John Birmingham - Without warning

Thinking about her family made him feel even worse. She had cried all through that first night of the Disappearance, after wasting hours ringing every number she knew back on the East Coast. Her parents, her brothers and sisters, her uncles, aunts, old friends were all gone. Kip almost turned on his heels and went back inside, but momentum carried him forward. He had to get to work.

The street was sorry-looking and deserted. Nothing moved in a grey landscape of dying trees, brown lawn and wilted flowerbeds. Rain had washed away the worst of the fallout, but blackened, soggy clumps of mud and ash had collected at natural choke points in the gutter, behind the wheels of parked cars, and in small ponds of sludge where the ground dipped and run-off normally collected. Normally lush green and manicured to within an inch of its life, Deerford Drive was now sadly unkempt. Kipper shivered in the bleak chill of the morning. It had been unnaturally dark for most of the past week, with the sun completely blotted out, but prevailing weather patterns had finally pushed away the worst of the airborne waste, and although the day was by no means sunny, it was at least a good dealer brighter. That wouldn’t necessarily last, however.

Hundreds of cities and towns were ablaze across North America. The entire continent was pouring out vast noxious plumes as the infernos spread, with nobody and nothing to stop them, save for the occasional (and completely futile) automated firefighting system. He’d seen satellite photos of it on the web, and once on a local news show, before FEMA took over the airwaves. If he hadn’t known better he’d have bet good money that an angry rash of super-sized volcanoes had suddenly erupted all over the US and up into Canada. Vast, slow-moving geysers of smoke, thousands of miles long, trailed away east from city after city. The Atlantic and most of Europe were now blanketed, with the wave front due to pass over the Urals in a day or two. It wouldn’t be long before it had circled the northern hemisphere and reappeared back over Deerford Drive.

‘Mr Kipper, Mr Kipper! Hello!’

Jolted by the unexpected cry, Kipper got his mask in place. He knew the voice only too well. Mrs Heinemann from number 43.

‘Is it safe now? Is it safe to go out, Mr Kipper?’

‘Well, you’d better hope so, Mrs Heinemann. Because you’ll be in trouble otherwise, won’t you?’

The woman was a wire-framed ninety-eight pounds of faded Jewish-American princess. Never married. Never got over it. At fifty-something, perhaps even sixty-odd, give or take some plastic surgery and a high degree of elasticity in her actual birth date, she’d poured all of her considerable energies into her self-appointed role as block kapo of the neighbourhood. Without a husband or children to harass and make miserable, she busied herself with other people’s ‘problems’ – situations that, generally speaking, nobody had recognised as a problem until Mrs Heinemann became involved.

And yes, she was Mrs Heinemann. Unless you wanted an earbashing out of your thoughtlessness and lack of consideration for the cruel vicissitudes that had left her single when so many other, undeserving women had chanced upon partners and offspring. Dressed in a bright green and salmon-pink shell suit, gathered at the ankles and wrists with elastic bands, and sporting a plastic shower cap and handkerchief face mask, she hurried up the slight incline in the street towards him, firing from the lip as she advanced.

‘I’m so glad I caught you, Mr Kipper. I haven’t seen anyone out and about all week. This terrible situation, you know. And the curfew. So is it safe now? Can we move about? It’s just that I have very little food in the house. And so does everyone else. Mrs Deever at number 36, with her two little ones – she needs formula, Mr Kipper. And sweet Jane at 29, the retarded girl, she needs her medication. The Songnamichans – that very large Hindu family, he’s a Microsoft manager – well, they must nearly be eating the wallpaper by now, with all of those children. What is to be done, Mr Kipper? What is to be done?’

She’d arrived right in front of him by now, yapping the whole time, a classic demonstration of fire and movement. He hadn’t had a chance to speak or retreat. But her questions gave him the opportunity he needed.

‘Mrs Heinemann,’ he said forcefully. ‘You need to get back inside right now. It is not safe out here, yet. We haven’t had a chance to take any measurements of air or water quality. I’m only out here because it’s my job. You need to get back inside where it’s safe, this very minute. Go on. Right now. Don’t delay. And don’t drag any mud into the house with you. You’ll need to strip off, bag up that outfit, and scrub yourself thoroughly. You still got water stored in the house? Good. Then, get going. Right now!’

He made sure his delivery was every bit as rapid and incontestable as her own. He waved her back towards her own house, shaking his head and brooking no backchat. In his peripheral vision he could see curtains twitching aside in a couple of houses and he made sure that everyone watching could see he didn’t want anybody wandering around until it was safe.

‘But Mr Kipper -’

‘No! Move along now. Go on, Mrs Heinemann. You’ve no business endangering yourself out here. Now git. Go and decontaminate yourself.’ He took her upper arm in a deliberate grip and gave her a hurry-on towards home.

‘Oh my. Oh dear,’ she mumbled as she toddled off at high speed.

Shaking his head, he returned to the pick-up and climbed in, carefully knocking any mud from his boots before doing so, mostly for the benefit of his audience. The cabin was cold and still smelled of the McDonald’s Family Meal he’d brought home late on day one. He’d also picked up a whole heap of canned fruit and eighty gallons of spring water in big ten-gallon plastic bottles, but that was the extent of any hoarding he felt necessary – because of all those freeze-dried, vacuum-sealed meals he’d bought in bulk near the end of last year, from some camping store that was closing down. Man, hadn’t Barb changed her tune on that little purchase. He’d got himself a new one torn at the time.

The engine needed turning over a couple of times before the truck grumbled into life, sounding louder than usual in the unnatural stillness of the morning. He checked the fuel gauge as soon as he had power, making sure he hadn’t been siphoned. The city council’s Emergency Management Committee had banned the sale of gasoline for ‘non-essential’ purposes on the second day, but hadn’t had the manpower-or the will, in his opinion-to enforce the measure when thousands of people ignored it and started queuing at gas stations. They bid up the price to almost fifty dollars a gallon at one point. That was when the army had rolled out of Fort Lewis to lock down the city and get everyone off the streets as the sky had blackened and the rain turned to acid.

Kipper’s truck had three-quarters of a tank, and he could get more from a council depot without any trouble, yet. But that’d change. No commercial shipping or air traffic had come into Seattle for five days, and he didn’t expect any in the foreseeable future. The only supplies they could draw on were aid shipments: food from Australia and New Zealand, one supertanker of petroleum so far from Taiwan, and more food and medical supplies from Japan. It was enough to keep things ticking over, if it kept coming, and if people didn’t panic. Two big fucking ‘if’s.

The island was quiet, and people were sticking to the curfew. Mostly. Kipper searched the radio dial for anything besides the recorded EBS messages, which told him nothing new, and said nothing about the raid on the food bank. He picked up a scratchy, inconsistent transmission from somewhere in Canada, but it was all electronic dance music, which in his book was worse than nothing. Sighing, he punched the button to cut off the radio and pulled away from the curb, wondering what the hell he was going to do about Piglet’s Big Movie.