The World After: An EMP Thriller

by Ryan Casey

  Hannah crunched across the twigs. “What’re you guys—”

  “Ssh!” I said.

  She frowned, then looked at my hand. “Scott. You’re bleeding. You realise that, right?”

  “Quiet,” I said, blood trickling down my hand. “Listen.”

  She stopped. And soon, Haz, Remy, Sue and the kids were by our side.

  All of them were listening to the sound.

  All of them knew what it was.

  “Does this mean the power’s back?” Hannah asked.

  Remy pulled his phone out of his pocket. He tried to switch it back on. “Doesn’t seem to be the case.”

  “Then how is this happening?” Sue asked.

  I wanted to give an answer. I wanted to help put their thoughts and suspicions at ease. But what could I say? After all, just like them, I didn’t understand what was happening here.

  I just knew that something was different.

  Something was wrong.

  “We have to check it out,” I said.

  Sue shook her head. “It’s too dangerous.”

  “Too dangerous?” I said. “That you hear is power. And we’ve seen for ourselves that all power has been fried. You seriously suggesting we just back off and leave this?”

  I saw the frown lines on Sue’s face, and I felt a twinge of guilt for confronting her so hard, especially so soon after the death of her husband. “I just—my children.”

  “You don’t have to come. You can stay back if you want to. But I’m going. And whoever wants to come with me… you’re welcome. Okay?”

  Remy stepped forward. “Don’t see any other way forward.”

  Hannah shrugged, stepped to my side. “Me neither. Haz?”

  Haz’s cheeks flushed. Sweat was visible on his forehead. “Ah, shit. I shoulda known sticking around with you guys was a bad idea.”

  He walked ahead and joined us, leaving just Sue and her kids on their own.

  “Sue,” I said, looking back at her. I didn’t want to leave her alone, but at the same time, I wasn’t going to let her hold us back, either.

  She shook her head. “I can’t put my children in danger.”

  “We’ve got your back. We’ve got each other’s backs.”

  “I trust you. I do. It’s just…”

  “I see it,” Remy said.

  I didn’t know what he was talking about at first. Not until I turned around and headed to his side.

  When I got to his side, I peeked through the trees to see what he was talking about.

  And right then, I saw it too.

  There was a house. A cottage, right in the thick of the woods. It was one of those old grey-bricked buildings, a run-down farmhouse type, with a large metal garage.

  Inside the garage, there was a car.

  It was an old looking car. Bit of a rust bucket.

  But, petrol canisters by its side, its engine was running.

  “So we see for definite now the car’s running,” Hannah said.

  I realised then that Sue and her kids were by my side. They’d joined us, without announcing as much. At least I could feel good about that.

  “What do we do?” Haz asked. “I mean, we can’t just go over there. We can’t just take it. Right?”

  “It’s a car,” Hannah said. “It’s there for the taking. We need to make the most of this. We might not get another chance.”

  “I’m not sure,” Sue said. “I mean, it could be some kind of setup. Some kind of trap.”

  “Perhaps if we just approach them,” I said.

  “And say what?” Hannah said. “Hey, we like the look of your car; can we borrow it for a while?”

  “Not exactly like that.”

  “No. Not like that at all. We take this car. Whoever owns it, they’d do the same to us.”

  A bitter taste filled my mouth. I felt twin hands tugging from either direction. My old self was telling me to be peaceful about this. To either approach the cottage amicably or to move on altogether.

  But another voice—a newer voice inside my head—was telling me something very different.

  It was telling me to go over there and take it because that was the kind of thing that kept me alive.

  “Scott?” Remy said. “Any ideas?”

  I swallowed a lump in my throat. I looked from Remy to Hannah to Haz and to Sue and their kids. “We at least need to go over there. To see what we’re dealing with.”

  “I have a bad feeling about this,” Sue said. “A really bad feeling.”

  We moved on regardless. As we stepped out of the trees and into the garden of this house, getting closer to the rumbling engine, I felt exposed. I’d seen what people were capable of already. Hell knows what they’d do if they came across a group trying to steal from them.

  I knew I wasn’t even sure how far I’d be able to go myself if someone did the same to me.

  And this was still the first week.

  We walked slower through the grass. And as we got closer, I realised that the car door was open, and nobody was around.

  We could just climb in there and take it. Drive our way down the gap between the trees. We could use the car as shelter. Find places off the beaten track to stay in. Travel the country in search of a real shelter.

  I was beginning to salivate at the thought.

  “Scott,” Remy said. “You see this?”

  I looked to my right.

  Remy was holding a torch.

  The light was flicking on and off.

  “More power,” I said.

  “I do have a theory,” Haz said, as we got closer to the car and the garage. “I mean, it’s a long shot.”

  “Go on,” I said.

  “It is technically possible to save electrics from EMP strikes.”

  “Nice of you to tell us that now,” Hannah said.

  Haz rolled his eyes. “Not after the event. Before. You can create something called a Faraday Cage. It keeps electrics safe in case of an event like this.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I remember you saying. My question is… what kind of a person is prepared for this kind of event? Really?”

  Haz scratched the back of his neck. “Someone very clever.”

  “Or someone very paranoid,” Remy said.

  I was growing more and more confident about taking the car. It drew me towards it, beckoned me inside.

  I put a hand on the door.

  “Then I think we should—”

  “You won’t do a bloody thing.”

  I wasn’t sure who the voice came from. And moments later, I realised that’s because I didn’t know who the voice belonged to at all.

  When I turned around, I saw who it belonged to.

  There was a man wearing a checkered flannel shirt over a stained white T-shirt. His jeans were baggy and torn. He had long white hair, spindly and brittle. On the top of his head, he wore a flat cap. One of his eyes looked like it was shooting off in another direction.

  “Get on your knees. All of you. Now.”

  And we weren’t in a position to argue.

  Not when he lifted the shotgun and pointed it at us.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  It wasn’t long before we were in darkness again.

  It was hard to tell whether it was day or night in the room we’d been stuffed inside. The room which, by the way, was barely big enough to fit me, Hannah, Haz, Remy, Sue and her two children inside. We were pressed up against each other, feeling one another shaking. It really was the most terrifying situation I’d ever been in—and I’d been in a few these last couple of days.

  As I sat there, nausea crippling my body as the smell of our collective sweat built up, I realised just how awful things were going to get with regards to personal hygiene. I needed a shower, badly, as did everyone else. Rooms like this, or the car, as we’d discussed, were going to end up stinking like mad. It was already hard enough adjusting to the new way of using toilets—which included not flushing because the water supply was just as affected as everything
else. Other times, we’d just have to use holes in the ground, then dig over them, things like that.

  If everyone started taking this no dignity route—which, soon, they’d be forced to—then things were going to get pretty grim pretty quickly.

  But shit. That was the least of our concerns right now.

  “I should’ve stayed back,” Sue said. She was by my side, and her children were at her side, crying. Aiden was saying he was scared of the dark, and Sue was trying to reassure him. “I—I should never have followed. I should never have brought my children here.”

  “You didn’t know it was going to play out like this,” I said.

  “You know, I lost the kids, once. Both of them. Jason and I, we were at a park for the day. It was pretty quiet, except for a few others kids. Anyway, we got chatting to some other parents. And I swear I was watching them. I was watching them at all times. Then they just… I turned around, and they were gone.”

  “Sounds like something every parent goes through,” Hannah said.

  “Not like this,” Sue said. “I didn’t find them that afternoon. I didn’t even find them that night. I started to prepare for the worst. I was tearing my hair out. If it wasn’t for Jason, I’m not sure I’d ever have made it through.”

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Sue said. “We never found them. They could still be out there.”

  I frowned. “Wait. But Holly and Aiden are here with you right now.”

  “I didn’t say it was Holly and Aiden that we lost.”

  Sue looked at me, and although I couldn’t make out her face in the darkness, I could tell that she’d just peeled some very painful layers right back. All of a sudden, I understood her fear of losing her children. I understood her paranoia and her pain. I understood her and Jason’s urgency to get their children to somewhere safe and not to take any real risks in the quest to do so.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Really. I am.”

  I pulled against the cuffs around my wrists.

  “I’m not going to let any of us get stuck in here forever. That’s just not going to happen.”

  I pulled harder against the metal. I kept on pulling and banging.

  “Hey!” I shouted.

  “What’s he doing?” Haz asked.

  “Hey!”

  “Scott, he’s going to come back here.”

  “Good,” I said. “Good. That’s exactly what we want to happen.”

  I kept on kicking and punching at the wall behind me. The metal echoed as I hit it. Soon, Hannah joined me. And before I knew it, everyone was doing it. Everyone but Sue.

  “Trust me,” I said. “We’re going to get out of here. We’re going to—”

  The door swung open.

  Light flooded into the pitch blackness. I had no idea how long we’d been in here, whether this was another day, but it felt like forever.

  The man stood at the opening of the door, shotgun in hand.

  “I thought I told you to keep it quiet or I’d kill every one of you?”

  “I don’t believe you’d do that,” I said.

  I wasn’t sure where my confidence to say that came from. Judging by the terrified look on Haz’s face, he didn’t either.

  “Oh really?” the man said, walking towards me. He pressed the shotgun against my throat. The cold metal made me shiver. But still, I sat upright. I couldn’t let my composure break.

  “Really,” I said. “I think if you were going to kill us, you’d have killed us by now.”

  There was a pause. And in the man’s crooked eyes, I saw thinking. Deliberation.

  Then he pulled back the shotgun and cracked it across my face.

  “Scott!” Hannah said.

  The man lowered down beside me and squeezed my cheeks together. He breathed strangely minty breath into my face. “That was for you trying to steal my car.”

  Then he let go and reached around my back, and for a second, seeing the knife in his hand now, I thought he was going to stab me.

  But he didn’t.

  Instead, he removed my cuffs.

  I pulled my hands in front of me. My wrists were chapped. There was still blood stained on my right hand where the dog had bitten me, but the wound didn’t look too bad.

  “Up,” he said, to each and every one of us, setting us all free. “On your feet.”

  “Please,” Sue begged. “My children. Show mercy. They’ve been through a—”

  “Don’t like children. Never have. The sympathy card won’t work on me. Now come on. Through here, before I change my mind.”

  The walk up the steps of the basement—that’s what it turned out to be—and into the man’s house was daunting because I really didn’t know what to expect.

  But the first thing I saw when I stepped into his dusty kitchen was even less expected.

  A dog.

  No. Not just any dog.

  The German Shepherd I’d set free. The one that bit my hand.

  “Now, if it were up to me, I’d have killed you all. But Lionel here says you saved him from a trap. So I guess you’re very lucky to have him fighting your corner.”

  He put his shotgun to one side and smiled like we were friends all of a sudden, and none of the events that had unfolded mattered at all.

  “Um, yeah. He…”

  “I’m Derek,” he said. “Derek Hooper.”

  He held out a hand and shook at the air.

  “And you are?”

  “Oh,” I said. “I’m Scott. This is Hannah. Remy. Haz. Sue. Sue’s two children, Holly and Aiden.”

  Derek looked at and studied each of them. “Pleasure to meet you. Pleasure to meet you all.”

  He turned and walked down the corridor, out of his kitchen and into a long hallway.

  “Um,” I said. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

  He turned and frowned. “Forgetting what?”

  “You just had us locked away in your basement for… well, I don’t know how long. And now you’re just letting us free?”

  He chuckled, then waved a hand at me. “Oh, I know you kids aren’t a threat. You just needed teaching a lesson.” He said it like we were nothing more than annoying ten-year-olds that needed a telling off.

  “The power,” Hannah said, stepping forward. “The car. How does it have power? How does your torch have power?”

  Derek smiled like he was happy someone had finally asked the question. “Follow me. You’ll find out.”

  We all looked at one another. I felt like I was Alice being led down the rabbit hole. Or a kid being offered candy by a stranger. I wasn’t sure which felt worse.

  Still, I took a deep breath, and I followed.

  When I reached the room that Derek was looking into, I couldn’t understand at first. I couldn’t comprehend what I was seeing.

  “You heard of preppers?” Derek asked.

  “In America,” I said. “I didn’t know…”

  “Well, this is good ol’ Blighty, my friend. And I’m a prepper.”

  I looked around at the three guns. I saw the fishing rods, the nets, the traps that had been set up. And I saw a little metal cage, which had a watch inside it.

  That watch was ticking.

  “Now come on,” he said, closing the door. “You lot look like you could use a good meal.”

  Prepper or no prepper, nutcase or no nutcase, a good meal was an offer I couldn’t refuse.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  As a part-time vegetarian, I never thought I’d be so thrilled to tuck into a juicy piece of venison.

  Alas, a lot had changed in the space of a few days.

  It was late, and we sat around the table lit by candlelight. Although Derek insisted he had enough working lights to keep this place lit up, he didn’t want to draw too much attention to himself, or to any of us, which was admirable, really. Instead, the curtains were sealed shut, and beyond the curtains, wooden boards were pressed up against the windows, keeping any light from escaping.

&n
bsp; It also meant that anyone could be out there, watching, which made the hairs on my arms stand on end.

  It was windy outside, and I could hear it creaking the foundations of this old house. The light from the candles was dim, and it felt like we were some kind of medieval family tucking in for a feast.

  Everyone was silent when they ate. Well, not silent. They were gorging on food, of course. We all were. But we weren’t speaking. We were just too focused on the energy source in front of us, reduced to our base instincts.

  When I’d finished, feeling full, I sat back and held the glass of red wine Derek had poured for me.

  “Let me guess,” I said. “You caught the deer yourself?”

  Derek grinned. “Bingo.”

  “How do you do a thing like that?”

  “It’s not so hard when you have some guns in your possession. But yeah. The preparation has to be done carefully. A deer goes a long way, though. You can cook the meat right away. You can dry some of it in the sunlight and treat it as jerky. The hunting’s the easy part, really.”

  I lifted my hand, which Derek had bandaged. “Evidently.”

  We laughed, all of us. As we ate some more and drank some more wine, I could sense the collective spirits of this place lifting. The children seemed happy to finally be around a table. Sue… she looked distant, and grief-stricken, and kept bursting into tears, but she couldn’t be blamed for that. Not when her husband’s death was still so recent, still so raw.

  Hannah leaned over to me, reached for the bottle of wine. When she lifted it back, she spilled a little onto my lap.

  “Oops,” she said.

  She put a hand on my leg, and I flinched. But then I let it rest there. I looked into her eyes, smelled the wine on her breath, and found myself growing intoxicated with her.

  Then I cleared my throat, and Hannah moved her hand away, and the moment was forgotten, just like that.

  “Don’t you think about him?” I asked.

  She topped up her wine. “Think about who?”

  “Your boyfriend. Don’t you wonder how he’s doing?”

  She sighed and sipped back some of her wine. “Sometimes. But mostly I don’t bother because I know he’ll be doing just fine.”