“We’re getting closer to the city now. Make sure your hoodies are pulled down low,” Shaun said as he flicked down the lever for the indicator and came to a stop at the stop sign.

Liam moved to sit up.

“Hey, you shouldn’t be…” Lydia tried to stop him.

“I’ll be fine,” Liam said with a grunt.

Lying in the backseat of the Jeep, Liam stared at the ceiling, his leg throbbing with each heartbeat. “What if I can’t pull my weight anymore?” he muttered, his voice barely audible over the engine’s hum.

Lydia glanced back at him. “You’re not a burden, Liam.”

He smiled faintly. “You don’t know that. Not yet.”

Shaun cussed under his breath.

There were cars everywhere, going nowhere. Between the cars hundreds of people were milling around aimlessly, walking in a slow shuffle, and in no hurry to get anywhere fast. Some were walking around in circles around cars as if they wanted to get in but did not exactly know how. Some people were running along the side of the road, looking back over their shoulders as if they were being chased by something that only they could see. Some were fighting bloody, violent fights to the death. They were biting each other and thrashing around in pools of their own blood. The road was littered with dead bodies.

“What are we going to do?” Lydia whispered. “How are we going to get to Alton Stine?”

Liam turned his head to look at her. “You want to go back home? That’s the first place the government will come looking for us.”

“I have to find my mum,” Lydia insisted. “And if you don’t want to come with me, I can do it all by myself.”

Shaun turned in his seat. “First things first. It’s not like we can walk there.” He glanced in Liam’s direction. “It would take too long.”

“Then what are we going to do?” Lydia looked back at the people in the road. The ones who were not wandering around without any clear purpose looked murderous and bloodthirsty. Their eyes were blank, their jaws slack, and they looked mad. A despondent feeling threatened to overwhelm her.

Lydia gasped as she watched a frail woman across the road suddenly lunge across the tarmac at a tall, muscled man. She grabbed hold of the loose folds at the front of his white T-shirt. The man side-stepped her in a slow-motion action, but it was fast enough to break her hold on him. Her feet – one with a shoe on, and one without – briefly left the ground. The woman wobbled and looked up at the man with a raging snarl that shrank her eyes to slits and exposed her teeth. “Look at them,” Lydia said in a soft voice. She could not look away and her eyes were fixed on the scene in bewilderment.

“No,” Shaun said. “We should be watching the two over there. It’s slow and I can’t tell if it’s deliberate, but they are definitely coming this way.”

There was a sudden loud bang on the bonnet of the Jeep, and all three of them whipped around to look. A girl was standing in front of the car, her chest was soaked in red. She darted her face forward with lightning speed, bared her unquestionably strong teeth, and hit her fists against the top of the car, one after the other, again and again. At the same time, she lifted her blood-smeared face up to the grey winter sky and howled.

“She’s crazy,” Shaun whispered as he pushed his body back in the chair, as if trying to get a little further away from her would make her not take notice of him.

The girl screamed, “What’s happening?” She looked at Shaun with wide, scared eyes. “What’s happening to me? Who am I?”

Lydia started to whimper. “This is not happening. No. It can’t be. It’s not happening. Did we do this? Is this our fault?”

“Just drive,” Liam said loudly. He reached out and placed his hand on Lydia’s where it was resting on the seat between them. “Don’t blame us. We didn’t know this would happen and if anyone is to blame, it’s the government for doing this to us in the first place. They never, ever should have barcoded people in the first place as if they can control everything we do or eat or say or buy. It never should’ve happened in the first place.”

Shaun heaved an exasperated sigh. “Where should I go? There’re cars everywhere.”

“On the pavement,” Liam suggested. “It’s wide enough and should get us past this pile up, at least.”

“Is it even in the right direction?”

“I don’t know.” He looked in the direction to his side for a long while. “Probably. My leg is sore, and I just want to get somewhere where I can have it looked at. At home, like Lydia said, is probably the best place, for now.”

Shaun pushed his palm against the hooter and the car made a loud blaring noise. The girl standing in front of the car jumped with fright and looked at Shaun as if she had forgotten where she was or why she was standing in front of the car, but she did not move.

Lydia suggested, “Maybe I should get out and help her.”

As if in one voice, Liam and Shaun both yelled, “No!” Liam grabbed hold of her arm to keep her where she was.

Shaun changed gears and started to slowly reverse the car away from the girl standing in the middle of the road. When he had pulled the car back with enough room to spare so that he did not knock her off her feet, he turned the car sharply and with a spine shuddering bounce the car climbed up on the pavement.

Lydia looked in the direction of where the two men were walking toward them earlier, but they seemed to have forgotten why they were heading in the jeep’s direction. However, the loud roaring from the engine as it struggled to climb over the curb drew the men’s attention back to them. A shiver ran down her spine. “Just get us out of here, Shaun.”

Luckily for them, all the lost, wandering souls were rambling around in the road between the stationary vehicles and not on the pavement. As far as they drove, the scene to the side of them did not change. The roads were usually always busy, at any time of the day or night, but they must have blown up the data centre when everyone was on their way home after a long day at their place of work so there was more traffic than usual. Hundreds of people were walking around aimlessly. It was as if they did not even notice the snow settling on their heads and shoulders. They turned to look at the vehicle as it passed by them but they’re eyes looked haunted and empty when the lights from the front of the vehicle reflected in them.

Lydia’s voice was loud in the silence that had filled the car for the last kilometre or two when she said, “When is help coming for these people?”

“See if there’s anything on the radio,” Liam said to Shaun.

“No. You concentrate on where we’re going. It would be a really bad thing if we had an accident now, so I’ll do it,” Lydia offered as she lifted herself from the seat and started climbing over the console between the front and the back. She sat down and leaned forward to switch on the radio. Loud white noise filled the car, and she quickly turned down the volume. She turned the dial, looking for a station all the way to the right and all she found was the same hissing noise. She started turning it all the way to the left. She was about to lose all hope when there was a change in the tone of the noise. Very faintly, they could hear a voice. She could not find the exact frequency because a little to this side and it disappeared, and then a bit to that side, it was back to the awful hissing noise. She turned up the volume.

The crackling female voice on the radio was saying, “This is an emergency broadcast. Please remain in your homes. Our technicians are working hard to restore all internet access and radio broadcasts. Please do not panic.” There was silence for a second or two and Lydia thought they had lost the station, but then the woman started to repeat the same message.

“Switch it off,” Liam said.

Shaun said, “I guess this is the end of the world, then?”

Lydia shook her head. “No. I don’t believe it. Things are supposed to go back to the way it was. This was never supposed to happen.”

Liam wondered, “It’s just here right. This isn’t happening in the rest of the world, is it?”

Shaun smirked, “If not, we’ll soon enough have a government from another country come and save us.”

Lydia looked out the front window at the snow flurries dancing in the headlights of the car, avoiding looking to the right and seeing all the people stumbling about in slow motion as if they had lost all their co-ordination. “I’m guessing we won’t be waking up from this nightmare anytime soon.”

CONTINUE READING