With a smile, the woman nodded. Josh left his desk and ran out, avoiding the glare of the girl with the walkie-talkie.
‘I’m impressed to see you walking,’ said the woman.
‘I tried to stop her,’ said Mildred from the top of the steps. ‘The doctor said she really shouldn’t be on her feet.’
The woman appraised me with her hands on her hips. I could have sworn her monkey did the same. ‘She looks fine to me,’ she said. ‘Obviously made of strong stuff.’
Mildred cleared her throat. ‘I should probably get back to the hospital.’
‘Yes,’ said the woman. ‘Go now, I can take care of her.’
Mildred attempted a strange and flustered curtsey before abandoning it and abruptly about-turning. Her heels echoed down the corridor.
‘You are Beth Hill,’ said the woman. ‘I’ve heard all about you. My name is Maggie Navaro.’ She gestured to the desk. ‘And this is my daughter, Dani.’
As the girl glanced up, the walkie-talkie crackled and she brought it to her ear.
‘Yes?’ she said, turning away.
‘She helps me run things around here. It’s a kind of mother–daughter operation, if you like.’
‘Operation?’ I gazed round the strange roughly hewn walls covered with maps and plans. My head began to swim. ‘What kind of operation?’
‘Try to relax, you’ve been through a lot.’
‘I don’t have time to relax. I need to …’ My head swam. ‘I need to leave. I need to get to Florida. How do I get off this place?’
She gave me a smile of pity and shook her head. ‘Oh, darling, if only life was that simple.’
Another terrific crack shook the ground and I walked to the open wall.
‘Why?’ I said. ‘And what the hell is that noise?’
‘Careful,’ she said, coming to my side. I pulled back a vine and looked out, immediately hit by a swell of vertigo. We were hundreds of metres above a choppy grey sea, standing within the face of a sheer cliff. To our left, the cliff tapered to a steep, forested hill, which led down to wide marshland dotted with stone structures, wooden jetties, and sandbagged turrets. Beyond, a huge network of sailing boats were lashed together around a vast, dilapidated cruise ship. It was far bigger than the Unity and crawling with vegetation, with scorched holes torn in its hull like the open sores of a beached whale.
Between the ship and the cliff, a skirmish was playing out beneath a haze of mist and smoke. The cracks and thuds were from guns, and I saw figures wading between the structures close to shore. Somewhere further out was their enemy, and I saw the occasional flash and puff of smoke from a crumbling tower block.
‘What the hell is happening out there?’ I said.
‘I’m afraid you’ve stumbled into a war, Beth Hill,’ replied Maggie.
Chapter 10
An urgent voice crackled on the girl’s radio, obscured by shots and yells. She exhaled audibly and muttered something back.
‘They can’t get past Eurotowers,’ she said. ‘Again.’
Maggie turned.
‘Tell them to return. Pull back. I’m not going to waste any more lives or ammunition on that idiot this afternoon.’
‘They need something to draw the fire. If we send down another—’
‘Pull them back, Dani. That’s an order.’
The girl stared back for a few moments, jaw set. Finally she scowled and marched from the room, muttering the order into the radio.
Maggie sighed and shook her head. ‘My daughter is her mother’s child.’
She turned to me and smiled. I shivered on the stone floor, though the air was hot and thick with moisture.
‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s find you some clothes.’
‘I’ve lived in Gibraltar all my life. Born here, raised here, never left. It’s the finest place in the world. A country where everybody knows each other – not many can boast that, no?’
Maggie led us through the maze of stone corridors. Her stride was immense and I struggled to keep up with my new limp. The monkey watched me from her shoulder with what I was sure was amusement.
‘I ran a shop in the Old Town selling electronics, curiosities, knick-knacks and what have you. It was just me and Dani. Her father was … a long-forgotten mistake, shall we say.’
‘Where are we, exactly?’
‘Where are we? We’re in the Rock, my darling. Right in the middle of it. Over thirty miles of tunnels dug by the British over three hundred years of its bloody wars.’ She slapped the rock. ‘These walls have kept garrisons safe since the eighteenth century. They’ve seen fourteen sieges, countless battles, and a million lives lost on the land and sea beneath. It’s a living fortress, and now it’s ours. Pretty good place to live when the sky falls, no?’
Her laugh – a friendly but maniacal cackle – echoed from the stone. The monkey added its own screeches, hopping excitedly onto Maggie’s other shoulder.
We climbed some steps and reached a doorway, behind which was a huge cavern filled with tiers of seats, like a concert hall. Stalactites hung like gnarled fingers from its roof, and at the front was a stage stacked with crates.
I hovered at the top, still shivering.
‘They used to play music here,’ said Maggie, with a disinterested sniff. She led us down some more steps to the stage. ‘Orchestras and what have you. Now it’s our supply store. When we heard those things were coming, the military – there was a base at the top of the Rock, no? – they packed this place with food, clothes, blankets, fuel, you name it, and opened the tunnels to the population in the town below. Many came up, but most preferred to stay in their homes.’ She gave me a flat, disparaging look. ‘They thought they would be safer there. Can you believe that? Not me. Me and my daughter, we came straight up here, and anyone with sense came too.’
We reached the stage and Maggie began searching through the boxes. She found a crate of water and pulled out a bottle, tossing it to me. I emptied half into my mouth in one gulp, eyes bulging with relief. Some spilled from my mouth.
‘Careful with that,’ she said with a frown. ‘We don’t have an endless supply.’
I froze and took another more careful sip.
‘That’s better.’
Maggie began sorting through a stack of crates further along.
‘Everything was rushed. The army was needed elsewhere, God knows for what, so they had no time to evacuate us. They left us in the dead of night. We watched their trucks roll across the border from the top of the Rock, and never heard from them again. Can you believe that? This Rock, the military stronghold that’s stood for centuries, abandoned overnight.’
She opened one crate and selected from the stack of neatly pressed fatigues inside a vest, some trousers and the most heavy-duty set of bra and underpants I had ever seen.
‘Here,’ she said, tossing them to me. ‘For you.’
I caught them, nearly falling over with the impact. She waited.
‘Go on then, girl, get dressed.’
I slipped off the coarse gown and struggled into the clothes. Maggie searched another box.
‘We were right to take shelter in the Rock,’ she said, ‘because when those asteroids fell –’ she broke off, examining a pair of polished black boots ‘– we heard it all over the radio. They peppered the south coast of Spain, took out most of the major towns and cities, Gibraltar included. There were terrible fires. No survivors. Not one. The buildings, the airport, the harbour – almost all that reclaimed land burned down or sank beneath the waves. Then another hit the rock itself, tearing off a chunk that killed half of us inside and exposed a huge section of the tunnels. Here, these look like your size.’
She handed me the boots and a pair of long green socks, and watched as I struggled to pull them on. I had the sense that I was being assessed.
‘We sheltered in here for two weeks with the bodies, waiting for the fires to go out. When they finally did, we emerged into a very different world. Our homes beneath were destroye
d, and our friends and relatives were all dead in the rubble. But that wasn’t all. The water had risen. It encircled us. Spain was flooded for miles, and La Línea, that poor little town that had been our only border with Europe for hundreds of years, now lay beneath the Mediterranean Sea. We were no longer connected to the mainland. We had become an island.’
I finished tying the laces of my boots and stood. The rush of blood to my head made me stagger, and she caught me.
‘Easy there,’ she said, but I brushed her off.
‘I’m fine,’ I said, looking down to see Maggie’s monkey with one paw on my leg. He was looking up expectantly. ‘Why do you have a monkey?’
‘Colin’s not a monkey,’ she said. ‘He’s a Barbary ape, and he obviously likes you. Which is a good sign, no?’
She made a kissing noise and the creature found her shoulder in two light bounds. She rewarded him with a smile.
‘Most of the other apes were killed in the strike, of course, but—’
‘Maggie,’ I said, no longer able to endure Alice and Arthur’s faces swimming into my mind every few seconds, ‘thank you for rescuing me, and for looking after me, and for the clothes, and the boots, but I really need to go. My children have been taken from me, and I need to find a way of getting to them. Now.’
I gulped, wobbling, my throat dry again. She looked down at me, her face all grim concern.
‘I told you, my darling, it’s not that simple.’
‘Why?’
She looked me up and down.
‘You’re weak. You need to eat. Come and I’ll explain.’
‘They came from all around,’ said Maggie. ‘Refugees from a flooded Spanish plain.’
We were in a brightly lit room full of long tables – one of the mess halls, Maggie explained. There were others in there too, all in the same fatigues as me, looking over and sharing whispers as they ate. Dani sat alone a few tables down, grumpily hunched over her bowl.
I wolfed the food in front of me. I had no idea what it was and I didn’t care; it was fuel and my body accepted it. Perhaps it already knew before I did that leaving Gibraltar was going to take everything it had.
‘They carried their possessions in plastic bags on their backs,’ said Maggie. ‘Wading, swimming, pushing their children on rafts. We were the highest point in many miles – their only sanctuary – and we took them in. The idea of thousands of Spanish people wandering freely across the border and taking sanctuary in this rock would have been laughed at once.’ She shrugged. ‘But I suppose multiple asteroid strikes have a way of making territorial disputes somewhat trivial.’
I licked my plate and pushed it to one side. She gave a quizzical smile. ‘You were hungry.’
‘Who’s down there?’ I said, wiping my mouth. ‘Who are you fighting?’
She paused, then leaned on the table.
‘When I said that everything had been destroyed beneath us, that wasn’t entirely true. There was a cruise ship in the harbour, the one you saw down there earlier. They arrived every week in the summer, full of rich old Brits, Yanks, Dutch, Germans and what have you. They’d come in their droves and blunder about the town with their caps and cameras, getting in everyone’s way. Good for trade, of course, but …’ She broke off, noticing my look of impatience. ‘There were still people on board the ship, and it was by pure luck that they survived. When we found them we offered them shelter in the Rock, but they refused it. They were terrified. They didn’t want to leave the safety of their boat. They had some food and water, sanitation, comfortable beds, and they were sure they would be rescued. “Someone will come for us,” they said. And they were right, someone did. Unfortunately for them it was Tony Staines.’
‘Who’s Tony Staines?’
Maggie’s gaze drifted to the row of high windows. ‘It was a cold day when we spotted that line of boats in the east. Late September and the wind was up. There must have been fifty of them, maybe more, and apart from the refugees and the cruise ship holidaymakers they were the first people we’d seen for months. A party of us made our way down to Europa Point to greet them and found they’d already dropped anchor. We had no boats of our own because, apart from that great monstrosity in the harbour, everything that floated in Gibraltar had been smashed to pieces and dragged away by the tide, but we had a small raft made of palettes and empty fuel barrels that we used to paddle out to that boat of his. The Black Buccaneer he calls it – his pride and joy.’
She stopped and shook her head.
‘I had a bad feeling about him from the start. Red nose of an over-imbiber, stretched belly of an over-eater, smile of a crocodile. ‘“Well, greetings to you, madam,”’ he said, waving his hat like some old-fashioned gentleman. Honestly. Nobody should be that polite and happy when you’ve just survived the end of the world, and those men skulking behind him … I’d seen their sort a thousand times before with their bald heads and tree-trunk arms, the wrap-around sunglasses, red faces and oily grins of men on holiday to do nothing but drink, I—’
She stopped again, mid-fume, and turned to me.
‘I’m sorry. It’s just that I trusted him, you see, despite all the signals. Do you understand?
I paused. ‘Yes. Yes, I do.’
‘It’s my mother’s fault, God rest her soul. She always taught me to give people the benefit of the doubt.’
‘What happened?’
She ran a tongue over her front teeth.
‘I swallowed my misgivings and invited him in. I took him and some of his men up to the Rock, and they sat in that very room in which you met me, with candles lit, eating our chicken, drinking our wine and telling me their stories. There was a point to what I was attempting, you understand; he had boats and we did not. There is only so long ten thousand people can live isolated on the Rock, after all. We had to find supplies from somewhere, and I thought perhaps, if we joined forces, we could reconnect with the outside world. He laughed when I suggested this to him. It was a terrible laugh, a counterfeit, and when I heard it I knew at once that it came from a man to whom treasures like joy or kindness or love were alien. And I knew I had made a terrible mistake.
‘When the laugh was over he wiped his mouth and stood up, his henchmen quickly following, and he told me he had no intention of “reconnecting with the outside world”, as I had put it. He wanted nothing to do with the outside world, never had, and that it was a damn fine thing those rocks had rained down upon it, because now we could all live as we were supposed to. Hand to mouth, port to port, free as the sea to do as they pleased. “I have almost everything I need at sea, Miss Maggie,” he said, “and everything else is right here.”
‘At this point I was ready to bolt, but there was already a blade at my throat. “You’ve done a fine job,” he said, “but I believe I’ll be taking things from here.” Before I knew it I was being dragged away down corridors that were suddenly full of his men, all of them armed and bullying our people out of the place in which they had found safety. Children, families, old men and women. I tried to plead with him, offering him half of what remained in our stores if he left us alone, but he just laughed again. As it turned out, I needn’t have bothered.’
‘Why, what happened?’
Maggie turned to her daughter, still eating at her table.
‘Because, unlike me,’ she said, loud enough for her to hear, ‘my daughter never trusts strangers.’
Dani looked over, saying nothing.
‘She had seen Tony too,’ Maggie went on, ‘and his boats and his men, and she’d watched his ambush from an adjoining corridor, where she’d prepared one of her own. We had our own guns, you see, from what was left of the military barracks. Tony wasn’t expecting it, and before he knew what was happening two of his men had been killed and they’d been forced under heavy fire back down to their boats.’
She smiled at her daughter, but Dani’s face was deadpan.
‘We shouldn’t have pulled back today, Mother,’ she said. ‘We had him on the back foot. We could h
ave pushed.’
‘It was too dangerous, Dani. You know it was.’
The girl pursed her lips, nostrils flaring.
‘We have to make sacrifices, can’t you see that? Or we’ll never get off this place.’ She slammed her hand on the table, and the room hushed. ‘Never!’
With that, she stormed out.
Maggie watched her daughter leave, then turned back to me.
‘As you can see, my daughter and I share somewhat different views on our home country. Anyway, we thought we’d seen the back of Tony Staines, but he had no intention of giving up so easily. He moved his boats to the harbour, and set up that floating … shanty town of his behind the cruise ship. It’s under his control now.’ She leaned forward. ‘That bastard has kept those poor souls trapped in there and held us siege for the past five months, and he’s showing no sign of giving up. We cannot leave.’
‘What about from the other side of the Rock?’
‘It’s a sheer cliff face now after those things hit us. We tried one night. We built two rafts and lowered them down with ropes, but one of them fell, killing three people on the rocks below, and the second was ambushed a quarter of a mile from the shore. Staines has boats stationed all around, waiting for us.’
‘Then how did we get through?’
‘You were lucky. You rolled in on a ferocious storm that kept them to the harbour. If it hadn’t been for that then you’d be in his care now, and I guarantee you his care is not as good as mine.’
At that moment I heard footsteps and looked up to see Richard at the canteen door. He smiled at me with relief.
‘Beth,’ he said, ‘how are you doing?’
He looked tanned and well fed, less wiry than he had done on the boat.
‘I’m fine,’ I said, as he hovered at the door. ‘Richard, I need to talk to you.’
Maggie stood up. ‘I’ll let you catch up with your friend.’ She clicked her fingers and her monkey, who had been gathering scraps beneath the tables, hopped back onto her shoulder. ‘Come and see me later so we can discuss your living quarters, and what kind of job we can give you. Richard tells me you’re good with computers, no?’
The End of the World Survivors Club Page 8
