Shelter

by Dave Hutchinson

  In the compound, a group of Taylor farmhands surrounded the wagon. Harry looked down at them and his heart broke. For a moment, driving up the track to the farm, he had briefly entertained a fantasy that this was like the other times he had visited the Taylors. The band of armed men around the wagon dispelled that fantasy. He felt his eldest son, James, stir uneasily on the seat beside him and reach for the crossbow.

  He said, loudly enough for everyone in the compound to hear him, “We don’t want any trouble.”

  “Tell your lad to put his bow down, then,” Patrick called from the top of the wall.

  “You can tell him yourself,” Harry said, more angrily than he had intended. He nudged James and said quietly, “Don’t be a twat, son,” and after a moment James put the bow down again.

  Rose walked across the compound, through the group of people standing around the wagon, and stood looking up at them. Harry thought she looked exhausted. “Rosemary,” he said. When she didn’t answer, he said, “Where’s Max?”

  “Inside.” Rose gestured at the house. “Dying.”

  Harry sighed. “All right, Rose,” he said. “I’m going to get down now and you can tell me what happened.”

  “They stay where they are,” Patrick called, nodding at James and his brother.

  Harry looked up at the boy, then at Rose again. “All right,” he said. And he got up and climbed down from the wagon and walked over to Rose. She stared at him wordlessly, then turned and led the way to one of the outhouses across the yard.

  Inside, three tarpaulin-draped shapes lay on the floor. Rose silently pulled the tarps back, revealing two young men Harry did not know, and one he did. He stared at the lifeless face, nicked here and there by stray shotgun pellets, and found himself remembering, quite at random, a Christmas years and years ago, before Alice died. He reached out and gently covered his son’s face again.

  “Who are the other two?” Rose asked.

  “Never saw them before,” he replied.

  “We don’t know for sure what happened, because Max was unconscious when he got here,” she said. “They were in the wagon.” She nodded at the bodies. “They were dead, Max was dying. Anyone else would have left them where they were, but Max loaded them onto the wagon while he was bleeding to death because that’s what Max is like.”

  Harry said, “They could have been attacked by someone.” A bunch of bandits from somewhere in Bedfordshire had arrived in the area a couple of years before, stealing livestock and attacking lone travellers. Harry and Max and some of their men had gone out and dealt with them.

  Rose went over to a corner of the shed, came back holding a shotgun, its stock broken. “This is Max’s,” she said. “There’s a round jammed in the breech. Two of the boys were shot, one’s got head injuries and a broken neck, Max had a crossbow bolt in his gut. Shall I draw you a picture, Harry?”

  Harry scowled. He knew men in the area who would start a fight at the least provocation, but Max Taylor wasn’t one of them. Max would go a long way out of his way to avoid trouble.

  “I want to talk to Max,” he said.

  Rose shook her head. “No, Harry,” she said angrily. “No. Even if he was conscious, I wouldn’t let you near him. He’s going to die and your son’s responsible.” She gestured at the bodies with the ruined shotgun, then turned and threw it across the shed. Harry winced at the noise it made as it hit the wall and crashed to the floor among a nest of empty jars.

  “You don’t know that,” he said.

  “Oh, I do.” She turned away. “Take them away,” she told him. “And then I never want to see your face around here again. Yours or your family’s.”

  “I don’t know what happened,” he said. “And neither do you.”

  “Fuck off, Harry!” she screamed. She walked to the door, took a long, shaky breath and said more quietly, “Just fuck off. Take your boy and go home. Please.”

  After she’d gone, Harry stood looking down at the bodies, a great sad weight growing in his chest. He’d lost children before, to illness and accidents, but this was different and he didn’t know how to feel about it. It seemed that the sense of loss he felt was balanced precisely against his anger – anger at Rob, anger at Max, anger at the Taylors in general, anger at the two other boys whose names he didn’t even know.

  “Dad?” James said from the doorway.

  Harry sighed. “Come and help me take your brother home,” he said.

  Chapter Four

  “HEY,” SAID RICKY. “Going on holiday, are we?”

  “Good morning, Erika,” said Adam.

  She trotted down the gangplank onto the quay. “I thought you only just got back.”

  “Yes, I did.”

  She looked at him. “You look awful. Are you ill?”

  “I have a hangover.”

  “Don’t think that’s going to get you off working on my boat, sunshine.”

  “I thought perhaps I could sleep it off for an hour or so,” he said. He loved boats but had never worked out why they always involved early mornings.

  Ricky picked up his rucksack. “Come aboard, you daft sod. We have coffee.”

  “Coffee would be nice,” he admitted, following her. “And then some sleep.”

  One advantage Guz had had over practically every other place in Britain on the day The Sisters came was an unusual concentration of skills. HMS Drake was home to engineers, chefs, weapons experts, logisticians, psychiatrists, doctors, musicians, helicopter pilots, meteorologists, divers, boatbuilders, and more Marines than anyone knew what to do with. These were people who knew how to do things and how to get things done, and the first thing they did, in the early panicked days and months and years after the disaster, was impose Order. It had been a sturdy, no-nonsense sort of Order, but by and large that was what people needed.

  What Guz chiefly had, of course, was sailors – Plymouth had been a Navy town as far back as the Armada – and people who knew how to build boats. Almost by default, it had become a maritime superpower.

  Anna Mendonça was an old-style square-rigged ketch with .40 calibre heavy machine guns mounted fore and aft. She spent most of her time going back and forth along the South Coast, trading in small high-value items with some of the coastal communities beyond Southampton, and if sometimes the items turned out to be people, landed at dead of night on Sussex beaches, that was just part of the job.

  They were out of the Sound and making their way up the Channel before Adam felt competent enough to come up on deck.

  “Better?” Ricky asked.

  “Loads, thank you,” he said, looking around. It was a drizzly afternoon. To port the Devon coast loomed up through the dimness; everywhere else was a vague misty distance. “Is that the Spanish?”

  She looked at the three boats – two trawlers and what seemed to be an ancient cabin cruiser – riding at anchor side by side a mile or so away. “Yup. Gives me the willies.”

  The Spanish – it was assumed they were Spanish, from the names painted on their boats – had started to appear a year or so ago. There were never more than four of them at a time, and they never did anything. They just sat offshore. No one ever saw them arrive or leave; they moved under cover of darkness. There had been much debate about what to do about them. They didn’t respond to radio or hails or signal lamps or flags, just rode at anchor for a day or so and then left again. In the end, it had been decided to leave them respectfully alone; if they ever chose to make formal contact it was obviously going to be in their own time.

  “Never seen them before,” Adam said, accepting the proffered pair of binoculars and focusing on one of the trawlers. “It’s quite spooky, isn’t it.”

  “You know nobody’s ever seen a crew?” Ricky said. “Not once. This is the way stupid stories get started.”

  It was as if the sea were haunted. “Yeah.” He handed back the binoculars. “I know what you mean.”

  “Commodore’s talking about paying them a visit, maybe next year.”

  “Rea
lly? I hadn’t heard that.”

  “That’s because you’re always somewhere else.”

  This would be true. “We’re going to Spain?”

  Ricky shrugged. “I hear the idea’s to repay the compliment. Do a recce of the coast to see if we can find a port, anchor offshore for a bit, then come home.”

  He thought about it. “Seems a rum way of going about things.”

  “The Commodore knows what she’s doing.”

  Adam, who tried to limit his contact with Guz’s military authorities as much as possible, shrugged. He wondered whether a Spanish phrasebook would be waiting for him when he got back from Thanet.

  IF THE SEA was haunted, the land was even worse. Sodden by continual rain and drizzle, it was an impassable nightmare of overgrowth and fields gone wild and sudden bogs under lowering clouds. It was a slog just to get inland from Worthing.

  At the end of the first day, he pitched his tent beside an old road, its surface turned to crumbs by decades of frost and rain and the patient lifting of weeds and vegetation. He heated up some soup, and when he’d finished eating, he took a little metal box from his rucksack. There was a handle set into the side of the box; he gently pulled it out, turned it a few times, then pressed the button on the side and said, “Hello.”

  A minute or so later, a voice from the box said, “Hello.”

  He pressed the button again. “Well, I’m on my way.”

  “Understood,” said the voice. “Check in at your next contact point.”

  “Will do.” He pushed the handle back into the side of the radio and put it back in his rucksack and sighed.

  HIS NEXT CONTACT point was Brighton, where it was market day, farmers from the Downs bringing their produce into town for trade. The place looked tidy and well-organised, if a little shabby around the edges – there were only a few hundred people living here, not enough to keep everything maintained and painted. Today the population must have been almost a thousand, though, and the streets and lanes were crammed with carts and wagons and hawkers and livestock.

  He’d brought trade goods with him – some magnetic compasses, odds and ends of medical gear – and for the price of a couple of surgical scalpels still in their original packaging and an old watch he managed to get a room in a boarding house for the night. The owner, a taciturn man named Mr Brown, allowed after some questioning that he might know someone who would be prepared – for a small price – to give Adam a lift further east along the coast.

  The someone turned out to be Nigel, who had a cart drawn by a single mule and piled up with what looked like bales of military surplus clothing looted from an old warehouse.

  Unlike Mr Brown, Nigel was not remotely taciturn, and as they plodded through the drizzle along the rutted and crumbling A27, he gave Adam chapter and verse on any subject that came into his head, and that was how Adam first heard Frank’s name.

  “Pendennis, he’s called,” Nigel said. “Frank Pendennis. Lives like a king, so they say.”

  “Have you ever been up there?” Adam asked. “Thanet?”

  Nigel shook his head. “No need to; I’ve got all I need here. Besides, I hear Frank doesn’t take kindly to strangers just wandering in.” He took his pipe from his mouth and spat into the road. “I see them here sometimes, though. His people.”

  “Bit far from home.”

  “Just every now and again.” Nigel clamped the stem of his pipe between his teeth and spoke round it. “Trading. Big ugly fuckers with guns, walking round like they own the place.”

  To be fair, that could really describe a lot of people wandering around England these days. Particularly the guns. Adam was carrying a service automatic and some spare ammunition, but that was really only for defence against the packs of feral dogs roaming the countryside. He’d always thought the best way not to get into trouble was to avoid it entirely.

  “What do they trade?” he asked.

  Nigel shrugged. “Vegetables, mostly. Tomatoes. Have you ever seen a tomato?”

  Adam shook his head.

  “Fucking horrible things,” Nigel said. “Wouldn’t give you the last drop of piss off the end of my cock for one.”

  Adam filed this information away in the part of his brain where he put the stuff he didn’t want to think about. “What do they trade for? With their vegetables?”

  Nigel thought about it. “Nothing much, now you mention it,” he said. “Medical supplies, mostly. What they really do is try to talk people into going back with them.”

  “Why?”

  Nigel shrugged. “No idea, old son. Maybe they’re cannibals, eh? Looking for a good meal.” He laughed and clicked his teeth together.

  In this way, with much jolly banter, they made their way to Pevensey, and a couple of days later Adam was on the Kent Downs just north of Folkestone. Because he was there anyway and he might as well, he swung east and took a discreet look at Dover. There seemed to be some activity around the harbour, but the rest of the town appeared deserted, and he turned north again.

  As he drew closer to the Thanet coast, he started to see more and more people. Some were on horseback, others in wagons; mostly, they were on foot, in little groups, carrying a motley array of tools and equipment. A lot of them were clearing roads, cutting the rusted carcases of cars out of the encroaching vegetation and dragging them into the fields on either side. He watched them from a distance through his binoculars and they did not look particularly happy or enthusiastic, but they were getting it done. There were farmsteads; none of them fortified, which was interesting. Did these people have no enemies, no one who wanted their resources? Or did they just not care?

  After a day or so, he decided it was the latter. There were guns everywhere, mainly shotguns and mostly in the hands of people who seemed to be acting as overseers. He pondered that for a while before moving on.

  He was working from Ordnance Survey maps, over a century old, the theory being that by and large towns and cities and most of the main roads would still be in much the same place as they were before the disaster, even if they were inaccessible. The maps were good enough for navigation, but beyond that they might as well have been blank. His briefing before he left Guz had been based on not much more than an entry in an old encyclopaedia and some unconfirmed word-of-mouth that had drifted down the coast with fishermen and traders. Eleanor had reported seeing what he was seeing now – an apparently organised but impoverished community with some kind of well-armed ruling group – and then fallen silent.

  The countryside was huge and wet and empty and wild. It was easy for him to pass through it unseen, particularly as the work-crews and patrols weren’t making any great effort to hide. Navigating with map and compass, he gave Margate a wide berth, staying away from roads and trudging along the edge of overgrown fields.

  He laid up for a few days in an abandoned village near the coast, cautiously scouting the area, trying to get a feel for the place – in truth working himself up to take the next step; it was never easy. Searching the cottages and little houses, he found a rucksack and odds and ends of camping equipment and assembled a disguise for himself; a traveller looking for safety and shelter. He certainly, he thought, looked the part.

  One morning, unable to put it off any longer, he stashed the gear he’d brought with him from Guz, made one last brief radio contact, then shouldered his pilfered rucksack and set out again.

  IT TOOK HIM a week to work his way back to Brighton, coming in from the north a few days before market day. Asking around, he found a builder named George who needed a labourer for work on a row of houses inland from the seafront, and he spent the rest of the week replacing smashed windows.

  As the next market day approached and the town’s population began to swell again, he took to wandering the local pubs in his off hours, spending an evening nursing the same pint and keeping an ear open for local gossip. This led to him, on the afternoon of market day, wandering down a little street off the seafront and finding himself looking at a group of men all w
earing long waxed coats with hoods and with shotguns and rifles slung over their shoulders. They were big and beefy and many of them were shaven-headed and they were clustered around a cart full of produce.

  “Hey,” one of them said as he walked by. “Hey, old son. Fancy a tomato?”

  He took a few more steps, stopped, turned. “What?”

  The shaven-headed man held out a small red fruit. “Tomato. Only the best. Give it a try.”

  Adam looked at the fruit, thought about it, then shook his head. “Nah. I haven’t anything to give you for it.”

  “Listen,” the shaven-headed man said, lowering his voice until it was a conspiratorial rumble. “Between you and me, these things are just going to rot, nobody wants to pay our prices. You can have this one for free.”

  Adam shrugged. “You should drop your price, then.” But he took the tomato and turned it over in his hand. It felt squishy and overripe, and there were spots of black mould on its skin.

  “Look, it took a lot of work to grow these. Give it a try.”

  Adam bit into the tomato and was rewarded with an unexpected and unwelcome spurt of juice and seeds. Nigel had been right; it tasted awful. But he chewed and swallowed anyway.

  “I’m Albie,” said the shaven-headed man. “Albie Dodd.”

  “Adam Hardy,” he said, running his tongue over his teeth to dislodge errant seeds.

  “You from round here?”

  “Horsham.”

  “In town for the market?”

  “Working. Fixing up houses.”

  Albie nodded. “What’s your line then, Adam? Brickie? Roofer?”

  Adam shrugged. “I can fix windows.”

  Albie looked thoughtful. “You know, we could use people who can fix windows.”

  “Who’s ‘we’?”

  “Thanet.”