Last Light (44 page)

CHAPTER 90

12.07 a.m. GMT
Shepherd’s Bush, London

He fired.

The shot missed his son by inches and punched a hole in Ash’s chest, knocking him back against the wall. He pulled Jacob back with him, tumbling with him to the floor, the blade still held to his son’s throat. Andy charged across the lounge, knowing in the three long strides it would take to reach them, this man could sink the blade in with one convulsive twitch of his hand.

Somewhere across the small room, his hand let go of the torch and it dropped to the floor, the beam of light bouncing and flailing around.

He hurled himself at where the man had gone down, and landed heavily on top of Jacob’s writhing body. In the dark, Andy’s hands fumbled around, desperately seeking the knife before it was pushed home and extinguished his son’s life.

Jenny could hear both men struggling in the dark and Jacob’s muffled voice, crying, presumably tangled up with them, sandwiched in between them, that blade still, presumably, inches away from his throat or his face. She reached out for the torch on the floor and swung it around.

By the light of the torch, she could see the man’s and Andy’s legs kicking and swinging around. She could see one of Jacob’s little arms emerging from between both men’s writhing torsos, it flapped around raining small ineffectual un-aimed blows on both the man and Andy.

She could hear both men grunting with effort, and then she saw the glint of the knife amidst the confused tangle of limbs. Andy had a hold of the man’s long knife by the blade. It was lacerating his fingers, and dots and splatters of Andy’s blood flew up against the lounge wall.

The man lurched to one side, pulling Andy over with him. And then Jenny saw Jacob manage to wriggle some way out. She stepped toward him, reached out and grabbed Jacob’s extended hand and pulled as hard as she could. He tumbled on to the floor with her, freed from the two men.

‘Shoot him Andy!’ she screamed, now that Jacob was safely out of the way. ‘SHOOT HIM!’

The men rolled across the floor, behind the sofa, and now all she could see in the dancing light of the torch, were two pairs of legs, kicking, scissoring, flailing . . . and more blood flicking up on to the wall.

‘Oh God, Mum!’ howled Leona. ‘He’s gonna kill Dad! He’s going to KILL DAD!’

Jenny looked around the floor, hoping that the gun might have been dropped and kicked clear in the struggle.

And then the room flickered as if a firecracker had gone off, and simultaneously they heard the bang of the gun.

Both pairs of legs ceased moving. Jenny studied them for a moment, unable to move, not daring to look behind the back of the sofa.

‘Andy?’ she whispered.

Then the man’s - Ash’s - legs began to move, a short, jerking, twitching movement. Andy’s legs remained still.

‘Andy?’ she cried.

Ash’s legs stopped moving.

‘Oh shit!’

Andy’s voice.

‘Oh, shit!’ Andy grunted again.

‘Dad, are you all right?’ cried Leona, her voice trembling.

‘Ah, jeeez, that’s just bloody disgusting,’ sighed Andy.

Jenny watched his legs kick at the body as he emerged from beneath it, and a moment later she saw his bloodied and torn hands on the back of the sofa.

‘Don’t let the kids come round the back, Jenny,’ he muttered. ‘I’ve got most of this guy’s brains down the front of my shirt.’

His face appeared and he pulled himself up, wincing as he looked down at the thick dark slick across his chest.

‘Daddy won,’ whispered Jacob, the hint of awe in his voice unmistakable. ‘He beat the baddie.’

‘Oh my God, Andy,’ Jenny uttered. And that was all she could say for the moment. The ‘God I Love You’s . . . were all going to have to come later. For now the only thing that Jenny could do was sob with relief.

Andy looked up from the splattered debris of Ash’s head on his shirt and offered his family a goofy grin.

‘Should’ve changed my bloody shirt first. I liked this one.’

Leona and Jenny both managed to push a smile through the tears. Jacob grinned proudly at his father, then studied with a mixture of revulsion and fascination, the bloody mess.

‘What’s that?’ Jake asked, pointing at another rapidly expanding crimson stain lower down the shirt.

Andy looked down, and saw the small, slim handle jutting out from his lower abdomen.

‘Oh, just great,’ he managed to mutter before collapsing.

Epilogue

It’s been a while now since the world collapsed.

I miss Andy. I miss him so much. And his children miss him.

I don’t know how we’ve survived, how we managed to keep going. It’s been a blur to me, just moving from one day into the next. I know we left London soon after that night. I remember Leona had to drag me out of our house, away from our bedroom, where we left Andy.

Leona’s been a tower of strength. I was useless for a long time. She got us out of London, and then we finally found a community in the countryside willing to take us in.

Very kind people, very different - historical re-enactors; the sort of people you would see at those big English Heritage events where they replayed battles from the English Civil War. Normal people with jobs and mortgages (back before the collapse), but with this other parallel life, attempting to revive, to learn the everyday skills of a time long before we had oil doing everything for us. Very different people, unlike any I’ve met before; they had already mastered so many of those skills of survival, the basics like . . . how to make soap, how to make bread from grain. You know? The simple things.

And there’s so much to do, we’re kept busy, which is just as well.

We have several wind-up radios in the community, and from time to time there are broadcasts from the BBC World Service. For a time, just after the first week, it looked like a recovery might be on the cards. Oil lines were being fixed and a trickle of oil was getting through. But things were too broken, too messed up. We heard horror stories coming from the two dozen or so ‘safe areas’ the government had established. The supplies ran out at the end of the second month, and the people crammed inside turned on each other. And the same thing, so we hear, has happened in other countries around the world. America, I think, has been hit particularly badly.

In the months that followed, there was a worrying time . . . there was a limited war between China, India and Russia over the Tengiz oilfields. It started with tanks and infantry, and escalated to a few nuclear bombs. Then very quickly it blew itself out. Perhaps some sanity broke out at the last moment, or perhaps their troops decided to stop fighting. Or maybe they simply ran out of the oil they needed to continue fighting.

Often, in the evenings, when the community gathers together, we discuss who was behind it all. Because, you see, it’s obvious to everyone now that there was someone behind this. The theories are many and varied. The most-voiced opinions are that it was either a Muslim plot to destroy the decadent western lifestyle, or, alternatively, an attempt by America to destabilise all her economic rivals in one go . . . but somehow it went wrong for them too.

I’m not convinced by either theory, but I don’t know enough about politics to offer a better suggestion. Andy would have known. He knew all about that kind of thing.

We’re being kept very busy right now, as I was saying. There’s a lot to do, crops to grow, tend, cultivate or pick. We’re digging a well, down to the clean water-table below us, and we have animals that need looking after. Jake’s landed the main role as chicken tender; feeding them, collecting the eggs. When he’s a little older, he’ll also have to cope with killing them on occasion, plucking them, gutting them.

Leona’s struggling a bit now. She was strong for me when I needed her. Now, she’s finding it hard to cope. I know she misses her father, and I know some of the things that happened before I got home really traumatised her. There’s a lot of crying.

Jacob misses Andy terribly too. But he’s also so proud of his dad, and tells anyone who’ll listen that his dad was a superhero. I love that he thinks that about Andy.

Anyway, we’re alive, and my kids will mend eventually. And things will eventually knit themselves back together again. All those empty cities, full of burned-out homes, and looted shops . . . one day people will migrate back to them. When it all eventually comes back together again, I think it’s going to be very different.

To use one of Andy’s pet phrases . . . the oil age is over.

Just like all those other ages; the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Steam Age . . . it’s been and gone. Hopefully what replaces it will be a world less greedy, less obsessed with having things; trinkets and baubles, gadgets and bling. I wonder what my children’s children will make of the weathered and faded mail order catalogues they’ll undoubtedly come across, everything lavishly powered by electricity; giant American-style fridge freezers, those extravagant patio heaters, electric sonic-pulse hi-spin toothbrushes, automatic can-openers.

God, did we really get that lazy?

That’s something Andy would have said, isn’t it? Christ, I miss him.

I need to say something though, out loud
.

I’m pretty sure you won’t hear this Andy, you’re gone. There’s none of that looking down from heaven nonsense, is there? You’re gone, that’s it. But all the same, I need to say this even if it’s just for my own ears . . .

I’m sorry. I did always love you, I just forgot that for a while. You came back for us, and you saved us. Our son and our daughter will always, always remember you as a hero.

And so will I.

Love you, Andy
.

Author’s Note

Last Light
started out four years ago as a result of my stumbling across a phrase being repeated over and over by two posters for a forum. They were hotly debating a geological issue and this phrase kept cropping up: Peak Oil. Being capitalised like that suggested that this was some sort of technical term in common use by those in the know. Curious, I Googled it.

And so, to indulge in an appalling cliché, a journey of discovery followed. Out there in internet-land are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of websites devoted to Peak Oil. I should perhaps explain what the term means before going any further. Simply put, it refers to the point at which all the easy-to-extract oil has been sucked out of the ground leaving only the really hard to get to, very expensive to refine, stuff. Now, there is a great deal of debate amongst geologists and petro-industry experts about how much oil there is left in the ground. It ranges from either a doom ’n’ gloom scenario that we’ve already ‘peaked’ and it’s rapidly running out, to a naively optimistic view that we have another fifty or sixty years of untapped oil. I’m not going to make a call on that debate here. But what no one disagrees on is how utterly reliant we are on the stuff. If you’re reading this, having read the book, you don’t need me to reiterate here the warnings Andy offered his family. The fact is, with
globalism
having run its course, the world is now inextricably linked as one large, interlocked set of dependencies; we get our sausages from
this
far flung country, our trainers from
that
far flung country, our plasma TVs from yet another far flung country . . . and so on.

Whether we’re about to run out of oil, or whether the world is approaching a clash of religious ideologies or an economic - possibly military - showdown between the new economic superpowers and the old; whether the world’s climate is on the cusp of a dramatic change that could imperil billions and lead to mass migration; whichever one of these scenarios lies ahead of us, to be so completely dependent - as we are here in the UK - on produce grown, packaged and manufactured on the other side of the world . . . well, that’s simply asking for trouble.

Last Light
is the book I’ve wanted to, no,
needed
to write since . . . well, since 9/11. It’s not really a book about Peak Oil - that was merely the starting point for me. No, it’s a book about how lazy and vulnerable we’ve allowed ourselves to become. How reliant on the system we are. How little responsibility we are prepared to take for our actions, for ourselves, for our children. Somewhere along the way, in the last two or three decades, we
broke
this society of ours; whether it was during Blair’s tenure of power, or Thatcher’s, I’m not sure. But somehow it got broken.

And here we are, the ghastly events of 7/7; the increasing prevalence of gang related gun crime in London; legions of disaffected kids packing blades to go to school; a media that night and day pumps out the message -
screw everyone else, just get what’s yours
; reality TV that celebrates effortless transitory fame over something as old-fashioned as ‘achievement’; corporations that rip off their employees’ pension funds; a Prime Minister deceiving us into entering an ill-conceived war; and politicians of all flavours putting themselves and their benefits first. All these things, I suspect, are the visible hairline cracks of our broken society that hint at the deeper, very dangerous, fault lines beneath. And all it’ll take is some event, some catalyst, for the whole thing to come tumbling down.

Damn . . . this has turned into something of a rant, hasn’t it? That wasn’t my intention. Ah well sod it, ‘author’s note’ is my one opportunity to get things off my chest without having to worry about plot, character and pacing.

Anyway, I’d like to think that a whiff of
Last Light
will remain with you once you snap the cover shut. I’m hoping Andy Sutherland achieved something; that the world looks slightly different to you now - more fragile, more vulnerable. After all, to be aware is to be better prepared.

I dunno . . . is it just me? Or do you get that feeling too? That something’s coming, something on the horizon . . . a
correction
of some sort?

Peak Oil - Do you want to know more?

I came across numerous websites on this subject whilst researching for the book; they range from being very dry, statistics-heavy pages for industry insiders to the more bizarre survivalist sites that feature banner ads for automatic weapons and nuclear shelters. But one of the best laid-out sites that I came across - a site that spells out the whole issue in a way that is easily digestible and appropriately sobering - is this one:

http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net

If this book has piqued your interest, and you want to follow the trail yourself, you can do far worse than start right there.

Alex Scarrow 12.09.07