“And what might your name be, young lady?” I say cheerily.
“Jenni,” she says, and thrusts a gun into my hands. “They didn’t think to search us.”
For a moment I’m too surprised to speak, and then I remember Tariq giving her the weapon back in the school hall.
“Oh, Jenni,” I say eventually. “You are my kind of girl!”
“Where are they taking us?” she asks. I can hear her trying to be brave.
“I don’t know, sweetheart. I don’t know anything.” But that’s a lie. I know Spider. I know what he’s capable of.
I shove the gun into my trousers and pull my jacket down over it. They searched me back at the school; they’ve no reason to do so again.
“Where are you from, Jenni?” I ask.
There’s a long silence, and I wonder if she heard me, then she says: “Ipswich.”
“And how old are you?”
“Thirteen.”
“So you were eight when…”
“Everyone died.”
“And how have you lived since then? I mean, who’s been looking after you?”
“Mike,” she says, as if this explains everything. “But he’s dead now.” Her matter of factness stops me cold. I don’t ask any more questions. She lets me put my arm around her though, and she nestles into my chest. She soon falls asleep. I feel the slow rise and fall of her breathing as we rattle and bounce in the darkness. Eventually I rest my head on hers and I slip into a half-sleep. I have no idea how much times passes until the explosion.
In the enclosed space, the bang is deafening. It comes from the front, from the cab, and the lorry lurches violently to the left. We’re flung into each other like some mad rugby scrum and there are cries and screams as the lorry tilts past the tipping point and slams down on its side. The doors at the back buckle and a chink of light breaks in. The lorry is still moving forward, crippled now, and we’re bounced and jostled. Loud screams from the bottom of the human pile as children are crushed. The lorry jacknifes on its side and the cargo container sweeps in a wide arc then smashes into something solid. We come to a sudden halt and are all flung against the wall, compressed in an awful smashing of limbs. The doors crash open and children spill out of the container, tumbling helplessly onto tarmac.
There’s a moment of stillness as our ears ring and we get our balance, re-orientating ourselves. Then the screaming starts again and there are children yelling for air, and for people to get off them, or just crying in pain as the inevitable broken bones grind against each other.
I’ve ended up at the top of the pile, so I scramble towards the doors as delicately as I can, but it’s impossible. The mass of children heaves and shifts beneath me and I’m thrown off balance, unable to escape.
I hear the crack of small-arms fire over the din. I can’t locate where it’s coming from, but it redoubles my determination and I ruthlessly scramble back to the top of the pile and out the doors, literally sliding out across the backs of children. I draw my gun as I do so. To my surprise I manage a relatively graceful landing as kids rain down around me, blinking in the sudden, bright afternoon light.
The gunfire is coming from my left. I spin and see the snatchers who’ve survived the crash, huddled behind the open cab door, firing up at concrete embankment. We’re on an A road, in the suburbs of London, at a guess. Beckenham, perhaps? I glance around the container and see that the first lorry is still upright, parked a few hundred metres down the road. It is coming under heavy attack, many rocks and a few bullets pinging off its bonnet and roof. Before I can react, they pull away, cutting their losses, abandoning us.
Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
The kids are still tumbling out of the lorry, all walking wounded. I briefly search for Jenni, but can’t find her in the confusion.
Right, time to take control.
I have no idea who’s attacking the convoy. They could be good guys, but they could equally be a rival bunch of snatchers. Until I know, I can’t afford to start shooting. I look behind me. There’s a side street with a pub on the corner. It’s derelict and ruined, but it will have a cellar and that’s our best chance of shelter.
“Listen,” I shout. “Everyone into the pub. Quickly.”
But it’s no use. I have no authority here. These kids don’t trust me, and why should they? They scatter in all directions, in ones and twos, pure panic. Scurrying for cover or making a break for freedom. I see one duo blindly racing past the snatchers towards the enemy guns. One of them is hit in the crossfire and drops, but the other keeps running and disappears into a tower block.
I feel a hand tugging my coat and I turn to find Jenni pulling me towards the pub.
“Come on,” she says urgently. Then she shouts at the kids who are still pouring from the back of the ruined lorry. “Come on! This way!” Thankfully, some of them hear, and once they begin to follow us, the others fall in behind them. Jenni and I begin running towards the pub.
We’re about ten metres from the door when a man steps out of the doorway. He’s about my height, dressed in tracky pants and a thick, quilted coat topped by a beanie. His face is grimy and hard to make out. In his hands he holds a crowbar. He stands with his legs apart and starts smacking the crowbar into the palm of his left hand like a panto actor in Eastenders pretending to be a hard man. He doesn’t slow me down. I level my gun at him as I keep running.
Two more men step out of the shadowy pub interior. They’re also dressed in rag-tag looter chic, but while one of them dangles a bicycle chain from his right hand, the other has a gun aimed right back at me. Jenni and I skid to a halt, but the kids behind us are too panicked. They sweep past us and then veer right as they see the menacing figures before us.
Instead of heading into the pub the stampede takes off down the side street, leaderless, lost and running into the territory of god knows what kind of gang. I yell at them to stop, but nobody’s listening.
“Leave the kids alone, bitch,” shouts the man in the middle over the sound of pattering feet and, I realise, nothing else — the gunfire behind us has stopped.
“She’s not one of them,” shouts Jenni. “She was a prisoner, like us.”
“Then she can drop the gun,” replies the man.
I aim it at his head. “And let you take them instead? I don’t think so. Stay close Jenni.”
I notice that the tide of children is ebbing and that some of them have gathered around us. I glance down briefly and recognise a number of faces from the school. About five of the kids we tried to rescue have rallied to my defence.
“She’s telling the truth,” pipes up a boy so tiny he can only be about eight. “She tried to help us.” I make a mental note to hug the life out of him if we get out of this alive.
“Doesn’t matter,” comes a loud voice from behind us. “She’s still a fucking adult. You can’t trust them. Everybody step away from her. NOW.”
Such is the authority in this woman’s voice that four of the kids peel away and begin running to catch up with their fellow escapees. It’s only Jenni and the pipsqueak left.
I turn to face this new player.
In the distance I can see the snatchers lying dead in the road, and between us and them stands a group of ten children. And then I do a quick double take back at the pub doorway and realise that they’re not men — they’ve got the slightly out of proportion, weed-thin tallness of teenage boys.
I look back at the group in front of us. They’re all teenagers. Only two have guns, the rest brandish truncheons, chains and even pitchforks. One of the kids with a shotgun, a girl, steps out of the crowd and takes point. She’s wearing a brown fur coat tied around the waist with a leather belt; she’s got a grey hoodie on underneath the coat and she pulls the hood off, releasing a cascade of greasy red hair.
The sun is behind her so I still can’t quite make out her face.
I lower my gun. “I really was a prisoner. I’m not one of the snatchers.”
She doesn’t rep
ly.
“Honestly, I’m trying to help these children,” I plead.
The girl steps forward and suddenly I can make out her face. It takes me a second, but then I gasp in shock.
“Well you took your fucking time,” says Caroline.
THE SCARS ON the right side of her face look like the worst case of acne I’ve ever seen. I remember the cleaner’s shotgun blast peppering her with shot, seeing her fall, working all evening to sterilise and dress her wounds. Failing to save her right eye.
I don’t know what it looks like under the eye patch she’s fashioned from elastic and felt, and I don’t ask permission to look.
She’s taller but still very solid. She’d be pretty if it weren’t for her injuries, and her hair is stunning. I spent so long looking for her; it’s hard to believe she’s actually standing in front of me.
The last time I saw her she was being taken into the hospital at the Operation Motherland base, Rowles at her side. I had assumed that was where she remained until the nuclear blast. But when Lee had recovered from his injuries enough to be able to communicate again, he told me that she wasn’t there. The Americans knew nothing about her. She had vanished from under their noses even as Sanders and I were escaping in the opposite direction.
I spread the word that I was looking for her to all our contacts, but I never heard so much as a whisper. Her trail had gone cold by the time I knew to start looking.
I look at the short, square, scarred pirate Jenny in front of me, gun in hand, defiant, leading an army of children, and I feel a strange sort of pride.
“That’s my girl,” I whisper.
She hands me a mug of hot milk, which I take thankfully, warming my frozen fingers.
“Fresh water’s hard to get here,” she explain. “But there’s a guy who comes to market with milk once a week, so…”
We’re awkward with each other. Not quite sure what to say. We slip into survivalist small talk — where do you get medicine, what do you use for fuel, do you have a generator?
We’re sitting on a ragged old sofa in the middle of a huge open plan office. Third floor, centre of the high street. The desks and chairs have been cleared away and the floor is a mad maze of old beds and sofas, with long clear runs where the younger kids race around, burning off the little energy they have.
It’s a headquarters, of sorts. There must be thirty or so kids living here; closer to a hundred now we’ve rounded up most of the escapees from the convoy. My hands ache from all the stitching and splinting I’ve been performing on the injured from the attack. Medical supplies are non-existent, so I’ve been using all sorts of dodgy unsterilised kit. The sooner I can get these kids out of here and back to the safety of St Mark’s, the better. We have enough supplies there to deal with the imminent avalanche of secondary infections. But for now, the last child has been mended and the majority of them are sleeping it off.
Caroline is the leader here, even though there are older, stronger kids in the mix. There are hulking great teenage boys who take orders from her without question.
It takes a while for me to ask the obvious question. “Where are we?”
“Hammersmith.”
“Jesus, that far in? I thought this was Bromley. What’s it like in the centre?”
“Church land. We don’t go there.”
“Church…? Never mind. Tell me later.” Small talk exhausted, I lean forward and ask the big question. “What happened, Caroline? Where did you go?”
She looks down for moment then, talking to her shoes, whispers: “Rowles?”
“He died, Caroline. I’m sorry.”
She nods once. She knew the answer to the question before she asked it.
“He saved us all,” I add. “Little madman took out the entire US army, if you can believe that.”
She looks up, amazed. “What?”
I nod, smiling. “Nuked them.”
Her mouth falls open in astonishment then she begins to laugh.
“He asked about you,” I continue, smiling in spite of myself. “Wanted us to find you, tell you he loved you.”
Gradually her laughter subsides and she wipes away a tear that could equally have been caused by hilarity as grief.
“He stayed behind so I could escape,” she says eventually. “The surgeon who operated on me came to get me during the attack. Spirited me away from right under their noses.”
“Where did he take you?”
“We spent a while in a house somewhere in Bristol, while I recovered. Just the two of us.”
“Did he…?”
“Oh yes,” she says matter of factly. “But, you know, could have been worse.” She registers my look of horror and dismisses it with a scowl. “I’m still alive,” she snaps, irritably.
“Okay,” I say, eager to move on. “And then?”
“He traded me to a trafficker for a pallet of Pot Noodles and a bag of firelighters.”
I stare intently at the floor, unable to meet her gaze. “I should have looked after you better,” I say. “I’m so sorry. This is all on me.”
I feel her hand on mine and I look up. She’s not smiling, but she’s not scowling either. “Not your fault. Move on,” is all she says. But I’m worried for her. Caroline and Rowles were inseparable for a while. Kindred spirits. Bonnie and Clyde. But while she was brave, strong and ruthless to a fault, she didn’t have the emotional detachment of her younger partner in crime. I remember the look on her face, the utter horror, when she accidentally shot a soldier who was trying to help us. Rowles would have shrugged and made some comment about tough luck; Caroline was devastated.
Yet here she is leading an army, battle scarred and hardened and not yet sixteen. I wonder if that vulnerable core has been entirely burnt away.
“I thought you’d died in the nuke,” I explain. “It wasn’t ’til much later that we discovered you weren’t there. We searched high and low for you, I swear.”
“I believe you. But once the traffickers had me, I was shipped straight to London.”
“You escaped, though. I mean, look at this place. Why not come find me?”
“I was… busy for a year or so. And when I did manage to get away, I didn’t escape alone. I had this lot to look after. And a war to fight.”
“Against who? Who are these bastards?”
She regards me coolly for a moment then says: “Come with me.”
As we walk out into the main street and down to the centre of town, we talk more, filling in the blanks. I tell her how I ended up in the van, about the snatchers and how they killed Lee, John and Tariq; she relates stories of all the times the church have tried to track them down or infiltrate them. There’s a streak of ruthlessness to Caroline’s tale — moles identified and shot no matter how young they may have been, lethal traps laid at freshly abandoned living spaces. She’s been fighting a guerrilla war and she’s been fighting dirty. I don’t have the right to disapprove — she’s kept these kids safe in the face of overwhelming odds — but there’s a disquieting element to her stories. I can’t decide whether her precautions and her summary justice were always justified or whether she’s succumbed to paranoia. I remember how Lee was after the siege of St Mark’s; reckless, too quick to fight when a calmer head could have avoided the need. I see a lot of that in Caroline. The sooner I get her back to the school, the better.
It’s so long since I’ve been in a city that I’ve almost forgotten what it’s like to be surrounded by concrete. Everywhere I look is evidence of The Culling Year. Burnt-out cars and buildings, skeletons in the street, a wrecked van, turned on its side. Someone’s gone mad with an aerosol too — up and down the high street, in big red letters it reads “whoops apocalypse J” over and over again.
With no council maintenance teams to trim them, the trees are taking over. Tough grass is starting to force its way through the moss-covered tarmac, and foxes stroll blithely down the road eyeing us more with hunger than fear, as if calculating the odds of successfully bring us down and mak
ing us their next meal.
As we walk and talk, Caroline notices me watching the foxes. “Keep clear of them and they’ll keep clear of you. Otherwise they tend to go for the throat. And if you hear a dog barking, go the other way. Don’t let them get your scent. We’ve managed to trap and eat most of the local packs, but there are still a couple of nasty ones left. We lost a girl to one of them only last week. Seven, she was. Poor love wandered off and tried to play fetch with a Rottweiller.”
We cross what would once have been a busy traffic junction and suddenly I realise that we’re not alone. I become aware of shadows flitting underneath the overpass, and catch a snatch of raucous laughter somewhere up ahead, echoing through a deserted shopping mall. There are people here, all moving in the same direction as we are. Then we turn a corner and I see our destination: The Hammersmith Apollo. The sign above the entrance still reads “Oct 24/5 Britain’s Got Talent Roadshow!”
There’s a small market outside, a pathetic collection of scavengers trying to barter remnants and relics for food. But there’s precious little of that, just an improvised spit on which rotate a couple of thin looking pigeons. The smell isn’t exactly appetising.
Caroline notices my disgust. “I know. You’ve probably got a big old vegetable garden and a field of sheep, huh?”
I nod.
“I dream about mashed potato,” she says wistfully.
“Then why are you still here?”
“Because of him,” she says, pointing.
I look up and see a huge mural painted onto the theatre wall. It stretches the entire height of the building and depicts a withered old man in glowing white robes. His balding head is ringed by a red circular halo and his hands are stretched out towards us in a gesture of welcome. Blood drips from his fingers. I suppose it’s intended to be beatific, religious, holy. But to me it just looks fucking creepy, because standing around him, gazing up at him in awe and wonder, are a gaggle of children.
“The Abbot,” says Caroline. “Come on, it’s nearly time for the miracle.” She leads me through the market and into the theatre.
School's Out Forever (afterblight chronicles) Page 60
