Afterlight

by Alex Scarrow

  Jenny angrily snatched a cushion in one hand, wondering what she was going to do with it. Throw it at him?

  ‘What? What’s Hannah got to do with anything?!’

  ‘You remember the day she was missing?’ continued Valérie. ‘You remember he did not want anyone to search that generator room, yes?’

  All of a sudden she could see where he was going with that. ‘Don’t you dare say another fucking word! Don’t you even think of trying that with me. Do you hear?’

  Jenny dropped the cushion and took several steps towards the door, before turning to face him. ‘Walter’s a bloody good man. I’ve relied on him for years! He’s done so much for us. Don’t try and—’

  ‘Jennifer, I am telling you what people are thinking. That is all.’

  ‘I came here to discuss these evictions! And that, Valérie, is stopping right now!’

  He said nothing.

  ‘And the mealtimes will be sat according to work groups. Do you understand!’ she added. ‘We are not splitting this place up into your kingdom and mine!’

  He shrugged. ‘It’s too late.’

  She turned for the doorway.

  ‘Jennifer,’ Valérie called out after her.

  She stopped in the corridor outside.

  ‘You are going to lose these people to me, Jennifer . . . and to God. Then you will be alone. Just you and Walter.’

  She turned round. ‘There’s four hundred and fifty people here. How many come to listen to you? A hundred?’

  ‘More each day,’ he replied almost apologetically. ‘Soon it will be all.’

  Jenny felt rage bubbling up and out of control. She knew it was going to come out as a shrill bark before she’d even opened her mouth. ‘Right! That’s it!! I want you off this rig, NOW!!’

  He said nothing.

  ‘I WANT YOU TO FUCKING LEAVE, NOW!!’ Her voice rang off the metal walls beside her, down the passageway and out into the space of the compression module’s gutted main chamber.

  His reply was measured and quiet. ‘No. I have work to do here.’

  She turned and headed down the passage and out onto a walkway that overlooked the cavernous interior of the module. She saw pale oval faces peering out from a jungle of hammocks and bunks, between washing lines strewn from one side to the other, from the floor, up three storeys to the ceiling. Eyes followed her as she followed the railed walkway to a door that led outside onto an external staircase.

  They all heard that. Heard me lose control. Shit.

  Chapter 56

  10 years AC

  O2 Arena - ‘Safety Zone 4’, London

  Snoop sat down at Maxwell’s beckon; the leather sofa creaking softly. Through the thick double doors of his quarters they could hear some of the boys whooping with delight as they scored a goal. They were kicking a football around on the arena’s main floor. A game usually ended with a punch-up. So far, it seemed, they’d managed without it turning into a fight.

  He could see there was something on the old man’s mind. ‘What’s this about, Chief?’

  Maxwell offered him a thin smile and steepled his fingers thoughtfully. ‘The future, Edward. The future.’

  Something flipped uncomfortably inside him. The last time he’d seen the old bastard looking like this was last year, when he’d awoken in the middle of the night and wandered into his quarters at the top of the arena, away from the boys. He’d ordered Snoop’s girl to dress and leave immediately. Once alone, he’d casually wondered what Snoop’s opinion on some sort of a collective suicide might be. Something potent stirred into the evening meal; no one need know.

  He’d been drinking heavily that night. And it had been the first time Snoop’s confidence in Maxwell had been shaken.

  The old fucker had passed out shortly afterwards and he’d had the boys take him back down and put him to bed. Next morning, it was like the conversation had never happened.

  ‘What you got in mind?’ Snoop asked warily.

  Maxwell looked across the coffee table at him. ‘We’re moving.’

  ‘Moving?’

  He nodded. ‘You heard me right, Edward.’

  ‘But . . . we got our shit sorted here, right, Chief?’

  Maxwell shook his head. ‘No, our shit here, I’m afraid, is not sorted.’ He smiled. ‘You know that, Edward. Come on. You’re a smart lad, you know that just as well as me.’

  ‘We growin’ all types of shit out front and stuff.’ Even as he blurted that, Snoop knew it was empty bluster. What they were growing was nowhere near enough to feed them all. It padded out the tasteless gunk that was served up each day; it was definitely slowing down the rate at which they were eating their way through the countless pallets of tinned and dried food packs, stored down on the mezzanine floor. But it wasn’t enough to feed them.

  ‘Edward, I did another stock take a fortnight ago. It’s not good. We’ll have to start evicting people soon.’

  Snoop was silent for a moment. ‘S’really that bad, man?’

  Maxwell sighed. ‘Edward, you’ve been downstairs with me. You know what it’s like.’

  Snoop nodded. A growing sea of empty wooden pallets, flattened cardboard boxes, tossed aside sheets of plastic wrapping. He hated going down there. He always emerged with a queasy sense of unease in his gut; as if the world’s future was measured by how much of the floor was still occupied by squat towers of untapped polythene-wrapped supplies. He let the Chief do the number-crunching, the worrying. The man had a plan, right?

  ‘We have about enough food to last into next year. Then we’ll be left with whatever’s being grown outside.’

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘Yes, shit. But that can’t be such a big surprise for you, Edward?’

  He stroked his chin. ‘Didn’t think it was that bad, tha’s all.’

  ‘It’s not just the food; the fuel for the generators. It’s nearly all gone, Edward. There won’t be too many more party nights for our boys.’

  ‘But we got fuel in them barges out back, yeah?’

  ‘No, it’s an entirely different grade of diesel. You can’t pour that in, it’ll clog everything up.’

  Snoop folded his arms unhappily. ‘Why the fuck I learnin’ this shit now, man?’

  Maxwell stared sharply at him. ‘Talk to me like that again and you’ll be out, Edward, do you understand?’

  Snoop realised he was pushing his luck. He might be able to snap the man’s old wattled neck without any real effort but that would leave him in charge; leave him holding the baby . . .

  . . . just when it needs its shit cleaned up.

  ‘Sorry, Chief.’

  Through the double doors the boys roared. Someone must have scored again.

  ‘Look,’ said Maxwell, ‘we knew this day would eventually come, Edward. We’re lucky to have lasted this long. But here it is. And it will be bad. When the food and the generators run out, the boys will turn on you and I, then probably on each other. The workers will turn on the boys. We will end up like the other safety zones did. It won’t end up particularly well for anyone.’

  ‘The praetorians will be well angry, Chief. They believe you . . . you said the Zee was going to last for ever.’

  ‘They’re just fucking children. What do you expect? They can’t think five minutes ahead, let alone worry about tomorrow, or next year.’

  Snoop said nothing for a while. Maxwell was right. The boys were perfectly happy doing what they were told just as long as they had their smokes, their treats; just as long as they had access to the girls in their cattle shed. He tended not to venture down there much these days. It smelled of shit and stale sweat. More than that, he preferred to keep a little distance from the girls - the distance of authority; the cattle-shed girls were for his foot soldiers: the general got his pleasures elsewhere.

  ‘So you got a plan, Chief?’

  Maxwell grinned. ‘Of course I do. When do I not have a plan, Edward?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The new boys - Nathan and Jacob -
they’ve come from a community that has access to fuel, Edward. Fuel on tap. They’re living on drilling rigs for fuck’s sake. Do you understand what that means?’

  Snoop nodded. ‘Sure, we can make more power.’

  Maxwell smiled dismissively. ‘It’s much more than that. It’s the life blood that flows through a civilised world. When the last of our little stockpile runs out, and the floodlights go dark here . . .’ Maxwell shook his head. ‘We’ll all become cavemen again. It’s that simple. Just like those wild children . . . fucking savages.’

  Snoop didn’t need him to say any more. He’d seen those pale feral wraiths up close enough times. He’d seen the remains of their eating: dogs, cats, rats . . . and on one occasion the tattered remains of a human cadaver.

  ‘We’re going to the rigs, then?’

  Maxwell nodded.

  ‘When?’

  ‘As soon as possible,’ replied Maxwell.

  ‘How soon?’

  ‘We should start preparing the day after tomorrow.’

  Snoop’s eyebrows shot up his forehead. ‘What?’

  ‘You heard me right, lad. We need to start preparing. I’d say we’ve got another month of reliable summer weather, hopefully, and if we’re going to use those river barges, then we need the best weather we can get.’

  ‘But . . . ain’t those barge things just for rivers an’ shit?’

  ‘They’ll float just as well on the North Sea, so long as we’re not dealing with choppy weather. That’s why we need to get a move on. Autumn’s coming. We wait too much longer, then we’ll have to do this next year.’

  Snoop considered that for a moment. ‘The boys won’t be happy leavin’ the dome behind. S’all they know.’

  ‘Those little thugs will do as you tell them. Anyway,’ he continued, ‘I’ll tell them the place we are heading to is tapping oil, that we’ll have power that will last us for ever. And we’ll bring along on the barges all the comforts the boys are used to - their games machines, the girls, the booze. There’ll be space enough for those things. And when we get settled there, they’ll be able to play the games and movies every night, not just once a fortnight.’

  ‘Yeah? For real?’

  Maxwell smiled. ‘Yes, Edward, for real.’

  Snoop grinned. ‘My boys’ll like that.’

  ‘Of course they will. And we’ll also have a smaller, more manageable population; a smaller kingdom, but at least one that doesn’t have a sell-by date printed on the side. Also, with limitless fuel, it means we can forage much further. Up and down the coast. It gives us a lot more scope.’

  ‘What about them workers, we leavin’ them behind?’

  ‘We’ll take a few with us, yes. The rest? Well, if the poor buggers can survive here on their flippin’ cabbages and onions, good for them, but they’ll not be my concern any more. The important thing is that we load up and slip away without them finding out, all right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘We’ll be nice and discreet. Don’t want a panic or a riot on our hands as we leave. So, we’ll load those barges up with the minimum of fuss. We don’t need to take everything, just what we need. We can always come back here later and pick up whatever goodies we left behind.’

  ‘Okay, Chief.’

  ‘Maybe you can move some workers into the arena area to help with the loading, and those will be the ones we take along with us. We keep them in the arena until we go.’

  ‘Y’know where these rigs are?’

  ‘Yes, I checked it on the map. Just a dozen or so miles offshore from a seaside town called Bracton. Thing is, we know this place is on some rigs, right? I have no bloody idea how big they are, or how tall they are. We may need to forage some ladders and ropes and grappling hooks from a hardware store and—’

  ‘We attackin’ it?’

  Maxwell shrugged. ‘Ideally, we won’t need to. I don’t want us to have to storm these rigs. I don’t want a bloody battle if it can be helped. I don’t want to risk damaging these rigs. I just want us to arrive, say hello, come aboard and then once we’re on, calmly evict those we don’t want around. That’s why those two new boys are so important. They’re going to vouch for us . . . get us on so we don’t have to fight our way on.’

  ‘You think they’d do that?’

  Maxwell shrugged. ‘They might if we treat them good enough. Make a fuss of them. Treat them like celebrities. We’re going to make them praetorians. So let’s give them a great initiation party, give them some booze, give them some blow and make sure they have a good time.’

  Snoop grinned.

  ‘And, I think what we do is, we make them both your number twos. Give them some authority over the other praetorians.’

  ‘Shit,’ Snoop pulled a face. ‘Some of me boys won’t like that. Dizz-ee will fuckin’ well throw a shoe, man.’

  Maxwell shook his head. ‘Which boy is that - Lawrence Bolland?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘The boy’s a big idiot. He’s only your number two because he’s the oldest, right?’

  Snoop nodded. ‘Fucking wigger. I can handle him if he gets shitty.’

  ‘I’m sure you can. What about the rest of the lads?’

  Snoop gave it some thought. ‘Nathan they like. They think he’s well-sick. But the other one? Jacob? His face don’t fit so well.’

  ‘What’s wrong with him?’

  Snoop shrugged. ‘Way too quiet, man . . . a loner. The other boys think he’s, like, stuck up.’

  ‘Stuck up how? Too posh? Too nerdy? Too white?’

  ‘He just don’t fit.’

  ‘Well, you’ll just have to embrace him, Edward. Give him your official stamp of approval tomorrow night. The boys will follow your lead. Just give those two lads a bloody good time, all right? Make ’em a part of the family.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘And if you can, make sure they try a bit of junk. You know? Won’t hurt if they start developing a bit of an appetite for that, too.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Okay, Edward, that’s all for now. I need to do some planning, make a list of what we’re taking along. You can talk to the troops and let them know about Nathan and Jacob. Party night can also be their initiation party. And why not sweeten the deal a bit. Let them know it’s double booze and blow rations for all of them. That should soothe any ruffled feathers.’

  Snoop got up and made his way towards the double doors, feeling a growing fizz of excitement in his stomach. The Chief had a fucking plan. The boys might grumble a bit at being uprooted, but he could keep them in line - even that twat Dizz-ee.

  He was outside, walking up the sloping aisle to the arena when he realised already he had questions in his head that he should have asked. Questions like, how could he know there was going to be enough fuel to last them for ever on those rigs? Hadn’t that shit been running out or something? Wasn’t that why the world got totally fucked in the first place?

  He guessed Maxwell had a handle on that. The man certainly wasn’t a fool.

  Chapter 57

  10 years AC

  Bracton Harbour, Norfolk

  Walter listened to the gentle lapping of water against the quay and the boat’s fibreglass hull. It was an altogether more relaxing sound than the thump and roll of the North Sea. That and the soft tink of the halyards against the mast.

  Bracton was quiet and still as it always was. Earlier he’d heard the snapping and yipping of a pack of dogs disputing some small find, but since then nothing but the tide.

  He could have headed back to the rigs before it got dark. He could have made it back in time. Instead he chose to overnight here and sail back some time tomorrow morning.

  To be honest, he preferred the time away from the platforms. Things were getting unpleasant on there. Jenny refused to talk to Latoc any more and that bastard was carrying on as if he was now in charge. There were well over a hundred and fifty, maybe even two hundred of them now following the man. Too many, really, to all fit on the large compression platfo
rm. Since the accommodation platform was the one directly linked to his, Walter guessed he’d soon be insisting Jenny and the others currently bunked there vacate onto the next platform down so as to make way for his overspill.

  The day that happened, Jenny might be better admitting she’d lost control of the rigs to him and prepare to gather up her things and those who wanted to go with her, and come ashore. The accommodation platform was the heart of the community, and surrendering that to Latoc was as good as losing it all.

  There was another reason he preferred as much of his time as possible ashore, ostensibly scouring for bits. It was the staring. Everyone was doing it now and not just Latoc’s loony followers; long icy stares as he passed by, not even a formal nod, or a half smile, or a limp wave.

  Just the bloody staring.

  He knew what it was. That silly rumour. Alice Harton’s rumour, or whoever else she’d picked it up from. Just words. The rigs were full of words. In between chores it was all there was to do, gossip. But this . . . it was nasty. And there really was no verbal defence a man could make against that kind of innuendo. In fact, to bluster aloud that he’d never had any inappropriate thoughts about Hannah would seem to condemn him still further.

  He protesteth too much!

  Hannah, she was a lovely little girl. He was very fond of her, almost like a granddaughter to him. And yes, there’d been occasions he’d been in the Sutherlands’ quarters when Leona was washing her hair or scrubbing her in a tin bath. But it was all innocent. For Christ’s sake, this was the kind of environment - all of them living cheek-by-jowl - where people were going to catch each other half dressed occasionally. It happened all of the time. But this . . . this kind of suggestion made by someone out there, someone who presumably had an axe to grind, somebody whom he must have annoyed or upset at some point in the past, this kind of suggestion stuck fast and never shook off. It made every hug he’d given Hannah, every peck on the cheek and a million other innocent physical interactions since she was born, take on a sinister new meaning. And dammit, yes, it could make him look like some pervert if that’s what someone wanted to see in him; a pervert carefully, patiently playing out some long game, biding his time as he groomed the girl and earned Jenny’s and Leona’s implicit trust.