Flare (2 page)

Chapter
3

Thirty minutes later I pulled in next to Jerry’s car, a rust-bucket of a VW Golf that was at least twenty years old if not more.  From there Jerry wasn’t hard to spot.

He’d camped up on the brow of the nearest hill, surrounding himself with all manner of strange equipment ranging from a telescope to what appeared to be a portable satellite dish attached to a box of lights, switches and dials.

Climbing the gate into the field, I trudged over to his nest with a flask in one hand and my torch in the other, careful not to trip on the rutted ground.

As I approached, I could just make out Jerry sat on a folding garden chair, his face gently illuminated by the glow of a small screen attached to the box of lights.

The aurora had faded now, at least for the moment, and I carefully pushed my way into the small area near Jerry that wasn’t bristling with equipment.

He stood awkwardly and shook my hand, torch and all.

“Thank you Malc, thank you for coming.  There’s a lot to explain, and I know that despite what’s happened in the past you’ll at least listen to me”.

I looked up at him and searched his face in the dim light, hoping to glean some clue as to how serious he was about all this.  Although, to be fair, he’d been deadly serious last time he told me about the crashed alien spaceship the government were hiding in The Forest of Dean, and I shuddered when I remembered how
that
had turned out for me.

He stood a couple of inches taller than me at 6’2”, with floppy, almost black hair that fell in front of his eyes on a regular basis, constantly making him flick it back with a small toss of his head.  Round glasses perched high up on his nose, and even though the night was far from cold he had his duffel coat buttoned right up to his chin.

He looked, I thought as he waited for me to speak, a lot like a younger, thinner version of Jeff Goldblum.

“Coffee”, I said, holding up the flask.
  “I assume you want some before you tell me what’s going on?”

He nodded eagerly as I unscrewed the flask and poured out two cups.  I’d made it with milk and sugar and he slurped at it greedily as I sipped my own.
 

“So”, I said as I looked for somewhere to sit, then gave up and crouched next to his chair, “I take it the lights are being caused by the flare then?”

Jerry nodded and took another gulp of coffee before speaking.

“They are.  There’s only two recorded sightings of the Aurora Borealis, to give it its proper name, this far south.  One was in 1859, during the so-called Carrington event, and the other was way back in about 775AD”.

I took a larger swig of coffee and almost yelped as I burned my tongue.

“Are we in danger?”  I asked, thinking back to my elderly neighbour’s question.

Jerry shrugged.  “Yes, well, no.  Ok, maybe.  I’m not just up here for the view.  There’s a good chance that this is going to make the Carrington event look like a crap fireworks party”.

“The Carrington event?”

He nodded and flicked back his hair.

“It was a flare that hit the United States in 1859.  It was so powerful that it melted telegraph lines and set light to the paper in the telegraph offices.  It also caused the Aurora to be seen as far south as Colombia”.

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 w
ho 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 wa
s 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.

Other, smaller fires began to
follow, and I watched, helpless, as flames began to spread.  The rolling boom of the first explosion hit us, but other than that it was eerily silent up on the hill, nothing but the wind blowing in gently from the sea, bringing with it the tang of salt air even up here on the downs.

I kept expecting to see blue lights, maybe hear the faint echo of sirens as the fire service and ambulances raced to save lives in the carnage below, but the streets s
tayed quiet and dark, not counting the hundred or so small fires that dotted the landscape from one side of the city to the other.

I turned and looked at Jerry, his face a mask of horror that mirrored my own.

“Jerry, how could this happen?”  I asked, still not quite believing my own eyes.

Another explosion lit the night, this one much closer, somewhere in Shoreham.  The sound hit us much
faster this time, a sharp retort that echoed around the hills before fading into silence once more.

“I told you, Malc, I tried to tell everyone but no one would listen”.

There were tears in his eyes, I could see them glistening in the faint light from the moon.

“But it’s night time”, I continued, as if using logic would turn back the clock and stop it all from happening, “how can a flare hit at night
?”

“You’re thinking of it as a beam, like a laser”, he said,
reaching into his rucksack and rooting around for something within.  “Think of it more like water or a cloud of gas.  If you spray water at a ball bearing, or pump gas at it, it doesn’t just hit one side.  Sure, the worst of it will hit the surface facing the spray, but it envelops the ball bearing.  And it’s not just energy from the flare.  There was a coronal mass ejection too, what we call a CME, superheated plasma spat out from the sun.  If you think this is bad, try and imagine what it’s like on the other side of the world.  It could be that the only reason we’re still alive is because we’re on the opposite side to the sun”.