Survivors of the Sun Read online

  Coffee made, and no suspicious curdled lumps floating in it, Georgia sat down at the breakfast table, smelling the swirling aroma of her freshly made brew and as she sipped it, everything seemed to be very normal.

  She closed her eyes, imagining that it was a routine day and Nathan had left for work a couple of hours ago. The dogs, having had their morning walk, would be getting ready for the arduous task of lying exhausted, in the streams of sunlight pouring in through the bay windows. Soon she would rinse out her cup and go downstairs to her workshop, turn the music up loud, and create.

  ‘Georgia?’ It was Jamie’s voice. She opened her eyes and looked across to the doorway to where he stood.

  ‘Hey buddy, come and give me a hug.’

  He came sleepily, his pajamas bottoms a little too long and as he snuggled up to her, he asked if Dad were back yet.

  ‘No, not yet,’ she soothed, smoothing back his sleep damp hair, ‘but then I didn’t really think he would be. Don’t worry, he will definitely be back by this evening.’

  ‘Do you think Mum will be here today?’ Jamie asked.

  ‘I am sure she will,’ Georgia said, then deliberately changing the subject asked, ‘Are the girls awake yet?’

  ‘Yes, Deedee is crying.’

  ‘Why what’s up with her?’ Georgia asked, taking another sip of coffee.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he shrugged his shoulders, ‘maybe because she wet the bed.’ At Jamie’s word’s Georgia nearly choked on her coffee.

  ‘You have to be joking,’ she spluttered, staring at him in disbelief. Jamie seemed unfazed.

  ‘Nope, that’s why I got up.’

  Oh that was just too perfect.

  Half an hour later the mattress had been sponged down. The sheets and pajamas hand washed in cold water and hung up to dry. And poor Deedee had been given a quick but thorough sponge bath, then dressed in an old pair of Jamie’s jeans.

  She continued to cry as Georgia helped her put them on, even though Rebecca had generously given her a favorite pink top to wear with them. Georgia was not completely sure if Deedee was crying because she had wet the bed, or because she was having to wear Jamie’s old, cast off jeans.

  ‘It’s okay, honey,’ Georgia said, as they sat down to breakfast, ‘it happens and we have all forgotten it already. Haven’t we?’ she asked the others.

  ‘Yep,’ Jamie said.

  ‘What have we forgotten?’ Rebecca asked, a smile threatening to escape.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Georgia laughed, feeling close to tears. Deedee had hiccupped in reply and started to silently eat her cereal. Surprisingly she had not said a word about wanting her mother, nor had she asked where Maggie was. Which was really good, seeing that Georgia had no idea.

  After they had eaten, they were sent into the bathroom to brush their teeth. Earlier she had given Deedee a new toothbrush from the top cupboard; where the extra soaps, toilet paper and such, were kept.

  ‘Georgia,’ Rebecca’s voice came floating out of the bathroom, ‘why is the bath half full of water?’

  ‘That’s in case we run out of water,’ she called back.

  Half full? What did she mean half full?

  She hurried into the crowded room, Jamie was leaning over the sink bench, foaming toothpaste as he spat it into the basin.

  Deedee poked him in the side. ‘Hurry up, I want to brush my teeth too. It isn’t all about you, you know.’ She waved her toothbrush as she spoke, a neat line of paste threatening to fall off.

  Georgia looked past them at the bath, and sure enough, half the water was gone. The plug leaked! She had forgotten that.

  How to stop it? She thought frantically, and then remembered the cling wrap. That might work. She grabbed a roll from a kitchen drawer and went back into the bathroom. Deedee was now brushing her teeth. Jamie had gone to his own room and Rebecca stood watching her as she pulled out the plug and hurriedly wrapped it in cling wrap.

  ‘Why are you doing that?’ she asked.

  ‘Well I don’t want the water to run down the drain.’

  ‘No, I mean why are you keeping water in the bath?’

  ‘It is just in case we run out of water.’

  ‘Why would we run out of water?’ Rebecca asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Georgia answered, ‘but we might.’

  ‘That is disgusting,’ Deedee said as she finished rinsing her mouth. ‘Bugs will fall in and anyway Mummy says I am not to drink bathwater.’

  ‘Well Mummy is not here,’ Georgia thought, but Deedee did have a point about the bugs. Before she could stop herself, her mind conjured up at least a dozen of the ugliest most revolting insects she could think of, floating on their backs, soggy and definitely dead, contaminating the water. She knew that if they reached the point that they had to drink that water those bugs were going to reappear in her mind.

  She refilled the bath and then carefully watched the level of the water. Had it dropped? In the end, she took her eyeliner and made a thin black mark just above the water level. She waited a little while longer but the level was not dropping. As an afterthought, she pulled out length after length of cling-wrap, grateful that she had purchased the continuous roll, and with Rebecca’s less than enthusiastic help, laid it out strip by strip across the top of the bath. It threatened to peel away in one place and so she placed the shampoo bottle on top, to stop it. If nothing else, she thought it would help prevent evaporation.

  She wondered if she should add a couple of tablespoons of bleach to the water, to disinfect it, then shook her head, perhaps a little later, when the kids were not around. She was sure Deedee would throw a tantrum at the very idea of it.

  The kids went outside to play basketball, their carefree conversation drifting in through the open kitchen window as she washed the dishes. Soap-suds clinging to her wrists as she swirled the sponge round, missing her dishwasher.

  Though outwardly she appeared calm, her insides were churning and she felt as though everything was moving in slow motion. She still had no idea what was happening out there, and there didn’t seem to be anyone around she could ask. Under normal circumstances she could just pick up the phone and ask someone. Under Normal circumstances!

  She kept replaying the conversation she had had with the stranger the previous day, over and over in her mind. The part about the carnage on the freeway and his words were starting to haunt her. What if Maggie had been caught up in that? What if…? All these ‘what ifs’, were driving her crazy. She just wanted to know what the hell was going on.

  Suddenly she put her hands to her temples, soap suds flying everywhere, wanting to scream with frustration, and helplessness. She wished again that Nathan were here. He would know what to do.

  Outside, under the kitchen window, the basketball went thunka, thunka, thunka.

  ‘I need to think,’ she said to herself, as she used a dishcloth to wipe soapsuds from the window sill. And I need to find out what is going on. There was nothing for it really, but to go and see what was really happening on the freeway. She would leave the kids and walk down. And then…,

  The thought trailed away. She couldn’t leave the kids, what if she had an accident, or worse, what if they had an accident while she was away? What if someone broke in? In the end, there was really no choice, they would all go, the dogs would have to stay at home and afterwards, as they were running low on dog biscuits, they could walk to Prestos.

  Then she had a thought that cheered up her immensely, surely the checkout clerks at Presto would know what was happening? Why hadn’t she thought of that before? Maybe, they would even have a phone that worked.

  Chapter Five

  Nothing could ever have prepared Georgia for what the four of them saw as they reached the edge of the road and looked down on the freeway. The entire route, as far as the eye could see, was jammed with vehicles, doors open, bonnets up, here and there clusters of cars piled up against each other, with broken glass and twisted metal scattered across the tarmac.

  Far of
f in the distance a few people wandered around, weaving drunkenly between the cars. Nearer, a man in a torn suit, the sleeves rolled up, just stood and stared at a ford Capri. It was crumpled, the windscreen shattered in a crazed pattern and a dark crimson, almost black blotch was smeared across the inside of the glass. It looked as though someone had taken a huge sponge and dipped it in a paint pot and…. It was dried blood, she realized, and the more she looked the more horrible it became, as she became aware of tangled limbs, limp broken bodies fallen over steering wheels, and hanging half out of car doors or lying on the road, like so many discarded rag dolls. This is not real, it cannot be real.

  Below them, not far from where they stood, a car was half suspended over the mangled guard rail, as though at the last moment, the driver had tried to avoid crashing into the cars ahead. So many vehicles, so many people, and even though she knew that Nathan would not have been on the road at that time, she scanned the cars to the horizon looking for his silver SUV

  The four of them stood in stunned silence, Jamie squeezing her hand rhythmically, Rebecca with her arm around Deedee’s visibly trembling shoulders. Georgia was too shocked to speak. ‘No,’ she thought again, ‘this is not real, this is not happening.’ It had to be a nightmare. Never, could she have imagined witnessing anything like this, holding onto Jamie’s hand, listening to Rebecca quietly sobbing as she comforted Deedee.

  Jamie spoke first, his voice trembling. ‘What happened?’

  ‘Tell them the truth Babe,’ Nathan’s voice popped up in her head. But I don’t know what the truth is. But I do know that this has to be much more than a pile up on the motorway. For a start, there weren’t any ambulances, or fire engines, or rescue crews. Why wasn’t anyone helping these people? It didn’t make sense. Perhaps the stranger was right, perhaps there had been some sort of terrorist attack.

  Jamie tugged at her hand, ‘Georgia, what do you think happened?’

  She hesitated for a moment. What could she tell them? What could she say in such a situation? She decided to tell them the truth. Whatever was happening, they were all in this together. She crouched down, and gathered the children around her. ‘I don’t exactly know what happened, but you all have to be very brave now, because I think it might have been another terrorist attack, like 9/11, but different. This time I think it was an EMP.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Deedee asked.

  ‘Well, I don’t know too much about them, but I think it is like a nuclear bomb but instead of dropping it on the ground they send the bomb miles up into the sky and when it explodes it sends a wave, kind of like a radio wave, across the land below. The wave is so strong that it destroys all the power and all the electronics.’

  ‘It made the power go out? And all the cars stop running?’ Rebecca asked.

  ‘I think so,’ Georgia said.

  ‘How come we didn’t feel it then?’ Deedee asked, obviously not believing Georgia for a minute.

  ‘I don’t know but…,’

  ‘Ooh,’ Jamie exclaimed, ‘but we did, that must have been when Georgia’s hair stood up, all by itself just before the lights went out.’

  It had? Georgia looked at him. She hadn’t realized her hair had done the same thing as Jamie’s. ‘I think you are right, Jamie.’

  ‘So did the planes stop flying too?’ Rebecca asked.

  Georgie slowly nodded, suddenly feeling sick. The idea of planes, just falling out of the sky was simply too dreadful. She had a momentary flash of passengers praying and screaming, as they plummeted to their deaths. Was that where some of the palls of smoke were coming from? Suddenly she felt the blood drain from her face. Hadn’t Lydia been on one of those planes? She frantically tried to remember exactly what the woman had said the last time they had spoken. Had she mentioned what time she would be landing?

  As the four of them turned their faces up to the sky, Georgia prayed that none of the children would make the connection. There was not a single plane to be seen anywhere. How odd that she had not noticed this before. And even more telling, was the total absence of the crisscross of contrails that usually patterned the sky. She expected hysterics from the kids, not this calm acceptance.

  ‘If it was a nuclear bomb,’ Deedee said suddenly, in a very matter of a fact tone, ‘then we are all going to die, our skin is going to melt off our bones and fall on the ground in big puddles and then when we are just skeletons we will die.’

  ‘That’s not true,’ Jamie said, ‘you get a rash first, everybody knows that.’

  ‘No, your skin melts, I saw pictures, and anyway you will see tomorrow when…,’

  ‘Is there radiation?’ Rebecca interrupted, ‘from the bomb?’

  Georgia tried hard to think about what she had read about EMP’s. She was pretty certain that there was no fallout from them. Wasn’t that the whole point of an EMP; to bring the population and technology to a standstill without making it uninhabitable?

  ‘No, there won’t be any radiation.’ she assured them. I hope.

  She was about to say something else when suddenly they heard a terrible howl coming from the freeway.

  ‘Oh, there’s a dog!’ Rebecca said, pointing just below them, ‘trapped in that car, look.’

  ‘We have to go rescue it,’ Deedee wailed.

  Georgia did not want to go down there. She did not want the children to get any closer, but she knew that she could not just leave the dog in the car to die. She peered over the embankment. Half way down, was a mature Linden tree.

  ‘Okay,’ she said, ‘we will go down to that tree and you three are to sit down beneath it and wait for me.’ Slowly they made their way down to the tree, and the shade.

  It was so good to be in the shade. ‘Do not move from this spot,’ she warned once she had them settled. ‘If one of you so much as moves a muscle, I will come back and the dog can stay where it is.’

  The three of them stared down at her wide-eyed and motionless. She could tell they were taking her seriously. At least she hoped that was the case. She was a useless stand-in mother. That was for sure. Nathan’s ex was always reinforcing that idea to her. She frequently dotted her conversations with asides like, ‘well, not being a mother yourself you wouldn’t know,’ or ‘of course not having any children yourself you wouldn’t understand.’ And, there would always that annoying little titter that went with it.

  As if the act of giving birth unlocked some part of the brain and released a knowledge bank of how to care for children. But now she was not so sure. Maybe Lydia was right; poor, probably dead Lydia.

  She should never have brought them out here in the first place. Let alone have them see this stuff and now she was leaving them (granted not out of her sight), alone under a tree, while she went to rescue a dog. She clambered onto the freeway, climbing over the barrier guard, the metal hot to her touch, as she slid over it. It was going to be another scorcher of a day.

  The car, in question, was in the far lane. It had ploughed into the back of a GMC Sierra; the howls from the dog guiding her way. If the window had been rolled up, she thought, the dog would have cooked in there by now, and as she thought that, she wondered why the dog had not jumped out of the car.

  The answer became clear as she approached it. The dog was wearing a harness, clipped onto the back seatbelt. As she cautiously peered into the vehicle, she was overcome with the unexpected, gagging smell of blood; something beginning to rot. A swarm of flies arose and then settled downwards. Then she saw where the smell was coming from.

  A woman lay across the front seats, her ribs appeared to be caved in, and her neat white jacket was caked with blood. Her eyes were open, staring blankly up at her, blonde hair hanging across her face. One hand was stretched out, between the front seats, as though she had reached out to her pet, in her last moments.

  The dog whined again, tail frantically wagging, pulling at its harness. It did not look like it was going to bite, she decided as she pulled open the passenger door of the two-door sedan. There was no way around it. The dog
was going to have to clamber over its very dead owner, and worse still, she was going to have to lean in over the body, to reach the harness.

  As she fully opened the door, a handbag fell out onto the road, scattering coins and a lipstick. Not sure why, she picked the bag up, replaced the contents and set it back in the car on the floor, then grimacing she pushed the woman to one side so she could squeeze in. She was much more difficult to move than Georgia had imagined. At first, Georgia was very careful and then she thought, ‘the woman is dead, just grab her and shove her over.’

  ‘Sorry,’ she said, as she did exactly that. There was suddenly a horrible release of gas from the woman’s body as she flopped sideways, finally making room. Georgia felt terrible for the dead woman. The final humiliation, tears prickled the corners of her eyes. What evil bastards was responsible for all this, she wondered. Not even caring that she had sworn.

  She squeezed awkwardly between the seats, the dog was still frantically wagging its tail. It licked her, the lolling tongue slobbering over her face as she tried to reach into the back seat.

  ‘Stop it, you stupid mutt.’ she muttered, her fingers stretched to their limit, the dog in her face, making it impossible to see what she was doing. Finally, she felt the clasp and wriggled her fingertips down until they felt the nib of the catch and unclipped it. As she heard that tiny click of success, the dog was already scrambling over her, yanking the lead out of her outstretched fingers, claws digging into her scalp and across her back as it made a bid for freedom.

  Before she could stop it, the dog leapt out of the confines of the car and bounded down the freeway, the blue lead bouncing behind it. She backed out of the car, wiping her face on her sleeve, hoping in her heart of hearts, that the lead would not catch somewhere.

  She would not have taken it back with her to the house, three dogs and three children were already almost too much for her to deal with, but she would have preferred to have removed the lead, before letting it go. She glanced over to the tree where the children sat and saw they were waving triumphantly at her. She firmly closed the door of the sedan looking over at another car as she did so, parked a little further back.