Afterlight

by Alex Scarrow

  Jenny managed a wheezy laugh - little more than a weak rattling hiss and a half-smile.

  Don’t give up, Jenny. They need you here.

  ‘No they don’t, they’re fed up with me in charge. Anyway, I’ve had enough—’

  Don’t let someone else take over, Jenny. Don’t let someone who wants to be in charge take over. You know where that leads.

  Andy had always hated politicians. He’d always joked that the best way to filter out the bad seeds was to place a job ad for Prime Minister in a national newspaper and all those that applied would be automatically disqualified. The bad seeds - those were the ones who were going to be jockeying for position whilst she lay here in the infirmary drugged to the eyeballs.

  Don’t let anyone else take over, Jen. I’m serious. You’ve made something good here. Don’t let someone turn it into something else.

  ‘But, Andy, I can’t do it any more.’

  Fight for it, Jenny, fight for it. Don’t give up.

  Then he was gone. Just like that. Gone. Conjured up and magicked away just as easily by her mind.

  ‘Andy?’ She reached out with a hand, wincing as taut healing skin stretched across her shoulder blades, and felt the cot where he’d been sitting. She wanted her hallucination back.

  ‘Andy, please . . . I need you,’ she whispered, settling her head back against the pillow, exhausted, dizzy, spent. ‘Please . . . come . . . back . . .’

  Chapter 27

  10 years AC

  Norfolk

  ‘I’m glad we didn’t set up camp in there,’ said Helen, nodding towards the slip road with its diner and petrol station alongside it. ‘It just feels wrong, sort of like it’s a . . . I don’t know, like it’s some sort of museum.’

  Jacob, Leona and Nathan finished assembling the tents, the kind that required little more than threading thin flexible plastic rods through several vinyl sleeves. They’d picked them up at a camping store along with a small camping trailer designed to attach to a car’s bumper, that they were towing behind their bikes on the end of several lengths of nylon rope.

  ‘Like one of those little thingies set up in a whatcha-call-it to show you what a typical street looked like in olden times.’

  ‘A diorama?’ said Jacob.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Diorama? Where they sort of make a scene of exhibits and stuff from the past.’

  Helen smiled dizzily. ‘Yeah, one of them things.’ Her pale brow knotted momentarily. ‘I think me mum took me to one of those once. All dark streets at night and flickery gas lamps. Must’ve been four or five then.’ She glanced across at the empty buildings. Although some of the smaller windows were still intact, it was clear that both the diner and the petrol station had long ago been thoroughly picked clean.

  ‘Anyway, glad we’re camping out here on the road, really. I hate going in buildings and finding you know . . . stuff.’

  She let the rest of her words go. Didn’t need saying. They knew what she meant; the dried and leathered husks of people.

  ‘Jay, catch!’

  Jacob looked up as Nathan tossed him a sealed tub of freeze-dried pasta. He caught it in both hands. Heavy. Something else they’d managed to find at the same retail park outside Bracton in the camping supplies warehouse. There were gallon tubs of this stuff in storage at the back; freeze-dried ‘meal solutions’ that required only cold water to metamorphose what looked like flakes of dust and nuggets of gravel into a palatable meal. Jacob noticed on the plastic lids covering the foil seal a ‘best by’ date of 2039. This stuff, kept dry, lasted decades. They’d piled a dozen tubs onto the back of the tow cart. Enough food to keep them going for weeks. Certainly enough to get them to London and back.

  He scooped out four portions using the plastic ladle inside and poured in four pints of water from a plastic jug; stirring the savoury porridge until the desiccated flakes of pasta and nuggets of ham and vegetable began to swell. Before his eyes the sludge-like mixture began to look almost like food.

  Half an hour later, the sludge was bubbling in a pan over a campfire. Helen dumped an armful of things to burn that she’d gathered from the diner: vinyl seat cushions, fading menu cards promising an all-day breakfast for £5.75, lace curtain trim from the windows, the pine legs from half a dozen stools.

  Although the day had been bright and dry, it was getting much cooler out here in the middle of the road now the sun had gone down.

  Nathan arrived with another load of flammable bric-a-brac; a stack of glossy magazines and A to Z road maps from the garage.

  ‘But what I mean is,’ said Helen, ‘what I’m saying is . . . is . . . I just don’t get it.’

  Leona rolled her eyes tiredly. In the sputtering light of the campfire, no one seemed to notice.

  ‘What’s the bit you don’t get, Helen?’ asked Nathan.

  Her bottom lip pouted and her eyebrows rumpled thoughtfully. ‘Why . . . I guess . . . why it all happened so quickly.’

  This subject was a floor-time discussion topic Leona had hosted during morning class on many an occasion. For children like Helen, who would have been only five at the time of the crash, and those younger, it seemed to be a bewildering piece of history; almost mysterious, like the mythical fall of Atlantis or the sudden collapse of the Roman Empire.

  ‘Our dad knew it was going to happen,’ said Jacob. ‘He worked in the oil business, didn’t he, Lee?’

  She nodded in a vague way, eyes lost in the fire.

  ‘Dad said the oil was running out quickly back then. He called it “peak oil”. Said it was running out much faster than anyone wanted to admit.’ Jacob had heard Mum and Leona discuss that week many times over. ‘So, because there wasn’t much of it, no one managed to build up reserves, no one had it spare. So when those bombs exploded in . . . in . . . those Arab countries and all those other oil places, and that big tanker thing blocked the important shipping channel over there and the oil completely stopped, there was nothing anyone could do. It was too late.’

  He tossed several pages from a faded magazine onto the fire, producing a momentary flickering of green flame. ‘There was no oil for anyone. That meant no fuel. No fuel meant nobody bringing food on ships and planes to England.’

  Helen shook her head. ‘So why weren’t we growing our own food here?’

  Jacob shrugged. ‘It was cheaper to import it than grow it ourselves. Right, Lee?’

  She nodded mutely. ‘Economics. The finely tuned engine.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Jacob, ‘the “Finely Tuned Engine”.’ He sighed.

  Nathan shrugged. ‘The fuck’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Something our dad used to say.’

  Nathan and Helen stared at him, none the wiser.

  ‘It’s what Dad called the world,’ he answered. ‘It was one of his sayings, wasn’t it, Lee?’

  She nodded.

  Jacob nodded at her. ‘Go on, you can explain it better than me.’

  She sighed. ‘It was just one of his metaphors: the global economy was like a perfectly tuned engine, like a Formula One racing car; tuned to deliver the best possible performance and profit, but only under, like, perfect racing conditions.’ She tossed a menu card on the fire. ‘So, sure, it drives just fine on smooth dry tarmac. But not so good at coping with a pothole, or crossing a muddy bumpy field. That’s what the world was - a finely tuned engine for churning out profit. That’s all. Efficient, but very fragile. No money wasted on non-profit stuff like safety margins or back-up systems. No money wasted on tedious things like emergency storage or contingency supplies.’

  She looked across the fire at them. ‘For instance, no supermarket was ever going to bother wasting its profits on setting up expensive warehousing for storage when they could rely on a just-in-time distribution system. So this country only ever had about forty-eight hours’ worth of food in it. It was always coming in on ships and trucks, refrigerated and as fresh as the day it was picked and packaged.’

  ‘Dad used to say w
e’d be screwed in the UK if something serious ever happened,’ added Jacob. ‘More screwed than just about any other country in the world.’

  ‘True, that,’ Nathan nodded.

  ‘There were no emergency stockpiles for us. No contingency planning, ’ said Leona. ‘We were totally caught out.’

  ‘Dad used to say the fuckwits who ran this country didn’t have a clue between them.’

  Leona smiled in the dark. He certainly did. She remembered him shaking his head in disgust at the TV, snorting at the dismissive platitudes offered by government suits when uttered by some talking-head.

  The fire crackled in the silence. Jacob tossed some broken strips of chipboard onto the flames.

  ‘It was only in the last year or so, when oil started getting really expensive, that the big important fuckwits at the top - the men in smart suits - began to realise their finely tuned engine was struggling to cope; that we were all gonna get caught out by something.’

  ‘So why didn’t they change things?’ asked Helen.

  Jacob shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’

  Leona looked up. ‘Because the fuckwits in suits were only thinking about the next financial quarter and their next big bonus, that’s why.’

  The others turned. It was the first real sign of life they’d had out of her all day.

  ‘Too greedy for their own good.’

  ‘Well, that’s just silly,’ said Helen. ‘The men in charge should’ve fixed things if they knew they were all wrong.’

  ‘Yeah, right,’ muttered Leona. ‘So, a pothole in the road finally turned up.’

  ‘The bombs in those oil places?’ said Helen.

  Leona nodded. ‘And our finely tuned engine just rattled and fell to pieces.’

  ‘Within a single week,’ added Jacob.

  Leona tossed the wooden leg of a stool onto the fire, sending a small shower of sparks up into the sky, the flames momentarily flickering with renewed appetite. The dancing pool of amber light stretched a little further up and down the smooth tarmac of the motorway, picking out several abandoned cars along the hard shoulder, nestling amidst tufts of weeds that emerged between the deflated tyres and wheel arches.

  ‘I suppose we all had it coming,’ said Jacob after a while.

  Leona nodded, her eyes glinting, reflecting the guttering flames. ‘Dad was right,’ she uttered quietly, before shuffling down on her side and zipping up her sleeping bag.

  Chapter 28

  10 years AC

  ‘LeMan 49/25a’ - ClarenCo Gas Rig Complex, North Sea

  Walter held her hand. He knew she wasn’t hearing any of this, she was elsewhere, the place people go when they’re dosed up on enough codeine to knock out a horse.

  ‘The explosion shredded the feed pipes, it doubled back into the methane storage cylinder and blew that to pieces. The shards of that lacerated the other two of our three digesters. So, before we’re going to have some power again, I’m going to need to find replacements for those as well.’ He sighed. ‘They were bloody well perfect for the job as well. I suppose if I can find another brewery nearby . . .’

  Jenny lay still, her breathing deep and even. The right side of her face, her right shoulder and arm and her torso were bandaged. The burns from the flash of gas igniting had been third degree across her shoulder and arm, and second degree across her neck and the right side of her face. Dr Gupta had told him Jenny had something like fifteen to twenty per cent damage to her BSA - body surface area. A person could quite easily die from that amount of damage, she’d added.

  An infection and a fever had threatened to complicate the matter. So there was little more she could do but dress the knitting skin and keep it as clean as she could and bombard her with antibiotics.

  It looked as if the infections were clearing up and the fever lifting. Jenny’s temperature was down, although the skin, where it had burned badly, still radiated an almost fever-like heat. Tami was still keeping Jenny out for the count; sedated and anaesthetised with a cocktail of drugs - as much as she dared use together.

  ‘There’ll be extensive scarring,’ she had told Walter. ‘This side of her face, her neck and her shoulder. There’s a chance some of her hair may not grow back on the right side. For a woman that’s, well, that’s not easy to accept.’

  The scars were always going to be there, across her cheek and neck where she could easily see them every time she faced a mirror; always reminding herself of the day she lost a granddaughter.

  He sighed, squeezing her hand gently.

  Life’s a complete bastard, isn’t it? A completely cruel malicious bastard.

  Truth was, Hannah died because she was playing where she shouldn’t, and had kicked the feed pipe by accident. That would do it, he realised. That would have been enough to dislodge the G-clamp.

  But that’s what they’re saying, isn’t it? He kept overhearing mutterings that it was his shoddy workmanship that had killed the poor girl. Nasty spiteful assertions that the silly fool had cut too many corners, eager to hurry up and make electricity so he could impress Jenny - woo her into his cot with a spectacular display of his practical ingenuity.

  Bitches.

  And with Jenny out of the loop for now, for quite a few weeks, if not months, according to Dr Gupta, Walter was having to stand in as her replacement. No one seemed to be particularly happy with that idea. Certainly not that sour-faced bitch, Alice Harton, who seemed to be taking every opportunity to be canvassing support and stoking dissent.

  Oh, yes, she sees herself as Jenny’s replacement all right.

  Without Jenny at his side he suddenly felt very lonely. Not even the other old boys, Howard and Dennis, were bothering to stand by him. David Cudmore, the chap Alice was bedding right now, must have talked them round for her. They all bunked together on the drilling platform, all thick as thieves.

  And there was that Latoc fella, too. He was over there - he seemed to have attracted something of a following.

  Groupies. That’s what they were. His adoring bloody fan club.

  Walter didn’t have a cluster of people around him that could shore him up. If Jenny’s kids hadn’t buggered off and left him, he’d at least have had them gathered close and giving him some support. But instead, all he had was Tami, and perhaps Martha, although she seemed to be increasingly interested in spending time up the far end of the platforms.

  Another bloody groupie probably.

  Everyone else . . . they were carrying on with their duties as they were spelled out on the whiteboard and turning up for their correct meal sittings; doing their bit and politely nodding at Walter when he had to issue instructions. But that was hardly support.

  ‘Jesus, Jenny, hurry up and get better,’ he muttered.

  She stirred in her sleep, her clogged voice calling softly for someone.

  He wondered how much she was aware of things. Every day there were periods when her glassy eyes were open and she was groggy but awake; moments when she could manage a few muddled words through the fog of drugs, as she sipped carefully spooned tepid stew - not hot, that would hurt the raw skin around her lips. But those were snatched moments amidst a chemical haze. He wondered if she even knew Hannah was gone, that her children had deserted them.

  Oh, Jesus.

  Thing is, it would be down to him to tell her; news that was going to break her heart. Not now though - not now. If she really could hear him, then that was news she could do without knowing at this point in time.

  He looked at her hand, strangely untouched by the explosion, a lean and elegant hand. A grandmother’s hand. A mother’s hand . . . a beautiful hand. He raised it to his lips and kissed it gently, wishing he was twelve years younger and more her type; wishing he was a bit more like the husband she had lost in the crash. He knew she still mourned him, still spoke to him in quiet moments.

  He sighed. Only with her like this, unconscious, did he have the courage to say what he’d yearned to say for a number of years now.

  ‘I love you, Jenny,’ he
whispered. ‘I’d do anything for you. You know that, don’t you? Absolutely bloody anything.’

  Chapter 29

  10 years AC

  Thetford, Norfolk

  It was far easier to replace Helen’s bicycle than bother to fix the puncture. It went flat with an explosive pfffft just outside Thetford. Half a mile further along the road they rolled past a turning that promised them yet another retail park. Five minutes later the wheels of their bikes and the trailer rolled across a broad leaf-strewn parking forecourt. Untamed weeds pushed up in places, and the tarmac was lumpy where the roots of a row of decorative saplings were making a show of their spread down one side.

  Like every other parking area they’d encountered, this one was more or less bereft of cars. Jacob remembered seeing roads clogged with vehicles in the week after the crash. It had seemed any car or van with at least a quarter of a tank of petrol had been pressed into service, packed with families desperately trying to get away from the chaotic anarchy of London.

  But every artery out of the city had been sealed with a roadblock manned either by armed police and soldiers or ‘emergency response workers’ - civilians hastily pressed into service, armed and invariably supervised by a solitary policeman. They’d quickly discovered the civilian workers were a greater hazard, using the roadblocks as an opportunity to stop and shake down people for water and food supplies. Every major road and motorway out of London was now a graveyard of cars, vans and trucks - a carpet of immobile metal rooftops, bubbling and blistering from the rust spreading beneath their paintwork. The frames of their windscreens dotted green with small islands of moss, anchored to the perishing rubber seals.

  The retail park looked like the dozen others they’d passed by in the last couple of days; even damaged to the same degree, as if a tacit agreement had passed amongst the panicking people of Britain that IKEA, Mothercare, Pets World, B&Q and the ubiquitous McDonald’s were to be ruthlessly targeted and plundered, and the likes of Currys, Carpetright and PC World were to be left well alone.