‘I…’ Helen said, turning to face us. ‘Look, we can sit here all day and try and figure this out with no information like we’re in the dark ages… Which we kind of are… Or we can make some effort to figure this out another way… And I actually think I know somebody who might be able to shed some light on the situation. Metaphorically speaking, that is.’
‘Who?’
‘There’s this guy at the college. Well, I say a guy, he’s a professor, but he’s not your quintessential academic. Runs the astrophysics department, I think. He’s a little weird. Very introverted. He says things when they aren’t supposed to be said, and he doesn’t read people very well, but the guy’s a genius. He only teaches a few classes, but they keep him on because he publishes all of these articles for the college.’
‘And you think he might understand all of this?’
‘Yeah. And even if he’s not there, there’s something from there that we can use.’
‘What?’
‘Bikes. If you’re right and all the cars have stopped, a bike is our best bet. It’s a lot easier than walking to your dad’s house.’
‘I thought there weren’t any students there during the summer?’
‘There aren’t, but a few always leave them behind.’
Luke and I looked over at each other, he raising an eyebrow.
‘It’s a better plan than I’ve got,’ Luke said.
‘Me too,’ I agreed. ‘Okay… Let’s grab everything and get out of here.’
‘Oh, no,’ Luke said, laughing and shaking his head. ‘There’s no way in hell I’m going back out of that fucking window. What if Helen’s psycho neighbour tries to shoot me again?’
‘We’re not going through the window,’ I assured him. ‘I’ve gotta have a word with that asshole doorman of yours, Helen.’
‘I told you, I’m not some damsel in distress.’
***
She certainly wasn’t, but when somebody locked the love of my fucking life in an elevator and left her there in the midst of the apocalypse, it wasn’t exactly like I was going to react with some level of reason.
We packed up everything that we needed and descended the stairs slowly. I finally saw the reception hall in sight, but no sooner had we reached the final flight of stairs than another bullet came flying into the wall just a few feet to my left.
Immediately, we all backed up.
‘I told you I was armed, you two! How did you even get in?’
Wentworth, once again.
‘Why does everybody in this fucking city have a gun?!’ Luke screamed, as we took shelter around the corner. He wasn’t asking anybody in particular, but I felt his frustration.
‘Stop shooting, you idiot!’ I shouted. ‘How did you even know we were coming down?’
‘I spend 12 hours a day here, I hear everything.’
‘Does that include my girlfriend while she was trapped in the elevator and calling for help?’
‘I… I was going to get help eventually! I… She’s better off here, anyway. I deserve her so much more than you do!’
‘Who is this guy…?’ Luke muttered to himself, as we all hid on the next stairwell.
In that brief moment of quiet it occurred to me, though, that Wentworth was the pinnacle representation of humanity’s opportunistic nature in the face of certain situations. He had probably fantasised about her since they had first met, waiting for her to get home every day from work, imagining what it would be like to be with her… And now his opportunity had come, he had seized it in the most psychopathic of fashions.
‘I…’ Helen said loudly, and on her face I could see her searching for the right words, whatever she was getting at. ‘You’re right, Wentworth.’
‘… Helen?’
‘It’s me… And you’re right about everything. You deserve me so much more than Sam does. Will you protect me? If I run to you, will you protect me?’
A look of pure shock rose to my face, and a much more confused one on Luke’s, before I realised exactly what she was doing.
Don’t do this, I mouthed, what if he shoots you?
I’ll be fine.
‘Of course I’ll take care of you, Helen.’
She grabbed me by the scruff of my shirt and planted a kiss on my lips, before looking me in the eyes and stepping away.
We had saved her, and now she was going to save us.
Helen took off down the stairs, taking each step one at a time, as Luke and I watched her step into a different kind of abyss – this wasn’t one that belonged to her, of course. It was the one that was about to belong to Wentworth.
‘I can’t believe it took me this long to realise…’ She said in the a voice I had only ever heard her use behind our bedroom door. ‘It’s always been you…’
I could hear her moving closer and closer to him, and in that moment I could only imagine the look of pure ecstasy on the doorman’s face, until-
There was a hard thudding sound, and the kind of groan released by a man only when he had been kicked in the unholiest of places. It was followed by a hurried shuffling, before the echo of a click sounded up the stairwell.
‘Guys?’
Luke and I hurried down the steps, and in the half-light coming in through the glass of the entrance doors I took in the sight of Wentworth on the floor curled up in the foetal position, clutching his hands between his legs. A few feet away, Helen stood over him, pointing the revolver down at him.
We moved forward, and all three of us stood around him. Maybe at this point you’d like to hear all about how Luke and I kicked the fuck out of him – it was what I had been planning on doing back upstairs because of how angry I had been at what he had done.
In that moment, though, I thought back to every teen movie where the good guy lets the bad guy live. I had always thought to myself that that would never happen in real life, that the good guy would seek his retribution.
He who fights monsters should be careful that he himself does not become a monster. I wasn’t even worried about becoming a monster – I only cared about looking after myself and those whom I loved. The problem was, though, that in moment I wasn’t angry about what he had done, and I wasn’t seeking retribution.
I just felt sorry for him, this pathetic idiot who had envied my life in the creepiest of ways and had decided to play out his stupid, indulgent fantasy in real life.
‘Keep the gun,’ I said to Helen, nodding at the weapon in her hand. She must have picked it up off of the ground without even realising it, because when she looked down at her hand it was as if she suddenly realised she was holding a severed head. ‘We need as much firepower as we can get.
‘You,’ I continued, turning to look down at Wentworth. He glanced up at me with a look of pure fear in his eyes, managing to draw a hand away from his crotch long enough to shield his eyes. ‘I should kill you, or at the very least beat you half to death… But I’ve seen enough of that tonight. I don’t wanna add to it…’
That, of course, didn’t stop Luke from booting him in the stomach pretty harshly. Wentworth let out a guffaw from the floor, and fumbled about with his hands, not knowing where to move them to.
‘You’ve got enough troubles to deal with anyway…’ I said. ‘Nobody’s coming to turn the power back on. And if they are they’re a long way off. Find a hole to crawl into and stay alive for as long as you can.’
With that, we headed towards the door, and with a few harsh hits, smashed through the glass that had stopped us from getting through in the first place.
Once again, Luke and I stepped out into the dark, but this time we were accompanied by Helen. All at once I was so glad to have her by my side, but also terrified; she was out here with the two of us, true, but she was exposed to every possible thing that might pose a threat. I couldn’t let myself fall into mollycoddling her. She was with us. She was a fighter.
The screams and the clattering, chaotic noises of metal being bent and precious things being destroyed all around us in the street
s only seemed to have intensified.
All we could do was follow the plan.
‘Are you sure you wanna do this?’ Luke asked. ‘The college, I mean? How do we even know this guy is still there?’
‘He will be,’ Helen said. ‘He’s like a hermit. Likes his own space.’
‘We need the bikes, anyway,’ I interjected. ‘I haven’t cycled in years, but I’m sure I’ll get the hang of it once we get on the road out of the city.’
‘How far is it from here?’ Luke said.
‘Four blocks,’ Helen said, nodding. ‘That way… I just hope we don’t run into anything… Bad.’
She nodded towards the alleyway we had used to gain access to her apartment.
‘Based on what we saw on the way here, it’s probably a given.’
‘Stick together,’ I said, ‘and keep your weapon close. We stick to the back alleys, just like we did on the way here.’
‘Okay,’ Luke agreed. ‘Welcome to the world, Helen.’
Chapter Fifteen
Moody
‘I think it’s clear.’
‘Make sure.’
I glanced out into the street, considering my definitions of ‘clear’. There were people everywhere, that much was true, but it wasn’t the bystanders that I was worried about – it was those were suited to this chaotic world. They only come out at night, and now we were in the world of eternal night.
Seeing just another avenue bathed in darkness was something that I still couldn’t comprehend. Shopfronts were closed, even the 24-hour ones, and all of the apartment windows were grey with dull lifelessness.
A group of people, perhaps five or six, went running past.
‘Go.’
We hurried across the street as quickly as we could, before crossing about twenty yards down the sidewalk and ducking into the next alley.
This wasn’t so much an alley as a passageway, though. It was roofed and in the centre of a building, brickwork surrounding us on all sides save for the route straight ahead. I lead us on, Luke in the middle, Helen at the back with the revolver. She had been glancing over her shoulder every so often, making sure that we weren’t being followed.
‘This is fucking madness…’ She whispered – she had been saying that, or some variation of it, ever since we had left the apartment. ‘How can everything have just gone out like this?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, continuing on. ‘This is what the city turns into when something like this happens though.’
‘It’s a nexus,’ Luke said.
‘A what?’
‘I’ve been thinking about this. I remember one of my old science teachers talking about it in the ninth grade. He used to ramble on about tech stuff all the time, and one day he brought in a computer and took it apart to show us how everything worked. He said that every system has a nexus point, some central thing that controls everything else. It demands the most power, just like this city, but when it’s deprived of that power the end result can be catastrophic, especially when there’s no backup. This is a city, one of the most densely populated in the country… Just imagine how much power it uses up every day, only for it to suddenly all disappear. People don’t know how to cope. There is no backup.’
‘… That actually makes a lot of sense…’ Helen muttered from the back. ‘We still don’t know if this happened everywhere else, though.’
‘We haven’t seen a helicopter, or a plane, or a car working since. And if this thing, if it really was the solar flare and not just some isolated incident, was strong enough to bring a plane down… Well, it’s starting to make me thing that it isn’t just us.’
We all continued on through the passageway, dwelling on those words, remaining silent, until we reached the end.
My eyes had adjusted to the darkness, so any flicker of light became a point of attention for me – my mind was naturally attracted to whatever was causing it, and as we reached the end of the passage that flicker of harsh, yellow light was unmistakable.
‘What is that?’ Luke asked.
‘I’ve got a hunch.’
There was a group of people, maybe five or six, dressed in the kind of 1980s New York village Bohemian attire that you’d expect from the original beat poets back in the day. They were dancing around a flaming car like wild Indians, yelping and shouting as they danced around the flames.
‘They only come out at night,’ Luke said, shaking his head. ‘Weirdos of the city.’
He had only said it quietly, but at that moment they all stopped and turned their heads to look over at us.
Unconsciously, like some involuntary response, I felt myself readying the gun in my hand.
Aside from us and the dancing Bohemians – what else was I supposed to call them? – the street was empty. That was the part that creeped me out the most.
Up above, amongst the sky and the windows of the buildings on both sides of the street, all was dark.
‘End times are a’here,’ one said.
‘Fucking company men,’ another shouted.
Aside from that, they made no move towards us.
‘Come on,’ I finally found myself muttering to Luke and Helen, who nodded in agreement and set off with me in the opposite direction, up the street.
I told myself to shut up and rid myself of this desolate fear about what people were turning into in this powerless world that we were now all a part of and all embroiled in, but that fear, above everything else, continued to claw away at my mind.
***
We were moving closer to the edge of the city where the college was, and as a result any such incidents of oddness or insanity or violence dissipated into the hubbub and the hurly burly of the city centre.
We had survived, all three of us, and we had made it out and away from all of that.
Though, even if we had been confronted by something else, nothing would rid my mind of the image of those people dancing around the car, engrossed in flames, basking in the glory of this fall, this loss of civilisation that we were in the midst of.
None of us had spoken about what we had seen, and I don’t think any of us wanted to.
I certainly didn’t.
Within ten minutes, though, the houses and the buildings began to grow sparser, and we found ourselves approaching the college campus.
‘This is so weird…’ Luke muttered.
‘What, being back here?’ Helen asked.
‘No... It’s so empty. I don’t like it.’
‘This is what it’s like during the summer… Was like, I suppose. I guess it’ll be that way all year round now… Fuck, all of my research… There are backup servers, but they run on electrics too. All I’ve got are my papers…’
Helen came to a stop and ran her hands through her hair, staring at the buildings ahead. Despite everything that had happened so far, this was the point at which my heart had broken most. I knew how hard she had been working, and in the midst of this chaotic event, everything she had been working on for so long was gone.
‘Helen… I’m sure it’ll be somewhere.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said, shaking her head and letting out a light laugh, even though I could hear the sadness in her voice and the quivering in her breathing. ‘We’ve got more important things to worry about than that, now. Come on.’
***
It had been years since I had set foot on the college campus or the grounds – I had been back on a few occasions a little while after I left, but sooner or later ties with everything are broken.
Helen had been there Monday to Friday since then for work, so she knew exactly where we needed to be going.
The place was well and truly dead – at this time, closing in on four in the morning, the world of academia was in stasis, quiet and serene. As with the rest of the city, it was enshrouded in darkness.
Helen led us with brisk caution along the paths between buildings and over the grounds, until we reached another building on the far side of the campus. Despite the fact that the who
le system of buildings was modern, it was evident that a large part of the budget had gone to where we were headed. It had a design that was odder and more jagged than the rest, and even in the remaining light of the sky there was a sheen to it that set it apart from the rest.
That, and something else that sent a curious, chilling shiver through me – from one of the windows on the third floor it was viewable that there were several streams of light emanating, and they weren’t from the uncanny flickering of a candle or a fire, the likes of which I had noticed so much that night; they were solid and steady.
It was like seeing a natural wonder for the first time.
‘Looks like he’s still here,’ Helen said.
‘How… How is that possible?’ Luke asked.
‘I told you,’ she continued, ‘if anybody knows what’s going on, he will.’
I didn’t say a thing – all I wanted was to be up there despite the fact that I also felt an apprehension. It was like coming to face to face with royalty, this mysterious man who had something that everybody needed.
But nobody was here, and nobody could see him, and the lights were continuing to shine.
The front doors were another glass fixture, locked. Old habits didn’t really die, though. Luke was in no shape to swing a bat, so I took it up and swung away. Hours ago I would have been having palpitations over doing something like this, but this time it became so much easier. The glass was strong, particularly with a building that likely possessed such a high quantity of costly equipment inside. It was one of the research facilities, stocked with a myriad of expensive machines… All of which were now likely to be obsolete.
Helen led us through a reception hall towards a stairwell, which we ascended. We took them with hurried fervency, before finally reaching the sixth floor and emerging onto the corridor.
Aside from minimal light, there was nothing much different about the place than how you would imagine it to look. The corridor stretched off through unaltered darkness in both directions… Except for the light that spilled through the small square window in the top half of one of the doors to the left.
The Solar Pulse (Book 1): Beyond The Pulse Page 10
