On Deadly Ground

by Simon Clark

  ‘I’m sure.’

  Stephen looked at me. I nodded. ‘Come on, let’s do it.’

  We were in the air before sunrise. Kate sat up front with Howard. I sat in the back, sleeping-bags, ammo belts, rifles piled across my knee and mounded on the spare seat beside me.

  No one spoke, but there was a sense of tension, even excitement, that filled the cabin with something like an electric charge. What the Hell would we find in London? Again, I felt a wave of uncertainty about whether I’d see Fountains Moor again.

  Howard brought the plane in a huge arc, up high over the moor. Down below I could just make out that cleft in the hillside, and although I couldn’t see them, I imagined that line of tents running two by two alongside the stream.

  Then, just for a second, I saw a figure far below. It was waving.

  It was little more than a speck. But I had no doubt in my mind who it was.

  Once more I’d conjured the image of Caroline. At least I believed the image was the product of my imagination. Or maybe it really was her ghost. Can love be so strong it survives death itself? Who knows? I closed my eyes, but in my mind’s eye I saw her waving goodbye. A figure that grew tinier and tinier as the plane carried me south.

  Chapter 58

  It’s bizarre looking back. The flight down to London was strangely surreal. There we were, my old friend Howard Sparkman at the controls, wearing shades against the great wash of morning sunlight slamming through the glass. And there was Kate Robinson. The girl I once had the hots for. The girl I’d craved so much I’d lie awake in bed in my old family home back on Trueman Way in Fairburn. Every so often she’d lift the binoculars to those clear green eyes of hers, make some comment to Howard. Most of what she said I missed because of the sound of the engine whirling the prop at more than two thousand revolutions per minute, pulling us ever further away from home.

  Above us the sky was blue, cloudless; below the countryside was a green carpet, patterned with roads, rivers, towns, villages.

  For weeks we’d been searching that countryside for an overlooked tin of carrots or a few onions, or whatever we could find that would keep us on the right side of starvation for just another twenty-four hours. We’d walk by the rotting corpses of people—people just like us—who’d not made it through the summer. All the time the stink of rot in our nostrils. Or the stink of burning where the ground was heating up. All the time keeping your senses fine-tuned so you’d see the tell-tale signs of a refugee camp just ahead, whose occupants just might have turned to cannibalism to ensure they got enough protein to survive.

  ‘Rick?’

  ‘Yeah?’ I leaned forward to hear what Kate had to say above the engine noise.

  She twisted in her seat. ‘Do you know that town?’

  ‘Doncaster.’

  ‘You sure?’ Howard called back. ‘I’m trying to follow the East Coast railway line down to London.’

  ‘That goes through Doncaster.’

  ‘I know. But did Doncaster ever have a lake that size?’

  I took a second look. ‘Jesus. What a mess.’

  ‘What’s left of it. Is that Doncaster?’

  ‘Uh…Kate, can I have the binoculars? Thanks.’

  ‘The lake’s covering the railway line and the major roads,’ Howard said. ‘The AlM’s completely flooded.’

  ‘Can’t you take us down lower?’

  ‘I’m at three thousand metres. I’ll risk going down to two thousand.’

  ‘Risk?’ Kate asked.

  Howard shrugged. ‘People are desperate. They imagine I’m flying a plane packed to the wing struts with chocolate or roast beef sandwiches or something. They take pot shots at me.’

  I looked down. From this height nothing looked spectacularly amiss. I could see houses, factories, schools, playing fields. The whole place looked green with trees lining housing estate roads. It looked peaceful, unthreatening. Of course you didn’t know what carnage had happened down there when civilization rolled over and died on us. No doubt those green gardens were by now littered with human skulls picked shiny white by birds and rats.

  The only evidence that the landscape was undergoing some pretty fundamental changes was the vast lake that now stretched out for kilometre upon kilometre to the south of the town.

  ‘I’ll make another pass over the town centre.’ Howard swung the plane round in a tight arc. Instinctively I hung onto the seat belt. The plane seemed to balance on its wing tip. And I couldn’t escape the sensation that I could fall right out of the plane to splatter onto a road far below. The townscape rolled beneath me. Shopping malls, supermarkets, houses, shops; a jumble of geometric shapes of predominantly black slate roofs.

  ‘What do you think, Rick?’

  ‘Just a moment. Ah, yeah. I can see the racecourse.’

  ‘Doncaster?’

  ‘Definitely.’

  ‘See any sign of the railway line?’

  ‘Nope. It must be underwater.’

  ‘If this is Doncaster, we should be able to pick it up by flying due south.’

  ‘It’s Doncaster, all right. There’s what’s left of the Leisure Park. I once went out with a girl from Doncaster. We used to go ice-skating there.’

  ‘Ice-skating?’ Kate’s green eyes flashed with amusement.

  ‘Yeah, ice-skating.’ I grinned.

  ‘Sorry,’ she smiled. ‘I just can’t imagine you ice-skating.’

  ‘The things we do for love, eh?’ I found myself blushing so I broke eye contact and looked down again.

  The Dome leisure complex where I’d fallen flat on my back so many times trying to skate hand-in-hand with Julie slid by far below. The glass dome that topped the white building had been shattered. For a second I had a vivid mental picture of the interior. The Dome’s interconnecting swimming pools would be knee deep by now; they’d be slimed a disgusting green. The water slide flumes would be dry, cracked. Razor-sharp pieces of glass would litter the edge of the pools where I’d seen children laughing and shrieking and running barefoot. Maybe a water rat grown plump on human flesh would sit stroking its whiskers beneath the dead tropical plants that had once given the pool area a Caribbean feel. Everything would be rotting back into the ground. The once gleaming silver hand rails would be red with rust. The changing cubicles would be deserted. I could imagine the ghostly laughter and shouts of children drying themselves after the swim and calling out to one another:

  ‘Where next, Paul?’

  ‘Pizza!’

  ‘Nah! McDonalds?’

  ‘Going bowling this aft?’

  ‘If you lend us some dough.’

  ‘Hey, Bio-Hazard, what do you think this spot is?’

  ‘Pox.’

  ‘On my eyelid?’

  ‘Fluttered his eyelashes at Pussy Galore again.’

  ‘Winker!’

  ‘Ow!’

  ‘Mum…Terry won’t let go of my arm.’

  ‘Rick? Rick…hallo…reality calling planet Rick Kennedy.’

  I came out of it. ‘Uh, sorry. Miles away.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Well what?’

  She smiled and shook her head. ‘You really were away with the fairies. I only asked if you wanted a coffee.’

  I smiled. ‘Thanks.’

  The plane left Doncaster behind. I watched as the town receded. I saw the Warner Brothers cinema where Julie and I had sat in the back row through some movie that we never even watched. We’d kissed non-stop. I’d worked my hand up under her top.

  The cinema now stood out of the lake like a square boat, the water level as high as the tops of the entrance doors. The suburb of Bessacarr to the south was flooded, too; dozens of once expensive detached houses stood in the lake looking like a flotilla of little boats. Here the trees were dead; they thrust skeletal branches from the flood waters, the leaves long gone.

  Julie lived in one of those houses. Where was she now? Alive? Dead? Fighting tooth and nail for survival?

  I squinted through the binoculars. T
he rooftops now looked close enough to reach out and touch. One of the houses had been burned out, leaving a brick shell. Bizarrely, a pair of horses swam along a flooded avenue. On another roof someone had tied a white bed sheet flat across the tiles. Written across it in black paint was one word: HELP.

  In every one of those houses an individual or a whole family would have had to confront this disaster. They all would have had stories to tell of terror when they knew the society that had protected them all these years had vanished almost overnight and of how they struggled for survival.

  If anything, right then, high above Doncaster’s flooded suburbs, I felt a calm detachment. As if I was watching old news footage. The fact was: it had happened. There was no point in crying over spilt milk. We had to go forward. Survive. Create new lives.

  Or die trying.

  Chapter 59

  ‘Careful, Rick. It’s hot.’

  Kate handed me a steaming plastic mug, then carefully stoppered the thermos.

  ‘Thanks. How long now, Howard?’

  ‘About another hour. You OK in the back?’

  ‘Yeah, but I was just wondering when the stewardess would be bringing dinner round.’

  Howard laughed. ‘Help yourself to a mint.’

  He handed back a tube.

  ‘You certainly take care of your passengers.’

  ‘Just wait until you see me land this thing. You might prefer walking back.’

  ‘I’ll risk it. I don’t think you’d get far on foot down there.’

  Kate pointed down through the window. ‘Grantham,’ she said, ‘or at least what’s left of it.’

  I looked down. The railway line ran along the western edge of the town, the rails dull and rusted now. I saw the station. But of the town of Grantham there was precious little. I remembered it as a pleasant-looking town of redbrick buildings with a cattle market and tall steepled church. Now where Grantham once stood was a hole.

  Well, a more precise description would be a crater.

  ‘A blowout of subterranean gas.’ Kate took the binoculars back to take a closer look. ‘That crater must cover the area of a couple of football fields.’

  ‘Hell.’ I shook my head. ‘It must have gone up like a hydrogen bomb. Have you seen all the houses? They’re wrecked.’

  Most of Grantham had been flattened by the huge explosion: trees all lay in the same direction as though someone had painstakingly felled them so that they would point away from the epicentre. Even from this altitude I could see that the force of the blast had cleanly shorn away the branches and bark leaving the trunks like so many white matchsticks. The crater itself, occupying the position where the Isaac Newton shopping centre once stood, was a neat circle, with steep dirt sides running down to where water had pooled at the bottom. Already the earth slopes were turning green where plant life relentlessly counter-attacked. No doubt in five years or so if I was to overfly the area again—if I was still alive—I’d see nothing but a green expanse where plants had overgrown the shattered town. And in the middle of that greenery would be the crater with a pond in the bottom, probably populated by frogs and ducks.

  That was if this stupid frigging planet hadn’t gone completely incandescent in that time.

  We flew steadily south. The sun shone bright in the sky.

  ‘I’ve not seen any traffic on the roads,’ I said, ‘Or even any people walking.’

  ‘Nor me,’ Kate said.

  ‘It’s the altitude.’ Howard pushed the sunglasses up the bridge of his nose. ‘You’d see people if we flew low enough.’

  ‘There’s Peterborough.’ Kate pointed. ‘It looks as if someone’s not been careful when they’ve been playing with matches.’

  Most of the town had gone up in flames. Whether from the effects of a local hotspot beneath the ground, deliberate arson or common-or-garden accident you couldn’t tell. Most of the buildings in the town centre were blackened by fire. With no fire service in existence flames would have spread unchecked.

  Near the railway station a high-speed Intercity passenger train had jumped off the tracks. Carriages lay jumbled like child’s toys alongside the railway line where it crossed the river. The locomotive itself had crashed down onto a block of once-elegant waterside apartments, smashing through walls and tearing through floors.

  Again, all I could feel was that cool, virtually Olympian detachment. Perhaps that was part of the survival mechanism, too. Maybe you would go insane if you couldn’t stop yourself constantly imagining what it would really be like when that loco came smashing through your bedroom wall. Or hearing the crash, then walking outside to see dozens of people spilled out from the rail carriages to lie broken and bloody on the ground.

  As we flew on I began to feel that mixture of nervousness and excitement increase. The rain forest’s worth of butterflies fluttered madly in my stomach. In the distance, through the haze, I could just make out the first high-rise blocks of London. Just a few months ago it had been one of the six largest cities in the world, home to more than six million people. How many of those millions had survived? Howard had told us that the low-lying areas had been flooded.

  Now he was taking us into that vast tract of concrete, brick and stone buildings that clung to the south-eastern part of England like some monstrous scab.

  ‘Now comes the tricky part,’ Howard said ‘Finding the island.’

  ‘What should we look out for?’

  ‘It’s not far from Hampstead. That’s high ground so the roads will be clear of any water. Once I find those I can find the place. The island itself is a figure eight shape. Basically it’s one island that’s split in two by a railway cutting.’

  ‘I take it this wasn’t an island until a few weeks ago?’

  ‘That’s right. I don’t know what happened to the River Thames downstream, but it’s been blocked, either by land upheavals or subterranean explosions. The whole river’s backing up.’

  ‘So the island might have been covered since the last time you were here?’

  Howard shook his head. ‘My guess is the Thames has found a new outlet to the sea. The water levels seem to have stabilized. But it’s no longer tidal. Ah, damn. I think I missed it. Rick?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Just look back. Can you see two tower blocks with a white church steeple in between?’

  ‘Got it. Straight behind us.’

  ‘Good. I just need to circle to the right. There to the left is Hampstead. Now…just ahead. There’s Camden. Well, what you can actually see of it above the flood water.’

  ‘Now that does look Biblical,’ I said. ‘London beneath the Flood.’

  ‘My God.’ Kate’s voice sounded small. ‘All those people…all those poor people.’

  ‘Right, ladies and gentlemen. Please extinguish all cigarettes, put your seats in the upright position. And you might wish to close your eyes. This airport’s a bit on the small side.’

  ‘Airport?’

  ‘OK, so it’s a football field.’ He shot us a grim smile. ‘At least it’s hard and it’s flat and it might just be long enough. Eyes shut? Here goes.’

  Chapter 60

  SPARKY’S ISLAND. PRIVATE. KEEP OFF.

  That’s what Kate Robinson in a lighter moment chalked on a wall that faced outwards across the new lake created by the mother and grandmother of all floods. It was broken only by lamp posts poking their glass heads above the waters, house roofs, treetops (now dead and looking bone-dry).

  We’d been there eight hours. Howard Sparkman hadn’t even turned off the engine. We’d unloaded our supplies, sleeping-bags, tents, rifles, then he’d taxied to one end of the football field, turned the plane and taken off, circling the island once before disappearing north back to Fountains Moor. And right then Fountains Moor seemed so remote it could have been on one of the remoter planets on the edge of the Solar System.

  ‘Welcome to Holiday Island,’ Kate had said, shouldering her backpack.

  ‘As long as the natives are friendly.’

/>   ‘Don’t count on it.’

  ‘OK, shall we explore?’

  It didn’t take long. The figure eight shaped island covered only a few acres. On one half of the island, the lowest-lying part, were a couple of warehouses. These must have been just part of an industrial estate, the rest of which now lay largely submerged. At least the food warehouse was still high and dry, and was, as Howard had promised, still untouched. We walked round it, mouths open in awe. Stacked there were canned foods by the ton. Sometimes we just had to stop and run our hands wonderingly over cases of canned chicken pies, or sweetcorn, or ratatouille or corned beef.

  Kate and I left the warehouse on a high.

  ‘It’ll last months!’

  ‘Certainly all winter.’ Kate looked close to skipping. The rifle jiggled on her back as she walked.

  ‘Could you believe all that food? There must be a hundred thousand cans.’

  ‘More.’

  ‘Old Howard certainly dropped lucky there.’

  ‘Deserves a knighthood.’

  ‘At the very least.’

  She grinned. ‘I know, we’ll name the island after him.’

  ‘All right, then. Sparky’s Island.’

  So that’s how Kate came to chalk the notice on the wall that overlooked a drowned, dead London.

  As Howard had said, we reached the other half of the island via a footbridge. Beneath us the flooded railway cutting ran as straight as a canal. A train lay at the bottom with waves lapping gently across the carriage roofs. At the far side of the footbridge an exercise bicycle stood incongruously in the middle of the path. A little further on a Rolls-Royce, painted a delicate powder blue, had been abandoned on a dirt track that ended in a clump of trees. In the other direction, the track now led down to disappear beneath the lake of scummy, black water.

  Kate walked up to the Rolls-Royce and opened the door. ‘Ah, someone’s been thoughtful?’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘They’ve left us a welcome grocery pack.’ She lifted out a carrier bag and looked inside. ‘One tin of oysters, two jars of caviar and three bottles of champagne.’