“Don’t be ridiculous,” Timmy wagged a finger from side to side.

  Alex laughed, looking around the basement. The guns on one wall, the MRE pallet on the other side. The TVs, now silently playing through the news. There was even a sofa, a tatty three-seater, which looked as though it had seen better days.

  “Bomb shelter in the basement is against regulations,” Timmy continued, smiling with half his mouth.

  But Alex wasn’t listening. Something had caught his eye. There was one corner of the room which wasn’t lit at all. Alex had assumed it was storage. A place to stash all the junk used when renovating a house. Buckets of paint, plaster, that kind of thing.

  But he was looking closely now. It was a huge shape, about the size of a hatchback with the top cut off. But it was covered in thick tarpaulin, from top to bottom. There was no hint at what was underneath. Above, a single strip light was fitted beneath a green shade, but not turned on.

  “What’s this, then? Hovercraft? Some kind of drone? Bet it’s illegal if you’ve got it down here, wrapped up.”

  “What, that?” Timmy replied, turning toward the unlit corner.

  He ripped away the tarpaulin in one smooth motion and flicked a switch. The strip light lit up the surface.

  “That’s the pool table.”

  The green felt was immaculate. Timmy walked to a cabinet and took out a long, thin case. It was metallic, the kind of crate Alex had seen rock bands use to cart equipment across continents.

  Two clasps opened on the side. Timmy reached in and removed two separate ends of a pool cue. He pieced them together, screwing the thin end into the fat.

  Fishing a chalk cube from his pocket, Timmy leaned over the light. It threw the shadows up over his chin.

  “Welcome,” he said, “to Castle Ratz.”

  Chapter 9

  Alex was having a good time at Castle Ratz. Once the pool table had been set up and the beers retrieved from the fridge, Timmy brought down a battered old box. An old analog radio. A wireless, he insisted on calling it. “Thought we could hear the game on this.”

  “Didn’t you tell Eddie that you knew how to get around the blackout? What was all that about soldering?”

  “Ah, I read that online. Seemed easy enough.”

  “So these don’t have it?” Alex motioned toward the bank of screens watching over them.

  “Nope. They’re just for the news. Got to keep on top of these things.”

  Timmy had muted all the TV sets but they played on in the background. The light above the pool table and the light from the screens was all they had. It was enough to play pool, at least. As they played, they talked.

  Timmy would invariably react to some story on the news, a story neither of them could hear, while the baseball played on some ten miles away. The man announcing must have been doing it for years. He didn’t so much know the players’ names, but he knew when to shut up and just let the audience hear the sound of the ball on the bat.

  The sound was one of the only things which had stayed the same. It wasn’t the reboot loop of a cheap Chinese phone. It wasn’t the hum of an electric car creeping out of a warehouse carpark. It wasn’t the screaming din of the news channels they’d silenced in the background of the basement. It was just a stiff piece of wood hitting sweetly against a square inch of tightly stitched horsehide.

  No one watched baseball anymore, though. They were all at GUNPLAY. Alex listened again but didn’t know the score.

  But between innings, they’d get back to the news. That was Timmy’s chance to evangelize. He’d bend down over his cue, lining up the white, waxing lyrical about this or that. But it wasn’t just one subject and then another.

  No, to Timmy, they were all interconnected. It was all butterfly wings and tornadoes, Korean biotech and San Francisco fisheries. Cartels, gangs, and the rising cost of medication. He was in his pulpit, on the other side of the pool table, and Alex was happy to listen. It was reassuring that someone was paying attention, at least.

  “You really think it’s all like that?” Alex asked. “You’re just paranoid.”

  Timmy was quiet. Try and pry deeper into his mind and his surface level knowledge would thin out. Alex lined up his shot. Hit it. Caught the corner of a pocket and bounced out. He swore.

  “Your hit,” he said. “I shot a blank.”

  Timmy stayed quiet. Alex looked up. His friend was transfixed in front of the TV screens, edging closer and closer.

  “Don’t get too close, Timmy,” Alex said. “You’ll get square eyes.”

  Picking up a fresh beer, Alex pulled back the tab. There was that familiar hiss. But then he noticed. The baseball commentary had stopped. The sound of the bat on the ball had stopped. There were still sounds coming from the radio. But it was shuffling feet. The ambient noise of a huge group of people lumbering from foot to foot. Alex looked up again at Timmy.

  “Hey,” he said, “what’s happened to the game?”

  Waving a hand for silence, Timmy remained with his eyes glued to the screens. The hand turned into a pointing finger, twisted, and drew Alex’s eyes up to the row of televisions. Alex watched the world change.

  * * *

  There was the President. Terrance Fletcher himself. His face was across all five screens. Even the weather channel. They’d stopped mid-storm. There was still no sound. Alex could see the man’s trademark smile. It had been plastered over every surface during the election. He’d been a handsome man in his youth. Winning easy against such an unpopular candidate, they’d made sure that everyone knew the face.

  Knew which box to tick.

  But that same youthful confidence wasn’t there now. Alex carefully left his pool cue leant against the table. He walked around to watch with Timmy. The President was sitting behind a different desk. Not his usual oval office position. Everyone must have seen that a hundred times. This was different. Smaller. Cramped.

  “It’s Air Force One,” Timmy said. “That’s the desk they got on there.”

  Alex trusted his friend. When the man started to shake, along with his chair and table, they knew it to be true. Turbulence. They were hitting hot air. Which meant they were already flying. It had been serious enough for the news channels to cut straight to the President. They hadn’t even updated the rolling tickers along the bottom of the screens.

  As Alex watched, Timmy began digging around between the cushions on the chair. As he dug deeper and deeper, desperately looking for the remote, the radio crackled back into life. They cut to the same audio feed, the President speaking. The sound lagged slightly behind the man on the screen, the familiar words – “my fellow Americans” – arriving after the lips had already moved. It gave the entire speech a ghostly quality. A man speaking from another world.

  There was too much information to process. Alex found himself studying the grain of the footage, the little beads and crackles which spoke to him from the past. This was the high definition future. The President’s video fidelity was the least pressing issue, but Alex couldn’t focus on anything else.

  “You hear that? Eko virus.”

  The red mess of hair was standing still, for once, parked in front of the screens. Federal emergency and martial law. In twenty-four hours, they’d be shutting down state lines. People should get to where they needed to be. Alex had watched too many terrible action movies for this to make any sense. It shouldn’t be happening.

  He forced himself to concentrate, like trying to catch a waterfall in a paper cup.

  “-on the advice of the FAA, FEMA, and other government departments. We have thought long and hard about this course of action and,” the President’s voice stuttered, “we can see no alternative. We must plan for a future, a future in which America the bold, the brave, and the free continues in the strongest possible fashion.”

  The man was talking, the delayed voice from the radio blathering about a national guard who had been federalized and a curfew introduced for everyone. Police leave cancelled. Don’t leave your home. Lock your door. Stay inside. Don’t dial the police. They’re too busy. This must be a joke, Alex thought. He can’t be serious. Timmy didn’t move.

  Walking back around the pool table and picking up the cue, Alex took another shot. He missed, again, and it didn’t matter. They were playing a different game now. The radio was ancient and fickle. Most of the words were present and correct. But occasionally, the speech would fizz and hiss. In these empty pockets of dead air, Alex knew that people would be pouring in their deepest fears.

  “Your shot,” he told Timmy. “Looks like I’m staying here tonight. Holed up in Castle Ratz.”

  It was too dark in the basement. Alex went searching for a light switch. The radio broadcast was still echoing around the room, bouncing off the concrete floors.

  “I implore you, my friends--” The President’s voice ached, heavy with the weight of a hundred days arriving all at once. “—to stay safe. This is only temporary. We will not be defeated. This is a disease and, it seems to me, something against which we can fight.

  “But we will not win this battle at the end of a sword or down the barrel of a rifle. We will triumph through our social graces, our common sense, and--” The voice snapped, catching a high note in the throat. “—our innate greatness. We must work together to stop the spread of this dreadful plague. We must deliver ourselves from the danger. We must entrust unto ourselves the power to conquer this terrible threat. Good night, and God ble-”

  The lights went out. The basement was dark. Empty. Quiet. Another blackout. It felt good to be back on familiar territory. Alex heard his friend fumbling through a drawer. A match struck, lighting up Timmy’s face. The sound of sirens was heard away in the distance, all over Detroit.

  “You think it’s real?” asked Alex, shadows catching strange shapes across his cheeks.

  “I guess. I mean, it looked like him. And it was on the radio and all the TVs. What do you think happened?”

  “I don’t know. There’s been some weird stuff happening lately. This is the weirdest bit of all.”

  “They’re on the plane, so that’s obvious. I don’t know. Something seems off to me. They can’t just announce that. We’d have known.”

  “Before now? Really?”

  “They don’t tell us everything. Why would they change now?”

  “They’ve told us something.”

  “We’ll see.”

  The match fizzled out, burning fingers as it went.

  “Have you got any torches or whatever? You must have something that runs on batteries.”

  There was that familiar laugh.

  “We can do one better than that, man.”

  Lighting another match, Timmy vanished into the darkness, taking the light with him. After a few minutes, a rumbling sound was heard. Then, a moment later, the basement sputtered into life. The gloom vanished and the screens lit up. The radio, too, was alive again. But no one was broadcasting. Instead, there was only static. Alex turned it off.

  Of the five screens, only two were still broadcasting. They were running on a skeleton crew, it was clear. Gone were the complicated graphics, the glitzy animations, and the thin veneer of professional reassurance that was the newsman’s stock in trade. Instead, there were two terrified people, reading falteringly from cue cards. Next to their heads, headlines rolled past with advice.

  Stay at home. Don’t break the curfew. Virus. Spreading. Quarantine. Cure. After just thirty seconds, the words were almost meaningless, repeated across both channels.

  “The generator should be good for the night,” Timmy said as he walked back into the room. “Think they’re the regular rolling blackouts, but I’ve set it up to cut in whenever we’re caught short. Might be a few wobbles.”

  Alex motioned to the screen.

  “They’re treating it seriously.”

  “Any of them mentioned Detroit yet? We never get any attention here. Bet it’s some California thing. Or New York. They get all the new stuff.”

  “You’re handling this very well. I thought you’d be up in arms. Gung ho.”

  “Look, the way I see it: either this Eko virus is unstoppable and we’re all screwed. Or they’re working on it and we’ve just got to sit tight and wait for it all to blow over. Guess we’re not going in to work next week, huh?”

  “Guess not.”

  * * *

  They played pool again. And again. The TV screens stayed on. The same stories. The crew seemed to dwindle, the broadcast crumbling into nothing until there were just a few people left. They stopped switching cameras, stopped cutting away from the anchor. First one fell, then the other. The news people were heading home. They were replaced by words. Warning signs. Just the same stock phrases, repeated back. Be careful. Be safe. Don’t step outside. Don’t panic.

  The internet seemed to have ground to a halt, too. Both men checked all the devices they had available. Phones and computers. All dead. Nothing showing.

  “Must be a tower down or something.”

  That seemed a decent enough explanation, Alex thought. But it would be nice to know what was happening outside of the house. They tried the radio. Nothing. The other TV channels. Nothing. Calling people. Nothing. So they went back to drinking beer and playing pool. There was nothing else they could do. Three beers in, Timmy began to talk.

  “See, you want to stay away from the cities. Times like this, city is the worst possible place. Too many people. They all panic. We need to keep level headed. Out here in the suburbs, we’re not getting looting or whatnot. Your place? Well, you’re a target. You’ll be staying here, though, so that’s fine. Just don’t get your hopes up about heading home.”

  Trying to call the pizza company was a dead end. No answer. They ate one of the meals from the pallet. It wasn’t great. Putting it to the side, Timmy complained about a “grand wasted.” But his fridge was bare, the vacuum sealed fruit tasting of plastic leakage. So they ate another meal. By the time they’d finished the second, Alex never wanted to see another readymade meal ever again.

  By the time the small hours of the morning arrived, they were out of beer and out of energy. Timmy began to yawn and announced that he was heading up to bed.

  “Fortunately for you,” he told Alex, “I’ve been preparing my whole life for this kind of thing. My old man was sure the world was going to end. Beats me why he had kids. Still, that kind of thinking is in the blood.”

  Hidden in one of the cabinets under the guns, behind all the ammunition, was a leather bag, four feet long and half a foot wide. It was pulled out and placed on the floor.

  “See, between the generator, the guns, and the night vision goggles, you’ve got to be ready for anything.”

  He pulled out poles, thin metal sticks which he clicked together. Threading them through a piecemeal slip of cotton, Timmy assembled the pieces and threw them on to the floor. It was a cot, barely wide enough for one. It rocked slightly on uneven feet.

  “All this end of the world crap,” said Alex, “and you don’t even have a pull-out couch?”

  Timmy grinned as he presented the rickety camp bed.

  “Waterproof, light as a feather, and ready for anything.” He was too happy as he said it.

  Alex slept on the couch. After his host went to bed and the lights went off, the house rumbled on. At least three times in the night, the generator purred into action. It seemed like the electricity was cutting in and out around the town.

  It was times like this that the imagination began to stir. No, Alex realized, there were no times like this. At least, it didn’t seem like there could be. They’d have to find out more tomorrow. They needed information.

  But that was on the other side of a long sleep. Uncomfortable on the couch, Alex twisted and turned throughout the night. Tomorrow, he assured himself, everything would be fine.

  Chapter 10

  The door opened at the top of the basement stairs and the morning rushed in. Waking up, kitchen light falling across his face, Alex remembered everything that had happened. It all came back at once. The news. The images. The implications. A strange smell wafted down from above. Timmy was cooking something.

  “Wake up!” he shouted down. “We’re moving out.”

  The smell crept down from the kitchen, strong enough to stand up on its own two feet. It did not smell good. Wandering up in spite of his nose, Alex reached the top and found himself confronted by a hectic scene.

  All across the kitchen counters lay a collection of handguns and ammunition. These items were arranged carefully, lined up in their rank and file. But around them, Timmy had tried to cook breakfast. He had hauled a couple of MRE packets up the stairs from the basement and thrown the contents into a pan. From there, he’d added salt, pepper, and an inestimable number of spices. That explained the smell.

  “I thought the power was off,” Alex said, running a finger along a line of something powdered and brown.

  “About that,” Timmy responded, turning back to his kitchen. “Turns out one of my wiring jobs wasn’t up to much. The power was on and off all night.”

  “I heard the generator kick in.”

  “Exactly. Exactly. Probably just some rats chewing through it or something. Bet they’re smarting this morning.”

  “You get in contact with anyone?”

  “Nope. Comms seem down. Tried it all. Phone. Internet. Radio. TV. The lot. Ended up just sticking my head out the front door. Saw some guy running past. Shouted at him and he told me that they’ve got rations or vaccines or something someplace in the city. They’ll be handing them out.”

  The MRE packets lay on the kitchen counter, ripped apart. Timmy picked up a handgun and holstered it on his hip.

  “But we’re not waiting for that, are we?” Timmy said, the confidence in his voice disconcertingly palpable.

  Eyes widening, Alex took a seat on one of the barstools at the counter.

  “And why would we go out into a city when we’ve been told not to? Why the hell would we do that?”

 

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