Helen bit her lip and finally nodded over at me.
‘Right,’ she said, ‘Right… Yeah, we should get going. Luke?’
‘Hey, I’m with you guys for better or worse…’
I suddenly thought back to yesterday, to everything my mind had been plagued with about living with Luke, about moving out, about the possibility of the two of us drifting apart… Now it seemed trivial, completely unimportant. We were here, now, and everything had changed. We would need to stick together.
‘Oh…’ Helen said suddenly, shaking her head and turning back to Professor Moody. ‘Professor, I forgot to ask… My research… I was wondering if there was any chance of it being recovered. I know that that might be a long shot, but I just thought I’d ask.’
Moody, going quiet and contemplative for the first time since we had met him, sat still, only his eyes moving about in his head, before looking down at the floor, then at Helen.
‘I’m sorry, Ms Carson, but the pulse will have wiped out everything. Nature is merciless. It doesn’t care how hard you worked.’
I had never seen such a look of despair cast itself across Helen’s face. She had been working for the better part of a year on her project, spending endless days and nights toiling away on her research, just to have it all vanish in a matter of seconds. No number of back-ups would have saved it.
I felt like telling Moody to be a little politer in his revealing of this information, and I was seconds away from having my own outburst, when he continued.
‘Fortunately for you, though, I’ve put together a back-up of all of our researchers work a few days ago. If the tech team had reported me for this I couldn’t tell you how long I’d go to prison for…’
Then, in sharp contrast to the terror and horror of the nightmarish few hours that we had experienced, Helen’s face lit up with a sudden expression of blissful hope. The Professor crossed to a door on the opposite side of the room and opened it, going inside and fumbling about in the dark for a few moments.
‘Put my own small faraday cage together a while back as a little side project… Thought about storing a phone or a computer in there in preparation for the pulse, but what use would it be? It’s the practical things we need now – food, shelter and the like.’
He returned with a USB drive, handing it over to Helen. She cradled it in her hands like some kind of tiny new-born before burying it in the inside pocket of her jacket and zipping it shut. I watched as she raised her hand to it, pressing her palm flat against the material and feeling the tiny indentation, making sure that it was still there.
‘Of course, that thing will be completely useless unless you can find a working computer to hook it up t-’
The professor was abruptly cut off by Helen wrapping her arms around him, hugging him tightly.
‘Thank you,’ she said earnestly. ‘Thank you so much.’
‘That’s… That’s all right,’ Moody said, not returning the hug – he simply stood there. ‘Now, I think you three should get moving. It’s almost sun-up.’
‘Is that bad?’
‘You say that your father gave you advice, Sam? Well, my mother always used to tell me not to go out when it got dark, because you never know what’s out there. Day time you can see the threat, but the problem with that logic is that the threat can see you, too. There aren’t any police anymore to stop anything bad from happening – and if there are, they’re probably looking out for their own families and themselves…’
In some quiet agreement, the three of us looked at each other and headed for the door, the same way we had come in.
‘Stick to the backroads,’ Moody said abruptly. ‘I’m assuming you’ve got a destination in mind, otherwise you wouldn’t be leaving in such a hurry. Try and find a quiet way to get there. We might push the selfless narrative during modern times, but in times of survival everybody is out to look after themselves. Stay away from the populated areas.’
‘You don’t need to tell us that twice,’ Luke said, shaking his head and smiling. ‘I’m… I’m sorry if I was a little uppity, Professor. It’s been a long fucking night.’
‘I’m sure,’ he said, nodding and smiling faintly. ‘But if you’ve made it this far I’ve no doubt you have the ability to make it a little further. Two things, though…’
We stood by the doorway, all three of us, a step away from exiting.
‘Don’t trust anyone. If you run into somebody on the road, operate under the assumption that they’re going to want you dead.’
‘What about the other thing?’
He turned to Helen.
‘Take good care of that memory stick, Ms Carson.’
Helen nodded, and quietly we filed out.
Chapter Sixteen
The Road Ahead
That was where we left him, up in the lab where we had found him. There was no formal goodbye, no follow-up conversation – we simply exchanged a nod and parted ways. We had met Moody in the room, and I had spoken to him at a time when I really needed to. Whatever move he was going to make next was beyond us.
That was the last time that we saw Professor Moody.
We exited through the broken glass doors that we had entered through, stepping out into the early morning sunlight. With the upcoming day the city seemed to have quietened somewhat, but we could still hear the general hubbub of noises coming from it. It was a blur of sound, indistinguishable and rough, and I had little doubt that the sources of those sounds would soon start to spill out from the apartment blocks and the buildings.
The night had brought about a terror that only the collapse of civilisation could, but for a brief moment I considered the prospect of the day ahead to be far worse. The nightmarish sights of bodies and blood and chaos would be brought before the people who had just decided to leave their homes for the first time, and even those who hadn’t yet done so would look down from their windows and witness what had occurred during these hours of a powerless world.
We relied on everything for electricity – our food, our systems of communication, our lives. Now it was gone. The professor’s words continued to buzz through my mind, every prospect and possibility and theory of chaos that could be occurring in the background of all of this.
One thing became immediately apparent to me, though, as Luke and I followed Helen wordlessly towards the bike racks on the other side of the building – I could hear no helicopter blades overhead, no rolling jeeps or tanks making their way through the streets or roads nearby, and no jets flying overhead carrying out recon checks.
We were on our own, and whether or not the people in charge knew what was really going on was an issue beyond my knowledge.
A few minutes later, and after a few fired bullets, strikes and broken locks, we had retrieved three bikes left behind at the college. It had been a while since I had ridden a bike, but it was true that you never forgot how to ride one.
The notion of the professor’s words still buzzed, but I had more things to worry about than the bigger picture right now. I had to focus on the smaller one, the things that were closer to home – like my best friend, my girlfriend, and the prospect of the other people who were closest to me.
‘How far is it to your dad’s house?’ Luke asked.
’Just shy of fifty miles.’
‘We can make that before midday if we push it.’
‘Yep.’
‘My parents are another hundred,’ Helen said. ‘But Luke, what about…’
‘Mine? Other side of the country…’
Helen and I both glanced at each other with a gutting expression.
I was about to say something, anything, but Luke cut in.
‘It’s okay,’ he said, nodding. ‘I’ve been thinking about them a lot tonight, actually. They live out in the country. They’ll be all right, I think. And if I feel like I need to make the trek to them, then I will. Let’s worry about you guys for the minute.’
I nodded at him simply, knowing that there was nothing else that I could add to
what he had said.
We hopped onto the seats of the bikes. I felt the rubber handles, adjusting myself to the feel of it so that I could comfortably use it.
We had made it out of the city. It was the end of our journey, the longest and most treacherous night of my life, but somehow we made it. Now I was at the beginning of a much longer journey, as cheesy as all of that sounds. Yeah, you survive and manage to make it out alive, but what do you do after that? How do you live in the aftermath of the fallen world?
What does this do to people who are so used to living another way?
I had more questions about the events of the past twelve hours than I would probably ever answer in a lifetime, but if I had these two by my side it didn’t matter. We had each other’s backs, and that was more than I could ever ask for.
With the sun rising, we wordlessly set off towards my hometown. I hoped that my dad would still be there, and that no awful fate would have met him during these chaotic hours. I hoped that he hadn’t tried to play the hero and that he had looked after himself
I hoped that more than anything.
He was all that I was thinking about. At the time I certainly wasn’t thinking about what the professor had said about the memory stick in Helen’s pocket – because while at that moment we didn’t know it, there was much more to it than the research that she had been working on.
But that’s a story for next time.
THE SOLAR PULSE WILL CONTINUE IN BOOK 2
COMING SOON
The Solar Pulse (Book 1): Beyond The Pulse Page 12
