John Birmingham - Without warning

‘Vous avez mal? Une douleur, un malaise?’ he said, asking whether she was experiencing any pain or discomfort. He addressed the query to his watch, which he was examining as though it was the most fascinating trinket in the world.

‘Oui, docteur. Quand j’essaie de tourner la tкte, j’ai mal au cou, et зa me fait – ‘ She stopped short. To judge by the wide-eyed surprise on Monique’s face, the young woman had not known she could speak French.

Shit.

‘Oui? Vous sentez quoi exactement?’ Colbert encouraged her to continue.

‘My neck… is very stiff and sore,’ she said slowly, in English. ‘It hurts so much to turn it, I get sick. And I have a terrible ache in my head all the time.’

Monique’s hand fell away from hers. The young woman stared at her as if she had grown a new limb. The others were still fixated on the BBC. More commercial satellite imagery, from all over the North American continent, was becoming available every minute. Forty-five minutes after the short burst of white noise that shut down all communication with the richest, most powerful nation in the world – and big chunks of the countries bordering her to the north and south – the truth was unavoidable. They were gone.

Caitlin had woken into some sort of Kafkaesque nightmare and for a moment she clutched at the hope that it might just be an actual nightmare, or even a psychotic breakdown, perhaps the result of an acquired brain injury.

‘But you told us you could not speak French,’ Monique said.

‘Fookin’ ‘ell, look’t that.’

‘Mademoiselle Mercure, malheureusement j’ai une mauvaise nouvelle a vous annoncer…’ Dr Colbert, still mechanically checking his watch, had just told her he had more bad news.

No shit, Sherlock, thought Caitlin.

Monique, like the doctor, was also phase-locked in her own little world. ‘But you told us. You told us you could not speak French.’

Caitlin stared back at her, as the world broke up into jagged mirror shards of meaning and insanity. She improvised as best she could. ‘I don’t speak it very well. It’s embarrassing to even try. You guys are like so hard-core about it, with all the eye rolling and the shrugging. I mean, you know, lighten up.’

The doctor saved her by cutting in at that point, ‘Excuse me. But my patient is very ill. Now is not twenty questions time. Now is -’

‘Fook me!’

Aunty Celia’s extra loud cry finally brought everyone’s attention back to the TV, where a top-down image of Manhattan was displayed. Caitlin momentarily thought it might have been archival footage of the 9/11 attacks. Great plumes of black smoke curled away from collapsed high-rise buildings that burned at their cores like active volcanoes. But quickly she saw there were too many of them, too widely spread over the island, at least eight or nine that she could count immediately.

‘… if repeated across the country, the death toll might run into millions,’ read the anchorwoman.

‘Everyone’s gone,’ said Maggie in a flat voice. ‘This is fucked. Where have they gone?’

‘… At any one time many thousands of aircraft are aloft over the US, many of them above densely populated cities.’

The coverage switched to grainy video taken from a weather cam, somewhere high above Manhattan. As Caitlin watched, numb and disbelieving, a Singapore Airlines jumbo jet ploughed into the side of the Chrysler Building, one wing spinning off screen.

Something snagged in Caitlin’s conscious mind. Something that she had almost missed. ‘I’m ill?’ she said, suddenly picking up on the qualification the doctor had made. ‘I’m sick – not just injured?’ Irrationally, she reached for the thought, hoping it might explain the psychotic bullshit on the television.

Dr Colbert nodded distractedly. Now that he was watching the TV he seemed unable to wrench his attention away from it.

The screen switched to a series of shots detailing the moments just before and after a giant tanker had slammed into a wharf in a city she didn’t recognise. Two frames showed it heading straight into the dockside. The next two captured the impact, with the front quarter of the supertanker crumpling back in on itself while the water around the vessel churned white and dockside cranes began to topple. A single frame caught the moment of detonation amidships, a blossom of white light spilling from the ruptured hull. And then the entire length of the supertanker was consumed by the birth of a dwarf star.

Maggie started swearing at the TV again, a stream of disconnected curses. Aunty Celia softly repeated the same thing over and over again: ‘Fookin’ ‘ell… Fookin’ ‘ell…’ Every time she said it, she folded and unfolded her arms, like a malfunctioning animatronic figure. Monique, however, was refusing to even look at the screen anymore.

‘You said you could not speak French at all,’ she said, challenging Caitlin once more.

Dr Colbert shook his head like a dog emerging from water and waved the young woman away with his clipboard, addressing himself only half to Caitlin. His eyes remained fixed on the catastrophe as it unfolded a few feet above the end of the bed.

‘We have done scans while you were unconscious,’ he told his patient, in English. ‘You have a lesion on your hippocampus, a part of the brain intimately involved in the organisation of memory. It may be a tumour. But we need to take a biopsy to ascertain its nature. It may be serious. Much more serious than the injuries that brought you here. They are uncomfortable, but they can be dealt with.’

Caitlin Monroe had been an Echelon field agent for nearly five years. She had been intensively trained for three years before that. For her entire adult life, she had lived in a crazy maze where every step she took, every corner she turned, she faced the possibility of betrayal and death. She had adapted to a contingent existence where nothing was taken for granted. She had faced her own potential annihilation so many times that a doctor telling her she might be dying was completely passй. At least, on a normal day.

But this was a thousand miles from being a normal day, and for once Caitlin found the idea of her life ending to be a completely novel and unsettling experience. It stuck in her mind, a barbed, immovable object that tugged painfully whenever she tried to pull at it. ‘I’m dying?’ she asked him finally.

‘No,’ said Colbert. ‘But -’

The television went blank, the screen a dead, black void.

‘What the…?’

Two words of white, plain type appeared.

‘Holy shit, it’s happening here now!’ Maggie exclaimed.

‘No!’ said Caitlin, cutting off an outbreak of panic. They could all hear cries of alarm and distress from other rooms on the hospital floor. ‘Just wait.’

‘Check the French news channels,’ she said. ‘See if they’re still on. And the English sports channels.’

Monique abandoned the task of glaring at her to flip through the channels with the remote. As Caitlin had expected, the continental stations were still broadcasting, as was Sky Racing and the English football channels. Even the end of the world wouldn’t be allowed to interfere with interminable replays of last year’s Champions League.

‘It’s nothing,’ Caitlin assured them, rubbing at her throbbing temples with one hand, the one trailing slightly fewer leads and sensors. ‘The government has taken control of the news broadcasters. It’s standard procedure in a national emergency. Just watch… And doc… what’s your name again?’