Shelter

by Dave Hutchinson

  A hundred years ago, The Sisters came, a string of asteroid strikes that destroyed human civilisation and brought on a decades-long winter.

  Now, communities are starting to rebuild, and trying to piece together the knowledge that was lost. The old tools are broken, superstition is rife, and the land is hard and unforgiving.

  And some, inevitably, have dreams of conquest.

  The Aftermath tells the stories of a future on the edge of survival.

  First published 2018 by Solaris

  an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd,

  Riverside House, Osney Mead,

  Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK

  www.solarisbooks.com

  ISBN: 978-1-78618-105-3

  Copyright © 2018 Rebellion

  Cover art by Sam Gretton

  The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.

  IT TURNED OUT that over a century of blockbuster films and catastrophe novels did nothing to prepare humanity for the disaster when it came.

  The Spacewatch programme, perennially short of funds and resources, failed to spot The Sisters; they were just too small and moving too fast, the shrapnel of a comet shattered by some collision on the edge of the asteroid belt. The crew of the International Space Station saw it, though, a quick series of blinding, soundless detonations scattered across the face of the world.

  Later, the Commander of the ISS, a woman of a poetic frame of mind, said they were like rapid camera-flashes as God took a snapshot of the final moments of human civilisation.

  By the time she said that, there was no one left on Earth who could hear her.

  Thanet

  Chapter One

  THE WEATHER THAT summer was dreadful, even by Berkshire’s mediocre standards. Storms swept down from the north carrying hail the size of peas and left the Vale carpeted in dirty white. Fields were waterlogged, ponds flooded, rivers broke their banks. One morning, out for a walk to check the damage, Max looked out into the murky distance towards Oxford and it was like looking out across an inland sea dotted with trees and hedges and little hillocks.

  Late at night, in the fortified smallholdings of the Parish, aged gaffers sat by their fires and muttered darkly about the summer of ’22, which up until this year had been the worst summer anyone could remember and during which hundreds of people had died of varying causes, from drowning to starvation to being struck by lightning.

  Max was too young to remember that time; all he’d known was year after year of miserable summers, monsoon autumns and yellow-grey winters of dirty snow. Times had been hard, but none of these things had, during his lifetime, actually killed anyone directly.

  “Summer of ’22,” Rose said one night, as they sat in the parlour listening to hail hammering down to the roof.

  “Don’t you start,” Max said. “I’m sick of hearing about the summer of bloody ’22.” He got up from his armchair, went over to the window, lifted back the curtain, and peered out into a vertical sheet of driving hail. He sighed.

  The next morning, the yard was still paved with white. Some of the younger kids waded ankle-deep through it, kicking up slushy clods of ice and getting in everyone’s way. John Race, Max’s foreman, wandered over, coat collar turned up and pipe clamped between his teeth, and nodded hello.

  “If you so much as mention the summer of ’22, I’m going to give you such a slap, John,” Max warned amiably.

  John took his pipe from his mouth and examined the bowl. He sniffed. “We’re going to be in trouble if this goes on, Max,” he said.

  “Well, that’ll be a novelty, us being in trouble.”

  “There’s going to be a lot of folk around here in trouble.”

  “Yeah.” Max scratched his beard. “Well, we’ll cross that bridge,” he said.

  John sucked his teeth. The Taylor farm had crossed a lot of bridges, these past few years, but he didn’t say anything. Max knew it as well as he did.

  Max clapped him on the shoulder. “The weather’ll pick up, John. You wait and see.” And he strode off across the compound to check how the repairs were going on one of the outbuildings.

  AND, THOUGH IT seemed unlikely when Max said it, the weather actually did start to improve. The wind dropped, the hail went away, the temperature rose. The sun shone weakly and apologetically through high cloud. The landowners made repairs, assessed the damage to crops and livestock, traded for supplies and manpower. Peace descended on the area.

  It did not descend everywhere, though. On one of his walks, Max stopped on the brow of the hill and was presented with a vista of flooded fields that went on as far as he could see. The people on the Ridge didn’t mix very much with the people of the Vale, even though there were some towns – Didcot, Abingdon – that were almost intact. Max’s teenage years had been a bit wild, and he had spent some time in Abingdon as part of a vaguely-expressed interest in going to Oxford to find work. After a couple of months, he’d turned round and come home.

  Abingdon, as it turned out, was about as far as he’d ever got from home. The country seemed finally to be emerging from the Long Autumn, the almost century-long period of driving rain and cooling which had followed the arrival of The Sisters, but travel was still hard and people still tended to stay put, in general. Max liked his comforts, his armchair by the fire in the parlour, his breakfast bacon sandwich, his nice warm bed. Camping out in the countryside didn’t appeal.

  Sitting here, now, he could see Didcot, and the dirty grey smear beyond that was Abingdon, but everything else was lost in floodwater. Off to the north, in the direction of Letchlade, a column of smoke was rising into the sky. Through his binoculars, a cluster of buildings was just visible, sitting on a low hill rising out of the shallow water. One, maybe more, of the buildings, was on fire. Slow movement nearby resolved itself into a line of four or five boats making their way along a flooded lane away from the fire.

  Max sat and watched this little scene for quite a while. The boats were too far away to make out individual people – they were almost too far away to make them out as boats. Impossible to know, of course, what the story behind all this was. The people in the boats could be rescuing people from the houses. He laid the binoculars down beside him and hugged his knees.

  Back at the farm, he didn’t say anything about what he’d seen. Rose was getting dinner ready, the smaller kids were running around causing havoc as usual; Nell was trying to get them to wash their hands before they ate. He hung up his coat and took off his boots.

  “Everything okay, love?” Rose asked, and he smiled and said it was, although later that night he found he couldn’t sleep and he lay thinking about those boats moving slowly along the lane far away.

  AROUND THE END of August, they had things squared away around the farm enough for Max to feel able to head over to the Coghlans with a case of homebrew and a flitch of bacon. So one morning he harnessed March and April, their two most equably-minded horses, to the wagon and kissed Rose goodbye.

  “Give Betty and Andrew my love,” she told him. “And you take care.”

  “I’m only going to Blandings, Rosemary,” he protested.

  “You should take Patrick,” she said.

  He glanced up at the wall surrounding the compound. His eldest son was standing on the parapet, crossbow slung across his back,
looking out across the countryside. Sixteen years old and protector of everything he surveyed.

  “Patrick’s busy,” he told her.

  She thumped him on the chest hard enough to hurt. “Don’t you take the piss out of him.”

  “I wasn’t,” he said innocently.

  “You were and you know it. I remember you at that age; you were just like him.”

  “At that age I was on my way to Oxford,” he told her. “Remember that?”

  Rose waved it away. “You came back.”

  “Yeah,” he said, looking around the compound. “Yeah, I always come back.”

  “Go,” she said. “Go, you daft man, if you’re going to go.”

  “Look after your mum!” Max called up to Patrick, who just shrugged and kept scanning the area beyond the wall. Rose punched him again.

  THE BRIDGE ACROSS the Thames at Streatley had washed away long before Max was born; years of floods had swollen the river and simply eaten it away, along with most of the other bridges both upstream and downstream. At some point, an enterprising group of people had come along and set up a ferry. They had cleared the main road through the Gap where the river cut through the Chiltern hills. And then they set up shop taxing travellers.

  Those had been wild days; Max’s grandfather had told him of bands of armed and desperate people besieging the village, of firefights between the people operating the toll and travellers who thought they could go any-damn-where they wanted and didn’t see why they should pay for the privilege.

  These days, things were quieter. Max arrived near dusk and joined a line of wagons and riders waiting to board the ferry. He could hear, on the other side of the river, the bells of St. Thomas’s calling the faithful to evening prayer.

  A group of men armed with shotguns and crossbows guarded the slipway down to the big flat-bottomed boat that winched itself from bank to bank. When Max reached the head of the line, one of them came up and nodded hello. “Howdo, Max,” he said amiably.

  “Terry.”

  “Off on your travels?”

  “Going to Blandings.” Max reached behind the seat and brought out a bottle of homebrew. He handed it down.

  “Give the old woman my regards,” said Terry, taking the bottle.

  Max drove on into Goring, where stallholders were just packing up after market day. There was a pub on the other side of the village – no one knew what it had originally been called, everybody just called it The Goring – and here Max pulled off the road, drove round the back of the main buildings to the stables, left the wagon in the hands of one of the ostlers, and went inside.

  The bar was full of farmers and traders, most of them wearily drunk after market day. Max ordered a beer, nodded hello to the few faces he knew. A young woman brought his pint, and he beamed. “Hallo, Evie,” he said. “Room for a little one?”

  Evie was small and slim and blonde, her hair tied back. She looked tired. “Should do,” she said. “Most of these old lads will be going home in a bit.” She looked out into the bar. “I hope. How’s the family?”

  Max had been coming here for... oh, longer than he wanted to remember. Evie’s parents had both died within weeks of each other during a particularly bad flu season which had swept through the area a few years before, leaving her alone to run the pub.

  “They’re fine, thanks. Been busy?”

  She grunted. “Market day. We’ve got some stew on; that do you?”

  He grinned. “That’d be smashing, thanks, Evie. I’m starving.”

  “Yeah,” she said, looking him up and down. “Like Rose would ever let that happen.”

  Max took his pint over to a table at the other side of the bar, where he joined a couple of gaffers he knew vaguely.

  “Been talking about things up north,” said one, a ruddy-faced man called Bob, when pleasantries had been exchanged. “You heard anything?”

  Max shook his head. “I saw something the other day, over to Letchlade. Houses burning, people on the move.”

  “Bandits,” grunted the other gaffer, one of the Robinsons from up towards High Wycombe.

  “I don’t know about that,” said Max, trying his beer. The Goring ran its own microbrewery, and produced the best beer in the Hills. That was what Evie said, anyway.

  “Our Rita’s husband has people up Oxford way,” Bob said. “He’s not heard from them in months.”

  “That’s hardly conclusive proof,” said Robinson.

  Evie came over with a steaming bowl of mutton stew and a chunk of bread and put them in front of Max. “They had boats,” he said, dipping his spoon into the stew. “The people I saw.”

  “Every bugger down there’s got a boat,” Robinson said. “One day it’s going to flood for good.”

  “He’s been saying that since we were boys,” Bob told Max.

  Max chewed a mouthful of stew, washed it down with a sip of beer. “Any idea what exactly’s going on up north?”

  Bob shrugged. “Something in the Cotswolds. Don’t know what.”

  “Cotswolds,” Max mused. “Bit of a distance, that.”

  “If they’re messing around in Letchlade, that’s not such a distance,” Bob pointed out. “If they decide to come south, they’re going to have to come through here.”

  “Mm,” said Max, tucking into his stew.

  THE GORING’S ROOMS were small and cramped, but they were clean and dry and the kitchen provided plenty of hot water for washing and a big bacon and egg breakfast the next morning. Some of the slates on the roof had been loosened during a storm the week before, and Max spent a few hours up a ladder repairing them to pay for his board before setting out again.

  The old roads were nearly unusable. Almost a century of rain and frost had patiently cracked and lifted the tarmac or washed it away altogether. Main roads were still choked with the rusting wrecks of ancient cars and lorries, almost hidden by weeds and overgrowth.

  The preferred option for getting about was horseback, or failing that on foot, but in some places – the Chilterns was one shining example – two generations of settlers and farmers had worked to keep at least some of the roads clear and open for wagon traffic. So it only took Max half the day to travel the well-used road between Goring and Wallingford.

  Just outside the town, he turned off down a side road, and a few minutes later, he reached a pair of tall iron gates set into a high brick wall. There was a nest of sandbags atop each of the pillars on either side of the gateway, and attached to the wall beside the gates was a sign which read, BLANDINGS. FUCK OFF. He drew the wagon to a stop and waited, and a couple of minutes later, a figure poked its head over the wall.

  “It just occurred to me that there’s nobody round here who can read this sign, you know,” Max mused out loud.

  “For the illiterate,” said a voice from one of the sandbag nests, “we have Mr Browning.” And there was the sound of a heavy machine gun being cocked.

  “Afternoon, Betty,” said Max. “Andrew.”

  The figure on the wall waved and dropped down out of sight. Another figure rose from behind the sandbags. “Mr Taylor,” said Betty. “And what can we do for you?”

  “Brought you some bacon.”

  Betty grinned. “I knew there was a reason I liked you. Come on in. Andrew?”

  Andrew, a tall, slim young man in jeans and a black pullover, with an L85A2 assault rifle slung over his shoulder, unlocked the gates and cranked them open.

  “Follow Andrew,” Betty called. “I’ll be with you in a bit.”

  The estate was much too large to be easily defensible; its perimeter wall was more than four miles long, so they relied on what the Coghlans described with a wry smile as ‘passive defence’. Down the years, local brigands had learned to steer clear of Blandings, but every now and again someone drifted down from Bedfordshire, or up from the Plain, and in their ignorance decided to try their luck. Betty quite welcomed moments like that; she said they served as a reminder that she was serious about that sign by the front gate.

>   Max followed Andrew down one of the safe paths to the house, then round the back to the stable block. They unhitched the horses and Andrew went to feed and water them, while Max carried the flitch of bacon into the kitchen.

  “This is nice, Max,” Betty said, coming into the kitchen and taking off her duffel coat. “Many thanks.”

  They hugged. “Brought you some homebrew too,” Max told her. “It’s in the wagon.”

  Betty grinned. “Much appreciated. How’s the family?”

  “Not too bad, thanks. Rose sends her regards.”

  “I haven’t seen her in... two years? Three?”

  “Nearly four. Patrick’s birthday party.”

  She shook her head. “I need to get over to see you more often, Max.”

  “You’ve been busy, probably.”

  “Nah. I forget there’s still a world on the other side of that wall, and that’s not good. I should get out more.” She clapped him on the shoulder. “You’ll stay, yes?”

  “I didn’t come all this way to turn round and go back again.”

  Betty looked at his face and cocked her head to one side. “Is everything all right?”

  He thought about it, wondering whether, at the last moment, to cross this particular bridge after all. “I do have a favour to ask, as it happens. Advice, as much as anything.”

  “Well, advice is always free. We’ll talk after dinner. Go and clean up; there’s plenty of hot water.”

  NIGHT FELL OVER the Chilterns, cold and windy but dry at least. At Blandings, lights began to come on, here and there, in some of the rooms. Electric light was one of the reasons Max liked to come here. That and the seemingly inexhaustible supplies of hot water.