Table of Contents Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Acknowledgements Chapter 1 - 2010 - Eight days after the Oil Crash
The Beginning Chapter 2 - 10 years AC Chapter 3 - 10 years AC Chapter 4 - 10 years AC Chapter 5 - 10 years AC Chapter 6 - 10 years AC Chapter 7 - The Day of the Crash 10 a.m. Chapter 8 - 10 years AC Chapter 9 - 10 years AC Chapter 10 - Crash Day + 1 11 a.m. Chapter 11 - 10 years AC Chapter 12 - 10 years AC Chapter 13 - Crash Day + 1 1.15 p.m. Chapter 14 - 10 years AC Chapter 15 - 10 years AC Chapter 16 - Crash Day + 2 4.45 a.m. Chapter 17 - 10 years AC Chapter 18 - 10 years AC Chapter 19 - 10 years AC Chapter 20 - Crash Day + 2 weeks Chapter 21 - 10 years AC Chapter 22 - Crash Day + 27 weeks 5.45 a.m. Chapter 23 - Crash Day + 27 weeks 6.15 a.m.
The Journey Chapter 24 - 10 years AC Chapter 25 - 10 years AC Chapter 26 - 10 years AC Chapter 27 - 10 years AC Chapter 28 - 10 years AC Chapter 29 - 10 years AC Chapter 30 - 10 years AC Chapter 31 - 10 years AC Chapter 32 - 10 years AC Chapter 33 - 10 years AC Chapter 34 - 10 years AC Chapter 35 - 10 years AC Chapter 36 - 10 years AC Chapter 37 - 10 years AC Chapter 38 - 10 years AC Chapter 39 - 10 years AC Chapter 40 - 10 years AC Chapter 41 - 10 years AC Chapter 42 - 10 years AC Chapter 43 - 10 years AC Chapter 44 - 10 years AC Chapter 45 - 10 years AC Chapter 46 - 10 years AC Chapter 47 - 10 years AC Chapter 48 - 10 years AC Chapter 49 - 10 years AC
Chapter 50 - 10 years AC Chapter 51 - 10 years AC Chapter 52 - 10 years AC Chapter 53 - 10 years AC Chapter 54 - 10 years AC Chapter 55 - 10 years AC Chapter 56 - 10 years AC Chapter 57 - 10 years AC Chapter 58 - 10 years AC Chapter 59 - 10 years AC Chapter 60 - 10 years AC Chapter 61 - 10 years AC Chapter 62 - 10 years AC Chapter 63 - 10 years AC Chapter 64 - 10 years AC Chapter 65 - 10 years AC Chapter 66 - 10 years AC Chapter 67 - 10 years AC Chapter 68 - 10 years AC Chapter 69 - 10 years AC Chapter 70 - 10 years AC Chapter 71 - 10 years AC
The Journey Home Chapter 72 - 10 years AC Chapter 73 - 10 years AC Chapter 74 - 10 years AC Chapter 75 - 10 years AC Chapter 76 - 10 years AC Chapter 77 - 10 years AC Chapter 78 - 10 years AC Chapter 79 - 10 years AC Chapter 80 - 10 years AC Chapter 81 - 10 years AC Chapter 82 - 10 years AC Chapter 83 - 10 years AC Chapter 84 - 10 years AC Chapter 85 - 10 years AC
Epilogue Author Notes
Afterlight ALEX SCARROW Orion www.orionbooks.co.uk
An Orion Books ebook
First published in Great Britain in 2010 by Orion Books This ebook first published in 2010 by Orion Books (c) Alex Scarrow 2010 The right of Alex Scarrow to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
ACIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. eISBN : 978 1 4091 0817 7
This ebook produced by Jouve
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd Orion House 5 Upper Saint Martin's Lane London, WC2H 9EA
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To Jacob, Leona and Nathan. I started out using you guys as inspiration for the characters and about halfway through this book realised I wished I hadn't. You'll see why. This book is dedicated to the three of you.
Also by Alex Scarrow A Thousand Suns Last Light October Skies
Acknowledgements This book required a lot more research than I expected it to. The person to whom I'm most indebted is Chris Gilmour, a man with a lot of experience in the North Sea and knowledge of the oil and gas rigs out there. Without his help this would have had to be a very different book. I also owe a big thanks to my hardcore team of beta readers; John Prigent, Robin and Jane Carter, and Mike Poole, who waded through my first draft and returned copious notes of feedback. Finally, as always, Frances, for the many thorough read-throughs and attendant margin notes that help me turn my unintelligible ramblings into 'books'.
Prologue There are many names for what happened in 2010: The Big Die Off, The Crash, The Long Darkness, The End of the Oil Age. It was the week that crude oil was stopped from flowing and the world catastrophically failed. My head still spins when I recall how quickly it all happened. A complete systemic collapse of the modern, oil-dependent world within the space of a fortnight. Events chased each other around the globe like a row of dominoes falling. It started with a series of bombs in the Middle East. Bombs deployed in the holiest of places that set the whole of the Middle East on fire with a religious civil war; Shi'as fighting Sunnis fighting Wahhabis. Then, later on that first day, I remember there were other explosions; an oil tanker scuttled in the busiest shipping channel in the world, a gigantic South American refinery, an oil processing hub in Kazakhstan . . . and a dozen more. By that evening, something like ninety per cent of the world's oil production capacity had been disabled. What we were spoon-fed by the news on the first day was that oil prices were going to skyrocket, and that . . . yes, we'd be in for a sharp and protracted recession. It was on the second day, or maybe the third, that everyone began to wake up and realise that billions of people were very quickly going to starve . . . and that was in the western world, not the Third World. The moment people collectively understood what 'no oil' actually meant, that was the tipping point; the point of no return. Panic and rioting swept like wildfire through every city and town in every country. No nation was immune. At the end of the first week of anarchy, as cities smouldered and streets lay quiet, littered with shattered glass and looted goods, broken and spoiled things, most of the tinned, preservable food was gone. Around the world, ready-to-harvest crops that might have been speedily gathered, processed, tinned and shipped to provide emergency supplies to feed us as the dust settled and we picked ourselves up . . . well, all of those crops rotted in the fields because tractors were sitting with empty fuel tanks . . . the Big Die Off began. For a long time after the crash, the world really was dark. With no generated power, there were no lights at night except for the flickering of campfires, candles and oil lamps; the pinprick signs of life of small communities dotted here and there that had found a way to keep going. The UK resembled some collapsed east African state; a twilight world. Empty towns, burned-out farms with gone-to-seed fields, empty roads, abandoned cars. And I must admit, I'd completely lost hope. I was ready to face the fact that where I was, I was going to slowly starve until my weakened immune system finally succumbed to a minor cut or a cold or tainted water. Then I met her. Ten years after the crash, I met her. She lived in a community of the weak and the vulnerable, living in isolation aboard a cluster of rusting gas platforms in the North Sea. There were four hundred and fifty of them living there and, I realise this only now, back then that was quite probably the largest self-sustaining community left in Great Britain. She was to become the driving force for recovery. It was this remarkable woman who kept things together as we rebuilt our country from the abandoned ruins of the Oil Age. I'm an old man now, too bloody old. If we still used the pre-crash calendar it would be the year 2061 as I write this. Today, the world has lights again, computers, even trams and trains, technology that was once taken for granted before the crash. It's a very different world. There are far fewer people, owning far fewer things. The skyline no longer bristles with telecoms pylons sprouting satellite dishes and mobile phone antennae. There are no longer garish advertising billboards or phallic mine's-bigger-than-yours high-rise office towers. Instead, our horizons are broken by a sea of wind turbines, big and small. I think of it as her world. She helped make it. She helped define it. I see her stubbornness, her determination, her common sense, her sense of fair play and her maternal wisdom in everything around me. But sadly she's a footnote in history. The e-books being written on the Oil Crash by academics today tend to focus on the things that went wrong in the first weeks and months of the crisis. Not on the rebuilding that began ten years later. So her name is a small footnote. Just a surname in fact. Sutherland. But I met her. I actually knew her. Adam Brooks 21 December, 51 AC [ After the Crash]
Chapter 1 2010 - Eight days after the Oil Crash North London
'I'm really, really thirsty, Mummy.' A quiet voice - her son. 'Yeah,' whispered her daughter, 'me too.' Jenny Sutherland realised they'd not stopped since the first light of dawn had made it possible to pick their way through the rubbish strewn streets without the help of a torch. Her mouth was dry and tacky too. She looked up and down the deserted high street; every shop window a jagged frame of threatening glass shards, every metal-shutter-protected shopfront was crumpled and stove in. Several cars, skewed across both sides of the road, smouldered in the pale morning light, sending up acrid wisps of burning-rubber smoke into the grey sky. She glanced at the stores either side of them, all dark caves within, but all promising goods inside that had yet to be looted. Jenny would much rather have stayed where they were, out in the middle of the road, well clear of the dark shadows, the interiors. But water, safe bottled water, was something not to be without. Her children were right, this was probably as good a place as any to see what they could find. 'All right,' she said. She turned to her daughter, Leona, and handed her one of their two kitchen knives. 'You stay here and mind Jacob.' Leona's pale oval face, framed by dark hair, looked drawn and prematurely old; she had eyes that had seen too much in the last few days, eyes that looked more like those of a haunted veteran from some horrible and bloody war than those of a nineteen-year-old girl. A week ago at this time of the morning Jenny could imagine her daughter lying under a quilt and wearily considering whether to bother dragging herself across the university campus to attend the first study period of the day. Now, here she was being asked to make ready to defend her little brother's life at a moment's notice with nothing better than a vegetable knife whilst the matter of a drink of water was seen to. 'Mum,' she said, 'we should stay together.' Jenny shook her head firmly. 'You both stay here. If you hear me shout out to run, you run, understand?' Leona nodded and swallowed nervously. 'Okay.' 'Mummy, be careful,' whispered Jacob, his wide eyes hidden behind cracked glasses and bent frames. She ruffled his blond hair. 'I'll be fine.' She even managed a reassuring smile before turning towards the nearest shop: a WH Smith's newsagent. She could see it had been repeatedly visited and picked over in the last week from the litter strewn out of the doorway and into the street. It was surprising, even now, after so many days of chaos, how worthwhile finds could still be had amidst the debris - a can of soda pop here, a packet of crisps there. Looters, it seemed, weren't the systematic type; the shadowed corners of a floor, the spaces behind counters, the backs of shelves, still yielded goodies for someone patient enough to squat down and look. She stepped towards the shop, her feet crunching across granules of glass. Outside the door - wrenched open and dangling from twisted hinges - sat a news-board bearing a scrawled headline from last Wednesday. OIL CRASH - CHAOS ACROSS LONDON
Wednesday seemed so long ago now; it was the day this country flipped into panic mode, completely spiralled out of control. The day the government suddenly decided it needed to be honest and tell the public that things had become extremely serious; that there would be severe rationing of food and water and there'd be martial law. Actually, Wednesday was the day the world panicked. She'd witnessed snarling fights, torn hair, bloodied knives, things set on fire, bodies in the street casually stepped over by wild-eyed looters pushing overladen shopping trolleys, and woefully few police, who watched, powerless to stop any of it. A madness had descended upon everyone, particularly here in London, as people desperately scrambled to grab what could be taken, and were prepared to kill in order to keep hold of it. Jenny remembered the news stories of the Katrina survivors in New Orleans; those stories paled against what she and her children had seen. She stepped inside, holding her breath as she did so. Standing still, she let her eyes adjust to the dim interior. Like every other shop it looked like a whirlwind had torn through. The floor was a mash of spoiled goods, newspapers, magazines and paperback novels; shelves dangled precariously off the walls and a row of fridge doors stood open, the contents long since emptied. A plastic CD case cracked noisily beneath her shoe as she slowly moved deeper into the store, her eyes working hard across the carpet of trampled and soiled stock, searching for an overlooked bottle of water, a can of Coke. Something. 'You okay, Mum?' called Leona.
'I'm all right!' she replied, hating the feathery sound of growing fear in her voice. The sooner they cleared London the better. After that . . . Jenny didn't have a clue. All she knew was that this city was death now. There were too many people tucked away in the dim corners of every street, cowering in dark homes, ready to use a knife or a smashed glass bottle or a gun to take what they wanted, or keep what they had. She really had no idea what they'd do once their feet hit a B-road flanked by open fields. She entertained a fanciful notion of living off the land, Jacob trapping rabbits and cooking them over a campfire; all thick jumpers and outdoors rude health. Almost idyllic, just like that old BBC show, The Survivors. If only Andy was with them . . .
Not now, Jenny, not now. Her husband - their father - was gone. Dead in the city.
Crying comes later when we're clear of this place. All right? She thought she saw the glint of a soda can on the floor - dented, but quite possibly still full of something sickly sweet and bubbly. She was bending down to pick it up when she heard a noise. A plastic clack followed by a slosh of liquid. An instantly recognisable sound; that of a plastic two-litre bottle of some drink being casually up-ended and swigged from. 'All right?' A boy's voice, a teenager perhaps; the cadence wavering uncertainly between choirboy and manhood. Her eyes darted to where the voice had come from. Adjusted to the dark now, she picked out a row of four . . . maybe five of them, sitting on crates, buckets, boxes. She could see the pale outline of sporty stripes and swooshes, trainers and caps, and the soft amber glow of several cigarette tips. 'Uh . . . fine . . . thanks,' she replied. 'You after somethin'?' Another voice, a little slurred this one. 'I . . . I was looking for something to drink,' she replied, taking one small step backwards. 'But forget it, you can have this shop. I'll try another.'
Keep your voice calm. 'Don' matter,' said the first voice, 'we got loads. Wanna share?' She heard a snigger. Several cigarette tips pulsed and bobbed in the dark. She recognised the smell - a familiar odour from long ago, from college days, the same smell she picked up occasionally off the dirty laundry Leona brought back from university. Dope.
They're just kids, she told herself. Just boys. Boys who could be scolded and cowed if one picked just the right tone of voice. 'So where are your parents?' she asked. Another snigger. 'Who cares?' replied one of them. 'Fuckin' dead for all I know,' said another. Jenny took another step backwards, hoping it was too dim for them to see her attempt to put further distance between them. 'You should get out of the city, you know,' she said, trying hard to sound like a voice of authority. 'Seriously. You'll starve when there's nothing left to pick up in the shops.' 'Thanks, but we're all right, love.' She saw the pale outline of a baseball cap move, the scraping of a foot and the tinkle of broken glass. One of them getting up. 'Hey, why don't you give me a blow job? An' I'll give you a fag.' A snort of laughter from the others.
Oh, God, no. 'How dare you!' she snapped, hoping to sound like an enraged headteacher. Instead it came out shrill and little-girly. She stepped back again, her foot finding a plastic bottle that cracked noisily beneath her shoe. 'Hey? Where you goin'?' She saw more movement, they were all getting up now. 'I'm going,' she announced. 'You boys stay here and get pissed if that's what you want, but I'm leaving.' 'Look,' said one of them, 'why don't you stay?' Phrased as a question, as if she was being given a choice in the matter. The nearest boy took another step forward, wobbling uncertainly on his feet and swigging again from his plastic bottle. Her hand closed around a wooden handle poking out from the waistline of her skirt. She pulled the knife out, feeling emboldened by the weight in her hand. 'You stay where you are!' she barked, holding the bread knife out in front of her. 'I just wan' you to give me a little luurrve.' 'Yeah, me too,' said one of the boys behind him. 'I've got a knife!' shouted Jenny, 'and I will fucking well use it. Do you boys understand?' That drunken giggling again. 'We're going to a part-eee,' one of the others cheerfully announced from the back with a sing-song voice. 'She's doing me first,' insisted the lad nearest her. He lurched clumsily forward, reaching out for her with big pale hands. Instinctively Jenny slashed at one of them. 'Ahhh, fuck!!' he screamed, tucking his hands back. 'Shit! Bitch!! Bitch fuckin' well cut me!' A torch snapped on and, for a moment, she caught sight of the boy's face. Beneath the peak of his hoodie-covered baseball cap she saw the porcelain
skin of a child, pulled into a rictus sneer of hate and anger. Surely no more than fifteen, sixteen at a stretch, his big hands, one gashed, reached for the knife. It happened too quickly to remember anything more than a blur of movement. But a moment later she could see the handle protruding from the side of his waist, a dark bloom of crimson spreading out across his Adidas stripes. The boy cried out, all trace of his puberty-cracked voice gone, now screaming like a startled toddler stung by a wasp. He collapsed heavily onto the floor of the shop, his desperate whimpering accompanied by the clatter of displaced bottles and cans, the scrape of feet as his mates drunkenly clambered forward either to help him or, far more likely, to overpower her now she no longer held her knife. Jenny turned and ran, stumbling across an overturned newspaper rack, her foot slipping on the glossy covers of a spread of gossip magazines scattered across the shop floor. She headed towards the front of the store and grey daylight, leaving the drunk boys behind her. This is how it's going to be from now on, she realised with a growing sense of dread; the world Jacob and Leona will inherit is a world of feral youths, a lifetime of scavenging for the last tins of baked beans amidst smouldering ruins.
The Beginning
Chapter 2 10 years AC 'LeMan 49/25a' - ClarenCo Gas Rig Complex, North Sea
Jenny sat up in her cot, a scream caught silently in her throat. That nightmare again. There were others, of course. Plenty her subconscious mind could choose from, but that one in particular kept returning to haunt her sleep. It was worse than the other memories perhaps because the boys had been so young, just babies really - drunk, dangerous babies. Maybe because that particular encounter had happened the day after Andy died. She'd still been in shock then, confused. Running on autopilot for her children's sake, her foggy mind making foolish decisions. She rubbed the sleep from her face and tucked the nightmare back in its box along with the others, hoping for a few nights of untroubled sleep before another managed to creep out and torment her. Through the porthole beside her bunk a grey morning filled the small cabin with a pallid light. The North Sea, endlessly restless, seemed calmer than usual today. She could hear the persistent rumble of it passing beneath the rig, feel the subtle vibration in the floor as gentle swells playfully slapped the support-legs a hundred and forty feet below. Newcomers to their community always seemed terribly unsettled by that - the slightest sensation of movement beneath their feet. Once upon a time, this archipelago of man-made islands had been called 'LeMan 49/25a'; a cluster of five linked gas platforms, in the shape of an 'L', a couple of dozen miles off the north-east coast of Norfolk. Now it was called 'home'. Five years of living here and even when the North Sea was throwing a tantrum and sixty-foot swells were hurling themselves angrily against those tall, hollow support-legs, she still felt infinitely safer here than she did ashore. She heard the clack of hurried footsteps on the stairs outside her cabin. The door creaked open. 'Breakfast time, Nanna.' Jenny smiled wearily. 'Morning, Hannah.' She slipped her legs over the side of the cot, her feet flinching on the cold linoleum floor, and glanced at the empty bunk opposite, the blankets tossed scruffily aside. Leona was gone. Hannah grinned cheerfully, eyes too big for such a small face tucked beneath a fuzz of curly strawberry-blonde hair. 'Mummy's up already?' Jenny asked, surprised. Usually she had to kick Leona out of her bed in the mornings. Hannah rolled her eyes. 'Lee's eating breakfast already.' Jenny sighed. She tried to encourage Hannah to call her mother 'Mummy', but since Leona actually encouraged the first name thing - sometimes it seemed like she almost wanted to be more of a big sister than a mother - it was a futile effort on her part. 'Okay . . . tell her I'll be down in a minute, all right?' Hannah nodded and skittered out of the cabin, her wooden sandals rapping noisily along the floor of the passageway. Jenny unlatched the porthole and opened it a crack, feeling the chill morning air chase away the cosy fug in the cabin. She shivered - awake for sure now - and pulled a thick, chunky-knit cardigan around her shoulders and stood up. 'Another day,' she uttered to the woman in the mirror on the wall opposite. A woman approaching fifty, long untamed frizzy hair that had once been a light brown, but was now streaked with grey, and a slim jogger's figure with sinews of muscle where soft humps of lazy cellulite had rested a decade ago.
A poor man's Madonna. Or so she liked to think. She smiled. The Jenny of before, the Jenny of ten years ago, would probably have been thrilled to be told she'd have a gym figure like this at the age of forty-nine. But then that very different, long lost, Jenny would probably have been horrified by the scruffy New-Age-traveller state of her hair, the lined and drawn face, tight purse-string lips and the complete absence of any make-up. She was a very different person now. 'Very different,' she whispered to no one but the reflection. The smile in the mirror dipped and faded. She pulled on a pair of well-worn khaki trousers and a pair of hardy Doc Martens that promised to out-live her, and clanked downstairs to join the others in the mess room. Four long scuffed Formica-topped tables all but filled the mess; utilitarian, unchanged from the days when gas workers wearing orange overalls and smudged faces took a meal between shifts. Busy right now. It always was with the first breakfast sitting of the day. There were nearly a hundred of them sitting shoulder to shoulder; those on the rota for early morning duties. Potato and fish chowder steamed from plastic bowls and the room was thick with chattering conversation and the chorus of too-hot stew being impatiently slurped. Jenny spotted her daughter. She grabbed a plastic bowl, ladled it full of chowder and squeezed in beside her. Leona looked up. 'Mum? You okay?'
'Fine.' 'You were whimpering last night. Bad dreams again?' Jenny shrugged. 'Just dreams, Lee, we all have them.' Leona managed a supportive half-smile. 'Yeah.' She had her nights too. Jenny cautiously tested a mouthful with her lip. 'I noticed it's a good sea and fair wind out there today. We're overdue a shore run. Could you get together a shopping list and I'll grab it off you later?' 'Yeah, okay,' Leona replied, picking an escaped chunk of potato off the table and dropping it back into Hannah's bowl. Nothing wasted here. Certainly not food. 'Anything you want to put on the list?' Jenny's mouth pursed. 'A couple of decent writing pens. Some socks, the thermal ones . . . oh, and how about booking me in at a posh health spa for a weekend of pampering.' Leona grinned. 'I'll join you.' Jenny hungrily finished her breakfast before it had a chance to cool; too much to do, too little time. She clapped her hands like a school-teacher and the hubbub of conversation slowly, reluctantly, faded to silence. 'It looks like a good day for a shore run. The sea's calm and we've got a westerly wind. So Leona's going to be coming round this morning to get your "wants and needs".' She picked out a dark-skinned and broad-framed woman halfway down the table. 'And, Martha Williams, let's try and keep George Clooney off the list this time.' There was a ripple of tired, dutiful laughter across the canteen and a loud cheerful cackle from Martha. Her grin and the musical lilt in her accent still hung on to a fading echo of Jamaican beaches. 'Aye, Jenny, love. How 'bout me 'ave some Brad Pitt, then?' Martha got a better response; popular with everyone. Jenny grinned; to do less would be disingenuous. She gave the room her morning smile; even those who she knew sniped at her behind her back, those who muttered and complained in dark corners about Jenny's Laws. A smile that assured them all she'd weathered far worse than sticks and stones and whatever bitchiness some of them got up to out of her earshot. 'Busy day today. We've got seedling propagators to transfer from Drilling to Accommodation, slurry from the digesters to bring out and spread; we had some rain last night so all the water butts and catch-troughs to check.' There were some groans. 'First teatime sitting will be at four-thirty; a little later since we're getting more evening light now.' She nodded. 'Okay?' Chairs and benches barked on the scuffed floor as everyone rose to go about their morning duties. The mess door opened, letting in a lively breeze. Outside on the deck, those waiting to come in for the second breakfast sitting rubbed their hands and shuffled impatiently. Jenny felt her sleeve being tugged and looked down to see Hannah cocking a curious barrister's eyebrow. 'Who's Brad Pitt?'
Chapter 3 10 years AC 'LeMan 49/25a' - ClarenCo Gas Rig Complex, North Sea
The catch bell jangled. Jacob looked up from his pack of weathered and faded Yu-Gi-Oh cards to the net cables tied off along the platform railing. They were both as taut as guitar strings and twitched energetically - a sure sign there was enough squirming marine life in the net to make it worth his while pulling it in. He crawled on hands and knees out of the sheltered warmth of the rustling vinyl one-man tent and onto the grating of the spider deck - an apron of metal trellis running around the bottom of the accommodation platform's thick support-legs, no more than thirty feet above the endlessly surging swells. The tent snapped and rustled in the fresh breeze as he stood up and leaned over the safety rail. The sea gently rolled and slapped against the side of the nearest leg, sending a languid spray of suds up towards him, but not quite energetic enough to reach him. He grabbed the winch handle and began to wind the net up, a laborious process that seemed to take ages, each creaking turn on the winch hoisting the laden net just a few inches. He gazed out at the sea as his arm worked the handle. It was well behaved today, mottled with the shadows of clouds scudding across the sky. He pushed a long tangled tress of sun-bleached hair out of his eyes and squinted up at the platform towering above him. From down here all he could see was a large messy underbelly of welded ribs, giant rivets and locking bolts sporting salt and rust collars, and criss-crossing support struts linking all four enormous support-legs together. This early in the day, the sunlight was still obscured by the body of the tall, top-heavy accommodation module perched on this platform, like an elephant balancing on a barstool. It towered a hundred and thirty feet above him, a multi-storey car-park on stilts. On top of the module he could see the large circular perimeter of the helipad. Faint rays of sunlight diffused through the safety netting and promised to angle down here to the spider deck come midday, but for now he had to shiver in the accommodation platform's tall shadow. The fishing net was out of the water now and he could see amidst the struggling tangle of slippery bodies a healthy haul of mackerel, whiting, sand eel and other assorted specimens of marine life drawn to graze for food in and around the man-made ecosystem below; a thick forest of seaweed that propagated around the support-legs below the sea like a fur stole. He smiled, satisfied with the haul.
Enough there. He could finish early, pack up his tent and join the second sitting in the mess. Occasional wafts of chowder and stewed tomatoes had been drifting down from the galley's open window, accompanied by the faint clink and rattle of cutlery and ladles. His tummy rumbled for breakfast. Above him feet clanked across the suspended walkway from the neighbouring gas compression platform - people on their way over for second sitting. Most of the machinery, cooler tanks, scrubbers and pumps that had once been installed over there had been stripped out before the crash when these rigs were being mothballed. Now, about a hundred and fifty members of the community were sheltered on the compression platform amidst a cosy, often noisy, cavernous interior; a rabbit warren of towelling 'cubicles', bunks and hammocks, and laden washing lines strung across the open interior space from one gantry to another; a many-layered bazaar of multicoloured throw rugs, bedsheets and laundry. The second, smaller, compression platform, also stripped from the inside out, played host to another technicoloured shantytown; just over a hundred of them living cheek by jowl in a warm, stuffy, smelly fug. Both compression platforms linked to the accommodation platform overshadowing him. That was home to the most; about two hundred and forty people lived there. The cabins, once designed to keep a crew of fifty in home-from-home comfort, were now cosily filled four to a cabin, and, like the compression platforms, a noisy maze of chattering voices and clothes lines strung across hallways. Beyond the smaller compression platform was the production platform. It hosted the generator room and the stinking methane room with its digesters full of slurry - a mixture of human and chicken shit - with the chicken deck directly above. No one lived there. It would be a resilient person who could endure both the rancid stench of fermenting faeces and the endless clucking of several hundred brainless poultry. At the furthest point of the cluster of platforms, flung out at the end of the longest linking walkway, beyond production, was the drilling platform. Just under fifty people lived out there. It was quieter than the other places, and a much longer walk for breakfast, the evening meal and any community meetings that needed to be attended. But it was where those less sociable preferred to bunk. All five platforms, unique in shape and purpose, were united in one thing, though: they were green. Every walkway, every terrace, every gantry, every external stairwell, every cabin and every Portakabin rooftop was overgrown with potted vegetables, grow-troughs, bamboo frames holding up rustling mini forests of pea and bean climbers. Approaching the platforms from a shore run, Jacob always thought that, from afar, they looked like a sea-borne version of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, a towering wedding cake of rustling green. He heard his name being called out and looked up, a hand shading his eyes from the pale glow of the morning sky. His mum was leaning over the railing of the cellar deck. 'Jake!' she called, her voice competing against the thud and spray of languid swells and the clanking of feet across the walkway above. 'Good haul?' she smiled. 'Yeah, Mum.'
She disappeared back out of sight and then a moment later he saw her making her way down the ladder to the spider deck. She stopped midway close enough to talk. 'We're doing a shore run today. You okay to go with Walter?' 'Yup.' 'Go get some breakfast first, love, all right? Walter's going to lower the boat in about an hour.' 'Okay,' he called back. She gave him a hurried wave then clambered back up the ladder and out of sight. On her rounds. She was busy paying each platform a visit, checking every deck and walkway of plants, conferring with those tending them, ensuring every chore that needed to be done was being done, settling minor disputes, soothing ruffled feathers and petty egos . . . tirelessly keeping this little world of theirs ticking over. He shivered as a teasing gust played with his anorak. He zipped it up and resumed winding in his catch, a smile spreading across his face. The shore run was a welcome departure from his daily routine. The foraging trips to the coastal town of Bracton came with much less frequency these days, not like in the early days when they'd first settled on the rigs and needed so many things that they were constantly ferrying supplies from the mainland. He cherished the trips ashore. An opportunity to explore, to see something other than these windswept islands of paint-flaked metal. He savoured the fading reminders of the past, often wandering a little away from the others as they busily foraged for the things that were needed. He enjoyed standing in the silent high street. The shop signs were all still there: WH Smiths, Boots, Nationwide, Waterstones . . . but the storefront windows were long since gone. If he half-closed his eyes, let them soft-focus, and used a little imagination, he could almost see the high street busy once more; the soft creak of swinging signs replaced with the hum of traffic, the boom of music from the back of a passing car, the pedestrian thoroughfare filled with mums pushing buggies, the jingle of a newsagent's door opening. His smile turned into a cheerful grin. 'Shore run,' he announced happily, as he hauled the net over the rail, 'cool.'
Chapter 4 10 years AC Bracton Harbour, Norfolk
Walter Eddings dropped the sails twenty yards out from the concrete quayside and let the thirty-foot yacht glide forward under its own momentum. The boat drew parallel as he steered her to a gentle rest. He watched as, on the foredeck, Jacob and his friend Nathan flipped tethered buoys over the side to cushion the boat's fibreglass hull. As they bobbed gently, drifting the last few yards to a standstill, both young men equipped themselves with boat hooks and reached out to snag the moorings. Jacob hopped across onto the quayside, Nathan tossing him a couple of lines which he secured fore and aft. 'Good enough,' shouted Walter, a ruddy face half hidden by the thatch of a grey-white beard and framed by thick salt-and-pepper hair pulled back into a ponytail that fluttered in the breeze like a battle standard. He looked like an aging biker, like an old roadie who'd happily tell you how many groupies he'd once banged in the back of Status Quo's tour bus. However, in the Sealed Knot uniform that he kept safely tucked away and took out and wore on very special occasions, he looked every bit a musketeer from the King's Royal army, snatched from the seventeenth century and dumped into the twenty-first. Jacob loved listening to him describe the battles of Nazeby, Edgehill, Marston Moor, as if he'd actually been there. He could almost smell the acrid smoke of gunpowder, feel the thud of cannons firing and the grunting of massed pikemen going toe-to-toe . . . and he could certainly imagine Walter, thickset and ruddy-faced, in the middle of it, pouring powder from a horn down the long barrel of his musket. It was gone two in the afternoon. They'd made good time from the rigs to Bracton Harbour with the wind behind them. Walter had got them across without needing to turn on the engine once. Something he preferred to do whenever the wind was in their favour. Even though they'd discovered a diesel tank still half full in the marina from which they topped-up each time they visited, and promised to last them a good many years yet, he was determined to use as little of it as possible. Walter looked at his watch. 'We've got about five hours of daylight left,' he announced. Enough time for them to forage for most of the items on the very long shopping list, whilst Walter did a water-run. Across the marina was a tugboat moored on a side canal. It was tethered up to the delivery jetty of an old ale brewery. The brewery had its own well, tapping the very best of 'natural Norfolk drinking water', or at least that's how it was described on the labels of their traditional brown glass bottles. It was in fact clean enough to drink and showed no sign of running out any time soon. Every time they did a shore run Walter filled the several dozen brewery drums in the back of the tug with well water, piloted the tug out to the rigs and exchanged the full drums for empty ones. It supplemented the rainwater they managed to catch in their water butts. He'd usually returned, refilled the tugboat's fuel tank and moored it back down the canal by the time the others had returned from their foraging. They'd then overnight at the quayside aboard the yacht, spending a few hours the next morning looking for whatever was left on the list, before heading home. 'All right then, gents, it's gun time,' said Walter. Four guns in the cockpit, the community's entire arsenal. Jenny had appointed Walter - her right-hand man - as sole custodian of them a long time ago, fed up with being pestered by the boys, Jacob included, to get them out so they could hold them. Walter picked up a shotgun. 'As normal, we're pairing off. One gun per pair.' He handed the shotgun to a tall, narrow-shouldered guy called Bill Laithwaite who pushed scuffed glasses up the bridge of his nose and grimaced uncomfortably as he took possession of the gun. 'Bill, you can take young Kevin with you.' Kevin pulled a face. 'Can't I go with one of them?' he whined, pointing towards Jacob and Nathan. Kevin was just thirteen, yet considered himself to be one of the 'big boys'. The last thing he wanted was to be paired up with Bill who fretted and worried like an old woman. Walter scowled. 'Excuse me, you'll do as you're told. You're with Bill.' 'Great,' Kevin pouted. Walter picked up the second gun. 'Jacob and Nathan, you can have the SA80.' He passed it over to Nathan, who took a moment to pose with the army assault rifle like some urban gangster. Jacob snorted. 'For Christ's sake, Nathan! It's not a frigging toy!' snapped Walter irritably. Chastened, but still flashing a conspiratorial grin at Jacob, Nathan passed it carefully over before hopping across to join him on the quayside. 'Howard and Dennis . . .' Both men were old, older even than Walter. The three of them regularly played cribbage together in the mess during the evening lights-on hours. 'You chaps can have the HK carbine.' Walter picked up the remaining weapon and looked at David Cudmore. 'And we'll have the MP5.' 'Righto,' replied David, running a hand through the thin wisps of hair on his head. 'Okay then,' said Walter impatiently, 'you've all got your lists?'
They nodded. 'Back here no later than eight this evening, please. We should have supper on the go by then.'
Jacob pushed the shopping trolley down the aisle. The wheels squeaked with an irritating metronome regularity. However, unlike most of the other trolleys discarded outside in the high street, exposed to ten wet English summers and ten even wetter winters, at least the wheels hadn't seized up with rust. It was piled almost to overflowing with medicines requested; antibiotics, antiseptics and a variety of painkillers. This particular chemist had weathered the looting better than most stores. Of course, the windows had gone in and all the energy drinks, fruit juices and bottled water had vanished a decade ago within the first few days. But most of the rest of the shop's stock was still patiently sitting on shelves or scattered across the floor collecting dust. For those who needed to dye their hair, wax their legs, or colour their nails this was going to be the place to visit for many more years to come. Jacob looked down at the list. They'd ticked off most of the items, mostly the different branded painkillers. Of the four hundred and fifty-three members of their community, a large proportion were women between the ages of sixteen and fifty. On any given day there were at least half a dozen of them reporting to Dr Gupta - once upon a time a GP - for something to ease stomach cramps. Jacob wheeled the trolley through the checkout, Nathan walking behind him with the SA80 held casually in both hands, the muzzle pointing safely at the ground, just as Walter warned them, ad nauseam, to do. 'Nah, it was definitely a game on me PlayStation,' said Nathan, continuing a conversation Jacob had almost forgotten they'd been having. 'I know it was. I think it was the last game me dad got me.' Jacob shook his head. 'But I'm sure I played it on my Nintendo, though.' 'Nope, you didn't . . . couldn't have, Jay. Was a PlayStation-only , man.' They emerged outside onto the high street. The sun was just dipping behind the flat roof of the multi-storey car-park opposite; the dark shadow it cast slowly creeping across the thoroughfare of weed-strewn paving. Jacob stepped through tufts of waist-high nettles, the trolley squeaking and rattling before him, the small wheels juddering over a broken paving slab. He let go of the trolley and rested for a moment. ''Sup, Jake?' He shrugged. 'You ever stop and pretend?' 'Pretend what?' 'That the street's still alive.' Nathan looked around at the overgrown pedestrian way, the dark shop entrances, the jagged window frames, cars resting on flat tyres, many of them displaying tell-tale bubbles of rust beneath the paintwork. 'Used to. Sort of gets harder to imagine each time we come ashore, though. You know what I'm saying?' Jacob looked at the signs above the shop doorways. Most of them - the homogenous chain stores - were plastic facades, perfectly well preserved, some still bright and colourful. Here and there, fractures in the moulded lettering had allowed thin veins of moss to take hold and spread bacilli-like fingers of growth. The sign above a phone store in front of him had slipped down from its mount above the shop's front window at some point in the past and lay on the ground, cracked on impact with the street, weeds and grass growing around it. 'We used to live in London.' 'I know, Jay.' Jacob turned to him. 'Can you remember how streets used to sound?' Nathan's dark features clouded for a moment; he tucked a wiry dreadlock behind one ear and scratched at the meagre tuft of bristles on his chin. 'Shit . . . not sure,' he replied, the soft echo of Martha's accent in his. 'Where me mum 'n' me was livin', it was sort of always rumbly.' 'The cars?' Nathan nodded. 'And car music. Sort of a boom . . . boom . . . boom . . . kinda thing?' 'Yeah, I remember that.' 'And police cars and fire engines sometimes. Me mum said it was a rough place.' Memories from a younger mind flickered momentarily in front of Jacob. He remembered so little from before the crash. It was that chaotic week that formed most of his recall of the old world; the wailing of sirens, trucks full of soldiers on a gridlocked high street. People hurrying, not yet running . . . but hurrying; not quite ready to be seen panicking, but eager to get home and lock the door. Harried-looking newsreaders on the TV talking about oil, and food rationing and martial law. Images of Oxford Street full of people smashing windows and running away with arms full of stolen things. 'Yeah,' he said, 'I remember those siren noises.' They stood in silence for a moment, listening to the fresh North Sea breeze hiss through the leaves of a young silver birch tree, growing out of a decorative island in the middle of the shopping centre's thoroughfare. It had probably been little more than an anaemic sapling when the crash happened. 'What do you miss the most, Nate?' Nathan pursed his lips in thought. 'Gonna have to be me game consoles. There was great games and graphics that was, like, real enough you could be in there.' Nathan's hands absent-mindedly cupped around buttons and joysticks in the air. 'I guess I miss all that. And the telly,' he said wistfully. 'What about you?' Jacob rubbed his eyes irritably. Since his glasses had finally fallen to pieces several years ago he'd had to make do without. It left him too often nursing a headache and tired eyes. His face creased with concentration. 'I miss the orange.' 'Orange?'
'At night time,' added Jacob, 'the orange. Night wasn't black like it is now. It was always sort of orange.' Nathan's face clouded with confusion for a moment, then cleared. 'Oh yeah, man. It was, wasn't it? You talkin' about the street lights.' Jacob nodded and smiled. 'I remember even the sky was a dull sort of orange. And those lights always had a glowy fuzzy sort of halo round them. I remember there was one outside my bedroom window. It used to buzz every night.' Nathan shrugged. 'We lived up high. I was always lookin' down on 'em.' Jacob watched the evening shadow complete its slow crawl across the high street as the sun set, and begin to climb the deserted shopfronts. The setting sun, warm and blood-red in a vanilla sky, glinted off the few shards of glass that remained in the store windows. 'I suppose I miss that the most - the night time lights.' His face cleared, brushing away hazy childhood memories. He turned to look at Nathan. 'And TV, too. I miss The Simpsons.' Nathan's face cracked with a broad grin. 'D'oh . . . stoo-pid oil-crash apocalypse.' Jacob doubled over. Nathan could do Homer's voice perfectly. He could do all of them brilliantly. Many's the time he had the mess filled with laughter, impersonating some old TV personality from the past. Just like his mum, Martha - very popular, because he could make smiles happen. And, fuck , you needed a reason to smile every now and then. Jacob slapped his forehead Homer-style. 'Duh!' 'No, man, it's d'oh !' Nathan did it so much better. 'Doh.' 'Nearly, Jay.'
Chapter 5 10 years AC 'LeMan 49/25a' - ClarenCo Gas Rig Complex, North Sea
Leona sat on the accommodation platform's helipad savouring the warmth of the evening sun on her back. Hannah, her best friend, Natasha, and several other children were chasing each other across one side of the open deck. On the other side, tomato plants grew in endless tall rows, sheltered beneath a large plastic greenhouse roof. The tangy odour of the plants drifted in pleasant waves across to her, alternating with the faint stench of fermenting faeces coming all the way across from the production platform. Nice. Apart from that particular fetid odour, which fluctuated in strength from one day to the next, this was her favourite place on the platform. Up here on the highest open space amongst the five linked platforms, she had a three-hundred and sixty degree panorama to enjoy. The sea varied little, of course, always dark, brooding and restless, but the sky on the other hand was an ever changing canvas, sometimes steel-grey and solemn, sometimes like this evening, splashed with mischievous pinks and livid crimson. Strings of light-bulbs began to wink on as the sun dipped closer to the waves and the evening light waned. She could just about hear the distant chug of the generator. The lights would stay on until an hour after the last dinner sitting in the canteen. Time enough for everyone to eat and make their way safely back home, perhaps read a chapter of a book, darn a sock, tell a bedtime story or two, play a card game . . . then lights out. Thanks to Walter's technical know-how and hard work, they generated a modest but steady supply of methane gas. Enough to give them a few hours of powered light every evening and no more. Leona heard soft footsteps and the rustle of threadbare khaki trousers behind her as her mum approached and squatted down beside her. 'Hey.' 'Hey back.' They watched Hannah get tagged by another little girl and resentfully have to stand still like a statue until 'freed' by someone else. She lasted all of ten seconds before getting bored and pretending that she'd been released. She rejoined her friend, the same age, same size . . . they even looked similar; frizzy hazel-coloured hair, tamed, more or less, by bright sky-blue hair ties. That was their colour. Sky blue . . . for some reason. Leona squinted her eyes as she watched them play - they could almost be twins.
Tweedledum and Tweedledee. 'She's so like you were,' said Jenny. 'Always cheating at games.' Leona smiled. 'And stubborn.' Above the soft rumple of the wind and the chatter of the children, she could hear people emerging from the mess and clanking back across the walkways to their platforms for the night. Another routine, uneventful evening. 'I know you still pine for the past, Lee. But it's gone. It's not coming back.' Leona shrugged. 'I know.' 'I listened in on your school class this morning. You were talking to the kids about how music used to be.' Leona nodded. She ran classes, along with another woman, Rebecca, for the younger children. It wasn't much of an education, truth be told; basic reading and writing and a little maths, that's all. This morning one of the children had asked about what music she used to listen to before the crash and, before she could stop herself, she was telling her class about the gigs that she'd gone to as a student. About how electricity used to go into guitars and make them sound fantastic and big. About how the shows were flooded with powerful flashing lights and dazzling effects and lasers. They'd sat and listened, spellbound, all of them born after the crash, all of them used to nothing more than campfires, candles, oil lamps and, only recently, the miracle of flickering strings of light-bulbs. The only music they heard were nursery rhymes and Bob Dylan songs strummed rather badly by an old Buddhist earthmother called Hamarra. 'It's not good for them, Leona. You can't fill their heads with things as they were. They're never going to see any of those things. This is all they'll have.' Leona sighed. 'It's hard not to want to tell them, Mum.' 'But it's kinder not to. You have to let go. That world's really not coming back any time soon.' Leona said nothing. This was an old conversation, one they'd had too many times before. 'We've witnessed enough to know that,' added Jenny, 'haven't we?'
Witnessed enough. She was right about that. They'd seen that world collapse up close, living in London - the worst possible place to have been during that first week. After the dust settled on the riots, there was a hope that order would somehow be restored. But it was soon clear things had gone too far. Too much damage done, too many people killed. The food that had been in the stores on the Monday was cleaned out by the Wednesday; stolen, spoiled, eaten, hidden. And with no power there was no clean water. People were very quickly dying of cholera, or killing each other for bottled water.
There'd been many small communities outside the cities that were better prepared; foresightful people with beards and chunky-knit jumpers who'd been rattling on about Peak Oil for years and preparing for the inevitable end. The sort of scruffy new-age weirdy-beardies that Leona had once turned her nose up at; that reminded her a bit of her dad. They had their freshwater wells, their vegetable plots, their chickens and pigs. The one thing they didn't have, though, was guns. So many of them were overrun and picked clean by the starving thousands flooding out of London, Birmingham, Manchester. Picked clean . . . and in many cases, since there was no sign of the police or the army or any sense that law and order was going to return, the women raped and the men killed. Years of foreknowledge and preparation accounted for nothing. It had simply made them a target. Survival through those first few weeks and months turned everyone into a brutal caricature of themselves. Everyone had done something they weren't proud of to stay alive. For a while it was nothing more than a twisted form of Darwinism at work; it was the most selfish who managed to survive: the
takers. Hordes of people emerging from the cities - running from the rioting and the gangs making the most of the anarchy, they choked the roads, endless rivers of people on foot, all of them hungry. At first it was begging, when they came across the well-tended vegetable gardens and allotments and chicken runs out beyond the urban sprawl. Soon it became a matter of stealing after dark. Finally the migrating hordes just picked clean anything they found, and if a person was stupid enough to try and explain they'd been preparing for this for years and tried to stop them stripping his garden clean, then it turned even nastier. Leona remembered the day their small settlement had been raided by a gang of about thirty men, several years after the crash. By then, they'd assumed roving bands of scroungers were a thing of the past, died out, killed by others or starved long ago. Then one cold winter morning they turned up, armed with guns, some of them wearing ragged police and army uniforms, emerging from the trees, drawn by the smell of woodsmoke. She shuddered at the memory of what followed and forced her attention back on the playing children. But her mind wasn't done yet.
They were always men, though, weren't they? The 'takers'. Groups of men with guns. Her mind played flashes of that winter morning; the raping in the barn. The ensuing struggle. Spatters of blood on the snow. Screams. Gunshots.
Stop it. Leona turned to look at her mother watching the children play; always on guard, always on duty.
That's why she doesn't trust men any more. That winter morning . . . It was why they now struggled on out here on these windswept rigs. In the aftermath of that morning, after the men had gone, Mum had gathered her and Jacob and a few others who'd decided to leave, and she'd left. Soon after, they'd found the rigs, and she'd decided that's where home was going to be. What happened that morning to her, in the barn, mum never spoke of. But she'd never trusted men since. Well, that wasn't entirely true. She trusted Walter, but only because she knew she had a hold over him. He was like a puppy, always eager to please her, always around their quarters, like a live-in uncle, always there. Mum trusted him and herself. That was it. When they first moved onto the rigs there'd been about eighty of them; mostly those from the raided settlement. Now there were over four hundred and fifty; people they'd encountered in and around Bracton, looking for safety from men with guns. Quite possibly the same ones. And mum had allowed them to join - safety in numbers and all that. Mostly women and children, a few old men. Leona watched as her mother goaded Hannah to chase down one of the other kids.
But now there's too many people, aren't there? Too many for Jenny to indefinitely remain an undisputed leader. There were grumblings amongst some of them that Jenny Sutherland was unelected and yet making all the rules. A self-appointed dictator and Walter, with the only pair of keys to the gun locker, her lackey. Leona suspected that one day Mum was going to have to face down an open challenge to her authority. It could be over any number of contentious issues; her refusal to allow any prayer groups to be organised, the relentless work-schedule for everyone, her insistence they remain hidden away on these gas platforms with no clear indication for how long. Surely not for ever? And, of course, they were welcome to leave if they didn't see things her way. One day, Leona suspected, a group of them were going to down their tools and defy Jenny. If for no other reason than to see what she would do in the face of such a challenge - to see what sort of a person she really was. And then, in that moment of truth, what would she do? Evict them at gunpoint? Mum was tough, she had to be to make this place work, but Leona hated the idea that she was paying for that with what was left of her old self. 'I'm sorry to moan,' said Jenny, breaking into her thoughts. 'But you can't dwell on what's gone. Our children need to be happy with what we've got, Lee. Not pining for what you once had.' 'Our children can't live their whole lives here either, Mum. I won't do that to Hannah.' Jenny's face tightened. 'Look, one day we'll settle back on the mainland,' she said after a while. 'When we can be sure it's safe again. When we can be sure that the bastards who take what they want at gunpoint have run out of things to scavenge and have starved to death.' Leona shrugged. Jenny turned to her, softening her voice, realising how harsh she must sound. 'Hannah will inherit a better world. One day it'll be better than this. Better even than it used to be before the crash.' Leona offered a wan smile. The old spiel, again. She had heard that speech about a million times, 'All That Was Wrong With The Oil Age World'; greed and consumerism, borrowing and spending, debt and negative equity, haves and have-nots; me generation people living lonely lives in their own plastic bubbles of consumer comfort. Maybe she was right? Maybe it was a miserable world full of discontented people, but in a heartbeat, in a heartbeat, she'd have that shitty old world back and thoroughly embrace it. So would Jacob. 'Mum . . .' Jenny looked at her. 'You know, one of these days, Jacob will go out on one of our shore runs and he won't be coming back.' Jenny's face pinched and she sat silent for a moment. 'I do worry that will happen every time I send him.'
'So why do you send him?' 'Because I hope he'll see enough to realise there's nothing ashore, nothing to run away to, only overgrown streets and buildings falling in on themselves.' Leona knew he felt differently. 'Several of the older boys, Jacob included, are convinced that things are rebuilding themselves on the mainland. That somewhere in the big cities they've already got power going again, that street lights are coming on and the like.' Jenny sighed. 'We'd know, Lee, wouldn't we? We'd have heard something on the radio about it. Something from a passer-by.' 'I know that. I'm just saying Jacob's becoming, I don't know, sort of taken with the idea that out there, some sort of . . . glittering metropolis is waiting for him.' Jenny watched as Hannah flopped to the ground, exhausted from her running around. Natasha flopped to the ground beside her, and the pair of them, for some reason, suddenly decided to waggle their feet and hands in the air like struggling house flies. 'You can talk to him, Lee. He listens more to you than he does me now. Tell him that's a bloody stupid idea.' Leona shook her head. 'I do talk to him. But, you know, I guess sometimes I feel a bit like that too.' Jenny turned towards her. 'Leona, it's a dead and dark world. You've seen it for yourself. If there are any people left, they're dangerous and hungry and looking for people like us to strip bare.' Leona noted mum had kept that comment gender neutral. But by 'them' she meant men, and 'us' she meant women. 'Here, on these platforms, we're safe. We've had time to consolidate, to build things up. We can feed ourselves now, we aren't relying on a dwindling supply of canned goods in some grubby warehouse. We're not scavengers, Lee.' Jenny reached out for one of Leona's hands and squeezed it. 'I know it's tough, it's cold, it's wet and boring out here. But one day, Lee, one day the last of those bastards will have starved to death and it'll be safe. Then we can move ashore.' Leona watched as Hannah and Natasha got bored with playing dead flies and scrambled to their feet, ignoring the other children and playing their own game of tag, chasing each other towards the swaying field of tomato plants, along the faint, peeling lines of the helipad's giant 'H'. 'But look . . . will you talk to Jacob? Assure him we're not staying here for ever? One day, right? One day we can go back.' 'I'll try,' said Leona.
Chapter 6 10 years AC Bracton Harbour, Norfolk
Sitting on the foredeck of the boat, secured alongside the harbour's quayside, Jacob listened to the noises of the night. The rhythmic slapping of water on the hull, the sporadic whisper of a fresh breeze and the clatter and tinkle of loose things teased by the wind amongst the quayside warehouses. On occasions such as this, on guard duty, there had been times that he'd heard other noises; the haunting echo of a faraway cry; once, the solitary crack of a distant gunshot; often the sound of someone, or wild dogs, rifling through crates and cargo containers in the warehouses. Less so with each visit, though. Tonight it was the tide, the breeze and shuffling debris skittering in wind-borne circles and nothing else. He reached out for the SA80 and stroked the smooth cold metal of its barrel. He'd only ever had one go at firing the thing; a dozen test rounds out into the North Sea. The punch on his shoulder, the bucking in his hands, the crack of each shot - it had been exhilarating. One burst of fire and then Walter had snatched the gun off him saying that was enough. Ammunition couldn't be replaced, and now he knew how to fire the thing, he was trained enough. Walter had been part of the community from almost the very beginning; after the crash, back when they lived for several years amidst a cluster of barns. Jacob had been only twelve when the 'bad men' arrived. Hungry men, lean men in tatty clothes, some even in army uniforms. He wasn't certain whether they were really soldiers or not; he remembered some wearing trainers, some had the sort of tattoos he'd never imagined that a policeman or a soldier would have, and no one seemed to be in charge. They saw the chickens, the pigs. They'd followed the smell of frying bacon and woodsmoke through the thick forest that thus far had hidden them from the world outside. He shuddered at the memory of that particular day. An initial polite request for a meal and a little hospitality had quickly escalated to something very different. After they'd eaten the bacon, a girl only a couple of years older than him was taken by several of the men to a nearby barn. That was the first. They took other girls and women, one by one. Mum included. The fighting started soon after. It was probably all over in ten minutes, but to Jacob it seemed like that whole winter morning had been filled with the crack of gunfire, screaming, crying. Seven of the bad men were killed, the others melting away into the woods. But so many more of their own people had died - mostly they'd been women, girls. It was as if the soldiers had decided that if they couldn't have them, they might as well kill them. Leona lost the young man she was with; a tall guy with long hair called Hal. Jacob remembered Hal's father - he couldn't remember the man's name had used a kitchen knife to make short work of one of the bad men left wounded in the snow. He'd dragged him into the barn and finished him there. He returned with Mum, helping her back across the paddock, she was covered in scratches and cuts and blood, her clothes ripped, her face a hardened stare. Their little community never really recovered from that morning, and a few weeks later the survivors were split down the middle; those that were going, those that were staying. Over the years Jacob had often found himself wondering whether those they'd left behind - people who had almost been like extended family through the early years after the crash - had managed to carry on there. Or whether those men had come back as promised and this time finished them all off. It was certainly a morning no one ever discussed. When newcomers arrived and asked how the rig community started out, Mum always fluffed the question, and Walter usually said nothing. That day was just over five years ago and Jacob was certain that all the bad men must be long gone by now - run out of things to steal and people to kill, and just faded away. What was left of the UK had to be safe now. He looked out at the dark skyline. Bracton was just empty buildings, wild dogs and weeds. But London? That's where the government, the Prime Minister and all the important men lived. He remembered listening to the BBC emergency broadcasts just after the crash mentioning the safe zones in and around the big cities. There were about twenty or so of them; big buildings guarded by soldiers and full of emergency supplies of food and water and taking in civilians who sought their protection. Yes, some of the zones had gone wrong in the aftermath, he'd heard about that, too many people, too few troops. But surely not all of them? Right? At least one or two of them must have muddled through, especially in London where there were several of the biggest zones. Surely, by now, they'd managed to get things up and running again; had powered up lights like they had on the rig, perhaps even had enough power to make hot water, to run some street lamps, perhaps even a few shops selling their wares once more. It was possible, wasn't it? He smiled in the dark.
It's inevitable. You can't keep a great country like Great Britain down. Called 'great' for a reason, right? He knew he was right. He knew something else too. One day he was going to find out for himself.
Soon. One day soon.
Chapter 7 The Day of the Crash 10 a.m. RAF Regiment, 2 Squadron mess hall, RAF Honington, Suffolk
Flight Lieutenant Adam Brooks sat in the corner of the mess hall, his eyes glued to the small television set, as were those of several dozen of the lads from 2 Squadron. The rest of the gunners were out on rotation manning the front gates and beating the airfield perimeter with the dogs. Security readiness at Honington had already been upped this morning, as a matter of precaution, from amber to red. Adam suspected it was almost a certainty that all leave and weekend passes were being revoked right now as they sat here watching the telly. On the small screen BBC24 was covering the story - already somebody had managed to throw together some computer graphics to sex up the visuals. As if shaky mobile phone footage of columns of flames was not enough.
'. . . and then there's the Paraguana refinery in Venezuela which is the main processing facility in the country - in fact for all of South America - for their light crude. We have no details on how much damage has been done there and whether that's going to have an effect on oil output from the region but . . .' 'They're all oil targets,' grunted one of the men sitting next to Adam. It was Lance Corporal Sean 'Bushey' Davies. 'Someone's just hitting the oil!' 'Jesus. Well spotted, Bushey, you stupid twat,' someone a row back quipped. 'Fuck off,' he grunted over his shoulder. Adam watched as the talking heads in the studio were replaced by a Google Earth map that panned silky-smooth across the screen. Slick explosion graphics were peppered across the Arab states, several more around the Caspian Sea. He counted two dozen. More were being added to the map as they spoke.
'. . . Nigeria, the Kaduna refinery. That's just come in. Again no idea of the size or damage or how many fatalities. So, the question being asked is just what is going on out there? Who's doing this?' 'It's . . . uh . . . really too early to be putting the blame on any group in particular,' replied a freshly scrubbed and suited industry expert. To Adam, the poor young man appeared to be an unprepared and none-too-willing participant, pulled without notice from some back office and thrown before the glare of studio lights. He cleared his shaking voice with a self-conscious cough and took a quick sip of water. 'But this does appear to be an attempt to disrupt
as much global oil production as possible.' 'What about the earlier bombs in Saudi Arabia at Medina and near the Kaaba in Mecca? Neither one, apparently, to do with oil.' The expert looked awkwardly at the camera - a complete no-no. His skin turned a blotchy corned-beef red, uncomfortable, nervous, before turning back to the well-groomed news anchor.
'Well . . . uh . . . that's obviously an attempt to incite widespread Sunni-Shi'a retaliatory violence . . . religious civil war. With just two bombs in those very sacred places, you've got a peninsula-wide tinder-box going up. It'll completely destabilise Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq . . . and other producers in the region, the core OPEC producers.' The young man's helpless face was replaced with shaking camera footage of an enormous oil slick, entirely aflame, spreading across a slim shipping channel. The towering pyramid of fire tapered into a thick black column of smoke that, in terms of scale, reminded Adam of photos of the pyroclastic cloud above Mount St Helens. The morning sun was lost beneath it. The sea that should have been a bright blue was a dull twilight grey. Beneath the shaking pixellated footage, red tickertape indicated further explosions in the Strait of Malacca.
'And that, of course, is a very dangerous scenario. Just by taking Saudi Arabia and two or three of these other key producers out of the loop we're looking at a shortfall of fifty-five to sixty-five per cent of the world's oil production capacity right there.' 'Now that sounds quite serious,' said the anchor with a thoughtful frown spreading across his tanned face. 'Presumably we can expect some sort of impact on us here in the UK. Are we going to be looking at queues at the pumps?' The expert stared back at him, not studio-savvy enough to dial-back the look of utter dismay on his face. 'Uh . . . no, you . . . you're missing the point. It's a lot more serious than that. In the oil markets, we call this type of . . . of scenario, well there are a number of what are called Perfect Storm Scenarios--' A cocked eyebrow from the anchor. 'Perfect Storm?' The expert nodded silently. Dead-air time. The anchor prodded him gently. 'Which means what exactly?'
'Enough wild-card events occurring synchronously to completely shut down oil processing and distribution--' 'Affecting, of course, the price per barrel; presumably a major blip on the price of other commodities. So, this kind of an interruption of oil availability . . . how long before we can expect to feel the impact of this on our wallets? How long before we--' 'You really don't get it, do you?' The anchor stared at his studio guest, his mouth hanging open.
'It's a Perfect Storm . . . there's no contingency for it. We're screwed.'
'It's a Perfect Storm . . . there's no contingency for it. We're screwed.' Adam glanced at the men in his unit, silent now, boots shuffling uncomfortably beneath the tables.
'We . . . we're a net importer,' the expert continued, 'a net importer of oil and gas. More importantly, we're a big importer of everything else . . .' The anchor nodded, an expression of practised gravitas easing onto his face, as if he'd known exactly how serious things were all along.
'. . . Food, for example,' continued the expert. 'Food,' he said with added emphasis. 'There's very little storage and warehousing in the UK because it's a drain on profit. What we have instead are "just-in-time" distribution systems; warehouses that need only store and refrigerate twenty-four hours' worth of food instead of two weeks' worth. As long as haulage trucks and freight ships keep moving, it works just fine. But, no oil,' the expert shook his head, 'no food.' The anchor's eyes widened. 'No food?'
'We could well be looking at a severe rationing programme, perhaps even some form of martial law to enforce that.' 'Martial law? Oh, surely that's--' 'A Perfect Storm . . . we're into uncharted territory this morning.' The expert's voice was beginning to waver nervously. 'There's no way of knowing how serious this could get . . . or . . . or how quickly. Believe me, there are industry doom-sayers who've long been pointing to this kind of event as a . . . as a global paradigm shift.' 'A global . . . a what?' 'Paradigm shift. A . . . well, a complete global shutdown.' Adam turned to look at his men. Silent and still. The last time he'd seen the lads like this was when an unexpected third six-month extension on their rotation to Afghanistan was announced to them last year. A moment later the first mobile phone began to trill.
Chapter 8 10 years AC Bracton Harbour, Norfolk
They all heard it and froze. It was unmistakable and instantly recognisable, an after-echo peeling off the myriad warehouse walls, across the open quayside and slowly petering out. 'That was a gun,' said Walter. Like it needed saying. Jacob lowered a sack full of boxes and plastic bottles of pills through the storage hatch into the boat's fore cabin and stood up straight, squinting as he scanned the buildings overlooking the quayside. 'It sounded pretty close to me.' 'Maybe we should leave,' said Bill. He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose and glanced anxiously out of the cockpit. 'Just leave the rest of the stuff and go.' Walter was giving that consideration. They could always come back another day. But then if it was a rival group of survivors staking a claim, attempting to frighten them off, they'd be buggered. Bracton was their only source of essentials. Another shot. 'Dammit,' the old man muttered unhappily. 'Shit, man, that was definitely closer,' said Nathan, his face in an involuntary nervous grin. 'Are we going or what?' asked Bill. Walter's eyes narrowed. He remained where he was on the quay, scanning the buildings for signs of movement. Undecided. 'Walter?'
Dammit . . . we can't just go. He knew that. They needed to find out who was out there, what they wanted. Bracton was all they had. 'My gun,' he said, 'pass me my gun.' Kevin reached down into the cockpit for the shotgun and passed it over the narrow sliver of choppy water to Walter. 'What the hell are you doing, Walt?' asked Howard. 'There's just you, me, Dennis and Bill . . . and the boys. We can't get into a fight!' Walter was tempted to jump in the yacht, run up the sail, turn the motor on and flee. But that would be it. They needed to clear the marina, the warehouses, the brewery's freshwater well was already being tapped by themselves, and wasn't fair game for anyone passing through. 'We can't leave,' he snapped irritably. 'We have to find out who that is.' 'S'right,' Nathan nodded, 'this place is ours, man. They need to know that.' Jacob picked up the assault rifle from the foredeck and hopped across onto the quay to join the others ashore. 'Hey, gimme the gun,' said Nathan. 'It's okay, I've got it.' 'But I got better eyesight, Jay.' Jacob made a face, tight-lipped. Walter nodded. 'He's got a point. Best give the SA80 to Nathan.' Jacob passed the gun over to him resentfully. Another couple of shots rang out across the open space of the quayside. 'Jesus!' hissed Dennis ducking down in the boat's cockpit. 'Look!' shouted Nathan, jabbing a finger towards the loading bay of the nearest warehouse. From the dark interior, out through large, open sliding doors, a man emerged, staggering frantically towards them. He'd seen them, was making his way towards them. He cried out something - it sounded garbled or perhaps foreign. Following him, two more men appeared from the doorway, both armed. They walked unhurriedly after the first. He wasn't going to run anywhere. He looked weak and spent. No danger of him escaping. One of them shouldered his gun and fired off a shot. It pinged off the ground a yard away from the staggering man, sending a puff of concrete dust into the air, and ricocheted in the general direction of Walter and the others. 'Fuck!' the old man hissed, raising his shotgun. 'Ready your weapons,' he uttered to the others. Nathan raised the assault rifle to his shoulder. 'Safety,' muttered Walter, 'lad, you need to take the safety off.'
'Oh, yeah.' The man being pursued continued to stagger towards them. They could see now he'd already been hit in the thigh, the left trouser leg was dark and wet with blood.
'Aidez-moi . . . aidez-moi!!' he gasped, his eyes wide with terror beneath a mop of dark curls of hair. Another shot whistled past the man, almost clipping his shoulder, and thudding into the fibreglass side of the boat.
Fuck this. 'STOP RIGHT THERE!!' bellowed Walter. The two men slowed, but didn't halt. The wounded man collapsed several yards in front of them. He groaned with pain as he clutched his thigh in both hands, sweat slicked his olive skin, sticking dark ringlets of hair to his face.
'Ils essayant de me tuer!!' he gasped. 'They going to kill me!' he said again with a thick accent. 'I SAID STOP!' shouted Walter again, shouldering his shotgun and aiming down the barrel at them, now standing only a dozen yards away. One of them was wearing a police anti-stab vest, the other a grubby pair of red tracksuit bottoms and a faded khaki sweatshirt. Both of them, like Walter, with lank hair tied back into a ponytail and a face of unshaven bristles. 'Out of our fuckin' way,' snapped one of them. 'He's going to die.' Walter realised he was trembling; the end of the shotgun's barrel was jittering around for everyone to see. 'You just . . . just bloody well stay back!' shouted Walter, breathing deeply, shakily, the air whistling in and out of his bulbous nose. One of the men looked up at him and shook his head dismissively. 'Shut the fuck up, you old fart.' The man in the stab vest took a quick step forward and lowered his gun at the foreign man on the floor. 'This is how we deal with dirty fucking Paki wankers.' The wounded man screwed his eyes shut and uttered the beginnings of a prayer in French. 'You . . . y-you can't just . . . shoot him,' cut in Jacob. 'It's not right.' 'Yeah?' said stab vest. 'Is that right, son? Am I infringing his fucking human rights?' Jacob swallowed nervously. He nodded. 'It's just not . . . you can't!' 'Yeah? You get in my way I'll do you next, you little prick.' The man levelled his gun at the Frenchman's head. 'Fuckin' scum like this . . . only way to deal with--' Walter's shotgun suddenly boomed, snapping stab-vest's head back and throwing a long tendril of hair, blood, brains and skull up into the air. The other man looked up, startled, and swung his weapon towards the old man. Instinctively Nathan squeezed several rounds off from his assault rifle. Only one of his shots landed home, punching the man at the base of his throat. His knees buckled and he dropped to the ground like a sack full of coconuts. 'Oh, fuck!!' whispered Walter. 'Oh, fuck,' he wheezed, 'I didn't bloody mean to. Damn thing just went off in my hand!' Red tracksuit's legs scissored on the ground as he gurgled noisily, his hands clasped around his throat as if throttling himself, blood quickly pooling on the gritty concrete beneath him. 'Walter . . .' said Kevin from the back of the boat. He stood up, eager to clamber ashore and get a closer look at the mess. 'You blew his head off!' 'Dammit! Kevin, sit down and be quiet!' snapped David. 'Oh, shit, man!' said Nathan, his features ashen. 'He's dying! What - what the fuck are we gonna do?' They watched the man squirm on the ground for a moment. 'We have to do something!' shouted Jacob. 'He's bleeding everywhere! ' Walter stared, dumbfounded, smoke still curling from the barrel of his shotgun. 'He's dying,' said Bill. 'We can't help him.' Walter nodded. 'We could take him back to Dr Gupta,' said Jacob bending down to peer at the man convulsing on the ground. 'Don't be stupid!' snapped David. 'He's bleedin' out! He'll be dead before we get him back.' The sound of the man's gurgling, bubbling breath filled the space between them. 'Then, shit, we ought to . . .' Nathan started, looking at the others. 'You know? We can't leave him like this!' Walter nodded, finally roused from a state of shock. 'Yes . . . Christ. Yes, I-I suppose you're right,' he said quietly. He placed the shotgun carefully down on the ground and tugged the assault rifle out of Nathan's rigid hands. 'Best close your eyes, mate,' he said to the man on the ground. The man struggled to say something. Bubbles and strangled air whistled out through the jagged hole in his throat, whilst his mouth flapped uselessly. 'Look away, boys,' he said to the others. Walter aimed, closed his own eyes and fired.
Chapter 9 10 years AC 'LeMan 49/25a' - ClarenCo Gas Rig Complex, North Sea
Jenny looked down and watched Dr Tamira Gupta take charge of lifting the wounded man out of the boat. Tamira - 'Tami' as she was more commonly known - small and delicate, her dark hair pulled back out of the way into a businesslike bun, bossed the men and boys as they eased the man out of the cockpit. 'Be very careful,' she heard the woman bark at Jacob and Nathan as they lifted him into the net swinging just above the rising and falling foredeck. The man groaned weakly as he flopped across the coarse netting. Tami threw a blanket over him to keep him warm then signalled those above manning the davit to start winching him up. The net rose from the bobbing deck, swinging its catch in the fresh breeze. The sea was beginning to get a little lively, swells slapping against the nearby legs sending up small showers of salty spray. 'So what the hell happened?' Jenny asked Walter. He leant forward on the railing, watching the net slowly rise, and Dr Gupta clambering up the rope ladder onto the spider deck. He breathed deep and swallowed, looking like someone ready to vomit. 'Walter?' 'He was being chased like it was some kind of . . . of a bloody fox hunt. The poor sod was already wounded, saw us moored up on the quayside and getting ready to go and made straight towards us. The blokes chasing after him . . .' Walter took another breath and watched the swinging net slowly rise for a moment. 'The two blokes chasing him fired shots at him that nearly hit us. In fact, they didn't seem to give a shit that they nearly hit us. They came over, standing right over him and were about to execute him when . . . when . . . the bloody gun just went off in my hands.' 'You killed them?' Walter wavered for a moment, wondering whether he ought to tell Jenny that one of the men had been killed outright, but the other, they'd had to shoot like a wounded animal. 'Yes, we killed them.' To his surprise she nodded approvingly. 'Well, then you did the right thing.' 'We checked around nearby. Didn't find anyone else. But that doesn't mean there aren't more of them out there.' Jenny nodded. 'Seems like they were after this Frenchman for a bit of fun.' 'French?' 'He spoke something before he passed out.' Walter shrugged. 'Been a long time since I've been in school - it sounded like French to me.' They watched as Tami climbed the last steps of the stairwell onto the cellar deck. She pushed her way through the crowd gathered around the davit cranes, pulled the netting aside and knelt down beside the man, quickly checking the wound, the man's pulse. 'I wonder how far he's come?' asked Jenny. 'From mainland Europe?' Walter shook his head. 'Or perhaps further? He's quite dark. Could be from somewhere Mediterranean, possibly Middle Eastern?' 'You think that made him a target? You know, being an outsider, a foreigner?' Walter tugged on the grey-white bristles of his beard, the slightest tremble still in his fingers. 'By the look of those two men chasing him . . . who knows? Thugs with guns. You know the kind.' Jenny nodded, biting her lip. 'I was starting to hope the mainland was a safe place again. I was hoping vicious bastards like that had died out long ago.' Dr Gupta finished making an initial examination and had him transferred to a stretcher to be taken up to her infirmary. Jenny quickly excused herself to let Walter oversee the unloading of the boat whilst she pushed her way past the onlookers gathered along the railing. 'Jenny,' called out one of the women. 'You going to tell us what happened?' 'Not now,' she called over her shoulder. She quickly climbed the steps to the cellar deck and joined Dr Gupta as she packed up her medical bag. 'Tami, how is he?' 'He has lost a lot of blood from the wound. I cannot see if there are any broken bones in there, or fragments. I will need to clean him out and take a look. He is also very malnourished by the look of him. In a very sorry way, I am afraid.' 'Will he live?' She shrugged. 'I really don't know, Jenny. We have got plenty antibiotics to combat any infection and I'll sedate him right now and take a look inside the
wound, make sure there is no internal bleeding. I will see how we go from there.' 'All right, I'll let you get on with it.' Dr Gupta flicked a stiff smile at her then headed after the stretcher, being manoeuvred awkwardly up the next stairwell to the main deck by half a dozen pairs of hands. 'Careful, Helen!' she barked out at one of the youngsters she'd drafted to help heft the stretcher. 'Both hands, please!' 'I'm doing my best!' the girl replied haughtily. 'He's heavy, though!' Jenny watched them go, pitying the poor sod being rattled around on the stretcher, moaning with every jar and bump.
I hope he pulls through. There's about a million questions I'd like to ask him. Walter puffed up the last of the steps and stood beside her, his red blotchy face dotted with sweat. 'It all happened so quickly.' 'I'd like to know where that man came from, and what he's seen abroad,' she replied. 'I wonder if the rest of the world is faring any better.' She looked down at the sea. Sixty feet below, the net, lowered once more to the boat's foredeck, rising and dropping on the swells sliding beneath her, was being filled with the goodies they'd found on the shore run. Walter nodded silently. She could see he was still shaken by what had happened. She decided to direct his mind elsewhere. 'So, more importantly, how did your shopping run go?' 'Oh . . . yes, we got most of what was on the list,' he smiled, 'and a few little extras for the party.' Jenny smiled wearily. Good. Life was usually made a little easier after a shore run. Most people got something they'd requested and were less likely to bitch and grumble for the next few days at least. And the celebration party . . . well, that couldn't come soon enough. They were soon to mark the very first anniversary of getting the generator up and running; Leona's suggestion - a good one, too. The two or three hours of light every evening, afforded by the noisy chugging thing, made all the difference to their lives. More than a small luxury, it was a significant step up from merely managing to survive. It was a comfort; a reminder of better times; a statement of progress; steady light across the decks and walkways after dark.
Absolutely worth celebrating that. Apart from anything else, the party would be a boost for their morale - hopefully shut the whingers and malcontents up for a while. 'Come on, Walter, what extras did you manage to rustle up?' Walter tapped his ruddy nose and managed a thin smile. 'Just a few nice things.' The net was full enough for the first load and Nathan flashed a thumbs-up to the people manning the davit. They worked the manual winch and the laden net swung up off the deck with the creaking of polyvinyl cables and the clinking of chains. As it slowly rose away from the rising and falling boat, Jacob, Nathan and the others worked in practised unison, bringing boxes of supplies from below deck and stacking them in the cockpit ready to fill the empty net again. Mostly medicines. But also items of clothing, woollen jumpers, waterproofs, thick socks and thermal underwear. She spotted a basket full of paperback novels and glossy magazines, cellophane-wrapped packs of cook-in-sauce tins, catering-size bags of salt and sugar and flour . . . amazing how, even now, if one knew where to look, what things could be foraged from the dark corners of warehouses. Hannah clattered on noisy clogs through the crowd and found them, dragging Leona by the hand after her. 'Uncle Walter, did you find me anything?' He hunkered down to her level and winked at her. 'Oh, let's just see.' He reached into the old leather bag slung over his shoulder, made a show of rummaging around inside. 'I'm sure I must have something in here for you.' Finally, with a little theatrical flourish, he pulled out a transparent plastic case containing what looked like a row of water-colour tabs and a paintbrush. 'Little Miss Britney make-up set,' he said handing it to her. Her little caterpillar eyebrows shot up to form a double arch of surprise. 'Wow!' She threw an arm around his shoulders and planted a wet kiss on his rough cheek. Walter's face flushed crimson. 'Bit young for grooming, isn't she?' said a woman stepping past - Alice Harton, a miserable-faced bitch who seemed to make a life's work out of meanspirited put-downs and caustic remarks. Walter looked up and shrugged awkwardly. 'Well . . . I saw it . . . just thought she'd like it.' 'It's lovely!' cooed Hannah brightly. 'There, see?' said Leona, handing the woman a dry now-why-don'tyou-piss-off smile. Alice Harton brushed on past them, shaking her head disapprovingly as she spoke in hushed tones and backward glances to the women with her. Jenny squeezed his round shoulder affectionately as he slowly stood up. 'Don't listen to that silly cow, Walter. I don't know what I'd do . . . what any of us would do without you.' He smiled at her and down at Hannah. 'I'm here for you, Jenny,' he uttered. 'And I got this for you, Hannah,' said Jacob. He produced a Playmobil Princess and Pony set from his sack. It was still in its cardboard and plastic packaging; pristine and not sun-faded. He'd found it at the back of a children's shop on the high street. Her eyes instantly lit up, as much at the sight of the beautiful pink cardboard presentation box and the unscuffed plastic window than at the two small plastic play figures she could see imprisoned inside. 'Thank you, Jake,' she gushed, twining her short arms around his neck and plastering his grimacing face with wet kisses. The large mess and the hallway outside were crowded with a couple of hundred of the community's members; those that had put a must-have on the list and turned up in the hope that there was something for them to collect. It was a deafening convergence of overlapping voices raised with pleasure and surprise or groans of disappointment.
Jacob extracted himself from Hannah's clinging embrace. Leona thanked him with a squeeze. 'Thanks, bruv. Two treats today, she's being spoiled.' He shrugged. 'I used to love Playmobil stuff. It was proper cool. Those things don't ever break.' She smiled. 'I remember. You had the Viking ship and all the Vikings in your bedroom, didn't you?' 'Yeah,' he nodded. 'So, I umm . . . I treated myself to a present as well . . .' He reached into his bag and pulled out a small pristine cardboard carton. 'Viking captain,' he smiled, opening the box and pulling out the plastic figure. He turned it over in his hands, his fingers stroking the smooth contours of plastic, his eyes drinking in the bright unblemished colours. For a fleeting moment - like a dormant memory stirred by a smell - he was back home in his bedroom, seven once again, sitting cross-legged on the blue furry rug that looked like an ocean, and steering his ship through a stormy furry sea. Beams of afternoon sun warming his face through the window; the reassuring sounds of mum in the kitchen, dad in his study watching the news on his laptop, Leona playing music in her room. A very ordinary Saturday afternoon . . . from another time, another life. 'The arms and legs can move,' he added thoughtfully, adjusting them in his hands. 'I know, little brother, I know,' she smiled. He looked up and saw amongst the animated faces others like him, staring wistfully at mementos from the past, lost in a fog of nostalgic delight. 'So, there were some men, I heard,' said Leona. He nodded. 'A couple of them.' 'Chasing the guy you saved?' Jacob was reluctant to talk it out right now. It was still way too easy to conjure up an image of the Y-shaped splatter of blood and brain tissue across the concrete. 'We had to shoot them. Otherwise they would have killed the other man,' was all he wanted to offer just then. Leona was going to press him for more details, but Hannah was yanking impatiently on her hand, keen to show her the princess and pony. Leona relented and squatted down to her level and Jacob watched and smiled as his sister and niece cooed at the marvellously preserved plastic figurines. Two men with guns.
Is it really safe ashore? The question annoyed him, made him feel angry and his stomach lurch unpleasantly.
See . . . if you really want to go ashore, Jay, if you really insist on going ashore and exploring, then that's what you might be up against. Nasty men. Big guns. You ready for that? You a big enough boy to look after yourself now? 'Yes,' he muttered under his breath. A gun was going to be just as deadly in his hands as some wild-eyed thug playing fox and hounds. 'What's up, bruv?' asked Leona looking up. He shook the Y-shaped splatter from his mind and smiled. 'Oh, nothing.'
Chapter 10 Crash Day + 1 11 a.m. Suffolk
Adam looked out of the open canopy of their truck as it rumbled south along the A11's slow lane, towards London. The rest of the squadron's gunners, inside, were trying to listen to a small radio attempting to compete with the deafening snarl of the RAF transport truck's diesel engine. Today, the second day of the crisis. The situation seemed not to show any sign of abating. On the contrary, the news seemed to be getting worse by the hour. The last soundbite Adam had managed to catch from the radio was that the American military forces in the region had begun redeploying en masse in Saudi Arabia. Although no one from the US Defense Department had made a public statement on this large scale rapid movement of muscle, it was obvious that the troops were being sent to defend critical installations in the Ghawar oil fields, an area that had yet to be wholly incapacitated by the widespread rioting. The Middle East was sounding like one big battlefield, the fighting now not just between Sunnis and Shi'as, but between rival tribes, between neighbouring streets, seemingly in every city and town in many of the Arab nations; a chance in the spreading entropy to settle age-old dishonours and more recent disputes. Then, of course, there was the bottomless plummet on the markets. Adam, with ten thousand pounds of savings in a Nationwide Share-tracker account, had listened with increasing desperation as the FTSE had plummeted this morning to somewhere close to two thousand, losing just over fifty per cent of its value, the government apparently doing or saying nothing to halt the slide until half an hour ago when it announced, out of the blue, that the London stock exchange was being suspended for the day. Shrewdly, before Wall Street was about due to come online. A voice on the radio reminded listeners that the Prime Minister was scheduled to make an important announcement at midday. Adam checked his watch. An hour or so to go. All ears in the truck would be cocked for that one. He stared back out of the truck at the road filled with unhurried vehicles going about a normal day's business and wondered why he wasn't seeing any signs of panic yet. Why there were so many cars out there making routine journeys. But then, of course, none of them had been there at the briefing yesterday. It had been little more than a hasty exchange over Squadron Leader Cameron's desk; enough to leave Adam with a cold, churning sensation in the pit of his stomach.
'Unofficially, Brooks, we're getting orders to redeploy the regiment. There's a lot of rear-echelon chatter buzzing around this morning. The word is we'll probably be pulling the rest of the regiment back from Afghanistan, Iraq, East Timor and Belize immediately. They want as many boots back on the ground in Britain, as soon as is possible.' 'In response to this oil thing?' Cameron nodded. 'Yes. I'd say someone upstairs is anticipating laying down some degree of martial law in this country; guarding critical fuel depots.' 'It's going to get that bad, sir?' 'What do you think? We nearly had bloody riots over the duty being paid on petrol a few years back. I can only imagine what sort of fun and games we're going to have on our hands when petrol pumps start running dry.' Cameron, agitated, tapped his pen on a desk pad thick with scribbled notes. 'Our poor bastards, 15 Squadron, guarding Kandahar will no doubt be the last fellas out of the country. That is if we still have enough fuel to keep our planes flying.'
Jesus. Being the last company-strength unit left on the ground in that hell-hole, even on a good day, was going to be hairy. He wondered, when the dust settled in the aftermath of this crisis, what sort of news stories would get top billing in the tabloids: A-list celebrities stranded on holiday islands, X Factor auditions postponed by the oil shock, or the massacre of an entire company of left-behind British soldiers.
Stranded celebrities, obviously. Cameron looked at him. 'You know this has caught everyone on the hop. Everyone. I can't believe there wasn't a prepared contingency plan for something like this. You'd think the Russians buggering about turning off gas supplies in recent winters would have alerted someone to the possibility of an oil switch off.' He shook his head. 'I get the impression that everyone up the chain of command is simply winging it. It's a fucking shambles.' Adam nodded at the pad on his desk. 'So, where are we redeploying?' 'I've got a list of places just come in, places the government want troops stationed round. Since we're perimeter defence specialists we've been handed a lot off the top of the list. Oil distribution nodes, government command and control centres.' He looked down at the list. 'I'm splitting 2 squadron between you, Dempsey and Carver. You're taking Rifle Flight one and two down to London. The O2 Dome, of all places.'
'The Millennium Dome?' Cameron shrugged. 'Most probably be a regional emergency coordination centre. It's not listed as such, but that's probably why they want guards on the gates there.' 'Right.' 'Get your boys ready to go. As soon as I've got a confirmation order on these deployments I'll let you know.' 'Yes, sir.' Adam turned to go. 'Oh . . . Brooks?' 'Sir?' 'Good luck.' The two words came out in a way he'd probably not intended. They sounded unsettling. 'You think it's really going to get that bad, sir?' Cameron tried a reassuring smile, but produced little more than a queasy grimace. 'Just, good luck, Brooks. All right?' He dismissed Adam with a busy flicker of his hand. As Adam pulled open the door Cameron called out for him to send in Flight Lieutenant Dempsey.
Adam watched the vehicle a dozen yards behind; a couple of scruffy teenage kids in a beaten-up white van, yapping merrily like they hadn't a care in the world. Beyond them, a Carpet World truck was rolling placidly along, the driver on his mobile. Overtaking in the fast lane a young lad with gel-spiked hair driving a bakery van like it was a performance racing car.
And life goes merrily on for some. He shook his head at the surreal ordinariness of the scene beyond the back of their truck. People going about their business as if today was just another day. 'Surely they realise?' he muttered. 'What's that, sir?' asked Corporal Davies, sitting on the bench opposite. Adam looked up at Bushey. He wasn't the brightest lad in the unit, but even in his bullish features Adam could recognise a growing unease that world events were beginning to out-pace the increasingly frantic news headlines. 'Nothing, Bush. Just singing.' The big fool grinned; a stupid oafish Shrek-like grin that was probably never going to end up on a calendar. He turned to look back out of the truck at the white van behind them and leered at the teenage girl in the passenger seat in a manner he most likely considered rakish and charming. She returned his unattractive leer with a cocked eyebrow and a middle finger.
Chapter 11 10 years AC 'LeMan 49/25a' - ClarenCo Gas Rig Complex, North Sea
'Mum, you really don't need to be shovelling this shit,' said Leona. 'Seriously, you're in charge round here, no one would expect you to.' Jenny looked up from the foul stinking slurry before her. The odour rising from the warm, steaming bed of human and chicken faeces was so overpowering that she'd been fighting a constant gag reflex until she'd managed to adjust to the unfamiliar habit of breathing solely through her open mouth. 'I'm taking my turn just like everyone else,' she said, tucking a stray lock of hair behind her ear. 'If I ducked this job, the likes of Alice would have a field day with it.' Alice was a miserable shrew. There wasn't a day that passed without Jenny hearing some little barbed comment come from the woman's flapping lips. There wasn't a day Jenny didn't regret allowing the woman to join them. She'd been so quiet and meek the first few months, no trouble at all . . . that is until she'd found her feet; found other quiet voices like hers. Voices that wondered why this community should have an unelected leader; why one woman should be allowed to impose her values, her opinions on all of them, when it was everyone who contributed to their survival. Jenny suspected it wasn't the idea of democracy being shunted aside because it was a temporary inconvenience that so irked Alice Harton, it was the fact that some other woman was in charge . . . and not her. After all, as she constantly let everyone know, she'd had extensive management experience back in the old world; ran a local government department of some kind. Logically, it should be someone like her team-leading, not some workaday middle class mum. 'Sod Alice,' said Leona. 'She moans about everything anyway. You're damned if you do, damned if you don't with a bitch like her.' 'Still, we all should take turns doing this, Lee. It's going to be your turn soon.' Leona grimaced. 'Oh, gross.' 'We've all got to do our bit, love.' Walter nodded. 'Each digester stops producing methane after three weeks and needs emptying and refilling.' He gestured at the other two sealed eight-foot-long fibreglass cylinders that he'd rescued from a brewery. 'Huey and Dewey are doing fine right now. Week after next, I think it's your name up on the rota to clean out Dewey.' The rota . . . The Rota . . . was the community's closest equivalent to a Bible. It was written out in tiny handwriting on a whiteboard in what had once been some sort of meeting room. There were four hundred community members old enough and fit enough to work one chore or another. Every day Jenny found herself in front of that whiteboard, shuffling names around, shifting groups of people from one chore to the next. No one escaped the rota, she insisted, not even herself. This task, though, was generally considered to be by far the worst; shovelling the spent slurry from the digester into several dozen four-gallon plastic drums to be taken up to the plant decks and used as fertiliser. There was always someone who refused point-blank to do it; like Alice Harton did, like Nilaya Koundinya who claimed it was unacceptable for someone of her caste to work directly with human faeces. On both those occasions she'd found herself in the middle of a shouting match, ultimately having to threaten eviction if they didn't shut up and take their turn.
This isn't a popularity contest, she told herself daily. Remember that. 'Next week is it?' asked Leona. 'Yup,' replied Walter. 'Fantastic,' Leona replied drily. 'And do I get your help as well, Walter?' The old man grinned but didn't reply. He'd volunteered to come down to the 'stink room' to help Jenny out when her turn came up on the rota. His infatuation for her was embarrassingly obvious. 'What do you say, Hannah?' asked Walter. 'Want to help your mum, too?' She shrugged. 'Maybe. I'll think about it.' Jenny laughed. Such a little madam. 'I know it smells bloody awful down here,' said Walter, 'but if you get into the habit of breathing through your mouth--' 'Can't we move it to somewhere better ventilated?' asked Jenny. He stood up straight, stretching his stiff back. 'It's the warmest location on the production platform.' There were no windows down here, the room was perfectly insulated on all four sides by other storage rooms. 'It's the easiest place for us to maintain a consistent fermenting temperature,' he said, 'and let's be honest, the chickens on the deck above are unlikely to moan about it.' Hannah giggled. 'Moaning chickens.'
'It worries me,' said Jenny regarding the other two digesters. Thick rubber hoses attached with G-clamps ran from both of them up to the ceiling and there, attached with wire ties to a metal spar, snaked across towards a doorway leading to a second windowless room where the generator rattled away noisily. 'What does?' 'That we can't ventilate this place properly. Isn't that a bit dangerous? ' He shrugged. 'We just keep the door open. That'll be all right.' 'I know. But that's another worry - the door always open, one of the smaller children could just wander in and--' Walter stood up and arched his back. 'They all know not to come down here.' 'Could you not rig up an extractor fan or something? Then that door could be closed and locked.' He sighed. 'Another thing to put on the To Do list, I suppose. I could consider relocating all of this to a cabin with a window, for safety's sake, but then we'd need to heat the room to keep it warm enough for the slurry to ferment. That'd be a lot of work, Jenny.' She nodded. 'Yes, I suppose.' 'For now, as long as the children know they're not to play down here, we'll be just fine.' Jenny hefted another shovel of spent slurry into the barrel at her feet. 'Perhaps something to think about in the future, Walter.' Hannah was doing her best to help out with a trowel, scooping small dollops out of the digester with a determined frown on her face. Leona grimaced at the sight of shit smudged up her daughter's arm. 'But did you have to rope in Hannah?' 'I want to help my nanna and Uncle Walter,' she answered. Walter smiled at her. 'You're our little helper. Aren't you, poppet?' Hannah scooped up another heavy trowel, carelessly flicking a small dollop of pale brown mush onto her forehead. 'Yup.' 'Ugghh,' Leona made a face, 'be careful, Hannah, you're getting covered in crap.' 'It's not crap,' said Walter. 'Just think of it as rocket fuel for our potatoes, onions and tomatoes. That's all it is. Everything gets used; there's no room for waste or slack on these rigs. You know that.' Leona continued to curl her lip at the sight of the slurry as they shovelled and scraped it out of the plastic tube. 'Walter,' said Jenny after a while, 'how's our newcomer? I've not had a chance to drop in on him yet.' 'Tami says he's still very weak.' 'What do we know about him?' Walter shook his head. 'Not much. I'd say he's in his late thirties. He's French, or at least he speaks French. He looks Mediterranean, perhaps Middle Eastern at a pinch . . . hard to say.' He stood up straight, leaning tiredly on the shovel. 'But, to be honest,' he hesitated a moment, choosing the right words, 'he looks like the type you wouldn't normally take on, Jenny.' 'Hmm?' she mumbled. 'A loner. The loners are always trouble. You know that.' They'd had trouble before; a young man they'd encountered in Bracton harbour, foraging for things nine months ago. They'd taken him in and assigned him a cot on the drilling platform. A fortnight later he'd sexually assaulted a woman there. They'd nearly tossed him over the side. Instead Jenny decided he should be taken back to Bracton and left to fend for himself. A year before that there'd been a couple of younger men with guns who'd buzzed the platforms in a motorboat, demanding to be let on and firing off a few wild shots in anger when she'd refused them. And before them, there was the wild and ragged twenty-something lad they'd found living on scraps in Great Yarmouth. He'd ended up nearly beating Dennis to death because the old boy had complained about the lad's language in front of the young ones. Men of a certain age, in their twenties or thirties, seemed to be either dangerous predators who viewed this quiet world as their personal playground, or were unbalanced and unpredictable. 'This French chap was being pursued by the others,' added Walter with a cautionary tone to his voice. 'There could be any number of reasons for that.' Jenny nodded. 'True.' She pursed her lips and took a moment. 'When he's well enough, I want to interview him, though. If he really is from France or further afield, I want to know what he's seen.' 'Of course,' said Walter. 'And then?' 'And then, yes . . . when he's fit enough that he can look after himself, maybe we'll send him back. I'll just have to see for myself. I really can do without worrying whether we've picked up another nut or some sort of an axe murderer.' She realised an interview was very little on which to make a judgement. But, to be honest, she couldn't be entirely certain of any one of the men already on the rigs. There was no way of knowing if at some time in their past they'd been violent, abusive; perhaps taken advantage of the chaos and anarchy and done unpardonable things. She couldn't know that. All she did know was that the few men living here had behaved themselves thus far. More importantly, that these few men were vastly outnumbered by women. Best to play it safe, she decided, and assume this man was potentially a danger until he could prove himself otherwise. After all . . .
After all, it takes just one fox to get into the hen house . . .
Chapter 12 10 years AC 'LeMan 49/25a' - ClarenCo Gas Rig Complex, North Sea
Hannah watched the man; his chest rising and falling evenly beneath the sheet. She felt sorry for him. He looked so thin and frail, his olive-coloured skin almost grey by the light seeping in through the round porthole above the bed. Dr Tami told her the man was not to be pestered. She could look at him, but she wasn't to be a nuisance. Dr Tami was gone now, left the sick bay to visit someone who'd had a fall on one of the other platforms and possibly broken something. The man's dark hair tumbled down in lank ringlets onto the pillow. He looked like the picture of Jesus Martha had shown her once; a peaceful, kind face, not etched with angry lines around his eyes, but kind lines . . . a man used to smiling. A coil of limp hair was curled into his beard and stuck in the corner of his mouth. She reached over the bed and pulled it away from his dry lips. 'You poor, poor thing,' she uttered softly as if this sleeping man was a baby griping and mewling with wind. His eyelids quivered ever so slightly, then a moment later flickered open. 'Oooh,' whispered Hannah. Brown eyes, unfocused and dazed, darted around the cabin walls, the ceiling above him, the small porthole opposite, then finally onto Hannah. She smiled. 'Hello, my name's Hannah.' He stared at her silently. 'You're sick,' she added, 'you got shot by bad men and you're poorly. Dr Tami said you have to stay in bed and I'm not to be a nuisance.' His eyes narrowed, dark brows locked as he studied her. Finally the thick thatch of bristles around his mouth stirred and parted. 'Pplease . . . you have water?' For a moment she struggled to make sense of the man's strange accent. 'Water?' he rasped again, voice thick with phlegm. Then she understood. She grinned and nodded, eager to be like Dr Tami, caring for a patient just like a real doctor. She clacked quickly across the floor and poured treated rainwater from a jug into a plastic tumbler. She came back to the bedside and held it out proudly in front of her. 'Please . . .' he whispered softly. He was asking for help to sit up. Just like she'd seen the doctor do before, she reached up on tiptoes to slide a small hand behind his head, tilting it as best she could so that he could drink from the tumbler. She tipped the cup carefully, some of the water going where it was intended, the rest soaking into his thick beard and trickling down either side of his face and onto the pillow. 'There, there,' she cooed softly. She eased his head back. 'Is that much better?' He closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them and returned her smile. 'Better, thank you,' he replied, his voice a little stronger now; more than a dry rattling whisper. 'My name's Hannah,' she said again. 'I'm nearly five years old.' He smiled. 'I thought . . . I thought you were an angel,' he replied. 'Just now . . . when I opened my eyes.' 'An angel!' Hannah giggled at the thought of that, grinning like a Cheshire cat. 'My nanna calls me that sometimes.' His eyes went from her, back to the walls, the ceiling, the other cot in the sickbay. 'Please, what is this?' She knew what he was asking. 'You're in our home. We live above the water on big legs.' He licked dry lips and winced with pain as he tried to sit up. 'You have to sit very still,' cautioned Hannah. 'More water? Please?' asked the man, glancing at the tumbler. She helped lift his head again and held the tumbler to his mouth. 'Dr Tami is going to make you better again with all her medicine.' She let his head rest back again on the pillow when he'd finished the water. He nodded gratefully. 'Thank you.' 'You are French,' she informed the man. 'Mum told me.' He shrugged weakly. 'No. Not French. Belgian.' Hannah's brow knotted. 'Bell-gee-an. I never heard of that. Is it in Africa?' 'Europe,' he managed a wan smile, 'what is left . . . at least.' 'U-rope?' she repeated the vaguely familiar name. She repeated it again under her breath, her face locked in concentration. 'That's another place, isn't
'U-rope?' she repeated the vaguely familiar name. She repeated it again under her breath, her face locked in concentration. 'That's another place, isn't it? Is it an island? Like America?' He shook his head, closing his eyes, dizzy and nauseous. 'No, not really.' Hannah felt a passing stab of guilt. Dr Tami had told her not to pester the man; that he was weak and needed as much rest as possible. And here she was pestering him. 'I better go now,' she said. 'I have school soon.' She turned to go. 'Please!' the man called out. She stopped. 'You . . . what you say your name is . . . ?' 'My name's Hannah Sutherland.' He nodded. 'Merci beaucoup - thank you very much - for the water, Hannah.' 'What's your name?' 'My name is . . .' he licked his lips, 'my name is Valerie.' Her eyebrows knotted disapprovingly. 'Valerie? Ewww. That's a girl's name!' He laughed tiredly, his head collapsing softly back against the pillow. 'Girl, boy, is same en francais.' She thought about it for a moment. 'You're very funny.' His eyes remained closed, the rustling sound of his breath growing long and even. He nodded sleepily. 'I try.' 'I should go now,' she said again. She thought he was asleep, but he cracked an eye open and winked. 'Thank you, little angel.' She was grinning as she fluttered down the corridor to the stairwell to deck B, carried aloft by the invisible little wings she'd suddenly decided to grow.
Chapter 13 Crash Day + 1 1.15 p.m. O2 Arena - 'Safety Zone 4', London
The Millennium Dome loomed before Flight Lieutenant Adam Brooks. He refused to call it the 'O2 Arena' just because some profit-fattened telecoms company had bought the abandoned site at a knock-down price and decided to re-brand it. Enormous, squat, daunting, the last time Adam had stepped inside he'd been going to a Kaiser Chiefs' gig. The dome, lit up at night, had looked like something out of Disneyland - the canvas cover illuminated from within by a spinning kaleidoscope of neon colours. It had looked like some sort of giant undulating pearl in the darkness. This afternoon the canvas appeared a drab vanilla, worn by the elements, washed dull by ten years of interminably wet British weather. The pedestrian plaza in front of the dome's entrance was thick with civilian emergency workers, all wearing requisite bright orange waistcoats to identify them. The vast majority of them were crisis-situation draftees: paramedics, firemen, GPs, security guards, health and safety managers, Scout leaders . . . community-minded civilians who'd registered online as willing emergency helpers last time there had been an avian flu scare. Many of them were queuing to be processed; name and national insurance number taken down, given an orange waistcoat, an ID badge and a supervisor to report to. Adam returned from his hurried jog around the dome's perimeter - a cursory inspection to see how much work they'd need to carry out to successfully contain the area. He found most of the gunners gathered around the backs of their trucks, amidst off-loaded and stacked spools of razor wire and equipment yokes laid out in several orderly rows. They were crowded tightly together, heads cocked and leaning forward; a circular and improbably large rugby scrum of soldiers, watching a TV in the middle.
Why the hell are those lazy fuckwits standing around? 'Hey!' he bellowed. 'Sergeant? What's going on here?' Sergeant Walfield straightened up guiltily. 'Sorry, sir. Prime Minister's just come on the telly. Thought I'd let the lads hear what 'e's got to say.' Adam crossed the plaza towards them, grinding his teeth with frustration and debating whether to give Danny Walfield a mouthful for letting the lads down tools when they were supposed to be getting a wriggle on and erecting a secure barricade across the front of the plaza. As he stepped through the tight knot of men he saw Bushey holding a small portable TV aloft, intently listening, his RAF-blue beret clasped tightly in one hand. 'PM's just coming on,' he explained to his CO. The men wanted to hear what was to be announced. For that matter, so did Adam. 'All right then, let's see what he's got to say.' He turned round and picked out the sergeant. 'Then, Danny, I want them straight back to work.' 'Aye, sir,' replied Walfield. Adam squatted down beside Bushey and listened in. The small TV screen flickered with the flash of press cameras as Prime Minister Charles Harrison, flanked by his ever-present advisor, Malcolm Jones, stepped up onto the small podium. Adam thought the poor bastard looked haggard and pale, his tie loosened, his jacket off and shirt sleeves rolled up; like some unlucky sod who'd worked through the night and been roused from a nap ten minutes ago with a strong black coffee. The Prime Minister uttered some grateful platitudes for the press assembling here at short notice, and after steadying himself with a deep breath, he began. 'Yesterday, during morning prayers in Riyadh, the first of many bombs exploded in the holy mosques of Mecca and Medina, and in several more mosques in Riyadh. A radical Shi'ite group sent a message shortly after to Al Jazeera claiming responsibility for the devices. Similar explosions occurred yesterday in several other cities in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman and Iraq. The situation has continued to worsen in the region. Because of the potential danger this poses to our remaining troops, and after consultation with Arab leaders, a decision was taken to pull all of our troops out of the region until this particular problem has corrected itself.' Adam shook his head. So far it seemed as if the Prime Minister was doing his best not to mention the word 'oil'. A lot of news time yesterday had been filled with industry experts talking about the drastic impact the unrest was going to have on crude oil supplies; assessments on reserves in the supply chain, reserves in the holds of tankers still at sea - unaffected and able to deliver - and the possible per-barrel price these reserves might hit in the next twenty-four hours. Five hundred, seven hundred . . . even a thousand dollars a barrel for the next few weeks - that was the kind of punditry they'd been getting all yesterday afternoon. Today, however, it seemed by consensus between the news channels, no one was discussing barrel prices, reserves or shortfalls. Today's news agenda was all about getting the boys back home from the troubled Middle East. It smacked of misdirection. Adam wondered if someone was leaning on the media to steer the agenda elsewhere; to keep people's minds on matters abroad. There had been endless news footage of our poor lads holed up, besieged and waiting for their planes home, market places running with blood, baying crowds dancing around flaming cars, blackened corpses being dragged behind rusting trucks through rubbish-strewn streets. Horrific attentiongrabbing stuff, in marked contrast to yesterday's footage of smoking oil refineries, towers of orange flame licking through ruptured storage tanks, and twisted piping belching black smoke. The refineries around Baku in Azerbaijan, Paraguana in Venezuela, rendered useless; the striking image of a tanker ripped open and spewing gigantic black lily pads of oil across the narrowest section of the Strait of Hormuz, rendering this crucial shipping lane impassable. Yesterday's talk was all about how an oil stoppage was going to affect the UK - what exactly this all means to me and mine.
Clumsy misdirection. Adam was sure that, no matter how much everyone cared passionately about our boys trapped abroad, what they really wanted to know was exactly how screwed are we here in the UK? Charles Harrison rounded his prepared speech off with some assurances that order was going to be maintained and all possible measures were being put into place to minimise the economic damage done. Adam was surprised to hear no mention of any 'safe zones' being set up, or of the implementation of any sort of martial law. Perhaps that was going to come later? Perhaps what was needed right now were some calming assurances, not the announcement of a raft of specific emergency measures. He realised the PM was doing his best not to spook the press or the general public. No one's ready for a stampede, for a mass panic. This is about
buying another twenty-four . . . forty-eight hours of prep-time. Adam looked at his men.
It's about getting more army boots back on the ground first. The PM rounded off and then opened the floor to questions. They came in noisy volleys. The first few he answered calmly with more assurances that this was a blip that the UK was well-placed to ride out. Then Adam heard one of the assembled journalists cut in - a sharp female voice that sounded as if it had already been spoon-fed enough bullshit for one morning - with a question specifically about how much stockpiled oil and food was on UK soil right now. The Prime Minister blanched. 'How long, Prime Minister?' the journalist asked again, the press room silent. 'How long can we feed ourselves whilst this oil crisis is playing out?' Harrison froze for too long with a rabbit-in-the-headlights expression on his face.
Shit, that looks bad. 'Twat,' one of the gunners muttered. 'He doesn't fucking know.' 'Look . . . th-there really is no need for anyone to panic,' the Prime Minister replied, his voice wobbling uncertainly. 'There has been a lot of planning, a lot of forward thinking about a scenario like this.' A shouted question from the back of the press room. 'Prime Minister, is the army being brought back to enforce martial law?' A pause. Another too-long pause. They listened to dead air for nearly ten seconds. 'All right.' Despite the small tinny sound of the television's speaker, Adam could detect that the Prime Minister sounded tired, resigned. 'All right . . . look, that's probably enough crap for one day. So, I'm going to tell you how it is.' Adam and Bushey looked at each other.
Did the PM really just say 'crap'? 'The truth is, everyone, the truth is . . . we are in a bit of trouble. Whilst this mess is sorting itself out we're going to have to make do with the resources we have. I'm afraid nothing is going to be coming into the UK for several weeks. So we're all going to have to work together. We are going to need to ration the food that is out there in the supermarkets, corner shops, warehouses, grocery stores. Food vendors are going to be asked to cease trading as of now. We're also locking down the sale of petrol and diesel from this point on. That has to be reserved for key personnel and emergency services.' The Prime Minister paused for breath. It was silent except for the rustle of an uneasy press audience stirring. Adam noticed a subtle tic in the man's face. He looked like someone on the very edge of a nervous breakdown. 'Look, it's going to be a very difficult few weeks . . . perhaps months. But, if we all pull together, like we did once before, during the Second World War . . . we're going to be just fine. If we panic, if people start hoarding food and water . . . then . . .' His voice faded. Prime Minister Charles Harrison suddenly stepped away from the podium, knocking a microphone clumsily with his arm. He walked quickly to the press room door flanked by his advisor and a bodyguard. The stunned silence was filled a second later with an uproar of questions shouted at the Prime Minister's back, as the Home Secretary replaced him at the podium and attempted to call the press conference to order. Adam leant over and snapped the television off. He turned to look at his men, two squadrons of gunners, forty young lads; a good half of them still in their teens and sporting pubescent acne; but all of them silent and anxiously regarding their CO. He looked across at Sergeant Walfield. The sergeant shrugged casually. 'I believe, sir, the shit 'as just gone an' hit the fan.' Adam nodded. 'I think we had better get on with securing this place.'
Chapter 14 10 years AC 'LeMan 49/25a' - ClarenCo Gas Rig Complex, North Sea
The foreign man looked up at Jenny from the steaming bowl of chowder, and around at all the others who had gathered in the mess to get a good look at the new arrival. 'Valerie Latoc? Is that right?' He nodded, spooning soup into his mouth. 'Yes. I am from the south of Belgium, Ardennes region originally.' He pushed a tress of dark hair out of his eyes; brown eyes that her gaze lingered on longer than she wanted. 'We don't get many visitors out here,' she said. Which was true. The community had grown over the last five years as a result of the people they'd come across whilst foraging ashore for essentials. People in small numbers; a family here, a couple there. It was an unspoken rule, though, that no one could join them on the rigs until Jenny had sat down and spoken with them. The Jenny Sutherland Entrance Examination, that's what she'd overheard Alice scathingly call it. There'd been those she'd turned away, those she considered might cause trouble for them. Those she didn't trust. Some she simply didn't like the look of. Unfair, discriminatory, but Jenny didn't give a damn what was being muttered, the last thing she was going to allow aboard was some schizo who might go off like a firecracker amongst them. It was men mostly. Men she didn't trust; males of a certain age. Young boys and old men she felt comfortable with. But men, particularly very masculine men, who oozed testosterone and smelled of hunger; who looked upon her female-heavy community with hungry eyes like a child in a candy store . . . they had no place here. 'I want you to tell us about yourself,' she said. Valerie spooned another mouthful of chowder, wiped the hot liquid from the bristles of his beard. 'From the beginning?' 'From the beginning.' He shrugged wearily. 'I was living in Bastogne in Belgium when it happened. The second day, the Tuesday, you remember your Prime Minister's television appearance?' She nodded. Everyone behind her nodded. Valerie shook his head. 'A big can of snakes he opened. No . . . worms, is it not? Can of worms?' Jenny nodded for him to continue. 'It was on TV5 Monde only minutes after. Your leader was the first one to come out and tell the people how bad things were. Then our President Molyneux had to do the same, and then every other leader. It was the significatif word, you know? The trigger words that people heard; ration, curfew, martial law . . . words like this that made people panic and riot.' He sat back in the chair. 'Le jour de desastre . Like a modern day Kristallnacht, you see? Every shop window in Bastogne was broken that night.' He sighed. 'We had power in Belgium at the time, you know - nuclear power from France, not like you British needing the Russian gas and oil. But even so, we also lost our power on the Wednesday. There was the complete black-out. The French stopped the power to us . . . or their generators had problems. But we had better order in our country. No riots yet. Our government had made much emergency preparations for this kind of thing. Much more than yours, I think?' He was right. Jenny recalled the appalling state of panic the British authorities went into during the first few days. A complete lack of communication from the Cabinet Office during the first twenty-four hours, the Prime Minister's disastrous performance on the second day, then there was nothing else from them except one or two junior members of government wheeled out to broadcast calls for calm. 'But then things became much more worse for us in Belgium in the second and third week. There were millions of people who come up into northern Europe. They were coming from the east, from Poland, from Czech Republic, from Croatia, from Bosnia. We had much, much many more come north, up through Spain, from Morocco, from Algeria, Tunisia. Even from further south; Zimbabwe, Uganda, because of tribal problems in these places. You know?' He hungrily spooned some more soup, then continued. 'In week three we became like you people in England. Fighting in the street; my city, Bastogne, on fire. No control by the leaders. Soldiers without clear orders.' He shook his head sadly. 'And many, many people dying when the water stopped pumping. You remember? It was very warm that summer?' She remembered all right. The UK hadn't been particularly hot, but it had been very dry. When the oil stopped, the power stations, without adequate oil reserves, had soon ceased functioning, and with that so did the flow of water through pumping stations and purification plants. In London, bottles of unopened drinking water became like gold dust; vending machines were wrenched to pieces to reclaim cans of Coke buried inside them. 'I suppose, I guess a month after the oil stopped, most people not killed in the riots and fighting were sick with the water diseases in my country. You know, cholera, typhoid.' 'So, Mr Latoc, how did you manage to make it through the early days?'
It was a question Jenny always asked. The answer given to this question was, more often than not, the answer that decided her. The type of person she didn't want on the rigs with her family was the type who boasted about their survival skills; their ability to fight off others for what they needed. They didn't need fighters. Not out here. What they needed were people prepared to muck in and work a long day, prepared to share, to compromise. 'I wandered,' he said. 'I stayed away from cities and towns and prayed like crazy I get through this nightmare. After many months I found some good people who took me in.' His eyes drifted off her, down to the steaming bowl of soup in front of him. 'Good people who let me - a stranger - join them during the time when charognard meant danger. You understand what I mean, yes? The people who take your food?' 'Scavengers,' said Jenny, nodding. 'Yes, scavengers. On the continent there were many, many . . . perhaps even still.' She had hoped that those desperate people content to endlessly drift and live off what could still be foraged from mouldering shops would surely be scarce now. Isolated loners, unbalanced, dangerous and best avoided. What she'd been hoping to hear was that the only people alive now were communities likes theirs, people like themselves knuckling down to the business of making-do. 'I lived with these people for seven years. Then strangers came.' He shook his head sadly. 'Men and guns.' The expression on his face told her more than his fading words. 'They came. Smoke brought them . . . they came for food, but then they wanted much more,' he said. Jenny felt her heart race, memories of a winter morning. 'Children, women,' Valerie shook his head, his voice failing for a moment. 'They,' he took a deep breath, 'they shoot the men first. The others, they play with.' He looked up at her. 'You understand?' 'Yes,' she nodded. 'But you . . . ?' 'How come they did not shoot me?' That was her question. He dropped his gaze, clearly ashamed. 'I hid and saw these things. Then I ran away.' He placed his spoon back in the bowl and pushed the bowl away; his appetite understandably seemed to have gone. He dropped his head and a moment later Jenny realised from the subtle heave of his shoulders that he was crying. She reached across the table and rested a hand on his forearm. 'It's okay, Mr Latoc.' He raised his face, cheeks glistening with tears. 'I did nothing . . . I was frightened. I ran.' He shook his head angrily. 'I did nothing.' 'There isn't much you can do,' said Jenny softly, 'not against armed men. It's just the way it is. That's why we stay out here.' He accepted that with a hasty nod. 'So what happened after that?' 'I ran. I keep moving.' He composed himself, wiped the tears from his face and took a deep breath. 'I went south-east for some time, towards the Mediterranean.' 'Tell me, is it as bad over there?' His eyes met hers. 'Yes. I will tell you . . . I saw tanks, some burned. Many abandoned tanks.' 'Did you say tanks?' cut in Walter. 'Yes. Russian ones.' 'My God! You remember, Jenny?' said Walter. 'Remember the rumours we kept hearing on the radio a few years after?' She nodded. They'd heard garbled reports of short and frantic wars in Asia; resource grabs around the Caspian and several months of fighting in Kazakhstan. 'Let him continue, Walter.' 'I travel down to Croatia. And then I find a sailing boat in Rijeka. I know a little sailing so I went across Adriatic, along the Italian coast. It is all much like the UK, some small communities making food. But small, you understand? Several dozen, no more. But one group tell me that they hear Britain survived much better. That they have built these big safe zones. So then I sail to Montpellier, and I cross France. Head north up to Calais.' 'Why not just sail around?' He shrugged. 'I am not so confident with a boat - not to go out of the Mediterranean into rough sea.' He grimaced like a naughty child. 'I cannot swim. So, I go through France instead. And then I find another boat at Calais. I sailed across the Channel this last summer. To Dover. I walk towards London hoping to find one of these safe places. Order, you know?' She nodded sympathetically. He scratched at his thick dark beard. 'But I soon see that this country is no better; just like Belgium, like France. Empty towns, burned homes, abandoned car and trucks.' She leant forward, almost tempted to reach out and comfort him. 'Tell me, did you see any signs of rebuilding going on? Did you see anything like that?' He shook his head. 'I saw . . . very little. Smoke a few times. I saw horse . . .' he looked up at Walter standing just behind him. 'Shit?' 'Oui, horse shit, on some roads. You know? There are some people, like yours, surviving. But nowhere as big as this place.' 'And no lights?' He shook his head. 'I saw no lights. There were no safe zones.' There was a sombre stirring amongst the crowd gathered behind Jenny. A long silence punctuated by the soft rumple and languid thump of the sea below, and the steady patter of rain on the plexiglass windows of the mess. 'Those men that were after you at the harbour,' said Jenny after a while, 'why did they want you dead?'
He shrugged. 'I do not know.' 'There must have been a reason, Mr Latoc.' 'Really?' He glanced up at her, his tired voice pulled taut with irritation. 'I have come across too many men who kill you for a . . . for a fresh egg . . . or a rusty tin of food. Or just because you are a stranger to them, look different. Or because for fun.' 'I want you to tell me what that was about,' she insisted, feeling the slightest pang of guilt for pressing him. 'Okay, so, I found a settlement. They let me stay for a while. But then . . .' He looked up at the sea of faces standing behind Jenny. Eyes judging him silently, waiting for him to give them a reason to ask him to leave. 'Please go on,' urged Jenny. 'But then a woman was . . . was killed.' He lowered his voice slightly. 'You understand before she was killed she was . . .' He paused and Jenny knew he was omitting the word raped. She nodded silently. 'Go on.' 'They pull me out of my bed at night and did a . . . a trial. They decided I am guilty--' 'Why would they do that?' He shook his head, genuinely exasperated. 'Why do you think?' He laughed. 'Maybe it is because I support the wrong football team, uh?' Jenny acknowledged the naivety in her question. The dark ringlets of his hair and a black beard long enough to lose a fist in reminded her vaguely of the sort of firebrand mullahs who once preached outside the overcrowded mosques in Shepherd's Bush. She could easily imagine how that made him a target. 'They take me in a truck, away to be killed. To the town where your people found me . . . to Beckton?' 'Bracton.' 'Yes. The men said if I manage to get to the water and jump in and start swimming back to Paki-land, they will let me live.' Valerie sighed. 'I tell them I am actually Belgian. But do they listen to that? Of course not.' 'Mum,' called out Jacob. He was standing at the back of the small crowd. He squeezed his way forward until he was standing beside Walter. 'Mum, it was just like he said. Those men were hunting him, you know? Like it was a sort of game.' Valerie nodded; he recognised Jacob from the quayside and offered him a hesitant smile. 'Hunting, yes . . . I suppose. Like your fox and hounds hunting.' Jacob nodded. 'Yeah . . . that's what it looked like.' 'I would be dead now,' Valerie added, looking up at Jacob and Walter, 'if not for you. Thank you.' Walter shrugged. 'That's okay.' It was quiet for a moment, save for several whispered exchanges amongst the crowd. 'So,' Jenny sighed, 'that's how it still is, then.' She was tempted to turn around and say I told you so. To direct that at Alice and her small circle of naysayers. Even to direct that at her own son, who seemed so certain the world was putting itself back together without him. She could have scored some cheap and easy points saying those things right now. Instead she shrugged. Valerie Latoc's story argued her point - that the world beyond their little island was still a dangerous place. 'I . . . I would very much like to stay here,' said Valerie. His voice strained and stretched, the voice of a man not too proud to plead. 'I do not want to go back. I have seen enough of . . . of . . .' A pitiful tear rolled down his sallow cheek and lost itself in the dark thatch of bristles. 'Please . . .' Jenny found herself reaching across the table again and gently patted his thin forearm. The gesture seemed to weaken his resolve and more tears rolled down into his thick beard. 'Okay,' muttered Jenny. 'Okay, that's enough for now.' 'Please may I stay?' he asked. Jenny glanced back over her shoulder, keen to get a feel for what the others felt. She could see eyes that regarded him with pity, eyes red-rimmed with sympathetic tears. Heads that silently nodded their approval at her.
Let the poor sod stay. She turned back to look at him. 'We'll see, Valerie. You can stay for a while, whilst I give it some thought.' 'For a while?' 'A probationary period. We'll see how things go, okay?' His face crumpled. 'Oh, thank you!' he sobbed, grasping her hand. 'Thank you!' She smiled awkwardly and pulled her hand back. 'All right.' She turned around in her seat. 'Right, the show's over, folks. We're done here.' Walter clapped his hands together. 'Come on then, ladies and gents! Come on! You heard her, jobs to go to!'
'You like him,' said Leona softly, 'don't you?' Jenny turned on her side to face Leona across the narrow floor space, the cot's springs squeaking noisily beneath her. She could hear Hannah's even breathing in the darkness, coming from the other end of Leona's cot. 'I suppose I feel sorry for him.' Despite her initial knee-jerk reaction at the first sight of him, the poor man didn't seem to have either the masculine swagger of a predatory male nor the dangerous glassy-eyed stare of a nutcase. He seemed beaten, tired, dispirited . . . perhaps even broken. Years of travelling, he'd told them, years of bearing witness to what was left: the ruined shell of the old oil world had taken its toll on him.
Jenny could only imagine how much worse conditions must be on the continent. She'd been hoping he had a more heartening tale to tell but deep down she'd always suspected it was every bit as bad as he'd described.
Poor bastard. She'd seen some awful things over the last ten years; once, the blackened and twisted carcass of someone tied to a stake in the middle of the ash-grey mound of a bonfire; someone she could only hope had been dead long before being burned. Once, a row of desiccated corpses lined up along the bottom of a wall riddled with bullet holes. Perhaps they'd been looters shot by soldiers or an armed police unit. She could only imagine what other sights this poor man could add to that. Many more, no doubt. She realised that there were also a few selfish reasons to let the man stay. Perhaps Valerie Latoc might be someone that Jacob would actually listen to. Perhaps in time the man would be ready to talk about what he'd witnessed in greater detail and maybe, just maybe, that would be enough to convince Jacob that there was nothing out there but empty towns disappearing beneath spreading weeds . . . and dangerous, armed people. 'You going to let him join us, Mum? We could do with a few more men here who, you know, aren't old age pensioners.' 'We'll see, Lee.' Mr Latoc had been found a space out on the drilling platform. Howard and Dennis lived over there. David Cudmore and Alice Harton - who were a couple, she was almost certain of that - and Kevin whom they seemed to have adopted between them. The Barker sisters bunked there, all four of them very quiet and introspective. She suspected they held prayer meetings, but at least it was kept over there and in private. Mrs Panhwar, her mother and her two daughters, they spoke a little English - the daughters doing a better job at picking it up. The drilling platform was as good a place as any for the man to find peace and quiet and recover. He could remain on probation until the anniversary celebration was out of the way, and then she'd have to make a decision. She smiled. The celebration party was just a week away and exactly what they needed after hearing Mr Latoc's depressing account. There'd been some silly rumours going around over the last year, that a UN force had landed on the south coast of England and was even now organising a major humanitarian effort. A silly rumour that had found traction because one of the women was picking up intermittent signals in Spanish on long wave on one of their wind-up radios. And, of course, there'd been that supposed sighting of a vapour trail in the sky last spring by one of the children. Things like that made everyone feel unsettled; made people want to put down their tools, forget their work assignments and go rushing ashore. Valerie's words seemed to have completely scotched those hopeful rumours. Shot them down in the most brutal way. Jenny had felt her heart sinking just like everyone else as he'd told his story. The party at least was something for them to look forward to; a celebration of Walter's wonderful methane-powered generator, a reminder that despite all the hard work, the cold winter nights, the monotonous diet, the discomfort, the damp, the wind, the rain . . . they were very lucky. That they were safe, and that slowly, little by little, things would get better again. 'He seemed really nice, in a sad kind of way,' uttered Leona. Jenny sighed. 'I'll decide after the party. Anyway, get some sleep, Lee. Don't forget you're on morning-chickens tomorrow.' 'Oh, wonderful,' Leona huffed, and turned over noisily in her cot.
Chapter 15 10 years AC 'LeMan 49/25a' - ClarenCo Gas Rig Complex, North Sea
27 May It'll be a lovely celebration this year. Walter brought back dozens and dozens of strings of Christmas lights on this week's shore run. We're having it on the production platform because of the open deck space and I've had Martha, Leona and Rebecca help me drape the lights all around there. Walter's run a cable feed off the walkway lights and while we know it all works, we've yet to see how pretty it's going to look when we switch it on. Our new arrival seems to be mending well. Dr Gupta says the gunshot wound looked worse than it was. He's stitched up and bandaged. Mostly, she tells me, it's malnutrition that's weakened him. He does look a lot better now he's had a chance to clean himself up and trim that awful beard - at least he doesn't look like some mad Rasputin character. Hannah's very taken with him. She's really quite sweet, helping him over the lips to doorways. I think she likes the idea of playing nurse and has made Valerie her pet project. She can be a bossy little madam, though; last night in the canteen she was really laying into him for not finishing up the fish in his broth. Poor chap. The rain is getting me down. So far this summer it's been almost constant drizzle and overcast skies. Good for all our crops, of course, and good that we've spent less diesel having to refill the freshwater tank so often, but the endless tapping on every porthole, the dripping of water from leaks seems to be everywhere. It depresses me. Reminds me that this is a prison just as much as a safe haven. When there's enough of a break in those bloody clouds the helipad is usually almost full to bursting with people grabbing a little sun. Not exactly bikini weather with that North Sea wind tugging away at you but it's so nice to feel the warmth on your face. Close your eyes and dream of a sun-kissed beach, sangria and topaz-coloured water - what I wouldn't give to walk away from this fucking place. Anyway, I'm looking forward to tonight, those Christmas lights. They're going to look lovely. 'So, it's our first anniversary of having power,' announced Jenny proudly. Some of the audience around her cheered and whooped. Jenny stood on the main deck of the drilling platform, lit by the faint amber glow of several plain bulbs in wire safety cages from the walkway leading across to the production platform. The deck was filled with expectant faces standing amidst the stacked Portakabins, sitting on them, hanging out of open windows, squatting in rows on those gantries not cluttered with growbags and foliage, and all of them waiting, full of excitement, for Jenny to get on with proceedings. The middle of the deck was open to the sea sixty feet below. When the rig had been active the drill core had descended through that opening to the cellar deck and down to the sea. Thick support struts ran across the open space now and sheets of metal grille were welded on top of them to fill the gap and create sturdy additional floor space. They'd done that a couple of years after settling here, after they realised this platform was the most practical outdoor space on which the entire community could assemble together. It was their public forum, their civic space, a place for announcements, celebrations and, so far occasional, burials at sea. According to Walter the metal-grilled floor was secure and utterly safe, however, Jenny found it disconcerting standing on the mesh and seeing the water, a long way down, churning menacingly beneath her feet. 'A special day for us,' she added her voice croaking already as she did her best to be heard by everyone congregated around her. 'A celebration of our ability to make our own electricity. And, you know, it's also a reminder that things will get better; get easier for us. We'll get better at the business of survival . . . and maybe one day soon, when we know for certain it's safe enough, we'll all return to the mainland.' She heard several voices amongst the crowd muttering. She'd like to think, just for once, that sour-faced cow Alice wasn't sticking her oar in. 'So, that's why we're having this anniversary bash, to remind ourselves that these rigs are just a temporary home . . . that things will improve. I promise you.' Several voices called out in agreement. Another good-natured voice heckled her from the back to get on with throwing the switch. Jenny laughed. 'All right.' She gestured towards Walter, standing beside her. 'As always, Walter's been working tirelessly for us. We have some homebrew booze that he's managed to distil.' 'Not from chicken shit I hope!' cried someone. A peel of laughter rippled across the crowd. Jenny smiled. 'Potato peelings . . . so he tells me.' Several people groaned at the thought. 'I'm sure it tastes better than it looks.' Walter strode forward to stand beside her. 'That's right, ladies and gents! Several gallons of the highest quality Spudka. So you'd better bloody appreciate it!' he chipped in gruffly. The crowd rippled dutiful laughter.
'And, of course, we have our wonderful Christmas lights. Shall we get them on now?' She smiled at the gathered rows of faces in front of her; pale ovals fading out into the dark night. The chorus was deafening.
God help me if this trip switch doesn't flippin' work. She turned to Walter. 'Walt, would you like to do the honours?' He grinned as he reached down to his feet and picked up a length of yellow flex with a junction box attached to it. 'Ladies, gentlemen and children,' he pronounced grandly. 'Happy anniversary!' Around the edge of the drilling deck hundreds of tiny coloured bulbs, strung across from one side to the other, suddenly winked on, lighting the platform like a Christmas tree. The night was filled with a collective gasp. Jenny found herself joining them. Even though she'd done her bit threading the power cables and strings of lights around the metal spars this afternoon, and took turns standing guard, banning anyone else from coming down on to the deck so that it would be a big surprise for them all; even though she had a rough idea where all the lights were strung and how many of those twenty-five watt bulbs were going to come to life, her breath was as much taken away as anyone else's.
Oh, God . . . it's beautiful. Impulsively, she reached out and hugged Walter, looking over his rounded shoulder for her kids in the crowd.
Leona's gaze drifted along the strings of bulbs; red, blue, green, orange; beautiful carnival pinpoints of light that fogged and blurred with her tears. Hannah was chuckling with delight and swinging on her arm. 'Hey, Lee? Why you crying?' Leona laughed, shook her head and wiped the dampness away. 'I'm not, Han. It's . . . it's just . . . so pretty!' She felt her throat tighten and knew that saying anything else right now would mean she'd probably end up blubbing like some old dear. She noticed amongst the other faces around her, turned upwards to gaze adoringly at the lights, the telltale glint of moist eyes.
Not just me then. Hannah's attention returned to the lights and she whooped with joy, then tugged Leona's hand. 'Can I go give Nanna and Uncle Walter a "well done" hug?' Leona nodded and let her hand go, watching Hannah scoot off through the crowd towards her grandmother, realising how old she felt just then. Only twenty-eight and yet she felt like one of those sad old soldiers who got misty eyed at the sight of an RAF flyover on Remembrance Sunday. Old before her time.
Oh . . . to hell with it. She let the tears roll; the lights becoming a blurred kaleidoscope. Laughing and crying at the same time as she suddenly realised all those pretty lights winding their way up the comms tower reminded her vaguely of Trafalgar Square on New Year's Eve, Oxford Street at Christmas. There was an orderly queue already forming beside the huge plastic ten-gallon drum containing Walter's potato brew and Hamarra had started bashing out an old folk tune on her acoustic guitar. Rowena Falkirk - a silver-haired surly stick of a woman, unsurprisingly a friend of Alice's - joined in on the fiddle; a playful tune that instantly lifted everyone's spirits and had toes compulsively tapping. Leona found herself humming along in her own tone-deaf and tuneless way before she even realised she was doing it.
Jacob and Nathan had managed to sneak a second tumbler of Walter's brew before Jenny spotted them both queuing for a third and turfed them out of the line. Sitting on the steps leading up to a Portakabin, Jacob found Valerie, smiling at the revelry going on around him. Walter's concoction - limited to a mug per child and two per adult - had begun to weave its magic, taking the edge off the cool breeze and the damp and drizzle in the air. 'It is a good party,' said Valerie. Nathan nodded. 'Walt and Jake's mum done well cool with them lights.' Jacob found space on the step beside Valerie and sat down. 'How's your leg feeling?' 'It is very sore, but it is healing well, I think.' He looked at the man. Valerie looked much more presentable now he'd tidied himself up a little. He'd borrowed some trousers and a thick woolly jumper from the clothes-library. If Mum decided to let him stay, he'd be able to pick a whole wardrobe of clothes from the communal pile, and those would be his to wash and repair as needs be. He wanted to quiz Valerie further on what he'd seen ashore whilst on his travels. Mum had said she'd heard enough from him for the moment and when he was feeling better she'd want to hear more details. But Jacob was eager to know more now. Stone-cold sober it would have felt presumptuous to corner him like this; emboldened by the drink, this felt as good a time as any. 'You said there was nothing out there, Mr Latoc. Not a thing.' He looked up at Nathan, standing with a foot on the bottom step and distractedly watching the party going on. 'Me and Nate thought maybe, by now, there would be things getting themselves sorted out?' Valerie shrugged sympathetically. 'In the Europe that I have seen . . . no. There was too much migration of people. Eastern Europeans, North Africans all assuming France and Germany would be better organised to cope. Too many people. It was a very bad mess.' 'And the United Kingdom?' asked Nathan. 'Is it really as bad as that?'
'I sailed across to Dover,' Valerie replied, shuffling on the hard metal grating of the step to find a more comfortable place. 'Then I walked through, uh, Kent? Yes. Then north towards London.' 'What did you eat?' 'There is still food to be found. Much easier to find food actually in your country than in Europe.' Jacob cocked his head. 'Why's that?' 'You British died much faster at the time. The water was stopped when your power stopped, yes?' Jacob nodded. 'People drinking bad water and getting diseases very quick. In Europe; France, Germany had much better emergency plans, reserves of food and water, and some power in areas. More people survived for much longer . . . a year, two years. All this time, they are finding food in damaged shops and warehouses, but not making new food. So, you know, eventually, we have too many people coming in, our emergency plans collapsed too. But by this time too many people had been picking for food and it is now all gone.' Mum had said something along the same lines once, that in a way it had been a good thing that the die-off in Britain had been so incredibly rapid. It meant there'd been much more left behind to be foraged; it had given those who'd survived a better chance of keeping going whilst they prepared to feed themselves on what they could grow. 'What about those men who chased you?' asked Nathan. 'What was their place like?' Valerie shook his head. 'Scavengers mostly. Just a few of them, maybe twenty. They were growing a few things, but not growing them very well.' 'Surely there were others you came across?' 'I just saw some signs of other people. The horse droppings . . . I saw a horse-drawn cart far away, I think. I saw a woman on a bicycle on a motorway bridge. She did not stop to talk to me.' 'But you never saw any lights on at night?' Valerie nodded. 'Once or twice, you know, perhaps candlelight, a campfire maybe.' 'But no electric lights?' Valerie hesitated. It was long enough that both Nathan and Jacob sensed he was holding something back from them. 'Hang on,' said Nathan, quickly ducking down to sit on the step. 'You saw something, right?' 'Did you see street lights?' asked Jacob. Valerie's jaw set, reluctant to say any more. 'It is nothing. Your mother is right. This is the best place to--' 'Come on, what did you see?' urged Nathan. 'Please,' said Jacob. 'We need to know.' Valerie studied their faces with a long considered silence. 'Very well. I think . . . I maybe saw electric lights . . . once. Perhaps.' Both boys' eyes widened. 'Where?' 'It was very faint. Very far.' 'Where?' Valerie bit his lip. 'Your mother would not be happy with me. It is still a very dangerous place on the land. I know she does not want--' 'Where?' asked Jacob. He leaned closer. 'Please!' Valerie looked up at the party going on across the deck. Some of them were dancing in a circle, singing along and clapping to the accompaniment of the guitar and fiddle. The babble of merry voices, the incessant rumble of the sea below, more than enough going on that nobody but the two boys sitting beside him would hear their conversation. 'I was crossing the River Thames at a place near your Big Ben. I saw a glow of lights in the east.' 'Shit!' uttered Nathan, 'you mean the City of London, don't you? East? That's the Bank and trading bit.' 'Yes. That part.' Jacob slapped his hands together. 'Shit! I knew it.' 'Government, like,' said Nathan. 'Westminster and stuff.' Jacob nodded. 'Keeping it quiet. I fucking well knew it would start there!' Valerie reached out and grabbed Jacob's arm. 'It was just lights. That is all. It could mean nothing.' 'But you saw it from far off?' asked Nathan. 'I only saw some light shining up on the clouds,' he said warily. 'That is all.' 'Shit!' Jacob's eyes widened. 'Really?' The young men looked at each other. 'That could be like a floodlight? ' Nathan nodded. 'It would need to be powerful, right? To bounce off the clouds.' Valerie looked uncomfortable at their growing excitement. 'I should not have told you this! Your mother will throw me off!' Nathan patted his arm, his face widening with a grin. 'We won't tell, Mr Latoc.' Valerie looked at them both, his mouth drawn with worry. 'It is still very dangerous ashore. You are better to stay here where it is safe. Look, I have made a mistake to tell--'
Jacob shook his head. 'No. We needed to know. My mum shouldn't keep this kind of thing from us. It's only fair that--' 'Please,' begged Valerie. 'Forget that I told you this. The lights . . . perhaps I--' Nathan rested a hand on the man's arm. 'You didn't tell us nothing, all right? Nothing we didn't already suspect. S'right innit, Jay?' Jacob nodded. 'S'right.' 'It's been ten years,' said Nathan. 'Never believed we'd be the first to make some 'lectric again.' 'We won't tell Mum, Mr Latoc, okay?' Valerie looked at them both. 'You are planning to leave here, aren't you?' Nathan and Jacob shared a glance. 'I see it, you are. You should know it is very dangerous still,' he repeated. 'We'll be careful,' said Nathan. 'And we'll take a gun.' Jacob looked out across the deck at a knot of people dancing. He saw Walter bopping around with Hannah bouncing on his shoulders; she was giggling. He could see Leona spinning, arm-locked hokey-cokey circles with Rebecca. He could see Mum laughing as she waltzed energetically with Martha. Mum laughing . . . she rarely seemed to do that these days. 'We have to go and see,' said Jacob. He looked at Valerie. 'You understand? See for ourselves. I can't just stay here for ever not knowing. You know?' Valerie nodded slowly. 'Of course, I understand.' 'Please don't tell my mum.' 'Seriously . . . don't,' added Nathan. 'She'll stop us going ashore again.' 'She would blame me when you leave.' 'Why? You haven't mentioned about the lights to anyone else have you?' He shook his head. 'Then we won't mention it to anyone, will we, Nate?' 'Nope. Our secret.'
Chapter 16 Crash Day + 2 4.45 a.m. O2 Arena - 'Safety Zone 4', London
Adam Brooks looked out across the spools of razor wire stretched across the pedestrian approach and the acres of open coach-parking tarmac in front of the Millennium Dome. Beyond the glinting coils of wire he could see thousands of them. Tens of thousands of people filling up the open tarmac and spilling back past the football academy towards the front of a boarded-up and abandoned dockside factory - still patiently awaiting its time to be knocked down and turned into expensive dockside flats - and down the car-free Blackwall Tunnel Approach towards the low rows of terraced houses and south London beyond. Their spools of razor wire were stretched thinly across a quarter of a mile of urban landscape from one part of the Thames to the other as it looped round, sealing the tip of the Greenwich peninsula from the rest of south London. A quarter of a mile of wire and just two sections of gunners and half a dozen police officers to hold in check thirty, perhaps forty, thousand people, all of them desperate, thirsty, hungry and frightened. The wire was shaking and rattling here and there - the press of people from behind forcing those at the front into it. The people, frustrated and angry, were beginning to break up the tan-coloured tarmac and hurl chunks of it over the barricade. Adam could see absolute terror on the faces of many of them, and absolute rage on the rest. They all wanted in, many desperate for something clean and safe to drink, to escape the violent, feral chaos ripping through London. Adam could see a mother directly in front of him waving her crying baby above the glinting coils of wire, screaming that she needed formula milk, or anything, for it.
Jesus. He looked sideways at Sergeant Walfield. Normally the grizzly-faced bastard was a rock that Adam relied on. But right now, he was glancing at Adam with a face that said what-the-shitting-hell-do-we-do? Several more bricks and clumps of dislodged tarmac arced over the top of the wire and clattered noisily on their side of the barrier. The wire loops bulged further along.
Bollocks . . . we're going to have to let them in. There were standing orders from Safety Zone 4's supervisor, Alan Maxwell, that the growing crowd was to be processed in an orderly manner; no more than twenty at a time, details to be taken down, a medical check, sleeping cots assigned before another batch was allowed through. He'd been very specific about that; he wasn't going to allow a stampede to happen. But this . . . batches of twenty, it was taking far too long. The number of people outside had swollen drastically this morning after last night's riots. Adam had been walking the wire perimeter since yesterday evening. He'd witnessed the flickering glow of countless fires, heard the crash and tinkle of glass breaking, the distant whooping of delight from gangs of youths making the most of their new playground, sporadic screams here and there amongst the far-off terraced houses, and the occasional unmistakable crack of a gun. Adam imagined that, to those poor bastards out there, it must have been like the night after Baghdad had fallen; British and American soldiers standing behind compound walls watching bedlam unfold before their eyes, under orders to do nothing. Just watching as the city tore itself to pieces through the hot and stifling night. He glanced back at the dome, a drab whale's hump of canvas in the lifeless grey light of pre-dawn. The very tips of the support spars, arranged like a thorn crown at the top, glowed as they caught the very first vanilla rays of light from the early morning sun breaching the urban, smoke-smudged horizon. Just outside the entrance he could see orange-jacketed emergency workers processing the recently admitted civilians. He could see several hundred more civilians inside the entrance atrium, many exhausted, stretched out on crash mats and cots, set out in orderly lines across the floor. He could see workers moving amongst them handing out bottled water, first aiders working on cuts and burns, wrapping grey blankets around those in shock. But he couldn't see any bloody sign at all of Maxwell.
We've got to let them in. Now. They needed to throw aside the barrier and worry about getting names and National Insurance numbers later. After all, that's what they were here for; food and water and safety for these people. Surely the damned paperwork could come later. 'Sir!' shouted Sergeant Walfield. 'Look!' A hundred yards to his right Adam saw the wire coils beginning to bulge and flatten out. 'Bastards are trying to get over!' A group of men, fed up with hurling tarmac over the top, had found a large panel of chipboard and hefted it across the wire. One of them stepped onto the board, his weight pushing down the wire coils, twenty yards either side, almost flat beneath it. Shit. Forty yards of breached perimeter; the coils of razor wire were compressed enough that it was possible to cautiously pick a way through. 'Get that fucking board off!' bellowed Sergeant Walfield, his voice carrying above the rising roar of encouragement from the crowd.
The nearest of the men temporarily under Adam's command, half a dozen sequestered constables from the Metropolitan Police, jogged over towards the board, their guns aimed at the man standing astride it. The man ignored their barked orders to get the fuck off; instead he was beckoning others to follow him up and over. He stood alone for a moment, deaf to the police and soldiers shouting at him to get off immediately. Then he was joined by two or three others clambering up on the board, their combined weight pushing the coils flatter across an even wider span.
Shit, shit, shit. Adam racked his assault rifle and fired three shots in quick succession up into the air. It had the effect he wanted. The first half a dozen ranks of people beyond the wire ducked and froze and a hush descended for the briefest moment. Adam finally found his voice. 'YOU!' It rang out across the tarmac in the moment's silence. 'Yes, YOU! Get the fuck off that board right now!' For a moment Adam was convinced the man was going to comply. But the brief moment of hush his three shots had won them was already beginning to wane. The man stepped forward, the board tilted downwards as the wire twanged and rattled beneath his weight. He leapt down onto the tarmac, on their side.
You stupid fucking idiot. A Berlin wall moment - the first man safely across inspiring all the others to surge forward in his wake. A dozen others - men who on any other day would look unremarkable waiting outside a school playground to pick up their kids, or buying a sandwich and a coffee for lunch, grabbing a newspaper and some milk from a corner shop - encouraged enough by the first stupid bastard, barged and wrestled with each other to clamber onto the chipboard ramp. It was one of the policemen who opened fire first. The shot punched a ragged hole in the first man's face and took off a section of the back of his head. His legs instantly crumpled beneath him and he flopped backwards over the end of the board and onto the compressed loops of wire, where his still body dangled untidily from the barbs. For a fleeting moment Adam thought that would have been enough of a demonstration to the others that any further feckless stupidity like this was going to be met with more of the same. He hadn't given an order to fire. The policeman didn't have the discipline of his gunners - wasn't waiting for the order; instead the copper had gone offpiste, popping like a poorly made firework. Still, it had bought them a second or two; a pause for thought from those nearest the splayed body. But that's all it bought. Now there were people tiptoeing through the flattened coils either side of the board, some of them flapping their hands in front of their faces, frantically waving at the young soldiers, screaming at them not to shoot. Sergeant Walfield turned to look at him. 'Sir, what do we do now?'
Oh, Christ. There were a dozen over the wire now, more snagged on the razor sharp blades and tugging their clothes clear, being pushed forward by a growing momentum from behind. Adam swallowed anxiously. Walfield again looking back at him. More of them were stepping over, and more behind them. The policeman who'd fired the shot was struggling with his weapon; the thing had jammed or he'd slipped the safety catch on in panic. Then suddenly he was down, clutching at his head. Someone had thrown a brick at his face. And more projectiles were arcing over the top.
If this barrier folds these people will flood into SZ4. We will have lost control and they'll strip us clean - Maxwell's briefing from several hours ago as the crowd outside had started to swell in the darkness. Do you understand? If you have to shoot, do it. 'Open fire!' Adam heard himself utter to Sergeant Walfield. Walfield bellowed the order again a dozen times louder. The crackle of gunfire oddly reminded Adam of bubble wrap being twisted tightly. The gunners in his platoon fired single and double taps, the policemen emptied their magazines. A dozen people, probably more, flopped like pathetic rag dolls amidst the wire; England football strips, FCUK tops, sensible Primark shirts . . . exploding in unison, spraying curious Rorschach splatter patterns and question marks of dark crimson onto the tarmac, leaving dust motes of polyester and cotton fibres to float lazily to the ground like cherry blossom. Behind the downed civilians the crowd ducked as one, an instinctive acres-wide herd response. Then they broke and ran, tangling with each other, falling over those behind who reacted with less urgency. The coach-parking area cleared rapidly from the front, rolling back like a receding Mexican wave, leaving behind a mess of items dropped in the panic; and those wounded and twisting in pain on the ground, or who'd stumbled in the rush and were now scrambling away on twisted ankles. Most of his men ceased fire. One or two of the coppers - unforgivably in Adam's mind - fired further opportunistic shots at the backs of the parting crowd. 'For Christ's sake, STOP FIRING!' he shouted. Walfield bellowed the order and the popping of gunfire halted. The backs of a sea of bobbing heads receded into the distance, still running, swerving around the football academy, streaming down a sloping grass bank towards the Blackwall Tunnel Approach. Adam could hear the awful chorus of screams and slapping feet diminish leaving them now with an unsettling quiet punctuated by soft moans of agony coming from the prone bodies in front of them. He realised his hands were trembling violently, the muzzle of his assault rifle wavering erratically. Not a good thing for his men to see. He clicked the safety on then lowered it until it was pointing harmlessly at the ground. In front of him, just a dozen yards away, the mother he'd spotted earlier was rocking backwards and forwards on her knees, lacerated and encaged amidst the shaking coils of wire, expanding again now no one was weighing the board down. She seemed to be unaware that she had a gunshot wound to her arm, instead she stared dumbfounded at the ragged and inert remains of her baby.
to her arm, instead she stared dumbfounded at the ragged and inert remains of her baby. Adam dropped down to a squat, feeling a wave of nausea roll up from his cramping stomach. He dry-heaved, not giving a thought to how it looked to his men. He straightened up after a while and felt the first warm rays of the morning sun on his face.
Oh, Jesus, what the fuck have we done?
Chapter 17 10 years AC 'LeMan 49/25a' - ClarenCo Gas Rig Complex, North Sea
'I don't know, Walter. I haven't made up my mind about him yet.' Jenny hunkered down amongst the troughs of compost lining the walkway along the front of the second tier of the accommodation module. Clear plastic sheeting, attached to the safety rail and stretched up to the overhanging ceiling of the tier above, protected the newly sprouting plants from the occasional drops of salt spray. The sheets flapped and rustled noisily in the breeze like the slack sails of a yacht luffing close to windward. Walter shot a glance over Jenny's shoulder at several ladies carefully watering the onion sprouts further along the walkway. 'You know,' he lowered his voice, 'he's been on his own for a long, long time.' He squatted down beside her. 'He's exactly the type, you know? The type you worry about. The type you don't normally allow to join us.' 'Walter,' she looked up at him, 'I said I haven't decided yet.' He recoiled ever so slightly. He looked wounded. She immediately felt guilty and reached out for his arm. 'Look, it's not entirely up to me. It's how everyone else feels about a newcomer as well. From what little I've seen of him, I . . .' She shook her head, searching for words. 'He doesn't seem the troubled kind. I've given him another month's probation, and we'll see how he gets on.' Walter's jaw worked silently. 'And if anyone, including you, Walter, feels really twitchy about him after that, then we'll sit down and have it out with him. See what he's all about.' He still looked unhappy. 'And believe me, if there's anything at all about him that worries me, then he'll have to go.' Walter nodded. 'All right.' It looked like that wasn't what he wanted to hear, but it was going to have to do. She knew what was behind this. It was jealousy. And that irked her a little. She knew Walter considered himself to be the alpha male of their community. If she was some sort of mother figure then by default he viewed himself as the father, and that didn't sit well with her. By implication, it meant Walter saw himself as a potential suitor for her. A potential lover, one day, when she was finally ready for it. The thought of that kind of a relationship with Walter didn't really do anything for her. He was ten years older. His florid face, salt and pepper bush of a beard and lank long hair reminded her of Billy Connolly. A poor woman's Billy Connolly. Ever since losing Andy she'd been without a partner. Too busy surviving, too busy fighting for her children, lately too busy peace-making every petty squabble, managing the lives of four hundred and fifty-plus people to consider a partner. If she ever did consider another man, well, it wasn't going to be Walter. He was the best of friends, a reliable second-in-command, an invaluable Jack of all trades. Without him she wondered whether they could have survived at all, let alone have electricity. But she could never imagine ending up lying in a cot with him, surrendering and sighing under the touch of his rough and callused hands. 'Where is he now?' he asked. 'Who?' 'Latoc.' Jenny stood up, feeling her worn knees creak. 'Jacob, Nathan and Hannah are giving him the grand tour.' 'What if he's a spy?' said Walter, his face immediately colouring after he'd spoken. She knew he'd just realised how silly and desperate that had sounded. She reached out and squeezed his hand. 'A spy for who, Walt?' she replied softly, offering him a tender smile. 'Who's out there now, organised enough to despatch a spy our way?'
'The chickens give us eggs,' said Hannah. 'Eggs and lots of poo.' Valerie tilted his head thoughtfully. 'You have very many chickens.' 'I reckon we're up to about seven hundred of them now,' said Nathan. 'That right, Jay?' Jacob nodded. 'At the last count. Some escaped ChickenLand a few weeks ago.' They called this deck that - the birds had the run of virtually the whole of the first floor of the production platform's main module. Wire mesh covered one or two opened portholes and an outside gantry had been wired in to give the birds an exterior run to scratch around on. Most of the floor was open plan. It had once been a series of workshops; several large areas divided by wide, sliding doors on runners. Like the rest of the rig, the rooms had been stripped
bare of machinery before the crash. On the linoleum-covered metal floor, faint stains of rust, divots and grooves showed where heavy equipment had once been secured. Now, though, the floor was mostly a carpet of chicken droppings, shed feathers and idling hens that stepped around the inert bulk of the remaining equipment - old lathes, milling tools. The nearest birds stared up at them stupidly. Through windows along one wall, looking across the walkway leading to the drilling platform, they could see several supermarket shopping trolleys loaded with seed trays being wheeled along, clattering and rattling their way across. The mesh on the small round windows was garnished with tufts of fluffy feathers fluttering gently in a soft moaning draught that chased itself through the rooms of ChickenLand. 'It is a very good set-up,' Valerie smiled approvingly. 'You have done well.' 'You want to see the magic source of our power?' asked Nathan. 'Yeah!' said Hannah enthusiastically. 'Wanna see our lectrik power?' Valerie smiled hesitantly. 'All right.' 'Not hard to find.' Jacob led the way out of the chicken rooms, shooing a few of them away as they opened the door. 'All we need to do is follow the stink,' he said, pulling a face. They stepped out onto an external walkway, thick with the rustling leaves of runner bean plants climbing panels of green plastic trellis on either side of them. If the metal grating beneath their feet had been covered with a thick bed of spongy moss they could almost have been walking down a jungle trail. 'This way,' said Jacob leading. They made their way carefully along it, passing several children and an elderly couple carefully picking pods from the stalks. Hannah announced to one of the children with solemn authority that she was doing her official job showing the newcomer around. Jacob and Nathan grinned at each other. Presently Jacob stepped to the left, and reached through a veil of leaves dangling down from the gantry above and doing their best to completely obscure a doorway. 'Guess you can smell it now?' Valerie wrinkled his nose and nodded. Jacob pulled the leaves to one side and opened the door. They stepped into an almost completely pitch black interior. 'Just a sec,' said Jacob. He fumbled in the dark for a moment before finding the torch dangling from a hook just inside the door. He snapped it on. They were in a narrow passageway, ahead of them a steep flight of steps leading down to the module's bottom floor. The smell of fermenting faeces quickly grew unpleasantly strong as they made their way down the steps and along a passageway lined with tall lockers on which were fading name tags. 'Down here used to be the shift workers' changing room,' said Jacob. 'Walter said it's the best place for our digesters because it's insulated. It's the warmest place on all of the rigs.' He opened a door and led the way in, holding his nose as he did so. 'Here we are . . . the stinky rooms.' Valerie and Nathan stepped inside, wincing at the overpowering odour. 'Sorry, Hannah,' said Jacob, gently holding her arm. 'You know the rules, no children inside.' She frowned indignantly. 'But I want to show him the jenny-rater.' Jacob smiled. Hannah frequently heard Walter referring to the generator as the 'genny'. Knowing how her faultlessly logical mind worked, Jacob suspected his niece assumed, quite reasonably, that the machine was named after her grandmother. 'No children inside without Mum or Walter around. You know that, Han.' She scowled at him, but stood obediently out in the passage watching Valerie intently studying the machine by torchlight. Jacob stepped across the floor towards the doorway to an adjoining room. 'In here is where the methane is brewed up,' he said. Valerie followed him inside. The smell was almost overpowering in the generator room, but in this room the odour was even more pungent. 'Can you feel how warm it is?' said Nathan. 'The crap actually generates its own heat as it ferments,' said Jacob. He stepped across to the nearest plastic drum and rested his hand on it. 'Feel it.' Valerie touched the plastic and nodded. 'Oh, yes . . . it is almost as warm as a radiator!' The room was quiet, save for a gurgling coming from inside the large plastic containers. The only place on any of the rigs that seemed almost completely devoid of sound; the endless rumble of the sea, the whistle and moan of wind, insulated from them. Just that soft contented gurgling and bubbling from inside. Nathan grinned. 'What do you think?' Valerie studied the plastic drums, the feed-off pipes coming from them and leading to several gas storage containers. Another pipe winding its way across the low ceiling and out through the door they'd entered, into the generator room. 'That's the feed pipe,' said Jacob. 'Feeding methane to the generator. ' They stepped through the doorway back into the generator room. Hannah was tapping one foot impatiently out in the passageway. 'We make enough fuel for about three hours of power every night,' said Nathan. 'Walter said maybe one day he'll improve it so that we get even more power and we could have spare for things like music systems.' 'Maybe even a TV and we could watch movies and cartoons,' added Jacob. 'Or even, if we find a working PlayStation,' added Nathan, 'we could play video games again.' Hannah, standing out in the passage, giggled. 'Viddy-oh games!' she chorused. She'd heard the term many times. Jacob had even described to her what they were. But in truth she had no idea - just that they were fun and happened on TV screens. Valerie stared silently at the equipment. 'So? It's cool, isn't it?' said Jacob, certain Mr Latoc was impressed with the progress they had made here, bringing power and light again to a dark world.
world. The cushioned silence in the small room became awkwardly long. 'So . . . uh . . . didn't anyone else you come across have stuff like this?' Valerie shook his head slowly. He glanced at them both. 'It is frightening.' Nathan looked confused. 'Frightening?' Valerie shook his head sadly. 'Do you not see? It is taking us back to what we were before.' 'Yes! That's what we--' 'Before was a very bad time. You know this? Too many of us, all in our big cars, in our big homes. Eight billion people all wanting the new TVs, the new music systems, the new video games. The more things we had the less content we became. You would want that world again?' Jacob and Nathan nodded. 'You want to live in a big city, full of noises and lights?' 'Yeah, 'course,' replied Nathan. The man shook his head with incredulity. Both Nathan and Jacob stared at him, bemused. 'I believe the world was sick then,' he continued. 'And people were sick with a disease of the soul. You understand me?' Neither boy did. Not really. 'Most people were not really happy. Most people were sick in their heart, unhappy with their lives. We all lived our isolated lives in our little homes and saw the world beyond through a tiny . . . digital window. People did not talk to each other. Instead they typed messages to complete strangers on the internet. The more things we had the unhappier we become because there was always people on the TV who had very much more.' Valerie shook his head and smiled sadly. 'You do not see how much better your life is now, do you?' Jacob, Nathan and Hannah continued to stare at him in bewildered silence. 'I think your mother understands this. It is not things - and all the electricity that makes those things work - that makes a good life. They are just things; distractions, you know? Shiny little amusements made to look so wonderful and fun and the answer to your unhappiness. But you get the shiny things home, you unwrap them, you hold them in your hand . . . and they are just shiny things, that is all. They mean nothing.' Valerie looked at the generator. 'You know what it is that really destroyed the old world?' They shrugged. 'It was greed.' Nathan and Jacob glanced at each other. 'You know children killed each other for things like training shoes? Or mobile phones?' Valerie continued. 'The time just before the crash was mankind at his most evil. There were wars for oil, wars for gas. People killed for things, for power. Killed for oil. It was a world filled with jealousy for all the things we would see others have on the TV. A world of greed. Anger. Hate.' He ran a hand through his dark hair, pushing it out of his eyes. 'All the bright shiny lights and the noises . . . video games, the TV, the internet, the music, the shopping, the arcades . . . these things were made by the governments to distract us; to keep our minds full and busy.' Hannah leant into the room, her feet still obediently out in the passageway. 'Why . . . why did the guvvy-ments want us to have busy minds?' Valerie turned to Hannah. 'So we did not realise how unhappy we all were.' They stood still and silent. Valerie clicked his tongue then rapped his knuckles on the generator's iron casing. 'Maybe machines like this are the first step back to bad, bad times, eh?' The three of them stared at him, bemused by the comment. 'I wonder,' said Valerie, 'do you ever think that this planet would be better off without people on it? Do you ever wonder if the oil crash happened for a reason? Just like the asteroid that finished off the dinosaurs because their time was done. Maybe it was our time.' The words hung in the air, echoing off the hard rusting metal walls. 'Uh . . . okay,' said Nathan quietly. He pointed towards the doorway. 'So . . . that was the generator room, anyway. Would you like to go see the tomato deck?' He led the way out, stepping past Hannah. Valerie followed, and Jacob emerged in his wake. 'You coming, Han?' She looked up at him, her face ashen. 'Is Mr Latoc right? Will the jenny-rater make everyone unhappy again?' Jacob sighed. 'No . . . he's just, I dunno, exaggerating a bit. Ask Leona, she'll tell you we weren't all miserable.' 'Mum always says it was better then.' 'There you go.' Jacob followed after Nathan and Valerie, whilst Hannah looked back once more at the dark generator room, listening to the sound of gurgling and bubbling, echoing along the feedpipes like the stomach of some large and hungry monster. 'You coming, Han?' 'Coming,' she replied.
Chapter 18 10 years AC 'LeMan 49/25a' - ClarenCo Gas Rig Complex, North Sea
Hannah watched him eat breakfast. He spooned the porridge into his mouth and smiled courteously at those who were speaking to him across the table. He said little himself. His eyes drank in the details around him, but his mind seemed elsewhere, far away. As was Hannah's. Mr Latoc troubled her. What Mr Latoc had said troubled her. Leona urged her to eat up whilst the porridge was warm, and then continued in conversation with Rebecca, the other woman who taught classes at their school. They were heatedly discussing what sort of subjects they wanted to bring into the classroom. Leona wanted to add some complicated things like science and technology; stuff to do with machines. Rebecca, on the other hand, wanted to add more 'farmy' things. She ate in silence and continued to watch Mr Latoc smiling politely at all the right times, even laughing occasionally, but just not there. Elsewhere. Finally, he finished his porridge and excused himself, standing up from the long table as he fiddled clumsily with his crutch and began to limp across the floor. Arnold Brown, old as the hills, offered him a steadying hand and offered to take his dirty bowl to the canteen counter for him. Mr Latoc smiled and thanked him, then shuffled towards the door of the canteen. It opened and the ladies coming in for the second breakfast sitting stepped aside and allowed him through on to the gantry outside. Hannah hurried to finish her breakfast with three well-laden spoons, piling in one after the other until her cheeks bulged like a hamster. She almost gagged on it. She wasn't hungry. In fact, something was gnawing away at her tummy, making her feel sick. But Leona certainly wouldn't let her step away from the table with anything less than a scraped-clean bowl. She stood up. Leona stopped talking and glanced at the bowl. 'That was quick.' Hannah nodded and smiled as she worked the porridge down. 'You all right there, honey?' 'Yes,' she managed finally. 'Want to go play for a bit before school.' 'Okay, but class starts in half an hour.' Hannah nodded. 'And only inside or on the tomato deck. The wind's up today.' 'Okay,' she replied, scooping up her bowl from the table. She walked over and placed it on the washing-up counter, then hurriedly stepped out through the canteen door onto the gantry. The wind tossed her blonde hair in all directions, stinging her cheeks with one or two spits of rain. She saw him standing at the far corner, leaning on the safety rail and looking down on the decks below. Right now it was a hive of activity as people emerged from all corners to head up to the canteen for breakfast or in different directions for their morning chores. She approached him warily, the wind teasing his long dark hair as well. The rumple of wind covered the soft clank of her sandals on the metal grating. She was standing right beside him before he seemed to notice and turn his gaze from the decks below towards her. 'Oh,' he said, 'hello, Hannah, I did not see you there.' Hannah didn't do 'good mornings', 'how are you doing today', 'it's blowing lively this morning, isn't it.' Those were the kind of boring openers she let adults waste their time on. She had something far more pressing to deal with; something she'd been stewing on all night. 'Is Walter's jenny-rater really a very bad thing?' He seemed taken aback by so direct a comment out of the blue. But after a moment, seemingly recalling his tour from yesterday, he nodded slowly. He lowered himself down, squatting so that his face was more on a level with hers, grimacing with pain as he did so. 'How much do you know about the times before?' Her eyes rolled up to the sky as she attempted to retrieve some of the many potted descriptions she'd been fed over the years. 'Leona said those were fun times. But Nanna says things weren't so good. That most people pretended to be happy, but weren't.' 'Your grandmother is right. Even I did not see this back then. I pretended to be happy like everyone else. We had our cars, our gadgets, our internet, our shopping malls. And the nights glowed with neon signs, telling us to buy even more things, to wear more things, to eat more things. But I am sure now few of us were happy.' 'Why?'
'I think . . . because deep down, we knew it was wrong. I know now there was a . . . a voice, a quiet voice telling me that bad things were coming. That the food we were eating was poisoning us. That the electricity we were using, the materials we dug out of the ground, were not going to last for ever. That there were too many of us being much too greedy.' Hannah thought she understood that quiet voice. There were times she'd been naughty, doing something she knew she shouldn't be doing, and not even enjoying it, because that annoying little voice was telling her there'd be hell to pay when Leona or Nanna found out. 'I think there were some who sensed that a . . .' Valerie looked around for the right word, 'that a storm was coming. And that storm would kill many people.' 'A storm,' she echoed quietly. 'But we did not stop or change our ways.' He looked sad. 'We were like caterpillars.' 'Caterpillars?' Valerie nodded. 'A type of caterpillar that eats much too much. I remember reading about them - they are a species that live in some jungle. They eat and eat these green leaves, and then, when the leaves have all gone, they will just eat each other until only one of them is left on the plant.' 'Oh.' Her favourite picture-book in the classroom's small library was The Very Hungry Caterpillar. She wondered whether she might start seeing that story differently. 'God made such a beautiful world, Hannah. Then he put us on it and all we have done is destroy it. We have suck it dry of valuable resources and in turn fill it with useless things we do not need. We turn a beautiful thing into an ugly thing.' Hannah looked down at the decks below; rusting, cluttered and messy. He was right. 'I feel this now, that the crash was like a judgement on us. Out there I have seen nothing but darkness and evil left behind, Hannah.' He smiled. 'But here, in this place, maybe I see goodness for the first time, in a long time. I see hope.' He looked out across the rigs, pushing dark hair from his eyes. 'This is a special place your grandmother has created; like an Eden. But . . . yes, the generator, it worries me.' 'Why?' 'Your friend, Nathan and your brother, Jacob?' 'He's my uncle.' Valerie shrugged. 'They, and Walter and others will want more electricity soon. And they will want other things, more and more things. And so I think we will head back to the way we once were. We will not learn.' Hannah's eyebrows furrowed as she thought about that. 'Your grandmother, I think, sees that the past was very bad times,' he continued, 'and that is good. She is a clever woman. But, I wonder if she sees that the generator is not a good thing; the first step back towards the bad times.' 'The bad time before the crash?' 'Yes. Perhaps life is better here just as it is? You see that, yes?' Hannah could hear the wisdom in his voice, even if she didn't entirely follow the logic. The jenny-rater rooms did in truth smell awful, and all that smell and hard work just to make a few light-bulbs glow? They had candles for that. She'd heard Leona and Jacob go on about the old world so much. Hannah often wondered what was really so bad about this world? The last time she'd actually felt genuinely sad was ages ago - when she'd accidentally lost a doll over the side and watched it tumbling in the wind all the way down into the sea, making hardly a splash. And Nanna said the same things as Mr Latoc. It sounded like people spent so much time being unhappy in the old days. Sad, and angry too, because they didn't have the same shiny things as someone else had. 'I think it is a mistake.' She sensed Mr Latoc was somehow disappointed in them, as if he'd hoped they were better people than they'd actually turned out to be. That thought burned her - like a telling-off.
It's the jenny-rater's fault. That's what was letting them down, that's what really disappointed Mr Latoc. She wondered if that meant he was thinking of leaving them as soon as his leg was all fixed up, go and find better people to live with; people who could live quite happily without silly 'lectric. She'd hate for him to go, especially after she'd worked so hard to make him better again. He seemed to be the only grown-up who really listened to her. When he talked to her, he actually looked at her. Other grown-ups always seemed to have their attention elsewhere, on things-that-needed-doing, they gave her an uh-huh, or a really?-that'snice. But Mr Latoc really listened; listened with his eyes as well as his ears. He was looking at her now. He reached out and gently held Hannah's shoulder. 'You are crying. I am sorry. I think I have upset you?' Hannah shook her head. 'Are you going to leave us?' He shrugged. 'I . . . I see things I would want to change if--' They heard the faint sound of a bell ringing out across the platforms. 'You have school now?' Hannah nodded absent-mindedly, her face clouded and deep in thought. 'You should go. Before you are late and get me in trouble.' 'You won't go, will you? I can ask Uncle Walter not to put the jenny-rater on tonight, if you don't go.' His smile was warm as he gently squeezed her shoulder. 'I do not think I am leaving today, Hannah.'
Jenny admired Martha's handiwork in the mirror.
'Oh, blimey! I can't believe what a difference it makes!' Martha beamed cheerfully, scissors in one hand, comb in the other. 'I told you, Jenny. Didn't I say? It's the length that ages you. I been tellin' you that since I don't know.' She studied her image in the mirror. Her hair, long and coarse and frizzy, had been tamed by Martha's hand into something she could be proud of. Instead of carelessly pulled back into a ponytail - out of sight, out of mind - it now framed and flattered her face. 'A little conditioner, and a trim . . . you look flippin' gorgeous now, sister!' Martha's enthusiasm was infectious. Jenny found herself borrowing some of that smile for herself. 'It does make me look . . . yes, younger.' She realised she looked a lot more like the old Jenny, the long-forgotten Jenny who once wore pencil skirts to work and looked good for thirty-nine with a little warpaint. 'Oooh, he'll love it, girl. He'll be all over you like a bloody rash.' Her cheeks coloured ever so slightly. 'What?' 'Oh, come on, Jenny. You know who I mean.' 'No . . . I--' 'Our newcomer?' Martha grinned in the mirror. 'Monsieur Tasty?' Jenny's jaw dropped. 'You think I got you to cut my hair for him?' Martha's raucous laugh filled the cabin. 'Oh-my-days! Of course you did, love! It's obvious you like him. Lord knows, we all know you're goin' to let him stay.' Jenny was appalled that they actually thought she'd put her own desires before the good of the community; that she'd let her loins do the thinking.
Desires? So, you're admitting it, then? She shook the thought out of her head. 'Look, Martha, no.' Martha cocked a sceptical eyebrow at Jenny. 'Seriously, no,' said Jenny. 'If he stays, it's because he can add something; knowledge, a skill set, a useful pair of hands, whatever. And that's the only reason.' 'Be nice though, to have a man 'round who ain't either some old goat or a young boy,' laughed Martha, her broad frame shaking. She sighed. 'A real
man at last. Perhaps I'll get a bit of the real t'ing between my legs instead of me trusty ol' faithful.' 'Oh, Martha!' 'See, the batteries have been flat for years. I have to shake the thing like a salt cellar.' Martha cackled again. Jenny found her own shoulders shaking. 'God, too much detail!' she snorted. 'Were you always this candid with your customers?' 'That's why they came to my salon, girl - for a little dirty talk an' a cup of tea.' Jenny shared some of that infectious smile again. A raucous giggle with Martha every now and then was just about as good as any medicine Dr Gupta could hand out. She wondered whether she'd have gone mad years ago on these rigs if it weren't for Martha. 'Honestly, girl, if you're not going to wiggle for him,' Martha added, 'then I gonna be the first one in the queue!' Their shared mischievous witch's cackle was brought up short by the sound of feet clanking up the steps towards Jenny's cabin. Jenny looked at Martha's face in the mirror.
Fast-approaching footsteps . . . something's up. It was Rebecca who stuck her head in. She looked pale. 'It's Hannah.'
Chapter 19 10 years AC 'LeMan 49/25a' - ClarenCo Gas Rig Complex, North Sea
Jenny felt her insides turn instantly to stone. 'What's happened?' Rebecca's mouth hung open, panting for a few seconds, gathering breath to speak, but also the words she should use. 'She's missing, Jenny. She's missing. She never turned up for the start of Leona's class.' Jenny looked at the watch on her wrist; a clunky man's watch with a winder and no need for batteries. It was 10.37 a.m.; classes began at ten. 'Leona waited a while,' Rebecca continued, 'said Hannah woke up cranky this morning and was moaning about going to school today.' Jenny nodded. She most definitely had awoken in a funny mood. Very quiet and sulky. 'Where is Leona?' 'I don't know. She's out looking for her. I don't know where exactly.' Missing. The word had a deadlier meaning out here on the rigs. 'Get everyone looking,' she said, getting up and pushing past Rebecca into the hallway, 'everyone!' Outside, on the top deck of the accommodation platform, she could already see the flitter of anxious movement, people leaning over rails and scanning the sea below.
Oh, God, no, please . . . not that. Word was already spreading. She could hear distant voices calling her granddaughter's name over and over. Martha, standing beside her, instinctively followed suit calling out for her. Below, spreading out amongst the winding pipes, scaffolding and a mess of stacked Portakabins on the compression platform, she could see the children of both Leona's and Rebecca's classes crouching, ducking, calling, stretching, looking into every awkward recess for their missing classmate. 'She knows to be sensible,' whispered Jenny. 'She knows not to play near the edges.' 'Didn't Lee say she could play on the tomato deck?' Jenny turned round to look up at the overhanging helipad. She could see movement up there. Could hear someone calling Hannah's name. 'Oh, God, Martha,' she whimpered, 'what if she's--' Martha put an arm around her. 'She'll turn up, love. She just playin' silly buggers.' Jenny heard the bang of a doorway below and then Walter emerged from the canteen onto the gantry beneath them. He turned round to look up at her. 'There you are! Someone said Hannah's gone missing!' he called out. Jenny nodded, unable to speak for the moment. 'I saw her earlier,' he said quickly. 'Not long after breakfast.' 'Where?' 'I saw her with Latoc.' Their eyes met and wordlessly exchanged between them was every conversation ever had over a kitchen table on the subject of a missing child, taken . . . the type of monsters that prey on children and the punishment creatures like that deserved. She felt her blood flush cold, her scalp prickle at the thought that she might have stupidly allowed a monster in amongst them; that Hannah . . . ? 'No,' she uttered. Her freshly cut hair suddenly felt like a badge of betrayal, a dunce-cap of stupidity. If she believed in such things, why not a punishment from God for allowing herself a foolish moment of vanity? Whilst she'd been preening, outside, somewhere, the man whose eye she'd been hoping to catch had been busy doing God-knows-what with her granddaughter. 'Where is Latoc?' she barked. Walter shook his head. 'I've not seen him since.' Then she saw it, half a mile away, the white blob of a sail. She leaned forward over the rail and looked down at the davit winches on the neighbouring compression platform. The chains dangled and clinked idly against the spider deck: one of their two boats was gone.
Oh, God . . . he's taken her. She sheltered her eyes from the glare of sunlight and the glints on the sea, beautifully blue this morning and reflecting the azure sky. The boat was turning lazily, only the mainsail up, no jib. It seemed in no particular hurry to put distance between itself and the rigs. A spark of hope ignited inside her. Perhaps Latoc had taken Hannah for a go on the boat? An innocent, but ill-judged kindness. That being the case, she decided she'd give him a very public bollocking for lowering the boat into the water without getting permission first. It wasn't there for joyrides.
They watched in silence for a few moments as the vessel slowly came about, the boom gently swinging across. Jenny squinted, trying to make sense of the distant flicker of movement in the cockpit. 'I think the boat's comin' back now,' said Martha.
They were waiting down on the spider deck, perhaps a hundred of them, assembled like a lynch mob, many more lining the railing above, watching the boat peacefully carve a return passage across the docile tide, the mast tilted, the mainsail full. Leona was shaking with rage beside Jenny. Rage, and anxiety. 'Come on . . . come on,' she hissed under her breath. 'Hurry the fuck up.' Jenny rested a hand on her arm. 'I'll deal with him, Leona. I won't let this happen again.' Her daughter stared at her silently. Jenny wondered if some of that anger was directed her way. 'If he's touched a hair on her--' Jenny squeezed her arm. 'She'll be fine,' she smiled. 'I'll let you deal with Hannah, though.' The boat's return was painfully slow. Although Jenny didn't say anything, she was nervously wondering if the boat might suddenly swing about and head away as soon as Latoc spotted the reception awaiting him. But it didn't. As it entered the loom of shadow cast by the rigs, the mainsail dropped to the foredeck and the yacht slid slowly forward under its own momentum. William Laithwaite's narrow frame stepped up from the cabin and into view. Eyebrows arched in surprise from behind his glasses as he finally noticed the sea of faces lining the safety railings. 'What . . . uh . . . what's the matter?' he called out. 'Hannah's gone missing,' shouted Jenny. 'Is she with you?' William shook his head. 'No.' 'Oh, God . . . Mum,' whispered Leona beside her. 'Why'd you take the boat out, Bill?' asked Walter. The boat softly nudged against one of the support-legs and Kevin emerged from the foredeck hatch, grabbing at the collapsed mainsail and pulling it down through the hatch to store it in the fore cabin. 'I was changing over the sails, thought, uh . . . thought it would be a good opportunity to give young Kevin some practice. Also, Mr Latoc fancied a ride with--' 'He's on there with you?' 'Yes! I am here!' Valerie stood up awkwardly in the cockpit, leaning around the boom and the fluttering folds of sail. 'What the fuck are you doing on there?' snapped Walter. Valerie recoiled guiltily. 'I am sorry . . . I . . . thought it would be--' Jenny waved impatiently for him to stop. 'Mr Latoc, you spoke to Hannah last. You were seen--' 'What has happened to the girl?' 'She's gone missing. Hannah's gone missing,' she replied. Next to her, she heard Leona's breath hitch, followed by a quiet keening whimper. 'You were seen talking with her last, Mr Latoc.' 'What have you done with her?' Leona suddenly screamed. 'You fucking bastard . . . what've you--!' Martha reached for Leona, and held her tightly as her cries diminished to a whimpering. He shook his head. 'Nothing. I spoke with her after breakfast, yes.' 'We can't find her anywhere,' said Jenny, struggling to keep her own voice even. 'She knows to be careful near the edges. There's no sign of her on any of the--' 'Did you try your generator room?' Jenny looked around to her left and right. Heads were shaking. She certainly had not thought to look down there. 'The generator room,' continued Valerie, 'your children showed me this the other day. They are very proud of it.' He shrugged. 'That is all I can suggest.' 'She knows not to play down there on her own,' Walter said defensively. 'None of the little ones are allowed in there without me or Jenny with them.' Leona shot an accusing glance at Walter then Jenny before hurriedly turning and pushing her way through the gathered crowd and up the steps. Jenny followed in her wake, wondering what accusation was wrapped up in that look.
You should have had Walter put a lock on that room, Mum. 'Stay back!' said Walter to the others outside the generator room. 'Hannah!' Walter called as he pushed the door wider and stepped in. His voice bounced back at him off the hard metal walls. The room's pitch-black darkness was pierced by the fading beam from his hand-trigger flashlight. He pumped the trigger several times, setting the dynamo whirring, the beam brightening once more. Behind him footsteps echoed noisily along the passageway outside and up the stairs at the end; a procession of the concerned. Walter turned round and raised a hand. 'Stop! I don't want everyone stomping around in here,' he said. 'There're cables, pipes, and all sorts. Not to mention a couple of gas tanks full of highly flammable methane!' Jenny and the rest of the search party halted in the doorway.
Walter panned his torch around again. 'Hannah! Hannah, love . . . are you hiding in here?' It was completely silent. 'I really don't think she's here,' he said. 'I'll just take a quick look in the fermenting room. You lot stay there, please.' He stepped across to the doorway leading to the next room. Jenny could hear Leona's trembling breath. Knowing what she was thinking; they were wasting precious time down here, she could be anywhere on the rigs, perhaps having tripped over the lip of a bulkhead, or fallen off the edge of a Portakabin and broken a bone on the deck below. A myriad of unforgiving hard and rusty metal edges for a child to come to grief on. Jenny didn't want to even consider the most horrifying possibility; that she'd simply slipped over the side, despite the many railings and catch-nets and grids they'd built over the years for the benefit of the young ones; there were still gaps to be found.
Slipped over the side and gone for ever. Jenny shuddered and could only hope her daughter was not entertaining the same possibility just yet. Walter emerged from the fermenting room; a quick shake of his jowly face told Jenny there was no sign of her. Then he stopped in his tracks. He aimed the torch beam at the generator. Jenny took an involuntary step forward into the room and out of the passageway. 'What? Walter?' He looked up at her, his face frozen. 'Walter?' 'Not another bloody step!' he hissed. Behind her Jenny heard Leona cry. 'What is it?! Is she there? Hannah!' Jenny ignored him and pushed forward through the doorway and into the generator room. 'No!!' Walter barked. 'Out!! Everyone stay the fuck out!!' 'Walter, is she there?' 'Get out!! Get out!!' he bellowed, stepping cautiously towards the doorway, plugged with Jenny's form, Leona trying to push her way in behind, the others craning their necks in the passageway. 'The feed pipe's been detached! It's on the floor!!' He reached Jenny and pushed her roughly back. 'Out, everyone out! No one goes in. I need to ventilate the room right now. There's gas everywhere!' 'But is she there?' asked Jenny. He looked at her quickly and nodded.
Oh, God. Leona spotted the subtle gesture, intended only for Jenny. She suddenly screamed and pushed her mother out of the way to get through the narrow door and into the room. 'NO!' Walter grabbed her arm and wrestled her back out through the door into the passage. 'Somebody help me!' Several pairs of hands restrained her as she struggled and screamed and kicked. 'No!! Let me SEE HER!!' 'Everyone get out! GET OUT!' yelled Walter. 'A spark could set the lot off!' He flapped his hands furiously at them, ushering them back down the passage. He expected Jenny to fall in beside him and assist in urging them towards the stairs at the end. Instead she slipped past him, wrenched the flashlight out of his hand and stepped into the room. 'Jenny! NO!' he barked. 'Get out!!' She swung the light towards the generator and immediately spotted one of Hannah's bare feet protruding from behind the metal casing; a single sandal on the floor a few inches away. Instinct overcame her and she rushed forward into the darkness to retrieve her granddaughter, not for one moment considering the risk of a spark of static, or the potential sudden disaster of anything metal hitting or scraping anything else metal; nor for one moment considering the foolishness of pumping the trigger on her wind-up torch to see her way inside as the bulb finally began to fade. A tiny glimmer from the hand-held dynamo; a glow of light from the bulb, just enough for her to see the glassy-eyed face of her granddaughter lying amidst the cables and pipes of the generator. And just enough time for Jenny to scream as she scooped up Hannah's lifeless body, once more triggering the dynamo in her torch to look into the pale face for any possible sign of life. Then things flashed white. That's all she remembered.
Chapter 20 Crash Day + 2 weeks O2 Arena - 'Safety Zone 4', London
This has to stop right now. Alan Maxwell looked up from the numbers he'd been scribbling on the dull pink cover of the back of the emergency protocol manual. He looked out of the window of his temporary base of operations - a small office above the Starbucks, overlooking the dome's main entrance plaza. The floor was thick with lines of cots, most of them occupied. Hundreds of them. And there were hundreds more of them out of view, in the open area of the London Piazza, further round the dome's circumference.
We can't take in any more. The figures, untidy but accurate, were telling him what he already knew. That stored below the dome's main central arena - where Kylie Minogue had performed only a few months ago, where Take That had been intending a reunion concert with Robbie Williams in a few weeks time - on the endless lowceilinged mezzanine floor, there was water and high-protein meal packs for sixty thousand civilians for twelve weeks. Alan had been down there on the first day to inspect the floor. His first impression had been one of awe; that somebody, somewhere up the emergency authority's rickety chain of command, had actually made sure their job was done to the letter. It seemed that someone - God bless them - had actually been ahead of the game for once, making sure Safety Zone 4 had everything it needed to fulfil its role providing a safe haven to sixty thousand civilians. Pallets of cardboard boxes, plastic-wrapped and waiting, filled the floor as far as he could see. As well as food and water, there were four emergency generators, all of them running noisily, with enough diesel to run them day and night for three months. A section of the mezzanine floor was filled with crates of medication, antibiotics, anti-inflammatories, refrigeration units, already plugged in and humming, filled with bags of blood and insulin. There was equipment enough, still boxed and waiting to be unpacked and assembled, to set up a dentist's surgery, even an operating theatre. Alan had been amazed that in a bloody useless country such as this, a country that seemed to teeter on the brink of complete collapse every time more than a couple of inches of snow fell, so complete and thorough a job had been done at such incredibly short notice. Heartwarming in a way, that when push came to shove, when it really mattered, there were civil servants who could tick the right boxes and make sure the job got done. But that was a couple of weeks ago now. That was back when he thought - as did everyone else - that this was going to be a disastrous, worldwide, three- or four-week Katrina-like event. An event that would shake the world. Rouse everyone from their complacency and remind the world's leaders and policy-makers that in the pursuit of endless economic growth and rising profit margins, the world had become a terribly fragile thing. That's what he'd thought. Four or five days of civil unrest, maybe a week of it; that's what he'd been expecting. Those civilians unable to seek refuge in one of the safety zones would be borderline malnourished, perhaps suffering from water-borne infections. And, yes, there'd be deaths . . . thousands of them most likely. Those caught up in the rioting. Those caught breaking curfew. Those caught red-handed looting. The streets of every UK city, town and village would be a horrendous mess that needed to be cleaned up. Every service stretched to breaking point as the country recovered. That was how bad he thought it would get. Then there'd be years of litigation; years of pointing fingers and blaming the government for not seeing it coming, the oil industry for not ensuring some sort of redundancy in its supply chain. Then, of course, once the world was put back together again, the endless documentaries on TV hungrily picking over the finer details, examining what had gone wrong, and dramas reliving those few summer weeks, spinning out of the grislier details into stories to fill broadcast schedules. Alan had imagined TV channels would dine out on the oil crash for many, many years to come, as once they had on 9/11. But he'd had all those thoughts two weeks ago. Since then it had become patently clear to him, if not also to many of the emergency volunteer staff working for him, that this crash was far, far worse than a Katrina-like event. What made it worse, what made it a different order of event entirely, was the fact that it had hit everyone. Where, with the victims living on the rooftops of New Orleans, or crammed into the Louisiana Superdome, there was an outside world ready to step in albeit sluggishly - to drop supplies, to airlift those stranded, to roar in with convoys of National Guard troops to restore law and order, in this case, there was no one. His eyes drifted across the cots, the orange-jacketed emergency workers dotted amongst them.
There's no one coming for us. No one coming. He'd had a digitally encrypted communications line with GZ - Government Zone - in Cheltenham set up here in his Starbucks office. The emergency committee were based in GZ, complete with several senior echelons of civil servants, a sizeable garrison of troops and, already, sixty thousand civilians within its compound receiving emergency rations and medical care. The first few days they'd been assuring him that extra troops and policemen were on their way. That he should calm down because SZ3 - Wembley Stadium - was doing just fine and they had only police holding their perimeter, no military personnel at all. They told him he just needed to hold tight, keep letting in those who turned up looking for safety, keep order, and
stay calm. Yes, things were a complete bloody awful mess, but they would settle down by the end of the week and then there'd be the real work to do. This morning, though, the line to GZ was jammed with competing calls coming in, and too few communications officers to deal with them. He finally got through to a harried-sounding junior emergency worker who admitted they were having some teething problems of their own. And this time, finally, acknowledging that, no - surprise, surprise - there weren't any military personnel spare to send over. The young man hadn't been particularly interested in his daily situation report either, suggesting that he write it up from now on and fax it over. Alan was back on hold again, a whisper of crackling static and a digital tone that beeped every thirty seconds; been that way for the last hour. The figures scribbled in front of him told him far more than he was getting out of GZ. So far, according to his people, they'd processed into the dome about two thousand civilians. Pretty much all of them in the first week, and merely a trickle in the second. The thick crowd pressing against the wire in week one had thinned out after word had spread amongst them that SZ3, SZ5 (Battersea) and SZ7 (Heathrow) were letting in far more people, far more quickly. There were still a few every day. They usually seemed to turn up in the evenings as the sun settled and the distant sporadic noises of gunfire, isolated hoots and screams echoed out over the still, dark rooftops of south London as the night-time shenanigans began. His workers let them in, no more than a dozen at a time, as per his standing orders, registered their details and listened with ashen faces to what they had to say. Alan had sat in on a few of these faltering conversations, letting the orange-jacketed workers, usually professionals, care-workers, gently coax out their stories. And, listening, it was increasingly obvious there was nothing beyond their spirals of wire, beyond the reach of their floodlights, nothing but a shambolic landscape of smouldering cars, smashed windows and cluttered streets, and small gangs of feral chavs happily getting by on what still sat on shelves in shops. There was nothing out there that was going to rebuild itself.
It's got to stop. Alan had three thousand people inside the dome already. Three thousand mouths to feed. Far fewer than the sixty thousand he'd been instructed to allow in. But then, he tapped the pen against the pad in front of him . . .
But then those were my instructions when we thought we were going to be feeding them for only three months. If he closed the door on any more civilians now, if it remained just three thousand mouths to feed, then the crates and boxes, stacked floor-to-ceiling on the mezzanine floor below, would keep them all going for roughly five years. More, probably, if he sent out his soldiers to scavenge, if he reduced the rations being handed out daily. 'Five years,' he uttered quietly. Just saying that sent a chill through him. If that's what he was considering - considering in terms of keeping things together here for years - then it really was a worldwide first-class fuck-up; a modern-day equivalent of the collapse of Rome, of Sodom and Gomorrah. It really was all over, wasn't it? All over, except for isolated places like this. The line went dead. Without thinking, he dialled GZ again and got the digital beep of a busy line once more. He looked out at the cots, the slowly milling crowd gathered around a long row of benches where warmed breakfast rations were being doled out. He looked across the plaza, at the floodlights mounted on tall tripods beaming cold and clinical over them, despite the pale grey dawn seeping in through the wall of glass at the front. It was bright enough that those floods didn't need to be on. He thought of all four generators thudding away down on the mezzanine floor, eating slowly and surely into their stockpile of precious diesel. 'Shit,' he muttered, putting the phone down and standing up. It was time for a major rethink.
Chapter 21 10 years AC 'LeMan 49/25a' - ClarenCo Gas Rig Complex, North Sea
Dr Gupta watched the ceremony unfold in sombre silence, the north wind gusted mournfully through the spars and struts around the drilling deck, as Dennis, Howard and David carefully lowered the small wrapped parcel of Hannah's body towards the surging sea below, boiling with swirling white horses this morning. Beside the opening in the deck - a grille pulled aside to allow them to lower her through, the very same grille they'd all been waltzing on just a week ago - Walter and Jacob stood, both spilling quiet tears into their hands. The two people who should have been standing there, watching her go, were absent. Jenny, in the infirmary, drugged to the gills and fighting a fever. And Leona. She turned to look over her shoulder at the far-off accommodation platform, and yes, she could just about make her out; a forlorn, lonely figure standing on the helipad and watching the ceremony.
Poor, poor girl. Jacob had tried talking her down. Tami had tried to talk her into coming down at least to see Hannah buried. She'd tried explaining that the healing of that awful pain in her chest could only begin with the saying of a proper goodbye. Leona, stubborn as her mother, simply refused to come down and remained up there as she had the last couple of days. All day long, a lonely vigil up there with only the swaying tomato plants for company. As far as Tami knew, she'd not come down to sleep. The Sutherlands' cabin looked unchanged; Jenny's cut hair was still on the floor, Martha's hairdresser's scissors, comb and brush remained where they'd been dropped on the end of one of the cots. Valerie Latoc offered a prayer as the bound corpse inched its way down. Martha stood beside him, her hands clasped, her dark cheeks shining with tears, her shoulders hitched. '. . . such a precious spirit, a gift from God. An innocent who only knew this world and not the old one; not spoiled by the luxuries and privileges and distractions of that time. Here she found love, safety and happiness. And here she . . .' Tami detected the grief in the man's voice. He too had been touched by Hannah; his nurse, his carer, his little guardian angel.
Oh, Leona, you should be down here. The distant silhouette remained perfectly still, anorak flapping in the breeze. Tami could only imagine the poor girl's lonely torment. She needed to be right here, to see how many lives her daughter had touched; to see all the children in her class crying, to see the others, even the likes of Alice Harton, shedding genuine tears for her.
She was loved, Leona. Your daughter was loved by us all. And she truly needed to witness her daughter's wrapped form slide into the water and fade into the depths. Closure; the way back to them, back from her lonely vigil up there, back to the land of the living - it could only begin with closure. Tami could see, though, even from here, she could see it in her resolute stillness on the edge of the helipad. She'd seen it in the firm set of her jaw earlier; the lifeless gaze of her eyes and the calm, stubborn way she'd politely refused to come down for the ceremony. Leona had no intention of coming back to them. Tami suspected she knew how this ended. Tomorrow morning, perhaps the morning after, Leona was simply going to be gone; at some point during the night, she was simply going to step out into the darkness and be gone. Valerie Latoc finished his prayer and a solemn 'amen' rippled amongst those gathered around the hole in the deck. The old men lowered the linen bundle the last few yards towards the sea. A rolling wave rose up and soaked the cloth, rolled the body off its harness and took her away. Jacob and Walter squatted down by the edge and together tossed a small plastic figurine after her. It tumbled and spun in the gusting wind between the platform's legs, pink and bright and finally lost amidst the grey froth. Walter held Jacob closely as his shoulders heaved; more than a family friend - Walter was family. Tami wished Leona was down here, too, so she could hold her; let her open her heart onto her shoulder, soak her jumper with tears.
Oh, Leona . . . She could see which way this was heading. It was touch and go with Jenny. There was a fair chance she might not pull through. And if she did pass away, young Jacob then would probably quietly leave. Then they'd all be gone; all the Sutherlands; the family who'd started this place.
Chapter 22 Crash Day + 27 weeks 5.45 a.m. O2 Arena - 'Safety Zone 4', London
Lieutenant Adam Brooks blew warm air into his cold hands as he stepped out through the dome's main entrance into the still-dark morning. Both guards saluted; Gunner Lawrence paired up with one of the Met officers. Lawrence made a better job of it as Adam acknowledged the salute and strode quickly past them beyond the pool of light. His radio crackled again. 'Sir?' 'I'm on my way over,' replied Adam. 'How many of them did you say?' Ahead he could see the faint glint of a torch beam flickering around in the darkness, picking out something beyond the wall of the barricade. 'Hard to say, sir. I guess . . . I dunno, several dozen of 'em. Maybe thirty or forty.'
That many? His pace quickened, standard-issue heels clicking noisily in the darkness. They'd not had a group that big turn up outside for months. These days they came in twos or threes, often alone; malnourished people who looked like scarecrows, faces rendered blank and immobile. As he approached the guard point he snapped off his radio and called out. 'Lieutenant Brooks approaching!' The torch beam that had been lancing out over the barricade wall swung his way momentarily and picked him out. Adam winced and shaded his eyes. 'You say thirty to forty?' he called out to Gunner Huntley. 'Yes, sir. Looks about that.' Adam jogged over to the base of the wall; six-foot-high panels of corrugated iron pilfered from the roof of the factory out in no-man'sland, welded together side by side, and topped with loops of razor wire. He climbed up onto a small crate and stood beside Huntley. What he was about to say to these people he'd already said to hundreds of groups before. And the response was always the same; the desperate pleas to be let in, hopeless sobbing. Adam took the torch off Gunner Huntley and panned it down across the small crowd of pale oval faces - smudged with dirt, expressionless, eyes narrowed from the glare of torchlight, and all of them shivering from the cool night air. 'This is London Safety Zone Four,' he announced with tired formality, a cloud of his breath danced brightly across the torch beam. 'I'm afraid we can't take in any more people at this time, unless you have a special skill, in which case you can be admitted for a probationary period.' There was an expected mewling of defeated voices amongst them. 'I'm sorry,' he replied, 'that's just the way it is.' The voices raised in anger and frustration. Adam quickly counted. Forty-seven of them. He turned to Huntley. 'Better get Sergeant Walfield and a section of men up here, to be on the safe side.' Huntley nodded, dropped heavily down off the crate, his webbing jangling, and scooted noisily off into the darkness towards the dome. Adam turned back to them. 'Look, I'm sorry. We have barely enough supplies for the people already inside. We can't spread what we've got any further.' Somebody's voice cut through the chorus of protesting voices. 'We've come from the Cheltenham safety zone.' Cheltenham? GZ-C? 'Who said that?' he asked, panning his beam across their flinching faces. A hand rose up. A woman; thin and dark-haired, her face almost as white as a ghost. 'I'm a government worker. One of the emergency workers.' The others around her suddenly cast suspicious glances at her. Adam noticed a gap growing around the woman and a palpable sense of rage simmering amongst the others. 'Have you got ID on you?' he called down. She fished inside her fleece top as a woman standing next to her spat in her direction. 'You fuckin' bitch,' she hissed, 'you're one of them?' The woman produced her laminated ID badge, dangling from a chain. From where he stood it appeared to be legitimate, the same as that worn by the workers in SZ-4; Home Office logo, name and details, passport photo . . . although from here Adam couldn't really tell if that was the woman's mugshot. 'Okay, you better come in,' he said waving her forward.
Before the others rip you to pieces. He nodded down at the soldier manning the gate to slip the bolt. 'Keep your shoulder against the door, though.' His torch beam swung across the others. 'The rest of you stay back!' 'Fucking bitch!' shouted a man. 'You're a guv'ment worker? And we shared our food with you!' The woman eased herself through the snarling faces towards the door, grimacing as someone spat in her face; another man, barely more than a lad, mimicked headbutting her. So close, in fact, that Adam thought he'd actually done it as she recoiled, raising her hands to protect her face.
'Fucking fat-cat bastards like you an' the guv'ment left us outside to starve.' 'Taking care of their own, again.' 'Go on, then, fuck off . . . bitch!' She reached the rough rusted metal of the gate and looked up at Adam. 'Please! Open the gate! They're going to kill me!' Adam swung the assault rifle off his shoulder and cocked it noisily. 'Please, everyone, back off . . . right now. Or I will shoot.' The crowd made some space, reluctantly drawing away from the base of the wall. 'Please! Let us in!' someone called out. 'It's dangerous out here.' He ignored the voices. 'All right, open it,' he uttered down to the lad by the gate. It cracked open on thick rusty hinges that creaked noisily. The woman saw the gap and squeezed hastily through it, just as the others, yards away, instinctively stepped forward, some of them no doubt hoping to file through in her wake. 'I said stay back!' Adam shouted. The woman was in and the soldier swiftly rammed the thick bolts back in place. 'The rest of you,' said Adam, 'should disperse. I'm sorry, there's nothing here for you.' There was abuse hurled back. He could deal with the 'fuck-you's, the 'fascist bastard's . . . what he struggled with was those who desperately tried to appeal to his humanity. 'What do we do now?' an elderly woman asked. 'Please? I don't know what to do.' 'You should get out of London,' he replied. 'All of you! Get out whilst you're still fit and able enough. The city's dead space. You've got a chance out in the country.' He heard the heavy clump of boots on tarmac and jangling webbing approaching. Sergeant Walfield and a section of their boys emerged from the dark. 'Everything all right up there, sir?' Walfield bellowed. 'You people really should go now,' he said to the others outside. 'We've got orders to fire upon civilians if they attempt to get over the barricade.' The people drew a few steps back into the thick darkness; a pitiful mob that he suspected were all going to die sometime over the coming winter. If the cold or bad water didn't get them, then one of the many armed gangs would find them. 'Good luck,' he called out. Someone replied that he should go fuck himself. Sergeant Walfield stood below him, eyeing the woman suspiciously. 'Don't we have standing orders to let no one in, sir?' Adam stepped down off the crate to join them. He panned his torch across the woman's ID card again; the mugshot in the corner looked like her. 'Yes, Danny, but I think Mr Maxwell might be interested in talking to this one.'
Chapter 23 Crash Day + 27 weeks 6.15 a.m. O2 Arena - 'Safety Zone 4', London
Alan Maxwell stared impassively at the woman. The name on her ID card was Sinita Rajput. 'You say you're from GZ, Cheltenham?' She nodded. 'Yes.' He steepled his fingers beneath his bearded chin, deep in thought, his bushy brows locked together like two links of a heavy chain. The emergency contact line he'd had with them had finally failed eight weeks ago. If he tried dialling now he didn't even get the busy tone, just static. In the weeks leading up to that, his calls were only being answered with a pre-recorded message informing him that all communication officers were otherwise engaged and that he should call back at another time. Maxwell offered her a warm smile by the light of the lamp on his desk. Its glow flickered slightly as the solitary generator hiccuped momentarily. Come dawn it was turned off. Daylight they got for free. For an hour in the early evening he allowed two of the four generators to turn over, giving them enough power for cooking and to run a couple of flat-screen TVs and DVD players. One of Lieutenant Brooks' foraging patrols had brought back a supermarket trolley full of DVDs from a ransacked HMV. It was something to keep his people distracted for a short period every day. 'So, Sinita, tell me what's going on over there.' She looked up at him sitting behind his desk, flanked by Brooks on one side and Morgan - Maxwell's deputy supervisor - on the other. Alan insisted they both remained on their feet when they had their daily briefing with him; a small thing really, just a gentle reminder that he was the one in charge here. The Chief . . . as it were. 'Things went bad there,' she said, after gathering her thoughts for a moment. 'I . . . I was one of the medical team. A ward nurse before the crash . . .' 'Good. That will be useful. Please . . . carry on,' said Alan patiently. 'We took in roughly sixty thousand at Cheltenham. Plus the thousand emergency workers, soldiers and government people. There was talk from the first day the safety zone started taking people in, that this . . . this crisis would blow itself out within a month. So they told us to distribute standard maintenance allowances--' 'How much?' Alan was intrigued. 'Fifteen hundred calories per adult female, two thousand calories for men. It was about nine weeks after the crash that my supervisor was telling the government people that it was better we started lowering the allowance.' Alan nodded. His people had been on twelve hundred calories from day one. 'They agreed a while later,' she continued. 'But then it had to be a big cut. We were handing out eight-hundred-calorie nutrition packages for a month before they suddenly started rounding people up at . . . at gunpoint and removing them from the safety zone. They . . .' She shook her head and closed her eyes, clearly willing herself not to cry, or appear weak in front of these strangers. Her jaw clenched. She took a moment before continuing. 'They . . . the soldiers were selecting non-essential workers. Old people, unskilled people. It was awful. Then, there was news from . . . from, I think it was Heathrow first, then Wembley.' 'What news?' 'The riots. Riots inside.' Alan frowned. He'd heard rumours from several groups of people who'd tried their luck here. But nothing confirmed by GZ-C. 'They lost control in those places,' the woman continued. 'The soldiers were overrun by the refugees, the storage areas ransacked . . . completely gone in just a few minutes. The news made the government people at Cheltenham panic. One morning they started evicting the civilians that were left, just pushing them towards the exit. And then I think someone heard that all the other safe zones were rioting, and that news spread like wildfire . . .' Her lips trembled, curled - her chin creased and dimpled. 'It's okay, Sinita,' said Alan. He got up, walked round and sat on the edge of the desk and patted her shoulder reassuringly. She took a deep breath. 'It was a massacre. I saw hundreds of women, children, and boys and men . . . lying on top of each other. Those that didn't get killed . . . they ran.' 'And you?' 'I . . . I'm an essential worker,' she said with a humourless smile. 'I got to stay.' She wiped her wet cheeks with the back of her hand. 'We lasted another two weeks, I suppose, on what was left. Then the soldiers turned on everyone else.' 'On the emergency authorities?' 'Oh, yes, the civilian emergency volunteers, the civil servants, the cabinet members . . . everyone not in their unit.' She looked up at Lieutenant Brooks, her wet eyes narrowing ever so slightly. She reached for her ID card and held it up. 'This piece of plastic didn't mean anything all of a sudden. Several other women I was working with were raped and . . .' Her words ground to a halt. 'I . . .' She started and faltered.
other women I was working with were raped and . . .' Her words ground to a halt. 'I . . .' She started and faltered. 'It's okay, my dear, take your time.' 'So,' she wiped her nose on her sleeve, 'so, I left before they did the same to me.' Alan stifled an urge to turn around and study Flight Lieutenant Brooks' expression. During the first few weeks he'd been haranguing Cheltenham to send him more soldiers to help guard the dome. Now he wondered whether he'd actually been fortunate not to have a regiment of troops sharing the dome with them. Too many men in uniform and a more senior ranking officer than Brooks might have been something for Alan to worry about if supplies eventually began to get tight here.
Not if . . . when . . . supplies become tight, Alan. When. They're not going to last for ever. Maxwell shuffled uncomfortably. They had quite a few years' worth as things stood. But he wondered if Brooks and his two platoons of RAF gunners might one day decide to take matters into their own hands, decide who was essential and who wasn't.
Something to keep in mind. Maxwell offered the woman a kindly smile - one he hoped was comforting, fatherly. 'Well, Ms Rajput, let me assure you that you'll be safe here.' She nodded, eager to believe that, and then her face was in her hands, her shoulders shaking; her firm resolve to appear the strong woman in front of them had lasted as long as it could; she weakened and crumbled. 'There's food and water for you. We have an urn of heated water downstairs in the main piazza. Go down there and one of my people will sort you out a cup of tea.' She stood up, pushing the chair back. 'Th-thank you,' she managed to sob. 'I . . . I . . . was--' 'That's all right, Ms Rajput. You go and sort yourself out now. Morgan here will show you down and take your details. Help you settle in.' 'You . . . you're a kind man,' she smiled weakly. 'But how . . . how have you . . . ?' 'Coped so well?' She nodded. 'I heard . . . from someone . . . I think I heard, that every last one of our safe zones ended in a mess.' She managed a haunted smile of relief. 'I really thought it was all . . . all gone.' 'We've held out because difficult decisions were made early on.' 'What?' Maxwell gazed out of the office window looking down onto the rows of cots below. Dawn had broken and pallid grey light slipped across the entrance plaza. The people were stirring, roused by the clatter of a ladle on a metal catering pan. 'Morgan will tell you,' he continued, 'I made the call to let in a lot fewer than I was told to.' He shook his head. 'Hardest decision I ever made, but I believe it was the right one.' She nodded. 'Yes . . . yes, I suppose it was.' Morgan led her out of the office. The door closed behind them leaving him alone with Brooks. 'My God,' uttered Brooks eventually. 'Then, what? It's just us now?' Maxwell nodded. 'Us, and I suppose a few small groups here and there.' He laughed. 'The sort of survivalist nut jobs who've been hoping for something like this for years. I imagine they're like pigs in mud.' 'Jesus.' 'The thing is, Brooks, this dome, those people out there, that is the UK now. That's it. We're what's left of law and order, what's left of the chain of command.' He shrugged unhappily. 'And I suppose by default that's going to make me . . . well, that makes me the Prime Minister, doesn't it? The Big Cheese.' Brooks looked down at him sharply but said nothing. He swallowed noisily, shuffled uncomfortably. Maxwell stood up and stepped towards the window, looking down at Starbucks' outside seating area, at Morgan leading the woman through the chairs and tables. He sat her down on an unassigned cot, produced a clipboard and began asking her questions, scribbling down her answers.
If this is all there is now, just us - he shot a glance at Brooks - then I need to think about the future. Who I can trust . . . 'Brooks,' he said, 'I think I'm going to have to make some changes round here.'
The Journey
Chapter 24 10 years AC Bracton
Jacob watched Walter silently scanning the horizon as he helmed the yacht, all the sails out and fluttering, the diesel engine chugging and spitting; turned on to make better time. He knew the old man was desperate to find Leona; desperate to find her for Jenny. Behind the gruff mask he'd kept on his face since the explosion, Jacob knew he blamed himself for Hannah's death, for Jenny's injuries . . . and now, unless he could find her and persuade her to come home, he'd blame himself for Leona's departure, too. Jacob returned his gaze to the sea. The small dinghy she'd taken had only a sixty-horsepower outboard motor on the back. With the sea as choppy as it was this morning she was going to make painfully slow progress. There was no knowing exactly when she'd set off, other than sometime before first light; so there was no knowing how much of a head start she had on them. Nathan's eyes were far better than his. He stood on the foredeck beside him, probing the gently rolling sea for the telltale line of white trailing suds, or the dark outline of the small dinghy. Jacob couldn't believe she could do this. Just up and leave him, leave Mum. He couldn't believe it, but had somehow half expected it. Hannah had always been her argument for not returning to the mainland yet. Hannah was the reason she wanted to make their life aboard the rigs. And she'd never needed to explain to Jacob why, because they both remembered that winter morning the men came and did what they did. But Hannah was gone now. Half, if not most, of her reason for staying gone. But there's still me . . . and Mum, Leona. It stung that she'd just bailed out on them. 'There's Bracton!' shouted Nathan; nothing more distinct than the pale, feathered silhouettes of rows of loading cranes, the outline of several small commercial freighters still securely moored at the quayside. William, Howard and Helen - those who'd hastily volunteered to come along and help Walter and the boys search for Leona - craned their necks port side to get a better view around the mast. There had been dozens more who'd offered to come, but Walter had been wary of overloading the boat with the well-intentioned and slowing it down. 'See any sign of her ahead?' shouted Walter. Nathan squinted and shaded his eyes against the glare of the white sky. 'No.' Half an hour later, they were tying up at their usual spot, right next to where the dinghy bobbed and bumped against the concrete, secured to a mooring cleat by a careless half hitch and a loop that would have unravelled itself eventually. Jacob was the first onto the quay. 'LEONA!!' he shouted, his voice bouncing back at him off the warehouse walls across the way. 'LEONA!!' His echo filled the silent waterfront. Walter stepped ashore. 'Right, there's six of us. We're not all splitting up and going in different bloody directions. Two groups of three, one gun each and we meet back here in one hour, all right?' The others stepped ashore. 'Nathan, here you go,' he said passing him the army issue SA80. 'You and Jake and--' 'I'll go with them,' said Helen. 'All right.' He turned to the other two men. 'William, Howard and me then. Don't go any further than the commercial area; the warehouses, the loading points, the offices. Okay?' Everyone nodded. 'And back here in precisely one hour. No later.'
Twenty minutes later they were out of sight of the others, walking amongst the low industrial units of the port authority buildings, when it occurred to Jacob he knew exactly where his sister was; or at least where she was heading. 'She's going home.' 'What?' Jacob turned to look at Nathan and Helen. 'Going home. London.'
Helen's eyes widened. 'London?' 'Why'd she do that, Jay?' Jacob shrugged. 'I don't know, just a feeling. She's talked about wanting to see our old house again.' Both boys looked at each other in silence; an entire conversation within a glance. They'd discussed, fantasised many times about taking the opportunity one day. It was Nathan who spoke first. 'Jay, what about now? What if we go now?' Helen had never been part of the plan though. He glanced at the girl. 'Nathan, we can't just leave her here, and she's too young to come with--' 'I know about it,' she cut him off. 'Know about what?' 'The lights,' she said. 'I know about the lights in London.' 'What? How?' She glanced at Nathan. 'He told me.' Nathan shrugged guiltily. 'Sorry, Jay, I know it was like a secret, but . . .' 'I bribed him,' she finished with a cunning smile. 'I let him have a feel-up.' Nathan looked down at his feet, shamefaced. 'She knew somethin' was up.' Jacob shook his head. 'Oh shit, Nathan!' 'Anyway,' continued Helen, 'I heard some of it, you two and Mr Latoc talking at the party. I know he seen something. I knew it. I knew he wasn't telling us everything he seen. I saw him telling you two, and I heard some of it.' 'Well it doesn't matter, you can't come, Helen,' said Jacob. 'It could be dangerous.' She snorted derisively at him. 'Piss off, I can look after myself as well as you two idiots.' 'Look, man, are we really going to go, Jay?' asked Nathan. 'I mean, really ? Right now?' Jacob knew he was. He realised, for him, there was no choice in the matter. 'She's all I got, Nate. If Mum doesn't . . .' he bit his lip. 'If Mum doesn't make it, Leona's all I got left.' He turned and pointed towards the town. 'She's in there somewhere. Maybe she's already on the road. I have to go and see.' 'And then if we help you find her, we'll go down and see London, right?' asked Helen. The boys looked at each other. 'Jake, man? You wanna do that?' He realised he couldn't think of anything beyond finding his sister right now. As far as he was concerned he could promise them a trip to the moon, just as long as he found Leona first. 'Sure, all right,' he muttered.
Chapter 25 10 years AC Outside Bracton, Norfolk
An hour later, they were on the A road out of Bracton on bicycles they'd pulled out of a toyshop, at just about the same moment Walter must have found the scribbled note Helen had sneaked back and placed in the yacht's cockpit. It was the only way Jacob could think she'd go, along the main road heading south-west, keeping herself to the middle of the road, and warily scanning the untidy gone-to-seed fields either side, the tall weeds and untamed bushes that threatened to encroach on the road from the crumbling hard shoulder. He prayed she'd not been so lucky to find herself a bicycle to use, or if she had, that at least she wasn't pedalling as hard as they were. He kept finding himself drawing ahead of the others, desperate to eat up the road ahead of him and find her. Mid-morning he'd stopped yet again to wait for the others to catch up and to take a swig from a bottle of water in his shoulder bag, when he thought he saw some movement up ahead. He squinted, trying to make sense of the uncertain distant dark outline on the road; something low and round. Glancing back he could see the other two, broaching a low hill, struggling to catch him up. He put the bottle back in his bag, lifted his feet off the road and cautiously rode a little closer until his useless long vision gave him something more to work with. A wooden chair in the middle of the road and someone slumped on it, back to him. Even from this far he recognised the slope of her shoulders. 'Leona?' She didn't stir.
Please no . . . please no . . . He pedalled furiously forward. 'Leona!' he whimpered, finally clattering to a halt a dozen yards away and tossing the bike down at his feet. 'Leona?' he called out again softly. 'It's me! Jake!' This time he thought he detected the slightest movement. He was taking the last steps toward her when she slowly turned to look round at him. 'Hey,' was all she said. Jacob was about to reach out for her when he saw one hand resting in her lap, holding a knife, and on the wrist of her other arm the light and unsuccessful scoring of the blade; nicks and scratches that told of squeamish attempts at a decisive incision. She laughed humourlessly. 'You know me . . .' He nodded. 'Chuck my guts at the first sight of blood.' She sighed and turned back to look at the road ahead, straight as a Roman highway. 'I thought I'd just wait here a while.' He knelt down in front of her; her eyes were over the top of his head and they remained on the flat horizon. 'Lee,' he whispered, reaching out for the knife in her lap. 'Lee, can I have it?' Her fingers tightened around the handle until her knuckles bulged white. 'Lee?' She was still far away. 'Lee!' Her eyes finally dropped down to look at him. 'Sis,' he squeezed her hand, 'I . . . I need your help.' She said nothing, but a lethargic curiosity made her cock an eyebrow. 'I . . . my bike chain came off, Lee. Do you know how the shitting thing goes back on?' She closed her eyes slowly and sighed. 'Jesus, Jake. Can't you do anything?' He smiled and shook his head. 'No.' She eased her grasp on the knife and he gently took it from her. 'Not without you, I can't. I'm rubbish without you.' 'Always a dork,' she uttered, and pressed out a wan smile. He grinned, tears on his cheeks. 'And you were always a stroppy cow.' 'I know.' Jacob glanced back up the road. Nathan and Helen had stopped their bikes a hundred yards short; sensibly figuring they ought to hold back for the moment. 'Lee, you were always the strong one. You were strong for me once, do you remember? Back in the house?' She nodded. Oh, yes . . . she remembered cowering in the darkness of their London home, the small suburban street outside dancing with the light of burning cars,
Oh, yes . . . she remembered cowering in the darkness of their London home, the small suburban street outside dancing with the light of burning cars, several dozen kids drunk on what they'd looted from the off licence around the corner and on the end-of-the-world party atmosphere. For them it was the rave to end all raves. Fun and games. Looting and raping. Then they'd decided to play treasure hunt and invade the homes one by one. Leona still awoke at night reliving their desperate fight to keep the Bad Boys out of the house, hitting, swiping, scratching and biting through broken downstairs windows then finally running and hiding upstairs as they broke in through the barricaded front door. Hiding beneath the sink unit in the bedroom. Jacob, only eight then, trembling in her arms. They could hear the boys laughing, braying as they searched for their prize to rape, hunting for the 'smurfette' they knew was hiding somewhere inside.
We can sme-e-e-ell you-u-u-u-u . . . come out! 'Me, Nathan and Helen, we're going down to London.' 'Oh.' 'The lights have come on in London.' She frowned. 'What?' 'Mr Latoc said he saw them . . . from a long way off. A big glow over the Thames.' Leona stirred in the chair. 'He said that?' 'Yeah.' 'Across London?' She missed the hesitation in his reply. 'All along it, all over, that's what he said.' Some sense of possibility tingled inside her. An alternative to sitting here in the middle of the road until she could muster enough willpower to push that stupid blunt tip all the way into her wrist. An alternative. 'They've been rebuilding quietly,' continued Jacob. 'Nathan reckons they wouldn't be radioing out and telling everyone that they're rebuilding things 'cause it might draw too many people at once. Swamp them, you know?'
Hannah loved the stories you told her of the past, didn't she? She loved the idea of shopping malls, ten-pin bowling, IMAX cinemas, fun fairs . . . 'That's why we haven't heard about it on the radios,' Jacob continued. 'It's a secret. They've been doing it bit by bit. Otherwise there'd be people coming across from other countries too, probably.'
. . . she liked the idea of Piccadilly Circus, the Trocadero, all glittering lights and neon signs; ice-skating at Queens and then a pizza afterwards; disco dancing to naff Abba songs till the early hours and then Ben and Jerry's ice cream for breakfast. 'It's one of those safe zones, I reckon, Lee. One of them that's come to life after all this time, and now it's rebuilding the city. It's remaking our home.'
Home. Hannah wants you to find home. The fairytale home, real home; not those five rusting platforms in the middle of the North Sea. 'What about Mum?' Jacob was quiet for a few moments. 'Dr Gupta reckons she'll pull through. She's strong. We left a note. Telling them we're going to see what's happening in London. Then we'll come back.' She could hear a lot more pain and conflict in his voice than he was prepared to own up to. As for herself, right now, Leona felt nothing for Mum but a dim sense of regret, clouded by blame and anger; some of it deserved, most of it not. Every ounce of grief she'd cried out in the last few days had been for Hannah. But then this kind of pain mostly flowed that way, didn't it? Downwards - mother to child. Mum knew that, she'd understand. 'If it's all getting fixed up, we can come back and get everyone to join us and return to London. How cool would that be?' Leona nodded. 'Just a scouting trip,' he added. 'That's all. We're going to go find out and report back.'
London. Home. Perhaps there'd be a chance to revisit their abandoned house in Shepherd's Bush. To lie on her old bed once more, look at the faded posters on her pink walls. And if this glistening promise of lights turned out to be an empty promise, a mirage that came to nothing, then she could think of far worse places to come to a fitting end than in her childhood room, snug beneath her quilt, and Dad - Andy Sutherland, oil engineer, father, husband - lying still in the next bedroom, undisturbed these last ten years.
Going home. 'Can I come along with you?' she found herself asking. Jacob hugged her clumsily. He was always clumsy, her little brother. He mumbled something into her shoulder. She stretched an arm out and hugged him tightly. Not just a sparrow-chested little dork any more, but a young man with broad shoulders. He was big enough that they could look after each other now. 'Thank you, Jake,' she whispered, planting a kiss on his head amidst the tousled hair. 'So,' he replied, letting her go and swiping at his face with the back of his hand, 'we need to find you a bike and stuff.'
Chapter 26 10 years AC 'LeMan 49/25a' - ClarenCo Gas Rig Complex, North Sea
Jenny stared at him, sitting on the end of her cot. His face was still young, still thirty-nine, still carrying that tan he'd picked up last time he'd returned from a contract abroad; his fine buzz-cut strawberry-blond hair, a goatee beard and several days of stubble catching it up: Andy Sutherland, her dead husband, exactly as she remembered him.
You did well, Jenny, he said, a smile tugging his lips. I'm so proud of you. 'Oh, God, Andy,' she cried, knowing he couldn't really be sitting here. Knowing, at best, this was her fevered mind playing games with her. But it didn't matter. It was a good, lucid hallucination. Right now she was happy to have that. 'I've missed you so much,' her voice cracked painfully.
I've missed you, too. His voice, his soft Kiwi accent . . . but she knew they were her words. She reached out for his hand, wincing at the pain from the burns up her arm and across her shoulders, her neck. Don't, Jenny. She knew he was right, her mind - or perhaps it was the drugs - had given her this much. She should be thankful for that. 'Andy, your granddaughter . . . Hannah, she was beautiful.' Her voice failed, leaving just a whisper. 'You should have seen her.'
She was a pickle, wasn't she? 'She was. Just like Leona was at her age.' Andy smiled. Yes. Stubborn. In her dream, she could feel tears rolling down her cheeks. The saltiness stung her left cheek where the skin was open and raw and trying desperately to knit. Andy looked so young; thirty-nine still. 'I feel old, Andy. Since you died it's been so bloody hard. So many days that I've wanted to curl up somewhere with a bottle of pills and just admit defeat.'
Survival is a hard business, Jenny. We got lucky over the last century and a half. Like a lottery winner, we all grew fat and lazy. You know what I'm talking about. We. He was talking about mankind, talking about oil - the subject had obsessed him over the final years of their marriage. He'd become a Cassandra on the subject. An engineer who could see the fracture marks in the engine casing; the lookout who could see the approaching iceberg where no one else could, or even wanted to. Andy had once told her that the twentieth century was the oil century; every major event, every war, every political decision had oil behind it. A century of jockeying for position, musical chairs to see who ended up sitting on the biggest reserves when the music stopped.
I could have done more, he said. I could have warned more people. 'We knew, and what did we do?' They'd talked about moving out of London, as far from a population centre as possible, but they never did. It ended up being just talk.
You did well to survive the crash, he said. Got our children through the worst of it alive. You'll never know how much I love you for that. 'But they're gone, Andy,' she whispered. 'Gone. I heard Walter and Tami discussing it over my bed.' They must have thought she wasn't hearing them. But she had, and many other harried conversations between them, filtered and disordered by the drugs, the fever, until it was almost impossible to untangle and make sense of. But this she knew - her children had left her. He leant forward, close enough that if she dared dispel the illusion, she could have reached out and touched his tanned face.
They're grown up now, Jen. Not children any more, but strong young adults. They know how to survive, Jenny, because you showed them how to do that. Out there now, on the mainland it's just deer and dogs, and survivors like them. Survivors, not scavengers. People who'd carved sustainability from the ruins around them. People like that minded their own, kept themselves hidden away. Good people essentially. Andy was right, there were no more bands of uniformed scavengers, or migrating hordes of city folk. They were long gone. 'Maybe . . . maybe I can't survive without them,' she said.
You have to, love. The people out here rely on you. You've made this place work. You've built a safe haven. It's sane here, there's fairness, kindness; it's like an extended family. That's a projection of you, Jenny, of your personality; firm and fair, just like you were with the kids. Somebody who could never stand that corporate arse-talk at work, any kind of bullshit, injustice, prejudice. He grinned. That's why we got it together at college. You remember? You stopped me talking bullshit. Jenny managed a wheezy laugh - little more than a weak rattling hiss and a half-smile.
Don't give up, Jenny. They need you here. 'No they don't, they're fed up with me in charge. Anyway, I've had enough--'
Don't let someone else take over, Jenny. Don't let someone who wants to be in charge take over. You know where that leads. Andy had always hated politicians. He'd always joked that the best way to filter out the bad seeds was to place a job ad for Prime Minister in a national newspaper and all those that applied would be automatically disqualified. The bad seeds - those were the ones who were going to be jockeying for position whilst she lay here in the infirmary drugged to the eyeballs.
Don't let anyone else take over, Jen. I'm serious. You've made something good here. Don't let someone turn it into something else. 'But, Andy, I can't do it any more.'
Fight for it, Jenny, fight for it. Don't give up. Then he was gone. Just like that. Gone. Conjured up and magicked away just as easily by her mind. 'Andy?' She reached out with a hand, wincing as taut healing skin stretched across her shoulder blades, and felt the cot where he'd been sitting. She wanted her hallucination back. 'Andy, please . . . I need you,' she whispered, settling her head back against the pillow, exhausted, dizzy, spent. 'Please . . . come . . . back . . .'
Chapter 27 10 years AC Norfolk
'I'm glad we didn't set up camp in there,' said Helen, nodding towards the slip road with its diner and petrol station alongside it. 'It just feels wrong, sort of like it's a . . . I don't know, like it's some sort of museum.' Jacob, Leona and Nathan finished assembling the tents, the kind that required little more than threading thin flexible plastic rods through several vinyl sleeves. They'd picked them up at a camping store along with a small camping trailer designed to attach to a car's bumper, that they were towing behind their bikes on the end of several lengths of nylon rope. 'Like one of those little thingies set up in a whatcha-call-it to show you what a typical street looked like in olden times.' 'A diorama?' said Jacob. 'What?' 'Diorama? Where they sort of make a scene of exhibits and stuff from the past.' Helen smiled dizzily. 'Yeah, one of them things.' Her pale brow knotted momentarily. 'I think me mum took me to one of those once. All dark streets at night and flickery gas lamps. Must've been four or five then.' She glanced across at the empty buildings. Although some of the smaller windows were still intact, it was clear that both the diner and the petrol station had long ago been thoroughly picked clean. 'Anyway, glad we're camping out here on the road, really. I hate going in buildings and finding you know . . . stuff .' She let the rest of her words go. Didn't need saying. They knew what she meant; the dried and leathered husks of people. 'Jay, catch!' Jacob looked up as Nathan tossed him a sealed tub of freeze-dried pasta. He caught it in both hands. Heavy. Something else they'd managed to find at the same retail park outside Bracton in the camping supplies warehouse. There were gallon tubs of this stuff in storage at the back; freeze-dried 'meal solutions' that required only cold water to metamorphose what looked like flakes of dust and nuggets of gravel into a palatable meal. Jacob noticed on the plastic lids covering the foil seal a 'best by' date of 2039. This stuff, kept dry, lasted decades. They'd piled a dozen tubs onto the back of the tow cart. Enough food to keep them going for weeks. Certainly enough to get them to London and back. He scooped out four portions using the plastic ladle inside and poured in four pints of water from a plastic jug; stirring the savoury porridge until the desiccated flakes of pasta and nuggets of ham and vegetable began to swell. Before his eyes the sludge-like mixture began to look almost like food. Half an hour later, the sludge was bubbling in a pan over a campfire. Helen dumped an armful of things to burn that she'd gathered from the diner: vinyl seat cushions, fading menu cards promising an all-day breakfast for PS5.75, lace curtain trim from the windows, the pine legs from half a dozen stools. Although the day had been bright and dry, it was getting much cooler out here in the middle of the road now the sun had gone down. Nathan arrived with another load of flammable bric-a-brac; a stack of glossy magazines and A to Z road maps from the garage.
'But what I mean is,' said Helen, 'what I'm saying is . . . is . . . I just don't get it.' Leona rolled her eyes tiredly. In the sputtering light of the campfire, no one seemed to notice. 'What's the bit you don't get, Helen?' asked Nathan. Her bottom lip pouted and her eyebrows rumpled thoughtfully. 'Why . . . I guess . . . why it all happened so quickly.' This subject was a floor-time discussion topic Leona had hosted during morning class on many an occasion. For children like Helen, who would have been only five at the time of the crash, and those younger, it seemed to be a bewildering piece of history; almost mysterious, like the mythical fall of Atlantis or the sudden collapse of the Roman Empire. 'Our dad knew it was going to happen,' said Jacob. 'He worked in the oil business, didn't he, Lee?' She nodded in a vague way, eyes lost in the fire. 'Dad said the oil was running out quickly back then. He called it "peak oil". Said it was running out much faster than anyone wanted to admit.' Jacob had heard Mum and Leona discuss that week many times over. 'So, because there wasn't much of it, no one managed to build up reserves, no one had it spare. So when those bombs exploded in . . . in . . . those Arab countries and all those other oil places, and that big tanker thing blocked the important shipping channel over there and the oil completely stopped, there was nothing anyone could do. It was too late.' He tossed several pages from a faded magazine onto the fire, producing a momentary flickering of green flame. 'There was no oil for anyone. That
meant no fuel. No fuel meant nobody bringing food on ships and planes to England.' Helen shook her head. 'So why weren't we growing our own food here?' Jacob shrugged. 'It was cheaper to import it than grow it ourselves. Right, Lee?' She nodded mutely. 'Economics. The finely tuned engine.' 'That's right,' said Jacob, 'the "Finely Tuned Engine".' He sighed. Nathan shrugged. 'The fuck's that supposed to mean?' 'Something our dad used to say.' Nathan and Helen stared at him, none the wiser. 'It's what Dad called the world,' he answered. 'It was one of his sayings, wasn't it, Lee?' She nodded. Jacob nodded at her. 'Go on, you can explain it better than me.' She sighed. 'It was just one of his metaphors: the global economy was like a perfectly tuned engine, like a Formula One racing car; tuned to deliver the best possible performance and profit, but only under, like, perfect racing conditions.' She tossed a menu card on the fire. 'So, sure, it drives just fine on smooth dry tarmac. But not so good at coping with a pothole, or crossing a muddy bumpy field. That's what the world was - a finely tuned engine for churning out profit. That's all. Efficient, but very fragile. No money wasted on non-profit stuff like safety margins or back-up systems. No money wasted on tedious things like emergency storage or contingency supplies.' She looked across the fire at them. 'For instance, no supermarket was ever going to bother wasting its profits on setting up expensive warehousing for storage when they could rely on a just-in-time distribution system. So this country only ever had about forty-eight hours' worth of food in it. It was always coming in on ships and trucks, refrigerated and as fresh as the day it was picked and packaged.' 'Dad used to say we'd be screwed in the UK if something serious ever happened,' added Jacob. 'More screwed than just about any other country in the world.' 'True, that,' Nathan nodded. 'There were no emergency stockpiles for us. No contingency planning, ' said Leona. 'We were totally caught out.' 'Dad used to say the fuckwits who ran this country didn't have a clue between them.' Leona smiled in the dark. He certainly did. She remembered him shaking his head in disgust at the TV, snorting at the dismissive platitudes offered by government suits when uttered by some talking-head. The fire crackled in the silence. Jacob tossed some broken strips of chipboard onto the flames. 'It was only in the last year or so, when oil started getting really expensive, that the big important fuckwits at the top - the men in smart suits - began to realise their finely tuned engine was struggling to cope; that we were all gonna get caught out by something.' 'So why didn't they change things?' asked Helen. Jacob shrugged. 'I don't know.' Leona looked up. 'Because the fuckwits in suits were only thinking about the next financial quarter and their next big bonus, that's why.' The others turned. It was the first real sign of life they'd had out of her all day. 'Too greedy for their own good.' 'Well, that's just silly,' said Helen. 'The men in charge should've fixed things if they knew they were all wrong.' 'Yeah, right,' muttered Leona. 'So, a pothole in the road finally turned up.' 'The bombs in those oil places?' said Helen. Leona nodded. 'And our finely tuned engine just rattled and fell to pieces.' 'Within a single week,' added Jacob. Leona tossed the wooden leg of a stool onto the fire, sending a small shower of sparks up into the sky, the flames momentarily flickering with renewed appetite. The dancing pool of amber light stretched a little further up and down the smooth tarmac of the motorway, picking out several abandoned cars along the hard shoulder, nestling amidst tufts of weeds that emerged between the deflated tyres and wheel arches. 'I suppose we all had it coming,' said Jacob after a while. Leona nodded, her eyes glinting, reflecting the guttering flames. 'Dad was right,' she uttered quietly, before shuffling down on her side and zipping up her sleeping bag.
Chapter 28 10 years AC 'LeMan 49/25a' - ClarenCo Gas Rig Complex, North Sea
Walter held her hand. He knew she wasn't hearing any of this, she was elsewhere, the place people go when they're dosed up on enough codeine to knock out a horse. 'The explosion shredded the feed pipes, it doubled back into the methane storage cylinder and blew that to pieces. The shards of that lacerated the other two of our three digesters. So, before we're going to have some power again, I'm going to need to find replacements for those as well.' He sighed. 'They were bloody well perfect for the job as well. I suppose if I can find another brewery nearby . . .' Jenny lay still, her breathing deep and even. The right side of her face, her right shoulder and arm and her torso were bandaged. The burns from the flash of gas igniting had been third degree across her shoulder and arm, and second degree across her neck and the right side of her face. Dr Gupta had told him Jenny had something like fifteen to twenty per cent damage to her BSA - body surface area. A person could quite easily die from that amount of damage, she'd added. An infection and a fever had threatened to complicate the matter. So there was little more she could do but dress the knitting skin and keep it as clean as she could and bombard her with antibiotics. It looked as if the infections were clearing up and the fever lifting. Jenny's temperature was down, although the skin, where it had burned badly, still radiated an almost fever-like heat. Tami was still keeping Jenny out for the count; sedated and anaesthetised with a cocktail of drugs - as much as she dared use together. 'There'll be extensive scarring,' she had told Walter. 'This side of her face, her neck and her shoulder. There's a chance some of her hair may not grow back on the right side. For a woman that's, well, that's not easy to accept.' The scars were always going to be there, across her cheek and neck where she could easily see them every time she faced a mirror; always reminding herself of the day she lost a granddaughter. He sighed, squeezing her hand gently.
Life's a complete bastard, isn't it? A completely cruel malicious bastard. Truth was, Hannah died because she was playing where she shouldn't, and had kicked the feed pipe by accident. That would do it, he realised. That would have been enough to dislodge the G-clamp.
But that's what they're saying, isn't it? He kept overhearing mutterings that it was his shoddy workmanship that had killed the poor girl. Nasty spiteful assertions that the silly fool had cut too many corners, eager to hurry up and make electricity so he could impress Jenny - woo her into his cot with a spectacular display of his practical ingenuity. Bitches. And with Jenny out of the loop for now, for quite a few weeks, if not months, according to Dr Gupta, Walter was having to stand in as her replacement. No one seemed to be particularly happy with that idea. Certainly not that sour-faced bitch, Alice Harton, who seemed to be taking every opportunity to be canvassing support and stoking dissent.
Oh, yes, she sees herself as Jenny's replacement all right . Without Jenny at his side he suddenly felt very lonely. Not even the other old boys, Howard and Dennis, were bothering to stand by him. David Cudmore, the chap Alice was bedding right now, must have talked them round for her. They all bunked together on the drilling platform, all thick as thieves. And there was that Latoc fella, too. He was over there - he seemed to have attracted something of a following.
Groupies. That's what they were. His adoring bloody fan club. Walter didn't have a cluster of people around him that could shore him up. If Jenny's kids hadn't buggered off and left him, he'd at least have had them gathered close and giving him some support. But instead, all he had was Tami, and perhaps Martha, although she seemed to be increasingly interested in spending time up the far end of the platforms.
Another bloody groupie probably. Everyone else . . . they were carrying on with their duties as they were spelled out on the whiteboard and turning up for their correct meal sittings; doing their bit and politely nodding at Walter when he had to issue instructions. But that was hardly support. 'Jesus, Jenny, hurry up and get better,' he muttered. She stirred in her sleep, her clogged voice calling softly for someone. He wondered how much she was aware of things. Every day there were periods when her glassy eyes were open and she was groggy but awake; moments when she could manage a few muddled words through the fog of drugs, as she sipped carefully spooned tepid stew - not hot, that would hurt the raw skin around her lips. But those were snatched moments amidst a chemical haze. He wondered if she even knew Hannah was gone, that her children had deserted them.
Oh, Jesus. Thing is, it would be down to him to tell her; news that was going to break her heart. Not now though - not now. If she really could hear him, then that was news she could do without knowing at this point in time. He looked at her hand, strangely untouched by the explosion, a lean and elegant hand. A grandmother's hand. A mother's hand . . . a beautiful hand. He raised it to his lips and kissed it gently, wishing he was twelve years younger and more her type; wishing he was a bit more like the husband she had lost in the crash. He knew she still mourned him, still spoke to him in quiet moments. He sighed. Only with her like this, unconscious, did he have the courage to say what he'd yearned to say for a number of years now. 'I love you, Jenny,' he whispered. 'I'd do anything for you. You know that, don't you? Absolutely bloody anything.'
Chapter 29 10 years AC Thetford, Norfolk
It was far easier to replace Helen's bicycle than bother to fix the puncture. It went flat with an explosive pfffft just outside Thetford. Half a mile further along the road they rolled past a turning that promised them yet another retail park. Five minutes later the wheels of their bikes and the trailer rolled across a broad leaf-strewn parking forecourt. Untamed weeds pushed up in places, and the tarmac was lumpy where the roots of a row of decorative saplings were making a show of their spread down one side. Like every other parking area they'd encountered, this one was more or less bereft of cars. Jacob remembered seeing roads clogged with vehicles in the week after the crash. It had seemed any car or van with at least a quarter of a tank of petrol had been pressed into service, packed with families desperately trying to get away from the chaotic anarchy of London. But every artery out of the city had been sealed with a roadblock manned either by armed police and soldiers or 'emergency response workers' civilians hastily pressed into service, armed and invariably supervised by a solitary policeman. They'd quickly discovered the civilian workers were a greater hazard, using the roadblocks as an opportunity to stop and shake down people for water and food supplies. Every major road and motorway out of London was now a graveyard of cars, vans and trucks - a carpet of immobile metal rooftops, bubbling and blistering from the rust spreading beneath their paintwork. The frames of their windscreens dotted green with small islands of moss, anchored to the perishing rubber seals. The retail park looked like the dozen others they'd passed by in the last couple of days; even damaged to the same degree, as if a tacit agreement had passed amongst the panicking people of Britain that IKEA, Mothercare, Pets World, B&Q and the ubiquitous McDonald's were to be ruthlessly targeted and plundered, and the likes of Currys, Carpetright and PC World were to be left well alone. Leona told Jacob and Nathan to watch the trailer whilst she took the gun and led Helen inside Halfords to find a new bike for the girl. Jacob watched them disappear into the dark interior then glanced back at the glass front of PC World. It looked utterly untouched. Not a single panel of glass broken, not even cracked. No lights on inside, of course. But, by the muted vanilla glow of late afternoon, he could just as well be in the past again; a Sunday morning before ten a.m. opening time, waiting for the first member of staff to turn up, yawning, nursing a hangover and unlocking the double doors for the first over-eager customer, impatient to get inside and replace an ink cartridge. 'You see PC World?' he said, pointing to it. Nathan turned to look at the unbroken glass. His eyebrows flickered up. 'Hey, cool. Ain't broken.' Jacob realised that neither of them had seen an expanse of glass as large as this one still intact; not since before. Really quite an odd sight in a world where every window was a frame of snaggle-toothed shards, or snow-white granulated crystals. Nathan bent down, fumbling for a lump of loose tarmac. 'What're you doing?' He grinned. 'Gonna smash it.' 'What?' 'It's all ours, Jay. No one's did it in all this time. So it's, like, ours to smash.' He prised loose a crumbling chunk of parking lot which he tossed from one hand to the other with gleeful anticipation. 'Come on, Jay, we'll smash it together, on three.' 'No.' 'One . . . two . . .' 'I said NO,' Jacob barked, stepping away from his bike and letting it clatter to the ground noisily. '. . . three--' Jacob clumsily punched Nathan's shoulder and the tarmac dropped from his hand and clattered noisily to the ground. 'Hey! The fuck you do that for?' 'I don't want to smash it. I mean, why? Why break it? It's lasted this long.' 'It's a fucking window, man! That's all. Just a fuckin' window!' Jacob's face hardened. 'It's just . . .' 'What? Just like it was before?' Nathan looked at him. 'Shit, Jay, what's the matter with you?' 'I just . . . I don't know . . . it's done so well to survive this far, you know? It just seems wrong.' Nathan's scowl vanished and his faced creased with a bemused grin. 'Jesus, man. It's a piece of glass that didn't get broke. That's all it--' He stopped and frowned.
Jacob turned to look towards the glass frontage they'd been discussing. 'Someone in there.' Jacob saw it too. Movement in the dark interior beyond. The faint flicker of torchlight and the pale shape of a yellow T-shirt moving between the shelves and stacks of boxed printers and PCs. 'That one person you think?' asked Nathan. 'Or more?' Jacob squinted. 'Dunno.' A moment later the flicker of torchlight snapped off and then they saw the T-shirt grow more distinct as it approached the front of the store with the late afternoon light streaming in through the glass front. The pale T-shirt seemed to be carrying something in its darker arms. As it squeezed through a checkout and emerged through an open door that, once upon a time, would have slid aside with a compliant whoosh, they saw the T-shirt was on a man with pallid skin and a scruffy mop of long ginger hair who was whistling to himself cheerfully. He was outside and in the sun when he stopped in his tracks, studying them intently. The whistling ceased. 'Leona!!' shouted Jacob. 'There's somebody out here!!' 'Hey!' barked Nathan. 'All right?' he said, taking several steps forwards. The man in the yellow T-shirt lowered the boxes to the ground carefully - boxes with '5.1 Bose Surround Sound System' printed boldly on them. He reached up to his ears and pulled out a pair of small earphones, hissing music loudly in the stillness. His eyes warily appraised Nathan. 'Uh . . . look, I don't have any food,' he said, licking his lips nervously and shifting from one foot to the other. 'Honest, bro, I've got nothing you want. No food or water. I just--' 'Hey, don't worry,' said Jacob stepping forward to stand beside Nathan. 'It's all right, we're not going to rob you or anything.' The man's eyes were drawn to movement from the Halfords' entrance. 'Who's there?' came Leona's voice across the car-park, echoing off the storefront like a gunshot. 'A man!!' Jacob yelled over his shoulder. He turned back to him. 'Are there other people with you?' The man's face flickered anxiously. He looked relatively young, perhaps Leona's age; on his pallid face the meagre tufts of a trimmed ginger goatee. He pulled a Jesus-long cord of lank, greasy hair out of his eyes and tucked it behind one ear. 'No . . . uh . . . it's just me.' Jacob offered him a friendly smile. 'Well that's all right then.' The man watched Leona and Helen approach, his eyes on the gun she was holding. 'Hey! No need to shoot me. Look, I'm leaving!' Jacob shook his head. 'Don't worry. It's okay.' 'You want this stuff? Fine, take it. There's loads more inside--' Nathan shook his head. 'Relax, man.' 'Or jack my truck?' 'Shit. You got a workin' truck?' exclaimed Nathan. He nodded, his eyes darting to a blue Ford Transit pick-up truck across the car-park. 'I've got a little diesel,' he replied cautiously, his eyes sti
