The Night the Lights Went Out

by John Eider

Wareing was a man of surprising talents. For instance, he seemed to take to foraging and trapping easily, leaving me in the wooded hollow and coming back with rabbits and fat woodpigeons; which I then surprised myself by enjoying eating.

  ‘Do you remember how to get a fire going from your training?’ he had asked me before leaving.

  ‘Yes. But why go hunting at all? Can’t we just find a farm and steal the odd pig?’ I asked in ignorance.

  ‘You think there’s still pigs to steal?’

  ‘There’s horses.’

  ‘Yes, in Tommy’s territory, and who’d mess with those?’

  ‘You offered to kill one for the old man and little girl…’

  ‘…before I knew whose they were. Anyway, do you know how much time and space you’d need to butcher and cook and animal like that? We wouldn’t be able to eat a quarter of it before it needed preserving, and I don’t see any salt reserves or cold stores nearby.’

  ‘You seem to know a lot about this.’

  ‘I grew up on the edge of town, near the woods,’ he answered, displaying a warm smile I would see only rarely during the trip. ‘I was a tracker before I was a soldier, it came natural to me. The Major knew we wouldn’t need provisions.’

  As I looked up at the smoke of the fire mingling with the leaves and branches above us, diffusing any straight column rising into the sky, I realised that this shady spot had been chosen as much to hide the fire as to hide us. As we ate, Wareing pointed me back to the papers,

  ‘Most of it’s background,’ he spoke between mouthfuls, ‘but if we get split up or if anything happens to one of us, then the most important thing to keep hold of is the map at the back. It’s pretty large scale, but has every single target site marked; and even without directions you’ll soon be seeing these places a mile off.

  ‘We’re in West Sussex at the moment, just bordering Hampshire,’ he continued. ‘You’ll see the westernmost target marked. From here we move generally north-eastward toward London; but of course they can look after themselves…’

  London. Locked down tight by the time of our mission, of course; but come the crisis three months before and not one of its security protocols had worked as hoped. One of the problems with talking in terms of ‘E-Day’ was that the day itself was largely unremarkable – the power went off one evening, how scary was that? It was hardly enough to bring the men in chemical warfare suits out onto the streets. People remembered seeing the same thing happen in New York a few years before, and they had had parties in the streets all night. By morning though, and with word from outlying regions hard to come by, the Cobra committee was assembled and the Prime Minister arrived (at his own bidding) from his constituency. By the night of E-Day+1, panic buying (as I noted before, it being hard to purchase anything legitimately without cashpoints or shoptills) became panic looting. Meanwhile, with no radios, police and army found it hard to coordinate, impossible to keep order, some even reportedly firing live rounds at looters. They had left it too late, it was said in some quarters, had been caught napping on that sunny May day. But what was there for the security forces to possibly have done?

  It was said, when the troops regrouping in Calais finally ‘re-took’ London, that one of the first tasks of the First Wave of repatriated forces was to take up London’s dead. I saw the CNN reports, I watched the mass cremations. Like many others, I felt that same sense of extinction. I was a coward that day, sat in Calais with the drinkers and the immigrants and invalids around that cafeteria television. I was glad I wasn’t with my unit doing that work; and I’ve felt ashamed of it ever since.

  ‘I had not thought death had undone so many…’ said Wareing, at one point that afternoon.

  ‘Sorry?’ I asked, suddenly not quite sure where I was.

  ‘Not the most cheerful of sentiments, but perhaps not inaccurate,’ remarked my partner.

  ‘It’s Eliot,’ I remembered then, ‘from The Waste Land.’

  ‘And you’ve just blurted it out in your sleep.’

  ‘Have I? Sorry, I must have nodded off.’

  ‘Crofts, you’re not the typical soldier, are you.’

  I didn’t suppose that I was, from the number of times it’d been remarked upon.

  ‘You were humming Jerusalem back there,’ he went on, ‘and now you’re quoting poems? I thought you squaddies never looked further than the football pages?’

  ‘Well, I think in a world where someone can forget that they’re an Officer, perhaps someone else can forget that they’re a Private?’

  ‘Touché. But what’s your story? You’ve clearly been to school; and you don’t have the bitterness of one who went in for Officer and was refused.’

  ‘I never wanted to be an Officer. I mean, if it happens someday then all very well; but I want to do my bit first.’

  ‘A soldier of conscience then?’

  I told him the story why I’d enlisted, of how it had all been my grandfather’s doing, telling me of his time as a soldier, and of his own father’s service in the North African Campaign. After hearing those stories, then nothing else the world offered measured up. My parents certainly didn’t understand, thinking I’d thrown my future away by signing up as soon as finishing college – and after all the effort they’d gone to to give me the opportunities they hadn’t had. And now my country needed me as it had needed my descendants, and all I’d had to offer so far had been a sick-note and a bad leg.

  A little later Wareing had a map out, his gaze following his finger as it moved across it,

  ‘It’s a bit of a jaunt I’m afraid, our targets further north.’

  ‘So what kind of places are they?’ I asked.

  ‘Forget the rich cities: they’ve had the money to manage their sites or modernise old Council buildings, or else they still have regional commands in operation; and so they don’t want us interfering. Where we’re going are mostly the out of the way, the lost and the forgotten, places sitting there since Sixty-eight rotting into the marsh.’

  I looked again at the map,

  ‘But you said there were hundreds of the watching stations. There’s only, what, twenty targets marked on here?’

  ‘After the Cold War a certain cult grew up around these places, with civilians tracking down and photographing old sites. Some of the larger bunkers were decommissioned and preserved, becoming tourist destinations of sorts. People loved the mystery of them, the secrecy of all this once going on around them, and with the threat of war now passed into memory.

  ‘The Major’s job was once to manage these stations. Years later he was the perfect man to monitor their decline. Every time one of these enthusiasts got permission to photograph the old air filters and sinks and warning sings in an abandoned power station basement, then that was another facility he could cross off the list as derelict.

  ‘The problem came with sites either not known about by the enthusiasts, or which some local or national authority barred them from visiting, or which were still in some kind of use. Of course, the actual, current control sites are fine: after E-Day there were soldiers guarding them in hours.’

  ‘So, these aren’t either the sites still working, or the minor ones we know are harmless?’

  ‘No, just the worst of the rest.’

  ‘How far is the next target?’

  ‘Only a mile or two away.’

  ‘So close?’

  ‘Yes, it looks quite out of the way. You’ve finished eating? I say we get some sleep now.’

  ‘We don’t need to build a better shelter?’ I looked up to the canopy of trees.

  ‘In this sun? No, we’ll be gone before nightfall.’

  And so it turned out, we soon falling into a pattern of sleeping and eating under cover by day, and travelling and operating by night; which made the prospect of negotiating these rotten underground tunnels even less inviting. As Wareing would say on this nocturnal policy,

  ‘Tommy’s town was different: we got there early and there wasn’t a soul around; or so it seemed at any
rate. I made a judgement call, and sadly not my best: just look at what it got us into. But there’s the moral for you – had I been running back up to meet you at dusk then Grandpa wouldn’t have caught me in his sights.’

  It was a warm afternoon, as I say, and I soon nodded off again, right where I’d been sitting, my back propped up by my kitbag. I woke with a start, a noise heard just outside the perimeter of our clearing. I looked to Wareing, who was still curled up on his side and fast asleep. Some hours had passed as it was dusk, and noticeably cooler, felt most around my neck where my shirt and coat had been left open. I had just dreamt of being laid on a table or a rack with some great menace or danger above me, and not being able to roll away to either side to escape it. This, I woke to learn, had come from my pack still being strapped around my shoulders – I hadn’t even taken it off before resting on it. My shoulders would ache all that night.

  Crack.

  I looked again at the darkening line of trees and hedgerow that surrounded our natural hollow in the woods. Something was out there, and it was moving.

  Crack.

  I heard it again, and then another sound – a voice, muffled – coming from behind the undergrowth. I struggled with my bag straps and rose to face… whoever.

  Chapter 8 – Twilight March