Blackout

As the train was enveloped by the tunnel, the view from Linda’s window turned from a vast mountain landscape into a rough stone wall. Occasionally, a bright fluorescent lamp flashed by, leaving stripes of white light in their wake. For hours, she had watched the green countryside and the quaint little sugar cube farmhouses snugly slumbering beneath towering peaks. Rivers coursed like veins through the verdant scenery, their frothing streams speaking volumes of wilder nature higher up the mountain.

Cows and sheep and horses were grazing happily among the far-stretching dales and fathomless lakes. Sometimes the train seemed to be balancing on the outer rim of the steep hills, coiling like a serpent around the exoskeleton of some monstrous beast, peering down into a chasm of coniferous woodlands and scattered settlements.

The contrast between the soft, grass greens of the lower levels and the grey, harsh pinnacles above was striking. She could understand that the ancient Norse people had envisioned these mountains as malevolent giants petrified by sunlight. They inspired a primal dread, looming over her like this; ominous and powerful, masters of destruction and malice. Here at the birthplace of trolls and jotuns, she felt small in the grand scheme of things. She understood why the Norwegian word for enthralled and enchanted was literally translated as ‘taken into the mountain’. This was the home of folkloric hulders liable to ensnare and abduct humans, enslaving them deep beneath serrated cliffs and hollow hills.

As they ascended above the treeline, birches and spruces were replaced by purple heather, spongey dark moss and pallid lichen carpeting the ragged ground. Snow clung to the peaks now, an ice blue glacier embracing one particularly colossal ridge to her left. On her right, a sleet of clear water reproduced a perfect mirror image of the sky. Linda spotted a musk ox in her peripheral vision, chewing away in its characteristic ruminant manner.

Then the train entered the tunnel, and all she could see was her own reflection in the window pane. She looked into her own eyes for a second, as if nodding to an old friend. Then she proceeded to shamelessly spy on the other occupants of the carriage. There were not many. A young couple dressed for hiking, in sturdy boots and fleece jumpers; a stereotypical Scandinavian blonde sipping cocoa from a thermos and a handsome, brown-skinned bloke looking as though he had been mountaineering all his life. Their backpacks were too massive to be stashed in the overhead compartment and had been awarded their own seats.

Across the aisle, a middle-aged black man with a neatly trimmed a salt-and-pepper beard sat typing at his laptop, which was positioned on the small table between two sections of seats. Linda could not see what he was working on, but only surmised that it must be pretty important to allow him to ignore the spectacular view. He did not even look up when they were swallowed by the tunnel. Behind the baggage shelf and the snack machine, a woman hidden from view was talking on her phone, outlining in tedious detail the events of her holiday so far.

When the light went out in the carriage, Linda’s heart skipped a beat. She was not overly concerned at first, thinking it a momentary disturbance. A fault in the wiring that could be easily fixed or did not present a significant problem. The woman on the phone called out in annoyance and confusion. Linda looked around in the dark trying to make out some lighter contours in the utter blackness. She waited for the voice over the speaker to announce a temporary delay, but there was no sound other than the whispered voices of the couple, and the woman demanding to know what was going on.

It dawned on Linda that it was not only the ceiling lights on the train that had been put out. The fluorescent lamps out in the tunnel no longer showed up. No daylight reached them in here. She could not tell whether the sun had set or not. She should have been able to see the blue shine of the laptop screen illuminating the bearded business man’s face, but there was nothing. She fumbled for her bag and pulled out her mobile, but that too was dead. It was not just light, she realized. All their electronic devices had shut down.

People were shifting in their seats. She heard shuffling, and was startled by a pounding on the heavy plastic door between the carriages on the opposite side from where she sat.

“Hey!” a man’s voice was shouting. “We’re trapped in here!”

A bit of an overstatement, Linda thought. There was always that little hammer in the glass case on the wall, designed to make it easier to break the windows and push them out. It was not as if they were done for. She felt the train beginning to slow down. Someone had pulled on the emergency brake. Probably a good call.

“What is this?” the woman on the phone yelled at no one in particular. “Why is nobody answering?!”

“Calm down,” replied one of the hikers, her bright blonde hair the only nuance discernible from any other shadow around them. “It’ll be fine, we just have to –”

Her hiking partner interrupted her by saying something in a language that might be Danish, although Linda could not tell the Scandinavian tongues apart. The group seemed to turn towards Linda, but when she heard the noises beyond the door separating them and the other carriages, she turned in her seat and discovered the small flame from a lighter approaching. A woman in a conductor’s uniform rattled with a set of keys. She knocked on the transparent door to announce her arrival and then proceeded to unlock it, pushing it open with some force. Holding up her lighter flame like a treasure hunter’s torch, she smiled broadly.

“Hi there, folks! Everyone all right?”

The carriage erupted with questions, but the conductor held up one hand to quiet them all.

“The electronics are malfunctioning. We don’t know why, but we’re working on it. The train will come to a complete halt in a mile or so, and we’re in no danger of derailing. Currently, we’re unable to contact anyone, but if you’ll just stay where you are, I will return with information as soon as I have any.”

She went over to the other end of the carriage and pried open the door, bringing her flame with her. Each compartment faced her with the same questions. Nobody crossed into their carriage, their first instinct being to stay with their belongings rather than wander off to investigate.

While they waited for the conductor to return, Linda went over the contents of her bag. As a child she had got it into her head to plan for a zombie apocalypse, and had taken to carrying emergency objects around with her at all times. Matches. Band-aids. Maps. A flashlight. Having put the morbid fantasy behind her once she reached puberty, she was somewhat at a disadvantage now. What she had was a change of clothing, her toiletries, a half-eaten club sandwich bought at the last station, along with a packet of almonds and a bottle of carbonated water. Then there was her phone charger and headphones, which were useless to her at the moment.

Linda could not guess at what might have caused a power outage on such a massive scale. She would have suspected some sort of electromagnetic pulse, had it not effected the batteries of their phones and the laptop.

As the train rolled out of the tunnel and finally stopped, the passengers bore witness to a panoramic sunset of crimson reds and flamingo pinks, as well as yellows and oranges that faded slowly into blues and violets. Finally however, as myth predicted the gaping jaws of the Fenris wolf would do at the end of the world, the jagged peaks devoured the sun entirely. It really did feel as though they had seen the last day that would ever be.

For the first hour afterwards, people were restless. Having got the doors to the outside open, they climbed down to stretch their legs, but did not venture too far from the train. Everyone kept trying to bring their phones to life again, but nobody had any luck. At the front, the lady with the lighter and a pair of other uniformed individuals were poring over a paper map. One pulled out a compass and nodded to the west, a little to the left of where the sun had set earlier.

As they moved into the second hour, the passengers were given a choice. One group would stay with the train until morning, while another walked down the mountain to the nearest town. Linda decided on the latter. She did not much fancy spending the night sitting upright staring out into the darkness, not knowing if help would reach her before they ran out of food and were too weak to make their way back to civilization.

The air was chilly as they set out. Conversations were mumbled. In the moonlight, the mountains were silver-plated. Everything else acquiring a dusting of eerie white, but at least it allowed them to find their way without using up the lighters procured from the smokers on the train.

Occasionally, they saw wild reindeer in the distance or heard some undeterminable critter scuttering away from the group, but nothing so sinister as a wolf or other predators crossed their path. The lady with the lighter, whose name they soon learnt was Elisabeth, kept looking to her left as if expecting something to materialise. Eventually Linda could not refrain from asking.

“Something wrong?”

“The town,” Elisabeth said in an undertone. “We should be able to see it by now. The lights must be out there too.”

A sense of foreboding trickled through Linda’s body like rusty water from a leaking pipe. She thought she could smell smoke. As they rounded a cliff and got a clearer view into the valley, she was one of the first to see the flames.

They flickered and snapped like a cracking whip, raging on twisted heaps of what was now only scrap metal, but had recently been an aeroplane. The fuselage lay on its side, tail end missing, one wing broken in half and flung to the side like the torn-off arm of a ragdoll. Linda could not make out any survivors, but she might be too far away to spot them in the dark. People around her were crying out in horror, and Elisabeth swore under her breath.

“It’s everywhere...” she muttered.

The passenger plane must have fallen out of the sky once the electronics failed. It had smashed into the declining mountainside, sliding downwards leaving trails of fire behind, until it finally stopped for good. It seemed incredible that they should not have heard the impact, but perhaps the train had still been inside the tunnel at the time, the noise muffled by solid rock.

Linda pictured similar sites all over the country. All over the world, even. Planes raining like lethal hail over bustling cities. Car crashes on every street. Ships lost at sea. She thought of hospital machinery no longer keeping patients alive. People stranded in foreign places, unable to contact their loved ones. Homes deprived of heat, food perishing in darkened fridges. She had heard that society was never more than nine meals from anarchy. Food was the only commodity that could not be postponed. There would be panic. Struggle for resources turning people against each other.

There was no need for monsters or nuclear war or disease. Humanity would be capable of destroying itself without more outside influence than taking away something they all relied on for survival.

When the windows of the town lit up without warning, glowing embers scattered through the valley like tangled Christmas lights, Linda was the only member of the group that did not feel relieved. She had seen how it all could change in an instant. Next time, whether years from now or only an hour away, the darkness might last forever.