UK Dark Trilogy

by Harris, Chris

  People were not getting too angry about it yet; they were probably just a bit embarrassed, as they were emptying their purses, wallets, pockets and handbags to try to scrabble enough money together to pay for at least some of what they wanted to buy. Consequently, there were a lot of trolleys and baskets stacking up around the till with goods that people were unable to pay for. The poor staff members were trying their best to keep the aisles clear and put the goods back on the shelves as quickly as possible. I filled my trolley full of goods, waited patiently for my turn, saw the look of relief on his face when he saw that I was going to pay in cash, and pushed the trolley back home.

  It was turning into a bit of a party in our street. More neighbours were gathering and more kids were joining in the football match. It was a lovely sunny day, warm for the time of year, so people were gathering, and chatting away about the power cut and how they couldn’t get on with their jobs around the house because nothing was working.

  I went into our house to talk to Becky about what to do.

  “Should we spend the day trying to gather as much food as we can? After all, half of it will be going into our ‘food bank’. Should we inform our friends and neighbours of exactly what to expect in the future? Or should we just ignore it all and carry on like everybody else, having a bit of a party because there isn’t much else to do?”

  “Why don’t we just do a bit of everything?” Becky suggested.

  I told the neighbours, as I was pushing the trolley up the road, that we hadn’t had a chance to do our weekly shop so I was just “popping up the road” to get what I could.

  “Let’s make an occasion of the day. It isn’t very often that we can all get together. Why don’t we have an outside ‘bring and share’ barbecue to use up what’s defrosting in our freezers?” This idea was warmly received and people scuttled off home to see what was lurking in the bottom of their fridges and freezers.

  When I returned from the shop with another trolley load, a few of my neighbours said they felt a bit guilty as they didn’t have much in their fridges or freezers at the moment.

  “Well, I haven’t got much booze in. Why don’t we take my trolley up to the mini-market so that I can buy some booze? Anyone who hasn’t got much food to contribute can come along and see what’s left on the shelves. So then you’ll be able to add to the party food. Mind you, it’s cash only at the moment.” But the three neighbours that were joining me all indicated that they had enough in their wallets.

  On the way I asked them how much food they had at home. They weren’t sure, but the general consensus was “not much”.

  “Well, since we’re going to the shops anyway, you might want to stock up as well. It won’t do any harm,” I gently suggested to them.

  The mini-market was doing a roaring trade. The owner must have had a large stock room because the staff were still bringing goods out from the back and stocking the shelves. The shop owner let us “borrow” a couple of his trolleys in return for a £100 deposit, so we formed a mini convoy of four full trolleys as we walked home. Mine was half full of booze and half full of food and the other three, pushed by my neighbours, were full of food.

  On the way back I again said to them, as we walked past the closed supermarket and shuttered up shops, “You know, we can’t be too sure when things will start working again, so it might be a good idea to get more food in.” Two of them agreed.

  “Mm. well, we are experiencing unusual times, so it won’t hurt to stock up some more. Once we’ve emptied the trolleys, we’ll go to the mini-market again,” I said. Pete, the other neighbour, seemed a little embarrassed when I asked him if he was going to go to the shop again.

  “Have you got enough cash?” I asked him.

  “The thing is, I haven’t really, no.”

  “Well, I’ll be happy to lend you a couple of hundred quid.” Initially he refused my offer, but when I reassured him that it was not a problem (I lied and said that someone had paid me in cash for a job I’d done last week, so I had quite a bit at home at the moment which I was waiting to pay into the bank), he agreed to the loan.

  “But I’ll pay you back as soon as the cash point’s working again.”

  “Well that’ll be never!” I thought, as I was handing the cash over. But if he could get food for himself and his family for at least the next couple of weeks, I wouldn’t have to worry about him and feel the need to dip into our food bank. I wanted to keep quiet about that for as long as I could.

  My neighbours each managed a couple more trips up to the shop, in between sitting down with the rest of the road and having a quick drink and some food from the barbecue.

  Becky did one trip herself, but on her return, she took me to one side, and said quietly, “I feel guilty now about going out, because we’ve already got plenty of food. Why shouldn’t we leave some for other people?” I thought about it and decided that half of me wanted to keep gathering as much as I could, but the other half could see her admirable point.

  “Okay,” I agreed, “for today at least, we won’t, but if we come upon more supplies in the future, we will get them.”

  When the neighbours walked up the road to return the trolleys and get their £100 deposit back, they decided to spend the money on what champagne and sparkling wine was left on the shelf. Then the party really started. It was a really good day; we set tables and chairs up in the road, and the men took it in turns to cook/burn food on the barbecue. The afternoon was full of the sound of adults laughing and drinking, while the children switched between football and hide and seek, or whatever game they could think of.

  At one comical moment, a local policeman walked down the road and asked us to move everything out of the way as we were obstructing the highway!

  One of our neighbours, who is a barrister, put forward a highly spirited, if not slightly slurred legal argument as to why what he was asking was plainly ridiculous, and then invited him for a hotdog and a cheeky beer. Realising that he probably wouldn’t win the argument, the officer conceded the point and sat down for some food.

  “I’ve been on duty all day, I’m thirsty and getting quite hungry. The smells wafting over from that barbecue are particularly tempting,” he admitted.

  Once the policeman had finished his burger and was halfway through his second bottle of beer, I asked him for a quiet word. I quizzed him about the situation we were all in to see if he had any more information to give me. He clearly didn’t.

  “All I know is that the police station had an unusually large food delivery on Thursday, so the storeroom’s full of dried food, and all leave has been cancelled. We’ve all been instructed to make ourselves as visible as possible and patrol the streets. We haven’t been told when the power’s likely to be back on, or why everything electrical, including the cars, have stopped working.” I sensed he wasn’t lying and was telling us what he knew, which wasn’t anything more than I knew already. As he left to go back on patrol, he thanked us for the food and happily continued on his beat.

  By half past six it was getting dark and the Northern Lights were beginning to show. Blankets were fetched and passed around and the children sat on their parents’ laps and looked up at the night sky. It could have been a nice way to end the day, but I couldn’t get it out of my mind that all these people I was sitting with, some of whom were my friends, were in complete ignorance of the situation we were all in.

  Maybe I’d had one too many drinks, but I felt I had to tell them. At least then they’d be aware of the problems facing us all in the future. It seemed only fair.

  I stood up, attracted everyone’s attention by tapping a knife against my beer bottle, and asked if I could have an important word with at least one member of every family present a little further down the road. I didn’t want the children to interrupt what I was going to say, as it was very important, so I asked if it could be adults only.

  As the group gathered round me, I made sure the twenty or so adults could all see and hear me. I proceeded to tell them ex
actly what had happened and why. I told them about Jerry and what he had told me, missing out where I had met him, as I didn’t want people to know about the supplies I had been gathering, for obvious reasons.

  I was asked how I knew all this information, so I explained that my interest had been aroused by reading various books, and how this had led to the Internet research and my knowledge about EMPs caused by solar activity.

  Most people expressed disbelief and voiced their objections to my theory. Becoming slightly angry, I pointed at the sky and asked them to explain the Northern Lights. That shut the disbelievers up. I couldn’t answer any questions about how bad the effects had been, or how widespread, as I just didn’t know. But I advised them all to try to get some more food supplies in and to be sensible with them, to make them last as long as possible. Because let’s face it, nobody really knew when any help from the government would arrive.

  One neighbour accused me of holding back information.

  “Why didn’t you tell us all about this as soon as you knew it was happening?”

  “Oh for pity’s sake!” I replied, “I only knew this was going to happen a few days ago, and even then I wasn’t sure. I’ve tried to tell family and a few close friends, but none of them took me seriously, so would you have done? No, you would have thought I’d gone crazy.

  At least I’m telling you now and giving you a chance to help yourself!” Most of my neighbours thanked me for telling them, and as I had obviously ruined everybody’s party mood, they quietly gathered up the rest of their families, grabbed their chairs or camping tables and headed off home. A few people hung around and asked me some more questions, as I was now the neighbourhood’s resident expert. I couldn’t answer many of the questions.

  “I just don’t know. But just keep doing the same thing I’ll be doing and try to gather as much food as possible.” We went back to our house to put Stanley and Daisy to bed.

  Once they were asleep, Becky and I sat on the sofa, the room lit by the soft glow of a single candle, and had a quiet cuddle before we went to bed. I thought about Jerry so I grabbed my walkie-talkie and tried to contact him.

  He replied quickly but had little to report. He’d had a similar day with his neighbours, treating it as a sort of holiday. We signed off and promised to leave the radios on each sundown in case we needed to contact each other.

  How many people around the country had done the same? How long would it be before the reality of the situation kicked in and things started to turn nasty? Not long, was the unfortunate answer.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The following morning was spent tidying up the garage and playroom so that Becky could update the spreadsheet. I’d bought an old-fashioned camping shower at a car boot sale ages ago and installed it above the bath. It was a canvas bucket with a shower head attached. You filled it with water, pulled it up on the rope, tugged the chain attached to the shower head and water came out. All I needed to do was screw a large hook to a joist above the bath and fix a cleat to the wall to hold the rope. Hygiene was going to be important to keep healthy, so keeping clean was an essential part of survival, and a hot shower would be a luxury that not many people would have. The children were intrigued by the new shower and couldn’t wait to try it out. It had taken a worldwide disaster to get my children to want to have a shower. Typical!

  After a lunch of fridge leftovers, Becky decided to start cooking the perishable food we had left to make it last longer.

  She also went through the cupboards in the kitchen and pantry, to make sure that we weren’t going to waste anything by letting it go off.

  “I’m warning you now that meals might be a bit strange.”

  “You’re a great cook, and I’m sure whatever combination you come up with will be fine with me,” I reassured her.

  I walked up the road to see what, if anything, was going on. I took the trolley with me in case I came across any foodstuff. As I passed a small clothes shop and the local electrical goods retailer, it was obvious they had been broken into during the night and ransacked.

  It hadn’t taken the local criminals long to realise that without power, burglar alarms wouldn’t work, so they could easily break in undisturbed and help themselves. “So when will they pluck up the courage to break into houses with people in?” I wondered.

  The mini-market was still open, but the policeman who’d joined us the previous night was standing outside, so I stopped to have a chat.

  “Someone tried to break in, but they were disturbed by the owner who lives here in the flat above the shop. I’m here to be visible and to remind people to behave, after more break-ins at some of the other shops on the High Street,” he told me. Inside the shop, people were still trying to buy goods with their cards and the owner was becoming less polite about refusing them. The customers were becoming angry at being refused, and cross words were being exchanged as the rejected customers left the shop, but the inbuilt British sense of right and wrong and politeness was still holding.

  The situation wasn’t getting out of hand just yet. The shopkeeper’s prices seemed to have doubled overnight, but I didn’t say a word as I filled my trolley and paid at the checkout.

  The shop still had a fair amount of stock on the shelves, as most of his customers probably hadn’t had enough cash to pay. I decided to keep returning and buying the food while it was still on the shelves.

  The next couple of days passed quietly. Most of the time was spent sorting the supplies out and we only ventured out of the house to walk the dogs in the park and let the kids run off some energy. I began to look forward to my nightly radio chats with Jerry, and the more we talked, the more our friendship grew.

  He was doing the same as us, staying in and not drawing attention to himself, and waiting to see what the future held. We were much more willing to trust each other now, and as proof of this, he told me about the crate his brother had sent him before the event. Another military Land Rover had turned up on the Thursday before the event with a smaller package containing the key and a letter from his brother.

  The letter had said that he wouldn’t be in touch for a long time, as his command was following protocol and had retreated to a secret secure base, along with key members of the government. They would be hiding away there until they could work out how bad the situation was, and from there they would try to coordinate the relief effort.

  I had seen this in films. I suppose it’s called “continuation of government,” but normally in films the select few act like cowards, only look after themselves and ignore the rest of the population, while living in relative luxury. I could only hope that, as those films were normally American, the British government would have a better moral code and would want to help its people.

  The crate had contained packets of MREs, pre-packed ready to eat meals (hence the name MRE: Meals Ready to Eat). I’ve never tried one, but apparently, they don’t taste very good, although they do provide you with enough calories to keep you going.

  In addition to the food, the crate had contained a military looking radio with instructions on how to use it. At the bottom of the crate there were two military rifles and two handguns, one shotgun and boxes of ammunition for all of them.

  His brother had taken the weapons out of the base stores in the knowledge that in the ensuing chaos they wouldn’t be missed. He’d sent the key separately to stop anyone opening the crate and discovering what he had done.

  Jerry said that he’d left them in the crate and hoped he wouldn’t have to use them, since he hardly knew which end of a gun to hold.

  I told him that with my limited knowledge of guns, if he ever wanted help, I was sure I would be able to work them out and give him some basic instructions. We bid each other good night and signed off. “WOW,” I thought, “the guy’s a doctor and has some proper military grade weapons! If we pooled our knowledge and resources we could really help each other out in the future.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  That night we had our first traged
y on the road. Nobody was able to say exactly what happened, but in the middle of the night I was woken up by a commotion outside. A house about ten doors down was ablaze. I ran out to help. A crowd of neighbours was already gathering and I shouted, “Has anybody got out?” The ground floor of the house was an inferno and there was no way in or out, so nobody thought they had. I grabbed a neighbour and told him to come with me. We ran back to mine and I shouted to him to grab my ladders so that we could reach the upper windows. I ran through the house to my garage and wound the garage door up just enough to slide my ladders out. I felt the neighbour grabbing them, so ran back through the house and out of the front door, and we carried them down the road. We tried to put the ladders up to the upstairs windows but were beaten back by the intense heat and smoke.

  People had formed a bucket chain, but it took so long to fill the buckets up that it was pointless, and eventually we had to give up. Luckily, it was a detached house so the flames couldn’t easily spread to neighbouring homes. We all felt helpless as we stood there and watched. Someone had seen the family earlier in the day so we knew they’d been in.

  We could only guess that as candles or oil lamps were most people’s only source of light, either through carelessness or sheer bad luck, something had caught fire.

  A police foot patrol turned up, but as it was clear nothing could be done until the fire had burned itself out, they took the details of who was living in the house, and concluded that they were most probably dead. They gave everybody a lecture about being careful with naked flames.

  A group of us agreed to stay and make sure the fire didn’t spread. They apologised for not being able to do anything else and left to continue on their patrol.

  As we stood around, traumatised by the night’s events, a few of the neighbours admitted that they were running low on food and were planning to leave to go to friends or relatives they knew who lived out in the countryside where, hopefully, the situation was better. I asked them how far they were going to be travelling. One was going to just south of Worcester and the other to a place not far from Stafford. They all had bikes and teenage children, so were expecting to make it in a long day’s ride (they were planning to bike along the motorways as they were the most direct route).