The World After: An EMP Thriller Read online

  “This could be it,” she said as if the nightmare was on the verge of coming to a swift end. “This could really be it.”

  I let myself feel that hope for a second. And I knew I’d made a mistake right then because if anything went wrong, then the pain of the fall was going to be even worse.

  I knew something was ahead when I saw movement.

  I glanced up.

  “Did you see that?” Remy asked. So not just me, then.

  I squinted into the distance, past the solid green gates of the bunker grounds. They were high, but nothing we couldn’t scale if we tried really hard.

  I couldn’t see any more movement.

  “We keep going,” I said. And as we got closer, I felt cautious, and I realised it was about time I and everyone else found some kind of weapon to use in case of another confrontation. Sure, we had a few sticks and things like that, and a multi-tool that Haz insisted was for survival more than confrontation. But we couldn’t have another Jason incident. We couldn’t let that happen. “But we keep it stead—”

  “Mummy, did you see the army men?”

  Holly’s words went over my head at first. But then I saw them too, and I realised—with a surge of hope—that Holly was right.

  Standing at the gates, right at the other side, there were four men. They were all geared up in camo gear from head to toe. They were armed.

  “Shit,” Hannah said. “This is it. They’ve—they’re using this place. Some kind of temporary shelter.”

  But as we got closer, my hope started to shift into doubt. I saw that the soldiers didn’t exactly look welcoming. They looked… disorganised. Like they weren’t sure what to do.

  And then they raised their guns.

  We stopped, right there.

  All of us stopped, except for Sue, Holly and Aiden’s hands in hers.

  “Sue!” Hannah called.

  “Don’t make another move,” the soldier in the middle said. He had dark circles under his eyes. He didn’t look like he’d had much sleep.

  Sue still stumbled forwards, gripping tightly onto her children’s hands. “Please,” she said. “We’ve come so far. We just want—”

  Then, something happened.

  Something unexpected.

  Something awful.

  The soldiers fired.

  The sound of gunfire was louder and more cracking than I’d ever expected. Being a Brit, I’d never heard any real gunfire, like the vast majority of Brits.

  I couldn’t get over how… well, intimidating it was. How scary it was.

  When I’d got over the sound, which still rattled around my ears, I looked around desperately. Those soldiers. They’d fired.

  Sue.

  Sue and the kids.

  Were they…

  When I looked ahead, I saw that Sue was still standing.

  Both her children were still standing.

  Relief filled my body, and I fell to my knees.

  But as I fell, that relief soon turned into dread when I realised that these soldiers weren’t messing around. Not one bit.

  “Don’t make us fire again,” the middle soldier said. “Next time, we can’t promise we will miss. And we really, really don’t want to have to shoot you.”

  “What the hell’s going on here?” Remy shouted, raising his arms. “Why are you firing at us?”

  The soldier in the middle looked at the one to his right, somewhat mournfully.

  Then he looked back at us. “There’s no room here to sustain any more people. Not for long.”

  “What?” Hannah called. “But that can’t be possible. You’re supposed to be the army. You’re meant to have things in order.”

  The soldier in the middle shook his head again. “I’m sorry, Miss. But there is no order anymore.”

  When he said those words, it really hit me.

  It really, really hit me.

  The army didn’t know what was going on.

  Nobody—nobody even in authority—knew what was going to happen next.

  It was everyone for themselves, now.

  There was no hierarchy.

  There was only chaos.

  There was only survival.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  We sat outside the tent, under the stars, shivering.

  It was dark out here in the middle of nowhere. Far darker than it had seemed in the suburban family garden last night. It was impossible to believe another day had passed by already. But one thing was for certain—the fact that so long had passed meant that things weren’t straightening out anytime soon.

  And that was something I had to look in the mirror and accept.

  Haz was struggling to start a fire. He insisted he knew how to start one manually—the battery method, the matchstick method; even a method called the hand drill, which needed nothing more than some wood, hands, and a hell of a lot of perseverance—but as it stood, he was having problems even getting one going with a lighter. The wind was strong, and it rippled against the walls of the tent, and specks of rain fell and dampened the wood.

  And all this time, I couldn’t do anything but sit in silence.

  I couldn’t help staring at the road ahead, realising I needed to make a choice.

  The bunker had been a dead end. In the end, more powerful people than my group had got there and taken it as their own. Whether that was right or wrong, it didn’t really matter. What mattered was they had guns. They had weapons. Therefore, they had power.

  It was a bitter pill to swallow, knowing we had just been outright rejected entry into what could be a safe place. But I’d heard what the soldier said. The bunker was only large enough to sustain a certain amount of people. Which meant that its resources weren’t infinite. They were going to run out, eventually.

  And when they did… who would stand a better chance of surviving once they got out into the outside world?

  Those people in the bunker, who had been used to having everything delivered on a plate to them?

  Or me and my people, after we’d spent time in this world, learning, adapting, surviving?

  I turned around, then. I stood up, over Haz, Hannah, Remy, Sue and her two children, Holly and Aiden.

  They all looked up at me like I was mad.

  “I know this is tough to take. I know it’s not what you want to hear. But we need to stop reacting to this situation now. We need to stop searching, wandering. We need to start fighting. For ourselves. Because if we don’t, then this world isn’t going to show any mercy.”

  Sue shook her head. “I’m not strong enough to survive. Not on my own.”

  “You are strong enough,” I said. “And you aren’t on your own. None of us are. We have each other.”

  Hannah puffed out her lips. “All fair and well making a grand pitch at surviving. But what the hell do I know about survival? What does either of us know about survival? What does any of us know about survival, really? Sorry, Haz.”

  Haz barely budged. He was used to Hannah shooting him down by now.

  “We might not know things,” I said. “But what do you do when you haven’t revised for an exam?”

  “You spend the night before cramming?” Haz said.

  “No. You wing it. You use your intuition. You base your answers on what you do know.”

  “So,” Sue said, snivelling. “What you’re saying is… your grand plan is that we should guess our way to survival?”

  “Not so much guess,” I said. “Call it what you want. We might not know a lot about how to survive. But if we want to survive, we’re going to have to find a way.”

  I saw their faces turning, then. Like a light was sparking in each and every one of them. Like they were coming around to what I was saying. “How can you be so… cool, about this?”

  I was surprised to hear Sue say that. I was anything but cool. “I guess with what I’ve gone through this last year, I just… I’ve found a way to get through things. Even when I don’t think I can. I don’t know if I believe in a God, but I do beli
eve that things tend to work out if I’m willing to fight for them. ‘We rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope.’”

  Sue smiled. “Romans 5:3-4. That was one of Jason’s favourites.”

  I smiled back at her, felt our collective loss.

  “So what do you say?” I said, attempting to sound more hopeful now. “We might not be experts, but we know we need four things. Shelter. Water. Fire. Food. So we can work on getting better at those four things. Can’t we?”

  I saw a few muted nods.

  “Can’t we?” I repeated.

  “Yes,” everyone said, a lot more enthusiastically now.

  I smiled, feeling like a leader for the first time in a long time. I was scared. Of course I was scared.

  But I just had to swallow that fear and put it to the back of my mind.

  I had to live in a day-tight compartment and take things one step at a time.

  “Good,” I said. “Now, we sleep. Then tomorrow, we begin.”

  “Begin what, exactly?” Sue asked, still sounding sceptical.

  I looked up at the stars shining down brightly from above. “Surviving.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  It was some time mid-afternoon the following day, and we were finally trying our luck at catching our own food.

  Of course, we could take the easy route. We could work our ways into the towns and salvage the shelves for supplies. We were only just outside the suburbs, and those suburbs were only just outside the nearby town of Bolton, so it wasn’t like the option wasn’t there or anything.

  But the truth was, we knew we had to get stronger. All of us. We knew that if the world was going to be the way it was currently—powerless—for a while, that we needed to build our skill set. After all, building that skill set would put us at an advantage over the rest of the population, as well as giving ourselves a higher value somewhere down the line. Maybe we would find our way to a community when communities began to forge. If we had skills—evidence that we were well adapted to this world—then we would be valued higher than the average person.

  And what better way to build our skill set than start by hunting?

  “I’m really not sure how I feel about this,” Sue said.

  She was struggling still. Of course she was. She’d just lost her husband, and things hadn’t stopped moving since then. But she was doing remarkably well for a woman who’d just lost their love. She was holding things together, for the sake of her kids.

  I put a hand on her back. “Hey. None of us are comfortable with this. Not really. But if the power isn’t going to come back—”

  “We need skills. I know. It’s just… I guess I think about my children. What this might do to them.”

  “Think about what might happen to them if they don’t know these things.”

  Sue tilted her head like she was considering the awful possibility that her children might end up all alone in this world someday. “And if the power comes back on?”

  “Then that’s a good thing, isn’t it?”

  “You’ve seen the chaos. You’ve seen the mess. You can’t possibly just believe everyone will revert to normal when they realise just how easily things can be toppled.”

  I agreed with Sue. I couldn’t see the world just clicking back to normality. Too many people had lost, and so many things had happened in such a short space of time for that to be the case.

  Thankfully, Haz broke the silence before I had a chance to answer. “Right. I think I’ve done it. Think it’s in place.”

  I walked over to Haz’s side and looked at the trap he’d made. It was a ground snare, designed to catch smaller animals like squirrels, rabbits, that kind of thing. There was a piece of wire wrapped around a tree branch, then tied in a noose. In the ground, there were three smaller twigs with forked ends holding that noose up at head height. The idea was that a small animal would run through it and be captured.

  I winced a little at the thought of what Harriet and her veggie ways would think of me involving myself in something like this.

  “And you’re sure this will work?” I asked

  Haz shrugged. “It worked on video games. And I read somewhere that it’s a pretty good trapping method. Just got to be patient, you know?”

  “And if it doesn’t?” Hannah said, walking over to the side of the trap. She looked down at it like it wasn’t much cop, but like all of us, she was surely hoping that it would work.

  Haz shrugged. “Then I’m sure I’ll be able to scour the archives of my mind for another method. There’s one called a spring deadfall. You bait a rock propped up by a stick and then—”

  “Okay,” I said, feeling queasy. “We get the picture. Just… let’s see if this works out first.”

  We waited for a long time, right by the side of the tent. We lay stomach flat in the grass, watching the trap, just waiting for something to happen.

  “What kind of animal are we supposed to be waiting for?” I whispered to Haz.

  “Any will do. But this trap should be suited more for a rabbit or squirrel than anything too big.”

  “Hmm,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You don’t think it’ll work, do you?”

  “It’s not that I don’t think it’ll work.”

  “That’s what people usually say when they don’t think something will work.”

  “Look. I’m just holding out hope, that’s all.”

  I wasn’t sure how much longer we waited in silence. I looked around, saw that Sue and her kids were further back. Her kids were clearly growing bored. Sue just looked pale and jaded. Stay in there, Sue.

  I looked at Hannah then, and I smiled. She smiled back at me. It was a while since we’d had a proper conversation. Thinking about it, I didn’t really know much about Hannah’s life, aside from the fact she’d been a mature student at Manchester Met University. She kept things awfully guarded. There just never seemed to be a right time or place to speak.

  Then there was Remy. He was as quiet as ever. Clearly, he was a decent guy. A peaceful guy. And he looked like he wasn’t sure about catching an animal himself.

  We decided to pull back after what felt like hours to the tent, so we could check on the trap later. In that time, Haz spoke about other methods he knew of and an action plan of how we could create some kind of secure base. There were options, outside of living in a tent forever. Prisons, which would now be mostly emptied, but an idea which was a bit too The Walking Dead for my liking. There was talk of more bunkers or plans to get to the coast to see if any kind of emergency evacuation could be set up—even if it did seem all engines were fried. We even discussed getting a paddleboat of our own and attempting to make our way across the sea. It would be dangerous. Treacherous, even. But at least that way we could see just how widespread this darkness was.

  It was a little while later that we heard a snap.

  I looked at Haz. His eyes widened, and he looked back at me. Just in time. I was growing extremely hungry and couldn’t stomach the thought of another slab of peanut butter and cheese.

  Both of us ran out of the tent, battling to be at the front of one another.

  “First dibs on the legs,” Haz said.

  “Oh, you can have them,” I said. “I’ll take the loin if I can…”

  We stopped, then.

  Total horror filled my body.

  Right in front of us, there was something caught in the trap.

  But it wasn’t a rabbit.

  It wasn’t even a deer.

  It was a dog. Its paw was stuck in the noose. The noose was wrapped around it. Tightly.

  “Shit,” I said.

  The dog was a German Shepherd. It was whining badly. I could see its paw was bleeding with the tightness of the noose, and its eye-whites were on show.

  “Didn’t you plan for shit like this?” I said, angrily, as I approached the dog.

  �
��How was I supposed to know?”

  “Just shut up a minute.” I got closer to the dog. “Hey, boy. If you are a boy. I’m just going on… Oh, yeah. Yeah, you are a boy. What’re you called? Obviously, I’ve no idea what you’re called, and neither have you, and here I am speaking to a dog like you’re a human. Totally normal.”

  I got closer, feeling gradually nervous. I’d never really been a dog person. Not that I didn’t like them—I just struggled to communicate with them.

  But as I got closer to this dog, I felt a right to free it, and let it go.

  Even if I was worried it might snap my fingers off.

  The dog whined as I got closer, looking nervously between Haz and me.

  “Ssh,” I said. “It’s okay. I’ve got you. You just… you keep still. Good boy. Good boy.”

  He wagged his tail a little when I said that.

  And right then, I reached out and yanked the trap away from his paw.

  He yelped. And for a split second, I didn’t realise what’d happened until I saw the blood and felt a searing pain down my hand, then realised that the dog had bitten me.

  “Damn it,” I said, falling back, as the dog backed away, limping on its paw. “It bit me!”

  “Ssh.”

  “What do you mean, ssh? He bit me. He—”

  Haz covered my mouth then.

  It took me a moment to realise why.

  There was a noise.

  But it was a noise that I hadn’t heard for quite some time.

  “Does it mean…” Haz started.

  “I don’t know,” I said, as I watched the dog disappear into the trees. He turned around, looked at me, then limped away. “I don’t know.”

  There was no mistaking the noise, though.

  The sound of a car engine, revving up.

  The sound of power.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  I heard the revving of the engine once again, and this time, there was no denying what I was hearing.

  I stood in the middle of the woods. My hand was still stinging, bleeding from where the dog I’d saved from our trap had bitten it. But that pain seeped into the background, now. It seemed irrelevant. Everything seemed irrelevant, all because of that engine sound.