“I beg your pardon?” I had no idea what he talking about.
“Your shirt. It appears to have blood stains upon it.”
“Oh, that! Nothing to worry about,” I said, “It’s not my blood.”
“Not your blood? Then whose blood is it?”
I told him about the man I’d met earlier, the one who had bled out in the alleyway by the chain-link fence.
Mr Cadwallader looked aghast. “Oh, Good Heavens, how frightful. You must have a change of clothing at once.”
“It’s nothing,” I said, “Really.”
“I beg to differ. Blood is never nothing. Especially not when it is somebody else’s blood. You never know what’s in it.”
He found me some more clothes: jeans, a tee-shirt and denim shirt, even a chunky-knit Arran pullover which, in other circumstances, would have been well beyond my means to buy. He insisted that I remove my old clothes carefully, avoiding touching the blood stains. Then he used some tongs pick up the blood-stained clothes and he sealed them inside a plastic bag. To me this seemed to be an unnecessary rigmarole. But I went along with it. Well, after all, the new clothes were much better than what they replaced.
I looked around the floor of shop in which we were sitting. I couldn’t see much, due to the dimness of the illumination from the single light – a sort of hand-held torch that had a panel of LEDs in its side; it currently stood in the centre of the table around which we were sitting. From what I could see, though, the shop looked to be in good shape. If the electricity ever came back on it would be ready to start trading again as though nothing had ever happened.
“Nobody has been out here,” Mr Cadwallader explained, “Well, I mean, I’ve seen a few youths staggering around. But one does, doesn’t one. Even at the best of times. Over-indulgence in the communion wine, as one might say. But no looting, no destruction. We are out on the fringes, you see. Industrial estate. Not the sort of place young people go for a rambunctious night out. At any rate, the mobs seem to be keeping to the town centres. So, all in all, I’ve done rather well of it out here. In fact, I could go on living here for quite some time, if necessary. Cadwallader’s Outdoor Supplies has everything required for survival in extremis. In the circumstances, business should be booming, don’t you think?” – he chuckled humourlessly. He glanced at the parkas, wooden sticks and torches that Geoff and I had plundered earlier – “I see you have made a selection from some of our items. Very good choices, if I might say so. No, no, please don’t feel the need to pay. I wouldn’t hear of it. The fact of the matter is that the outdoor supplies business may be going into a decline.”
There was a sadness in his voice that I had not noticed before.
“Three generations of Cadwalladers built this business. My grandfather, Jeremiah Ezekiel Cadwallader opened the first shop in Uttoxeter in 1952. He had come back from fighting in Burma with a wife and, within four years, three children to support, among whom was my father. Being an enterprising fellow, he realised that the tent pegs, knives and jerry cans which he had taken for granted in Burma were rather thin on the ground in post-war Britain. He resolved to make up for that deficit. And thus, the citizens of Uttoxeter were soon to be supplied for a life in the Great Outdoors by ‘Cadwallader’s Countryside Walking Emporium’. It was my father, Cyril Amadeus Cadwallader, who expanded the business by opening no less than ten more shops and changing the name, wisely, to the altogether snappier ‘Cadwallader’s Outdoor Supplies’. We now have twenty-seven stores across the length and breadth of the country. Three generations it took. Three generations and a hell of a lot of hard work.”
“That’s pretty amazing,” Geoff said.
“It is,” agreed Mr Cadwallader, “as you say, pretty amazing. And all, quite, quite worthless.”
“Well, I don’t know about that,” I said.
He smiled, “Don’t you? Come, come, I think you do. All those stores, all those people working in all those stores. All gone, I think. Never to come back.”
“We don’t know…” I began.
He interrupted me, “Three of my stores were destroyed. That much I do know. Before the power went, when the telephones and the Internet were still operational, I was in touch with the managers of my stores in Aberdeen, Sunderland and Plymouth. Two stores had been burned to the ground. The third had been looted and wrecked, just for the hell of it. The deputy manager in my Doncaster store informed me that the manager, Mr Starke, had been beaten to death on the streets. He was a nice fellow. Had a wife and two daughters.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Oh, you needn’t be. This is all quite commonplace now. This is what the world has become. At least, my store here, remains intact. Though I rather doubt that the spring sale will go ahead as planned. Oh, please, do have some more tea.”
“What are you planning to do?” I said.
“Me? Oh, there really is nothing left for me to do, is there? I shall never leave here. My life is…”
He stopped mid-sentence. His face froze as though he were a mechanical toy whose battery had run out. But in the next moment, he was smiling again and continuing as if nothing had happened. “We had a house, you see. Out on the west of the town. We only moved in last year. Quite a grand affair, I suppose. Ten bedrooms. Six acres of gardens. Indoor heated swimming pool. The business was doing well, you see. We moved into the house last July. We had a dog…” – he reached down and stroked Bobby again, “A Cocker Spaniel, called Rickie.”
“When the snow melts you’ll be able to…”
He shook his head. “We kept in touch with one of these.” – He took a small hand-held transmitter out of his pocket. What I would have called a walkie-talkie but which he called a dual-band transceiver. “He called me, but… the house was… the dog…” – he stopped again, “I don’t know what happened exactly. There were screams. I could hear the dog howling. I was in a wild panic. I kept shouting, ‘What’s happening? What’s happening? What are they doing to you? For God’s sake, what are they doing to you?’ And then there was silence. And then there was another voice. A voice I didn’t know. A young man, I’d say. Laughing. Gloating. And he told me what they’d done. And I…”
Mr Cadwallader put his head into his hands and cried. He cried in a way I’d never heard a man crying before. It was like a wail of agony. It took him a while to recover. I put my arm around his shoulders and muttered the sort of stupid platitudes I’d heard people saying in films. I knew what I was saying was stupid. But I didn’t have anything else to say.
After a couple of minutes, the wailing became sobbing and then the sobbing became a halting, irregular breathing. And then, quite suddenly, he looked up, smiled and said, “Goodness me, I am being a bad host. That tea is quite, quite cold. I shall put on the kettle at once.” I could see in his face that his heart was broken. There was nothing left to live for. To all intents and purposes, he was dead already.
5
We must have finally gone to bed again at about half-past four. Maybe five o’clock. I remember thinking, well, at least we are safe. There were three of us now, plus the dog, lying reasonably comfortably inside sleeping bags on metal-framed camp beds set out on the upper floor of the shop. There were sounds in the far distance. Cars screeching. People shouting. Occasional noises that sounded like explosions. But close at hand, everything was, as far as we could tell, peaceful.
I knew we couldn’t stay there. Not for ever. I had no intention of living the rest of my life inside a deserted shop in a decaying industrial estate. But, for the time being, this was the best sanctuary on offer. We would stay there, I thought, for a few days. That would give us enough time to work out a coherent plan. We had to have some objective. I didn’t believe, couldn’t believe, that the entire country had fallen into a state of anarchy. Our problems, I told myself, were local. Somebody somewhere must have plans underway to restore power, phone lines, infrastructure. This must be what it is like at times of war, I thought. London after the Blitz. Baghdad in the
wake of Shock and Awe. Hiroshima after the bomb. For a while everything falls to pieces. Nothing works as it should. Nobody knows who is in control or how life can ever return to any semblance of normality. But gradually, bit by bit, step by step, people begin to recover from the disaster, the authorities begin to regain control and, eventually, life goes on. Life may never be quite ‘normal’ ever again – but at least, it goes on.
My mind was racing so much that I didn’t think I would be able to sleep even though I was totally exhausted. But I did fall asleep eventually. I was awakened by Geoff shaking me. I asked him what the time was. “Shhhh,” he said, “Listen.”
I listened. I could hear the dog snoring. I could hear Mr Cadwallader snoring. Apart from that, I couldn’t hear very much.
“What am I supposed to be…?”
“Listen!” Geoff whispered again.
I lay as still as I could. In addition to the stereophonic snoring, I could also hear my own heart beating. It was beating fast. Because even though I couldn’t hear anything out of the ordinary, I knew that Geoff wouldn’t have woken me unless he was convinced that something was wrong.
Finally, I heard it. Laughter. Then someone said something. Then more laughter. There were two people. At least two people. They were downstairs. Inside the building. The voices were faint but getting louder.
“How did they get in?” I whispered, “Did you hear anything?”
“Yes. Like glass breaking. That’s what woke me. You didn’t hear it?”
“Not a thing.”
“What d’you reckon? Someone smashed a window. The front door?”
“Wouldn’t that be made of tempered glass or something?” I said.
“Not sure. I saw people smashing shop windows in London. On the telly. It didn’t look that hard to do.”
I leant across to Mt Cadwallader and tapped him gently a few times. That had no effect whatsoever so I tapped him not-so-gently until he snorted into wakefulness. I explained the situation. Then we all listened for a few moments to try to work out the whereabouts of the intruders.
“Hammocks and groundsheets,” Mr Cadwallader said.
“What?”
“Hammocks and groundsheets. That is the department where they are currently situated. We have some very nice cotton and polyester hammocks in a cheerful and summery design. Our hammocks are extremely comfortable and strong with maximum load-bearing capacity of 150 kilograms. They have integrated spreading sticks for added comfort.”
The sales patter came as second-nature to him.
“How far away from us is the hammocks and groundsheets department and is there anything we can do to stop them getting up to this level?”
“At a brisk walking pace they could be up here in a minute, a minute and a half maybe. I can lock the door to the stairwell but I doubt if that would prove much of a barrier.”
“Lock it anyway.”
I don’t know why I had suddenly started giving orders. Maybe because nobody else was. And I had the feeling there wasn’t much time to start a campaign to elect a leader. The position was vacant, so I took it.
Mr Cadwallader tottered over to the door, took a bunch of keys from the pocket of his nightgown and proceeded to lock the only communicating door between this level and the rest of the shop. On the one hand, I was glad that the door had a mechanical lock rather than an electrically-operated one, which would have been useless. On the other hand, I couldn’t help noticing how much noise a keyring full of keys made. The jangling was so loud I couldn’t believe that the people downstairs could fail to hear it.
“Is there any other way out?” I said.
“The fire escape,” he nodded to the far corner of the room. There was a glass door there, next to a wall of windows. It was early morning. Outside, the town stretched into the distance, grey and dismal in the pale light.
“Is it open?”
“It’s a fire escape,” he said, “Of course it’s open.”
The voices were getting closer. They were at the bottom of the stairwell now. I could hear talking, interspersed with laughter. Whoever they were, they seemed to be in an exceptionally humorous mood.
“Quick,” said Mr Cadwallader, “Behind the ponchos!”
I had no idea what he meant until I saw him pointing to a rack of long, shapeless nylon garments which, according to the sign, were “Rainproof Ponchos – guaranteed to keep you dry in style!”
I had a distinct feeling that hiding behind the ponchos would fool no one. I didn’t know if the people who’d broken into the building were looking for a fight but, if so, I thought we stood a better chance if we faced them openly instead of cowering behind a rack of fashionable rainwear.
If we’d had more time on our hands, we might have debated the matter. As it happened, we had no time at all. Seconds later, there was the sound of feet running up the stairwell towards us. Then there was an almighty crash as the glass of the door exploded in upon us followed by a large metal object landing on the floor. It was a fire extinguisher.
Seconds later, they were in the room with us. There were three of them. Young men. All between the ages of about seventeen and nineteen, at a guess. The first to enter was tall and rangy. He had long, greasy black hair and was wearing a fringed buckskin jacket in the ‘Davy Crocket’ style. There was something of the wolf about him. His movements were jerky and his hands trembled slightly. His eyes looked abnormally large and bloodshot. He was the one we’d heard laughing. He was laughing now. A high, braying laughter that had a touch of madness about it. He was holding a knife. It was a fairly short knife – much shorter than the one that the farmer, Douggie Lampton, had threatened me with – but it had a very sharp-looking serrated blade. I had the feeling that, in the right hands, that knife could do a lot of damage. I was hoping that these hands weren’t the right hands.
“Looky, looky, looky, chumsters,” giggled the man with the knife, “Looky what we got here. Three jolly victims and a jolly, jolly doggie.”
The jolly, jolly doggie didn’t take kindly to the description and was crouching, snarling through his teeth, with the hairs on his back standing upright like the spines on a porcupine.
“I see,” said Mr Cadwallader, with a calmness that amazed me, “that you have selected one of our premier line of survival knives. This particular model has a drop-point CPM-S30V steel blade and a Japanese white oak handle.”
The mad-looking man giggled again, stepped forwards and, with one swift movement, he slit Mr Cadwallader’s throat.
6
“That guy talked too much,” said the laughing man. He laughed when he said it.
Mr Cadwallader didn’t die quickly. He clutched at his throat. He staggered forward. He bumped into a rack of overcoats. He held onto one of the coats with his free hand. Then he sank slowly to the floor and lay there, with his hands around his neck as blood poured between his fingers. All the while, he was making the most horrific sound I have ever heard: a wheezing, bubbling, gasping sound. I turned away. I couldn’t bear to look. The laughing man laughed on. His two friends started laughing too. But I could barely hear the laughter. All I could hear was the terrible sounds of the man on the floor suffocating and drowning but, for what seemed a vast eternity of time, refusing to die.
And then, at last, he was silent. I looked at him. Lying, still and white in a growing pool of crimson.
Geoff moved towards the laughing man. I thought at first he was going to hit him. But he didn’t. Geoff looked the laughing man straight in the eyes and said: “Cool knife. Almost as good as the ZT 0454.”
“What’s that?”
One of the other two men spoke then. He was tall and blond. He had the physique of a rugby player and yet he seemed to cringe in the attitude of a hyena. When he spoke, his voice was whiny and uncertain: “We, we don’t need, don’t n-need knives, Jake. G-guns is what we n-need. Where’s the bleedin’ guns?”
The laughing man, Jake, spoke over him: “What’s a ZT…?”
“0454,” sai
d Geoff, “One of these.” And he produced a dangerous looking, short-blade knife from his pocket.
Oh God, I thought, Geoff, don’t do anything stupid.
“I tell you,” the blond man said, “G-guns is what we need.”
“It’s an outdoor shop,” Geoff said, “They don’t sell guns.”
“What do you mean, they don’t sell guns?” said Jake, “Guns is for outdoors, ain’t they?”
“This place is behind the times,” Geoff said, “You want guns, what you want is a firearms shop.”
“‘You want a firearms shop…’” Jake mimicked in a high, whiny voice, “And what the hell do you know about guns anyway?”
Geoff unbuttoned the top of his denim shirt and pulled it back to show his bandaged shoulder. “I got shot by one.”
Jake found that hysterical and doubled over in a fit of laughter. Then, quite suddenly, he straightening up and, without any trace of humour in his voice, he said, “You can’t know much about guns if you got shot.”
Geoff laughed too. “Nah, it’s the bloke who shot me didn’t know much about guns. If he had known much about guns, I wouldn’t be standing here now, would I?”
“He’s g-got a p-point, Jake,” said the blond one.
Jake thought this over a bit. “Yeah, OK. Maybe.”
“The thing is,” Geoff continued, “I got shot by some crappy old pheasant-shooting gun. If I’d got shot by, say, a JD5050E, the outcome would have been very different. If you know what I mean.”
“I know what you mean,” said Jake, belligerently, “Are you trying to say that I don’t know what you mean?”
“No, not at all. I can tell you are the sort of person who can size up a situation right away.”
“Abso-bloody-lutely,” agreed Jake.
“Well then, what you need is a JD5050E – it’s powerful but compact, has PTO engagement and synchronized transmission. You don’t want to go for one of the flashy numbers. The JD5050E is what a professional would use.”
The Exodus Plague | Book 1 | The Snow Page 8
