NaNo'17 - Back to Alice

On the home stretch for the first part now. 10.11am is the last update time before "After" kicks in.

After what, exactly?  Read on...

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– Friday, 26^th September, 2025 –

 – 10:11 –

 – Alice –

With her flat locked and the Venetian blinds set to half, Alice hoisted her rucksack and set out for her brother’s house.  Zack lived on the other side of town with his wife, Jessica, and baby Molly. He was an architect, and had a lot of leeway about working from home. They rubbed along as well as brother and sister might be expected to, though there had been moments growing up when she though he was the biggest idiot on the planet.

She had tried to spend the last of her credit on getting through to him, to let them know she was on her way, but the network was completely down now, a situation confirmed to her by a police officer at the next main road.

‘Where are you headed to, miss?’ he asked.

‘Going to my brother’s,’ Alice explained. ‘He’s up in South Fields.’

‘Okay, well take it gently,’ he advised her. ‘Ground is pretty badly buckled on the other side of the town centre.’ Alice thanked him for the information and plotted a new route in her head. She needed to swing by a cash point, whatever road she took, so she turned left and followed the old path down to the canal.

The tarmac was scrunched up and tricky to walk on. She was glad of her sturdy brown boots, but she kept both hands free of her pockets, despite the cold, in case she tripped or overbalanced. She went down onto the tow path first, to have a look at the bridge she needed to cross to reach the cash point, but it appeared intact and she could see no visible cracks. She decided to take it at a brisk walk but, except for the hammering in her heart, she felt no tremors as she crossed.

The supermarket in whose wall the cash point sat, however, had a very long queue waiting to use it and, although she did move steadily towards the front of the line, everybody seemed to be withdrawing the maximum three hundred pounds. She only wished she had that much to withdraw. With each person that left the queue ahead of her, she fretted that the machine would run out of money before she got there, but luck seemed to be on her side when she got to the front and the machine dutifully dispensed eighty quid. A quick balance check told her she had been paid, despite the chaos, but eighty was what she had thought she could realistically risk; if payments were still automatically going in, then they could assuredly be automatically going out, as well, and if Mark Sanders of U&U Properties tried to take the rent again, then at least it had a good chance of debiting successfully this time. As she walked away, she heard people complaining that the machine was empty.

The roads remained empty, though people filled the streets. She overheard people say that all the motorways were shut until the inspection crews had done their work. She heard other snippets; about the damage, about the power outages, or the lack of water and telephone signals. She heard people saying which friends and loved ones that had not been able to get hold of.

She heard nothing about the dead, though she presumed there must be hundreds. Thousands, maybe? No, she thought, and hating herself for it, if the damage was as widespread as she had seen, then thousands was going to be very wide of the mark.

The police officer had not been exaggerating; Alice approached South Field, up high on a hill at the very edge of town, and at least two miles from the gaping maw that had once been the Summerlands Industrial Estate and surrounding houses, but the ground was rippled, as if a great wall of sound had rushed through, baking its mark in the tarmac as it whooshed by. The unevenness made walking painful, each stride a different length from the last, and she stopped several times. The weight of the rucksack did not help, either. It was as full as she could make it, without packing anything she didn’t think she would absolutely need; she had a week’s worth of clothes, folded up and rolled down so tightly she wondered what state they would be in when she needed them; a bag of assorted charging cables and the devices they belonged to; her last few cans of Sprite and all the toiletries she thought she might need to last a week. In her favourite coat she had slipped her phone, keys, a handful of change she had been keeping in a jar, and the smallest purse she could find. She didn’t want to be carrying another bag, too, so this would have to do.

Give it a week, she hoped. By then, with any luck, we’ll be getting back to something like normality.

She reached the little square of shops at the top of the hill and found the newsagents open. Everybody in there could speak only of the calamity, or were glued to the little TV on counter. Some stood in tears. Others left, unable to take any more of the awfulness. Alice paid a pound for packet of bourbon biscuits, and set off again.

She was a little further up the road when she heard a door fly open and a loud, brassy voice cry out her nickname.

‘Ally!’

She turned, looking towards the row of mostly intact houses to her right, to see her supervisor from work, Erin, running towards her. ‘Erin!’ Alice exclaimed, meeting Erin in a warm hug.

‘Fucking hell, you’re okay!’ Erin sighed. Alice saw the distinct redness around her eyes. ‘You’re okay…’

‘Yeah…’ Alice agreed, but did not elaborate. ‘Yeah, I’m alright.’

Erin stepped back, her face still taut. She was biting her lips. ‘Fuck… it’s all fucking crazy. Well, come on, come in. I’ll do you a cuppa, you look absolutely frozen, love.’ Alice nodded, and merely allowed herself to be led towards Erin’s house, and noted that Erin had not asked why Alice was in this part of town. ‘I brought the kids straight home when it… it started,’ Erin explained, as they stepped around the broken tiles on the garden path. ‘School’s shut, anyway. Headmistress pinned a sign to the gate. We haven’t had any messages, at all!’

The hall was full of pictures of Erin, her husband Sam, and their two children. ‘No, I haven’t been able to call anyone,’ Alice agreed, straightening a couple of frames as she passed.

‘Have you heard from anyone? I’ve been going fucking mad trying to get hold of people.’

‘I saw on the group chat that Jack and Hannah were okay, but I haven’t heard from anyone else since.’ Erin quickly swept a jacket off the stool at the breakfast bar. ‘You sit there, Ally love. Tea okay? Coffee?’

‘Oh, coffee please, Erin. That’s great.’ Now that she had stopped moving, this false cheer was the only thing keeping Alice’s thoughts away from the darkness of that awful maw.

‘I’ve only got instant,’ Erin apologised.

Alice smiled, for what felt like the first time in hours. ‘Instant’s fine.’

They came the sound of feet running down stairs, then a small child appeared in the kitchen. ‘Mummy!’ the boy called out. ‘Mummy, I want a drink!’

‘What do you say, Olly?’ Erin asked, without looking up from the kettle.

Olly looked briefly guilty, then tried again. ‘Please can I have a drink?’

‘Apple or orange?’ his mother asked.

Olly smiled. ‘Apple!’

Erin filled a small glass and handed it to Olly, who beamed. ‘There you go,’ his mother said. ‘What do you say?’

‘Thanks…’ he mumbled, mostly to the glass, which was almost all the way to his mouth. Alice shared a smile with Erin as the boy departed, and some of the lines in her supervisor’s face seemed to relax at last.

‘He’s adorable,’ Alice said, and Erin laughed.

‘When he’s not being a little shit bag, yeah,’ Erin exclaimed, once the sound of feet was more than half way up the stairs again. ‘Fucking nightmare, sometimes,’ and she stirred the coffee absent mindedly. ‘But, I love him to bits.’

‘Were they frightened?’

Erin looked away and nodded. ‘Soon forget, though,’ and she wiped a fresh tear from her cheek. ‘Kids…’

They relocated to the lounge. Erin didn’t have the TV on, and Alice did not ask for it to be turned on. They told each other what they knew, though Alice gave an account that she had set out late, and was turned back by the police.

‘Up on the main road,’ she explained. ‘Everyone was running away, so I just turned around.’ At this evasion, she felt a sudden prickling sensation in her right heel, the very same foot that had wobbled on the pavement beside the office, seconds before –

She hid her discomfort behind her mug, and drank deeply.

‘Well, I just know the police have roped the whole fucking estate off,’ Erin went on. ‘I’ve tried calling, but there’s nothing…’

Alice didn’t know what to say, and certainly couldn’t say that she knew exactly why there was no reply to the phones. The damage had been so widespread, the footage so copious and dreadful, that it wasn’t surprising to find that Erin didn’t know the whole area had sunk into oblivion. And, what with the various power cuts and the lack of mobile signal, and the sheer enormity of the event, there could be any number of people who didn’t know about this particular catastrophe.

Or, and this though scared Alice even more, maybe Erin did know what had happened, and was simply skirting round the truth, just as Alice was; maybe she could not bring herself to talk about it, either?

‘Why are you out this way, anyway?’ Erin suddenly asked.

Alice spluttered slightly, but recovered. ‘My power’s out. And the water. I was going to go to my brother’s.’ She wondered if Erin had been convinced by her story about turning back on the main road.

‘Oh, of course, you said he lived up this way before,’ Erin said. ‘His other half okay? And…?’ she fished for the names.

‘Jess is fine,’ Alice confirmed. ‘Molly’s nearly one, now.’ This topic reminded her, though. ‘Is your internet working, Erin? Can I be a pain and borrow it for a bit? My phone’s completely out of credit, and I had no power, so I couldn’t get on the wifi at the flat.’

‘Of course you can,’ Erin smiled. ‘Let me get you the password.’ She disappeared, but soon returned with the plastic strip from the back of the router.

‘Thanks,’ Alice beamed, tapping the password into her phone. She waited a few seconds, then her notifications exploded into life. Erin smiled, and excused herself, saying she would check on the kids, but Alice knew she was simply being given some space.

After scrolling through the swarm of I’m safe notifications from Facebook friends, making sure to add her own, too, she checked for an update from the work chat – everybody in her team was accounted for, and she called up to Erin to let her know.

‘I’ve just got through to head office, too,’ Erin said, coming back downstairs. They’ve said they’ll contact everyone when they have an update on the office.’

‘Do we keep getting paid in the meantime?’ Alice wondered.

‘I don’t know,’ Erin sighed regretfully.

Alice returned to the lounge, drank the remains of her coffee, then picked up her phone again. She was just looking for signs of Zack and Jessica, however, when the handset buzzed, and her mother’s picture appeared on the screen.