Undead at Heart (4 page)

So, finally,
thankfully, he’d convinced her to get into the car, and it looked like he would
be getting a useful lift and be back on the road soon as. As much as he could
be, with his car in flames, Tony was happy.

Okay, so the demo was going
to be less impressive with the MFD currently charring in the backseat of his
Audi. And he would have to go shopping for clothes before tonight. He couldn’t
exactly turn up to his date with Susanne dressed in his work gear and with no
over-night bag. But, it could have been worse: at least he had his phone.

As they climbed into
the car he started typing. There was a really strong signal just here, which
was a blessing, and he needed to let the client know that he might be late, and
then he needed to do the same for Susanne. In fact, he would include details of
the terrible accident and his miraculous and heroic escape. That might speed
things along. Especially when he told her about the woman and her child that he
had saved from their car just before it blew up.

He was half-way
through his mail to the client when his phone suddenly shut down. He shook it,
but nothing happened, so he turned it over and started to prise at the battery.
It did this sometimes and he had to take the battery out, put it back, turn it
on again, and it would be fine for a while.

He’d just got the
battery out when he realised they had drifted to a halt and the woman - Nicola,
did she say?
– was turning the key in the ignition over and
over with no result.
He sighed. “What now? Is it out of petrol?”

She turned a sharp
gaze on him. “What? No! I filled up when I set off.” She carried on turning the
key.
Nothing.
Just the dry click of
the key turning.

“Battery?”

The sharpness when she
looked at him had turned to scorn. “No.
New last month.
It’s something else.”

Tony’s sigh was even
louder as he undid his belt, opened the door and stepped from the car. He
walked around to the front, flicking his hand at her to open the bonnet. She
did so,
then
got out to join him.

He opened it and started
looking around for a loose connection. He didn’t really know what he was
looking for. Engines had never been an interest of his. But he was sure he
would do a better job of finding a loose wire than any woman, especially an
ignorant American.

He poked and prodded,
taking care not to burn himself on the hot engine or to get dirt on his shirt
sleeves. He couldn’t find anything. He glanced over at Nicola and saw that she
wasn’t even looking at the
engine,
she was staring
away from the car to the other carriageway.

She glanced back at
him and then pointed. “Look.”

In their short journey
in the car, they’d moved far enough to draw level with the front of the queue
which had formed behind Tony’s wrecked car. Some people had left their cars to
watch the fire, but many more had initially stayed in safety. These people were
now getting out of their cars and opening their bonnets, looking at the
engines. Others were standing holding mobile phones in the air and waving them
about, much as Tony had been doing just a minute earlier.

He stood up, trying to
work out what she was going on about. Okay, it was strange, but he couldn’t see
what it had to do with them.

“Listen,” she said.

He did. He couldn’t
hear anything, and started to say so.

“Exactly,” she cut in
over him.
“Nothing.
No car engine noise, no music
playing, no mobile phones ringing.
Nothing at all.”

He hated to admit it,
but she was right.

“What the hell’s going
on then?” he asked. She seemed to know the answers, so maybe she had this one.

She shook her head.
“I’m not sure. It seems like everything has gone dead at the same moment.”

She turned to him, but
her gaze was drawn up and over his shoulder. Her eyes went wide. He started to
turn, but then realised he didn’t need to as five fighter jets flew low overhead,
their roar trailing behind them. In an instant they were gone, leaving behind a
rush of wind and an almighty noise. He watched them head out over the fields,
bank sharply and head straight back. He tracked them, raising his hands over
his ears to baffle the noise of their passage, and watched as trails of smoke
detached themselves from under the wings of the planes and sped away. Moments
later there were several explosions in the distant field beyond the place where
the helicopter had come down. The noise reached him first, and then the trees
bent towards them and a hot, smoky wind rushed over him, making his eyes sting
and the air rush from his lungs.

He heard Nicola
coughing next to him, and tried to open his eyes to see what was happening.

He eased them open a
painful crack and saw that the trees which had screened the field from view
were now denuded and on fire. Tiny tinkerbells of flame drifted towards him as
the leaves were consumed. Beyond them he could see nothing but fire engulfing
the whole landscape.

Tony didn’t stop to
think. He didn’t say a word. He simply turned and ran.

As Nicola stood,
holding Alyssa’s hand and looking at the silent cars, she could hear nothing
but the crackling of flames from the still-burning truck and the confused
voices of deprived motorists, a phrase went through her head:
Electro-magnetic
pulse
. It wasn’t the kind of thing she would normally know. She was a
historian, not a scientist. But Rob had watched enough sci-fi and action movies
for her to have picked up the term. Hell, the concept was now so
mainstream
they even used it in
Ocean’s Eleven
. It
was what happened when a nuclear bomb went off. It sent out a kind of wave that
fried electrical circuitry. Normally it wasn’t an issue because the circuitry
was
fried
in other ways too, or so irradiated that
no-one would want to use it for thousands of years. That would be one way of
getting brain cancer from a cellphone, she mused. Even as she was thinking
this, she marvelled at the fact that she was standing in the midst of the
insanity that her day had become and was still thinking so clearly.

Tony was asking her
what had happened and she was saying she didn’t know even as these thoughts
were going through her head. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to tell him, it was
more that she had the feeling that he wouldn’t hear her if she did. He seemed
like a nice enough
guy
, but – No. Actually, he didn’t
seem that nice. He reminded
her a
lot of Rob. He was
so caught up himself that he didn’t care about anyone else.

He had started
ordering her around, telling her to abandon the wounded, telling her to give
him a ride to a rental place, and she had simply acquiesced. She had slipped
back into the person that Rob had moulded her into without
so
much as a thought. She hated that it had been so easy for her to give in to
him. And even more she hated that it had felt comfortable, like slipping into
old shoes.

So, maybe she wouldn’t
tell him what was going on. Maybe she would keep it to herself and let him work
it out if he could. Let’s see how capable he was without other people around to
look after him.

She turned to him,
intending to press
him
for answers, to make
him
take some
responsibility for what was happening to them, but her words were stillborn.
She watched as an arrow-head of planes swooped low over the trees and passed
over their heads in a deafening rush of wind. She felt Alyssa snatch her hand
away, needing both of them to cover her ears. Nicola did the same, swivelling
to watch the planes flash out over the countryside and then turn and race back
towards them. As they passed back over her head she saw rockets strapped to the
underside of the wings. Even as she noticed them, flames sparked at their rears
and they left the planes behind in the wake of their exhausts. Moments later an
almighty explosion rocked the world, causing her to stumble to her knees and
clutch at Alyssa who, in turn, clutched at her mother.

A flash of flame
dimmed the sun, bared the trees and threw cindered leaves at her on a hot fist
of wind. She bowed her head and waited to be burned alive, but there was no
further blast. The missiles had impacted far enough away to not kill them, just
for them to be caught in the wash. She lifted her head, squinting open her eyes
at the heat.

Fall had come early
and all the trees were lit in shades of yellow and orange, the black
silhouettes of their branches playing host to a raging fire. Behind them the
field looked as though it contained a new type of rape which was more than just
yellow, it was alive with light.
And beyond that?
What
was
that?

She was aware, even as
she knelt there and held Alyssa tight into her chest that Tony was no longer
beside her. She looked round, concerned, and saw him once more vault the
central barrier. He continued across the road, down the bank, and disappeared
into the trees on the far side. Some of them were starting to smoulder, but
they had fared a lot better than the ones on her side.

She turned back and
looked through the burning, aware that the heat was growing. She tried to see
through the flames and shimmer. There was something there, something moving on
the ridge. She could only imagine it was whatever the planes had been shooting
at. Whatever it was, it was huge and didn’t seem to have been in the least bit
bothered by the missile strike.

But she couldn’t see
it clearly and now the heat was too intense, she could feel her skin tightening
as it started to burn. She picked Alyssa up and, more slowly and with extra
care for her daughter, she followed Tony.

The crowd on the far
side which, like her, had been gaping at the transformation of the
landscape,
were also starting to back into the relative
safety of the trees. She hoisted Alyssa over the rail, climbed over, then
picked her daughter up again. As she reached the hard shoulder on the far side
she looked back. The trees were starting to fall, bringing burning branches and
trunks down onto the carriageway. As she watched, a long branch crashed onto
her car. She stood, transfixed, as her people-carrier started to go the same
way as Tony’s Audi, and might not have moved even when it exploded and the fire
started to creep across the road, if someone hadn’t taken her arm and started
pulling her towards the relative sanctuary of the woods.

She looked round, to
find the owner of the hand on her arm. It was a man not that much older than
herself, early-forties at a guess, his face covered with the same black streaks
that she supposed she was adorned with. He was giving her a confused but
soothing smile. “Come on, love,” he said, his voice only just audible over the
crackling blaze.
“Time to get somewhere a little safer.”

“But…
But…
Just what the hell is going on?” she asked him.

He shook his head.
“Fuck knows!” He grinned at the look of shock on her face,
then
pulled on her arm again. “Come on, we better move before the cars start to go
up, and the trees on this side of the road too, maybe.”

She nodded, glancing
back one last time to where her car was now lost in a ball of fire. She felt a
moment of guilt, wondering if her wish to be rid of the Queen CD had
precipitated all this, then dismissed such a silly thought. With Alyssa held in
her arms, head tucked into her mother’s neck, Nicola followed her saviour into
the cool of the woods.

Tony ran into the
woods, the smooth soles of work shoes slipping on the grass and detritus. As
soon he was under the shade of the trees he felt relief from the heat that had
been rolling off the burning field. The image of it was still floating before
him, imprinted on his retina, and as he ran he careened from trunk to trunk.
His earlier care over his shirt was forgotten as moss and dirt created a new
pattern over the blue pin-stripe, but his Blackberry was still clutched in his
hand. Despite his fear and panic he peered at it every few steps
,,
focussing on its black screen through the burning haze
obscuring his vision, hoping that it would come back to life and somehow
transport him from all of this.

Finally, inevitably,
he tripped over a root, or a log, or a pine cone, or nothing at all, and
sprawled on the ground. His breath was coming in gasps which sounded in his
ears like sobs. He tried to calm, to breathe normally, but he no longer seemed
have control. He bowed his head and let out a series of loud moans.

He didn’t hear her
come up behind him, so he squealed and scrabbled away when he felt a hand on
his shoulder. The owner of the hand screamed in response, took a step back and
fell onto her bottom with a yelp. Tony peered at her in the darkness. It wasn’t
Nicola, it was someone else. She was young and blonde and slim.

“What?” he asked her,
unable to articulate
more.
“What?!”

She leaned forward,
reaching behind to rub where she had landed. “I- I’m sorry,” she said, still rubbing
and emitting little hisses when she touched a particularly sore part. “I just
wanted to see if you were okay; if you’d been hurt. You sounded like you were
in pain.”