The Solar Pulse (Book 1): Beyond The Pulse Read online

  Chapter Six

  Dark City

  I said at the beginning that I’d like to keep the details of where exactly we were when all this went down a secret, and I’m going to keep it that way. If anybody ever finds this manuscript after things went down, and if society ever gets back to the way it was before the blackout, I want there to be some record of how things went down from my perspective, from somebody who was a part of the whole thing when it happened.

  I’m saying this now because some of this sounds too outlandish to be true, but I have to emphasise it; including the insanity of the event that had just happened, of the disappointing, gutting reality of the world and the chaos that constantly met our eyes, some of the sights that we saw during our journey to Helen’s apartment building still send a chill through me every time I think back to them.

  Luke and I reached the end of the street, stopping and looking ahead. We had moved adjacently, and we were no closer than before. Before us came into view the sight of a mass of people, all shifting in different directions or remaining stood where they were. Some had clearly been awoken by the plane crash and were stood on their porches in their pyjamas, some were crying, some were laughing.

  The last of those were the ones I felt most sorry for, weirdly enough – they still hadn’t realised how serious all of this was, and in large part I felt like we were the only two who realised exactly what was going on.

  Up ahead, a few people jumped up on the roofs of cars, trying to get a better view of everything that was happening around them. Engine hoods stood open on their latches as people tried to get their vehicles to work in the darkness.

  ‘Sam,’ I heard Luke say from my side. ‘We need to get through all of this. Keep your gun out of the way.’

  He was right – I didn’t want anybody getting the wrong idea.

  Power corrupts, though, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, as a great man once said. People placed no value on the things that they had freely given to them. When the lights went out, people would start to feel discriminated against, and when everybody starts feeling discriminated, everyone is looking out for themselves and nobody else.

  Even the people who you’d call ‘better off’ could turn savage under the right circumstances.

  In the darkness I held the frame of the gun close to my body, and we set off up the edge of the sidewalk. We hurried along, edging past people, keeping to ourselves through the scattered crowds of people until we were out of the mildew of it all, and we reached the end of the block.

  ‘How does this get resolved?’ Luke said to me over the voices, trying to keep himself quiet at the same time. ‘Like… What’s the contingency plan here? How does the government even resolve this?’

  ‘How do you even plan for it? Everything in the fucking country runs on electricity. Even if they wanted to send out helicopters to drop aid packages, they couldn’t. Systems don’t work.’

  ‘So what does that mean?’

  ‘Every man for himself,’ I said. ‘I think we’re on our own out here.’

  It was like some kind of hellish obstacle course, this maddening journey that stretched out before us. I couldn’t even comprehend how damn frustrated I was beginning to feel, and I hated myself for it. We had been so used to everything just working. We were accustomed to it. How did anyone come back from something like this?

  We had been waiting at the end of the street, surveying our surroundings for just a couple of seconds and deciding on the next possible route, when another burst of commotion appeared up the avenue to the left.

  You know that moment when you’re in a large crowd of people, like a restaurant or a food court or something like that, where everybody’s just sat around having friendly conversation, and suddenly there’s a burst of loud voices somewhere? Sometimes it stemmed from an uproarious laugh from a group of work colleagues getting drunk over their annual Christmas dinner out, but sometimes it’s an argument.

  In this case it was the latter, and in the circumstances we were in, it was far worse than some stupid drunken disagreement.

  ‘Hey, FUCK YOU!’

  Luke and I both turned our heads to look down the left avenue, and the voices of those around us descended into a murmur as everybody listened to the altercation that was breaking out.

  ‘I told you, sir, we are closed!’

  ‘Fuck you, man, your sign says 24 hours, and I’m a paying customer, so you’re gonna fucking serve me!’

  ‘How many times do I need to tell you?’

  It was a stupid clash of stubborn wills. I already knew that the plane had exacerbated this entire situation – I don’t need to remind you of the last time a plane came down into a major city and the images that flashed across every news screen on Earth in the following hours. It had caused a resonating panic that nobody could escape from, and right now everybody in the city was a part of it.

  In the midst of the argument down the street my mind wandered – and then it struck me.

  ‘If it’s like this here,’ I said, looking over at Luke, ‘and if it’s happened to the rest of the country, or the planet… What about all the other planes? Just imagine how many there are in the air at any one time… All of them will have come down-’

  Bang.

  The argument had come to a stop – in hindsight I can only reason that it was because of the muffled struggling sounds that the two people involved had been making. I could understand instantly what had happened without being able to see either of them – a shop owner had denied service, and somebody had argued differently.

  I thought back to Harold and his wife, dead in their grocery store.

  Right now, though, I had no idea who had shot first – the concealed-carry permit holder who had been exercising his free rights or the man who owned the shop with the sawed-off behind the counter. That was how I imagined the owners of these two voices, anyway, even though I couldn’t see them.

  That said, their appearance didn’t matter to me in the slightest – I was too busy ducking to the ground at the sound of gunfire, along with everybody else in the nearby streets.

  ‘Holy fuck…!’ I heard Luke shout out, ‘Sam!’

  People began running in every direction away from the gunfire, but there was nowhere to run to.

  There was a screaming and a smashing of glass amidst the shouts and stamping feet of everybody around us, and after several moments there was a loud, booming noise as a shotgun was fired up the street. It was like a herd of scared cattle running for its collective life.

  I ducked down even further, fearing the waves of buckshot that could have come flying at us.

  ‘We need to get off of the streets,’ I said, grabbing Luke. Amongst the sprinting masses of people we took off over the road, running up the sidewalk until we reached another alleyway and ducked into it.

  I still couldn’t get used to the absence of shadows in the darkness, the non-existent, imaginary light from the streets that should have been there casting no shadow of the edges of the buildings into the alley.

  Of course, it didn’t take long for us to realise that we weren’t alone.

  A little way ahead, one leaning against a wall, one stood in the middle, and one crouched down against the wall taking deep, heaving breaths, were three figures.

  ‘Woah, woah, woah,’ the one in the middle said, ‘we don’t want any trouble, guys.’ I could see the silhouette of his hands as he held them up before him.

  ‘Calm down,’ I said hurriedly, catching my breath. ‘We’re not gonna hurt you. We just wanna get through.’

  ‘Did you hear that?’ The one leaning against the wall said, turning to us. ‘The gunfire?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Luke said. ‘That’s why we came up here.’

  ‘We were about to head uptown towards the plane. Like, literally, we were right here, and we were about to go running out to go check out the plane, and then we heard that gun. What the fuck is going?’

  ‘What the fuck is going on?’ I repeated, a laugh of
incredulity escaping me. ‘Why are you guys heading towards the plane?’

  ‘Gonna go check it out,’ the one on the floor said. ‘I mean, a freaking plane coming down like that? That has happened since 9/11. This is gonna be all over the news.’

  Luke and I looked over at each other hurriedly before glancing back at them.

  ‘Uhh…’ I started, running a hand through my hair, ‘I hate to break it to you guys but I don’t think the news is a thing anymore.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The solar flare,’ Luke said, ‘the EMP? It’s wiped out everything, everything that runs on electronics, anyway. Which is pretty much everything on the fucking planet.’

  ‘Bullshit,’ the centre guy said. ‘Government’s got all sorts of plans in place to solve this kind of thing. They must do.’

  ‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘Wouldn’t they be here right now, though? And if everything runs on electricity, that doesn’t exclude all of their equipment.’

  ‘Shit…’ The seated guy said, ‘What if he’s got a point?’

  ‘Think about it,’ I said. ‘When you guys left your apartment, or your house, or wherever, was anything electrical working?’

  ‘No…’ The guy to the left said. ‘No, nothing.’

  There was a weariness in their scrawny figures, these three greasy-haired guys stood about in this alleyway. Maybe they were just here for the same reason that we were – plunged into a weird world and trying to deal with the reality of it all.

  ‘So things have really gone to shit, huh?’ The middle guy said, looking over at us.

  ‘Pretty much,’ Luke replied, like he was breaking bad news to a relative.

  ‘Damn…’ He continued, shaking his head and crossing his arms as he looked between us. ‘If that’s the case, then I guess the next thing is… What’s in the bag?’

  This was one of those moments that I look back on the way I remember a shitty movie villain from the 80s. No, that’s a lie – it was how I felt at the time. Looking back on it, it was one of the most uncomfortable experiences of that night aside from all of the fire, sirens and shooting – we’ll get to more of that last one soon.

  Right then, though, the situation just seemed awkward.

  ‘What?’ I asked, dumbfounded.

  ‘The bag that your buddy’s carrying. If what you say is true and the world’s coming to an end, I’m guessing that you didn’t leave your place with a bunch of books and DVDs. Food and water’s gonna become scarce, and right now we’ve got a lot more information than other people. So I ask again – what’s in the bag?’

  A resounding silence struck the alley – even with the chaos that was steadily engulfing the entire city, everything suddenly seemed to have gone quiet.

  Maybe neither of us would have taken the situation seriously if the other two guys weren’t now on their feet too. Yeah, they were like the back-up dancers in a rap video or the gang members in a 1980s high school movie, but just putting it that way would have been lying about how things actually went down.

  At that moment, the awkwardness was melded with a terror at the multiple number of violent courses this could take.

  I raised the rifle in my hands, pointing it at the guy in the centre – the ringleader. We would run into a lot of random people that night, the vast majority of whose names we didn’t know. I had already fired it once, but that wasn’t at a person - that, of course, didn’t make the prospect of firing at a human being even easier.

  ‘Boys,’ I started, ‘I don’t intend to start a fight or anything, but I think you’d better fuck off in the direction that you came.’

  They all laughed with this indignant, patronising tone.

  The centre guy: ‘You serious? I don’t care how dark it is, I can still see your hands shaking from over here. You ain’t gonna fire that thing.’

  He had a point about the darkness, and for a brief moment I was really appreciative of the fact that they couldn’t see our faces in detail – not because they might be able to recognise us at some point, but because my cheeks were flushed red with something close to embarrassment and anxiety. I could feel the blood pumping through me, all of a sudden very aware of myself and everything that composed me. My heart raced quickly inside of my chest.

  Funny how running into a burning building doesn’t even come close to confronting a guy who isn’t afraid of having a gun pointed at his face – or have any faith in you to pull the trigger.

  I chanced a look over at Luke. He was raising the bat slowly in one hand, feeling behind himself for the bag to check that it was still there – it was.

  ‘We’re not giving you the bag,’ Luke said. I think he was saying it both to this guy and to himself.

  ‘Well, who’s to stop us? You’re not gonna hit me, and he ain’t gonna shoot me, so…?’

  I had never felt such an astonishing, overwhelming rage. No, not that, a resentment… The hate for this man was impossible, rushing through my body, consuming me.

  It wasn’t because of the fact that he was trying to take something that belonged to us in the midst of the blackout. It wasn’t even because he was being a complete fucking asshole. It was because he was right.

  I wasn’t going to pull this damned trigger. Sure, I had fired the gun once before over the course of the night so far, but it hadn’t been at a human. I could have shot it right then – I could have carried out the motion and shown him that he was wrong, but he wasn’t. I couldn’t bring myself to commit to the act.

  We were both prepared to swing and hit with whatever we had in our hands, but I wasn’t prepared to fire a small piece of shelled metal, even in defence of our possessions.

  I know, you’re probably screaming at the pages right now that I’m a fucking halfwit – believe me, looking back at it all, I consider myself to be the same thing.

  Then everything went sideways.

  They were all already on their feet, but it was the guy in the centre who made the first move. He scrambled forward and went for the gun. I had never held anything so tightly in my entire life as he tried to take it from me. I knew that I wasn’t prepared to fire it at someone, but he would be – that I was sure of.

  Out of nowhere, and what was likely without any thought in particular, Luke swung the bat in his hand in a wide arc against the main guy’s back. There was a flat, hard, packing sound of wood against bone, and the man yelled out as he fell to the side.

  It seemed a small victory, but a victory all the same. I could feel the adrenaline flowing through me, pushing me to act, to remain alert. That alertness drew me to the fact that we were facing off against two more guys who came rushing at us from both sides.

  You know when you’re at a concert – back in the old world, I guess – and you’re stood in the same place for hours on end, and the memory ends up merging into a single mess of cells? This is what that was like.

  My life had been on the line several times that night, and it would be on the line a whole lot more, but those few moments of awkward scuffling in which any one of us could have punched somebody the wrong way, when the gun could have accidentally gone off, when a knife could have been pulled by one of them… Well, I was really fucking scared. Yeah, I had never been in a fight before, that I’ll own up to.

  After a number of seconds that seemed to stretch on continuously, it occurred to me that these guys had no training for a situation like this – they weren’t military, as I was originally guessing, but were just three guys about as scared as Luke and I were.

  ‘Sam…!’ My friend yelled out in the midst of it all – I later realised that he was trying to get my attention right around the time the guy from the right clocked me in the ear. There was a sharp ringing sound, followed shortly by a fall to the ground. I landed on my side, and a quick jolt of pain ran up my left arm.

  I was still holding on to the gun.

  I looked up to see Luke elbow the formerly seated guy in the face, an action that was accidental from my perspective but which he would late
r claim to be completely intentional.

  It wasn’t a knockout strike, but the location in which it hit was enough to throw him off balance and send him tumbling down to the point that he was nowhere near getting back up.

  Luke had gotten about during his life and been in a few less than savoury situations with some equally less than savoury people, but that had been a long time ago.

  There was still one guy left, and he had gone straight for the bag on Luke’s back. The straps came undone from over his arms and now they were each clinging to one, the precious contents within hanging between them, in the abyss, as they tugged on it from both sides.

  ‘Sam, fucking shoot him!’

  I shook my head out of my haze, and the first thing I did was raise the rifle and point it in their general direction. My eyes were still blurring.

  ‘Sam!’

  Could I get a clear shot? Looking back, a part of me thought that I had it, that I had this asshole in my sights, and that I just didn’t pull the trigger. I’d like to believe that I didn’t pull the trigger because of that, but in the state that I was in I honestly can’t say, and that’s the truth.

  The third guy finally wrenched the bag out of Luke’s hands and pushed him aside, and the other two went running with him. With that, they took off around the corner with our food and water and left us there. Luke didn’t run after them – I think he was just completely lucid and caught up in the moment. He turned to me – I knew that he wanted to go completely berserk at me, but that didn’t happen. Instead, in the darkness of the alleyway, he just ran his hands through his hair and clenched his eyes shut, groaning.

  All our food and water was gone, and here I was holding on to the thing that could have stopped it from being taken away… And I had done nothing.

  We were being turned into those guys who had just taken it from us – hungry and without aid, and with a weapon in our hands, ready to take it from somebody else.

  I couldn’t become that… Could I?