Flare

Chapter 28

We followed the convoy for about two hours, keeping well back but still seeing the trucks far ahead when we rounded bends and crested hills.

I was worried that they would see us in turn and send someone to investigate, but Emily assured me we were too far away and too small to be noticed.

“If we were driving a truck, I’d worry,” she said, and I bowed to her experience.

We turned off the motorway at a junction that headed north, climbing the slip road under a steel grey sky that threatened rain despite the muggy heat.

The moisture in the air seemed to make my ankle throb, and I found myself lagging further and further behind as the thick greenery to the side of the road abruptly gave way to buildings, mostly industrial but with houses visible behind a last screen of trees off to our left.

A large truck sat in the roadway opposite an office building, the back still locked on the trailer but the cab doors wide open.

Looking around to make sure we were unobserved, Emily hauled herself into the cab and then leaned out to pull me up behind.

I’d never been in a proper truck cab before. It was surprisingly roomy, with a small sleeping cubby behind the two seats. This one had a microwave on a shelf above the window, as well as a TV on an extendable stand that could be pulled down to rest in the middle of the windscreen.

The bedding was surprisingly clean, and anything personal had been stripped out to leave small pieces of blue tack and a lonely drawing pin on the rear wall.

“Lie down on the bed and take your shoe off.” Emily pointed at the small cubby and I obediently squeezed in, but paused before undoing my trainer.

“Uh, you know we haven’t washed for a couple of days,” I said, but she shrugged.

“Believe me, after you’ve spent ten days in thirty eight degree heat with no water to wash in, you get a lot less worried about things like that. What I am worried about is you keeping up.”

I removed the trainer, then my sock, grimacing at the smell of sweaty feet. Despite her words, Emily wrinkled her nose as she unwrapped the bandage. She took my heel in one hand and my calf in the other and began to rotate the joint slowly, and we both winced as it clicked and ground.

“That doesn’t sound good,” she said with a frown. “Priority number one has to be getting you some proper footwear with ankle support. The bandage is ok but it’s not enough.”

She redid the bandage, making sure it was tight, and I put my sock and trainer back on hurriedly.

“Where are we now?” I asked as she began to search the cab for anything useful.

“Maidenhead, apparently. You ever been there?”

I shook my head. “Not to stay, only passing through. Do you know it?”

“Not really, although it’s bound to have something like a camping shop where we can find you some shoes. You want to do that Google search now?”

We both smiled, although a little sadly. The first thing I would do if my phone was working, I realised, was call Melody just to hear her voice. I’d become used to speaking to her every single day no matter what happened, and the sudden lack of contact was starting to wear at me. I didn’t know if she was safe, well, happy or… I couldn’t even finish the thought. I could only pray that Angie had managed to get them to her parents, eminently practical people who would keep them fed from the years of tinned food in their larder.

“Good to go?” Emily’s voice pulled me from my daydreaming and I nodded, then slid off the bed and between the seats to follow her out onto the road.

As we set off again, Emily pointed at the unscarred buildings around us.

“I wonder why some of the places we go through are burned to the ground and others are untouched?”

“I’ve been thinking about that,” I said, pleased to be able to offer a theory on something, “and I think it’s to do with the substations. Different areas draw different amounts of power, right?”

She nodded and gestured for me to continue.

“So some areas are close to overload already. I wrote an article about the risk of a brownout a couple of years ago, and apparently there are places where they are, uh were, just a few kettles away from a shutdown. Yet other areas have a substation for every few streets, or so it seems. I reckon that the areas that caught fire are the ones that were already close to capacity, and the ones that handled the local current better had time for their switches to trip or whatever it is that they do, stopping the surge from carrying on into the buildings. How does that sound?”

Emily chewed her lip as she thought about it.

“That would make sense. I don’t know how sensitive the cut-offs are, but a big enough overload on an already taxed system would almost certainly result in a massive surge.”

“So now you’ve got your engineer brain on,” I said as we walked close to the central reservation, both of us now scanning the buildings on either side of the road for any signs of life, “answer me this if you can. Did you speak to Jerry much about what happened with the flare?”

She nodded. “Yeah, we had a few minutes to chat.”

“So why is it that my phone almost burned my hand off but and car batteries were drained if they were plugged in, but our torches still work?”

“I don’t need Jerry to tell you that one. Your phone has a processor in it, and everything that did overheated almost immediately. I think that might be another cause of the fires, to be honest. And as for the battery thing, your car is a big lump of metal, but a torch or anything smaller would avoid the worst of it unless you were carrying one of those huge metal maglites, the ones that take eight batteries.”

I still didn’t quite understand it but I nodded as if I did, hating to look stupid.

The buildings on either side of the road gradually went from industrial to domestic, but as with the last place we’d been through, there was no sign of anyone still living in the area.

Of course they could be shut away indoors while they waited for the power to come back on, but the windows we passed remained empty and the whole place had a desolate feel to it, as if stripped of humanity.

The truck was almost half an hour behind us when we came across a row of shops, all but a laundrette and an army surplus store with the windows smashed and goods looted.

The laundrette had presumably escaped because it held nothing of value, but the surplus store was a different matter. Both large windows had steel roller-shutters pulled down over them and the door in the middle was steel-reinforced wood. There were serious dents and gouges in the metal but it had held firm, keeping out the looters. Unfortunately, it seemed it was going to keep us out as well.

“Boots and proper clothing behind those,” Emily said, giving the door an experimental rattle. “All we need to do is work out how to get in.”

I pointed to the windows above the shop, single-glazed sliding sashes that a child could break into. A child that was twenty feet tall, that is.

“Maybe we can find a ladder?”

“Sure,” she said, “and where are we going to find one of those?”

I looked up the road, spying a builder’s van at the far end.

“In that, maybe?”

She shrugged and led the way to the van. It was locked, but the stock of the shotgun put a window out quickly enough. I winced at the noise, half expecting angry residents to pour out of their houses, but nothing stirred as Emily reached in, opened the door and climbed inside.

She disappeared over the seats into the back, and opened the rear door a few moments later, coming out with not just the ladder but also a small toolkit.

“Never know when it might come in handy,” she said, stowing it in her bag as I held the ladder.

“Anything else useful?” I peered into the back at the shelves and boxes lining the walls.

“Only if you like porn.”

“I think I’ll pass, thanks.”

I carried the ladder over to the shop, allowing Emily to keep her hands free for the shotgun, then we swapped as the ladder was extended and placed up against the wall. I stood with my good foot on the bottom rung as she climbed, trying to watch her and keep an eye out at the same time as my sweaty palms gripped the shotgun too tightly.

“It’s not even locked,” she called back down as she slid the window open, “I’ll be back out shortly.”

She pulled the pistol from her waistband and rolled smoothly through the window, leaving me to stand there in the road with the irrational fear that the police would turn up and arrest me for burglary.

The image was so ludicrous that I began to chuckle, and I was still laughing as I heard the bolts on the inside of the door slide back and it creaked open.

“What are you laughing at?” Emily demanded, expression showing that she thought she might be the butt of the joke.

“Just worrying about getting a criminal record,” I giggled, and she laughed too.

“I promise to put in a good word for you, come on, the place is full of stuff.”

I took the precaution of removing the ladder in case anybody happened by, collapsing it and laying it on its side against the wall of the laundrette. When Emily saw what I was doing she nodded her approval.

“Good thinking. Now let’s see what we can salvage before someone does show up to investigate the noise we’ve made.”

I cast one last look up and down the street, then hurried inside, eager to find myself some new boots, and maybe some clothes that didn’t smell quite so bad.