The World After: An EMP Thriller Read online

  Then, heart racing, I walked down the driveway, around the gate, into the garden.

  Holly and Aiden were running in circles after one another. They were laughing and giggling. They looked so oblivious to all the horrors outside. So naive.

  I wished I could let them stay like that forever.

  Then, Sue stepped out of the tent.

  When she saw me, her eyes widened. She smiled, clearly relieved to see me.

  And then her face dropped. Her eyes narrowed.

  “Jason?” she said. “Where’s…”

  “I’m sorry, Sue,” I said, a frog bouncing around my throat, tears building in my eyes. I shook my head. “I’m so sorry.”

  I didn’t have to say anything else.

  Sue fell to her knees.

  And in the gentle trickle of rain, she wailed.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  I dug my spade into the solid earth deep enough to fit Jason’s body into it.

  The sun peeked through the clouds, but specks of rain fell. The wind was strong. Around us, there wasn’t just Sue and her two children—there wasn’t just Remy, Hannah and Haz, either. There wasn’t even just the people in whose garden we were staying. There were a few people from the houses nearby, who had never known Jason, all of them walking by to pay their respects.

  Sue was in bits. Her children wouldn’t stop crying. I’d thought about just burying Jason’s body, but Suli, who worked at a local funeral parlour, gave us a coffin. “Pay me back when we’re back online,” he said.

  Even when he said it, I wasn’t sure if he totally believed that there was going to be such a thing as “back online”. But I appreciated the gesture.

  When I’d dug the hole, I looked at Haz, who’d helped me dig it. He was sweating and panting, probably some of the most intensive exercise he’d ever done in his life these last couple of days.

  I nodded at him as I crouched down to lift the coffin, and he nodded back at me.

  We lowered it in, holding on to bands on each side so it didn’t drop down. It was so heavy, though, and then it hit me in full force that I was lowering a human body into the earth. And yet in spite of what I was doing, after having witnessed first hand a death for the first time (I hadn’t been there when they’d turned the life support off Harriet’s machine), the world didn’t feel any different. Life still went on. I still had the same aches and pains in my body, the same sickly tastes in my mouth.

  Life hadn’t gone on pause, either. We couldn’t just step back and wait for the old world to come along again. That wasn’t going to happen. Now, there was going to have to be an adaptation to a new way.

  The coffin hit the ground below. And when it landed, I heard Sue let out an audible whimper, like she was finally facing up to a shocking reality that her husband wasn’t with her anymore.

  It was cruel. It was impossible. Yesterday, they were no doubt just sitting around with their children getting ready for another normal day.

  The power had gone, and the world had changed.

  I looked around and saw people were looking at me like they were expecting me to say something.

  I felt my cheeks blushing. I wanted to step into the background. But I soon realised I couldn’t just walk away from my responsibilities, not now.

  “I didn’t know Jason for long,” I said, as the rain fell heavier. “And we… we didn’t get off to the best start. But I know one thing. He was a good man. A good man who cared about his family very much. And more than anything, he’d have wanted us to make sure we get his family to that military bunker he told us about.”

  Remy nodded. Hannah sighed and smiled flatly out of obligation.

  “So that’s what we’re going to do,” I said. “We’re going to make our way to that bunker, and we’re going to honour Jason’s memory.”

  I looked down at the hole in the ground.

  But in my mind, I couldn’t get something else out of my head.

  What that man had said about “day release”.

  The people who’d taken Hannah and killed Jason were prisoners.

  So prisoners were escaping. And they were making their mark on the world already.

  “We’re going to make it,” I said. “For Jason.”

  Then I dug the earth back down and threw the soil onto Jason’s coffin.

  I wanted to avenge Jason’s death.

  I wanted to roll back time and make it so that I’d taken the blade instead of him.

  I wanted to hold those who’d killed him—and been willing to do God-knows-what to Hannah, too—to justice.

  But I couldn’t.

  All I could do was dig, as the rain fell heavier, and a bright rainbow arced across the sky, hopefully in promise of a better future…

  “Jesus Christ, Garry. Why did you have to get all frigging happy with the knife back there?”

  Garry sat just outside of the suburban town they’d been holed up in for the night with Mitch and Peter beside him. They were on a hill, looking down at the houses in the suburbs. It was nice to be getting some fresh air again, even if there was rain in the air now. The rain didn’t bother him as much as it used to. Mostly he was just grateful to be on the outside again.

  Besides. He’d done what he’d got out of prison to do.

  Everything was sweet now.

  “I mean, you coulda just told ‘um to piss off,” Mitch whined. “They’d have heard us loud enough. Now I’m gonna end up going back inside for the shit you’ve done.”

  Garry ignored Mitch. He wiped the bloodied knife against his leg. Unlike Mitch, Garry had figured out that they weren’t going back to prison anytime soon, not if the rumours about the mass blackout and power outage was true. They could get far away, and there’d be no way of tracking them. Besides, if there really had been a power outage, then every single prison in the country was gonna be causing problems for the police as soon as the power came back on.

  If the power came back on.

  He’d just be one in a long line of inmates that the country would attempt to get back inside.

  Good frigging luck with that.

  “I mean, what now?” Mitch droned on. “We supposed to just walk around and wait for them to lock us up again? ‘Cause I won’t go down for murder, mate. I was two years off being released. I won’t have fifteen years added to my—”

  “Then walk,” Garry said.

  He looked at Mitch, and at Peter, and he saw the fear in both of their eyes. It was strange seeing them out of their prison gear and in normal hoodies. To be honest, he hadn’t asked for anyone to come with him. They’d just gravitated towards him when he’d made his way into the suburbs, towards the nice little family home where his ex-wife was living…

  He’d done what he had to do.

  He’d made her pay for taking his children away from him.

  And the hardest thing of all?

  His kids had already moved out with some other man.

  The bitch had let the kids go, after everything.

  At least she wasn’t a problem anymore.

  Then there was the man he’d stabbed…

  He had to admit he felt a bit shitty about that. After all, he wasn’t the one standing up to him. He’d just got in the way.

  They’d fled soon after. And something inside Garry let Hannah and her fella leave with Jason—as he was called—in their arms. He’d taken one of them, made them pay, and so he’d let them go, learning their lesson.

  But as he watched them leave, he’d seen the man who’d stood up to him look him right in the eye with such a hate that he feared it would stay with him for a long time.

  “So what do we do?” Mitch asked, not quite as whiny anymore.

  Garry gritted his teeth together. He looked down at the house where his wife had lived, and at the small trail of blood that had fallen from Jason’s neck as that duo had carried him down the street, in an attempt to save him.

  “We see what we can get from this situation,” Garry said, as a rainbow formed over the b
eautiful suburban land. “From this world.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Another day of walking and suddenly this new world started to feel like a very pertinent reality after all.

  The sun was hidden behind the clouds, which were thickening by the hour. To be honest, I had a fear in the pit of my stomach, and that fear was night. We’d been allowed to take the tent that suburban family had let us stay in with us to the bunker, in case our journey took longer than a day. Admittedly, we’d had to trade a few things, but that was the way of the world now. Anyway, according to Jason’s instructions, we weren’t all that far off. Soon, we’d be back to something like normality.

  But that was the problem. Jason was dead, now. We were relying on a mixture of Sue’s faint—and grief-stricken—knowledge, road signs, and our own intuition. Neither were a great mix.

  We’d been trying to stray off the beaten track for some time now, but we weren’t having much luck. It was just suburb after suburb, each of them the same in their dim hopes that the power was going to return at some stage. Every supermarket we passed was a scene of chaos and panic, now. Honestly, I’d never believed the world would fall so quickly when shit went down, quite in the way it had. I’d always thought—and hoped—that people could pull their shit together in the face of a disaster.

  I was fast realising that those hopes were misplaced. Of course people were going to lose their shit. Everything they’d worked for, everything they’d spent their money on, everything they’d invested in—and not just financially, but mentally, like the internet and the news and pornography—all of it was gone.

  And I was just expecting them to pick up the pieces and band together like nothing had changed?

  “I’m thinking we’re almost at the stage where we’re gonna have to eat rats,” Haz said, mournfully.

  “Don’t be disgusting,” Hannah said.

  “What? I’m just being realistic. Our nicely packaged food isn’t gonna last forever. We’ve got a decent portable stove. Besides, I don’t think the peanut butter crackers are really doing it for me anymore.”

  “It’ll do you good,” Hannah said.

  “What? Are you saying I’m—”

  “Yeah,” she said. “You’re overweight. You know you are. Not point hiding from it.”

  I saw Haz’s cheeks blush, a wave of shame covering him, much like the time he’d confided in me.

  “So just don’t worry. You aren’t gonna die because you’re suddenly only getting… shit. Less than a thousand calories if you include all the exercise, probably.”

  That thought made me feel tense. I wasn’t the heaviest of guys. I lost weight easily. I knew it was going to take its toll on me, all this exercise combined with a lack of food.

  Besides, what if I got sick? We’d have to think about hydration. Because like the food issues, water was going to be a problem too.

  Unless we could think of a way to make water on the outside safe for drinking.

  “Haz,” I said, interrupting his and Hannah’s bickering. “You said a day ago that you knew a thing or two about survival methods. Stuff like that.”

  He scratched his head and frowned. “Only what I’ve read on the internet and played in games.”

  “How about making water safe for drinking? Know anything like that?”

  He looked like he was mulling it over for a few seconds. Then his eyes lit up. “I… I mean I don’t know if it’ll work, but—”

  “But you’re willing to try?”

  Haz nodded. Right.

  We found a large aluminium bottle inside one of our packs, which Haz had picked up to pool our water bottles together to save space.

  “Now, the best place to get water is from somewhere without people, manmade things. Stuff like that. Streams, basically.”

  I looked around at our surroundings. We were still in suburbia. “Not sure we’ll have much chance of that around here.”

  “It’s fine,” Haz said, shaking his head. “We can just boil the water ourselves. Besides, we can grab a few filters on the way. They should take the dirt and the bacteria out of it. Oh, and there’s Tincture of Iodine, too. Two per cent, I think. They kill viruses and bacteria. Or even just a bit of bleach.”

  “Bleach?” Hannah gasped. “I’m not drinking bleach. Feel free to go ahead, though.”

  I knew we were still a way from needing to gather our own water. But it was handy to have someone with Haz’s knowledge, however basic, around.

  Tincture of Iodine. Boiling water. Or drinking from a water source that is way away from humans or machinery. All foolproof methods.

  And if we got ill, well. There was always an abundance of hospitals to…

  Oh, wait. No there wasn’t. Not anymore.

  “Honestly, though,” Haz said, “there’s a few other ways. Layering a bottle with sediment and filters and pouring the water through it, but that’s when we’re really struggling. But to be honest, if we have to make a choice between chugging water that might be dirty and getting dehydrated, you’ve just gotta drink the water anyway. Bacteria might kill you. Dehydration definitely, definitely will.”

  Sue sniffed. She hadn’t said a word since they’d set off besides the basic directions. But she opened her mouth and said, “We’re going to be at the bunker soon. We won’t have to worry about all this for long.”

  I wished I shared Sue’s confidence.

  We walked further. And as we walked, Remy up ahead, Hannah further back, Haz by my side, I spoke to him about all these contraptions and survival methods he knew. He told me about using batteries to start fires. You basically had to connect the positive and negative terminals with a wire or some foil to create a spark. It seemed so simple, something I imagined so many people knew about, and yet I was so naive about these things.

  Similarly, he blew my mind about all other kinds of “prepping” tips he’d learned. Apparently, a good way to secure electronic devices before EMP events were Faraday Boxes. They are basically made from metal filing cabinets, biscuit tins, that kind of thing. However, the device you are trying to protect must be insulated and not touching the metal. If you wrapped a good spread of aluminium foil around the box, then theoretically, your device should survive.

  Just a pity nobody really took prepping seriously in this country.

  “All this knowledge,” I said, “and you’re worried you’re never going to get a job.”

  Haz stopped, then. He frowned at me. “This knowledge? It’s just silly stuff that’s stuck in my head after reading too many dystopian novels and spending late nights on conspiracy websites. It’s not exactly gonna get me a job.”

  I shrugged. “Maybe not in the old world. But in the new world…”

  It felt weird to be saying those words just one day into a changed world. But this, for sure, was something that had meaning. Haz could use his skills, if the power returned, to make people aware of survival, and what to do in case of emergency. A business like that would boom.

  And if the power didn’t return…

  Well. People like Haz were going to be in very strong demand.

  “It’s here,” Sue said.

  I barely registered what she’d said until I saw the tall, green structure right over a field in front of us. We were just outside the suburbs now, on a country lane.

  “Is that…” I started.

  “It’s the bunker,” Sue said, turning around and smiling for the first time since the death of her husband. “We made it.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  I saw the bunker in the distance, and for the first time in a long time, I felt hope.

  The sun was setting, which really captured just how long we’d been walking. I was still in the habit of checking my wrist for the time, but of course, it was still jammed at that same time it had been at when the power had gone completely. Eight thirty-one. The time everything changed.

  In a sense, though, I was growing less reliant on time, and that felt kind of liberating in spite of the initial di
fficulties adjusting to it. All that mattered, really, was the position of the sun in the sky. If the sun was lowering, then that meant darkness was coming, and we needed to find shelter.

  Of course, we could keep moving in the dark and shelter in the day. That was a possibility we’d discussed; after all, the bulk of people in positions like us would be travelling in the day and resting at night. But we needed sleep, and I guess there was still a naivety deep within that didn’t want to mess up our body clocks. We wanted to maintain some level of order, of normality. Suddenly shifting our body clock was too much of a change so early in the fall.

  The fall. What a thing to call it. What a way to think of it.

  And yet it struck up such images.

  Society, falling.

  Everything around, collapsing.

  But this here—this bunker—this was going to change everything.

  Sue led the way, eagerly, her children’s hands in hers. It was like she was running back towards Jason, living naively under the impression that if she got there, she’d be reunited in some way. That she’d be able to bring him back from the dead.

  Such was the shock of grief.

  And the real grieving surely hadn’t even hit yet. Not in earnest.

  “Wait up,” I said, jogging closer to Sue. Remy, Hannah, and Haz weren’t far away. “We should take it easy when we’re approaching. We don’t know for certain everything’s going to be in order here.”

  “Even if it’s not,” Sue said, “it’s shelter. It’s getting dark. Maybe… maybe we’re the first ones here.”

  Part of me kind of wanted that to be the case. Not because I wanted to be left to fend for myself. But because I feared what kind of people might already be in this place.

  I’d seen what the prisoners who’d attacked and killed Jason were capable of. Who was to say there weren’t more people like them? Who was to say they couldn’t just do it again?

  As we ran, I caught Hannah smiling at me. I knew what that smile was. I knew what that look in her eyes was. It was hope.