After the Storm (Book 1): Blackout Read online

  That was normality now.

  That was reality.

  I felt my breathing getting shakier and cursed my nerves. “Please. You’ve no idea how much I—”

  “Give us the bag, or I’ll cut you.”

  “Surely we can—”

  “Or how about your wee doggy here?” Cal asked. He turned the knife to Bouncer, resting it against his nose.

  Bouncer just sat there, wagging his tail, looking into Cal’s eyes.

  “How about because we could do with you ’round to help us, I take out your precious pooch here?”

  “You’ll regret that.”

  “Oh, I’ll regret it, will I?” Cal asked, a smile creeping across his face. A few of his mates sniggered. A few looked concerned. “Wanna take your chances?”

  I knew the answer right away. It pained me to admit it. But Bouncer was way, way more important than my bag.

  I started to pull it from one shoulder, then from the other, and held it out limply towards Cal.

  Cal snatched it from me. He dropped it on the floor, threw it over to his friends, the tall one nearly falling over when its weight landed in his hands.

  “Didn’t think so,” Cal said. “Now your clothes.”

  I didn’t think I’d heard him properly at first. “What?”

  “Your clothes,” Cal said. He still had his knife raised. “You’re dressed well. Every little helps, and all that.”

  “This is what you’ve come to already? Two days in and this is what you’ve become?”

  Cal didn’t look phased by my question. “I just want some fresh clothes, mate. And I’d hate for your dog to have to die for you to keep ’em on your back.”

  I knew giving away my clothes was out of the question. And it really brought home the savagery this world had already descended into.

  But I couldn’t lose Bouncer.

  I started to reluctantly button down my polo neck shirt. I went to lift it off, Cal’s mates sniggering, clearly pushing me as far as they thought they could.

  But as I began to pull the shirt from my body, I thought of Olivia and Kerry.

  I needed to get to them.

  And as much as I didn’t want to fight—as much as I’d spent my life running away from situations that might result in fighting—I knew I couldn’t give up right now.

  I stopped pulling my shirt off.

  I took a deep breath.

  Then I walked towards Cal.

  “The fuck are you—”

  I cracked my fist across Cal’s jaw.

  Before I knew it, I was on top of him. I was pulling back my fist and beating him. I just wanted to get that knife out of his hand so he couldn’t hurt anyone.

  “You wanker!” he shouted. “Gonna fucking regret this!”

  I heard commotion amongst his mates. I heard my bag drop to the floor, as a few of them ran over to me, tried to pull them off.

  As they pulled me back, Cal swung his knife at me.

  He swung it so close to my stomach.

  Almost slashed my neck.

  Then my—

  I grabbed his wrist.

  I tightened my grip, twisting over, free of his friends.

  And then I pulled the knife from his fingers.

  I don’t know what animal instinct inside me made me ram the blade into his neck.

  I think it was just that. Pure instinct. It had looked like he was making a break for Bouncer, trying to wrap his arms around his neck.

  Or maybe I was just worried about what’d happen if I didn’t make my move right now.

  Cal gargled on his blood. Around him, his friends stopped trying to pull me away. I heard silence. I heard confusion. I heard terrified cursing.

  But nothing was more terrifying than watching Cal clutch on to his bleeding neck, that blood spurting up and covering my hands.

  Nothing was worse than hearing a man—no, an eighteen, nineteen year old—suffocating on his own body fluids.

  “Screw it. Let’s—let’s go.”

  “But—”

  “We need to go, mate!”

  I heard the voices of the youths fleeing.

  But my main focus was on Cal’s crying eyes.

  The person I’d just killed.

  I put a hand on his chest, nausea filling my body. “I’m so… I’m so sorry.”

  Cal just looked at me, his skin paling, his eyes growing more tearful.

  “I’m so sorry.”

  I stayed with Cal until he couldn’t fight for another breath.

  Then I closed his eyes and covered him with some tarpaulin from the back of the shop.

  When I looked back, I saw blood seeping through that tarpaulin.

  The blood of my first kill.

  Two days, it’d taken.

  Two days, for the world to corrupt me.

  And there were plenty more days left yet.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  I sat in the hills outside of Aberfeldy and I felt the blood crusting on my hands.

  It was dark. Pitch black, in fact. I thought it was terrifying last night, when I’d been locked away in that log cabin, darkness all around. But this was worse. This must’ve been what it was like to be homeless. Only in a way, we were all homeless now. Every one of us was lost in this world. And nobody was coming to save us anytime soon.

  It might’ve been summer, but that didn’t mean the nights were ever warm in Britain. All around, I thought I could just about see the outlines of trees. But I couldn’t be totally certain. The moon was behind the clouds right now, as were the stars, so light had been completely suffocated from me.

  Part of me felt a comfort in that. I was totally invisible.

  But the other part felt worried.

  Because that meant everyone else was totally invisible, too.

  I tightened my wool blanket around me. Every time I moved, I felt Bouncer readjust how he was perched against my feet, which never failed to make me jump.

  I dipped my fingers into a tub of peanut butter I’d picked up from the Co-Op in Aberfeldy. I wasn’t hungry. My appetite was totally spent. But peanut butter was a high protein snack, and a full tub of it like this would last me a week or so. Easy calories. Easy fuel. They weren’t going to be abundant soon.

  I heard Bouncer whining, and I knew what he was after. But the truth was, I’d given him some of his dog biscuits. This was my fault, in a way. I’d made him beg. Kerry was right about that, as much as I hated to admit it. If I hadn’t fed him scraps after every meal, then maybe he’d just settle for his dog biscuits. Of course, I was an emotional creature, and I worried about my dog. I wanted him to be happy.

  But I needed this peanut butter to survive. There was no room for emotion anymore.

  And still I ended up letting him have a little bloody bit of it.

  I felt a wave of sickness hit me, and I knew exactly why it was.

  The kid, Cal. Because that’s what he was, really. A kid, probably not in his twenties yet.

  I’d killed him.

  I’d taken someone’s life.

  The weird part about it? How I’d just felt at the time, in the heat of the moment, like I had to do it. It was as if I’d assessed all the positive and negative outcomes in the space of a millisecond, and my brain concluded that murdering someone was the right thing to do.

  I’d preached so much to myself about the world around me collapsing, about people descending into violence, that I hadn’t even taken a second to step back and ask how I was so different?

  There was a positive to what happened at the Co-Op, in a morbid kind of way. The other five had done a runner, clearly terrified. They’d left my bag behind, too.

  I slept against it, now. I didn’t even want to risk losing it. I’d been stupid. Damned naive.

  I wasn’t going to be naive again.

  The thing that bothered me most, as I tried to close my eyes, was that I’d killed someone after two days.

  What kind of a monster would that make me in two more days?

  Wh
at would I be in two weeks? Months? Years?

  How would I even recognise myself?

  There was everyone else, too. If I was so convinced of my own morals, then that meant there were others like me, too. And as sceptical as I always was about technology and social media and the like, I couldn’t deny its innate power to create an illusion of togetherness and community.

  Now?

  We were all floating in a world of self-interest; we were all the main characters of our own story.

  We were all going to do bad things if we wanted to survive.

  I just wasn’t sure how long I could survive in this world before it broke me completely.

  I didn’t want to kill anyone else.

  I tried to shake the horrors of the look on Cal’s face from my thoughts as I closed my eyes tighter. But the more I tried to get away from them, the more they tortured me.

  The tears on his cheeks.

  The gargling of blood.

  I opened my eyes and twisted around as I lay there on the dirt in the middle of the forest. I had to sleep. I had a long day ahead tomorrow, and a long day after that, and I was going to have to keep on moving because my family depended on it.

  I felt the thoughts building. The nagging questions.

  What if they aren’t in Preston?

  What if they’ve moved on already?

  What if something bad’s happened?

  I thought about Olivia on FIFA and I hoped to God she was okay.

  Because that was all I had right now. Hope.

  And even that was growing weaker…

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Day Four

  SO I BURNED through that peanut butter a lot quicker than I expected.

  The cereal bars I went through pretty fast, too.

  Oh. And I had a bad case of the shits, that my Imodium tablets seemed to be making worse.

  I shovelled some soil over my shit. Sweat dripped from my forehead. I felt dehydrated. Every little bit of water I drank just went right through me. Such a waste. Such a frigging waste.

  I’d tried the rehydrating tablets, but they hadn’t made much of a difference either. There was a big difference between rehydrating yourself through fake means and actually getting water down you. And when your other end was squirting it out every time you drank it, yeah, it wasn’t ideal.

  I figured it was the dried chicken pieces, which clearly weren’t as fresh as they said on the pack.

  Either that, or the fact I’d killed someone two days ago was getting to me.

  Possibly a mixture of both.

  I sat back after burying my “remains”, my backside on fire. I was shaking, and sweaty, the heat intensifying to levels I didn’t even think British summer could reach. It made me wonder, though. Maybe the EMP had been a solar event instead of some kind of attack. If it were a solar event, then that would explain the change in climate now, as well as the weird lightning storm I’d witnessed before everything changed.

  But that was just the thing. I didn’t know.

  And I wasn’t going to find out anytime soon.

  I looked around at all the trees. Bouncer was right beside me, wagging his tail. He looked concerned for me though, glancing to and from that hole in the ground I’d just let myself go in. He must’ve thought I was regressing. “That’s what dogs do, Dad. You aren’t a dog, are you?”

  That said, he was probably disgusted that I wasn’t even as graceful in “passing” as he was.

  Probably embarrassed to be around me.

  My head ached, and my ears rang. The shits had definitely slowed my progress back to Preston down. If I was lucky and got walking right away, I could be there in six days, maybe less if I found a bike on my way—which surely I had to at some stage? It was as if bikes had suddenly become a valuable commodity. I guess they were the Lamborghinis of this new world.

  So six days until I reached Preston. And that was if I was lucky. The way I was going right now, I didn’t feel like I’d be able to walk at a pace of five miles per hour, which I could quite comfortably do if I were in peak shape. I could get thirty miles a day out of the way, easy. Sure, I’d be knackered, and I’d need to rest up big time afterwards. But when your family was at stake, you found yourself more and more willing to do the crazier things in life.

  I wiped the sweat from my forehead and got walking. I knew the many people in the country relying on medication deliveries to survive would really be feeling it now. I wondered how many people who’d needed the emergency services had died now. They had no phone to call ambulances with. And even if they did, the ambulance service didn’t have any ambulances to drive with. There would be no way of operating reliably in hospitals. Sanitation would be collapsing as stress increased.

  Everything would be falling apart.

  Appendixes would be rupturing left, right and centre.

  Simple—well, sore-but-simple—broken legs would be causing blood clots.

  The world was back in the dark ages. Literally.

  If there was one thing I had to get prepared for, even though I had cans to last me for the time being, it was catching food of my own. I had an advantage here too, in theory. My dad had taught me how to create a snare, to curve in the trail of an animal in the hope of catching one. He’d taught me how to make a simple deadfall trap too, which was honestly pretty straightforward. All I needed was a large rock, a couple of sticks about five inches long, preferably from the same branch. Another strong, thin stick, about the diameter of a pencil. And a knife, which I already had covered. You start by carving a small groove in one of the thicker sticks, about a quarter of an inch wide, then do the same in the next thicker stick. After that, you prep the thin stick as your trigger stick, carving it to make sure it fits pretty tightly between the other two sticks. Then, you balance the rock on the two support sticks, angling them towards the rock, which can take some time, but patience prevails, as my dad used to tell me. After that, it was just a case of baiting the trigger stick then inserting it in the groove between the support sticks. A lot of patience required, but an effective trap.

  I laid some bait—some peanut butter with a few chunks of one of Bouncer’s dog biscuits, much to his dismay—and then I waited.

  Every minute I waited, I felt like I was wasting time. But this was a step back to take two steps forward, in a way. Hunting and catching my own food was something I was going to have to manage and adapt to if I wanted to survive this world.

  But the longer I waited, the more frustrated and agitated I grew. And the more my guts started to turn. If only Bouncer could catch some food for us. Then again, that was never happening. Bouncer once sat and watched a mouse sneak into our house and drink some of his water. The chances of him catching some prey for us both to eat were—

  I heard a crack.

  I jolted my head upright. I felt groggy, like I’d dozed off or something.

  But the crack.

  It had to be the deadfall.

  I ran over to it, then slowed down. If I’d just trapped something, I didn’t want to risk scaring it off.

  When I reached the deadfall, I saw it had fallen.

  I felt a surge of adrenaline when I went to lift the rock.

  And then a rat went running from underneath it, clearly not injured, just caught on the tail, and disappeared into the grass.

  “Shit!”

  I kicked the grass. Booted the rock I’d used for the deadfall. Stubbed my toe in the process, bloody idiot.

  I rested my hands on my knees and took a few deep breaths. I was hopeless. I couldn’t do this. I couldn’t…

  When I turned around, I saw Bouncer tucking into something.

  He had a rat in his mouth.

  He was pulling it apart.

  And he’d finished the bulk of it all to himself, without me even realising he’d caught one.

  I couldn’t help laughing as reality laughed at me in the face.

  I couldn’t help laughing at the ridiculousness, at the typicality, of it all.
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br />   I laughed for a while as I watched Bouncer, the awful hunter, upstage a guy who actually knew how to hunt.

  I stopped laughing when my guts turned, and I found myself reaching for the shovel once again.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Day Five

  ON THE FIFTH DAY, God gave me a supermarket.

  Or maybe it was the Devil who gave me the supermarket. I couldn’t be sure what was a gift and what was a trick anymore.

  It was the middle of the day and I’d already walked many, many miles. I hadn’t seen much on my way. I was still in the wilderness, really, so fortunately I hadn’t bumped into too many people. The odd dodgy looking character here and there. But really, everyone was bound to look dodgy when you had no idea of their motives or morals, weren’t they?

  I probably looked dodgy as hell to most.

  I mean, I still had the blood of someone I’d killed crusting on my palms.

  The rain was lashing down and I was soaking. I was hungry, too. I’d managed to split the supplies in my bug-out bag and stretch a can of chicken tikka out over the last few days, heating it over my pocket stove, but my body craved for a real meal. Bouncer was fine, though. He was getting more exercise than he could ever have dreamed of. He was sorted, really.

  But now we were opposite a supermarket, and I wasn’t sure what to think, how to react.

  It was a Tesco. Right on the outskirts of the Callander Golf Course. I’d been sitting opposite it for a while now, trying to scout out any movement, any sign that things were amiss. The shutters were still up, which surprised me. I figured supermarkets would be great places for gangs to set up and make their own.

  I squinted, wishing I had some binoculars. I still couldn’t quite make out the shelves inside. They were too far away. It was five days into the end of the world as we knew it though, so I’d be stunned if there was anything worthwhile still in there.

  But I had to try.

  My survival pretty much depended on it.

  Especially when my hunting skills were as rusty as they were.

  Yeah. My own dog, who couldn’t catch a biscuit if you threw it straight at his face, was out-hunting me.

  I stood up, my knees like jelly. I gripped on to the Becker BK2 knife tightly. I didn’t want to have to use it. But I knew I needed it for self-defence. This was a kind of world that punished you if you didn’t take preventative measures. I’d make the mistake of going into that shop back in Aberfeldy unprepared and not ready for what I was about to face.