Alex Knightly - Sudden Darkness - A Post-Apocalyptic EMP Thriller

She faltered. She couldn’t leave them in those men’s hands. “I’ll explain everything. You’ve got to follow me. I have a car. Now! Come on.”

“You almost killed us. Why should we follow you?”

They turned and started to talk amongst themselves.

“We need to get out of here.”

“How? We left the bikes in there. We’ve got to go back and get them.”

“No!”

“Well how else?”

Si chewed the inside of her cheek. Go! Leave them. You can find Max another way.

And then it dawned on her. This was the other way. The gun. If she had a gun she could hide in the scrapyard and shoot the men from the Jaguar one by one. The last one would tell her where Max was—she’d make sure of it. Then she’d take their car. She had no need for the Renault if she had the gun.

“Will you listen to me? I have a car. I’ll trade you—”

The growl of the engine stopped and they all turned to her with stunned expressions.

“Into the yard,” she hissed. “Come on.”

Annie coughed again and gasped for breath. Was this a trick? They stumbled after the girl. Whatever it was, they didn’t have much choice. They had to get away from that garage and whoever else was coming.

The yard was a mess. The towering piles of rusty car parts looked like they hadn’t been touched in years.

“Come on,” the girl hissed. “This way.”

Annie couldn’t hold it back any longer. She fell to her knees on the wet gravel and cringed as her mouth watered and the contents of her stomach emptied out in front of her. Tears filled her eyes. As the seconds passed and that garage filled with smoke, she’d been convinced that that was the end. She still couldn’t believe they were out. Her ears rang from the sound of Olivia’s desperate shrieks. The flames hadn’t reached them, but they wouldn’t have needed to. They had had seconds left at most before they succumbed to the smoke.

Part of her wished she had.

She retched again.

They were all watching her.

“Come on,” the girl hissed. “We have to get out of here. They’ll find us.”

Annie stood and wiped her mouth on her sleeve. “Why should we trust her?” she muttered.

“We have no choice,” Terry said, patting her back. “The bikes are destroyed. She says she has a car.”

Annie looked at the girl again. Rage washed over her. How could she just stand there looking at them when this was all her fault? Poor Olivia looked like she’d aged ten years in the space of ten minutes and Clive hadn’t stopped coughing since they got out. None of them had. They’d been this close…

She marched forward and grabbed the girl’s arm, wrenching it up until it reached the point where a little more pressure would snap bones. “What are you playing at? First you try to kill us; now you’re offering us a car. What’s your game?”

“Annie, stop. No…”

“Why? Why should I?” She pulled her gun from her pocket and shoved it against the nape of the girl’s neck. “What’s stopping me from blowing your head off and taking your keys?”

“Annie, don’t…”

“Please,” the girl shrieked. “Please. I didn’t know who you were. I thought you were the ones who took Max.”

Her terror cut through Annie’s anger, but not fully. “Who’s Max?” she snapped.

“My boss. He owns this place.” She opened her mouth wide and wailed. “You ruined everything. Now they’re going to get us. I had everything set up. I’ll never find him now.”

Clive leaned forward and gently steered the gun away. Then he pulled her to her feet. “Take us to the car. Now.”

“I need one of your guns. Then you can take the car.”

“I’m not giving you a gun. What do you want that for?”

She jumped to her feet. She was coiled up like a snake, ready to run at any moment. Annie took a step closer to prevent that. “Shut up and take us to the car.”

Rough male voices floated towards them from outside the yard. Annie’s heart hammered even harder.

The girl looked at each of them in turn and then glanced behind her, as if making her mind up about something. Annie started to cough and stifled it as best she could. If those men heard…

The girl was practically twitching with fear in a way that made her look possessed.

“She’s not faking it,” Annie gasped. “And if what she said about those men is true…”

They started to run. Clive had to practically drag Olivia along with him. She hadn’t been coping since they got out of the garage.

Annie coughed as quietly as she could and gripped her gun tighter.

The towers of metal that surrounded them were so high they blocked out what little sun there was. Pools of water shone iridescent from leaked fuel, which drew her mind back to what had just happened. It felt like the smoke and soot was clinging to every pore of her skin.

Terry struggled for breath as they ran. “How do you feel about using that? I can tell you now…”

She shook her head. “If my life’s in danger I’ll do what I have to.”

She squinted. The light had changed. Up ahead there was a gap in the rubbish, behind which was a fence with a hole as wide and half as high as a door. The girl was waiting for them there.

Annie’s apprehension grew. What was beyond that fence? All she wanted to do was lie down and never get up again, but the thought of Dan made her push on.

Was it a trap? She didn’t know. She didn’t feel great about crouching down to get through the fence. But she did it all the same. They all did; even Olivia.

She emerged on the other side, half expecting to be grabbed by the very men they were trying to get away from. But no-one grabbed her. She stumbled to her feet and looked around, disappointed to see nothing but a couple of overturned cars that looked like they’d fallen over from the scrapyard.

“Where’s the car?” Clive snapped. “You’d better not be trying to fool us.”

“I’m not. Look. It’s right here.”

They had emerged into what looked like wasteland at the back of the scrapyard. The grass there came up to mid-calf but further into the field it was even wilder. There was a big dip in the middle where bricks and other construction waste had been dumped. Judging by the grass growing all over it, it had been there for a long time.

The girl raised the bonnet and started tinkering.

Annie looked around as bile rose in her throat again. “You said you had a car! Isn’t it working?”

“Can one of you get in and try to start the engine? Now! It worked last time but that was when Max was here.”

“Come on,” Terry snapped. “Hurry up.”

He too, Annie noticed, was paying less attention to the car and more to their surroundings.

“What do you think?” she whispered.

“Getting out might be a problem.”

The fence they’d come under ran the whole width of the scrapyard to the yards beyond. From the dip in the middle, it sloped back up to the other sides about five or six hundred yards away, where it was backed by a series of factories and warehouses.

“Yeah.” She looked around and pointed off into the distance. “It looks like there’s an entry over there. The main thing is whether we can get away without them noticing. I don’t know what kind of car that is, but it doesn’t look like it can outrun much. That’s if she gets it started at all.”

Clive had climbed into the driving seat and was trying to start it. The engine was coughing and spluttering and it made the hairs on Annie’s arms stand on end. Surely those men could hear it?

“Come on,” she hissed. “They’ll hear.”

Should we run now? she wondered. She had no idea where they were and they’d not gotten far that morning. Why the hell had they stopped at that bloody garage? If they hadn’t… well, they’d have had to take their chances with those men and knowing what they now knew about them, that didn’t seem like a very good idea.