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  “Why didn’t you go to the media?” I asked, “show them your calculations and make them listen?”

  He glanced over at me and I hurriedly looked away from the accusation in his eyes.

  “I tried them first, but the algorithms have taken me years to perfect, how in hell could I convince some self-obsessed journalist that I was telling the truth? When I called you yesterday it was my last hope. I knew that it was going to hit sometime in the next seventy two hours, and I knew it would be big because the CME was going to hit at the same time, and I was really, really hoping that you would at least listen to me so that we could get the word out”.

  A steely knife of guilt slid between my ribs and stabbed me in the gut. He was right, had I listened to him in the first place then maybe we could have done something.

  “I’m sorry”. It was totally inadequate, but at the same time all I could offer.

  He sighed and shrugged. “Don’t worry, I don’t suppose we could have done much anyway. Can you imagine anyone agreeing to turn their power off at the mains? No TV, no music, all the food going off in the fridge? It probably just would have made everyone panic”.

  “We could have saved a few, maybe”, I said, the guilt burning a hole in my stomach and making me feel sick. “Enough to have made a difference”.

  “It’s not like the human race has been wiped out”, he said, trying to sound cheerful, “we’ve just dropped back to the stone age overnight. No drama, eh?”

  I looked at him in amazement for a moment, then saw the sly grin and burst out laughing in spite of myself.

  “Funny bastard”, I said, the mirth fading as quickly as it had come. “So how long do you reckon it will take them to get everything up and running again?”

  “In truth, I don’t know. It looked pretty bad when it hit, worse than I expected”.

  “Worse than you expected? How much worse?”

  He shrugged again. “I can’t say for sure, not without deciphering the readings I took just as it hit”. He nodded back over his shoulder to the reams of printouts on the back seat.

  “So what are we talking, days, a week, a month?” I tried to imagine how many people would die if power wasn’t restored by then, and didn’t like the numbers my mind was offering.

  He slowed the car to a crawl and pulled out his cigarettes, lighting one before speeding up again. I picked up the packet from where he’d dropped it and helped myself to one, lighting it and coughing as the thick smoke filled my lungs.

  “The way it looked tonight”, he said slowly, “I wouldn’t be surprised if the power never came back on at all”.

  Chapter 6

  The truck had slewed across the road, the huge trailer toppling and blocking all three lanes. The cab itself was embedded in the central reservation, mangled shards of steel and concrete sticking out in all directions.

  Jerry pulled to a stop a dozen metres away, peering through the windscreen to see if there was room for us to squeeze past on the hard shoulder.

  “What do you reckon?” He asked.

  “I reckon we should see if the driver is still alive”, I said, climbing out of the car. The guilt I felt after our earlier conversation was too strong, and I couldn’t bear the thought of the driver lying trapped in the cab while we drove past.

  “Malc, wait!” Jerry scrambled out and hurried after me, the thin beam of his torch illuminating the wreckage.

  I ignored him, approaching the cab carefully. The heated metal of the engine was still ticking as it cooled, and up close the damage was even worse than it had looked from the car.

  It had hit the reservation at an angle, presumably when the weight of the trailer pulled it off balance, and the driver’s side had crunched into the concrete with horrific force.

  As I got close, I could see a fat, pale arm glistening in the moonlight, black streaks running from elbow to wrist where it had punched through the window and now lay against the grill, the rest of the body still hidden within the cab.

  “Hello”, I called, “can you hear me?”

  The wind picked up and I shivered. I’d dressed warmly for the time of year, jeans, hoody and a light jacket over the top, but the total absence of sound from anywhere made me feel colder, somehow.

  I’d never realised just how much sound pollution there was, the constant thrum at the edge of my hearing that signified the rest of the world going about its business, even in the dead of the night. Instead, all there was now was the soft whistle of the wind and the occasional bark of a fox from somewhere in the distance.

  I turned to see Jerry at my shoulder, his face pale.

  “Is he alive?” He asked nervously.

  “There’s only one way to find out”.

  I walked up to the cab, still canted at a dangerous angle, and gently took hold of the door handle. It refused to budge.

  I grabbed it with both hands and tugged, feeling the lock disengage, but the door itself was bent out of shape and it wouldn’t open.

  Placing a foot up against the cab, I hauled with all my strength and suddenly the door flew open, spilling three hundred pounds of dead flesh on top of me as the body of the driver came free.

  I collapsed, feeling my right ankle buckle with a sharp tearing pain that made me cry out as I hit the road, small pieces of broken glass and concrete digging painfully into my back.

  I came to rest with the driver’s sightless, staring eyes inches from mine, his neck twisted at an unnatural angle. Panic welled up inside me, a knee-jerk response to the horror of having so much dead, corpulent flesh covering my own body.

  I lashed out, kicking, punching and clawing as I screamed in fear, doing little except to wobble the fat on the body as my panic grew worse.

  His chest pressed down on my own, feeling like someone had dropped a car on me. My lungs laboured to breathe and black spots danced in front of my eyes as I came perilously close to blacking out.

  At the very edge of my perception I was aware of Jerry, his stick-thin arms striving manfully to pull the dead weight off me before I was crushed.

  Between us, we managed to roll the body just enough for me to scramble out from underneath, my chest heaving like a bellows as I sucked in huge lungfuls of air.

  I lay there for several minutes, my breathing gradually slowing until I had control of myself again, suddenly embarrassed by the panic attack.

  “Thank you”, I said to Jerry, “I, uh, well, thanks”.

  He offered me a hand and I took it, using it to haul myself to my feet. My right ankle buckled immediately and I nearly sprawled on top of the corpse. Jerry caught the strain, keeping me steady while I lifted my right foot and gritted my teeth until the pain had passed.

  “Do you want me to take a look?” Jerry asked, shining the torch at my trainers.

  I shook my head. “No, not yet. It’s not bleeding, and other than that it doesn’t make much of a difference if it’s broken or sprained, either way we need to keep moving. We can check it out when we stop”.

  He nodded in agreement and tucked an arm under my shoulders, helping me back to the car. He eased me into the passenger seat before getting in himself and starting it up, pulling onto the hard shoulder and squeezing past the end of the trailer by dint of putting two wheels up onto the verge.

  “Can I make a suggestion?” He asked as we pulled back onto the road and began to pick up speed.

  “Go on”, I said, peering down into the rubbish that littered the footwell as if I could see the swelling in the dark, unable to shake the dead driver’s face from my mind as I did so.

  “No more stopping to help”.

  I nodded in agreement. “Yeah, sure. Sorry”.

  He shrugged and slowed the car as we passed another wreck, this one a pile up with five cars wedged together and spread out across two lanes, two lifeless bodies lying tangled in the road nearby.

  “No need to be sorry, I’d just rather get us to Manchester in one piece, that’s all”.

  I looked at the bodies, one a man in
a business suit, perhaps a late commuter on his way home, the other a young woman with long brown hair matted thickly with blood.

  There was no sign of the other drivers, and after our recent experience I had no wish to stop and find out if they were ok.

  My ankle was beginning to feel uncomfortably tight, and as I reached down I could feel the swelling pushing at my trainer, rubbing at the bloated flesh as the joint filled with fluid. I could only hope that it was a bad sprain, not a break, and that the fluid wasn’t blood.

  The pain was excruciating, bad enough that every bump in the road jarred it and sent pins of agony up as far as my knee.

  “How is it?” Jerry asked, seeing me lean forwards.

  “Not good, but I’ll survive”, I said, straightening, “I think it just needs strapping up”.

  “I’ve got a first aid kit in the boot, we can strap it when we stop to rest. I was going to get you to share the driving but now…”

  “Don’t worry, I’m sure it’ll be fine once it’s strapped”. I tried to sound cheerful, burying the worry that it might be broken. If it was, even if we did get to Melody without further incident, I couldn’t be sure how much use I would be in keeping her safe when I could barely walk.

  The thought wasn’t much comfort as we drove on into the night, and I tried to put it from my mind as I watched the ruins of the world I had known flash past outside the window.

  Chapter 7

  Gatwick airport was burning. We could see the flames from the main road, a little less than a mile to our left as we headed towards London. There were now dozens of cars on the road, many with groups of confused looking people huddled around them.

  Our car was beginning to draw a lot of attention, and more than once Jerry had to put his foot down at the risk of hitting someone to get away from grasping hands and angry shouts.

  One man actually chased us, sprinting along the road as we disappeared into the night, falling quickly behind and screaming at us in his frustration.

  Maybe he had children he was trying to get to as well, but I pushed the thought fiercely aside. Even if we could fit more people in the car, what if they wanted to go somewhere else? Would they see their need as greater than ours and take the car by force? It wasn’t worth the risk, and one glance at Jerry’s stony expression told me that he felt the same.

  We’d gone a couple of miles past the airport when the road curved, and in the distance I could see something burning across all six carriageways, north and southbound.

  “What the hell is that?” I asked as Jerry slowed.

  “I don’t know”, he said, pushing his glasses further up his nose, “it looks like the whole road is on fire”.

  We didn’t have to wait long to find out. As we drew closer, I began to make out details, first a long metal tube stretching from one side of the road to the other and beyond, broken in places where hungry flames licked at the structure, then a long tapering wing with two huge engines, one of them split and scattered across the road.

  Even from here I could smell the stench of burning jet fuel.

  “Poor bastards”, I said out loud, realising from the direction the cockpit was facing just how close these people had been to making it to the airport when the plane must have lost power, dropping like a stone.

  “We can’t go through”, Jerry said, “we’ll have to go back and find a way around”.

  He slowed again and pulled a U-turn, heading back the way we’d come.

  “I think I saw a slip road a little way back, we’ll try for that and see where it takes us”.

  I nodded, still thinking about how the people on the plane must have felt when everything went dark, knowing that there was nothing they could do to save themselves as they dropped out of the sky. The thought brought me close to tears.

  The slip road Jerry had seen was tiny, a single lane track that I’d completely missed in the dark. He turned onto it and we were heading north again, passing buildings that were dark but seemed untouched by fire.

  The road curved around the left, taking us north west, and small houses began to appear on both sides of the road, gradually growing larger and more affluent looking as we got further away from the motorway.

  A couple of the houses had lights in the windows, and for a brief moment I allowed myself the hope that the damage wasn’t as bad as we feared, but then we passed a smouldering, burned out substation and I realised the lights must have been from lamps or perhaps generators running on petrol.

  “Do you have any idea where this road takes us?” I asked as the lane narrowed, dipping down as high, wooded banks rose above us.

  “Not a clue”, he said, not taking his eyes from the road, “but we’re going in roughly the right direction so I guess we keep going until we find a signpost. I’ve got maps in the back but they’re buried under the camping gear”.

  I lapsed back into silence, falling into a half-doze as we followed the winding country lane until it came out onto a larger, two-lane road. We took a right, and as we turned I saw that the sky ahead of us was glowing a faint orange.

  “Looks like a big town up ahead”, I said, guessing that the glow signified burning buildings, “are you sure we want to go this way?”

  “Unless you want to try and get past that plane, we don’t really have a choice. I don’t fancy driving around in the countryside until we get lost and run out of diesel. We’ll find the town, work out where we are and get the maps out, then plan a route”.

  “What I wouldn’t give for a sat nav”, I said wryly, and he nodded in agreement.

  The glow in the sky grew brighter as we began to pass suburbs, row after row of terraced and semi-detached houses that were all dark.

  On some the residents had gathered outside in the street, a few looking up at the sky while others stood in nervous or threatening-looking groups.

  We passed a stand of shops, the glass fronts smashed and the goods from inside strewn across the pavement. As I watched, two young lads ran out of one with arms full of chocolate and alcohol, their hoods up to hide their faces as an older, fat man chased after them with a cricket bat, his dressing gown flapping around his ankles.

  “That didn’t take long”, I said, thinking back to the article I’d been working on only that day, although it felt like months ago. “They’re looting already”.

  “What did you think would happen? No police, no CCTV, no way of identifying anyone short of walking around hunting for them, and who’s going to be stupid enough to do that now? They were probably out on the streets the second their playstations stopped working, looking for trouble”.

  At the sound of the car, both the lads looked in our direction before bolting down an alleyway and out of sight, perhaps thinking that any working vehicle would have to belong to the forces of law and order.

  We drove on, the signs telling us that we had reached Redhill, a large town but one that I’d never been to before.

  “I’m going to try and find a shop that hasn’t burned down or had everything stolen”, Jerry said as he negotiated the silent streets, “I want to save my supplies for when we really need them”.

  “Are you sure?” I asked, nodding towards the red glow in the sky, “it looks like half the town’s on fire”.

  “Then I’ll find a shop in the half that isn’t burning”, he said, turning away from the glow and promptly losing us in a maze of residential streets.

  As we reached one junction, I jumped out of my skin as another car pulled out, lights on main beam and horn honking as it passed us, swerving from one side of the road to the other.

  I got a glimpse of the occupants as it tore past, five teenagers crammed into a vintage Mini, the driver swigging from a bottle of vodka that he raised at us in salute, almost crashing into us in the process.

  “Jerry, I think maybe we should leave”, I said, watching in the mirror as the mini careened off the road, through a garden fence and then back onto the road again to continue its chaotic journey.

  As we sat th
ere watching, a large group of youths began to approach from a nearby street, most of them holding bottles of alcohol and not a few with bats, crowbars or large pieces of wood in their hands.

  They were laughing and pointing at us, and despite not being able to hear what they were saying it didn’t take a genius to guess what was on their minds.

  “Yeah, I think so too. Forget the shop, let’s just go”.

  He put the car into gear and pulled away. I twisted to watch the group, some of them running now as we gathered speed. When it was clear they wouldn’t catch us, a hail of bottles arced up into the air, raining down all around us, shattering on the road and spraying the sides of the car with broken glass and alcohol.

  A few thumped onto the roof and one lucky shot bounced off the driver’s window mere inches from Jerry’s head, making him yell in shock and almost swerve off the road.

  “What did we do to them?” He shouted, keeping his head low as if we were being shot at, peering over the wheel from somewhere down between his elbows, “Why are they doing this?”

  “Because”, I said as I watched them fade into the distance, knowing the answer but not finding any comfort in it, “we’ve got something they haven’t, they want it, and there’s no one left to stop them taking it. So if I were you, I’d keeping driving until we find somewhere dark, safe and a very long way from anyone else”.

  Chapter 8

  Ten minutes later we were thoroughly lost. Jerry had taken us back out of the town proper, and now we found ourselves navigating yet more narrow country roads. The only thing keeping me from sleep was the excruciating pain in my ankle, tiredness dulling my senses while the pain enhanced them so I found myself exhausted but buzzing with nervous energy at the same time.

  “I need to stop soon”, Jerry said, his voice betraying his own tiredness, “everything is starting to blur”.

  I pointed at a dirt track a dozen metres ahead, starlight illuminating the barn that it led to.

  “Will that do?”

  He squinted and then nodded, pulling off the road and onto the rutted track, every bounce and jolt sending waves of pain up my leg.