After it Happened Boxset: 1-6 Omnibus Edition, page 56
Steve ran through instructions for them all: both side doors would be open and all eyes would be searching for any sign of settlements. He pored over the maps, searching the swathes of farmland for the best places to support people. His last instruction was the most important. “Base layers, windproofs, gloves and hats; it’s going to be bloody freezing when we’re airborne.”
They wrapped up warmly as instructed, so much so that they were all overheating while Phil helped Steve run through the pre-flight checks. Neil looked on with professional interest. An interested crowd braved the cold to watch them take off.
Leah was strapped into the canvas seat nearest the sliding door. Her excitement was palpable, her grin impossibly wide with the fear and anticipation.
She had been on a plane once when she was younger, some wedding abroad paid for by family. She didn’t remember it in detail, so in her heart felt that this was the first and probably only time she would ever fly.
Dan strapped in opposite as Mitch showed off by standing and holding on with one hand as the heavy strap dangled to his back. Their weapons were secured tightly and headsets all plugged in.
The heavy bird lifted as it should and gained altitude impossibly fast, surging upwards before Steve tilted the controls. They left, peeling off to the right and heading away from home to quickly leave the crowd in silence. Leah’s smile didn’t fade at all, but during take off it seemed locked in a rictus of nervous and scared excitement. They craned their necks to see out of the doors and look down on the peaceful landscape. Mitch hooked their safety straps to the loops above the doors and unclipped the tight straps holding them in place.
Very carefully at first, they stood and looked out. The freedom and power Dan felt was incredible; he had ridden in helicopters half a dozen times before during training exercises, but this was something else. As he stared out over the empty landscape, he was overwhelmed by the urge to sit and hang his legs out of the door like he’d seen American soldiers in Vietnam War films do. He mentioned it jokingly into the microphone of his headset.
Steve laughed.
“I wouldn’t,” he said. “We’re doing about a hundred and seventy miles an hour at the moment; it’ll suck you out!”
He heard Leah’s chuckles over the headset as he stepped back a little further from the open door.
VISITORS FROM ABOVE
They had been in the air for almost an hour before they saw signs of human life.
Steve had slowed and dropped to about four hundred feet to allow time for his passengers to see more clearly. Out of Dan’s window, he spotted a moving vehicle and called it out over the headset. Steve turned the big aircraft slowly towards the promise of living people.
Somehow, landing in a helicopter with four armed soldiers made them less cautious than normal. The awe of their arrival should serve to assert their dominance and dissuade any thoughts of hostility; if they had a helicopter, then what else did they have? That was the theory in Dan’s mind, anyway. He gave no thought to the fear they would instil in others, or the false hope of a return of order their incredible machine could signify.
The dumbstruck driver of a battered farm 4x4 watched in silence as they swept around in front of him to land. Steve kept the rotors turning as Dan jumped down with Mitch. Leah, for once, didn’t pull a face at being told to stay put.
Dan had a quick shouted conversation with the man over the screaming whine of the three screaming engines, gaining his dumbfounded assent to lead them back to the camp. He checked there was enough clear space to land their ride before running low back to the Merlin; it was not strictly necessary, but it didn’t hurt to be careful.
It took a few minutes to follow the car back to a large, sprawling farm. Steve made an impressive turn before settling the howling machine on the grass and killing the engines to bathe the shocked survivors in renewed quiet and conserve the remainder of their fuel.
Mitch and Leah stayed to guard the aircraft as fifty or so people came from their work and hiding places to stare at the sudden and overwhelming newcomers. Steve and Dan went into the farmhouse, where they sat with a smaller version of their own leadership council. They were there for almost an hour, having swapped instructions on how to reach each other by road. They numbered only forty and were predominantly farmers. They had suffered badly from an attack last summer and had to resort to using their shotguns for the first time as defensive weapons against other people. It had scarred them deeply, and they promised to discuss with their members about joining Dan’s group for companionship and safety.
Leah spoke happily with the villagers who emerged to look at the helicopter, and she received some strange looks about the weapons she carried.
Dan and Steve eventually returned in a subdued mood, shaking hands formally with the elders and wearing uncharacteristically straight faces. They waved as Steve forced the machine off the ground with a backwards motion – so that he could see where he had to put it down if something went wrong during takeoff – and banked away to seek the airfield marked on his map. He gained altitude to use the roads as waypoints and Dan spoke to him while following the map as he sat beside him in the copilot’s seat with his hands and feet well away from the controls.
Mitch and Leah exchanged a look but were both too wrapped up in the fun they were having to look too deeply into what their change in mood meant.
The airfield was less than twenty-five minutes’ flight away, and the area where the small private helicopters were kept also housed a police helicopter which, Steve said, used the same mix of fuel.
Dan allowed himself a bitter smile looking at the black-and-yellow police chopper; not having been in the air for a year and a half was about par for the course. Unlike a police helicopter, theirs was well equipped to fly in minus twenty degrees Celsius as opposed to being grounded because it was a bit cloudy or the EastEnders omnibus was on.
The Merlin was left to cool before the correct fuel was found and carefully pumped into the tanks. Steve reckoned the reserve there was good for a few more days in the air, just as long as he dared to keep flying without the painstaking maintenance required.
Leah was disappointed about the lack of further searching, but Steve declared it was time to head home. Dan barely said a word the whole way back and strode off to the house the second they landed.
EXTINCTION EVENT
He found Marie sitting in Ops, waiting for their return. Ash was with her and his face lit up with excitement at seeing his master return, resulting in a rhythmic thud of his tail on the floor. Dan twitched his head outside and walked back out, unlocking his Discovery and climbing in to warm the engine and flicking both front heated seats to high.
Marie had wrapped up in a large parka and climbed in without a word. He drove. The cab had heated before she said anything.
“Something’s pretty bad, isn’t it,” she said. A statement, not a question.
He slowed and stopped, tiredly flicking the selector into park. He got out and hauled himself onto the bonnet, where he lit a cigarette and breathed deeply.
Laid out in front of him was a crisp, undisturbed landscape.
Marie joined him. “Tell me,” she said.
Dan explained about the group they had found, only then realising how perilously close they had been to the former Bronson’s reach if they had strayed into the urban areas.
“And?” she prompted, her patience running thin with the mystery revelation she was expecting.
“And they’ve had three stillbirths with double that in miscarriages,” Dan said quietly.
They sat in silence. Their own two could have been a coincidence. For other groups – the villagers and the one that the now dead King of Wales had mentioned – to all have the same issues was too much to accept as mere coincidence; it was a pattern.
Emma’s words haunted his mind all day: “We all have it,” she had said, but couldn’t say how it had left some people alive or what change it had made to them.
“What if Emma is right?” he asked Marie, voicing his thoughts.
For once, she had nothing to say. She hugged his left arm as she sat beside him, resting her head against his shoulder.
“If she’s right,” she said in a subdued tone, “then this really was our extinction event.” She hugged his arm tighter still as her tears began to fall. “It can’t be,” she said quietly. “I’m having your baby.”
EPILOGUE
Leaves blew across the pitted concrete, swirling them up and around inside a large, empty barn. Not strictly empty: the bones and decayed pelts of cattle lay undisturbed save for the scavengers who had long ago picked them clean.
A Land Rover lay on its wheel rims, tyres long weathered away, sitting awkwardly as the green film on it tried to obscure the symbol of vehicular dominance recognised all the world over. Where once the sound of lambs competed with the pigs, chickens and cows, there was now only an eerie silence.
A mile away lay a ruin of concrete, metal and glass. Greenhouses became tin skeletons, as all their glass panels had long since been blown in by the elements. Some were no longer even recognisable, as their contents had grown so tall in their confined space that they looked ridiculous and completely obscured the frames imprisoning them. The wood and plastic sheeting that had made the polytunnels was gone, only the occasional shred of exposed rubbish hinting at what used to be there.
Down the hill from the empty farm, a tree lay strewn across the rough driveway, its branches wilted and leaves gone. The trunk showed signs of rotting, as it had been there through the full turn of seasons.
The grand façade of the beautiful house was streaked with dark green from the blocked and damaged guttering; the once proud solar panels were covered in leaves. Water dripped from cracked glass and pipes, rendering the impressive feat of engineering useless and somehow spoiling the skyline with deformed additions to the architecture. Nature had encroached; thick vines had dug their deep and insidious grip into the stonework, gaining a beachhead on their long campaign to bring the building down and reclaim the materials once stolen to create it.
The large front door lay broken on one side, its hinges gone and the interior opened up to the elements. To the right, the twisted and grotesque remains of a cat lay on the floor under a shelf in a dusty office. To the left, evidence of humans existed in the damaged doorframe, laying bare a room filled with boxes of bullets and the guns to fire them. Thick layers of damp dust had warped and discoloured the cardboard, showing tarnished brass where it was exposed. Peeling paint and collapsed ceilings ran throughout the ground floor, and water dripped incessantly from a dozen obvious leaks. The remnants of what looked like a makeshift hospital lay deserted; cupboards of medicines stood untouched.
A large dining room stood empty and dark, children’s drawings now faded and fallen from their places on the walls where they had been displayed. Abandoned cups and plates were strewn across the room which had at one time seen many decisions made and the direction of many lives dictated.
Upstairs, more decay showed as floors creaked and bowed. Rainwater ran down walls, taking paint with it as the inexorability of gravity dragged everything man-made down to the ground.
Back outside, another vehicle was barely visible under the heavy canopy of a willow tree. Strips of what used to be chrome showed up dull in a shaft of light, and all four chunky tyres stood flat and useless. Once a proud example of status and intent, now just metal and plastic, never to move again.
To the rear of the big house was a lake, although it was overgrown all around and a haven for the teeming wildlife that called it home. Unchecked by predators, the animals ran riot as they competed for the abundant food sources. In the long grass of a field to the side of the lake lay the wreckage of a large machine. Heavy, long blades hung limp where they had not sheared away, and it was impossible to tell whether it was abandoned there or had crashed.
Nature was taking back what once belonged entirely to her; the existence of humans would be erased from this place by the passage of time. The desperate struggle to survive by the last residents would not be documented here, would not be discovered.
A row of small mounds of earth, headstones already long gone, disturbed the continuity of a patch of grass in the sunlight. Perhaps the only evidence of the fight to survive would be found there, one day, long after it happened.
After it Happened
Book 4: Hope
Devon C Ford
Dedicated to my own symbol of hope.
My daily dose of happiness.
My H.
PROLOGUE
Steve’s return trip was a lonely one. The two hours spent airborne to deliver the advance party was enjoyable as he guided the huge machine over the landscape.
Their target wasn’t difficult to find: the protected bay was unique in its geography and rich in lavish houses. Row upon row of individually sculpted residences, each with their own private jetty leading to the calm waters, jutted out over the high ground.
They called it “Million Row,” which was ironic because you’d have been very lucky to buy a house there with a measly one million.
Just before midday, he had swooped low to a patch of clear, open ground to allow his two passengers to jump from the side door and run for cover after closing the fuselage door behind them.
Steve had been on the ground for no more than a few seconds before his feet and hands guided the green Merlin helicopter upwards in a surge of power.
He turned the nose north, dipped it low and screamed away over the rooftops.
Without someone with him to focus his mind, his thoughts wandered, as they often did. He found himself again having covered miles in the air travelling in excess of one hundred and sixty miles an hour without any conscious thought. He had to stop doing that.
His focus returned to the immediate when he was about forty miles out and a blinking red light above his head became the centre of his world: oil pressure warning.
He tapped the readout in the vain hope experienced by every human being in such a situation that it might just be a mistake. It wasn’t. He began to feel a subtle change in the way his bird was holding the air – a slight tug here and there, more effort needed to keep her straight.
His fears of the diminished lifespan of a modern aircraft without proper maintenance was becoming fact all too quickly. He faced a difficult decision: make distance towards home as fast as possible or slow down and be prepared to ditch the aircraft at a slower speed which wouldn’t necessarily result in a violent death.
He steadied his nerves, opted for a period of speed and prayed he would make it back.
THE COMMON DENOMINATOR
Marie’s revelation prompted mixed feelings in Dan. He was utterly overjoyed at the knowledge that she was pregnant, and in the same second terrified that she would die. He felt utterly distraught that their baby would never live.
Being the well-adjusted and emotionally open man that he was, his fear and concern presented themselves as an impotent anger.
This did not impress Marie.
He tried to comfort her, to wrap her up in his arms and recite false platitudes like “it’s going to be OK”, but he couldn’t force himself to lie convincingly. Even for her.
He found himself avoiding her, furthering the distance they felt growing between them. He had to do something. Every problem had at least one solution, and if something couldn’t be immediately fixed with action, then he had no idea what to do or where to even start.
He stalked from room to room, looking for some useful activity or distraction to present itself. He found Kate sitting with Sera in the lounge and stopped. He wanted to confide in Kate, but Sera always mocked him and provoked arguments; he knew it was just their personalities clashing, but he couldn’t deal with that right now.
He mumbled to Kate, asking for a word. A scathing look was fired at him from Sera, and the two disentangled themselves as Kate rose. She walked with him outside, waiting patiently as he directed Ash off to search the bushes and lit himself a cigarette.
“Marie’s pregnant,” he said finally.
No look of joy washed over her face as such revelations usually prompted. The memory of delivering stillborn babies and fighting frantically to save the lives of their mothers was still a raw nerve for her. She knew what the news meant better than most.
“Before you say it was irresponsible, it happened before we knew about the problems. She reckons she’s about five weeks gone,” he said, looking at the floor and feeling utterly to blame for putting her life in danger.
“We’ll do everything we can for her,” Kate replied, placing a reassuring hand on his shoulder and feeling his pain for the impending loss.
“Everything,” Dan said with a mirthless smile. “What more can be done than to just try and keep her alive? An abortion?”
He felt instantly wretched for saying it out loud, but he couldn’t help thinking that it was early enough for her to take something and stay alive at the cost of their baby. He stopped and screwed his face up to try and keep the fear and grief locked inside.
Kate surprised him then, wrapping him up in a big hug while telling him it was going to be OK. He wanted to believe her. He almost did. How was it so easy for some people to comfort others, but his attempts just made them angry?
“We’ll look at this again from scratch. Go over all the medical histories and find something,” she said as she let him go.
He mumbled his thanks as she turned and walked back to the house. He stayed outside, letting the late summer morning warm his body.
Ash snapped his head up and stared as two figures approached, jogging down the long driveway. No growl came from him, betraying that he already knew their identities when Dan couldn’t tell from that distance other than to guess. He glanced up at his master, who nodded his head towards the two runners. As Ash bounded away to greet them, the shapes became two slim young women.
