School's Out Forever (afterblight chronicles)

by Scott K. Andrews

  “Indirectly, though. You planted the fucking bug.”

  He shrugs. “Kate, he was dead the moment he caught Spider’s eye and you know it. The bug was an excuse on a particular day. If it hadn’t been that, it would have been something else.”

  He’s right. I do know it.

  I consider the man sitting before me and I’m confused. Spider was obviously a monster. Everything about him screamed danger — the way he looked at you, the way he moved, the way he spoke. He was a predator, a shark, a psychopath.

  But Cooper is different. Kate never had a moment’s unease about him. He was jovial and pleasant but inspired confidence. And he still has an easy capability about him. He doesn’t seem unhinged or mad, scary or dangerous at all. He seems like a bloke. Just an ordinary bloke.

  He thinks of people as goods to be traded, commodities whose profit potential can be realised — but his manner gives no hint of the pitiless void at the heart of him.

  “I spent so long fantasising about what I’d do to that man, if I ever had the opportunity,” I say.

  “I bet you did. But I’m not him.”

  “No, you’re not. You’re the man who used me, set me up to be killed and then condemned me to a life ruled by a lie.”

  “Mea culpa.”

  “You’re also the man who trafficked vulnerable girls into hell.”

  “That too.”

  “Why?”

  He shrugs. “Because I can,” he says, a parody of abashed modesty, like a cocksure young man admitting to sleeping with a friend’s girlfriend; he knows it was wrong but he actually also thinks it was kind of cool.

  “But surely you must have realised it was wrong?” The words feel foolish and naïve, but I want an answer.

  “The world was built on slavery, Kate. How do you think this country got built? Or America? Or Rome or the pyramids or anything lasting? What I did, what I do, is perfectly natural. The slave masters of the past were pillars of the community, members of guilds and lodges, knighted and rich, the toasts of the town. Why shouldn’t I be?”

  I look at this man I once invited into my bed, and I feel sick to my stomach. Spider may have been a monster, but he wasn’t the worst of it. Not by a long shot.

  “I never took advantage. It’s important you realise that,” he continues. “I busted countless drug dealers in my time. They all had one thing in common — they were users too. The ones who didn’t get caught, the smart ones, stayed clean. It was the same with me.”

  “So that makes it all right then?” I am on the verge of shouting. I take a deep breath.

  “I trafficked them into the country, I set them up, sourced the clients and took the money,” he says, for some reason intent on justifying himself to me. “But never, not once, did I ever take advantage of one of them. That would have left me vulnerable, you see? There was no room for emotional attachments on the job.

  “I had a girlfriend. That surprises you, doesn’t it? Jenny. Nice woman, worked for HBOS. Thought I was a dull copper, which kept me safe. And her.”

  It takes me a moment or two to collect my thoughts.

  “All right, morality aside, how did you pull this off?” I gesture to the building around us. “How did you end up here?”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  MY DOUBLE LIFE ran like clockwork after you helped me sort out Spider. I found a new front man, someone else within the organisation. You never met him. He became the new Spider. It became a title rather than a person, which served me well. It made it clear to the new guy that he was disposable, and it allowed me to continue to use the, shall we say brand awareness that Spider had created amongst our clients and competitors.

  I considered coming down to school and finishing you off, you know.

  Really. You were a loose end. I hate loose ends. But in the end I figured it was riskier to break cover than leave you to rot.

  Did you enjoy being Matron? What am I saying, of course you did — the world’s ended and you’re still doing it!

  I had a fifteen year plan. Worked it out while I was undercover in Sarajevo, back in the day. I won’t bore you with the details, but it worked, was working, would have worked.

  Three years to go when the fucking Cull hit. Three years and then I’d have packed my bags and vanished off the face of the Earth. Nice little mansion in South America, I reckoned. Get fat, raise a few kids.

  Best laid plans, eh.

  They knew a lot earlier than they let on. About the blood type thing. Since I’d been in the army, my medical details were on record. I was contacted when the press were still talking about bird flu. Recalled to Hereford.

  There was this soldier, Major General Kennett.

  Really? What was your impression of him?

  Ha! Yeah, I agree actually. Decent bloke. Capable. Prissy, though. Couldn’t make the hard decisions.

  He briefed us. Not completely, obviously, but he told us we were immune and that it would get bad enough that there might be a breakdown of public order. We were going to be the last line of defence when the police and regular army were no longer able to cope.

  Operation Antibody it was called.

  I know. Laughable.

  They knew, though; the Government. Makes me wonder how long they’d known by then. What they knew about where it came from.

  I’ve searched this place and Number 10 top to bottom more than once. Nothing. No clue at all. I thought there may be some evidence at the MI5 or MI6 buildings, but all the interesting parts are still sealed up. I don’t reckon we’ll ever know how it started or where it came from.

  Who cares now anyway?

  Once I was drafted again, my main concern was the organisation. I kept in touch with my new Spider by phone, trying to maintain control. I got regular reports as things fell apart but eventually I lost touch with them all.

  My network was gone, my resources were gone and I began to suspect that the money I had accumulated would soon be worth less than nothing. All that effort, for what?

  So we were broken into teams and dispatched across the country to key installations — nuclear power plants, arms depots, local governments, that kind of thing.

  I was part of the London team. We were all Regiment or ex-Regiment; the best, you know? Our job was to protect the Government.

  At first it was pretty easy. The regular security teams were bloody good. We just shadowed them, learning the ropes. Then when one of them went down, one of us would step into the breach.

  They’d done the same in Government, you know. Formed an inner cabinet. The handful of O-Neg MPs, some immune peers and a few other top dogs. They were running things long before the rest of the real cabinet fell ill. It was like the ones who knew they were going to survive just started ignoring the ones who were doomed, as if they were already dead.

  Some of my colleagues thought it was callous, but of course it was the sensible, expedient thing to do.

  The armed forces were recalled from abroad and the O-Negs were weeded out. That’s when the word spread, you know. Someone in the army worked it out and told the press.

  Anyway they formed these units of immune men and women. Army, police, fire and medical. All the emergency services. Even the BBC were sorted out, a core team of broadcasters who could keep a skeleton news service on air until there was no-one left to watch it. But there weren’t enough of us to go around, so they had to be concentrated in one place. One safe haven where there would be enough immune people to stick it out until it was all over and retain order and civilisation amongst themselves.

  It was a good plan. It’s what I would have done. They made one crucial mistake, though. They chose the wrong place to make a stand.

  They chose London.

  Why do — sorry, did — all politicians have such a love affair with London? I never understood it. Obviously what they should have done is taken off for somewhere remote, rural. I actually said this to the PM once.

  Sorry? Oh yes, he was immune. I know, what are the odds! Things would have
gone very differently if he hadn’t been. There’d have been an almighty power struggle. But because he was top dog, and he knew he was going to survive, he was able to lay down the law pretty much unchallenged. He was a subtle fucker, too. Lots of backroom deals went down before the rest of Parliament worked out what was going on.

  So, yeah, I told him he should move everyone out to Macynnleth or some other alternative energy centre or something. And it’s not as if he didn’t think along those lines, ’cause the plans for Operation Motherland were drawn up at around this time, so they knew the advantage of being away from the urban centres, they knew the risk of secondary diseases and riots and all that stuff.

  But he was determined that they had to stay put, right here in the Palace of Westminster, barricading themselves in like it was Fort Apache.

  “The people need to see that we haven’t deserted our posts,” is what he told me.

  And of course once the news got out about the virus and what it was really doing, the riots began.

  I thought I’d seen desperation before, during the siege, but this was a whole other order of magnitude. The savagery of it was…

  We set up concrete barricades along Whitehall, blew Westminster Bridge, put up gun emplacements in the cathedral. Put a ring of steel all around Parliament Square and kept them out. Hundreds of thousands of them. It would never have worked in peace time. We’d have been overrun. Tear gas and water cannons, even rubber bullets wouldn’t have kept them out.

  We had live ammunition, though. And grenades and tanks.

  There came a day when it was obvious that we were going to be stormed, that Parliament was going to fall. I was with the PM when he made the call to shut down the BBC. He insisted he had to close them down before we opened fire on the crowds. Didn’t want news of the massacre to spread. I thought that was stupid — the more people knew, I reckoned, the better. Spread a little fear, show them we mean business. But he wouldn’t have it.

  I think he was ashamed of the order he was about to give.

  I was given the job of leading the team that flew to White City. There was a tent city outside Television Centre, as if people wanted to be close to some symbol of order and safety. The good old BBC, they’ll look after us. You know, I think there was more faith in them than in Government at that point.

  They let us in because they thought we’d been sent to protect them. When we ordered them to go off air they refused.

  So that’s where the massacre began. I must say it was a very odd feeling, kind of surreal, shooting Jeremy Paxman in the head. We took some fire too. God knows where they got guns from, but they put up a good fight. Kate Adie may have been in her sixties, but she shot two of my men. And fucking Andy Hamilton stayed on air on Radio Four the whole time, but we’d cut the lines to the transmitter, so no-one heard his final broadcast. I let him live, actually. He always made me laugh

  Once they were down I radioed in and the shooting began back in Whitehall. By the time we got back it was mostly over. There were bodies everywhere. I remember flying over Trafalgar Square and seeing it thick with corpses, like a human carpet.

  Sorry? No, not at all. It was necessary. I thought so then and I still think so. Needed to be done.

  The problem was that the PM’s power base wasn’t as strong as we’d thought. There were some people in cabinet who tried to stop him giving the order to open fire. While I was busy at the BBC, these dissenters tried to stage a coup. Some of our guys, SAS bodyguards, joined in. Said they couldn’t carry out an order like that.

  Wimps.

  It was a hell of a fight. By the time we got back, the PM was already dead, killed in the initial confrontation. Despite that, his supporters were winning. The coup was botched and the rebels were executed on the spot.

  But the next day something unexpected happened. Kennett turned up with a force of soldiers, and told us that we were under arrest. Following illegal orders, he said. Took some balls, I reckon, for him to stand up to us. There were eighteen of us, entrenched, all Regiment. He knew that we wouldn’t just roll over, and he knew he couldn’t force us to hand over our weapons. So he basically turned his back on us, threw us out of the army, said we’d all been dishonourably discharged and would not be welcome at Operation Motherland HQ.

  Then he buggered off to Salisbury and left us in charge of the wreckage.

  The only one who left with them was our mutual friend Sanders. One of the rioters had managed to hit him with a rock while he was on the barricades, so he’d been out of action when the order to fire was given. Lucky bastard had a get out of jail free card. I reckon he’d have opened fire like the rest of them, but later that day he swore to me that he wouldn’t have.

  You think so? Well, I suppose you got to know him a little better than I did.

  Anyway, with the PM dead, most of the cabinet wandering around like headless chickens, and the bleeding hearts executed, I saw my chance and took control. It wasn’t hard. I had the most experience of command. I acted like I was the boss and they fell into line.

  But Central London was empty. Those left alive fled the centre after the massacre, and the virus was still finishing its work.

  I was the ruler of a ghost town.

  I didn’t have grand ambitions. We fortified our position as thoroughly as we could, gathered up all the food we could find, and waited for the virus to burn itself out. That was a long winter. Quite boring, actually.

  By the time spring came I’d worked out a new plan. I divided the city into quadrants and we began clearing it. Emptying the roads of cars, dragging all the bodies to mass pyres, stockpiling fuel and resources. We did that for a whole year, one street at a time. Reclaiming the heart of the city.

  The army stayed away. I knew they were collecting weapons from all around the country and building their great depot on the plain, but they didn’t want to get involved in London. Kennett left it to us. Probably figured that time would only make him stronger and us weaker. He’d have been right too. I’d consolidated my position but I had no real power base because nobody would come into the centre any more. I think Kennett would probably have come for us eventually, and I’d have been toast. If it wasn’t for the American.

  I bet you encountered a lot of religious cults in the last few years? I expected the same thing to happen in the outskirts of London, but they all unified behind one preacher. I first heard about the American three years ago. He’d built up quite a following in West London. I found out later that he’d flown into Heathrow and started preaching at the first settlement he found. He taught people how to tune into the broadcasts.

  That’s right, yeah. The Miracle.

  So he gathered a huge following very quickly and then one day he and a gang of his followers walked into my territory and said hello. I think his acolytes were supposed to intimidate us. They were all dressed in army surplus and carrying shotguns.

  They nearly wet themselves when they realised who we were.

  He didn’t, though. He stayed very cool.

  So I let him talk. Gave him dinner at Number 10, allowed him make his pitch. I needed allies, after all. He showed me the broadcast and I was impressed. I didn’t think this Abbot guy was the new messiah but I could see how people could want to believe he was.

  I wasn’t convinced they were a real force, though. I mean, a bunch of religious nutters run by a Yank didn’t seem like much of a threat to Operation Motherland. But then, after dinner, the Yank took me down into the cellars of Number 10. There was a door down there that I’d not been able to breach. The keypad was still active, run by some distant power source, and I’d had no joy with the code.

  But this guy knew it. That’s when I really started paying attention. I asked him who he was, but he just smiled. To this day he’s never told me, but he must have been CIA, probably based here before The Cull. He knew all sorts of crazy shit, let me tell you.

  The bunker down there is pretty extensive, with lots of comms equipment. He took me to an office, which I think
was the PM’s retreat in the event of a major attack, and said to pick up the red phone on the desk.

  I did so, and after a second’s silence I heard someone saying my name.

  The voice at the end of the phone said he was the president, that he was working with the Abbot, and that they had managed to restore rule of law. He wanted to know if I was the de facto PM so of course I said yes.

  Long story short, he had a proposal for me. If I would start exporting children to the US, he would send their army to back me up.

  Now, look at this from my position. On one hand, I have a power base but no power, and the British Army knows where I am and is almost certainly getting ready to come and flush me out. On the other, I’m being offered the support of an entire army that will do as I say as long as I provide them with the resource they require. Can you think of anyone better suited to round up the kids and ship them abroad? I mean, it’s kind of top of my CV, isn’t it?

  So I told the president about Operation Motherland. Where they were and what they were doing. I told him if he wanted my help, he would have to eliminate them first.

  He put me in touch with Blythe in Iraq and the rest you know. I realised that once Kennett was out of the way, I would have to deal with Blythe, but at least initially he’d be on my side. I’d have time to work out a strategy to deal with him.

  And then, hallelujah, the Yanks took out Kennett and his forces, but managed to get themselves wiped out in the process. I’m not ashamed to say I did a little jig when I heard about the nuke. Couldn’t believe my fucking luck. The biggest single threat to my power base had been neutralised and there was no fallout.

  Well, not for me, anyway. Ha ha.

  At that point I could have told the president to go fuck himself, but the thing was I kind of enjoyed being back in the trafficking business. It gave me something to do, and it meant that my sphere of influence spread. People started to become afraid of me, to respect me and my forces. Me and the Yank still work together. He takes care of the religious stuff — brainwashing the plebs and spreading the word — while I take care of logistics and manpower.