He paused and checked the screen on his equipment, then muttered something and hit a button. A small printer at the bottom of the stack began to spew out paper.
I raised an eyebrow but he ignored me as he continued.
“So that was the most advanced technology in the world back then, and the flare all but destroyed it. Now imagine something as powerful as that flare, then scale it up by about five times and imagine what it will do to every single piece of technology on the planet, and that’s what I think is about to happen.”
He looked at me expectantly, perhaps expecting me to jump up in a panic or show some other sign of amazement that wouldn’t be forthcoming.
“Oh come on, Jerry,” I said, trying to keep the scorn out of my voice and failing, “if it was that bad the government would know, and they would have warned everybody, surely?”
“Oh would they? And these are the same people who had proof of WMD’s in Iraq, the same people who have spent the last year stocking up the old cold war nuclear bunkers and for the last twelve hours have been completely uncontactable?”
I finished my coffee and suddenly wished for a cigarette. I’d quit six months before but I still found myself reaching for them at odd moments. And this definitely counted as an odd moment.
“So you’re saying that the government know and they’re not telling anyone? Why would they do that?”
He stood and rooted through his pockets, pulling out a battered packet of Marlboro reds and lighting one. He offered me the packet and it took everything I had not to accept.
“Because,” he said as he blew a plume of smoke into the night sky, the breeze dispersing it almost immediately, “there’s no point in making people panic if there’s nothing they can do. If this flare is as bad as I think it’s going to be, it’ll knock out the national grid for days, maybe even weeks. The damage from that will be bad enough, but can you imagine what would happen if you told the general public that they were about to face it? Riots, panic, fighting in the streets, just to get food and water. No, far better for the government to squirrel themselves away and come out to pick up the pieces once the infrastructure is back on its feet.”
I shook my head. “I don’t buy it. They’ve known about the risk of big flares for a long time, they must have put some money into protecting the grid.”
Jerry barked a laugh. “For a journalist, you can be very naïve. The energy companies pay all those billions they make out to their shareholders, and keep the rest for themselves. What little money goes back into the system just replaces parts that are worn out or goes on research for cheaper ways to make the money they already charge. To protect the grid against something as big as a major flare properly would cost billions, and who’s going to pay that kind of money out for something that might never happen?”
“So what happens if the grid does overload?” As much as I didn’t want to believe him, for once Jerry was making a kind of sense. I could well imagine how bad things might get if the grid went down over the winter. Thousands, perhaps millions of people would die as food, fuel and water delivery ground to a halt, with too few people in the modern world having any idea how to live off the land.
“Well the flare will work like an Electromagnetic Pulse,” Jerry said, waving his cigarette to emphasise his point, “and that will knock out pretty much anything with a chip in it. The grid will stop regulating itself when the chips in its circuits fry, but the power stations will carry on pumping out electricity, only there’ll be a backwash and the transformers will blow. In order to get it all up and running again they’ll have to replace every single transformer in every single substation in the country. And that’s not even the worst of it.”
I opened my mouth to ask the inevitable question, but as I did the sky lit up again, the same blues, greens and reds as earlier but so vibrant that it looked as if a team of giants were standing behind the sky with laser pointers, each trying to outdo the other.
“What the…” I looked at Jerry but he had crouched by his display again, his fingers flashing over keys and dials as the printer continued to churn out reams of paper.
“If you’ve got anyone to call, I’d do it now,” he called over his shoulder, “I think the cell towers are about to go down.”
There was only one person in the world I wanted to call, and if Jerry was wrong she’d be grumpy with me but I could live with that. Pulling out my phone, I hit speed-dial and after a moment it began to ring.
I was about to give up when Melody’s sleepy voice answered the phone.
“Dad, do you know what time it is?” The line hissed and crackled as she spoke.
“I know sweetheart, I’m sorry. Listen to me though, and listen carefully. There’s a very good chance that the electricity will stop working for a while all over the country, and if it does then I’m going to drive up and find you, ok?”
“What, all the electricity?”
“Yes love, all of it.”
“Then how will I charge my phone?” She asked, still half asleep.
“The phones won’t work either, so if it does happen, you need to tell your mum that I’m coming and make sure that she keeps you safe. Can you do that?”
“…Dad, you’re scaring…” The line began to fizz, small popping sounds making her voice almost unreadable.
“Melody, tell your mum to keep you safe, I’m coming, ok?”
“Dad, I ca… hear y… I’m scare…”
“Melody, it’s ok, you’ll be fine. Just make sure you tell your mum. Maybe get her to take you to nan and grandpa’s, eh?”
They lived in the suburbs just outside the city, and still had the wartime mentality of stockpiling food ‘just in case’ that had been drummed into them by their own parents. I figured they had a far better chance of survival than Angie’s ‘get a takeaway on the way home’ way of thinking.
“…the sky! Dad, it’s…” The line gave a final pop and went dead. The phone felt hot against my ear and I pulled it away to see that the screen was totally blank, the battery pack hot enough to burn my hand.
“Shit. Jerry, I need to leave, now.” I dropped my phone on the ground, too hot to hold anymore, and looked around to see him frantically unplugging his equipment, pulling out the batteries and placing them in his bag.
“Jerry,” I called again, “I’m going, now.”
I thought for a moment that he hadn’t heard me, but as I turned he looked up at me.
“Malc, wait!”
I stopped, every fibre of my being telling me to get into the car and drive to Manchester now, but there was a note of pure panic in Jerry’s voice that rooted my feet to the ground.
He pointed south, and as I followed his finger I saw something that would have frozen me to the spot if I wasn’t already.
All across the city and the fields below us, I could see electricity pylons, their metal frames spitting fat blue sparks that crawled out from the substations and on towards the homes they connected to like jagged spiders of pure electricity, scuttling towards the unsuspecting city.
“Oh my god,” I muttered, unable to do more than stare in horror, hoping, praying that the discharge would ground itself before it reached the homes and businesses laid out below us. Only it didn’t.
And then the world caught fire.
Chapter 4
The city went dark below us, whole streets winking out into darkness in a split second until not a single electric light shone anywhere that I could see.
At the same time, the electrical charges struck in too many places to count. For a few seconds I thought that they had all grounded safely, losing their charge before doing any damage, but then a roiling explosion lit the night sky, a huge gout of flame and dirty smoke shooting up into the air somewhere in the heart of Brighton.