Chương 3: [Call to Order]

The square had filled up while they weren't looking. Leo stood at the edge of it, the blue screen still floating untouched at the corner of his vision. Around him people argued in low voices or tapped at dead phones. A woman nearby held hers up toward her UI, trying to photograph it, getting nothing. Whatever the thing was, cameras couldn't catch it. Down the road a few shops still had lights on, solar ticking over like nothing had happened. Most had gone dark.

Cars sat where they'd stopped, doors left open on a few of them where the drivers had climbed out and not bothered going back. Phil appeared beside him, looking at his own screen.

"What have you got on yours?"

"Blue screen," Leo said.

"Initialising text still up. Grayed out tab at the top, nothing on it." He glanced at Phil.

"Same?"

"Same." Phil looked at the tab.

"Maybe we need to unlock it somehow." Sam was crouched on the pavement a few feet away, fingers drumming, eyes moving between his screen and the crowd. Luka drifted between the groups of people nearby, picking up pieces of conversation. Parmo sat on the kerb with his phone in his hand. Screen on, battery fine, but no signal, no wifi, nothing. He'd been planning to get a taxi back to Trimdon — no chance of that now. Cars weren't running and his phone had no signal to call one even if they were.

He turned it over once and put it in his jacket.

"Anyone heard anything?" Phil said.

"Council, police, anyone official?"

"That fella in the high-vis was telling people to stay calm earlier," a man nearby offered.

"Don't think he's actually council. Just some busybody who found a vest somewhere. Looks as lost as the rest of us now." No police. No council workers. Twenty minutes and nothing. Phones were back in pockets. People had started watching each other instead, heads turning at every raised voice, every sudden movement across the square. Luka came back, arms folded across his chest.

"People keep saying EMP but that doesn't explain the UI. Or why some places still have lights on. Some stuff works, some doesn't. There's a reason, we just don't know it yet."

"Sounds like everyone's making it up as they go," Parmo said. He wasn't wrong. Six different theories since they'd got here, each one delivered with complete certainty, each one contradicting the last. At the far edge of the crowd a man stumbled backward, bumping into the person behind him. The person behind shoved back before they'd processed it. The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

"Watch where you're going!"

"I didn't — back off—""Get your hands off—""Leave it Greg." A woman's voice, sharp, cutting across the noise. The space around them opened. Not the usual crowd response — nobody pressing in to watch, nobody filming it on their phone hoping to post it later for likes. People just stepped back and away, giving it a wide berth. A man got between them, another pulled Greg by the arm. The voices dropped. Both men stood there breathing hard, staring at each other, not sure whether they were in the right or not.

Then a man came running down the street. He pushed through the edge of the crowd and pulled up, hands on his knees, getting his breath back. People turned toward him.

"Does anyone know where the police are? Anyone from in there?" He pointed at the Civic.

"Everything past Murray Street is completely gone." The square went quiet. Eyes turned north, toward the part of town nobody could see from here. Phil frowned.

"What d'you mean gone? Blocked off?"

"No." The man shook his head.

"The road ends. Past that it's just grass. Open fields. No houses, no roads, nothing. Like the town just stops." Nobody said anything. Leo looked at Sam.

"If that's true," Sam said, "this is a lot worse than we thought." A woman near the front had her hand over her mouth. A man in a football shirt started demanding answers from nobody in particular, his voice climbing when nobody gave him any. Two or three more joined in. Someone near the back started crying. The near-fight from thirty seconds ago was already forgotten. Then a voice cut through it.

"Right. Listen up, folks." Mike Ellis came down the street from the opposite direction to the pub. He was in his fifties, broad shouldered, grey hair tied back, salt-and-pepper beard, old denim jacket over a faded band T-shirt. Everyone in Monkhaven knew Mike. Ex-fireman, two decades of it. He stepped into the edge of the crowd, raised both hands and didn't raise his voice, and the square went quiet anyway.

"Phones are down, power's spotty, something weird's happened, aye," he said.

"Standing about sweating and guessing won't fix any of it. Anyone with little ones or anyone who needs to sit down, get them inside the Civic. Cooler in there. Anyone already inside, make sure they've got water. Simple stuff first." A woman in a barista apron said she had bottled water out back. Someone mentioned a first aid kit at the salon. People started moving, talking to each other with ideas rather than panic, and the feeling of the crowd shifted with it. Leo watched from the edge, arms folded.

Still no one official, but the crowd was moving, had a purpose. Phil appeared beside him.

"What about him. The guy going on about the street ending."

"We should go check," Luka said. Mike caught Luka's eye and gave a single nod. They left the square behind and moved into the quieter streets north. Terraced rows either side, red brick and satellite dishes, a curtain hanging from an open upstairs window, nobody at the glass. The noise from the square dropped behind them as they walked. Parmo pulled his phone out, looked at the blank screen where the signal bars should have been, and put it away again.

"My brother's watching the girls," he said.

"So that's something." Nobody answered.

"Well," Phil said, falling into step.

"Let's see if the anime screen thing is still the weirdest part of today." The edge of town was somewhere at the end of it.