The World After: An EMP Thriller Read online

  The scariest thing about the scene in front of us? It wasn’t the knife. Not in isolation. After all, a knife in isolation was always going to be pretty scary.

  But it was the fact that a man—ordinary looking, probably had a decent job—was standing in front of his two young children and threatening someone else with a knife, right in front of them.

  They were the lengths he was willing to go to.

  And this was only day one.

  “We can talk this through,” Hannah said, attempting to appeal to the man’s better nature.

  “No,” the man said. “No, we can’t. You’re going to lower your bags, and you’re going to get out of this truck.”

  “Or what?” Hannah said, tauntingly.

  The man looked all of us in the eye. He didn’t look totally certain about what he was doing. But I knew how he must feel as his family looked on in peril. He knew the severity of the situation. He’d seen it, just like we had. He was one of the lucky ones who was at least going to be partly prepared for the moment he realised the power wasn’t coming back on at all.

  But if he resembled the kind of people we all had to become, the kind of lengths we all had to go to, then I wasn’t sure I was comfortable with any of this new reality at all.

  “You need to think very carefully about what you’re saying and doing here,” Remy said, his voice calming. His hands were raised. I kind of hoped he would use some of his alternative medicine tricks on this man to get him to leave, but I knew I was clutching at straws. “There’s four of us. And there’s just one of you. We have the upper ground.”

  “And I have a knife.”

  “You’ve no idea what we have,” Hannah cut in. I was surprised to hear her speak with so much conviction, but then that’s the way we all had to act now, really, if we wanted to get through this situation. Haz included. Me included. “So be careful. Be very careful before you make your next step.”

  Silence followed. A tense, drawn-out silence. I saw the man looking at us with curiosity like he was starting to doubt his own convictions. Behind him, I saw his wife holding both of their children, who were crying.

  And despite everything, I felt sympathy for the man and his family.

  “This is how it’s going to work,” Remy said, taking a few steps towards the man. “You are going to lower the knife, and you’re going to leave us alone.”

  The man lifted his knife higher and pushed it in Remy’s direction. “No. No, that’s not what’s gonna happen.”

  “Relax, man. Please.”

  “Don’t tell me to relax!”

  I heard the tension splitting through the air, and I saw that this situation wasn’t going to end well—for our people or his. In that flicker of a moment, I saw the options opening up before me: act fast. Act fast.

  Before the man could say another word, I stepped forward.

  “We aren’t going to give up all our stuff,” I said. “You have to see it from our perspective. We need to ride this blackout out just as much as you do.”

  “Then we don’t have a deal—”

  “Half our water,” I said.

  The man frowned. So too did Hannah.

  “What?” the man said.

  “There’s four of us, and there’s four of you. We split what we’ve found in here, in half. We let you walk away and forget this ever happened.”

  The man turned away slightly like he was trapped between a rock and a hard place over what to do next. “How do I know I can trust you?”

  “You don’t,” I said. “But face it. You aren’t going to get a better offer right now.”

  “Jason, why don’t we just make our way to the bunker?”

  “Ssh,” the man—Jason—said. Then he looked back at me and the rest of our people. “You throw your stuff towards us. That way, we don’t have to make contact.”

  I heard him, and I saw sense in what he was saying. There was a fear, of course, that he was just going to slam the doors of this lorry shut and leave us trapped in here.

  But there was something else on my mind, now.

  Something that Jason’s wife had said.

  “Okay,” I said, lowering my rucksack. “I’m going to roll this over in your direction.”

  “Scott,” Hannah said, fear on her face. “Are you sure? We don’t have lots of stuff as it is.”

  I shrugged, defeated. “I don’t see another option right now.”

  We rolled the water, the cans, and another load of what we had in the direction of Jason and his family. Jason stuck it all into a bag for life, which was snapping at the corners, something else that made me incredibly pitiful towards him. When he’d done, he stepped back and looked me in the eye.

  “Thank you,” he said, knife still in hand. But it looked so alien there, now. So out of place. “Really. We…”

  He stopped speaking, then.

  He looked around.

  So too did his wife.

  Her eyes widened.

  “What is it?” Haz asked.

  I moved to the edge of the lorry, and my stomach sank.

  “We need to get away from here. Fast.”

  We gathered our stuff and, together with Jason and his family, after all, we ran.

  A small group—a group we’d seen leading a scrap in the supermarket just minutes earlier—were running in our direction.

  But at least, as we ran now, we had a direction.

  The bunker that Jason’s wife mentioned.

  That was where we needed to find out about.

  That was where we needed to go.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Garry Carpenter had been counting down the days to his release, even though deep down, in his heart of hearts, he suspected he was never going to set foot outside prison ever again.

  He didn’t think much of it when the lights first went out.

  Not at first.

  It was a normal morning at HMP Prison Buckley Hall. Normal being another day of the same white-washed walls, Calvin snoring away and grinding his teeth on the bunk above him. Sometimes, he wanted just to reach up there and wrap his hands around Calvin’s throat. At least he’d be saving him another trip to the dentist. As well as that, he’d be putting them both out of their misery. Calvin was always complaining and moaning about how much he missed his wife and kids. He’d been doing so ever since they’d been put in a cell together three years ago.

  Of course, Garry had been in here far longer than Calvin. He’d spent the majority of his life inside.

  But hey. It wasn’t so bad. Not when you were at the top of the food chain.

  The sun peeked in through the tiny windows. To Garry, everything was normal. He would leave his cell at his usual time for breakfast. Then, he’d go down to the mechanics to do some work. He was retraining as a car mechanic, a usable skill for when he got out. That was the fallibility of prisons. They pretended they were gearing you up for a great life on the outside, when in fact, he knew the truth. Everyone knew the truth.

  The second they got out of this place, they were right at the bottom of the pack. The chances of becoming homeless, or re-offending, were far, far greater than the chances of walking into another job.

  And that’s part of why Garry didn’t mind it inside.

  He leaned over, his bed creaking underneath him, the springs poking through the mattress. Of course, being inside had its downsides. The beds were crap. The fact that he didn’t have a woman to wake up beside, even crapper.

  But at least he had a bed. There were times in his life on the outside that he didn’t have a bed at all.

  Steady progress.

  He wasn’t aware of it yet, but something had changed in Buckley Hall. A massive, drastic change that would turn everything on its head.

  But a few of the other prisoners had realised it. And that was the first indication Garry got that something was wrong.

  He heard a few mumbles of confrontation, of fighting, but he didn’t do anything about it, not at first. He often heard fighting an
d confrontation these days, especially in the overcrowded states of the prisons.

  He lost himself in the fantasy of what an ideal life on the outside would be like. No worries, no concerns. Money already in the bank. He could get a little flat, enjoy a quiet life.

  Oh.

  And most importantly, he’d get revenge on Clarissa for what she’d done to him.

  For taking his children away.

  Garry felt tension in his chest when he thought of Clarissa and his two children. He didn’t mope about them like Calvin did. Instead, he just felt mad. So mad. He felt eager, determined, to act. He knew it would get him in trouble. He knew if he exacted the revenge he wanted to achieve, then he would be back in here for the rest of his life.

  But that was a failed fantasy anyway because he wasn’t getting out of this place.

  He was already in here for his last revenge mission. And that mission cost four people their lives.

  One, an accident, admittedly.

  The other… yeah, maybe a police officer. Didn’t exactly make his case clear cut.

  But he’d done what he had to do to extinguish his demons and make himself feel better.

  And he’d do it again in a heartbeat.

  “Shit,” he heard a voice mutter somewhere outside his cell. “The doors. They’re… they’re open.”

  He heard the voice, and it didn’t shock him, not initially. Sometimes they let the prisoners out in batches, especially now the crowding problem had got serious.

  But this sounded different.

  “Get back in your cell, Stan.”

  “Security! We’ve got a problem in here. Security? Do you copy? Do you copy?”

  He opened his eyes then and jolted upright.

  He smelled blood. Not literally, of course. But he could tell from the rising tension that something was going down out there and that this was an opportunity he wasn’t going to miss.

  If doors were open, then he was going to find his way out.

  He was going to take that one opportunity to get his revenge on Clarissa.

  And nobody was going to stop him.

  “Wake up,” he said, banging on the foot of Calvin’s bed. “Sounds like something’s going on out there.”

  He walked over to the door, still not quite accepting, still in disbelief.

  Then he pushed against the door.

  The door opened up.

  He looked outside, and he saw the chaos unfolding already. He saw guards scrapping with prisoners. He saw people crowding around the exit door, which the prisoners were desperately trying to guard, backing away slowly but surely like they were giving in.

  “Security!” One of the guards shouted. “Security!”

  Then, his voice was drowned out by shouting.

  Garry cracked his knuckles and walked towards the door. He saw one of the prison officers, John, glaring at him—only not assertively anymore, but with fear.

  “What?” Garry said, tensing his fists. “Got a problem?”

  John stood there for a few seconds, walkie-talkie in hand.

  Then he dropped it and ran away.

  Garry took a deep breath and smiled. He walked through the prison, past the fighting prisoners, past the security guards trying to hold everything together.

  He walked through the door. Down the corridor. Around the police, who were struggling to cope with the surge of people leaving the prison.

  And then, he walked towards the main entrance, and he stepped outside.

  He took a deep breath, then. In the distance, he saw a plane falling from the sky like all the damned power in the world had just gone away. Beside him, he heard the chatter of more prisoners, all of them in disbelief, all of them in awe.

  “This place is ours now,” one of them muttered, laughing with joy.

  “No,” Garry said. “This place isn’t ours. This world is ours now.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  It was when the sun started to set that the real tension kicked in.

  It was getting darker. Only very gradually, but it was noticeable. And as the sun set even further, I felt sick, right to my stomach. Even though I’d faced up to the fact that the power probably wasn’t going to come back on anytime soon, I suppose I’d still held out hope that maybe I was wrong. That maybe, just maybe, this all was some kind of big mistake by the power companies and that a solution was being worked on right away.

  Even with all the things I’d witnessed, I still chose to believe.

  Even with all the things I’d seen, I believed.

  Hospitals overspilling with sick patients desperate for care.

  Helicopters crashing from the sky.

  Tunnels backlogged with cars, all smashed against each other, the people inside left in the most awful conditions.

  People scrambling for supplies, reverting to their most primal selves.

  Perhaps it was just a case of me wanting to believe that the power was going to come back on. But as we headed towards a military bunker which Jason and his wife Sue—as well as his two kids, Holly and Aiden—were heading to, we knew we were in this for the night at least.

  “So this bunker,” I said, as we waded through a farmer’s field. Cows looked on from a distance, clearly oblivious to everything that was going on, perhaps even granted an extra lease of life for a few days because of what was unfolding. We were doing our best to stay off the roads now. Avoiding people wasn’t going to be possible forever, especially in an area of such urban surroundings, but we had to do our best to keep a low profile, while not moving too far from the cities and the towns, where we were relying on to get our supplies. “How do you know about it?”

  Jason sighed. He’d mellowed a lot since he’d joined our group. “We used to live over that way,” he said. “Used to joke that when the world went to shit, at least we had a nuclear fallout bunker in the back yard to hole up in. Just a pity we moved.”

  “And you’re sure it’s going to be… well, fit for purpose?”

  Jason shrugged. “All I know is that it was still an active military site. Owned by the MOD. I think they use it for surveillance, something like that.”

  “Handy,” Hannah said.

  “We don’t know for certain what kind of state it’s going to be in,” Sue said. “We don’t know who’s going to be in charge there. We don’t really know anything. Just that… well, if it’s a military presence, then there’s a chance that people might be there, and those people might know what’s going on.”

  “And if they don’t?” Remy said.

  Jason looked at his two kids, who were being remarkably well behaved considering the circumstances, treating this whole thing like it was just some big adventure. “Then I guess we cross that bridge when we come to it.”

  As we walked some more, it began to grow difficult. I’d had too much water; I knew that. I had to conserve. But building a conservation mindset wasn’t easy when you didn’t know how long you were conserving for.

  I could feel sores on the bottom of my feet, and I knew that wasn’t a good thing either. I’d have to find some better trainers when I had a chance.

  I looked at everyone. Remy was speaking with Hannah. Jason and his family were staying close. Haz was on his own. He didn’t look too comfortable.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  He looked at me like I’d taken him by surprise. “Me? Oh. Yeah, Scotty-boy. Yeah, I’m fine.”

  “You don’t seem it,” I said, walking alongside him.

  “Just a long day. Pretty tired, that’s all.”

  “What do you make of the new people?”

  “Jason and Sue? They seem… okay. They’re struggling, just like the rest of us. The kids are sweet, I guess.”

  “I hate kids.”

  “Yeah. Me too.”

  I smiled, and I caught Haz smiling too.

  Just the elephant in the room to address now.

  “What happened. Back at the tunnel…”

  “Oh, that,” Haz said, scratching the back of h
is neck. “I dunno what happened. I’ve never—I’ve never had that before.”

  “You suffer from anxiety, don’t you?”

  Haz looked at me like he was defeated—like I’d broken his facade right down. “Not… well, just a little. But not bad anxiety.”

  “I’ve seen ‘not bad’ anxiety before. I’ve had it myself. What happened to you in the tunnel… that was pretty bad.”

  “And you think you’re making me feel better about things by grilling me for it?”

  “That wasn’t my intention.”

  “Maybe you should look at your own problems before digging into other people’s.”

  “Hey,” I said, raising my hands. “I’m just trying to help.”

  Haz eased off then. “I’m sorry. I just… sometimes I get mad when people question me like that. Reminds me too much of the…”

  He stopped, then. I could sense that he’d slipped up. He hadn’t meant to bring up whatever he’d just brought up. I could see from the look in his eyes he knew he’d messed up.

  I didn’t push him, though, as we continued our walk to the bunker. “I just want you to know you can talk. If ever you n—”

  “I’m not a video games developer,” Haz said.

  “What?”

  “When I told you I was a games developer. I’m not. I’m a twenty-eight-year-old dude bumming around in his mum’s attic room claiming all the benefits I can because the crippling anxiety I’ve been dealt with won’t let me go out into the world and actually find a job I desperately want.”

  I could see the colour return to Haz’s cheeks when he spoke those words. It was as if he’d had something suffocating him for so long, and now the truth was out, he was so, so relieved.

  “Don’t tell anyone that,” he said. “If you don’t mind.”

  I put a hand on his back. “Course I don’t. You just stay strong. And know that right now, we’re all going through hell. Okay?”

  He smiled. “Cheers, Scotty—”

  “That still doesn’t mean you can call me Scotty-boy.”