by Seth Patrick
Sly’s voice woke him. ‘Get up, Never.’
He opened his eyes, wincing at the daylight coming in through the van’s open doors. Sly had a red mark across her face where the airbag had hit her. He sat up sharply, amazed that every part of him wasn’t in pain after the van’s impact. His hands, though, ached like hell. No wonder. He’d spent an hour holding the van doors closed, even though they’d latched, even once he’d seen the internal lock-snib and clicked it up. He couldn’t bring himself to let go. A long hour, with things from a nightmare continuing to flow over the vehicle, and – God help him – audibly testing the structure. Scratches that seemed more than just a scrabble over the roof.
Looking for a way in.
An hour was a guess, though. It had seemed like eternity before the sudden drop in the intensity of the sound, and a gradual dissipation of the claw-rain that surrounded him. At last, in the silence, he’d slumped to the floor, drained. He could hear Sly’s breathing, and he’d called to her without a response. Eventually, he must have fallen asleep. It astonished him that sleep could have come at all.
The camera, whose Judas-strap had almost been the end of him, was sitting beside him on the floor of the van. He looked outside. The light that had made him wince was the light of dawn, the edge of the sun barely above the horizon. The road was dotted with cars, but he saw no movement at all.
Sly was standing by the car that he’d seen stop last night, the driver of which had called out to him in fear – the driver he’d yelled at to close his window, moments before the dark swallowed him. He thought of how long an electric window took to shut, cold electronics with no notion of urgency. No sense of danger.
He got out of the van and walked over to Sly. The driver’s body was face down on the asphalt by her feet.
‘Did you pull him out?’ he asked.
‘Don’t look at him,’ she said, as she opened the car’s rear door.
He felt his blood go cold and went back to the van. He remembered all the times where footage of the aftermath of disasters had been taken by people; all the times the perpetually outraged had bemoaned how someone could document rather than help, as if documenting a catastrophe had no purpose. He fetched the camera and started to record. Someone had to.
‘I said don’t look at him . . .’ said Sly, as he turned the body over.
He stumbled back. There was a hole in the man’s face where his eyes and nose should have been. He made himself record it, then panned the camera around. Other cars further away, other bodies, slumped over steering wheels, faces obscured or just too far away to tell.
To tell if the same had happened to them.
‘Give me a hand with Kendrick,’ said Sly, and when he just looked at her, she scowled. ‘I’m not leaving him here, Never. I’m not fucking leaving him.’
His hesitation had merely been confusion, though – he’d not understood what she’d been talking about. Of course, he thought: the van was done for, and here was a car they could use.
Together they carried the body bag from the van to the back seat of the car.
‘Get in,’ she said.
Movement caught his eye further down the road. Someone was walking out to one of the cars, where a body was sprawled across the hood.
‘Can’t we help?’ said Never.
‘We’re going,’ said Sly, cold. ‘Get in the fucking car.’
He was about to protest when the distant figure took hold of the body’s arm and started to drag it slowly away from the vehicle and across to the sidewalk. There was something about the lumbering way it was done that made Never decide that getting out of there was the only sensible thing to do.
He got in the car, raising the camera to record as Annabel drove. There was no damage to buildings that he could see, but roadside vegetation looked trampled everywhere he looked, small trees broken, larger ones cleared of most of their leaves, the branches stripped and snapped. His dream came back to him, and he shivered.
Scattered cars littered the road, as did occasional bodies. Many of them were clearly mutilated, with the same bloody crater where their face should have been.
That could have been him. If he’d lost consciousness after the crash, or taken two seconds longer to get the van doors shut. He felt numb at the thought. He’d saved himself, and he’d saved Sly, but instead of relief he felt nothing. The same blank shock was on the faces of the few living people he saw as they drove, a total incomprehension of what had gone on here. Most people still seemed to be inside, and after the horrors overnight he supposed it was still early for them to pluck up the courage to venture outside. He imagined people cowering indoors, peering through curtains.
When they reached Chantilly, sixteen miles from the river, the trampled vegetation petered out.
‘Stop,’ said Never. Their car slowed to a halt.
From here on, the road looked clear, but the only person around was an elderly woman sitting on a bench. He got out of the car and approached her, lowering the camera but continuing to record.
‘Ma’am?’ he said. She looked up at him, deeply anxious, keeping a firm hold of a metal walking stick. In one hand she held a bible.
‘You stay back there,’ she said. ‘Till I get a good look at you.’
He nodded and kept his distance. ‘Did you see what happened here?’
‘I saw some of it,’ she said. ‘I saw a river come up the road, and I saw it was full of devils. I got in my cellar and I prayed. Seems God took pity on me.’ She said it with a hint of contempt, looking back down to the few bodies visible on the road, then she looked at Never with suspicion. ‘What about you?’
‘We were caught in it. We shut ourselves in the back of a van.’
She nodded. ‘My neighbour packed himself and his family into their car, half-hour back.’
‘Leaving the city,’ said Never, but the woman shook her head.
‘Others did, but not him. They were going into the city. He said they’d be safest there, but his kids looked at him like he was crazy.’ She fixed her eyes on Never. ‘He was something, but I don’t think he was crazy.’
‘What was he?’ said Never. He wanted to hear it from someone else. He thought of the person he’d seen, dragging a body to the roadside. Perhaps they’d simply been traumatized. Perhaps. Or perhaps they were getting on with a task. A clean-up.
The old woman was watching him closely. ‘I don’t know what he was. Changed, that’s for sure.’
Sly called to him. ‘Let’s get going,’ she said.
‘Two seconds,’ said Never. He turned to the old woman. ‘Have you got people here? Do you want to come with us?’
She watched him for a few seconds, then gave him a cold look and shook her head. ‘You go on your way, son,’ she said.
She didn’t trust him, he realized. He nodded, then looked back down the road. Who could blame her?
*
When he heard the car, Jonah was outside clearing leaves and other debris from the surfaces of the solar panels. The wind the previous night had been strong, although not strong enough to mask the noises they’d heard soon after dark – what started off like distant thunder had grown into something far more disturbing, and the sky itself had seemed to pulse with some kind of hideous life until the early hours. And all that time, Never and Sly were out there.
It hadn’t been long after the two of them had driven off that Annabel had returned, and Jonah wondered how he would have coped if she’d not been back, either. As it was he’d spent an uneasy night in the living room, sometimes listening in to the radio to see if any transmissions came through, but the static was complete. Even local transmissions were overwhelmed.
The rest of the time he tried to sleep, jumping at any noise in case it was his friend coming back.
Or something else. He’d lowered the shutters overnight.
He went to the door and, although he didn’t recognize the car, he could see Sly and Never through the windshield. He couldn’t help but run out to them, yanking N
ever’s door open as the car came to a halt.
‘Thank Christ,’ he said, and Never got out. He was trembling slightly, Jonah thought. ‘What happened?’
‘We were there,’ said Never. ‘We saw it.’
‘Saw what? We heard what seemed like a thunderstorm in the distance, but nothing like any of us has experienced. I didn’t know if it was—’ He stopped talking, seeing the urgent terror in Never’s eyes.
‘The attack was on DC,’ said Sly, getting out of the car. ‘Maybe Baltimore too. Depends on the radius. At least twenty miles from the Potomac in this direction, but who knows how far it could reach?’
‘It?’ said Jonah. The picture in his mind was of the Beast, vast and triumphant; striding across the landscape with a terrible screaming roar. He looked at Never, who held up his camera.
‘I don’t know how much I got,’ said Never, ‘but I got some.’
‘Uh, what are all these?’ said Sly. She gestured to the newly arrived vehicles in the driveway and Jonah nodded.
‘Annabel went to fetch the family of one of our neighbours. She came back with more than she bargained for.’
He led them into the house. Annabel appeared, grinning with relief. She hugged them both.
‘My God, we were worried,’ she said, but her smile faded as she realized how wary they all seemed. She reached out a hand to Sly’s red-marked face. ‘Are you OK?’
‘I crashed the van as we were escaping,’ said Sly. ‘It might be hard to believe, but Never saved my life.’
Annabel shot her a bemused look. ‘Escaping?’ she said. ‘What do you mean?’
Sly summed it up. ‘Something happened. Something bad.’
A ten-year-old girl strolled past them, wiping sleep from her eyes, getting a raised eyebrow from both Never and Sly.
‘OK,’ said Jonah. ‘Let’s take this somewhere private, huh?’
*
He took them to his office space and shut the door.
‘So who was that kid?’ said Never. The camera was hanging from its strap around his shoulder. He took it and removed the memory card.
‘Remy,’ said Jonah. ‘Grady’s big sister.’
‘How many strays have you managed to collect?’ grumbled Sly.
While Jonah booted up his PC, Annabel answered. ‘Three neighbours. Petro you’ve met. Philip, a seventy-two-year-old retired cardiovascular surgeon, and Cathy, our resident astrophysicist. Cathy’s daughter Sara, Sara’s husband Armel, and their daughter Remy, who you just saw.’
‘Remy’s younger brother Grady died a few days ago,’ added Jonah. ‘Just so you know.’ A horrible thought crossed his mind – the possibility that, when all was said and done, little Grady might have been the lucky one.
‘Is that the lot?’ said Sly.
Annabel shook her head. ‘No. Sara is neighbours with her best friend, and when we arrived and explained, she went next door. So they’re here too – Jansin, her husband Mark, two kids. That’s it. So far.’
‘Sara explained to her friend?’ said Never. ‘What exactly did she explain?’
Annabel shrugged. ‘Just that the blackout was widespread, and it might be better out of the city.’
‘And how does that affect your supplies?’ said Sly. ‘Having the extra mouths to feed?’
‘We’re fine,’ said Jonah. She and Kendrick had known that Jonah was half-heartedly setting up the place as a well-stocked bolthole, even if assembling and installing any of the kit he’d bought had tended to fall by the wayside. ‘We have our own bore for water, food for a month, and that’s without raiding our neighbours’ stocks too.’
‘A month,’ said Sly, half to herself. The despairing way she said it made Jonah anxious to know what the hell had happened.
‘What did you see?’ he said. ‘Can’t you just tell me?’
‘Best you see it yourself,’ said Never. Jonah logged on to his PC. ‘Let me drive,’ said Never, and Jonah stood to let Never take the seat. He put the memory card into the PC; it took a few moments for him to open the card’s folder. ‘Sly took us to meet someone. What was he Sly, NSA?’
‘Something like that,’ said Sly.
‘Here we go,’ said Never. He played it back – the view of the aurora, the camera lowered to give a shot of the stranger’s lower legs. The audio was a little muffled, but they could get the gist of the conversation.
‘Pause it,’ said Sly, and Never did. ‘I thought we knew more than they did, for a moment,’ she said. ‘But they sure as shit knew something cataclysmic was on the way. They knew about St Petersburg and Lisbon, but they thought the confused descriptions of what had happened indicated the use of a neurotoxin. Biochemical warfare. Something that would create chaos, a hallucinogen. The way they saw it, a hostile agent was taking advantage of the problems caused by the solar flare, and ensuring communications failed more completely than would have been the case without their help. Then this unknown enemy attacked with the biochemical agent to complete the job.’
‘Why?’ said Jonah. ‘Why the hell did they think anyone would do that?’
‘Somewhere like North Korea?’ said Sly. ‘Imagine if the rest of the world could be turned into a disaster zone, something they were prepared for and could cope with easily. They’d suddenly be the strongest nation around. And you know what? For a moment, I wondered if maybe that could be it. I forgot about what Kendrick saw, and I hoped . . .’ She shook her head. ‘OK, play it, Never.’
In the audio, they heard Never and Sly’s exchange, where she mentioned Cheyenne; Never paused it once more.
‘Tell me again what that is, Sly,’ he said. ‘Cheyenne.’
‘Imagine if an asteroid was coming,’ said Sly. ‘Imagine it was about to wipe out the country and there was nothing anybody could do about it. Cheyenne is the place to be. The bunker to end all bunkers. Started out as a command and control facility, like Mount Weather, but over the years they just kept expanding the place. All those mystery Defense-budget dollars.’
‘What’s its capacity?’ said Annabel. ‘How many people?’ ‘Five hundred for ten years,’ said Sly. ‘So I heard. Might be more. I imagine all the guests are already there. They don’t know what this is, but they know it’s bad.’
Playback resumed. Jonah and Annabel watched with rising dread, as the black patterns in the sickly green aurora appeared and gathered; as the column stretched down in the far distance, and the terrible thunder began, the hiss; as Sly and Never hurried to the van, and the darkness could be seen covering the Pentagon.
Turning off the interstate. The crash. A moment of silence, before Never moved again, and got Sly out. The panic as the strap caught, the camera juddering and capturing only the sight of Sly lying prone.
The other driver’s voice, and Never’s response.
And then, as Never triumphantly went to close the van door, the camera swung round on its strap and caught one last glimpse of the scene: green-lit creatures, the front line ever nearer, the dark river stretching out to the horizon. The doors closed; the sound of the flood covering the van poured from the PC speakers.
Playback stopped. ‘Then an hour or so of that fucking sound,’ said Never. He opened the next recording, which started with the shot of the body of the driver. Annabel and Jonah gasped as the body was turned over, then watched the rest in silence – the abandoned cars. The bodies.
‘Any questions?’ said Sly. ‘Because I don’t think we have answers.’
15
Annabel insisted on getting Sly and Never checked over by Philip. She had managed to introduce herself to the retired surgeon when she’d first moved into the area, although it had been brief. He’d appeared at his front door and had given her the shortest of polite greetings. He’d seemed pleasant enough, though he certainly hadn’t come across as wanting much of a relationship with his new neighbour. That had suited her fine back then, but this time Annabel had made far more of an effort to break the ice.
He turned out to have a gentle sense of humour, which was a
good sign. When she asked him to take a look at her friends, Philip didn’t hesitate.
‘Been a while since I worked ER,’ he said. ‘But it’s all in here, if I can dredge it up.’ He pointed to his temple.
She’d left Sly and Never with Jonah in his office, and when she and Philip entered, the two patients had a quiet desperation in their eyes that Philip seemed to pick up on right away. He gave Annabel a wary glance – she’d told him almost nothing about what had happened to them.
‘Annabel tells me you two had an accident,’ he said. ‘Tell me the details.’
‘We crashed in a van,’ said Never.
There was a pause, Philip clearly expecting more. ‘What speed?’ he asked.
‘About thirty,’ said Sly, and again there was a pause.
‘I see,’ said Philip. ‘I may be rusty, so bear with me.’ He produced a pen and held it up in front of Sly, then moved it around. ‘Follow the pen. OK, good. Now turn your head fully to the left. And to the right.’ He nodded, and turned to Never. ‘Now you.’
He repeated the same instructions, which Never dutifully followed.
‘OK,’ he said at last. ‘Did either of you lose consciousness?’
‘No,’ said Sly, and Never looked at her at once.
‘Yes you did,’ he said. ‘You were out cold. You didn’t stir the whole time the—’ He paused, and looked at Philip. ‘Uh, you didn’t stir.’
Sly frowned. ‘Shit,’ she said. ‘I can’t really remember.’
Philip put his hand under her chin and looked carefully at her, moving her head gently. ‘Rapid deceleration,’ said Philip. ‘I see the marks from the airbag on your face. We’ll need to keep a close eye on you. Concussion’s a real danger. Headache, dizziness, not thinking straight. You too, uh, sorry, Annabel did mention your names, but I . . .’
‘I’m Never,’ said Never. ‘She’s Sly.’
