The Complete Afternet: All 3 Volumes In One Place (The Afternet)

by Peter Empringham

  “How the hell do you know?” asked the manager.

  “Football Manager.” Said Jenkin.

  “Don’t take this badly,” said the midfield terrier, “ but aren’t you a bit young to be a football manager?”

  “No.” said Jenkin. “I mean I play Football Manager on the PC. I got Grimsby Town to the European Champions League Final.” Strangely, the players looked impressed.

  “Okay, smart Alec. What do you think we should do, then?”

  Jenkin told them.

  There was hubbub in the crowd as the German team took to the field, and Millie returned to grab Jenkin by the arm.

  “How’s Stacie?” he asked.

  “She’s loving it. The guy she kicked in the nuts asked her for a date.”

  “Is she going?”

  “She said she’d see him next week when the bruising goes away.”

  Jenkin laughed and took Millie by the hand to lead her back to their seats on the hill. His eye was caught by the sight, amongst humans in various states of disrepair, of a two metre tall red panda lurking to the side of a wooden structure that had to be some kind of VIP seating. Almost everyone in it appeared to be sporting a moustache and glasses, even one who seemed to have a trunk. Jenkin wondered whether something had been slipped in his drink. Next to the panda, he noticed, was Mary, and she was looking straight at him.

  He led Millie over to where she was standing, and realised that the panda was actually a man in a panda suit, which all in all, was only marginally less odd.

  “Hello.” He said. “Fancy seeing you here.” She smiled. “This is Millie. Millie, Mary.”

  “Hello Millie, nice to meet you. This is Marcel, and Justin, and of course Geoffrey. This is Jenkin.”

  “Hello Jenkin,” said Geoffrey, extending a paw. Justin nodded, and Marcel stared off towards the football in studied silence.

  The crowd noise was beginning to swell, and they had to shout to be heard.

  “That was the right thing you did back there.” Said Mary. Jenkin shrugged. It was past. “Fiends Reunited. Was that you as well?”

  His heart sank. He supposed that since she had found out about his other piece of work it was no surprise that she had figured this out, too. He could feel Millie staring at him, not understanding any of this conversation yelled above the cheering.

  “Maybe. Listen, do you know what they’re up to?”

  “We know that they’re going to launch some kind of attack, but they went off line to most users a few days ago.”

  “I know where they are and when they are going to do it, if that’s any help.” Millie was gawping now. This was like getting a crossed line with NATO.

  Mary was, once again, impressed. She took out a pen, and pulling Jenkin’s hand towards her, wrote something on the back of his wrist.

  “Mail it to me? Straight away.”

  “Ok.” He had to yell now. Some drama was occurring behind them on the pitch. “I’ve got it all except one company. They stopped checking in a few days ago, and I don’t know where they are going to be. I’ll send you everything I’ve got.” He began to move away, pulling a bemused Millie with him.

  “Thanks Jenkin. I’ll probably see you tomorrow.”

  All the way up the hill he had ‘Who was that?’, ‘What’s Fiends Reunited?’, until he finally told Millie that he would tell her everything after the match.

  The game had changed. The greengrocer had absorbed Jenkin’s input and his formation was now competing in the middle of the field, breaking up the German attacks, and occasionally bursting forward with speed and purpose.

  Even with these changes, though, England gradually defended deeper, allowing the Germans the chance to pass the ball around in their half, and as the clock ticked towards full time, anyone in the crowd from late twentieth century England would have had a familiar feeling of foreboding. That foreboding was well merited, because with only a couple of minutes to play, and with the pressure growing more intense, a German corner was headed only partially clear, and a thunderous shot brought the scores level. The Organising Committee (Ron) had decided at the start of the tournament, with much advice in gesture from the Brazilian kid, that there would be no extra time, not least because death tends to limit the physical capability of the players. When the whistle blew for full time, everyone knew that this match would be going to a penalty shoot-out.

  Around the crowd, this latest drama simply exaggerated the fervid excitement. As the teams organised themselves for sudden ‘death’, thousands chattered, speculated, and jumped up and down in anticipation. Songs and chants arose from all corners. In the VIP grandstand, Iron-Crutch Li was taking bets on the outcome. The Celtic Gods piled in on Germany (Excluding the Sudetenland), but his fellow immortals, obviously never having seen an England team in this circumstance (unlike Iron-Crutch, who was a regular at real world tournaments), were split. Slightly more money went on an England victory.

  A silence fell and they all stood back when they realised the Baron, black suit, top hat, ghostly face, had somehow silently appeared behind them.

  “Twenty quid on England.” He said, his voice a low croak. “Three to one, I believe.”

  Iron- Crutch looked down at the scrap of paper on which he was recording the bets.

  “Yes. That’s right. Er, ok. Twenty you say?” He held out his hand for the wager. His gesture was not matched.

  “He’s good for it.” The dark eyes in the white face pinned those of Iron-Crutch. “On the slate.”

  The bookmaker reluctantly nodded his agreement. Without noticeably making a move, the Baron was in the next instant whispering into the Nordic man’s ear.

  Jenkin had watched the balance of the second half firstly with some satisfaction that his tactical changes had worked with humans as well as they had previously done with silicon chips. He watched the penalty shoot out in the way that any English football fan watches a penalty shoot out against Germany. Rather like in the woods and hills surrounding the arena, disaster lurked, it just wasn’t obvious where.

  The first three penalties on each side were scored. A tall, muscular German (actually from the Sudetenland) slammed his shot, his team’s fourth, down the middle of the goal and into the net. The beanpole wandered forward, to viewers of whatever allegiance, like a man approaching the edge of a cliff. His shot was powerful, but hit the German goalkeeper flush in the face and rebounded thirty metres down the pitch. The German team in the centre of the field pranced in celebration as their hero bled copiously into the goalmouth soil.

  The final German penalty taker had only to score to take his team through to the final. He strode to his position without a flicker of emotion. He was the same player who had taken a scrotal blow from Stacie only an hour earlier, but he displayed no evidence of pain from the groin, or indeed from anywhere. He calmly took a few paces back from the ball, slowly stepped forward, and serenely stroked the ball towards the top corner of the net.

  The England goalkeeper, perhaps aware that after this it was back to endless wandering, flung himself to his left, arms springing to their full extent, and fingertips grazing the ball in its flight. The ball smacked against the underside of the bar, and thudded down into the ground, then out into the playing area. It was the turn of the English to dance with joy.

  The crowd went wild. The drama was not over. As they jumped and hugged each other their eyes were not on the field and did not at first see the raised flag of the tiny girl on the touchline, did not note the referee running over to consult, and only after a few moments absorbed the implication. Hugging and jumping recommenced as the referee awarded the goal, the German team running around with joy, apart from the lithe, athletic penalty taker, whose smile was fixed, but whose eyes were locked on those of Stacie.

  Behind one of the goals, as all around him screeched and yelled, Tofik Bahram oglu Bahramov, the so-called ‘Russian’ linesman at the 1966 World Cup Final, smiled quietly to himself. ‘Near enough’ he thought. He slipped on the spectacles he
had needed (except when officiating) since he was ten and pulled himself to his feet to join in the celebrations.

  The VIP grandstand had begun to empty out, and Iron-Crutch Li had settled all of his bets bar one. Collection of that stake would put him, albeit marginally, into profit. He looked back up the steps to where his creditor stood in sullen conversation with Dis Pater and Baron Samedi. With a gulp, Li set off up the steps, his metal crutch clanging on the wooden seating,

  He had deliberately not looked up as he progressed, well aware that would have caused a terminal loss of resolve. When he did raise his eyes, he was only a single tier away from The Devil, who looked down on him both literally and metaphorically. His acolytes turned slowly and did the same.

  “You here for the final, Li?” His voice was deep, and seemed to envelop the listener. The old man nodded.

  “Double or quits on Germany, then.” It wasn’t a question. He nodded again and turned to tap his way down the steps. He heard laughter behind him but did not concern himself as to the reason behind it. Li took one last look at the now deserted pitch, breathed in the atmosphere, the tangible excitement. Final day was going to be dramatic.

  As the gathered crowd happily discussed the events of the day, carpenters were hammering nails into fences, holes were being dug still deeper, and weavers continued their work in a race against time. The dam was removed from the diverted stream to allow the lake water to be absorbed into the earth. The gathered attackers, waiting at a distance, heard the roars from the arena and knew that their enemy was numerous, if not organized. They too were happy to wait for the drama to come.

  Twenty Five

  Jenkin’s A-Mail to Mary was comforting in that it showed with a great deal of clarity how the assembled evildoers were setting up their attack and when they intended to begin. It was also worrying, in that the young man confirmed that he had ‘lost’ one of the forces ranged against the growing population. Jenkin had also passed on the information to Guntrick, and they too were concerned about the missing battalion. They agreed, though, that they could only organise themselves to defend against what they knew. If that all worked, then they hoped that they would find a way of getting together to repel a surprise attack.

  The defence forces were a disparate bunch. As well as Guntrick and his Visigoths, there were, naturally enough, a number of squads of fighters who had passed across the divide together, and in the nature of the camaraderie they had, many had also stuck together in the hereafter. Of course, there were drawbacks with such groups, the first being that they tended to be in a state of some disrepair, and secondly that they were usually there together because they had lost whatever battle it was they had been engaged in.

  It would have helped had the defenders been, like the marauders already waiting in the near distance, heavily armed. Many of them, though, had been the first to offer their rifles, machine guns, ammunition, and in one case flamethrower, for sale on A-Bay. Whilst this meant that many of them were better dressed or fed than when they had arrived, their capacity to resist had been seriously diluted.

  There were any numbers of English soldiers, from Rorke’s Drift through the trenches of Ypres to Desert Rats; Americans: Confederate, Yankee, Lakota Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho, as well as many of more modern origin. There were Zulus, Boxers, Ghurkhas, and Boers.

  These forces were ranged to all points, behind the defences constructed by volunteers over the previous days. The majority of the hundreds of thousand gathered for the tournament were thankfully not aware of their ordained role as cannon fodder, even less that they may soon be under the rule of some resurgent dictator.

  Their Magnificent Seven defences were almost in place, and they ranged themselves in line with Jenkin’s information about the disposition of the enemy. Still they fretted about the lost company of attackers, who could bypass any of them should things go wrong.

  The rest day before o the final was spent in very different ways by the disparate sectors of the population of the afterworld. The teams practiced a little, talked a lot, and took the opportunity to absorb complex carbohydrate. Ron had coloured, re-coloured, tippexed, and annotated his final match scoresheet. He ventured out of the Committee Room and stood with hands on hips, eyes roaming across the massive settlement before him. His wife sidled next to him and he glanced at her before sliding an arm around her ample waist.

  “I don’t know how you’re going to beat this, Ron.” She said gazing at his profile as he stared staunchly over the crowds.

  “Me neither. I sometimes think we’ve almost done more since we’ve been here than we did when we were alive. I mean, where do you meet Visigoths in Purley? And the last thing I organised was that quiz, when only eight people turned up. And they complained that there were too many questions about English cars of the sixties.”

  “I suppose we’ll be off somewhere, soon. You know, now that the system is working. They say there are people disappearing every day, down there.”

  “It’s a big crowd, Ethel. People can get lost.”

  “No, Ron. They’re going. Millie says she saw a mime artist evaporate in front of her eyes yesterday.”

  They stood, joined by his arm, and watched the eternally moving crowd. Perhaps they were waiting for each other to say it. Ethel capitulated first.

  “Do you really want to go? Wherever it is we’re going?”

  Ron sighed, and the steering wheel in his chest rose and fell.

  “You said yourself we’ve done more than we ever did. Don’t you think that what we wanted then and what we want now are different?” she went on.

  She gazed at the little man, whose face was troubled.

  “I don’t know, Ethel. It’s more complicated than it should be. You’re supposed to be dead and then you go, well, wherever. Then you get years of this: friends, strange occurrences, this…’ he swept his arm to take in the sea of people stretching to the horizon. “Somebody should organise a protest.”

  Ethel sniggered, remembering the last time Ron had tried to do that, and their rapid retreat from a crowd baying for blood. “You’ve done a great job here, anyway.” She said fondly.

  “Well, only with your help.”

  Ethel gave him a surprised look. “I haven’t done anything, have I?”

  He squeezed her arm. “You’ve been here.”

  The evening was coming. The sun, which had decided today to set in the south, was dipping behind them, their conjoined shadows like a single form thrown onto the ground before them. Ron raised his arm and pointed to where, way below them, their friend Guntrick, massive in his fur jerkin, was marching with a deal of purpose, and both smiled.

  The Visigoth had spent the day with his comrades, reliving old victories and drinking copious amounts of alcohol made from root vegetables, the highlight a twenty year old beetroot wine which wasn’t supposed to be sparkling, but had turned out to be after all. For all that the environment was so utterly different, it had felt very much like old times. Nerves jangled at the conflict to come, bluster replaced conversation, eyes had begun to twitch to attention at every unexpected noise. He left them purple-lipped, growling songs reminiscent of the old days.

  His purposeful march, spotted from on high by Ron and Ethel, was for a final meeting with the leaders of the other defenders. Each and every one had the same internal feeling as Guntrick, the slight sickness, the stomach (for those who still had one), churning with expectation. All of them had looked around the crowds, and had a moment when they wondered to themselves why they were bothered about this fight.

  His fellow organisers of the resistance were in a clearing at the foot of the woods on the eastern slopes. Two Englishmen, a Spanish sea captain, Yankee and Confederate, a native American, a few random Celts, a Ukranian, a Masai…it was a world of warcraft. They were supposed to go over their plans for the following day, but in a cross-cultural connection, none of them had much of a mood for the review. Each of them had gone beyond bravado and leaned against the trees or sat on the floor to th
ink of what was to come.

  “Everyone knows what they have to do?” said Guntrick, looking around the group of faces set in grim determination. The silence in the clearing was interspersed with the distant sounds of children playing, adult chatter, and the sounds of communal living. Eyes were raised and heads nodded, a few murmured their affirmatives. They shook hands, or briefly embraced as they left, and went back to their troops to prepare for the next day.

  Jenkin and Millie were at a party with the rest of the Pennystone Ohio girl’s football team. They had set up camp close to a boy’s geography field trip from Norseman, Western Australia, whose driver had taken a wrong turning with the result that they spent four days in the Nullarbor Plain before succumbing to dehydration. There was much flickering of eyelashes and puffing out of chests going on, not all of it from the American side, and none of it from either Jenkin or Millie.

  The English boy had been assimilated into his female friend’s coterie with barely a murmur. He had come to enjoy the easy camaraderie. He was randomly joshed, pushed and pummelled, and dragged into arguments on which he had no opinion, but he saw that this was the way each of them was treated within the group. He loved it. He hadn’t got to the stage of returning the physical contact, but had found himself offering an opinion about the use of blue eye shadow with red lipstick, and generally joining in the banter. It was as if someone had removed a stopper on a bottle of 16-year aged social interaction.

  Millie, who hadn’t been sure that he would come out of his shell, smiled almost constantly as she saw how easily he became a part of the group. She couldn’t help a feeling of superiority as she watched the others doing anything to impress the Australians, knowing that she didn’t have to bother, she had someone who didn’t talk anything like so oddly.

  In common with Guntrick, the other leaders, Ron and Ethel, she and Jenkin had decided not to tell the others about the threat that could come to a head the following day.