Out After Curfew

Chapter 1

Melissa McBride walks along the pavements of Dale City in the dead of night, the path she is following seeming so much longer and more winding than usual in her tense and edgy state of mind. She walks at a hurried pace while also trying not to make too much noise with her footsteps, a difficult balance to strike. She feels so foolish now for staying at work later than normal to finish off some admin, something that could easily have waited until tomorrow.

At the time when she'd left work the sun was most of the way down but she wasn't concerned because her flat was only a few minutes away by car and her car was what she was planning to use to get there. But when she got in her car and turned the key in the ignition she was met with nothing other than a laboured splutter from underneath the bonnet as the engine failed to turn over. Panic was beginning to befall her at this point and she turned the key again, and then again several more times to no avail, desperate to get the car started, but it was no good.

After sitting back in her car seat for a moment, agitatedly trying to determine what her next course of action must be, she turned to look at the placement of the sun on the horizon. But there was no longer a sun on the horizon. It had set leaving only a remaining faint blue glow in the sky that would very quickly be gone too. It was too late to call a mechanic to fix her car; no one would come at this time. She had missed curfew. At this point she came to the one inescapable conclusion that she was going to have to walk back home.

And now, after a highly undesirable trek, exposed in the open - a tantalising meal to any predators watching - she has almost reached her flat block. She looks into the almost totally black, large and wide-stretching park beside her as she walks. There are only a few lamp posts positioned at far-stretching staggered intervals in this park, providing it with only a small amount of light in its inner depths. Beyond this area of parkland is nothing but forestry for miles with no lights at all, an area which at this time would be a place of certain death. Just looking into the park and in the forest's direction makes Melissa even more uneasy. She consciously stays wary of this danger zone - the territory of which could be entered by stepping only a couple of paces to her side - but tries not to obsess over it and just focus on her task of getting home. She knows that if she stays under the glow of the ultraviolet street lights running all the way along the pavement she should be safe.

The curfew is not a mandatory one. It doesn't need to be. Only the foolish or suicidal would stay out past it - past sundown. It is however, strongly advised by the government that one is inside before the sun has set, which at this time of year is at about six o'clock.

As Melissa looks ahead she sees that one of the UV street lamps is dimming and flickering slightly. This sight introduces into her mind an extra note of disquietude in this most precarious of mental and physical dispositions. She can only hope that enough of the street lights around the entrance to her building are working sufficiently.

She looks to her other side at the rows of buildings over the road, opposite the park, thinks about what they used to look like before; how much less imposing and brash they looked. Now every window is fitted with reinforced steel shutters that close automatically at sundown - all clanging shut along the streets of the city in unison, conjuring the image of the way in which automated cell doors shut on inmates in their prison cells at night. This is not the only similarity to prisons these homes now bear, for the residents of these buildings are now too imprisoned inside them every night, not having the option to go outside safely should they want to.

The purpose of these armoured shutters is not just to seal the windows from the intrusiveness of the intense ultraviolet light of the street lights outside - something curtains do not do an effective enough job of - but primarily to protect against anything getting in through the windows, should the barrier of the UV light fail.