I looked up, only now realising that the light had been gradually increasing as we approached the town. In my mind, I think I’d dismissed the glow as approaching streetlights, only there weren’t any streetlights left working.
Pulling the car to a halt, Jerry opened his door and got out. I followed suit, and the moment I stepped out of the vehicle I could hear the roar and crackle of flames, mixed with the shouts, screams and cries of people trapped in their homes or standing outside them watching their lives burn.
I could smell the fires now, the sharp acrid stink of burning wood, plastic and rubber catching in the back of my throat as the flames leapt and writhed, turning the scene into a hellish contrast of light and shadow.
In front of us, a whole row of houses was aflame, while fewer than a dozen people stood watching, most of them in night clothes with bemused expressions on their faces, many gripping their now-useless mobile phones as if they would suddenly start working again.
“What should we do?” Jerry asked uncertainly, “there’s no water, no way of getting help and the back seats of the car are full of kit so we can’t take anyone with us.”
He turned to me with an anguished expression.
“How do we help them?”
I ducked instinctively as the upper windows of a nearby house exploded outwards, filthy black smoke rolling out in clouds as the fire raged out of control.
“You were right,” I said quietly, seeing the futility but hating myself for what I was about to say, “we can’t help anyone. Except ourselves, anyway. Let’s go, there’s nothing we can do.”
We stood there for a few moments longer, perhaps hoping that inspiration would strike and we’d see a way to help, but eventually we climbed back in the car and Jerry started the engine, pulling away without another word.
I’m not sure what was eating me more as we left the ravaged city behind, the fact that we hadn’t even tried to risk ourselves to help anyone, or my secret relief that we didn’t have to.
Chapter 5
The roads were clear of other moving vehicles, although there were enough abandoned ones dotted around to make Jerry grip the wheel with whitened knuckles as they loomed out of the darkness.
He took us along the A27, the main Brighton bypass, then joined the A23 heading up towards London. As we merged with the larger road, we began to pass people walking back towards the coast on the hard shoulder, a few of them trying to wave us down.
“I’m not stopping,” Jerry said after one man all but leapt in front of the car in an effort to stop us. I nodded in agreement. Despite my earlier desire to help, there was nothing we could do but perhaps give out some of Jerry’s stock of food and water, and we would need that to get to Manchester.
The miles rolled past in silence, neither of us having much to say. Jerry was concentrating on avoiding the abandoned vehicles, some of which had crashed when they’d lost power, and I was still trying to come to terms with what had happened.
I wondered if my house had survived, or if I would return to find it a charred and smoking ruin, or broken into and looted.
Not that many of my worldly goods would be worth anything now. I listed them in my head as I realised just how dependent I was on technology that was now largely useless. Laptop, TV, phone, Kindle, playstation, tablet, ipod. The list went on, and even when they restored the electricity it would still all be fried, little more than expensive-looking paperweights.
It was hard to believe that one brief flare from the sun, our life-giver, had brought the modern world to its knees, but one look out of the window at the dark, abandoned cars that we were passing more and more frequently was enough to assure me that it very much had.
“How did you know?” I asked, startling myself as much as Jerry as the question popped out of my subconscious.
“Know what?” Jerry swerved and cursed as someone leapt out from the hard shoulder, arms waving frantically.
“That the flare would be so bad,” I replied, watching the forlorn figure disappear in the mirror. “And why were you the only one?”
“Before I, uh, left the university, I was one of the country’s leading experts on the sun, and flares in particular,” he said, “and I was working on a series of algorithms that would not only predict when and where a flare would hit, but also how strong it would be.”
He slowed the car a little, making an obvious effort to try and relax his death-grip on the wheel.
“I finally figured it out a few days ago,” he continued, “which turned out to be about six months too late. I tried to contact the government, but the best I could get was some smarmy little shit who was undersecretary to the undersecretary of sweet F.A. He told me that I didn’t need to worry, and that their experts had told them that the flare was going to be a small one, and would most likely just skim the atmosphere. Idiots.”
“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.