by M. T Hill
CONTENTS
Cover
Praise for Zero Bomb
By M.T. Hill and Available from Titan Books
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Part I
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
Part II
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 13
Epilogue
Part III
Part IV
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
Part V
Acknowledgements
About the Author
PRAISE FOR ZERO BOMB
“Conceived at the height of an unprecedented national crisis, M.T. Hill’s Zero Bomb is a violent, vital novel about virtue, loyalty, decency and love, even as we watch these timeless human attributes dissolve in the stomach acids of the World Machine. Think E.M. Forster’s The Machine Stops, written for the Westworld age, and you may just gain a fingerhold on this crazed colt of a book.”
SIMON INGS, author of The Smoke
“A beautifully-written and profoundly dislocating book about a chillingly-plausible near future and its discontents. Absolutely essential reading.”
DAVE HUTCHINSON, author of Europe in Autumn
“An ambitious novel that effortlessly combines speculation, social commentary, metafiction, and a compulsively readable story. Thrilling, audacious and timely, M.T. Hill’s visions of the future feel closer to reality than they should.”
HELEN MARSHALL, author of The Migration
“The fragmented story of Remi, a traumatised man struggling to remake his life, reminds me in its surrealism of Tom McCarthy’s Remainder. Intense and well observed, Zero Bomb delves into our fears and distrust of technology, and our political anxieties stoked by twenty-four-hour news.”
ANNE CHARNOCK, author of Dreams Before the Start of Time
“Vivid and richly imagined, Zero Bomb is a passionate examination of who we are and a warning of what we could shortly become. I couldn’t put it down.”
CATRIONA WARD, author of Rawblood
“Zero Bomb is a novel on the bleeding edge of desperate times. Delicious shivers of strangeness – an allotment of limbs, a fox that is also a surveillance device – bring an old magic to a future Britain broken by zero-hours contracts, algorithmic bosses, and 24/7 alienation. Using a bold structure, the novel reveals its mysteries across different facets of a compelling near-future North.”
MATTHEW DE ABAITUA, author of The Red Men
BY M.T. HILL AND AVAILABLE FROM TITAN BOOKS
Zero Bomb
The Breach (March 2020)
ZERO BOMB
M.T. HILL
TITAN BOOKS
Zero Bomb
Print edition ISBN: 9781789090017
E-book edition ISBN: 9781789090024
Published by Titan Books
A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd
144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP
www.titanbooks.com
First edition: March 2019
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
This is a work of fiction. Names, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.
© 2019 M.T. Hill. 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 written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
To Lucie and Raymond
PART I
REMI
1
Remi took to running when his daughter Martha died. His wife Joan called this denial, deflection – a kind of coping. But Remi called it running or jogging and nothing else, and within weeks his running had consumed him. He ran to the shops for milk, he ran to the shops for bread, and he often ran hours into the night so he couldn’t dream of her.
Remi wanted to run a marathon the morning of Martha’s funeral. Almost two months had passed by then, owing to a gross delay on the post-mortem. A fatal backlog, the coroner said, without irony, without so much as a twitch. Their service being tested, underfunded and overstretched. In the end Remi and Joan were on countdown so long that when the day finally arrived, Remi saw it as just another. He woke at three-thirty in the morning with plans to leave home by four; he woke to Joan sitting in low lamplight on the floor by their bed, freshly bereaved by the simple act of waking, and he saw she was weeping again. ‘It’s just the thought of her lying in that cold room,’ she told Remi as he dressed in his luminous running clothes. ‘She’s on her own.’ And Remi nodded his agreement and left anyway, went out with the foxes but before the dog walkers; out early enough to be the jogger who finds the body. He ran an easy eight miles into the day – was there as the late-spring mist rose from the fields and hills that hemmed Manchester. There to witness the rising sun, the neon-edged moorland, with the glowing feeling he might be the first or last man alive.
As the morning’s warm light planed in low, Remi lapped two reservoirs. There were geese on the water, static and wary. The power lines, strung between elegant new pylons that overlooked the site, chattered in the breeze. Remi only broke his stride when he came across a neat square of rabbit entrails on the path, and even then he didn’t stop for long. There was no fluff or blood nearby. The entrails sat there glistening, a uniform plum colour. Remi’s shin splints hurt. He was thirty-nine years old. His jowls were loosening, his crown was thinning, and his only child was dead.
Reaching the other side of the reservoir, Remi drew parallel with a fence that bounded a working farm. Snuffling sounds drew his attention – some donkeys were eating god-knows-what from a smouldering bonfire. Like the geese, they stopped to regard him dumbly. He wondered if they had the capacity for shame, if they could register being caught with their snouts in the filth. Then Remi considered if he should be ashamed. Not for intruding, but for being out here at all. It was then Remi noticed a dark fox, apparently following him, and saw its bloodied maw, and he understood.
* * *
Later, as Remi helped to bury Martha in the grounds of a church he’d never attended, sweating freely as he worked the shovel, he pictured those donkeys from the farm by the water. We each keep little rituals, and there are things we do when we think nobody’s looking.
The shovel was small and, owing to the church being quite new, the pile of soil beside the grave was full of crushed hardcore. Remi worked hard and committed this dark rubble with his sweat; it made a terrible sound as it showered the coffin. He was still wearing his luminous running gear. He was burying his daughter. He was thirty-nine and gravity was claiming his body and his child was dead, and here he was, amid this faceless mass, throwing smashed rock upon her. Convinced he was going to break the casket lid with the weight of the rubble, he stopped shovelling. He didn’t want to see her again.
Then the priest did his bit, ashes to ashes, and Remi stood away from Joan and her estranged family and sought something to hold on to, something real. He tried to list what comprised the England his daughter had kno
wn. What remained of his own England now Martha was gone. He considered his own anchoring points, his childhood – son of a French mother, an English father. The hills around his parents’ village near the Pyrenees, and then their move to Manchester when Joan fell pregnant, not long before the Brexit referendum. He began listing the things that made this England: the grey cracked pavements and potholed roads you ran along into town; the vascular tree roots breaking through tarmac on narrow streets; the font used on motorway signs. Passing a convoy of Volkswagens on their way to a club meet somewhere in the Midlands. Rooting in your pockets for loose change at a railway station toilet gate. Lying deeply hungover in a cheap hotel bed, your infant daughter kicking you in the chest, your wife laughing quietly as she tries to nurse.
Martha had not long turned seven when she died. England had changed so much in her scant years.
* * *
After the wake, the quietest the pub had known, Remi and Joan caught a taxi back to their house. Remi made a pot of tea and a plate of limp sandwiches that went untouched, and then he began to leave her. He packed his sports rucksack, energy gels, a bottle of water. A money belt and his bank card. He sniffed his way through the house, which seemed poisoned, noxious. He announced, ‘I’m going for a run.’ He pulled on his trainers on the front step and stretched his hamstrings, his calves. He rolled his shoulders and locked the door and posted his keys.
Remi reached the fringes of Birmingham the next morning.
2
It was Birmingham for a while, after that. No contact with Joan as a policy, a means to sever the connective tissue, annul their relationship mentally if not legally. To get by, Remi started washing cars at less than minimum wage for a friendly Polish family, until something of a turf war erupted with a rival firm down the road. When an early-morning petrol bomb nearly cost Remi his sight (and took his remaining hair), he gathered his stuff and ran himself out to Solihull, where he was forced to rough it properly. Unfortunately, he settled on the wrong patch – earned his licks from a band of local homeless who didn’t trust his accent, nor his unweathered face. Soon Remi was huffing spark as a crutch, and sooner still he could not run. He lost a year this way, though it made no odds since Martha’s death – time had become irrelevant to him; eating and drinking were little more than necessary hindrances.
Then an intervention, a ray of luckshine. Street pastors from a Christian charity arrived in the squat where Remi lay sored and broken, and brought with them the faint promise of redemption. Remi was unsalvageable, he thought, addicted and numb, but he went along to their centre and for several months ran clean for a lack of other options, having all but forgotten why he started taking spark in the first place. Making good progress, getting through the worst of withdrawal, he was in turn given a semi-permanent address from which to make job enquiries. A sort of alms postbox.
Some weeks later he began delivering food-aid parcels on foot. It was enough to keep a pay-as-you-go mobile going; brought in enough cash for him to hop between youth hostels or, occasionally, treat himself to a bed-and-breakfast. The work got his pulse up, and helped his muscles recover some of their previous form. He remembered something of what it was to run.
Not long afterwards, however, Remi’s luck ran dry. In the space of mere weeks his postal firm was swallowed up and mostly automated – redundancy culled all but two staff, the legwork farmed out to drones. Suddenly Remi’s prospects seemed shapeless, dismal, until a chance meeting with a metalworker stayed the fresh allure of spark and took him south to Kent, where he laboured long hours operating microcranes on the border fence.
Some days he can still smell the steel on his hands. Some days he can easily spend an hour counting the nicks and scars on his fingers and forearms.
Today, though? Today it’s London. Crushing, vital, imperfect London. Fractured, febrile London – London its own country, forever skirting ascension or total collapse; a shattered or immutable city, depending where you are and what you can see. Or how much you earn, and with whom you spend your time. London where Remi’s alarm is going off early, because he needs to get out and courier a hot manuscript to an agitprop publisher in Walthamstow. London where he’s scraped enough together to rent a studio flat in post-bomb Hackney – a shoebox, but a nice shoebox, in a converted Victorian gas holder on the Regent’s Canal. London where Remi sleeps in an old iron carcass, but still can’t believe his good fortune.
London where his daughter Martha’s voice is fading, the last low whisper of an exorcised ghost.
* * *
Remi dithers at breakfast. His ears are already full of rain and traffic. It’s a grey morning – a filthy week, all in all. He takes his toast with a cup of black, sugary tea, and pops three anti-emetics from a blister pod. Chewing and sipping, he grabs his traffic bug from its wall charger and tethers it to his watch. The bug is a newish Gilper on loan from a pawnbroker – it features urban-camo skin and a high-capacity cell that’s more than enough for a working day’s footage. As he pours himself into bike Lycra, his street armour, he lets the bug hover outside the flat window. According to the pawnbroker, the bug’s previous owner jail-broke it with introspective software. Now it seems to enjoy taking its own mysterious pictures of the pre-dawn, none of which he can ever find on its memory drive. Idly, Remi turns on the cooker hob and turns it off again.
Outside, and into London ramping up. A freezing pall has passed over the city, and the streets sparkle with ice. The bike lanes are hectic, too: riders running wheel to wheel, while above them streams an almost continuous river of bugs, every single rider leashed invisibly to their own, as if it’s really the bugs dragging their owners to work.
By the time he’s on street level, the smog has settled. Just as quickly, the whole scene is shot through with lasermesh from the City’s high-rises. Holo adverts rally in the pall. The sun, more of a backlight, gives everything a bright yellow density. Squint a little, and the sky is falling.
Remi numbly pulls on his breather, joins a fast lane and powers into the flow; he heads straight down the central chute past Spitalfields, minding his own business. He’s Kevlar-heavy and constantly swallowing what feels like nylon string. Early riding can do this to him, plastic lung being at its worst first thing. When it’s as cold as this, it can be as bad as the day he quit huffing. All around him, riders are bunching up as if subconsciously seeking each other’s heat. You’re meant to take your time on these mornings – especially if you’re rolling with tyres as thin as pennies, on a surface that’s been relaid to deal with each successive summer’s obscene heat. But Remi’s having as much fun as what’s left of him allows – digging in, running true, bang on time. The eerie hiss and clank of hard breathing and chaingear. Give it some extra welly down the off-chute, and he might just break some community trial records by the time he arrives. He might even feel something at all.
Remi’s bug flashes a right arrow to him, and Remi leaves his lane.
* * *
The literary agency is situated down a narrow side street. Remi stands the bike and checks his watch: he’ll make the manuscript collection six minutes ahead of schedule. This means an instant bonus, a guaranteed three-star review, and the possibility of repeat business.
The agency’s front gate is hidden behind a lattice of scaffolding and mesh. Shoring-up works, probably – more buildings damaged by tunnel boring for the next Tube line. He hits the buzzer. The Gilper lands on his shoulder and chirrups.
A bank of locks pop open, and a severe-looking woman comes out to the gate, a lead-coloured case in her hands.
‘Morning,’ Remi says. ‘Run to Walthamstow.’
‘You’re the courier?’
Remi flashes his ID. Freelance and fancy-free.
‘Very early,’ the agent mutters. She rubs at a coffee stain on her top, and doesn’t open the gate. ‘I hope we’re not paying you by the minute.’
‘I got lucky,’ Remi tells her, shaking his head. ‘No extras for you. What we quote is what you pay.’
The literary agent nods. ‘Is that everything, then?’
Remi nods, and the traffic bug lifts away from his shoulder.
The agent murmurs something about payment gates and backs into the shadows.
‘You have a good one too,’ Remi says. He walks to his bike, slides the envelope into the shock panniers, and holds his wrist against the connector pad. This links the envelope to his bug, in case he gets jacked.
* * *
Remi doesn’t know much about art, though he’ll blag his way through a client briefing to win a delivery contract. But by doing this job, he’s part of the scene’s nervous system. When you’re creating under a government that demands to see it all, you have to adapt. To paint or cartoon or write books these days is subversive at the very least, and to shift it through the city is not simple complicity – it’s open defiance. Remi reckons about half of his traffic is typed or handwritten manuscripts, and the demand for grey couriers like him is only growing. The current buzz on deep channels is that foreign embassies have cottoned on and started paying big, if certain assurances are met. If the art market takes a whack – if there’s another big crackdown, say – Remi might yet explore that route himself.
The commute only intensifies as he cycles on with the manuscript. His bug is flashing the directions, but he knows these roads, counts the miles instead through personal nodes: the pubs, the automated bookies, the empty temples and mosques and synagogues, the libraries-turned-flats, the sets of traffic lights you can safely skip. Graffiti tags and fissures in tarmac on certain roads. Grids and H-for-hydrant signs making for esoteric markers and signals.