The Grid Read online

  “How can I?” I ask, handing it back to him. “The battery's dead”.

  “It's not,” he says. He walks over to the other side of the room and flicks the light switch a few times; nothing happens. “Nothing works. The lights. The phones. The internet”. He grabs a torch from the side and flicks it on and off, except there's no light. “Nothing”.

  “So there's a power cut,” I say. “The plane probably hit a power cable”.

  “The plane landed after the power cut started,” Pierce says. “About two minutes after, to be precise. And a power cut wouldn't explain why the torch doesn't work, or why my fully-charged phone won't switch on. It's like -”

  We're suddenly interrupted by a cry from outside, from the back yard.

  “Help!” shouts a man with a muffled voice. He sounds like he's being strangled.

  We rush out and find the old man from across the road staggering towards us, clutching his chest. At first I assume he's injured from the plane crash, but there's not a scratch on him as he collapses at our feet. Kneeling down, we roll him over. His face is flushed and red, and he can barely breathe.

  “Call help!” he splutters. “Call someone!”

  “We can't,” says Pierce.

  “Call help!” the old man says again, looking up at us desperately, turning even redder.

  “You're having a heart attack,” Pierce says with the confident tone of voice of someone who seems to actually know what he's talking about.

  The old man shakes his head. “Pacemaker,” he rasps, pulling open his shirt to reveal a chest with lots of white hairs and, beneath them, the distinctive lump of a pacemaker under his skin. “Pacemaker not working, need...” He gasps, like a fish out of water. “Need help. Call them!”

  “There's no-one to call,” Pierce says. “The phones are dead”.

  “Don't listen to him,” I say, interrupting. I keep my gaze on the old man, and I try my hardest to smile. “There's an ambulance coming,” I say. “They're on their way. They're gonna help you, I promise”.

  The old man nods, but he's clearly not got long left. He can barely breathe, and he's clutching at his chest.

  “What's your name”? I ask him.

  “G... G...” He can't get the sounds out. “Gary Evans,” he eventually manages, with the kind of forced formality that you usually get from a kid on his first day of school.

  “It's going to be okay, Gary,” I say.

  “There's no -” Pierce starts to say, but I elbow him in the ribs and he falls back. I didn't mean to hit him so hard, but I'm not entirely sorry that I did.

  “When are they gonna get here?” Gary asks, his voice fading, his eyes starting to glaze over.

  “Soon,” I say. “Soon, Gary. Okay?”

  He reaches his hand up, and I take it in mine, and then he stares at me for a moment before his head falls back. He keeps his eyes on the sky, then he breathes out slowly, and it takes me a few moments to realise that he's dead. Fuck, he died right in front of me, he died... I look down at his hand in mine. He died touching me! I let his hand go, freaked out by the whole thing.

  “Why did you lie to him?” Pierce asks, still sitting back after I elbowed him.

  “I don't know,” I say, shaking my head.

  “Seems pretty cruel, lying to a dying guy,” Pierce continues.

  “I wanted to give him hope,” I say, reaching down and closing Gary's eyes.

  “False hope,” Pierce says. “They aren't coming. They can't come. Something's seriously wrong”.

  “It'll be okay,” I say, staring down at Gary's dead face.

  “Oh,” Pierce says, “you keep saying that “.

  “It'll be okay,” I say again, this time more forcefully.

  “Think about it,” Pierce says, sounding surprisingly calm. “Lights don't work. Computers don't work. Phones, batteries, fucking pacemakers don't work”. He comes closer and leans right in to my face. “A fucking aeroplane fell from the sky, and no-one came to even take a look. Don't you get it? It's not a power cut. It's more like... Electricity has stopped”.

  I turn to him. “What?” I scowl.

  “Nothing electrical works,” he says. “Even stuff with stored power, like batteries. It doesn't work. It's just stopped. It's like the concept of electricity just ceased to exist. The whole theory of how electricity works has just suddenly become false”.

  I stare at him for a moment. “That can't happen,” I say eventually. “You're full of shit. Completely full of shit”.

  “Am I?” he asks, staring me in a way that unnerves me because it's clear that he really believes this. “Whatever makes you feel better”. He pauses, his eyes fixed on mine. “But I'm totally, totally right. One hundred per cent, no doubt about it. And you know what else? I knew about two hours ago that this was gonna happen”.

  Extract from the diary of Lydia Hoff

  The first question, obviously, was a simple one: what happened? How could we go from having electricity one moment to having none the next? Where did it go? Everyone wanted to know, but no-one had an answer. It was as if it had just vanished. But eventually we started to hear rumours, and after a while these rumours started to seem like fact. I'm still not entirely sure what happened, but I have my suspicions.

  A man came to our town one day and told us that there had been a solar flare that neutralised all the electricity. Well, that's not quite right: what it actually did is it prevented electrons from functioning in their old ways, so we were no longer able to generate electricity because the basic scientific principle behind electricity suddenly changed. We were thrown back a couple of hundred years in terms of scientific development.

  Of course, there were others who said that this was an act of God. Many religious groups sprang up in the first years after the disaster happened, all claiming to understand what we had done to anger God and how we could possibly beg his forgiveness and mercy. I laughed at them at the time, but now that I'm old I find myself wondering if perhaps there was some truth to that. I'll tell you something that my own mother told me once: at the end, as they die, everybody believes in God. Everybody.

  I have never believed in God. But now I wonder, when the end finally comes...

  Chapter 3

  ELECTRON BLUES

  “If my laptop worked, this would be so much easier,” Pierce says, sketching out a bunch of circles on a piece of paper as we sit in the kitchen of my parents' house. “I'd have 3D models, animations, the works. As it is...” He draws another circle, and a squiggly line connecting them. “There,” he says. “That's what happened”.

  I look at the drawing and try to make sense of it.

  “Okay,” says Pierce, “that circle is us. Earth. And that circle is the Sun. That squiggly line is an high-intensity electron storm that the Sun belched out earlier today. It's done it before, but this time it was huge. Huger than ever. And it was fast. There was almost no time for us to react. And I'm pretty sure that it neutralised electricity all over the planet”.

  I stare at the drawing.

  “How long for?” I ask.

  He shrugs. “I was trying to work that out when the power went. Best guess is, it could be twenty, thirty years”.

  I look at him. “No electricity for twenty or thirty years?”

  He shakes his head.

  “Can't be,” I say. “That can't be right”.

  “Why not?” he asks. “Because you don't want it to be right?”

  “They would have warned us,” I say.

  “For fuck's sake,” he replies. “Who are they? Who's this mysterious 'they' who you keep thinking are gonna come and save us? No-one had enough warning about this. There's nothing 'they' could have done to stop it anyway. And 'they' ain't coming to pick up the pieces of that plane that crashed, or the pieces of any of the others that I'm damn sure crashed all over the country. All over the world”.

  I stand up and go over to the window, looking out at the street. It looks pretty normal if you only look in one direction, b
ut if you look the other way there's still a huge plume of black smoke coming from the burning plane and the burning houses beneath it.

  “We should get out of here,” Pierce says behind me. “That plane isn't exactly clean. The fumes from the fire are gonna get more and more toxic, and there's no-one to put the flames out. It's gonna spread. Can't you feel how hot it is? It's gonna get hotter. Give it a few hours, the flames are gonna be on our doorstep. We have to go”.

  “I'm not going anywhere,” I say. “Not until my parents get home”.

  “Where are they?” he asks.

  I swallow hard. “California for a conference”.

  “California?” he repeats, clearly amused. “Fuck you, that's the other side of the country. They ain't getting back home any time soon, okay?”

  “They'll be here,” I say.

  “How?” he asks, coming over to join me at the window. “No planes, no trains. How are they gonna get here? You think gas is still gonna be on sale? Even if it is, you think the pumps'll still work? What do you think's gonna happen, everyone's gonna just be calm?”

  “They wouldn't leave me here,” I say, turning to him.

  “It doesn't matter what they want to do,” he says. “They have no choice. If they set out now, to get from California to New Jersey would take them years. Fucking years”.

  “The government will -”

  “Fuck them!” Pierce shouts. He's getting angry. Just when I was starting to think that maybe he was okay, he's turning into a bundle of rage. “They can't help us! They have no more power than we have, and if they did, you don't think they'd be a little bit busy dealing with the potential fucking nuclear apocalypse?”

  “What?” I say.

  He sighs. “There are 104 nuclear power stations in the United States, okay?”

  “Okay,” I mutter.

  “Okay?” he says louder, shaking me. “Are you listening here?”

  “Yes!” I shout back at him. “I'm listening! What's your point?”

  “104 nuclear power stations,” he continues, “all of them now without electrical power. All of them. No cooling systems. No safety systems. Minimal back-ups. And no means of recovery whatsoever. Do you understand what that means?”

  I sigh. “104 nuclear explosions in the next day or two?” I ask.

  He shakes his head. “Not explosions. Meltdowns. Not up. Down. Geddit? Huge blotches of land across the country, impossible to enter and impossible to avoid”.

  “Impossible to avoid?” I say. “Why?”

  “Because they're each about five miles wide,” he says, shaking my shoulders like I'm some kind of idiot. “And I don't know about you, but I sure as hell don't have a map of where they are, do you?”

  I push him away. “Fuck off,” I spit at him. “I'll just find out by going onli...” My voice trails off. I turn and look at my laptop, and a heavy sinking feeling hits me. “Fuck,” I say softly. I turn back to Pierce. “What do we do? How long before they... start melting down?”

  “I don't know what we do,” he says calmly. “And it's too late, they've already started. But we can't stay here because of the flames. We have to get out of here, go somewhere where there's something better”.

  “Like what?”

  “I don't know,” he says. “I haven't figured it out yet”.

  “Then you haven't got any better ideas than I've got,” I reply. “I'm not going anywhere. I'm staying here and waiting for my parents, okay?”

  Pierce stares at me, and he opens his mouth to argue. But he seems to realise it's a lost cause.

  “Okay,” he says, turning and heading to the door. He looks back at me. “I'm not sitting around waiting for some magical unicorn fairy to come and save the day. I need to get some stuff together but I'll be gone in the morning. I guess I won't see you again, so good luck”.

  And with that, he's gone.

  I head over to the other window, and I see Gary's dead body on the lawn. Okay, things look bad right now, but help's coming. There'll be firefighters to tackle the burning plane, and someone'll find a way to get everything back up and running. The important thing is not to panic, and to just hold on and be patient. So that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to stay at home and wait until everything goes back to normal.

  Extract from the diary of Lydia Hoff

  My father said: We must stay here. This was before the ecotone. Although my mother wanted us to leave our home and go to the city to see if there was any news, my father insisted that we must stay at home. He said he would find us some food, and that help would be on the way. We believed him.

  No-one knows how many people died in the first day, but we can be sure that it was a huge number. There were seven billion people on the planet back then. I imagine that at least half of them must have died quite soon. Certainly here, in America, there were corpses everywhere. We all relied so much upon electricity back then.

  One of those who died was my brother, Russell.

  I loved Russell so much. He was almost ten years older than me, and I thought he was so wonderful. So cool. I always wanted to go with him wherever he went, but he couldn't have a little girl following him all the time. He always took time to play with me, but I always wanted so badly to live his whole life with him. I loved him as much as any sister can ever love her brother. Even now, ninety years after he died, I find myself wondering every day what he would have been like if he had been able to grow up and become a man.

  When the power cut came, my family assumed it was just a temporary glitch. It wasn't until about two days later, when even our phones still didn't work, that we began to fear that something was terribly wrong. There was just no news coming from the outside world at all. And then we heard stories about aeroplanes crashing nearby, not just one but many. And we heard about back-up generators failing at hospitals, and we found that there was less and less food, and less and less water. By the third day, we were starting to panic.

  My father took my brother Russell out early one morning to go and find food. They took hunting rifles, which mercifully still worked because they didn't require electricity. My mother was concerned, but my father reassured her that they would be very careful with the guns. I, of course, begged and begged to be allowed to go with them, but my father said I must stay at home. I was so angry at the time, though now I understand that if I had gone with them, I would have died.

  My mother and I waited all day for them to come home. When dusk came, my mother told me to go to bed and a little while later I heard the front door open, followed by sobbing. I didn't dare leave my room, so I waited until morning and it was only then that I found out my brother had been killed by a bear. My mother and father were distraught as they told me that without electricity, there was no light from the town to scare the bears away. It was then that I first heard the word that has stayed with me ever since, the word that is used to define a place where two habitats overlap: ecotone. My brother was killed by the ecotone.

  Chapter 4

  THE INVADER

  I wait, and wait, and wait. When night comes, the whole neighbourhood is lit up by the light from the fire where the plane crashed, but fortunately the wind seems to be blowing the flames in the opposite direction. Unable to sleep, I find myself sitting by the window, just staring out at the pitch black street. I don't think I've ever been in such a silent, dark place before. And although I half expect all the lights to suddenly come back on, I have this feeling in the pit of my stomach that tells me Pierce might be right.

  No-one's going to come.

  I eventually fall asleep, but I wake up as the sun is rising. There are birds singing nearby, a noise that I've only ever noticed on TV before. I get up and wander about the house for a while, not really sure what to do. There's still no power, so I eat something from the fridge and decide I need to be more proactive; I need to take control and find out what's going on. Although it's tempting to just sit in the house and wait to be rescued, I guess I might end up just sitting here forever.
r />   So I decide to head into town. Figuring there must be some information about what's happening, I grab my bike and cycle through a succession of deserted streets. I don't know where everyone is, but I guess they're all just waiting inside until we find out what's going on. There are still cars in the driveways, and at times things seem almost calm and peaceful.

  It's very different when I get into town, however. There are people milling about – not as many as I'd expected, but still people. I thought there might be some kind of meeting happening, maybe in the library or on the steps of the town hall, but there's nothing like that going on. Instead, people are just wandering about, talking in small huddled groups, and (somewhat surprisingly) pushing shopping carts full of food along the street.

  “Do you know what's happening?” I ask a woman pushing a cart past me.

  “Sorry,” she says, and keeps going.

  I walk my bike around the corner and find that the local supermarket has had its doors forced open. People are filing in and out like ants, taking whatever they can. They're stock-piling food in case of an emergency, and as I get near the door I hear what sounds like fighting and arguing inside. Peering inside, I see two men struggling at the far end of the store; one of them is in a headlock, and they're grappling with one another while those around them just empty the shelves into their baskets. The store is almost bare; clearly most of the stuff was taken earlier.

  Seeing a crushed packet of chips on the floor – which someone clearly stepped on as they left – I consider taking them, but I decide not to. After all, that'd be stealing and I'm pretty sure we aren't at the point yet where we need to start looting. I look up at the security camera monitoring the inside of the store, but then I remember that it's probably not running anyway.

  Leaning my bike against the wall, I go around the corner and find a man trying to smash an ATM machine with a brick. He looks up at me.

  “Fucking thing won't pay out,” he says.