It hadn’t been the plane crash, or the explosions, or the multitudes of screams and shouts that were truly untraceable in this metropolis that had finally made the gravitas of this situation sink into my head – it wasn’t even the thought of Helen in her apartment, scared for her life, that finally made it all sink in. It was the sight of Mr and Mrs Dempsey, their corpses splayed out in the dark, murdered in what was no doubt some stupid scuffle over theft and food, that finally caused it all to strike me.
‘Sam,’ I heard my friend’s voice say over my shoulder, as I stared into that encroaching, black scene. ‘Sam, we need to get out of here.’
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t even know what I could say if I had the ability to produce a sound at that moment in time. All I could do was turn, without a nod or any other indication, and head out of the store from the way we had appeared. We both stepped out onto the sidewalk, and as I emerged into a little more light, I found myself into a different world.
If the last working 18-wheeler on Earth had come booming around the corner at that moment and run us both down, I don’t think that I would have been able to move out of the way – or if I even cared. For a moment I thought the same about Luke.
Then, remembering why we had left our apartment block in the first place, I found myself again, looking about the street, seeing the continuous stream of intermittent people, the running and the oddities amongst it all.
‘I read this thing a few years ago,’ Luke said. ‘It was about the collapse of civilisation, and what would happen if we lost all of the things we need most… In that it took five days before the looting started.’
‘In that story did a passenger plane crash into the middle of a city?’
‘No.’
‘I think that might have been the turning point for a lot of these people.’ I thought back to Helen, to how scared she would be behind her locked apartment door. ‘Come on.’
There were fifteen blocks between us and where we needed to be, and that didn’t include the six flights of stairs that we would need to ascend to get where we needed to be.
We set off left from the store, keeping our weapons low and out of the way but tight in our grips as we set off up the sidewalk.
I suddenly found myself massively aware of everything that was happening around me; the clattering of my boots on the tarmac, the odd sounds that broke through everything else.
Somewhere nearby there was another burst of gunfire.
Both of us threw ourselves against the concrete wall, holding ourselves against the brickwork as I felt my breaths quiver.
‘We can’t stay out in the streets,’ I said, my mind racing and my voice shaking. ‘Let’s take the alleyways.’
‘Is that really a good idea? I don’t mean to be cliché but my mom always told me to stay out of them. She wasn’t fucking lying about the people you find down there at night.’
‘We can defend ourselves,’ I said, readjusting my grip on the gun. ‘Right now the streets are worse than the alleys on a good day. There are fewer people.’
‘You’ve got the gun,’ Luke said, shrugging. ‘I’m with you, just as long as you can cover both our asses.’
I exchanged a look of quiet agreement with my friend and we set off again.
‘There.’
We jogged up the street, turning left and looking into the dark abyss of the cut before us.
We stopped briefly, but simply ended up starting again, making our way through the blackness. I heard the splatter of puddles beneath the soles of my boots in the dark. Already I could feel the moistness of sweat on my brow, not so much from the running but from the anxiety and stress of it all, and the terror that was surrounding us.
‘Hang on,’ I said, slowing as we reached the end of the block. We found some shelter behind some dumpsters. ‘We need to stay hydrated.’
‘Already tired?’
‘It’s not that, I just… I just need to take a minute.’
In the light of an unmistakeable mass of flames coming from around the corner, it’s source currently unknown to us, Luke produced two bottles of water from the bag and handed one to me, unscrewing one himself. I could see his hands shaking in the dark, and even though his nervousness made me feel a little better about my own, I couldn’t help myself.
I fell back against the wall, feeling my vision close in and my hearing drifting as I began to hyperventilate in the alleyway.
‘Sam? Are you all right?’
I set down the gun and the bottle, drawing in deep breaths and clutching the material of my jacket in my clenched fists.
‘This is fucking madness,’ I said, thinking back to the sight of Mr and Mrs Dempsey’s bodies in the store. ‘Is this what we end up becoming the moment the electricity goes out?’
‘People are used to living a certain way,’ Luke said. ‘When you’re used to certain conditions and those get taken away, you start to feel entitled to them. Everybody does. That’s just the way people are.’
‘Nobody can just group together, can they?’
Luke sighed and sat down next to me in the alley. He pulled the bag off of his back and set it down in his lap, holding it tightly against his chest.
‘People are afraid of what they can’t see and what they don’t understand. We don’t like the unknown. It’s the reason that we’ve mapped everything on Earth to a fucking T. You don’t think I was scared of coming into this alleyway right now? I couldn’t see a damned thing. It’s so dark. But I did it anyway.’
‘What’s your point?’
‘I guess… I guess I just mean that people act on the offensive when things become unknown.’
A pause.
‘Everything’s turned off, hasn’t it? What the fuck are we gonna do?’
‘What you told me. We’re gonna get to Helen’s block, find her, and get the fuck out of the city. We can go find your dad. We’ll stay safe. Right now, with everybody like this, the only thing we can do is look after ourselves.’
I took another deep, drawn breath and felt my vision returning.
‘I feel like a fucking idiot.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I always thought I’d be able to keep myself calm in a situation like this. I always let my mind wander… And…’
‘Everybody always thinks they’re gonna be okay. It’s like when you watch a horror film and there’s always that guy that goes ‘these people are stupid, I wouldn’t do that, I’d do this’. The problem is that you don’t know how you’ll behave until you’re in that situation yourself. Now we’re here, and this is fucking happening, so we’ve gotta make a choice.’
I looked over at him by my side and nodded. I took up the water bottle and drank from it, feeling the coolness of the water before handing it back to Luke, and he put it back in the bag.
I returned my hands to the rifle and gripped it tightly, before pushing myself back up from the floor. Luke zipped up the bag and threw the straps over his shoulders, picking up the baseball bat and setting off by my side.
Now, remember that flicker of flames that we saw in the next street, the one that had lit our place in the alleyway? Well, that wasn’t just a trash can that had gone up in flames, or some malicious asshole who had been waiting for the opportunity to throw a firebomb through a shopfront.
It wasn’t a piece of the plane that crashed, either, although we could still see the flames from that wreckage on the other side of the city, and the smoke that was billowing up enormously into the sky. It occurred to me pretty quickly as I looked up at this thing that I was going to have to put my fear aside and pull myself together.
No, the thing we were looking at was a burning building, and there was no clearer way that I can state that.
A burning building in a city is a fucking nightmare. Back during the Great Fire of London in 1666, citizens of the city began blowing up buildings in some areas as a means to stop the fire from moving so quickly between structures. Whether things would get to that point here was beyond m
e, but one thing I knew was this; when the modern world failed, the primal world took over. Right now, fire was reigning supreme on the corner of the street, 14 blocks from our destination.
Considering the moment that Luke and I had just had there, where we had reconciled with the apocalypse and what might have near enough been the damn end of the world, it still took the air out of me as I physically gasped at the sight before me.
‘What the fuck…?’ I muttered. Despite the fact that we had seen the plane soar right over our heads back at our building, being up close to this stuff now gave it another angle. I had gained a permanent hold over myself, but being this close still astounded me.
It was only after a couple of seconds of staring into the hypnotic flames that I noticed the people stood in the street below. There seemed to be less of a mounting chaos here; the fire had captivated the people in the street. It had brought them together, either through a fascination or a collective terror that had evolved in us as humans since we first started traversing the Earth.
I set off forward with Luke in tow, clutching the gun tightly in my hand as we made our way closer to the people who were crowded outside. There must have been ten or fifteen stood a little way back from the sidewalk, but on the curb itself were two people who had clearly resided in the four-storey, burning structure – or had resided. A man and a woman, perhaps in their mid-30s, were holding each other with a quiet, unrestrained pain that they both couldn’t quite keep a hold on. They were both trying to stop each other from running back inside – I had never seen such conflict in my entire life.
I jogged forward to them, not knowing why I was doing what I was doing – maybe I felt the opposite of what I had felt in the alleyway, a desensitisation that came with dealing with what the world had turned into.
Flames only emerged with ferocity from the top floor, bursting through the windows, although it was starting to spread to the floor below. From the open front door two women, perhaps in their late twenties, came running out. Their arms were laden with things – food, water, a laptop, a TV… The first two made sense, but the latter two made me want to grab them by their shoulders and scream in their faces.
‘What about everything else?’
‘We can’t go back inside there, Mariah!’
Then I realised that it would be pointless to waste my breath doing something so self-indulgent, and made my way closer to the conflicted couple who were cradling each other on the sidewalk.
‘Are you all right?’ I shouted – the city was alive with noise, and the sound of crashing from inside the building wasn’t helping with communication.
‘We…’ Was all the woman managed to get out, while the man remained silent. ‘We…’
‘What happened?’
‘The stove,’ the man said, shaking his head and trying to hold back the tears from his eyes. ‘We only got it installed last week, and… When the electricity cut out there was a spark… We thought we could handle it, but soon enough it lit up the apartment… My father lives in the apartment downstairs on the third floor, but he barricades his door. We couldn’t get inside. I’ve told him not to keep doing that, and now he isn’t answering… I’m so worried for him, he’s got heart problems.’
‘Which apartment number?’
‘9.’
I was only vaguely aware of Luke’s presence by my side when he spoke.
‘Christ,’ he muttered. ‘That poor guy… He’s probably stuck inside there…’
Now, in retrospect, I still have zero clue to this day why I did what I did next. I remained standing by the side of the couple, Luke to my right, as I looked up at that building standing on the corner. The fire continued to roar from the windows, sending billowing smoke up into the sky from every opening that would allow it.
Maybe I heard the shout of a man’s voice inside, maybe I didn’t. Either way, I handed the rifle to Luke and set off running towards that open door, just a few yards away.
‘SAM!’
I heard Luke’s voice disappear behind me as I headed through the frame and into the warmth of the ground floor.
Even down here the smoke was present and disorienting, and I found myself coughing and raising my forearm over my mouth to assist with my breathing. Some small part of me wanted to question what the fuck I was doing, but if I had done so for a second I would have turned on my heel and gone back out.
I dashed up the stairs ahead, through the ever-increasing smoke as I rebounded on the stairs and continued on to the second and the third floor. With every new storey the smoke became ever more intoxicating, until it was blinding and I had to keep myself low to the ground in order to function in the slightest.
When they talk about house fires and the fact that it’s the smoke that kills you, not the fire, they’re not joking – if you’ve ever been to a bonfire and been near to one at a party, you’ll know that one hit of smoke in your direction and you’re coughing and spluttering.
Right then I had never felt more disoriented in my entire life.
I glanced at each door through the haze of smoke
7.
8.
When I arrived at the door in question, I didn’t feel a victory in the slightest. The smoke was filling the place.
Suddenly, down the hall, there was a horrendous cracking as a section of roof in the hallway came crashing in. The flames spluttered and scattered, and the notion struck me that behind each of these doors there could be a similar scene – a fire sinking its way through the floors, one by one.
But I had to try.
I tried the handle and was met with immediate rejection – it was locked.
That wasn’t to say it was barricaded though.
In my anger I stepped back through the haze of the smoke and kicked forward. There was a splintering and a cracking, but it held. It was only after two more strikes that I finally broke, and the door went swinging open.
Two things were immediately apparent to me. The first was the absence of fire – true, the source of all of this was down the hall, but it still hadn’t made it’s way through.
The other thing was the dead man lying on the floor, just a few yards from the front door.
He was curled in the most awkward of fashions, as if he were trying to push himself up against the right hand wall. His hands were pressed against his chest, even in death.
But there was no fire.
Heart problems.
The clutching at the chest.
I ran over to him and shook his arm wildly, trying to get some response. His eyes were wide and dead, his mouth hanging open. I had never seen a dead body before and how unnatural it looked – it, because it wasn’t a human anymore, just a bag of bones – really shook me.
What were the chances of this happening just as the EMP went off? How could such a coincidence exist?
It wasn’t a coincidence, that’s how. Because this guy had a pacemaker.
The EMP had shut down everything, and that didn’t exclude the electrical device inside this nameless old man’s chest that had been keeping him alive. It would have shut down and sent him flailing for life in a matter of seconds, sending him to his knees and then his death not long after.
The lights would have gone out, and he now he had died alone in the dark, the device that was supposed to keep him alive having killed him.
Everything had failed him, and now he was dead.
Behind me, the smoke began to enter the room like death snaking it’s way into a scene that had once been happy.
Gathering myself, I tried to calm down as I took a few deep heaving breaths, getting the air into my lungs. I took one final inhalation raced off through the open door, making my way to the stairs.
I near enough dived down each flight until I reached the ground floor. Everything had happened obscenely quickly, and as I ran for the front door of the building an overwhelming sense of joy washed over me. I had run into a burning building like a complete idiot and had somehow managed to make it back out.
It didn’t matter what their names were – they were both human, just like me, and that was the only thing that mattered. His grandfather was dead, his lifeblood, and now I was stumbling down the steps, returning to Luke.
I walked past them, deflated, and though I hate to say it, apathetic. What could I possibly say to them? There nothing to say.
I was just some idiot who had tried to save a man who had been dead before I even walked through the door.
Luke came running up to me, grabbing me by the shoulders in the same way that I had wanted to with the women who were saving their laptops and TVs.
‘What the fuck is wrong with you?!’ He screamed at me. ‘You could have been killed!’
I stared back at him and shook my head.
‘Why did you do that?’ He finally continued.
‘You were right,’ I said, nodding over his shoulder. ‘Back there. You were right. We’ve got to make a choice about what we do. Right then, that was me deciding to help someone because I thought I could. But he was already dead.’
‘H… How?’
‘Pacemaker, I think…’
‘What?... Oh, shit… Are… Are you all right?’
‘Yeah. I’m fine.’
A few yards away, the sobs of these two people whom I had never met before and would likely never meet again continued.
I could be lying. I’d love to tell you an alternate version of this story, where that elderly guy was just passed out and I carried him down two flights of stairs through the fire and smoke until I reached the door. I’d like to tell you about how much those two people thanked me, how happy they looked about the fact that his grandfather, whose name I still don’t know, had survived.
That isn’t the world that we live in, though. That man had been dead probably before I even woke up earlier that morning during the dead hours.
The universe had lined up in such a way that it was me who found his body and saw the hopelessness in all of this.
The Solar Pulse (Book 1): Beyond The Pulse Page 4
