“That’s what I been saying all along,” agreed Jake, “That’s what I need. So where will I get one, then?”
“A firearms shop is where you’ll get one.”
“And where will I find a firearms shop, my dearest chumster?”
“The best firearms shop in town is Johnson’s down on Canal Street.”
Jake started laughing again. “Can you believe this world, man? It’s like every dream you ever had all rolled up into one.”
I was wondering what dreams Jake had? Did he mean nightmares? Apparently not.
“Everything’s for the taking man,” he went on, “See something you want. Get it. The stuff in this place is shit compared to stuff in town. Come on a looting spree with us, my chummies, and I’ll show you stuff beyond your wildest dreams.”
“We’ve got to be off soon,” I said, “We have to get somewhere.”
“Sod that!” said Jake, “Nobody’s got to do nothing no more. Life’s for the living, man. You wouldn’t believe the stuff I looted this past couple o’ days. Booze, watches, an 82 inch colour TV!”
Much good that will do you without any power, I thought. But I kept the thought to myself. I had the feeling Jake might not appreciate my line in humorous irony.
“W-women,” the blond one said, “All there for the t-taking.”
“That’s all you think about,” said Jake – then, to us: “You’ll have to forgive my thick friend, chums, his brains are in his Y-Fronts.”
“So what about the g-guns?” the blond one said.
“OK, OK, I’m coming to that. My new friends here know all about guns. Where we can get some, which one is best. Don’cha, chummies?”
Geoff said, “Like I said, I know the place to get some.”
“Come with us,” said Jake, “Show us. Then maybe we won’t kill you.”
The blond one laughed.
Jake snapped at him – “Shut it, you moron. This ain’t no laughing matter.”
“Sorry, Jake.”
“The thing is, we are behind schedule,” I said, “We have to be somewhere.”
“Who asked you?” Jake wanted to know. Then, turning to Geoff, he said, “Why are you hanging out with this geezer, anyway?”
“He’s got all the contacts,” Geoff said. I had no idea what he meant. From the look on his face, Jake had no idea what he meant either. Geoff stood there smirking at Jake. Then Jake seemed to catch on to Geoff’s meaning and he began smirking back. Then he elbowed the blond guy in the ribs, “Why couldn’t you think of that?” he said, “Contacts. That’s what you need in this world.”
While this baffling conversation had been going on, Bobby the dog had been running around, occasionally growling. Now, quite suddenly, he started barking.
“Someone kill that dog!” the laughing man said.
One of his friends – a small, skinny teenager – stepped forward. He wasn’t giggling. In fact, he was frowning. “Not the dog,” he said, “You can kill people if you like. But if you kill the dog, I’ll kill you.”
“Calm it, Dink, no one’s gonna kill the dog,” Jake said, “Just my joke, you know that.”
That was the first time I’d got a good look at the man called Dink. He looked sick. His face had an unhealthy grey tinge to it. What should have been the whites of his eyes were dark crimson. A thick trickle of blood was oozing from one nostril. He wiped it away on the cuff of his jacket.
7
“What was that all about?”
“What?”
We were walking down a narrow lane on the far side of town – me, Geoff and Bobby. Doing everything we could to avoid being seen. Not that there were many signs of any people who might see us.
“You and Jake,” I said, “All that chummy-chummy stuff…”
“It worked, didn’t it?”
“‘It may have worked but I still don’t know what ‘it’ was.”
“Let’s just say I’m good at avoiding fights. I’m kind of small. I look like a push-over. So people try to push me over. It happened when I was at school. It happens if I go out to a pub. Some people go out looking for a fight. When they see me, they stop looking.”
“You get picked on is what you are saying?”
“That’s what I’m saying.”
“And…?”
“And I’ve learnt how to deal with it. You don’t argue. Whatever they say, you agree with. If there’s a gang of them, you especially agree with whoever’s the gang leader. Make him feel big.”
“Flatter him?”
“Exactly.”
“And then you tell him where to get some guns? That was kind of dumb, wasn’t it?”
“It would have been if that’s what I’d done.”
“I was there, Geoff. That’s exactly what you did. I suppose you thought we’d be well away by then so it didn’t matter if he went around killing other people.”
“What if I did think that? It’s true, isn’t it?”
He had a point. In this world, it is a case of survival of the fittest. Kill or be killed. The Marquis of Queensbury rules no longer apply.
“Yeah,” I said, “I guess so.”
“Except that’s not what I did. I ain’t got no idea if there’s any gun shops in town. But I didn’t think that’s what he wanted to hear. So I told him what he wanted to hear.”
“You told him to go to Canal Street.”
“Have you ever been to Canal Street?”
“Nope.”
“It’s where the farmers go.”
“For guns?”
“For tractors. It’s got one of the biggest agricultural machinery suppliers in the South West.”
“But you told him which gun he needed. I heard you. The name, the model number, all the technical details.”
“What, you mean the JD5050E, powerful but compact, with PTO engagement and synchronized transmission?”
“That’s the one.”
“It’s a tractor.”
“You’re kidding!”
“No, I ain’t. It’s the tractor my dad wanted to buy but couldn’t afford. He spent ages ogling the brochures, reading all the specs out loud. I could recite the whole damn’ thing. It’s the only piece of equipment I could think of that I could bullshit about convincingly. Hey, what are you laughing at? It fooled Jake, didn’t it?”
“Yes, but it could also have got us killed.”
Geoff shrugged – “Yes, there is that, I suppose.”
8
By the time we were back in the suburbs, a fine drizzling rain was falling. Snow still lay in patches, heaped against the curbs but the weather was milder than it had been and the thaw was well advanced.
Most of the streets were deserted. The neat, semi-detached houses were all in neat, semi-detached rows. The hedges were trimmed, the lawns were mowed. It looked like a pleasant area, if pleasant areas are your sort of thing. It also looked entirely normal. Apart from the fact that there was nobody to be seen. Maybe they were all sitting indoors, keeping out of the rain? Maybe if the sun had been shining they would all be out in their gardens tending to the petunias and arranging their gnomes. But I didn’t think so. I got the feeling that they had locked themselves away because they were scared.
Most of the streets were deserted, but not all of them. Sometimes as we approached a junction or the entrance to a side-street, we heard something. It might be the screeching of car brakes, motorbikes being revved, windows being broken, or just the hubbub of a gang of people talking and screaming and shouting. Often there was laughter; the sort of laughter that Jake had made; not normal laughter, not happy laughter. It was laughter on the border of hysteria, on the razor-edge of madness.
When we had arrived in town, the night before, it had been dark. I felt safer at night. Now, walking through the empty streets by daylight, I felt conspicuous. I was sure that eyes were watching me from behind all those lace curtains. I felt vulnerable. What if some lunatic in one of those houses had a gun and decided to take a pop at us?
Bu
t then, as I glanced into the houses, I realised that I’d got it the wrong way around. We needn’t be nervous of them. Because they were terrified of us. Every once in a while I’d notice someone peeping from behind the curtains. As soon as they realised that I’d seen them, they backed away further into the darkness of their houses. As far as they were concerned, we were the enemy, Geoff and I. We were out on the streets. Anyone who was out on the streets had no fear. And anyone who had no fear was dangerous.
We turned into one street and nearly ran, slap bang into a gang on the razzle. This was not the sort of gang you would want to run into. They would be unlikely to give you a warm welcome. They were haranguing an old man. The man was in his garden, standing his ground, determined not to be intimidated. The gang shouted abuse at him. Called him names. The man told them to clear off.
“Or what?” said one of the gang.
“Never mind what,” said the old man, “My wife’s not well. She’s got a bad heart.”
Someone in the gang yelled out that all they needed was a good sharp knife and her heart wasn’t going to be no problem no more. People laughed. It was that insane, cackling laugh again. Then someone in the front of the gang pushed the man.
“Clear off!” said the man, “I’m not afraid of you.”
“He’s not afraid of us, fellas,” said the loud-mouthed youth who’d been doing most of the taunting, “Let’s see if we can make him afraid then, shall we?”
More laughter.
Someone hit the old man with what looked like a baseball bat. There was a horrible thud. The man staggered. He didn’t scream. He didn’t yell. He tried to say something but the words didn’t come out right. Then someone pushed him to the ground. The gang crowded around. I saw the person raise the baseball bat again. And wham! down it came. The crowd laughed. Someone cheered. Up went the bat. And thump! Down it went. And again, and again and again! I was glad the crowd had gathered around the old man. I was glad I couldn’t see what they were doing to him. The gang who stood around watching, found it funny. Hysterically funny. Achingly, side-splittingly funny.
Geoff and I were hiding behind a clump of trees at the end of the street. We moved away quickly. As long as the gang was focussed on watching an old man being clubbed to death, they wouldn’t notice us. The last thing I saw was an old woman leaning from an upstairs window. She was wailing with a grief that I hope I never experience. Someone in the gang pointed to her. Then they surged forward towards the front door of the house, obviously intending to do something to the old woman too. I didn’t hang around to find out what.
9
That night we erected a tent deep inside some woods. We were out on the moors somewhere. The woodlands must have covered hundreds of acres. Narrow, rutted roads wound between the trees. We found an old bridleway that branched off one of the roads and went deeper into the forest. You wouldn’t have been able to go down there in an ordinary car. It was a bit of a struggle even with the Land Rover. Geoff and I shared the driving but Geoff was better at it than I was. He’d been driving his father’s Land Rover, illegally given his age, for the last five years or so.
The surface of the bridleway was uneven and slippery with mud. The trees on either side grew in so close that the branches scratched the Land Rover’s sides and top. Even so, we must have gone over half a mile down that bridleway before we were forced to stop. That was at a point where it suddenly sloped uphill into a denser area of trees that we couldn’t have driven through. It was far enough off the beaten track. We just wanted a place that was remote from prying eyes.
We had plenty of food with us. We had cans of food, tea, instant coffee and cartons of long-life milk that we’d taken from a shop in a remote village earlier in the day. The shop had already been looted but the shelves were still well-stocked and there were cans and bottles of food and drink packed in boxes and scattered around on the floor. Whoever had wrecked the place clearly hadn’t been impressed by what was on offer and there was plenty left for us to scavenge.
Scavenging is how we thought of it. We didn’t think of it as stealing. We were picking up the waste. Waste not, want not. Scavenging that food had been our good deed of the day. It’s funny how quickly you can get used to things. The moral compass of a lifetime can be ripped apart and reassembled in the blink of an eye.
Anyway, there had been nobody in the shop. Whoever had owned it must have moved on. Or else something must have happened to them. No point worrying about that. We needed food. Food was going free. If we’d left it, the rats would have had it. That’s how I rationalised it, anyway.
We hadn’t thought of scavenging soap or shaving kit, though. Even if we had, it would have been too cold to wash in one of the icy pools we saw in the woods. We were beginning to stink, my hair felt dirty and greasy and I was starting to grow a beard which itched like mad.
We made a fire that evening. In a clearing, beneath a canopy of trees. We’d camped out in a part of the forest populated by fir trees of some sort. It was a cultivated forest: manmade, regimented and dense. At other times I would have hated a place like that. I would have raved against the insanity of destroying our beautiful, rambling, native woodlands in order to plant soulless ranks of spruces. But that night I was glad of them. At that time of year, our native trees would be bare of leaf and they would have offered little in the way of shelter or concealment. Under the deadly darkness of those evergreens, on the other hand, we felt safe. Even the flames and smoke from our little fire, drifting up through those tall trees, would (I hoped) be hidden.
After we’d eaten (tinned fish and soup), we sat around the fire and had a few drinks. It was a cold night, but not freezing. We were wrapped up pretty well. The Arran sweater, parka and sheepskin gloves that I’d acquired from Mr Cadwallader’s shop kept me pretty toasty. We’d acquired a bottle of whisky from the same shop in which we’d acquired the food. It was blended whisky. Pretty rough. I made a mental note to look for better booze next time – a good Highland malt would hit the spot. But, rough as it was, the whisky did a reasonable job of lifting my spirits. With so much free for the taking, so much waiting to be ‘acquired’, I told myself, this wasn’t going to be such a bad life after all. It was a world well lost.
My good mood didn’t last. How could it? Everything I’d ever known was in ruins. The life I’d hoped to live had been taken away – the rug had been pulled from beneath my feet.
After a while, I got out the radio – the one I’d taken from Cadwallader’s store. I was hoping that I might be able to find some channels that were still broadcasting: one of the stations I’d heard on Douggie Lampton’s shortwave receiver. I remembered the old farmer telling me that he listened to shortwave broadcasts from around the world: America. Canada. Somaliland. Any news would be good to hear. But I wasn’t sure if this radio would be up to the job. Douggie Lampton’s receiver had been a big, powerful-looking brute. The radio I was holding was like an old-fashioned battery-powered radio. For all I knew, it might not be powerful enough to receive any broadcasts at all. Assuming that there was still anyone out there broadcasting.
I turned it on and twiddled some knobs but the results were disappointing. Just loud static. I think once or twice there were hints of voices wafting in and out through the noise but I couldn’t make head or tail of what they were saying. In the end I gave up.
After a few whiskies, I started to get a bit maudlin. I asked Geoff if he missed his family. What he thought would happen to them. He shrugged. “What’s past is past.” It seemed a callous thing to say. It was as though Geoff was glad to be free of them. Glad to be away from home and all the life he had lost. Glad the Catastrophe had happened.
Not me. For me, the past was a better place. It was a better life. Though, to be honest with you, that life had ended long before the snow had arrived. It had ended two years earlier, before I moved into Heather Cottage. Back then, everything had seemed possible. Love, happiness, wealth, success. I had still believed that one day I’d make it in the music
business. In a rock band. And then everything went wrong. I told Geoff about it but I left out the important bits. Just as I’m leaving them out now. There are some things in life that are too painful, too personal, to put on public view.
The only person I had ever really been able to pour my heart out to was an old college friend, Justin Davenant. He took me out for dinner in a restaurant near his flat in Bayswater. We drank far too much wine with our meal and I’d gushed out all my woes to him. I even told him about my breakdown, which is something I’d never admitted to anyone before, apart from my doctor.
Justin said I needed to get away from everything. Get away from London, put the past behind me. Make a new start. I told him that would be wonderful if it were possible. But it wasn’t.
That was when he’d told me about his cottage, Heather Cottage. He’d inherited it from a relative but hardly ever had the time to go and visit it. He offered it to me at a ludicrously cheap rent and I jumped at the chance. So I left London, determined to put all my problems behind me. I had no job to go to so I decided to set up as a guitar teacher. I put adverts in shop windows and in the local newspaper and, to my surprise, I actually managed to get some students. Not many. But I just about managed to make ends meet. Most of my students were, to be polite, on the mature side. Geoff, in fact, had been my only teenage student.
“They are all young,” I said.
“What?” Geoff was sitting on a groundsheet near the fire, his back propped against the trunk of a convenient tree.
“All the gangs. The street gangs. Everyone you see in the streets. They are all young. Where are the old people?”
“There are plenty of old people,” Geoff said, “They don’t come out, that’s all. Which is why we don’t see them. Mr Cadwallader was old. There was that other old guy that we saw in town. The one they were bashing with a baseball bat.”
I replayed that scene in my mind. It was so brutal I didn’t want to think about it.
The Exodus Plague | Book 1 | The Snow Page 9