by Andrew Tudor
Crowds are already gathering, some perhaps out of curiosity, but most out of misguided faith. As he walks Hart becomes aware that they make way for him or, rather, for his robe. To be a Guardian clearly commands respect and those around him are careful not to catch his eye, looking away or at the ground if he glances in their direction. So much fear, Hart thinks, what an extraordinary weapon it is. All these people, frightened of what awaits them, hoping and believing that there is another happier life to be had beyond the grave if only they follow the Word of the Prophet. As he wanders, a sense of revulsion grows in Hart, a loathing not directed at the desperate men and women around him, but at those who are playing on that despair for their own terrible ends.
Then, his train of thought is interrupted by a susurration that flows through the crowd like a ripple spreading out on the surface of a pool. Look, look, he is among us, the ripple says, and the faithful turn, searching to left and to right, wanting only a sight of the One. Hart also searches, at last locating a movement, a surge in the mass of disciples where a block of brown advances through them. In the midst of this protective cordon is a figure robed in white, supported on some kind of litter which elevates him above the heads of all the rest. He raises his hands, blessing those around him as the Guardians convey him towards a stage which stands in the midst of the arena.
Hart now begins to force his way through the mass of the faithful, the authority of his robe silencing any resistance. I have to get to them before they reach the dais, he thinks, and presses ever forward. The nearer he approaches to the Prophet’s entourage, the more dense becomes the crowd and the more he has to struggle to make progress. But at last he reaches the outer edge of the brown-robed barrier where he slows almost to a halt. One or two of the Guardians look in his direction, puzzled perhaps that they do not recognise him. To them he murmurs, “Prophet’s word be with you,” to which they reply, “And with you, brother, and with you,” turning their attention elsewhere as they seek out potential threats. Slowly he inches his way in among them, his hands now deep within his cloak, one gripping the pistol, the other, as he has rehearsed so often, priming the explosive belt and its dead man’s switch. Now the Guardians ignore him, for he is to all intents and purposes one of them, a protector of the faith. It is not his face that they see. It is only his robe.
They are nearing their destination now, readying themselves to deliver the Prophet onto the platform from whence he will preach his sermon. Hart eases himself closer to the litter, ignoring the muttered imprecations of those he pushes out of the way. Here the crowd is at its densest, confining the Guardians’ protective circle into a smaller and smaller space, compressing it such that Hart finds himself at last adjacent to the litter. He looks up at the Prophet. Just another madman on the make, he thinks, with a gift for oratory and an overweening desire for power.
The crowd is so tightly packed now that he can barely move his arms, but slowly he eases the pistol out of his gown, clutching it firmly in his right hand. Then he edges his arm upwards until it is free to level the gun. As he does so the Prophet catches sight of the weapon and for a split second he and Hart look at one another, the Prophet with growing astonishment and, finally, comprehension. Then Hart squeezes the trigger and the Prophet’s head explodes, bone and brain and flesh spraying onto those surrounding him. There follows a frozen moment and then, as one, the Guardians fall upon Hart like hyenas onto a corpse. He disappears beneath a writhing mass of bodies. His task is fulfilled. His final thoughts as he releases the button on the dead man’s switch are of Rosemary and of Jenny and of all the many millions of the dead.
Epilogue
It is a pleasant autumn afternoon of blue skies, warming sunshine and a scattering of fluffy clouds. An elderly woman is walking up the open hillside, each step taken with deliberation. It is not decrepitude that demands slowness of her. She walks as she does to enjoy the smell of the sea air, to feel the breeze on her face, and, above all, to think and to remember. Her long dark hair is now streaked liberally with white, or, as she confesses to herself when catching sight of it in the mirror, more accurately described as white streaked with black. Today it is tied into a ponytail, foiling the wind’s desire to whip it back and forth across her face. She has vivid green eyes, as striking still as they were in her youth. She is sixty-seven years old.
Before reaching the brow of the hill where the wind turbines stand in silhouette, she turns to admire the view. Immediately below is her own house and those of her friends and their families. Beyond that, out on the sea loch, she can see a muddle of small sailing dinghies, criss-crossing each other at frightening speed. Lucy is teaching the children to sail, a vital skill in a world where harvesting the sea has become so important. Missing from view is the customary sight of the anchored Cormorant. Marie and Stuart are away on one of their regular voyages. Every few years Marie becomes restless, even now that she is nearing seventy, and they sail off for a month or more. On their first such voyage they dropped Conrad in Bristol so that he could return to the family home. He and Julie had suffered a none-too-friendly break-up and, given his distaste for the community’s politics, there was nothing left to keep him in the Highlands. Subsequently, Marie and Stuart have several times cruised the entire British coastline, returning with news of pockets of survivors scattered here and there. On this occasion they have been more ambitious, setting sail for Scandinavia where there are rumoured to be communities in the fiords.
Turning away from the loch, Ali calls to her dog who is busy eyeing the grazing sheep.
“Skye, Skye, come on. We’re going.”
The dog turns to see her continuing up the hill and follows obediently, constantly running circles around her. Skye, named for her Uncle Bill’s dog of long ago, is a brown-and-white Border Collie with amber eyes, once the runt of a litter bullied by the other puppies and kept from his mother’s teats. Ali bottle-fed him, and as far as he is concerned she is now his entire family. He knows where they are going today for this is a regular walking route. Up and over they climb, turning north towards the open ocean. Below them to the right there is a track running along the shore of Loch Ewe which would lead them to their destination, but she and Skye much prefer to walk across the low hills.
After a little more than a mile they are descending towards the Atlantic, aiming for a promontory beneath which the waves foam and break on the rocks. The rough track leads up to this spot from the right and there is a scattering of boulders where the track ends. Skye runs in among them, hoping for rabbits to chase but finding none. When Ali catches up she slows almost to a halt, looking around her. At this distance it is clear that the boulders have not gathered here by geological accident, nor have they been marked only by the sea-spray and the wind. Each has a flat sanded surface on which are engraved names and dates. Ali walks directly towards one of the less weathered rocks which reads simply: ‘Douglas MacIntyre, 1991–2063’.
She stands before the memorial for some time, unseeing eyes fixed upon it. She had, she supposed, always expected Douglas to die before her. He was nine years her senior, after all. But it had still been a shock and had left a great chasm in her life. They had never had children, not by decision but by biological fiat. She did and did not regret that. It would certainly have added a new dimension to their lives, but it was not something that had seriously damaged the happiness that they shared. Besides, Ali had so many children by proxy. First, Charley and Lucy and that generation, and now their children and those of others. As the community’s moving force she has come to be seen as some kind of mother to them all, although it is a designation that she would reject if anyone dared press it upon her. As she always maintains, she has been nothing more than a determined enabler. The fact that there is now a Wester Ross region, comprised of collaborating co-operatives from Ullapool in the north to Lochcarron in the south, is, she insists, merely something for which she has been the fortunate midwife.
At last she moves away fr
om Douglas, walking among the stones, looking from one to another. Here is Jimmy, irrepressible Jimmy, with whom she has spent many an evening arguing political philosophy. He died in the only really devastating flu epidemic that they have experienced over all these years, as did Shona and one of her sons. Ali had been at a loss to understand how the virus reached them since there were so few travellers who might import it from elsewhere. But Sarah corrected her, pointing out that many of them could well be harbouring a mild and therefore unnoticed variant which, in lethal Zeno fashion, would suddenly mutate into something much more dangerous.
Ali continues onward, all the time getting closer to the sea. She is almost at the rear of the little forest of boulders now, and here she comes upon Irene. It pleases Ali to recall that Irene lived to see their plans for mutual aid come to fruition, for she and Julie had proved formidable campaigners for the cause, travelling up and down the coastline encouraging an ethos of collectivism. As she told Ali, Irene felt that she owed some recompense to the world after what she had come to think of as a misbegotten career in science and government.
Only one boulder remains beyond Irene’s, this one the most weathered of all. Ali traces its blurred inscription with her fingertips. ‘Pike’ it reads, then below: ‘in company with the spirit of Duncan MacGregor’. She smiles at the thought of Pike and her father reunited in the cosmic dust, something that Duncan believed to be the ultimate fate of all things. He would have approved of this entirely secular burial ground and would have been happy to be no more or less important than the dog. Ali pats the stone. “Good boy, Pike,” she murmurs, then walks the final few paces to the ocean’s edge.
The waves are much noisier here, rolling constantly onto the rocks just below. Ali sits down on a familiar flat stone, Skye beside her, and for a while watches the unpredictable flow of the turbulent blue-green water around and among the channels that the ocean has eaten into the land. Then she reaches into her knapsack and retrieves an old paperback book, its pages yellow and brittle. She dips into it seemingly at random, looking up every so often, turning her face to the sunshine, staring out at the vast vanishing horizon. After a while, a figure walks through the boulders behind her and calls out.
“I thought I’d find you here.”
This is Charley, no longer the little girl who worshipped her Auntie Ali, but now a woman in her forties and with two children of her own.
“Your mum not with you today?” Ali asks.
“No.” Charley smiles ruefully. “She’s got herself worked up about the prospect of yet another breakthrough. She’s in the lab with Dad. I expect it will turn out much like all the others.”
“But she does keep trying,” Ali observes. “It was always her great virtue, her determination. And it may yet pay off.”
“Maybe,” Charley says as she sits down. Then she continues, obviously excited. “I came looking for you because we’ve had a radio message from Marie and Stuart. They’ve come across a Norwegian community which sounds rather similar to ours. They have expertise that we don’t, and vice versa, so we may be able to trade with them. They have several good ocean-going boats too.”
Ali smiles. “As long as they’re not Vikings. Wouldn’t want all that looting and pillaging again.”
Charley gives her a look. “Sometimes,” she says, “I’m not entirely sure whether you’re joking or not.”
At this, Ali laughs out loud. “Yes, I could always fool you with a straight face when you were little. You used to get angry with me and go away in a huff.”
Charley shakes her head, mock offended. Then, seeing Ali’s book, asks what she is reading. Ali hands her the book.
“Earth Abides,” Charley reads out. “By George R. Stewart. It looks very old.”
“It is,” Ali replies. “My father gave it to me. Well, he wrapped it up and buried it in the bottom of my backpack when we left his house to come north. I didn’t know it was there. Didn’t find it until we’d been here a while. Have a look inside. He wrote a message.”
Charley looks and reads the message aloud: “Alison. You might find this interesting, perhaps even useful. Love, Dad.” She turns to Ali. “And did you?” she asks.
“Interesting, certainly. Useful, I’m not so sure. It’s a novel about trying to survive in a world in which most people have been almost instantaneously killed by a virus. First published in 1949. It’s very much a product of its time. So many of its attitudes sound old-fashioned now.”
She retrieves the book from Charley, handling it almost reverentially, and opens it to the page recording its printing history. She shows Charley the date.
“See, this edition is from 1965. My dad must have bought it second-hand somewhere. Although the cover says it costs five shillings, it has ‘two and six’ scrawled on it in pencil. That’s the old British money, before the 1970s. Shillings and pence. A crazy system – Dad explained it to me once. The ‘two and six’ is half the five shillings.”
Charley takes the book back, her attention drawn to a single biblical quotation from Ecclesiastes in the middle of the page opposite the printing history. She reads it out.
“Men go and come, but earth abides.”
“Yes,” Ali says. “The book ends with that line too. I guess it’s the main theme. Human beings are transient but the planet will continue regardless. At the end of the book people are surviving in a kind of tribal society. Over-population has been curtailed by the disease, but at the cost of much of what people think of as civilisation. I think we’re probably doing a bit better than them.”
“Oh, I hope so,” Charley says. “Out there” – she waves in the direction of the ocean – “there could be all sorts of survivors.”
Ali nods. “Uh-huh,” she says. “Who knows what’s out there?”
She does not add, although both of them are thinking this, that once or twice in recent years they have heard the distant sound of aeroplanes above the clouds. Not the whine of jets, but the thrum of propellers. Someone, somewhere, still has access to technology beyond anything that they have here in Wester Ross.
Charley returns the book to her. “I’ll have to have a read of that,” she says.
“Of course,” Ali replies, although she knows that reading is no longer something that much occupies the younger generations. The elders have carefully assembled all the books that they can recover into a library, but as time goes by it receives less and less use.
Charley stands up. “I’ve got to get back,” she says. “The kids will be in from their sailing lessons shortly. See you later.”
Once Charley has gone, Ali rests a hand on Skye’s warm back and gazes at length into the clear Atlantic water. The sea has calmed while they were talking. It no longer batters the rocks but is now lapping tenderly against them. She watches the seaweed turning this way and that beneath the surface and she pictures all the life that the ocean supports: creatures too tiny for her to see; exotic crustaceans crawling across the seabed; fish of every shape, size, and colour; and, out in the deep ocean, the dolphins, the sharks, the whales, perhaps – she smiles to herself – perhaps even the massive sea-monsters of mythology.
She raises her eyes from the water, gets to her feet then turns and looks back at the land. Although they are not visible from here, she knows where to picture the great mountains that surround her Highland home. She whispers the names to herself, relishing their Gaelic beauty. Over there, to the east, the majestic An Teallach. To the south-east, hard by Loch Maree, Slioch. To the south, the giants of Torridon: Beinn Eighe, Liathach, Beinn Alligin. These mountains, she knows, are composed of some of the oldest rock in the country, rock that has endured many hundreds of millions of years. Against that ancient backdrop human beings have been little more than the tiniest flicker of light. A flicker that has shone brightly, to be sure, but a flicker nonetheless. As the inscription in her book says, men will indeed go and come. Perhaps they are going now, tumbli
ng into the darkness of a passing age. But, she is certain, the earth itself will abide. And for Ali today, that is enough.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to all those who read drafts for me, offering criticism, suggestions and encouragement: David Anderson, Kristyn Gorton, Tatiana Heise, Gail Murden, Phil Stanworth, Jamie Tudor, Olwen Tudor, as well as several members of Olwen’s reading group.
I am grateful to Tom Halstead who corrected my outdated laboratory equipment terminology, and to John Illingworth who advised with regard to yachts and maritime matters. Needless to say, any surviving errors are my responsibility.
I am also indebted to Sophie Bristow for meticulous copy-editing, and to Lauren Bailey, Emily Castledine, Rosie Lowe, Fern Bushnell and no doubt others unnamed at Troubador, who eased me through the publication process.
Laura Spinney’s splendid study of the 1918 flu pandemic, Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World (Jonathan Cape, 2017) is fascinating and frightening in equal measure, and proved to be a constant source of stimulation and useful information.
For a novel whose characters are forced to traverse so many regions of the UK, a word on geography is appropriate. I have tried to ensure that overall geographical features are accurately represented. So, for example, the route followed by Ali’s group as they trek through the mountains from Stronmilchan to Torlundy is real enough. But I have taken liberties with specific locations, which are often entirely invented, such as Malvern Edge Farm, Duncan’s home in Stronmilchan, or Fleming’s house by Loch Maree.
