about as big as the containers which hung from pizza delivery bikes. When he pointed it out, Timmy scuttled over excitedly.

  Inside were three pairs of night vision goggles. They fitted them up and turned off the lights. The whole basement glowed in a green hue. They must have cost a fortune, Alex half-asked. Timmy waved it away.

  In one corner was a wooden pallet, piled high with cardboard boxes and sealed up with plastic tape. MREs, Timmy said, beside himself with excitement, meals ready to eat. Clunky name, thought Alex. The pallet sat beneath a row of four TV screens, each tuned to a different news network. One of them was the weather channel.

  “What they taste like?”

  “Like crap. Want to try one? Impossible to get a good taste and be nutritionally functional or whatever.”

  “Some people might call you paranoid, Timmy,” Alex suggested. “You got a bomb shelter down here, too?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.” Timmy wagged a finger from side to side.

  Alex laughed, looking around the basement. The guns on one wall, the MRE pallet on the other side. The TVs, now silently playing through the news. There was even a sofa, a tatty three-seater, which looked as though it had seen better days.

  “Bomb shelter in the basement is against regulations,” Timmy continued, smiling with half his mouth.

  But Alex wasn’t listening. Something had caught his eye. There was one corner of the room which wasn’t lit at all. Alex had assumed it was storage. A place to stash all the junk used when renovating a house. Buckets of paint, plaster, that kind of thing.

  But he was looking closely now. It was a huge shape, about the size of a hatchback with the top cut off. But it was covered in thick tarpaulin, from top to bottom. There was no hint at what was underneath. Above, a single strip light was fitted beneath a green shade, but not turned on.

  “What’s this, then? Hovercraft? Some kind of drone? Bet it’s illegal if you’ve got it down here, wrapped up.”

  “What, that?” Timmy replied, turning towards the unlit corner.

  He ripped away the tarpaulin in one smooth motion and flicked a switch. The strip light lit up the surface.

  “That’s the pool table.”

  The green felt was immaculate. Timmy walked to a cabinet and took out a long, thin case. It was metallic, the kind of crate Alex had seen rock bands use to cart equipment across continents. Two clasps opened on the side. Timmy reached in and removed two separate ends of a pool cue. He pieced them together, screwing the thin end into the fat. Fishing a chalk cube from his pocket, Timmy leaned over the light. It threw the shadows up over his chin.

  “Welcome,” he said, “to Castle Ratz.”

  8

  Alex was having a good time at Castle Ratz. Once the pool table had been set up and the beers retrieved from the fridge, Timmy brought down a battered old box. An old analog radio. A wireless, he insisted on calling it. “Thought we could hear the game on this.”

  “Didn’t you tell Eddie that you knew how to get around the blackout? What was all that about soldering?”

  “Ah, I read that online. Seemed easy enough.”

  “So these don’t have it?” Alex motioned toward the bank of screens watching over them.

  “Nope. They’re just for the news. Got to keep on top of these things.”

  Timmy had muted all the TV sets but they played on in the background. The light above the pool table and the light from the screens was all they had. It was enough to play pool, at least. As they played, they talked.

  Timmy would invariably react to some story on the news, a story neither of them could hear, while the baseball played on some ten miles away. The man announcing must have been doing it for years. He didn’t so much know the players’ names, but he knew when to shut up and just let the audience hear the sound of the ball on the bat.

  The sound was one of the only things which had stayed the same. It wasn’t the reboot loop of a cheap Chinese phone. It wasn’t the hum of an electric car creeping out of a warehouse carpark. It wasn’t the screaming din of the news channels they’d silenced in the background of the basement. It was just a stiff piece of wood hitting sweetly against a square inch of tightly stitched horsehide. No one watched baseball anymore, though. They were all at GUNPLAY. Alex listened again but didn’t know the score.

  But between innings, they’d get back to the news. That was Timmy’s chance to evangelize. He’d bend down over his cue, lining up the white, waxing lyrical about this or that. But it wasn’t just one subject and then another.

  No, to Tim
my, they were all interconnected. It was all butterfly wings and tornadoes, Korean biotech and San Francisco fisheries. He was in his pulpit, on the other side of the pool table, and Alex was happy to listen. It was reassuring that someone was paying attention, at least.

  “You really think it’s all like that?” Alex asked. “You’re just paranoid.”

  Timmy was quiet. Alex lined up his shot. Hit it. Caught the corner of a pocket and bounced out. He swore.

  “Your hit,” he said. “I shot a blank.”

  Timmy stayed quiet. Alex looked up. His friend was transfixed in front of the TV screens, edging closer and closer.

  “Don’t get too close, Timmy,” Alex said. “You’ll get square eyes.”

  Picking up a fresh beer, Alex pulled back the tab. There was that familiar hiss. But then he noticed. The baseball commentary had stopped. The sound of the bat on the ball had stopped. There were still sounds coming from the radio. But it was shuffling feet. The ambient noise of a huge group of people lumbering from foot to foot. Alex looked up again at Timmy.

  “Hey,” he said, “what’s happened to the game?”

  Waving a hand for silence, Timmy remained with his eyes glued to the screens. The hand turned into a pointing finger, twisted, and drew Alex’s eyes up to the row of televisions. Alex watched the world change.

  There was the President. Terrance Fletcher himself. His face was across all five screens. Even the weather channel. They’d stopped mid-storm. There was still no sound. Alex could see the man’s trademark smile. It had been plastered over every surface during the election. He’d been a handsome man in his youth. Winning easy against such an unpopular candidate, they’d made sure that everyone knew the face.

  Knew which box to tick.

  But that same youthful confidence wasn’t there now. Alex carefully placed his pool cue in a lean against the table. He walked around to watch with Timmy. The President was sitting behind a different desk. Not his usual Oval Office position. Everyone must have seen that a hundred times. This was different. Smaller. Cramped.

  “It’s Air Force One,” Timmy said. “That’s the desk they got on there.”

  Alex trusted his friend. When the man started to shake, along with his chair and table, they knew it to be true. Turbulence. They were hitting hot air. Which meant they were already flying. It had been serious enough for the news channels to cut straight to the President. They hadn’t even updated the rolling tickers along the bottom of the screens.

  As Alex watched, Timmy began digging around between the cushions on the chair. As he dug deeper and deeper, desperately looking for the remote, the radio crackled back into life. They cut to the same audio feed, the President speaking. The sound lagged slightly behind the man on the screen, the familiar words – “my fellow Americans” – arriving after the lips had already moved. It gave the entire speech a ghostly quality. A man speaking from another world.

  There was too much information to process. Alex found himself studying the grain of the footage, the little beads and crackles which spoke to him from the past. This was the high definition future. The President’s video fidelity was the least pressing issue, but Alex couldn’t focus on anything else.

  “You hear that? Eko virus.”

  The red mess of hair was standing still, for once, parked in front of the screens. Federal emergency and martial law. In twenty-four hours, they’d be shutting down state lines. People should get to where they needed to be. Alex had watched too many terrible action movies for this to make any sense. It shouldn’t be happening.

  He forced himself to concentrate, like trying to catch a waterfall in a paper cup.

  “-on the advice of the FAA, FEMA, and other government departments. We have thought long and hard about this course of action and,” the President’s voice stuttered, “we can see no alternative. We must plan for a future, a future in which America the bold, the brave, and the free continues in the strongest possible fashion.”

  The man was talking, the delayed voice from the radio blathering about a national guard who had been federalized and a curfew introduced for everyone. Police leave cancelled. Don’t leave your home. Lock your door. Stay inside. Don’t dial the police. They’re too busy. This must be a joke, Alex thought. He can’t be serious. Timmy didn’t move.

  Walking back around the pool table and picking up the cue, Alex took another shot. He missed, again, and it didn’t matter. They were playing a different game now. The radio was ancient and fickle. Most of the words were present and correct. But occasionally, the speech would fizz and hiss. In these empty pockets of dead air, Alex knew that people would be pouring in their deepest fears.

  “Your shot,” he told Timmy. “Looks like I’m staying here tonight. Holed up in Castle Ratz.”

  It was too dark in the basement. Alex went searching for a light switch. The radio broadcast was still echoing around the room, bouncing off the concrete floors.

  “I implore you, my friends--” The President’s voice ached, heavy with the weight of a hundred days arriving all at once. “—to stay safe. This is only temporary. We will not be defeated. This is a disease and, it seems to me, something against which we can fight.

  “But we will not win this battle at the end of a sword or down the barrel of a rifle. We will triumph through our social graces, our common sense, and--” The voice snapped, catching a high note in the throat. “—our innate greatness. We must work together to stop the spread of this dreadful plague. We must deliver ourselves from the danger. We must entrust unto ourselves the power to conquer this terrible threat. Good night, and God ble-”

  The lights went out. The basement was dark. Empty. Quiet. Another blackout. It felt good to be back on familiar territory. Alex heard his friend fumbling through a drawer. A match struck, lighting up Timmy’s face. The sound of sirens was heard away in the distance, all over Detroit.

  “You think it’s real?” asked Timmy, shadows catching strange shapes across his cheeks.

  “I guess. I mean, it looked like him. And it was on the radio and all the TVs. What do you think happened?”

  “They’re on the plane, so that’s obvious. I don’t know. Something seems off to me. They can’t just announce that. We’d have known.”

  “Before now? Really?”

  “They don’t tell us everything. Why would they change now?”

  “They’ve told us something.”

  “We’ll see.”

  The match fizzled out, burning fingers as it went.

  “Have you got any flashlights or whatever? You must have something that runs on batteries.”

  There was that familiar laugh.

  “We can do one better than that, man.”

  Lighting another match, Timmy vanished into the darkness, taking the light with him. After a few minutes, a rumbling sound was heard. Then, a moment later, the basement sputtered into life. The gloom vanished and the screens lit up. The radio, too, was alive again. But no one was broadcasting. Instead, there was only static. Alex turned it off.

  Of the five screens, only two were still broadcasting. They were running on a skeleton crew, it was clear. Gone were the complicated graphics, the glitzy animations, and the thin veneer of professional reassurance that was the newsman’s stock in trade. Instead, there were two terrified people, reading falteringly from cue cards. Next to their heads, headlines rolled past with advice.

  Stay at home. Don’t break the curfew. Virus. Spreading. Quarantine. Cure. After just thirty seconds, the words were almost meaningless, repeated across both channels.

  “The generator should be good for the night,” Timmy said as he walked back into the room. “Think they’re the regular rolling blackouts, but I’ve set it up to cut in whenever we’re caught short. Might be a few wobbles.”

  Alex motioned to the screen.

  “They’re treating it seriously.”

  “Any of them mentioned Detroit yet? We never get any attention here. Bet it’s some California thing. Or New York. They ge
t all the new stuff.”

  “You’re handling this very well. I thought you’d be up in arms. Gung ho.”

  “Look, the way I see it: either this Eko virus is unstoppable and we’re all screwed. Or they’re working on it and we’ve just got to sit tight and wait for it all to blow over. Guess we’re not going in to work next week, huh?”

  “Guess not.”

  They played pool again. And again. The TV screens stayed on. The same stories. The crew seemed to dwindle, the broadcast crumbling into nothing until there were just a few people left. They stopped switching cameras, stopped cutting away from the anchor. First one fell, then the other. The news people were heading home. They were replaced by words. Warning signs. Just the same stock phrases, repeated back. Be careful. Be safe. Don’t step outside. Don’t panic.

  The internet seemed to have ground to a halt, too. Both men checked all the devices they had available. Phones and computers. All dead. Nothing showing.

  “Must be a tower down or something.”

  That seemed a decent enough explanation, Alex thought. But it would be nice to know what was happening outside of the house. They tried the radio. Nothing. The other TV channels. Nothing. Calling people. Nothing. So they went back to drinking beer and playing pool. There was nothing else they could do. Three beers in, Timmy began to talk.

  “See, you want to stay away from the cities. Times like this, city is the worst possible place. Too many people. They all panic. We need to keep level headed. Out here in the suburbs, we’re not getting looting or whatnot. Your place? Well, you’re a target. You’ll be staying here, though, so that’s fine. Just don’t get your hopes up about heading home.”

  Trying to call the pizza company was a dead end. No answer. They ate one of the meals from the pallet. Spitting it on the floor, Timmy complained about a “grand wasted.” But his fridge was bare, the vacuum sealed fruit tasting of plastic leakage. So they ate another meal. By the time they’d finished the second, Alex never wanted to see another readymade meal ever again.