Afterlight

by Alex Scarrow

  She imagined Mum would see those things in him, too.

  ‘You helped me. You’ve got me home safely.’ Leona’s bittersweet smile ached as, for a moment, she’d give anything to be able to have Jacob standing here beside her. How she wished Mum was getting both her children back.

  ‘She’ll be grateful to you, Adam. Trust me. It’ll all be hugs and kisses.’

  He laughed. ‘She sounds nice.’

  She grimaced. ‘Ugh, don’t ever call her that. She hates that word. Nice is what you call ice cream, or a paper doily, or fluffy bunny rabbit print pattern. Mum’s . . . well, she’s a pretty tough case.’

  For a moment, for the first time in ages, she spared a thought for how Mum was. She remembered, through the cloud of grief she’d been floating in, that Tami had assured her Mum would recover. She was healthy, fit. A tough case all right.

  But how long ago had that been? She realised she’d completely lost track of the date, of what month they were in in fact. The trees were turning, the leaves falling. Autumn was just a spit away. Three months? Four, since they’d left?

  Would she have recovered?

  She’ll pull through. Tough as nails. That’s what Tami had said.

  Tough as nails now. But not always so. Leona still remembered a different mum; more rounded with fewer angles. Comforting curves rather than sinews and muscle. A decade ago the hardest thing she’d had to do was argue the toss with the taxman once a year over the details of Dad’s accounts. Or nag Jacob to get a wriggle on and do his bloody holiday homework. Since then, since the crash, she’d earned every single day of their lives; fighting for herself and her children. The first five years she was mother to her and Jacob. The last five years she’d been a mum to several hundred people. If that didn’t make a person harder . . .

  ‘She’s . . . well,’ Leona cocked her head, ‘she’s pretty forthright. But you’ll see that soon enough.’

  He laughed softly. ‘If she’s like you she sounds like someone I wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of.’

  The tug’s starter motor whined unhappily before the diesel engine caught, coughed and nearly choked before it settled into a rhythmic chug. Walfield grinned, pleased with himself as he held the helm tightly in both hands. ‘Piece of piss.’

  ‘So then, let’s go home,’ said Leona.

  Chapter 78

  10 years AC

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

  Half an hour out from shore they picked out the platforms on the horizon; like a row of five fat ladies with thick shapeless legs, skirts held up and wading through ankle-deep water for cockles. Walfield opened the throttle and the engine rose a note. They carved across the flat sea, leaving a tail of tumbling suds behind them and Leona’s spirits rose as she began to pick out more and more detail on their approach. Best news of all, she couldn’t see any barges anchored nearby or tethered beneath any of the platforms.

  We got here first.

  ‘Jesus. Much larger than I imagined,’ called out Adam.

  Twenty-five minutes later the men were getting a much better idea of how large the platforms were, towering above them as Walfield eased back on the throttle and aimed the tugboat towards the base of the tallest platform amongst the cluster.

  ‘It’s like a bleedin’ jungle up there,’ said Walfield gazing up at the dangling terraces of foliage.

  Leona detected movement along the decks; the ever-shifting green of endless leaves, lining every deck and walkway; the multicoloured fluttering of clothes strung out on laundry lines, and the movement of curious people emerging to gather along the safety rails.

  She waved up at them, trying to see if she could recognise individual faces yet.

  Walfield threw the tug into reverse to take the last of the momentum off the vessel, and the deck beneath their feet shuddered. Leona shaded her eyes, looking up at the closest faces on the spider deck.

  ‘It’s us!!’ she called out. ‘It’s me! Leona! Where’s Mum?’

  Several voices called back, over each other, lost against the idling chug of the engine.

  ‘Mum?! You up there!!?’

  A male voice called down. ‘Who is that?’

  Leona didn’t recognise it at first. Then she remembered the newcomer, the foreign man. It seemed like a lifetime ago that she’d been teasing Mum about fancying him.

  ‘It’s Leona!’ she replied. ‘I also have some friends with me!’

  She heard a chorus of voices stirring above her.

  ‘Somebody go get her, will you!’ she called out. No one was going to lower anything to them until Mum said it was okay to do so.

  ‘How many friends?’ It was that foreign guy again. She remembered his name now. Valérie.

  She shrugged an answer. ‘Four of them. Can you go get my mum, please?’

  She saw him now, leaning over the cellar deck railing. ‘Four men?’

  Why is he speaking for them?

  She wondered what was taking Mum so long. She wondered why Walter wasn’t already manning the davits, being a nosy bugger and calling out twenty questions to them as he lowered the crane hooks.

  Something’s not right.

  ‘Where’s Mum? Where’s Walter?’

  Adam emerged from the cockpit and stood beside her on the foredeck.

  ‘Everything okay here?’

  Valérie Latoc’s voice came down to them. ‘Your mother is not in charge now! Things have changed!’

  She looked along the crowd on the spider deck. She saw familiar faces. Deborah Hardy, her two toddlers, Ronnie, Moira and Audrey - white-haired old sisters - Saleena Chudasama, her children, Alice Harton, Denise Bingham. A deck up she recognised Tami Gupta, Howard, the Yun sisters, Keisha, Desirae and Kara and some of the other Bible-bashers. She saw Edward waving and grinning, David beside him. She saw Hamarra, Rebecca, the Barker sisters . . .

  Familiar faces, but all somehow a little different. She’d expected smiles; teeth everywhere and waving hands. But instead the lined-up faces watched events impassively.

  ‘What’s going on? Why the hell isn’t Mum in charge?’

  Latoc’s hesitation told her something. ‘I have replaced her! The people here wanted this! It is for the best!’

  ‘What?!’

  ‘You should go!’ called out Alice. ‘It’s not your mum’s place any more!’

  ‘Where’s my mum? I want to speak to her!’

  ‘Your crazy mum went and threw a bloody hissy-fit!’ snapped Alice. ‘She shot Valérie!’

  Leona steadied herself on the foredeck as the tugboat bobbed gently. ‘What? She wouldn’t do that! Where is she?’

  ‘She is in our prison!’ replied Latoc. ‘We have decided she cannot stay here any more! She is going to be evicted! She can leave with you!’

  This is crazy. When she’d left Mum was in the infirmary dosed up to the gills on painkillers and antibiotics. Walter was ostensibly running things, maybe not a popular choice, but as her right-hand man, the obvious choice.

  The newcomer, Valérie, is in charge? How the hell did that happen?

  Leona turned to look at Adam. ‘Something’s gone wrong.’

  She turned back to face the others along the railings. ‘This is my mum’s place, for fuck’s sake! She took you all in! You can’t just kick her off!!’

  ‘This is now a place of God! A place of worship!’ said Latoc. ‘I asked her to join with us, to pray with us. Instead she took a gun and shot me,’ he continued. He waved his bound hand over the side. ‘Do you see? I cannot allow her to stay here any more.’

  ‘This is my home, as well!’ cried Leona. ‘You can’t stop me coming aboard!’

  ‘Yes we can!’ shouted Alice. ‘You pissed off looking for something much better, didn’t you? Well tough shit! It’s the faithful only allowed on here. Do you understand!’

  ‘Alice!’ snapped Valérie, hushing her. ‘I am sorry,’ he continued. ‘I cannot let you and your friends with their guns come onto our ark.’

&
nbsp; Ark?

  ‘This is a holy place now, Leona! These people have been waiting for me!’

  Adam turned to look at Leona. ‘That guy’s a headcase,’ he muttered.

  She nodded.

  Without warning, something landed with a heavy thud on the foredeck behind her. She spun round to see the bottom end of a rope ladder snarled in a pile of coiled rope and wooden slats. She looked up to see that it had flopped down from the main deck. At the top of it was Martha.

  ‘NO!! This isn’t no holy place!!’ Her shrill voice cut across the space above them. She looked down at Leona. ‘You come up, Leona, love!’

  Valérie Latoc’s eyes widened. ‘Get that rope up now!’ Several people, not too far along the main deck from where Martha stood, stepped towards her.

  ‘Oh-my-God-grabbit!’ hissed Leona.

  Adam leapt across the deck and got a hand on the rope ladder before it could be yanked up beyond reach. Meanwhile, Martha had turned to fend off the people approaching her. ‘You stay back!!’ she screamed, slapping the face of the nearest woman with the palm of her hand. The others stepped forward and wrestled with her. The scuffle quickly became an undignified tangle of flaying hands; an almost comical bitch fight between her ample form and three others, hair-pulling and face slapping.

  Adam turned to Walfield. ‘Danny! A warning shot, please.’

  The sergeant shouldered his SA80 and cracked a single shot into the air. The effect was instantaneous; everyone dropped back from the railings and out of sight. Except Martha and the others still slapping, scratching and screaming at each other.

  Adam pulled himself up the first few slats of the rope ladder. It swung precariously over the side of the tugboat’s foredeck with his weight, leaving him swinging above the water.

  ‘Just cover me till I get my leg onto something!!” he bellowed as he swung. Working quickly he pulled himself arm over arm, up the next dozen wooden slats until he was banging his hip against the side of the spider deck’s safety railing. Several pairs of hands snatched at his khaki shirt trying to pull him off the rope ladder. Walfield fired another single shot that whistled close to them and zinged off the underbelly of the deck above. The hands disappeared back out of sight.

  Adam swung against the railing again, this time letting go of the rope and grabbing at the rusty metal, hoping it wasn’t so corroded that it was going to snap loose and bend out of shape and come tumbling down into the sea with him. He swung himself over the railing with the clumsiness of a man too exhausted to care how he landed. The spider deck rang with the impact. A moment later he appeared on his feet again, pulling the gun down from his shoulder.

  ‘All right, everyone get the fuck back!’ he screamed. ‘Please!’ he added as an afterthought.

  The nearest of them melted away from him, wide-eyed at the sight of the levelled gun. A deck above them they could hear Valérie Latoc screaming an order for someone - anyone - to go and retrieve the community’s weapons from Walter’s trusty locker room.

  Chapter 79

  10 years AC

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

  ‘She’s in here?’ Leona asked incredulously. ‘They shoved her in here?’

  Martha nodded tearfully as they made their way down the dark, unlit and narrow passageway towards the battery storage rooms. They were on the same deck as the generator room and connected sludgery. Even though neither had been in use for several months, the stink was everywhere still; ingrained in the very walls of this place now. It was overpowering to Adam, a step or two behind Martha and Leona, and he fought an urge to gag.

  ‘How could you?’ she demanded, looking at Martha then turning round and glaring at Tami. ‘Mum? Your friend, right?’

  Martha sobbed as she led them to the door. She had no answer and instead she shook her head, ashamed, unable even to look Leona in the eye.

  ‘He had a hold over them,’ Dr Gupta uttered. ‘He . . . we . . . there was nothing I could do . . .’ Her voice broke and faded to nothing as she began to cry as well.

  Martha slid the bolt and opened the door to reveal, in the gloom, Jenny perched on the cold hard floor, a bowl of cold uneaten broth at her feet. A toilet bucket in the corner. Leona’s first reaction was a shudder of familiarity.

  My God.

  Leona pushed in past Martha. ‘Mum? Mum, it’s me.’

  There was a faint spear of light coming in through a tiny cracked window, clogged with bird feathers, at the top of the wall. Not much light, but enough that Leona could see her eyes remained locked on the scuffed and peeling wall opposite. Leona knelt down beside her.

  ‘Mum?’

  At her daughter’s touch her trance broke and she turned to look at her, a momentary look of confusion on her scarred face.

  ‘Mum? It’s me!’

  ‘Leona?’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘I thought . . . it was. Like your father . . . just a dream . . .’ Then the hazy look of bewilderment was gone, replaced as her eyebrows suddenly arched and her face crumbled. She wrapped her arms tightly around Leona and began to sob uncontrollably into her shoulder.

  ‘It’s okay, Mum, I’m back. I’m back.’ She said I not We. Right now wasn’t the time to tell her about Jacob. Not now. If Mum asked she decided some white lie would do for the moment. Jenny sobbed a stream of tear-soaked words into her neck, none of which Leona could untangle or make much sense of. She recognised Walter’s name in there somewhere, however.

  Adam stepped past Martha into the store room. ‘Leona, we should make sure we find that fella. You know? Before he decides to rally his fan club and give us any more grief.’

  He’s right.

  Leona loosened her mother’s arms and pulled back slightly. ‘Mum, we just need to go and straighten things out, all right? Then I’ll be back and we’ll talk.’

  ‘Lee, don’t go again . . . please . . .’ she whispered.

  ‘I’m not leaving you, Mum. I promise. I’m home now.’

  She got up slowly, easing her mum’s lean arms from her, and started to follow Brooks out of the room.

  She stopped and turned to Tami. ‘Dr Gupta?’ Formal - she didn’t feel like indulging in first names with either of them right now. ‘See to her, will you? Clean her up. Take her back to her quarters?’

  ‘Of course, Leona. Of course.’

  Outside in the passage, Adam turned to her. ‘That was your mum?’

  She knew what he was asking by the tone in his voice. That’s the tough woman you warned me about?

  ‘Yeah, that’s my mum.’ She wanted to add, you’re not exactly catching her at her best. But she decided not to.

  Adam seemed to understand. ‘So, let’s go find that fucking bastard, shall we?’

  She nodded. ‘Let’s.’

  Leona looked at the far end of the walkway: the primary compression platform, a crowd of people on the main deck just beyond the walkway’s wire cage.

  Not such a big crowd of fans now, though, is it?

  Whilst she’d been looking up from the tugboat at the safety rails lined with once-familiar faces, Leona had assumed the whole community was in thrall to Mr Latoc. However, as soon as they’d managed to scale that rope ladder, as soon as his loyal followers had digested the sight of four soldiers bearing firearms . . . and Leona, looking like she was ready to cut herself a scalp or two, his support had quickly begun to fall away.

  Funny, that.

  And now they were staring down the walkway at his more loyal acolytes, those who had run back across onto ‘Valérie’s platform’. Her lips pressed out a hard smile. Little more than fifteen minutes ago that manipulative bastard had considered all five platforms to be his own personal fiefdom. It was now him and fifty or sixty of his followers over there and, having checked Walter’s gun locker, there was a solitary gun somewhere amongst them.

  She caught the glint of gun-metal, and saw it was Howard who was holding it shakily. Aiming it down the walkway at her. Right behind him, her head poki
ng over his rounded shoulder, was Alice Harton.

  ‘You fucking well stay back!’ she screamed at them. ‘Or he’ll shoot you!’

  Despite the warning, Leona stepped forward onto the walkway and into the wire cage. ‘Where is that bastard?’

  Alice angrily jabbed a finger over Howard’s shoulder. ‘You stay right there!’

  Leona advanced calmly, unarmed, fortified not so much by any notion of courage as an unshakeable desire to wrap her hands around the bitch’s throat. She’d never been a big fan of Alice Harton. Certainly much less so now.

  ‘Where is he, Alice?’

  The woman said nothing.

  Leona felt the walkway grille under her feet vibrate and turned to see Martha joining her.

  ‘Lee,’ she said, her strong voice catching with emotion. ‘I . . . I was as guilty as them. I listened to him. I believed in him. I . . . I’m so, so sorry, love. I was one of the first to turn against your mum. He told us God sent him to us. He told us we was chosen.’

  ‘More fool you, then,’ replied Leona coolly.

  Martha nodded. ‘Yes . . . yes, he did fool us.’ She stepped closer until she was standing shoulder to shoulder with Leona, looking down the remaining fifty feet of walkway.

  ‘He lied to us!’ she shouted towards Alice and Howard and the others. ‘Valérie lied to us!’

  Alice was about to shout something back, but Leona saw Howard hush her.

  ‘Valérie is a bad man. He did the . . . he was the one who killed Natasha! It wasn’t Walter!’

  There was a ripple of response amongst those at the end of the walkway, dark ‘o’s appearing on their faces.

  ‘And . . .’ Martha hesitated a moment, unsure whether to continue. She glanced at Leona’s set face. ‘And I think he was the one who killed Hannah!’