Electricity is like blood flowing through your veins. You don’t notice it till it stops.
Now there was something cold and inert about the town. The buildings, even in sunshine, seemed suddenly dark. It was quieter. All the air conditioning units and Xpelair fans that provide the subliminal hum had died too.
For the first time I realised that loneliness wasn’t just people not being there. Loneliness has form, it’s got a presence so huge you feel it pressing against you. You have to do something or it begins to smother you.
I couldn’t just keep circling the town like a calf circling around its dead mother. She was dead. I had to break away.
In the end, I didn’t have to make the decision.
A hundred yards ahead of me, gathering in a swarm, were men and women. They were moving in from side streets. Some were the ones that had attacked Steve. They had his lifeblood drying to cracks on their hands and faces.
I cut down a side street that lead in the direction of the station. It took me by McDonald’s. Smoke now filled the restaurant. I never did find out what had happened to the girls who’d served me twenty minutes ago.
People seemed to seep from the brickwork. They headed in the direction of Clock Corner, the traditional centre of town, as if there was going to be some announcement and the call had gone out to meet there. I saw no one under the age of twenty.
From the distance came the cry of someone in pain. After a second it cut to nothing.
Sweating-scared now, I ran down a narrow service alley. But walking towards me were five men of about forty. I forked off to the left along a narrow back street flanked by high brick walls.
This’s getting shitty, this’s getting shitty …
I looked back. The men were following me.
Shit.
Ahead, blocking my way, was a hulking great orange truck, the driver’s door open against the wall.
Heart juddering, breath turning ragged, I ran faster. I’d have to duck under the high door of the van and run until I bust. Or I’d be like Steve. The bastards would dance on my heart and lungs then leave me to be picked by rooks.
I slammed through the gap between the truck and the wall then ducked under the door, but stayed crouching there, the door above my head. Twenty yards ahead three men walked slowly along the alley toward me.
No, it wasn’t a deliberate trap. But it had become one.
Behind me, the other men had nearly reached the tailgate of the truck. I scrambled into the cab.
At that moment I felt God still loved me. The keys swung from the ignition.
The engine fired as I slammed the door and punched the lock shut. Outside two faces appeared to stare in at me. They were impassive; no expression – just like those of the mob before they attacked Steve and me.
Hands shaking, I struggled to knock off the handbrake while revving the motor until clouds of blue rolled down the alley. The guys in front had nearly reached the truck; the faces at the window pressed closer; the muscle beneath those faces tightened into an expression of sheer, fucking, alien fury.
‘Come on, you stupid bastard!’ I yelled at myself. My hands and feet were like mashed potato. Nothing worked; the engine roared like a bleeding elephant; gears screamed, shredding splinters of steel. Beside me the door handle turned. They wanted in. They wanted to tear my skin. They—
BANG! Gear connected to axle.
The truck moved. I stamped on the pedal. The engine roared and the brick walls blurred orange. I was, thank Jesus and all his sweet, sweet angels, really shifting.
I looked away from the side window. I didn’t want to see what happened to the faces.
I thundered that truck along the alley like a shell through its barrel, a paint-stripping hand’s breadth to spare at each side.
The truck powered out from the side of McDonald’s, the building now blazing. I swung right.
It was a one way street. I was going the wrong way. But I couldn’t care less.
I wouldn’t stop this big orange truck until the town was miles away. What’d I do then? God only knew …
Chapter Seven
Stay Tuned to this Station. An Important Announcement Follows this Message
Cutting myself from Doncaster felt like cutting an umbilical cord that had connected me with that town for seventeen years.
It hurt. But I had to do it or it would kill me.
The truck was slow, as noisy as a tank, but its sheer bulk felt reassuring.
I cut off onto minor roads that took me into the flat countryside that surrounds Doncaster in a vast pancake of fields.
There was no traffic. I saw no one. No one moving, that is. I powered the truck through small villages, sometimes seeing a shape at the side of the road. Often they looked like big dolls or just a mound of children’s clothes. I knew what they were.
In the front garden of a vicarage with roses climbing round the front door were the remains of a bonfire. Charred shapes with arms stretching up as stiff as branches lay in the ash.
A country hotel. From the window three young men hung head first down the walls like carnival decorations. In a dislocated way I wondered how it had been done. I guessed they had been dangled out of the windows while someone had nailed their feet to the window ledges. Beneath each corpse blood streaked down the wall.
Memories of the drive come back to me now. Bright and hard but somehow broken and disconnected. Miles of road cutting through fields and woodland. The nailed boys. Blue sky. Torched bodies, crisp as burnt toast. Lots of birds. A sports car burning in the middle of the road like a gigantic firework, pumping out sparks and smoke. The truck crushing through bushes at the road side as I swerved to avoid it.
I drove aimlessly for a couple of hours, circling the same few miles of countryside. Every so often I’d pass the hotel with the nailed boys. At one point I even found myself heading back into Doncaster.
I passed a school playing field where perhaps three hundred adults tore pieces from figures that looked like scarecrows. I turned the truck, flattening a road sign, then headed back into the countryside.
Ten minutes later I parked the truck in a field beneath some trees.
The truck contained about ten thousand bottles of spring water. HAMPOLE PRIORY SPRING sang the labels. At least I wasn’t going to die of thirst. In the cab I found the driver’s plastic lunchbox.
I remember feeling unreasonably bitter that whatever had happened to the truck’s driver hadn’t happened sooner. The sandwiches were gone leaving two apples and a large pork pie. The pie had a half moon shape missing from it where the trucker had taken a huge, slobbering bite.
The burst of anger over something as trivial as the pork pie actually settled me down mentally. Here was something I could concentrate my irritation on. Ten thousand bottles of frigging water and a part-masticated pie. Shit to the dead kids decorating the landscape, here was something I could handle. I could even see the guy’s teethmark slicing through the pink meat. I strode round the truck, kicking the wheels and swearing.
Then I sat on the grass, wrapped my arms round my knees and shook for ten minutes.
After that I didn’t feel so crazy any more. I picked off the bits of crust and meat that had made contact with the trucker’s lips and tongue, ate the pie, then drank water – lots of it. Fear dehydrates you.
I didn’t know why I didn’t think of it earlier but I tried the truck’s radio. Usually you get the crack and pop of dozens of stations as you spin the dial. All I got from FM was a hiss. On AM I picked up three stations. One played uninterrupted classical music. Another played old disco songs back to back with no DJ. Eventually the music stopped to be replaced by a sound like an electric razor.
Station three was more promising. I tuned in to hear a single word ‘… message.’ Then came orchestral versions of popular hymns. For five minutes I sat in the truck, swinging one leg out the door, listening to Hills Of The North Rejoice before it suddenly faded. Then came the voice.
‘You must stay tu
ned to this station. An important announcement follows this message.’
All Things Bright And Beautiful followed. I waited, actually gripping the steering wheel until my hands ached. This was it. I’d find out what was happening. And what I should do next. Again came the rapid music fade-out.
‘You must stay tuned to this station. An important announcement follows this message.’
I waited. More music. Then came the same message. I punched the steering wheel, swore and waited some more.
For an hour I sat listening to the shit-awful music and the automated voice repeating the same few words. In the end I switched it off and went for a piss against a tree.
The sun was touching the horizon when I realised I’d have to find somewhere to sleep. It was tempting to sleep in the cab. But a three-ton chunk of iron the colour of day-glo tangerines in the middle of the countryside shines like a moon in a midnight sky. I didn’t want to wake with faces pressed to the windows.
Carrying two bottles of Hampole Priory Well water and the trucker’s apples, I headed through the trees to where the land fell away into a valley. I knew the place well enough. We used to cycle there as kids. Spanning the valley is a huge viaduct carrying a motorway. No traffic moved on it. Beyond the viaduct at the far end of the valley is a small village with a church tower poking up through the trees.
It all came back to me as I walked down the paths winding through the trees. We’d come up here with air pistols and spend hours hunting through the woods, not hitting a damn thing but enjoying every minute of it.
Beneath a rock outcrop were a couple of small sandy caves. They were always dry and that’s where we’d make camp for an hour or two. And they were private. You could only reach them by climbing a near-vertical bank of grass.
I crawled into one of the caves.
Now. There was nothing more to do but lie down and shut my eyes.
Chapter Eight
Inside Me I Feel Alone and Unreal
At something past midnight I woke. Suddenly alert, my ears ringing with the quiet. I crawled over the cave floor to the entrance and looked out.
The night was cool, peaceful. No stars or moon. Below, the cloudy black shapes of forest trees.
As I looked out a sudden blast of light shot from one side of the valley to the other. It came from the direction of the village, its reflected glare silhouetting the viaduct carrying the motorway high across the valley.
From what I could see it came from the church on the hillside.
At that moment, squatting at the cave entrance I could believe that the interior of the church was filled from pew to roof beam with a solid block of eye-blistering light. Then someone had thrown open the doors of the church.
Unleashed, the light leapt out across the valley in a beam so hard and straight it looked like a second bridge, solid enough to drive a truck across.
One, two, three … I found myself counting. At five the light snapped off; darkness returned so heavily it was suffocating.
I crawled back into the corner of my cave. What was the light? Who had made it? Why?
I didn’t know. The only truth I did know was that the world tonight was different from the one I woke up in that morning.
How did I feel right then?
There’s a song by Syd Barrett. It’s called Late Night. It describes how it feels to slide into mental illness. There’s a line in the song that goes: Inside me I feel alone and unreal. If you’ve ever heard it you’ll know it’s the saddest song in the world.
Curled up in the cave corner that lyric went round and around my head. Inside me I feel alone and unreal.
Christ … Poor Nick fucking Aten. If only I’d been a university professor of philosophy or some high-powered shit like that you’d hold in your hands the words that explained logically and clearly what was happening. You would have a description as clear as glass of civilization lying belly-up and busted.
But I couldn’t. Inside me I felt alone and unreal. The song haunted my head like a ghost. I was alone. I was scared. I didn’t know if this time tomorrow I would still be alive.
Later, I heard a voice singing. It was my mother’s. I’d heard her singing thousands of times when I woke up on a morning as she made breakfast.
Then I’d hear her calling in her bright, it’s-a-beautiful-morning voice. ‘Nick. Time to get up … If you’re not down here in five minutes you’ll get nothing to eat.’ The night was heavy, my mind rambled on alone in the dark. The words from my mother seemed to be, ‘If you’re not down here in five minutes I’ll come up there and eat you.’
Mum’s ghost voice would not stop.
‘Nick. Breakfast’s ready. Nick, your brother’s dead. Nick, you’re next … you’re next.’
The cave walls tightened around me closer. Inside me I feel alone and unreal.
Chapter Nine
Food and Drink and Hope
DAY 3. YEAR 1. I woke from a deep sleep just after six. I sat at the cave’s entrance eating the trucker’s last apple and drinking a bottle of spring water. Sleep is the best cure for a psychological battering. I felt sane and in control.
As I crunched the apple down to the core I brewed up my own theory about what had happened. The military are always developing new weapons. The trend was to develop ones that killed or disabled people but left property and land intact. Hence nerve gas, biological weapons and those neutron bombs that are supposed to wipe out armies but leave buildings fit to move your Aunt Flo into the very next day.
I ate the apple nodding wisely as the theory ran through my head.
Our military or a foreign power had developed a weapon that affected the mind only. Whether a gas or some electro-magnetic neural disrupter I didn’t know. But they had a mind-busting weapon. That weapon had been used against Doncaster. Probably during that Saturday night I spent at Steve’s.
Clearly it only affected adults. And that effect drove them to kill their children. Whether that was the intention Christ knows but that is what happened. Or at least that was what my theory told me.
Your mind finds a mystery uncomfortable. Like that bit of grit inside an oyster’s gut. You have to wrap that mystery in a pearl of an answer – it doesn’t really matter if it’s right or completely crackers. An answer makes you feel better and that’s all that counts.
I quit the cave and headed up through the valley. As I walked three objectives fell quickly into place.
1. I wanted to eat.
2. I wanted a new set of wheels. The truck was about as discreet as a three-inch zit on the end of your nose.
3. I wanted out of this area.
I guessed the neural disrupter had only affected a few square miles. I imagined driving back to the normal world where the army waited at roadblocks to whisk survivors back to normality. There’d probably even be CNN waiting with cameras to get the survivors’ stories.
These thoughts were a comfort to me. They gave me hope.
I knew where I was going. Further up the valley there were a few big houses. Some quite isolated.
The first one I reached looked like a baked skeleton with black walls and still-smoking timbers. A burnt-out Rolls Royce stood on the drive.
The next was a converted farmhouse complete with a swimming pool in the barn.
First I knocked on the door then ran back to hide in the bushes. No one came.
I cut down the side of the house, feet crunching overloud on the raked gravel. The stable doors were open. No horses but three cars parked side by side. Two sportscars and a hulking Shogun 4x4. Perfect.
The bugger was locked.
On the patio at the back I found a child’s go-cart. It had been thoroughly cut to pieces with a saw. Hanging from a child’s climbing frame, swinging in the breeze, were two black bin liners. They could have been full of hedge clippings, but I doubted it.
For a minute I was ready to quit this house.
Get your fucking head together, Aten. You need that Shogun.
I hunted through the rocker
y, hoisted out a chunk of limestone the size of a football and lobbed it at the patio window. It bounced off the toughened glass.
Shit … It takes some skill to be a vandal.
Next, I heaved the rock at the kitchen window. It disappeared in a crash loud enough to wake the dead. I froze, expecting someone to charge from the house and cut me in two. Nothing.
I climbed through the window. This was breaking and entering but I didn’t feel a shred of guilt. The civilized bit of Nick Aten was already withering.
After checking that the place was deserted (the kids’ bedroom turned me sick) I went down and sat on the sofa for ten minutes. A couple of Scotches from the bar helped.
On a table stood a photograph of a family. Beautiful people, mum would have said with a wink, slightly catty, slightly envious. The father had slick executive looks, the mother was glamorous and well-jewelled.
Between them sat two little girls with plaits. They now resided in the plastic sacks hanging from the swing.
I put the happy family portrait face down and went to find food.
There was plenty of it. There was no power but the refrigerator felt cool. The gas cooker still worked so I made a breakfast big enough to bust the intestine of Homer Simpson. Eggs, ham, steak, mushrooms, coffee, more Scotch.
Now I felt fuelled and in gear.
The keys to the Shogun hung from a hook in the kitchen.
It was hit and miss but I loaded supplies into the back of the car. Food, Scotch, cans of beer, soft drinks, a spade, a tool kit, a long-handled axe, a wicked-looking diver’s knife. From the wardrobe I took a leather jacket. It was new and smelt so richly of leather you could taste it. I slipped it on.
I’d got the car, I’d got the supplies: now I’d find where the sane world started.
Chapter Ten
You’ve Never Seen a River Like This One
Finding where the sane world started wasn’t going to be as easy as I thought.