Pierre turned around to see the person who had just spoken. She appeared to be between forty and fifty years old, with short hair and wearing a rather elegant suit. Her gaze was firm, and her lips, painted red, were pursed, making them appear thinner than they actually were.

Let's be polite with this woman. She doesn't seem very friendly.

"Hello, Madam Mayor. My name is Pierre Marchais, and I'm looking for a place to live in your municipality."

"A place to live?"

Gwenn Le Gall scrutinized this man more intensely, who had attracted about ten people in front of her town hall. Despite his strange attire, she couldn't see him as a curiosity. Then she noticed the sword and knife on the ground.

"Are those yours?"

"Yes. The streets are very dangerous right now. At least in the big cities. It's quite useful for deterring thieves."

"I can assure you that it's not necessary here, Mr. Marchais. Where exactly are you from?"

"I'm from Paris."

"From Paris?!"

All the people around seemed surprised because, from their point of view, the capital was far away, even before the power outage. Most of these people had never been there and didn't want to go. In their minds, Paris was a monster that drove people crazy by concentrating them in a confined space with hardly any greenery. In many ways, it was the opposite of Saint-Pabu.

This rural municipality of two thousand inhabitants was very peaceful. When the electricity was suddenly cut off, there were no riots or looting. The people of Saint-Pabu simply waited for news, and as Madam Mayor, in office for nearly ten years now, had none, a crisis cell was created at the town hall.

The inhabitants of this small town helped each other and maintained as much activity as possible. Children continued to go to school, engage in sports activities, and read whatever they could find at the library. Meanwhile, adults did their best to organize themselves.

The mayor had specifically requested that everything in the only supermarket in the municipality be distributed equally among the inhabitants according to household size. All this had been possible because the inhabitants were cooperative and supportive. The type of population had something to do with it, as over half of the Saint-Pabusians were over forty-five years old. A third of the inhabitants were peaceful retirees who wanted nothing more than peace for their old age. The young people, those who could have caused problems like in Paris, were in the minority. It was openly said that Saint-Pabu was a town of old people.

Nothing exciting ever happened here, so when the municipality was deprived of water, gas, and electricity, it was like the end of the world. The more the days passed, the less they understood what was happening to them. They quickly got in touch with the people of Caméan, a hamlet depending on Lannilis located just opposite Saint-Pabu, on the other side of the Aber Benoît (the river that Pierre had followed to get here), but they didn't know more. The same went for Lannilis, Landéda, Ploudalmézeau, or Portsall.

There was only one horse owner in Saint-Pabu, and he only had two animals. He had agreed to lend them to the municipality to send riders to neighboring municipalities. The farthest they had gone in seventeen days was Le Conquet. Like Porsall, it was a small coastal town very exposed to winds and tides. It was less than thirty kilometers away (18 miles).

A day was more than enough to make this journey on horseback, but they hadn't even done it on horseback. They had indeed noticed that if the vehicles had stopped working, it was not the case for the small boats with manual systems. So, although all the electrically powered boats had been rendered inoperative, this was not the case for these equally effective ones. They were, however, limited in fuel.

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And here comes a stranger claiming to come from Paris!

"You... You really come from Paris?!"

"Yes, madam."

"And you made all this journey on horseback?!"

"Yes, madam."

The witnesses of the scene could not believe their ears. This man seemed to come straight out of a tasteless fiction. Some had thought they saw a scene from the TV series The Walking Dead when they saw him arrive on horseback.

"If you really come from Paris, tell us what it's like there. Um, please."

Pierre looked at all the people present. There were retirees, but also children who didn't seem to be more than ten years old. Seeing him hesitate, the mayor understood the problem and invited him to enter her office with the adults. To show respect to this man who must have seen a lot, she stood up, hiding her trembling hands.

"Please, sir," the mayor resumed, "tell us everything you know."

"Paris is out of control. The gendarmerie is doing its best, but it is powerless against all these people who are doing and are ready to do anything to survive. From the first hours, there were looting, and it got worse and worse. The army must be trying to salvage the situation now. It's been over a week since I left."

"My God," the woman swallowed, becoming paler than her shirt. "And who's in charge?"

"I don't know. On the second day, Parisians attacked the Élysée Palace but were repelled by the army, which fired on the crowd. At least, that's what I heard."

"Oh, damn..."

The mayor couldn't help but curse at this disastrous news. Her legs weakened, and she was forced to lean on her desk. The big man with blond hair and a ponytail came to her aid before anyone else.

"I-I'm fine, thank you. Thank you very much. Um, this is terrible news for all of us. So the president is safe. Whatever we think of him, he is the president of the Republic. So there's no power anywhere?"

"At least not between Paris and here. If I may, madam, you have done a remarkable job so far. All the cities I've seen haven't done as well. Paris was a war zone, Caen and Saint-Brieuc were plagued by looting, but less than in Paris, and Morlaix was partly burning. I didn't go in, but I saw the smoke."

"It's crazy! People are crazy!"

"They're afraid of running out, madam, and of not having anything to eat the next day."

"If this continues, order will never be restored, even after the power is restored!"

"I..."

"What?"

The mayor's voice choked as she saw the serious expression on this man's face. Her instinct told her that there was something else, a piece of news even worse than everything he had announced so far. Maybe something linked to the nuclear power plants. If he could read this woman's thoughts, Pierre would have exclaimed that a woman's instinct was truly a dangerous weapon!

"The electricity won't come back. At least not on a large scale and in the short term."

"What..."

"The nuclear power plants exploded. I learned that in Normandy. Those in Flamanville and I don't remember what else. Probably the others too."

It was too much for the small woman whose face was now devastated. Without Yvon's help, the man with the ponytail, she would have completely collapsed on the carpet covering the floor of the room.

"Are you... Are you sure?"

"Yes. During the night, you could see columns of light where they were. They must still be burning and releasing millions or billions of radioactive atoms into the environment. Chernobyl, compared to this, is nothing. The whole of Europe is being contaminated."

"We... We have to evacuate. Get away from here."

"Madam Mayor, if I came here, it was precisely to get away from all this. If you really want to protect your population, you'll have to take them to Africa. It will inevitably involve passing close to nuclear power plants."

"My God."

Gwenn Le Gall was not very religious, but when she found herself in a situation she couldn't control, she hoped that there was a god to listen to her and help her. She had already prayed, but never before had she felt the need to go to church to talk to God.

She had naturally heard of Chernobyl and knew what had happened. Above all, she knew what the consequences had been. The problem was that currently, if this man was telling the truth, there was no one to stop the fires and encase these things in concrete coffins. So they would have to continue burning for days or even weeks and release their poison into the atmosphere for thousands of years.

They would all be dead from a long series of cancers long before all this was resolved.

"If we can't escape this cloud, then we'll have to live with it. Brittany, I suppose, is the safest area in Europe. At least until we have winds coming from the east. Oh, I suppose if it's the same with our Spanish and English neighbors, we'll be exposed when there are winds coming from the south and north."

"We can't do anything, Gwenn. Don't worry about it."

Yvon Le Bihan placed a warm hand on the woman's shoulder, who must have been a head shorter than him. He smiled at her, doing his best to hide his despair, and let out a deep sigh.

"Well," he said, turning to Pierre, "we can thank you for all this valuable information. Now that we know a bit more about what's happening in the country, shall we have a drink? After all this way, you must be thirsty, right? It's on me. Oh, by the way, I'm Yvon. I have a bar and restaurant nearby. You're from Paris, so I'll make you taste some real local alcohol. Come on, and no refusing!"

Wait, what?