5

It smelled like Christmas, but no one was in a Christmassy mood. The sweet scent of blown-out candles hung thick over the conference room. On the table in the middle, a warm yellow light shone from the tea lights and candle stubs that someone had dug out of the drawers in the kitchenette–the sort that were left over from celebrating Saint Lucia or departmental parties, just because they might come in handy some time in the future.

Outside the twentieth-storey window of the great newspaper building, Stockholm spread out like a pitch-black miniature landscape, an abandoned model railway where only brilliant queues of vehicle headlights etched the darkness with creeping luminescent ribbons.

‘How far out does it reach?’ asked Christina. Try as she might, she could see no sign of an end to the darkness.

‘We took photos from up on the roof,’ someone at the table behind her chipped in. The silence that followed summed up the situation: nothing visible from higher up either.

Christina nodded but did not speak. There was no point in struggling against it now: that feeling had returned, the one that had overcome her in the darkness downtown, that she’d managed to almost forget over the years. You’re so easily scared when you’re young, aren’t you?

Thirty years ago, it had had her waking up in the middle of the night, stricken with fear that this might be the day when someone pushed the button that would set the superpowers annihilating the world. The sense that each new second balanced on a thin film of ice, and beneath the film lay the end of everything.

She turned back towards the room. All her colleagues were sitting around the table, and now they were waiting for her.

Pull yourself together.

‘Right,’ she said, and heard her voice cut slightly too sharply through the silence. ‘So none of us can make any calls?’

Shaking heads all round.

‘I’ve got a mate who can do smoke signals but he’s not answering.’

The voice came from the far end of the table, a slicked-back hairstyle that spoke without looking up. His name was Christopher, but he had a surname so impossible to pronounce that his name had long since been shortened to CW, for the sake of efficiency. He was a journalist of the old school, something he was keen to remind them of at regular intervals, even if it didn’t, as far as Christina could tell, mean much more than that he smelt unusually strongly of tobacco.

‘How’s it going?’ asked a colleague sitting next to him.

A big ghetto-blaster lay facedown in front of him in the candlelight. They’d found it in the window by someone’s desk, and it had of course been as dead as everything else. The only batteries available had been far too small, plundered from keyboards and peripherals from across the whole floor, but there he was, working like a nicotine-scented surgeon attempting to insert the batteries into too big a compartment, with sticky tape and paper clips to hold them in place.

‘It’s fucking fiddly,’ CW said, concentrating on the table in front of him. ‘But if anyone’s got a better idea let’s have it.’

Christina observed him from her seat at the table. She looked at the dark office landscape beyond the glass walls behind him, the quiet restlessness that was gripping her staff.

Everyone had a job to do, but no one knew how to do it. The constant ringing and bleeping of phones was eerily absent, the fax machines, the internet–all of it was down. The only way to find out what was happening was via good, honest, old-fashioned radio, but it seemed Sweden’s most modern tabloid wasn’t quite ready for that technology yet.

And the whole time, those nameless terrors were waiting at the back of Christina Sandberg’s mind, waiting to roam freely, the way they used to on those sleepless nights back in the seventies. What happens if the power doesn’t come back on? How long can we keep going? How long will the warmth last, how long will there be food in the shops—

‘Wait!’

CW’s voice. Moments later she heard the crackling. He looked up at them all, full of pride.

There was a weak, quiet hum from the speakers–the empty gap between two stations, but radio nonetheless–and an intake of breath went all around the table in anticipation of finding a channel where someone would tell them what was happening.

The crackling lasted two seconds. That was the time it took for the paper clips to come loose and break the contact with the batteries. All the same, it had shown that the method could work; Christina nodded approvingly and told him to give it another go.

Onwards, she said to herself, and then, turning to the others: ‘Angles?’

No one answered, but then it had been a rhetorical question.

Around the table, ballpoint pens were clicked in readiness; lined A5 notepads were brought into the weak light. Here and there, the odd face was lit by the screen of a laptop or a tablet that still had some battery power, and Christina couldn’t help but turn towards them.

‘Great idea. Unless the power cut lasts and you’re left sitting there with the world’s best copy trapped on your hard disc and not a cat in hell’s chance to retrieve it until it’s old news.’

No protests. Just screen after screen going dark around the table.

‘First off,’ she continued, ‘the practical. What has happened, how many are affected, are there any prognoses? Who do we approach?’

Someone suggested the power company, another the city council, someone else said the government’s press office. Christina nodded, delegated the tasks by pointing, and watched her staff make notes in the gloom. There were cars in the basement, others had bikes, the ones who had neither would just have to walk. The only way they were going to get any answers was by moving around.

‘Second,’ she said, ‘society. How vulnerable are we? Who’s in charge? What’s happening with the emergency services number, what’s the score with essential services?’

More scribbling, new suggestions.

‘Third.’ She paused. A tone of gravity. ‘The consequences.’

She was about to conclude her dramatic pause when she saw hands going up around the table again. Hang on, said the hands, and then came shushing from all directions, and finally the click as CW snapped the battery compartment closed for the second time. He carefully placed the radio upright so that he could get at the controls.

The room fell silent. On the far side of the table she saw CW clicking his way up through the frequencies, and the digits on the display increased in half-megahertz increments up through the FM band.

Static. Static. Static.

Interminable waiting.

Static.

Eventually he stopped. Opened his mouth to say something but couldn’t remember what. He had been through the whole dial, without passing anything that even resembled a transmission.

‘Anyone know where P1 is?’ he said. ‘Or Radio Stockholm?’

Embarrassed smiles showed through the gloom. Who memorised that sort of thing nowadays? Technology took care of all the necessary information–codes, addresses, even phone numbers of our nearest and dearest–and now, when there was suddenly no search engine to find them, no one had any answers.

But then again, it didn’t make any difference. Once CW had finished the third cycle through the whole of the FM band, step by step and with a little pause after each click of the button, the facts of the matter were obvious to everyone.

No one was broadcasting. The radio was dead.

Christina felt the dam break inside her. If all the signals were down, if there really was nothing at all out there in the ether, what did that mean? How far did an FM signal reach? How big was the area affected by the power cut? What had happened?

Her catastrophic thoughts took on a momentum of their own, and she could feel them spinning out of control. What if Stockholm had actually got off lightly, and was in fact at the periphery of a much bigger catastrophe…?

‘Wait!’

CW again. Proud eyes once more.

‘The AM-band,’ he said. ‘I searched the AM-band. I think this is Dutch.’

The relief was like everyone in the room breathing out. The voice from the speaker was incomprehensible and intermittent, but at least it was a voice. An over-energetic presenter talking to a caller who was even less audible, with both of them laughing for no reason, the way people do on the radio. Judging by their tone it was probably a quiz, but honestly, who gave a shit what it was: it meant the world was still there. Somewhere not all that far away there were people untroubled enough to spend time competing on a phone-in, which meant that whatever else had happened, life was not surrendering today.

Christina gulped hard, cursed herself for allowing those teenage feelings to get to her.

‘Third,’ she resumed. The final point. ‘The consequences.’

The questions spilled out of her. How long will society survive? What happens to Sweden? First hour, second hour, after a day?

‘As of now, we don’t know how long the power is going to be out, and let’s hope for the best, but suppose this continues, how long can we survive? What sort of reserves do we have? Water? Food? Healthcare?’

One by one her colleagues got up from their places, some in teams of two, others on their own, before trickling out through the open-plan office, pulling on their coats as they went.

They weren’t, of course, about to get any answers. Everyone would be blaming someone else, but that would be news too, and every step would lead to new people to question. Handled right, this was a press opportunity, and they couldn’t ignore it just because they didn’t have electricity.

No one knew how long that would last.

But, when it was all over, you wanted to have a story to tell.

Christina stood at the window long after the last of her colleagues had gone, staring out into cold and darkness.

‘Are you thinking about her?’ the voice behind her asked.

‘Amongst other things,’ she answered. ‘A whole lot of other things.’

The woman standing in the doorway was a photographer, even though the paper officially didn’t have any.

She was older than Christina, older and heavier and still panting from climbing the stairs, probably for the first time in years. She was wearing a big print dress with loose, multicoloured fabrics over the shoulders, thin material that fluttered at the slightest movement giving her the appearance of an old-fashioned screensaver. All of which did nothing to make her look smaller, which was probably the idea.

Above all, though, she was a friend. A prized colleague. Follow­ing a couple of vivid arguments when someone else had booked her before Christina, she had become Christina’s unofficial companion, and that was the way it had stayed.

Beatrice Lind. Saviour in her hour of need. Literally.

‘How are you finding the flat?’ she asked, as though tuning in to Christina’s thoughts.

Christina turned to face her before answering.

‘It’s perfect,’ she said. ‘If you like vintage, that is.’ A pause, then she couldn’t help adding: ‘And if by vintage you mean old stuff that just tends to smell a bit off.’

Beatrice nodded. ‘In that case my boss at my old job was vintage.’

They exchanged invisible smiles through the darkness, an island of normal in the middle of all the terrifying weirdness. Eventually Beatrice took a deep breath and asked the question on everyone’s lips.

‘What’s going on out there?’

Christina took an age before she spoke, then she nodded to Beatrice to follow her down to the car park.

‘Work,’ she said.