by Alex Scarrow
On the TV screen Sean Tillman suddenly disappeared. The only thing left on screen was the News 24 logo in the top left corner and the scrolling news feed along the bottom.
‘It appears,’ his voice announced, ‘we have lost some lighting in the studio. I’m sure this will be rectified short—’
And then there was a chaotic blizzard of snow on the TV and a hiss.
‘What happened to the TV man?’ asked Jake.
Daniel, holding Leona’s phone in his hand, looked up at her. ‘Oh shit. What’s going on now?’
She shook her head.
And then the lights in the lounge went out and the TV winked off.
‘Whuh—?’
The amber-hued streetlights outside along the avenue, which had only minutes ago flickered on, went out.
‘The power’s gone,’ she whispered in the dark.
Jacob began to panic. ‘It’s all dark! Can’t see!’ he whimpered.
‘Relax Jake, you can see. It’s not dark, it’s just gloomy,’ she said as calmly as she could manage, feeling the leading edge of a growing wave of panic preparing to steal up on her too.
Jacob started crying.
‘Shhh Jake. Come up here and sit with us.’
He got up from the floor and squeezed on to Jill’s leather Chesterfield sofa between Leona and Dan. ‘There,’ she said, ‘nothing scary’s going to happen, we’re just going to sit here and—’
Then her phone rang and all three of them jumped.
CHAPTER 41
7.53 p.m. GMT Between Manchester and Birmingham
‘Leona?’ cried Jenny with relief, ‘Is that you?’
‘Mum?’
‘Yes. I’ve been trying to get hold of you all day. Are you all right love?’ she replied quickly, not daring to waste a second of precious phone time. God knew how much longer the mobile phone system was going to last. ‘Did you pick up Jacob?’
‘Yes, he’s here.’
‘Are you at home?’
She heard Leona pause, a moment’s hesitation was all.
‘Mum,’ Leona started, ‘Dad told me to go to Jill’s house.’
‘Jill’s place? Why?’
Another, even longer, pause. ‘Dad just thought we’d be safer here in Jill’s house.’
Jenny wondered what the hell Andy was thinking about. She’d be much happier knowing they were settled in safely at home. Anyway, she remembered Jill was away this week, on one of her sales team’s get-togethers abroad.
‘How did you get in to—?’
She could hear Leona crying.
‘Doesn’t matter, I’m sure Jill won’t mind. Do you two have food?’
The question prompted a gasp from her daughter. ‘Oh my God, it was horrible Mum. It was just . . .’
Jenny could hear the tears tumbling in the timbre of her daughter’s voice.
‘. . . at the supermarket, as we came out, things began to go really bad. We were nearly in a fight. And we’ve been watching the news, and it’s . . .’
Jenny interrupted. ‘I know love, I know.’
Oh Christ do I know.
Jenny had seen things in the last few hours that she never imagined she would see in a country like this; a civilised, prosperous country, with the exception of the odd gang of youths on the roughest of estates, it was a place where one largely felt safe.
‘I know,’ she replied falteringly. She could hear her own voice beginning to wobble too.
Be strong for her.
‘Oh God, Mum. It’s just how Dad said it would be, isn’t it? It’s all falling apart.’
Jenny wondered what was best for her children now. Denial? A blank-minded reassurance that everything was going to be as right as rain in a day or two? Was that what Leona needed to hear from her? Because that wasn’t the truth, was it? If she now, finally, had come round to trusting Andy’s prophetic wisdom; if her worn-down tolerance and weary cynicism was to be a thing of the past and she was now ready to fully take onboard his warnings . . . then she had to concede this wasn’t going to sort itself out in a couple of days.
Things were going to get a lot worse. Andy had foreseen that. Andy had warned her, Christ, Andy had bored her to death with it, and now, finally, here it was.
‘Leona, my love. Have you got food?’ Jenny asked, swiftly wiping away the first tear to roll down her cheek as if somehow her daughter might catch sight of it.
‘Y-yes, Mum. We got a load of tinned things from the supermarket. ’
‘Good girl Leona. Can I speak to Jacob?’
Jenny heard a muffled exchange in the background, and then her son was on the phone.
‘Mummy?’
‘Jake,’ she replied, the trembling in her voice becoming too difficult to hide.
‘Mum? Are you okay?’
‘Oh I’m just fine, love.’
‘You sound sad.’
‘I’m not sad.’
‘When are you coming home?’
‘As soon as I can get home. I’m trying . . . really,’ replied Jenny looking across at the face of the man she’d been walking beside for the last four hours. Paul. She didn’t know him from Adam really. As much a stranger as the other dozen or so people sitting on the orange, plastic chairs around the burger van on the lay-by.
‘Okay. Leona and Daniel are looking after me until you come home.’
‘Who’s Daniel?’
‘He’s a man. He’s Leona’s friend.’
A man?
‘Jacob, let me speak to Leona.’
Jenny heard the rustle of the phone changing hands again.
‘Mum?’
‘Who the hell is Daniel?’ asked Jenny. ‘Jacob said it’s a man.’
‘It’s all right Mum, he’s a mate from uni. He drove us home. He helped us get the food.’
Jenny puffed a sigh of relief. This Daniel was just another kid then, no doubt her current boyfriend. Jenny had lost track of who was who on the list of names Leona casually ran through when she got her daughter’s weekly social update over the phone. Jenny found that comforting, there was a lad there looking out for her, and Jake.
‘Okay.’
‘Have you heard from Dad?’ asked Leona. ‘I’ve not spoken to him since early this morning.’
‘No love, that was when I last spoke to him.’
‘Oh God, I hope he’s okay.’
Jenny realised how much she hoped that as well. In the space of a day, she had found herself rewriting recent personal history; the last five years of seeing him as a tiresome mole digging his own little lonely, paranoid tunnel to nowhere. That was all different now. Andy had been seeing this . . . she looked around at the frightened people beside her, the empty motorway, the dark night sky no longer stained a muted orange by light pollution from the cities beneath it . . . he had actually been seeing this with his own eyes. All he’d been trying to do was warn them, that’s all.
‘He’ll be fine Leona, I’m sure he’s doing okay.’
Leona started crying.
‘Listen sweetheart, you have to be strong now—’
There was shrill warbling on the line, followed by crackling and static.
‘Leona!’
The crackling continued.
‘Leona!’ Jenny cried again desperately.
‘Mum?’
‘Oh God, I thought the phone system had gone down.’
‘Mum, please get home as quick as you can. The power went just before you called. It’s getting dark now and we’re all scared, and there’s these noises outside in the stree—’
Then the line went dead.
‘Leona!’
This time there was nothing, not even the crackling. Jenny looked across at Paul, who was hungrily devouring some of the stale buns the small group had managed to find inside the locked-up burger van parked in the lay-by.
‘The phones aren’t working now,’ she whispered, feeling her scalp run cold and realising that this was it; her children were on their own just as things in London - as no doubt th
ey were in every other city in the country, perhaps the world - were about to go to hell.
Paul took a swig from a can of Tango. Several twenty-four packs of fizzy sugary drinks and a dozen large catering packs of buns were all the small gathering of people, travelling on foot, had been able to liberate from the burger van. Some of these people, sitting silently on the bucket chairs outside the van, had been among the mob that had pushed past the police blockade. One or two others had joined them, emerging from the flat, featureless farmlands and drab industrial estates beyond the motorway, down the grass bankings lined with stunted, monoxide-withered saplings, as the light of the afternoon had slipped away.
‘You better eat something,’ Paul said quietly, handing her half-a-dozen buns.
Jenny stared down at the food in front of her.
‘I can’t eat. I’m not hungry.’
‘You should. There’s no knowing where we’ll find our next meal.’
She tore a bun off from the rest and took a bite out of it, chewing the stale bread with little enthusiasm.
The children are home, they have food. They’re safe inside.
That was all that mattered. Jenny knew it might take three or four days walking down the empty motorways on foot before she could be there for them. But they had food.
Andy’s warning, his advance warning . . . the one they should have heeded a little earlier than this, had sort of paid off, kind of. Of course, if she’d listened to him four or five years ago, they’d be living in some secluded valley in Wales, with an established vegetable garden, a water well, some chickens maybe, a generator and a turbine. Sitting pretty.
Instead, it seemed her kids had only just managed to beat the rest of the population, the blinkered masses - that used to be one of Andy’s pet phrases - to the draw.
Sitting pretty.
Maybe not. They might have had their secluded, self-sufficient smallholding, but, she wondered, how long would they have been able to keep hold of it? Especially once the looted supermarket food ran out and hunger began to bite. Those people, the blinkered masses, would come looking, foraging.
Jenny shook her head.
Andy wasn’t the kind of guy who could defend himself, his family. He was a pacifist. She struggled to imagine him guarding their little survival fortress, with an assault rifle slung over one shoulder and his face dappled with that camouflage make-up the boys liked so much.
He could plan, but he wasn’t a fighter.
CHAPTER 42
10.53 p.m. local time Al-Bayji, Iraq
Westley yanked Andy forward with a savage jerk of his arm, almost pulling him off his feet. With his other hand, Andy managed to grab hold of the truck’s tailgate, and together with the Lance Corporal grabbing hold of his sweat-soaked shirt, pulling him up, he found himself lying in the back of the truck, looking up at the flitting moonlit clouds.
With a crunch and a loose rattle of worn metal, the truck finally found third gear, and lurched forward.
Westley was screaming at Lieutenant Carter to get a move on. This truck was not going to slow down for him.
Andy sat up and looked over the rim at the back of the truck’s bed to see the young officer falling behind them. Beyond, a hundred yards back, the mob were furiously pursuing.
‘Come on, fuckin’ move it, sir!’ he shouted.
Lieutenant Carter ditched his webbing and his gun, and pounded the ground hard with his boots, his face a snarl of effort. His arms pumped hard, and to Andy’s amazement, his pace had picked up enough that he began to close the gap. Andy climbed over the rim and joined Westley leaning out of the back of the truck, one arm fully extended. Carter was so exhausted he would need both of them to pull him up, there was no way he was going to have anything left over to get himself up. Once they grabbed hold of him he was going to be dead weight.
‘That’s it!’ shouted Andy. ‘Come on!’
Carter increased his pace, and raised one arm out towards the back of the truck, his fingers brushed Andy’s.
A puff of crimson suddenly erupted from his torso; the young man lurched and fell forward.
‘No!’
Carter shrank as the truck rumbled on and left him behind. He’d taken a hit. Andy could see him scrambling drunkenly to his feet again, clutching at his chest. It was over for him. He could see that on the young man’s face. The gunshot wound looked bad.
‘Oh shit! Oh shit! He’s fucking dead.’
Carter collapsed to his knees, but stayed upright. Andy could see clearly the mob were going to get to him long before the wound did its job.
‘Oh this is fucked up,’ groaned Westley.
Andy quickly pulled himself back up and reached out for one of the SA80s in the truck. He steadied himself as best he could in the lurching rear of the vehicle as it rattled on to the bridge.
‘What are you—?’ Westley had time to say before Andy emptied the magazine.
The dirt around Carter danced. Most of Andy’s shots missed, but mercifully, a couple landed home, knocking Carter to the ground, where, to Andy’s relief, he appeared to lay still.
One of the soldiers up at the front of the truck shouted, ‘Hang on! Blockade!’ A moment later the truck careered into the flimsy burned-out shell of a small car, knocking it effortlessly aside amidst a shower of sparks and a cloud of soot, smoke and baked flecks of paint.
The truck roared past a dozen or so more militia, most of them diving out of the way of the truck and the tumbling chassis of the car. The truck rattled noisily across the bridge and Andy watched as the blockade, the dark, lifeless town and the enraged mob of people, dwindled behind them. The last he could vaguely pick out through the night-sight was the darkening mass of people, silhouetted against the distant bonfire, gathering around the body of Lieutenant Carter.
Already his mind was ready with the slow-motion playback.
He felt a slap on his shoulder, and turned to see Mike sitting behind. He nodded. ‘You did good,’ he said.
Andy looked at his watch. It was half past eleven and there was nothing at all to be seen, or, more importantly, heard, in the night sky.
Andy nodded. ‘I guess they’re not coming then.’
‘Are you sure Lieutenant Carter said they were coming here?’ asked Mike. ‘At eleven?’
‘I’m sure.’
There were any number of reasons why the Chinook hadn’t turned up; perhaps it had tried to make the rendezvous but had been beaten back, or even brought down, by a surface-to-air missile? Or perhaps they’d simply been considered too high a risk and left to it? It didn’t matter now. They were royally screwed.
‘Those boys back there are wondering what the hell we’re going to do next,’ said Mike, ‘they’ve lost both their commanding officers and they’re scared shitless.’
Mike was right. The lads gathered in the back of the truck were just that, boys; nineteen, twenty, twenty-one . . . most of them. Andy was thirty-nine, old enough to be a dad to some. They were looking at him right now, two rows of eyes staring at him from the back of the truck, wanting to know what happens now.
Mike spoke to him quietly. ‘They’re looking to you, you know that don’t you?’
Andy nodded. ‘Yeah,’ he said reluctantly.
‘So we need to think what we’re going to do now.’
‘No shit. We can’t drive south-west to the K-2 airstrip. We’d have to go back through Al-Bayji,’ he muttered, thinking aloud. He looked once more at the night sky, clear now, and sparkling with stars. There was only one thing they could do. He looked toward the north. ‘How far do you reckon?’ asked Andy.
‘How far to where?’ Mike replied.
‘Turkey.’
Mike’s eyes widened, his thick eyebrows arching above them. ‘Excuse me?’
‘If we go north, we can drive out of Iraq and make our way home via Syria or Turkey.’
‘You plan to drive all the way home?’
Andy turned to look at him. ‘I’ve got two kids and a wife who need me. I want
to go home, whatever it takes.’
‘Hmmm. I guess there’s not much we can do.’
‘No. It’s not like we got a shit-load of choice here,’ said Andy. ‘Anyway, we might get lucky and run into some troops . . . yours or ours. Who knows?’
Mike nodded. ‘I guess it’s about 150 miles to the border with Turkey.’
Andy pursed his lips. ‘As the crow flies. More like 200 if we want to avoid any more big towns and stay off the main northbound road.’
‘Then what?’
Andy shrugged. ‘Then we drive through Turkey I guess.’
‘That’s the plan?’
‘That’s the plan.’
Mike grinned, his white teeth framed by his dark beard. ‘You’re a fucking tenacious hard-ass bastard Andy, I think I like that about you.’
Andy shrugged. ‘If we make it home and you meet my wife, you tell her what a big hard-ass I am, okay Mike? Right now she thinks I’m just a dick.’
He slapped Andy’s back. ‘It’s a deal.’
Andy smiled weakly in response.
‘You got a family to get home to,’ added Mike.
Andy’s smile faded. ‘Every minute that ticks by that I’m out here is another minute my kids are all alone.’
Mike nodded and looked back at the truck. ‘So you better go tell those boys then,’ he said, ‘I get the feeling they’ve put you in charge.’
‘Ah bollocks, I’m not sure I’m up to it. I can’t even bloody well fire a gun straight.’
Mike shook his head and laughed. ‘There you see, you ruined it. For a moment, you were almost sounding like a true alpha-male. ’
Wednesday
CHAPTER 43
5 a.m. GMT Between Manchester and Birmingham
Jenny stirred, and realised that she had actually managed to fall asleep in the plastic bucket seat for at least a couple of hours. The first light of dawn had penetrated the surreal, complete darkness of night, and as the steel-grey early morning hours passed, she studied the empty motorway across the narrow grass verge that separated it from the lay-by.