Without warning

Kipper stepped off the porch and started down the wet concrete pathway to his vehicle, the same F-100 pick-up he’d driven in from the airport a week ago today. He felt both guilt and relief at leaving Barb and Suzie behind. The house was large and comfortable, like most on Mercer Island, but it had felt like a cell while they’d been confined inside during the worst of the fallout period, as thousands of tonnes of toxic waste from the burning of LA had hung over the entire city and its surrounds. Barb’s immaculately maintained garden had turned brown and died as though soaked in defoliant. Stopping at his front gate to survey the rest of the street, he could see they weren’t alone. Mercer Island was a high-tone enclave, and Deerford Drive, perched on the edge of the lake and snuggled up against Groveland Park, was one of its better addresses. Truth be known, it was all a bit precious for Kipper, but Barb’s family were Manhattan royalty – or had been, he reminded himself grimly – and she was used to moving among ‘a better class of person’. ‘People like us,’ she would tease, smirking, knowing that the rude inhabitants of the cheap seats at a Larry the Cable Guy show were more Kip’s sort of people than any of their opera-loving, sherry-sipping neighbours.

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.