Afterlight (5 page)

‘It’s not good for them, Leona. You can’t fill their heads with things as they were. They’re never going to see any of those things. This is all they’ll have.’

Leona sighed. ‘It’s hard not to want to tell them, Mum.’

‘But it’s kinder not to. You have to let go. That world’s really not coming back any time soon.’

Leona said nothing. This was an old conversation, one they’d had too many times before.

‘We’ve witnessed enough to know that,’ added Jenny, ‘haven’t we?’

Witnessed enough
. She was right about that. They’d seen that world collapse up close, living in London - the worst possible place to have been during that first week. After the dust settled on the riots, there was a hope that order would somehow be restored. But it was soon clear things had gone too far. Too much damage done, too many people killed. The food that had been in the stores on the Monday was cleaned out by the Wednesday; stolen, spoiled, eaten, hidden. And with no power there was no clean water. People were very quickly dying of cholera, or killing each other for bottled water.

There’d been many small communities outside the cities that were better prepared; foresightful people with beards and chunky-knit jumpers who’d been rattling on about Peak Oil for years and preparing for the inevitable end. The sort of scruffy new-age weirdy-beardies that Leona had once turned her nose up at; that reminded her a bit of her dad. They had their freshwater wells, their vegetable plots, their chickens and pigs.

The one thing they didn’t have, though, was guns. So many of them were overrun and picked clean by the starving thousands flooding out of London, Birmingham, Manchester. Picked clean . . . and in many cases, since there was no sign of the police or the army or any sense that law and order was going to return, the women raped and the men killed. Years of foreknowledge and preparation accounted for nothing. It had simply made them a target.

Survival through those first few weeks and months turned everyone into a brutal caricature of themselves. Everyone had done something they weren’t proud of to stay alive. For a while it was nothing more than a twisted form of Darwinism at work; it was the most selfish who managed to survive: the
takers.

Hordes of people emerging from the cities - running from the rioting and the gangs making the most of the anarchy, they choked the roads, endless rivers of people on foot, all of them hungry. At first it was begging, when they came across the well-tended vegetable gardens and allotments and chicken runs out beyond the urban sprawl. Soon it became a matter of stealing after dark. Finally the migrating hordes just picked clean anything they found, and if a person was stupid enough to try and explain they’d been preparing for this for years and tried to stop them stripping his garden clean, then it turned even nastier.

Leona remembered the day their small settlement had been raided by a gang of about thirty men, several years after the crash. By then, they’d assumed roving bands of scroungers were a thing of the past, died out, killed by others or starved long ago. Then one cold winter morning they turned up, armed with guns, some of them wearing ragged police and army uniforms, emerging from the trees, drawn by the smell of woodsmoke.

She shuddered at the memory of what followed and forced her attention back on the playing children. But her mind wasn’t done yet.

Her mind played flashes of that winter morning; the raping in the barn. The ensuing struggle. Spatters of blood on the snow. Screams. Gunshots.

Leona turned to look at her mother watching the children play; always on guard, always on duty.

It was why they now struggled on out here on these windswept rigs. In the aftermath of that morning, after the men had gone, Mum had gathered her and Jacob and a few others who’d decided to leave, and she’d left. Soon after, they’d found the rigs, and she’d decided that’s where home was going to be.

What happened that morning to her, in the barn, mum never spoke of. But she’d never trusted men since. Well, that wasn’t entirely true. She trusted Walter, but only because she knew she had a hold over him. He was like a puppy, always eager to please her, always around their quarters, like a live-in uncle, always there.

Mum trusted him and herself. That was it. When they first moved onto the rigs there’d been about eighty of them; mostly those from the raided settlement. Now there were over four hundred and fifty; people they’d encountered in and around Bracton, looking for safety from men with guns. Quite possibly the same ones. And mum had allowed them to join - safety in numbers and all that. Mostly women and children, a few old men.

Leona watched as her mother goaded Hannah to chase down one of the other kids.

Too many for Jenny to indefinitely remain an undisputed leader. There were grumblings amongst some of them that Jenny Sutherland was unelected and yet making all the rules. A self-appointed dictator and Walter, with the only pair of keys to the gun locker, her lackey.

Leona suspected that one day Mum was going to have to face down an open challenge to her authority. It could be over any number of contentious issues; her refusal to allow any prayer groups to be organised, the relentless work-schedule for everyone, her insistence they remain hidden away on these gas platforms with no clear indication for how long. Surely not for ever? And, of course, they were welcome to leave if they didn’t see things her way.

One day, Leona suspected, a group of them were going to down their tools and defy Jenny. If for no other reason than to see what she would do in the face of such a challenge - to see what sort of a person she really was. And then, in that moment of truth, what would she do? Evict them at gunpoint? Mum was tough, she had to be to make this place work, but Leona hated the idea that she was paying for that with what was left of her old self.

‘I’m sorry to moan,’ said Jenny, breaking into her thoughts. ‘But you can’t dwell on what’s gone. Our children need to be happy with what we’ve got, Lee. Not pining for what you once had.’

‘Our children can’t live their
whole
lives here either, Mum. I won’t do that to Hannah.’

Jenny’s face tightened. ‘Look, one day we’ll settle back on the mainland,’ she said after a while. ‘When we can be
sure
it’s safe again. When we can be sure that the bastards who take what they want at gunpoint have run out of things to scavenge and have starved to death.’

Leona shrugged.

Jenny turned to her, softening her voice, realising how harsh she must sound. ‘Hannah
will
inherit a better world. One day it’ll be better than this. Better even than it used to be before the crash.’

Leona offered a wan smile.
The old spiel, again.

She had heard that speech about a million times, ‘All That Was Wrong With The Oil Age World’; greed and consumerism, borrowing and spending, debt and negative equity, haves and have-nots;
me
generation people living lonely lives in their own plastic bubbles of consumer comfort. Maybe she was right? Maybe it was a miserable world full of discontented people, but in a heartbeat,
in a heartbeat,
she’d have that shitty old world back and thoroughly embrace it. So would Jacob.

‘Mum . . .’

Jenny looked at her.

‘You know, one of these days, Jacob will go out on one of our shore runs and he won’t be coming back.’

Jenny’s face pinched and she sat silent for a moment. ‘I do worry that will happen every time I send him.’

‘So why do you send him?’

‘Because I hope he’ll see enough to realise there’s nothing ashore, nothing to run away
to
, only overgrown streets and buildings falling in on themselves.’

Leona knew he felt differently. ‘Several of the older boys, Jacob included, are convinced that things are rebuilding themselves on the mainland. That somewhere in the big cities they’ve already got power going again, that street lights are coming on and the like.’

Jenny sighed. ‘We’d know, Lee, wouldn’t we? We’d have heard something on the radio about it. Something from a passer-by.’

‘I know that. I’m just saying Jacob’s becoming, I don’t know, sort of taken with the idea that out there, some sort of . . . glittering metropolis is waiting for him.’

Jenny watched as Hannah flopped to the ground, exhausted from her running around. Natasha flopped to the ground beside her, and the pair of them, for some reason, suddenly decided to waggle their feet and hands in the air like struggling house flies.

‘You can talk to him, Lee. He listens more to you than he does me now. Tell him that’s a bloody stupid idea.’

Leona shook her head. ‘I
do
talk to him. But, you know, I guess sometimes I feel a bit like that too.’

Jenny turned towards her. ‘Leona, it’s a dead and dark world. You’ve seen it for yourself. If there are any people left, they’re dangerous and hungry and looking for people like us to strip bare.’

Leona noted mum had kept that comment gender neutral. But by ‘them’ she meant men, and ‘us’ she meant women.

‘Here, on these platforms, we’re safe. We’ve had time to consolidate, to build things up. We can feed ourselves now, we aren’t relying on a dwindling supply of canned goods in some grubby warehouse. We’re not scavengers, Lee.’

Jenny reached out for one of Leona’s hands and squeezed it. ‘I know it’s tough, it’s cold, it’s wet and boring out here. But one day, Lee, one day the last of those bastards will have starved to death and it’ll be safe. Then we can move ashore.’

Leona watched as Hannah and Natasha got bored with playing dead flies and scrambled to their feet, ignoring the other children and playing their own game of tag, chasing each other towards the swaying field of tomato plants, along the faint, peeling lines of the helipad’s giant ‘H’.

‘But look . . . will you talk to Jacob? Assure him we’re not staying here for ever? One day, right? One day we can go back.’

‘I’ll try,’ said Leona.

 

 

 

S
itting on the foredeck of the boat, secured alongside the harbour’s quayside, Jacob listened to the noises of the night. The rhythmic slapping of water on the hull, the sporadic whisper of a fresh breeze and the clatter and tinkle of loose things teased by the wind amongst the quayside warehouses.

On occasions such as this, on guard duty, there had been times that he’d heard other noises; the haunting echo of a faraway cry; once, the solitary crack of a distant gunshot; often the sound of someone, or wild dogs, rifling through crates and cargo containers in the warehouses.

Less so with each visit, though.

Tonight it was the tide, the breeze and shuffling debris skittering in wind-borne circles and nothing else.

He reached out for the SA80 and stroked the smooth cold metal of its barrel. He’d only ever had one go at firing the thing; a dozen test rounds out into the North Sea. The punch on his shoulder, the bucking in his hands, the crack of each shot - it had been exhilarating. One burst of fire and then Walter had snatched the gun off him saying that was enough. Ammunition couldn’t be replaced, and now he knew
how
to fire the thing, he was trained enough.

Walter had been part of the community from almost the very beginning; after the crash, back when they lived for several years amidst a cluster of barns. Jacob had been only twelve when the ‘bad men’ arrived. Hungry men, lean men in tatty clothes, some even in army uniforms. He wasn’t certain whether they were really soldiers or not; he remembered some wearing trainers, some had the sort of tattoos he’d never imagined that a policeman or a soldier would have, and no one seemed to be in charge.

They saw the chickens, the pigs. They’d followed the smell of frying bacon and woodsmoke through the thick forest that thus far had hidden them from the world outside.

He shuddered at the memory of that particular day. An initial polite request for a meal and a little hospitality had quickly escalated to something very different. After they’d eaten the bacon, a girl only a couple of years older than him was taken by several of the men to a nearby barn. That was the first. They took other girls and women, one by one. Mum included.

The fighting started soon after. It was probably all over in ten minutes, but to Jacob it seemed like that whole winter morning had been filled with the crack of gunfire, screaming, crying. Seven of the bad men were killed, the others melting away into the woods.

But so many more of their own people had died - mostly they’d been women, girls. It was as if the soldiers had decided that if they couldn’t
have
them, they might as well
kill
them.

Leona lost the young man she was with; a tall guy with long hair called Hal. Jacob remembered Hal’s father - he couldn’t remember the man’s name - had used a kitchen knife to make short work of one of the bad men left wounded in the snow. He’d dragged him into the barn and finished him there.

He returned with Mum, helping her back across the paddock, she was covered in scratches and cuts and blood, her clothes ripped, her face a hardened stare. Their little community never really recovered from that morning, and a few weeks later the survivors were split down the middle; those that were going, those that were staying.

Over the years Jacob had often found himself wondering whether those they’d left behind - people who had almost been like extended family through the early years after the crash - had managed to carry on there. Or whether those men had come back as promised and this time finished them all off.