Nic Carpenter stared at the glow of his laptop monitor, eyes tired and raw from several hours spent online. His fingertips rested lightly on the keyboard as the computer completed another search, presenting another series of blue links. Nic sat motionless for several seconds as his mind struggled to link together all the tenuous threads he had found so far.

It was getting on for three in the morning, and there was a dull ache forming behind his eyes and at the forefront of his brain, but he was following the brief glimpses of something, some bigger picture which lay tantalizingly out of reach. He had been sat here for six hours, downing endless cans of coke, searching, searching. What he was searching for he wasn't sure; only that he knew it was there, and that he would know it when he found it.

He blinked several times and rubbed his strained eyes with the hands, willing them open. His computer buzzed for several seconds and he shivered involuntarily, stifling a yawn as he did so. It was cold in his bedroom, and the storm outside wasn't helping matters.

But then again, he could never remember being this cold. Sure, here, high up the side of the valley it could get pretty nippy during the winter, but the coming snow and ice were a few months away. He put it down to tiredness, but he couldn't sleep until he got some answers to a question he didn't know yet.

It was like a maddening itch behind his eyes, and he urged to scratch it, but he was as helpless as a man with no arms. In desperation he was staring at the screen, hoping for a blinding flash of light like St. Paul on the road to Damascus.

Currently he was looking at a blog of some lunatic conspiracy theorist, who was screaming at whoever would listen that the US government had advance knowledge of the 9/11 attacks. The tone was inflammatory, the conviction tangible, the evidence… mostly imaginary. It was a good read, even if it was the ravings of a certified loony, but it wasn't was Nic was after, although he read it all the way through in the hope of sating that infuriating itch.

No such luck.

With a groan of frustration he pushed his chair back from his desk, stood up sharply and began pacing his darkened bedroom. What he needed, he decided, was a drink. Muttering slightly under his breath as he tried to focus his mind and try to find something - anything - from all the information he had absorbed tonight.

Opening his wardrobe he rummaged through a pile of discarded clothes and retrieved his hidden bottle of vodka. Unscrewing the top he took a good straight slug, and then poured a measure into a tumbler. After placing the bottle next to his laptop he took a sip as he sat back down at his desk and tried to think.

Typing 'premonition' into Google had gotten him millions upon millions of results, and similar words like 'prophecy' and 'visions' had just returned 2012 doomsday sites and various charlatans out to make a quick buck from the desperate and the gullible. The only coherent message had been a warning, whether of disaster or whatever, but the underlying theme had been purely capitalist in intent.

But there had been little flashes here and there which had compelled him to keep going. Stuff like some guy who had missed a flight from Boston or somewhere that had subsequently ploughed into a field on takeoff. There had always been stories like that, and now scattered across the internet they were providing tantalising clues for Nic to explain the feeling that something was wrong not just with him, but with the entire world.

Whatever had happened this morning - and Nic was struggling to take this at face value, although the evidence suggested little else - Craig had claimed to have known about the bus crash and had saved eight lives by getting them off that coach. Discounting the idea that he had caused the accident, there was no way he could have known what was about to happen; the crash had come out of nowhere. Yes, the coach had been knackered, and he himself had joked about it crashing and killing them all on more than one occasion, but to be so specific about it gave Craig not just the ability to make a good guess, but the ability of precogniscience to a degree that was far beyond the rational.

Sitting there with unfocused eyes and the storm reaching new heights of fury outside he slowly brought his fingers to the keyboard, waiting for a spark of inspiration. There was a biblical explosion of lightning outside which filled the darkened room, and with a literal flash of insight the number '180' appeared at the forefront of his mind.

He remembered when the coach had come down the slip road, and past the vandalised motorway sign, how the single line 'BIRMINGHAM 180 MILES' had stood out simply because it had been mysteriously left alone. At the time he had noticed it and with a single internal shrug promptly forgotten it, going back to his music and the miserable thought of another school week to slog through. Now, given he was already clutching at straws and he had nothing better to go on, he typed 'premonitions 180' into the waiting box and clicked 'SEARCH'.

What the hell is Flight 180? he thought as he clicked open the first link. Oh, right.

Volée Airlines Flight 180 had taken off from JFK back in 2000 and had exploded a few minutes later; this much was well known. The blog he was now reading contended the story had not ended there, and had supplied a bunch of links to newspaper and TV sites with snippets of stories about a bunch of survivors who had gotten off the plane minutes before it's final departure.

What's that got to do with anything?

Further digging revealed an answer that sent a chill down his spine.

The results were vague on details but demonstrated enough to Nic to show him that what had happened this morning had happened before. Something called the North Bay Bridge in New York state, Flight 180, a massive motorway pile-up, a disaster on the morbidly appropriate Devil's Flight rollercoaster, and last year's accident at the McKinley Speedway, which he now vaguely recalled reading about at the time. Whilst the disasters themselves were well known, what hadn't been spread widely beyond the underground rumour-mill of the internet was that in each case one lucky bastard had had a premonition and had saved themselves and the lives of a small number of others. But in each case, Nic discovered with a start, it hadn't ended there.

His eyes widening in fear, he followed the trail of broken, burnt, torn and crushed corpses that lay in the wake of these disasters. The half-drunk glass of vodka lay ignored as the litany of dead survivors continued seemingly without end. At one point, reading of some poor bastard who'd had his guts sucked out of his arse he felt burning vomit rise up his gullet, and coughed hurriedly to suppress it before he was sick.

He was inclined to dismiss it all at first as urban legends, but the more he read, and the more he was linked to real life archived material of people being sliced and immolated and - Jesus! - impaled by a falling fire escape, the deeper the cold feeling in the pit of his stomach grew. If this was all some sort of coincidence, then it ranked alongside the proverbial roomful of monkeys being able to type out Shakespeare. In other words: impossibly long odds, on a par with winning the lottery every week for a century or something.

So, this was it: in every example where lives had been saved by a premonition, none of those survivors had lived beyond a year of the initial accident. He felt his blood turn to ice as the implications of this sunk in, and his body became clammy with fear sweat.

I've gotta tell someone. If all this was true - and he was more and more inclined to believe it was - then the lucky few who had escaped death by mere moments were all in mortal danger. He was decided whether to use his phone or send a warning via Facebook when there was an almighty explosion just outside his window, a blinding flash that knocked him out of his seat clutching his abused eyes and a deafening crash as a burning tree smashed through the ceiling about a foot from where he had been sat.

A bolt of lightning had struck the ancient oak that dominated the Carpenter's back garden, toppling it into Nic's bedroom and cutting off all routes of escape. Lying on the carpet, feeling the heat scorching his skin and crisping the hairs on his arms and head, Nic looked with streaming eyes at the flame-wreathed trunk that lay between him and the door, terror filling his veins as he saw the fire consuming his furniture like a ravenous animal. The bottle of vodka on his desk exploded, sending burning alcohol across the room in a bloom of liquid flame and further fuelling the conflagration.

Looking around frantically, scorched lungs fighting to breathe against the suffocating smoke, he shuffled away from the burning oak, feeling the freezing wind blasting into his room now unnaturally exposed to the elements.

An idea sparked in his mind as he looked up through the ragged gap where his roof had been. A joist of archaic wood hung down, miraculously free from flames. He scrambled to his feet, little eddies of fire snaking across the carpet towards his bare feet almost as if they had a will of their own. With no thought other than for that of his own safety he grasped the sturdy timber in both hands and began laboriously pulling himself up, inch after agonising inch.

Hot, greedy flames swirled around, and he could feel his skin tightening painfully in response. With streaming eyes, bare palms and feet being torn and bruised on the splintering wood he hauled himself out of the cauldron of fire and out into the tempest beyond.

Instantly as he emerged from the broken tiles he was battered by the ferocious, freezing gales which howled along the dark valley, and for one heart-stopping second he nearly lost his grip as death snatched hungrily at his heels. With a supreme burst of effort Nic pulled himself onto the roof, scrabbling across shining wet tiles away from the boiling inferno that was now his room.

He reached the chimney, the point furthest away from the gaping rent in the roof through which smoke and sparks now billowed ungovernably. He was temporarily safe here, but he was trapped. Hauling himself upright he now peered into the storm and opened his mouth to scream for help.

A second bolt of lightning screamed down from the tormented sky and struck the chimney, Amidst a fountain of white sparks, Nic's vision was obliterated by a wall of blinding light, in the centre of which, he was sure, was a black figure, reaching out with the finality of death.

The force of the strike blew his body limply backwards, sending him tumbling unstoppably, helplessly straight through the twisted hole in the roof and back into the searing charnel-house of his room.

There was a final bloom of fire as he was consumed utterly, whilst around his house the storm howled with a sound very much like a scream of triumph.