The Power of Five Oblivion (46 page)

Matt closed his eyes. Lohan watched him for a moment, then climbed back into the cockpit. The plane was still on autopilot but it occurred to him that it wasn’t following the computer instructions. It was doing whatever Matt told it to. And suddenly, for reasons he couldn’t quite understand, he found himself smiling. A minute later, he began to laugh.

The plane continued its journey over South America. Oblivion lay ahead.

DARK WATER

THIRTY-FIVE

They came across the fields just as the sun was rising, a line of policemen that was as long as the horizon itself. Nothing would get past them. If anything moved ahead, it would be seen. They continued forward slowly, at walking pace, and perhaps it was this – and the fact that there were so many of them – that made them seem so nightmarish. They were like robots. In their dark uniforms, clutching their weapons, there was nothing individual about them. Their faces were too far away to be seen, but even close to they would have been blank and emotionless, focused on what they were doing. They were simply a pack. They would not stop until they had found what they were looking for and they would allow nothing to get in their way.

Three hundred of them had been deployed to find their target: a thin, pale, fifteen-year-old boy with dark hair. If questioned, he would speak with an American accent. He was thought to be travelling with an older man and a girl of his own age. If possible, the boy had to be taken alive. The other two could be killed without a second thought.

They had spread out from the village in every direction, using it as if it were the centre point of a giant compass. According to the latest information they had received, the boy – Jamie Tyler – was trying to find his way through the thick woodland to the east, but it was always possible that he had doubled back or even reached the perimeter. The wood was being searched by men with dogs, and reinforcements were on the way. A platoon of fly-soldiers had already left London. One thing was certain. The boy couldn’t possibly have travelled far in the night. He must be somewhere nearby.

Every building they came to, they searched. There were isolated churches and a few farms dotted around – empty now – with rotting haystacks, clumps of trees and pigsties. The county had once been famous for its pigs. Any houses that were still standing, they simply set on fire. It was easier than searching them room by room. The whole countryside was wreathed in smoke. The day had dawned a miserable, choking grey.

The village itself, where the boy had taken refuge, no longer existed. Every single home had been destroyed. The villagers were dead. They had provided shelter for one of the Gatekeepers, whether they had known it or not, and this was their punishment. The streets and the village square were littered with corpses. Already the crows had descended and were picking at the dead flesh. More columns of grey smoke rose softly into the air and would have been smelled five miles away if there had been anyone left to smell it. The police had taken everything of value. All the food had gone. The apple trees in the orchard had been picked clean for the last time.

In the middle of all this desolation, a single figure walked along the main road that sloped down from the village square, her black leather coat flapping around her, her ginger hair pulling slightly in the breeze. There was no colour in her face. Her cheeks were pinched, her eyes narrow and guarded. She knew that she had arrived at the defining moment in her life, her greatest challenge. She hoped she hadn’t already failed.

Her name was Eleanor Strake and she was … well, it was difficult to say what she was exactly. She was in charge of the police, but since the police were now in charge of the country, that made her, what, the commander? That was how she thought of herself, and with the power of the Old Ones behind her, nobody was going to disagree. The prolonged series of terrorist attacks hitting almost every major city in the United Kingdom had long ago wiped away anything that vaguely resembled government. And that had only been the start. In the years that had followed, it was as if a curse had fallen on the land and everything that everyone depended on had been taken away, one item at a time. Security, communications, healthcare, employment, law and order. And at the end of it, food and water had gone too. The pathetic rabble that had managed to survive needed someone to look after them, to save them from starvation, even if it meant putting them into the labour camps that had sprung up in the north and the south – and that someone was her. Commander Strake. Sometimes it made her giddy to think of the amount of power she had at her fingertips.

And yet all that could be at risk. She had been thrilled when she had heard that one of the five Gatekeepers had actually turned up in England. When the teacher had made the telephone call (the dead teacher now), she had been delighted. Finally, she would prove herself to be worthy of the trust the Old Ones had placed in her. She would deliver the boy to them and she would be rewarded with a life of comfort and luxury away from the stink-hole that the country had become. It had never occurred to her that Jamie would slip through her fingers. She knew that the doors were no longer working. She didn’t think he had anywhere to go.

Eleanor Strake had reached the end of the road and walked onto the quay. There had been a vicious gunfight here. Nine or ten police officers had been killed – it would seem by one person; a plump, fair-haired boy in his late teens. He was lying on his side, cradling a machine gun. He looked strangely at peace. Briefly she wondered who or what he had been defending. She continued forward and stood on the edge of the black, ugly sewer that had once been a river. There was no movement either way. The water was so dead that it didn’t look like water at all. It must have been years since anyone had seen a fish.

Could the boy have come this way? Some old woman in the village had said he was in the woods, heading east, and it was always possible that she could have lied. But no sailing boat could have gone far on this oily sludge. If he had tried to leave that way, the police would have already picked him up. For just a moment, Strake felt a frisson of fear. If she failed, if she didn’t find him, what would happen to her? No need to answer that question. It was obvious.

She turned round and began to walk back into the village, where her private helicopter was waiting. It was still early in the day. She was confident that she would have the boy by lunch.

But in her haste and in her desire for blood, Commander Strake had made one mistake. Her officers had left no one alive to answer their questions and so she had never learnt that a man who called himself the Traveller had once arrived in the village on a canal boat. Of course, none of them had known that the
Lady Jane
was still fuelled and working, but even so, had the police asked, they might have noticed that the boat had now gone and that, following the banks of the river with a single, dim light glowing softly at the prow, it had been able to continue all night. It was already sixty miles away, heading south towards London.

Dead woman walking. As Strake made her way back through the carnage, she waited for the squawk over her radio to say that the mission had been accomplished, that Jamie Tyler had been found. But part of her already knew that it had gone wrong and that the voice would never come.

Jamie gazed ahead of him, watching the banks of the river as they slid past.

It had been twelve hours since the escape from the village and for much of the night he had been too wired up, too traumatized even to think about going to bed. He had thought he was safe, at least for a time, but in a matter of hours everything had been turned on its head. First Miss Keyland sneaking into the forest, then the telephone box, the sudden arrival of the police, the flame-throwers and the machine guns – and finally George, standing between them and their attackers even as his own life ebbed away … it had all been too much and it had happened too quickly.

And then there was the
Lady Jane
. Jamie had never been on a canal boat before. He’d never even been on a canal, and apart from the Truckee River, flowing in its concrete channel through the city of Reno in Nevada in America, any waterway was a mystery to him. For the first hour he had stood at the stern with Holly while the Traveller stood hunched over the tiller, guiding them through the night. The boat had a single lamp at the front, covered over so as to give as little light as possible, just enough to allow them to see the edges of the river. The engine hardly made any noise, just a deep throbbing, and Jamie wondered if it had been treated in some way too, to muffle the sound. He had found himself transfixed, staring at the dark water. It was like his own thoughts. Better left behind.

Nobody had said anything for the first few hours after they had left. There was still a chance that the police would overtake them and block their way. It was only when the river had carried them round a hillside, putting a mass of land between them and the village that the Traveller had finally broken the silence.

“You should get some rest,” he said. “It’s going to be a long day tomorrow.”

“I can’t rest,” Jamie said. He turned back. The village was on fire. Even on the other side of the hill, he could see the red glow, spreading through the sky. He glanced at Holly, wondering how she must be feeling. He had only been there for a few weeks. For her, it had been her entire life.

But Holly’s face was empty. Perhaps she was unable to accept what had happened. More likely, she was in shock. She was standing with one hand resting on the railing, the other on the roof of the cabin, oblivious to the cold of the night. Was she thinking about George? Well, that was all over now. The three of them were lucky to have got away. They had slipped through the net even as it closed all around them.

“One of you had better make some coffee.” The Traveller nodded in the direction of the kitchen. The galley. Somewhere in the back of his mind, Jamie remembered that was what a kitchen was called when it was on a boat. “We have to keep going. God help us if they notice that the
Lady Jane
has gone. But if they don’t, we can put fifty miles between us before it gets light.”

Holly didn’t move so Jamie pushed open the little door and went down the three steps into the living quarters.

The boat was long and barely six feet from side to side. That was what they were called. Narrow boats. Jamie thought that “cramped boats” would have been a good name too. All the furniture was packed in on top of itself: the cupboards, the fridge, the worktop, the two main beds and the table and benches that converted into a third. A corridor stretched from one end to the other with dim electric bulbs lighting the way, and Jamie found himself stooping as he made his way around the obstacle course that was the living accommodation. Everything was in its right place – plates, mugs, pots and pans, knives, tools, books and maps, gas canisters for the cooker – but somehow it still looked jumbled and untidy. The
Lady Jane
might have been attractive once. It was painted green and red and the floors and walls were all polished wood. But it was old. The Traveller had lived on it for too long. There was no longer any fresh water to keep it clean and although the toilet and shower were still in place, the one virtually on top of the other in a tiny compartment, it had been years since either of them had worked.

Jamie filled the kettle from a plastic bottle by the sink and made coffee as he had been instructed. It was only as he opened the jar of granules that he realized that the Traveller was giving Holly a rare luxury. There had never been any coffee in the village. Rita and John had drunk an unpleasant, bitter tea made out of acorns. The Calor gas for the cooker was also remarkable – as was the fuel that was propelling them along the canal. He wondered what other secrets the
Lady Jane
concealed.

And who
was
the Traveller? Matt had said he could be trusted. But Jamie still didn’t know his name, where he had come from … anything about him.

It was going to take a while for the kettle to boil. The flame was tiny, the gas reserves low. Jamie left the kettle on the cooker and wandered through the boat, opening cupboards and drawers. He knew he was snooping but he didn’t feel guilty. The Traveller seemed to be on his side but even so he had to be sure. He knew that his job was to reach London, to find St Meredith’s and hope that the door would work. Nothing else mattered.

The
Lady Jane
was packed with supplies of one sort or another. Every cupboard was filled with tinned food, medicine, spare parts for the engine and for different sorts of machines. There were maps covering the entire country on the shelves. One wardrobe contained fresh clothes – in the village nobody had owned anything more than what they were dressed in. As Jamie went from one section to the next, he realized that this was more than a canal boat. The Traveller might have spent seven years living in the village but all the time he had been secretly concealed in a world of his own.

He wasn’t certain what drew him to the two benches on either side of the dining table but as he went past he noticed a hinge and realized that they were actually storage facilities and must open. He pulled the cushions back and, sure enough, there were handles underneath. The seat bottoms opened like trapdoors. Jamie looked inside.