by Alex Scarrow
‘I thought Britain was supposed to be, like, overcrowded,’ said Grace. Leon smiled encouragingly. Good to hear her have a go at trying to be funny.
She had a point. It seemed as if they’d picked the one unspoilt wilderness left in the country through which to make their escape from the train. After an hour of traversing ploughed ruts of mud, they finally headed towards a nearby wood in the hope that it was concealing some sort of safe haven.
Leon spotted the corpses of dozens of animals – cows or bulls, by the look of them – in the far corner of the field they were crossing. Sagging black-and-white hides that had torn open to reveal rows of curved bones like the gnarled claw-like fingers of upturned hands. They were a safe enough distance away to pause for a moment, but then a gust of wind swooped across the field and scooped a cloud of particles from each carcass up into the air.
They scrambled towards the cover of the nearby treeline and skirted the edge for a while, looking for something else more promising for which to head than the deep, dark wood.
Finally, exhausted and thirsty, they came to a halt beneath the low boughs of an elm tree. Mum excused herself to go for a pee, ducking beneath a loop of barbed wire and disappearing into the wood.
Grace shucked the straps of her rucksack off her shoulders, let it drop to the ground, then slumped down to sit on it. She inspected her mud-caked trainers. ‘I wonder if school’s closed today,’ she pondered absently. A stupid question, but it was something to break the silence.
‘Of course it is,’ Leon replied. ‘Everything’s closed, sis.’
‘Like, forever and ever . . . The End?’
He shrugged.
She snorted humourlessly. ‘That’s your dream, isn’t it? Schools closed forever. The end of the world. Just like those stupid Xbox zombie games?’ The way she said that, it sounded as if she was blaming him for wishing this on the world.
She was right about one thing, though. How many times had he imagined how cool it would be to be the lone survivor in a post-apocalyptic landscape as he hacked his way through legions of undead, risen demons and SlenderMen? Brutal on-screen survival . . . from the comfort and convenience of his bedroom, with a mug of coffee and a warm Pop-Tart beside him.
‘Just shut up,’ was all he managed to come up with.
‘Great idea coming out, Leo.’ Her voice had lost that croaky sarcastic drawl she used for playground putdowns. ‘We should have stayed at home.’
Home? Did she mean London? Or was she talking about the States?
‘Dad’s a complete, total, idiot . . . telling us to get out of—’
‘Dad was totally right,’ he replied. ‘If we’d stayed, we would have been trapped.’
‘I hope he and his girlfriend are dead.’
He spun round. ‘Why don’t you just shut up?’
‘No, you shut up! You always take his side.’
‘What? No I don’t.’
‘Yeah, you do. You’ve done nothing but sulk like a baby since we moved. Making things even harder on Mom. And she’s had enough to—’
‘Jeez, Grace! Just stop trying to Big Sister me! You don’t know shit. You don’t know anything.’
‘I made an effort to fit in here. Which is more than you’ve—’
‘Mum didn’t have to drag us to England! She could’ve worked it out with Dad. She could’ve carried on . . . she just didn’t like it there. This was just an excuse to leave—’
‘Hey! Hey! Hey!’ Mum emerged from the woods. ‘Just pack it in, both of you!’ She stumbled out of the undergrowth towards them.
‘Grace said she wished Dad was dead!’
‘Yeah, so what? And all you do is blame Mom just because you can’t make any new friends over here.’
‘You’re so full of it, Grace. You—’
Jennifer ducked down quickly through the barbed wire – ‘The two of you just stop it! Please!’ – catching her scalp on a rusty barb. As she stood up, it scraped deeply, tugging roughly at her hair and making her yelp with pain.
Grace and Leon shut up. They watched her straighten up, clutching the top of her head and grimacing. She lifted her hand away from her messed-up hair and stared at the smear of blood across her palm. Then, without warning, her legs buckled beneath her and she slumped down heavily, ending up kneeling in the mud, her face buried in her hands, sobbing and rocking backwards and forwards.
Just like Ben had said.
One thing too many . . . Buckeroo.
Grace dropped down beside her. ‘Mom? Mom? Hey! Please! Don’t cry!’ But Jennifer continued wailing into her hands and then Grace started crying too.
Leon watched them both huddled together on the wet mud, with a sky threatening more rain and a silent wood beside them that should have been alive with birdsong but instead hissed mournfully in the breeze.
The three of them were stuck in the middle of nowhere . . . The other passengers? He had no idea if they were alive still. ‘People’ still. They were marooned here, with no food, no water, nowhere to go and no one left alive to help them, so it seemed.
Time to step up to the plate, MonkeyNuts.
He closed his eyes and massaged his temple, another bastard of a headache was announcing its timely arrival.
CHAPTER 24
Suffolk
As the rain pattered relentlessly on the corrugated-iron barn roof, beneath it, on a low stack of abandoned wooden pallets, several trillion cells that had once formed the architecture of a being called ‘Eva’ now began to work as a giant collective.
Nearby was another cooperative that used to be known as ‘Greg’. Both these colonies now served new masters. ‘Masters’, or, more accurately, ‘liberators’: like a crusading army, advancing from city to city, freeing slaves from their shackles and recruiting them to the cause.
The virally infected cells, simple automatons with no real understanding of kingdoms, or cities, or slaves, now worked on a new basic chemical incentive: to find cells unlike themselves, ‘non-brethren’ identified by their DNA, and store those sequences of nucleotides for later while converting them just enough to enlist them in the process of hunting down the other non-brethren that remained.
Within five hours of very first contact, as the light faded from the grey sky and the afternoon became twilight, the last soft-tissue components of the former ‘kingdoms’ of Eva and Greg had been absorbed and recruited as single-cell citizens of a far greater combined nation. What remained of those old kingdoms were the crumbling ruins, the defeated battlements and strongholds: bones, hair, teeth and nails.
The indigestible and the unnecessary.
Between those brittle forgotten remnants, the cells merged into a single big pool rich in stores of nutrition, a gathering place where cells swirled around each other and exchanged the tiny packets of DNA data they each carried like market-square gossip, like mercenaries comparing their looted booty.
They exchanged, compared and every now and then, when pieces of DNA accidentally fitted together, like jigsaw puzzle pieces stirred around in a box, they
. . . reconstructed.
Somewhere, in the middle of the dark glutinous puddle, a tiny part of Eva was remade; just a few hundred fragments of data that under the old regime would together have formed a single, solitary, not particularly important gene. A gene that decided the configuration of taste buds; a gene that used to have the tiniest say in the type of food Eva once favoured.
She used to have a thing for banana smoothies. That insignificant gene was the reason for that. A tiny part of Eva, in that moment, had been recovered. The short DNA sequence was reproduced in the genome of several cells that were now promoted to a more important role: specialized cells with a particular purpose, guardians of a microscopic fragment of genetic ‘knowledge’.
Tiny little librarians, tasked with keeping that part of Eva alive for posterity.
Forever.
CHAPTER 25
They came across it the next morning after a night huddled together beneath the
plastic hood of a rural bus stop. Leon, Grace and Mum . . . quite possibly the last three people left alive in Britain, possibly the world.
Leon had spent the entire night looking wistfully down the long, straight country road, overhung by leafy branches that creaked and hissed, hoping to spot the distant pinprick of someone’s approaching headlights.
As soon as the sky started to lighten to a dispiriting grey and they could see where they were going, they got to their feet and carried on along the road, hoping to find a small town, perhaps a petrol station with a vending machine selling something they could safely drink. Leon’s head thumped with every step, his headache compounded further by the ache of dehydration and exhaustion.
They passed a stream and considered for a moment dipping their cupped hands into it. But Leon and his mum looked at each other and shook their heads. Not worth it. Not yet at any rate.
The grey sky gradually became a featureless white – it was mid-morning, Leon guessed – when they finally came across the entrance to something: an old road of cracked, unmaintained tarmac leading up to a wire-mesh fence. There was an old Ministry of Defence sign over which a newer sign had been fixed.
Grace read the sign. ‘Redevelopment of site: Hewitt and Hughes Contractors. This site is supervized twenty-four hours.’
‘Maybe there’s someone here,’ said Leon. He could imagine finding a bow-legged old security guard with a German shepherd called Saxon, stoically doing his job despite the coming of the end of the world. A cranky man who might at first try to gruffly shoo them away, but who would take pity and let them in. He would provide shelter and food, and in return they’d show him how to open his stone-cold heart and learn to love again.
Just like some crummy TV movie.
The cracked road led up a gentle slope, past a cluster of saplings that looked as if they hadn’t been deliberately planted but were the random scatterings of Mother Nature staking her claim.
At the top of the slope, they came to a halt.
‘What are those?’ asked Grace.
They were looking across a couple of fenced acres of weed-tufted ground, punctuated at regular intervals by artificial-looking mounds of grass: uniformly round, with flat tops. Leon counted them. Twenty-seven . . . three orderly rows of nine. There were several boarded-up concrete structures and a single Portakabin.
‘Maybe there’s someone in the cabin?’
They made their way towards it, up an overgrown pathway between two of the rows of humps. Leon noticed each hump had a short flight of concrete steps that led down into the ground and a heavy iron door. They reminded him of the ruins of the Nazi fortifications along the Normandy beaches. Each hump’s iron door appeared to be firmly sealed with heavy-duty padlocks.
The Portakabin was also locked. They knocked on the door and waited a minute, then finally Leon decided no one was home and swung a kick at its flimsy door. It rattled inwards. Inside, they found several plastic chairs set round a table cluttered with copies of the Sun, the Mirror, the Express from three days ago. The headlines were all about some footballer who’d been arrested for assaulting a referee, a former Britain’s Got Talent star who’d been discovered living rough on the streets and an article on the recent spike in the number of African migrants ‘swarming towards Britain’. There was an ashtray full of cigarette butts, several mugs that held the congealed dregs of coffee and a long-handled night watchman’s torch.
There was an empty kettle and a small fridge. Mum hurried over to it and pulled it open. Inside there was a bottle of milk that was so old it had separated into three clearly distinct layers of gunk. There was, however, a plastic litre bottle of water. She pulled it out and opened it.
‘Here . . .’ she said, holding it out to them.
Grace curled her lips at the thought. Leon took it from her and sipped it.
‘It’s pretty stale . . . but it’s OK.’
He handed it to his sister. She tested it and pulled a face, but then thirst overcame her and she eagerly tossed back several hasty slugs. Leon followed her, then handed Mum the bottle. She upended it and gulped a few mouthfuls. It was stale water that had been sitting there for a while with God knows whose backwash floating around in it, but they quickly finished it off between them.
There was nothing else to drink and little of use except the torch. Leon picked it up and tried it. It was working.
They stepped out of the cabin and made their way back down the path. It was then that Leon noticed that one of the many grassy humps’ doors wasn’t padlocked.
‘Mum, look!’
He took the half a dozen steps down and pushed against it gently. It creaked inwards.
She shook her head. ‘Leave it, Leon . . . There could be anything – anyone, druggies – down there.’ She obviously didn’t share Leon’s hope of finding some friendly creaky-kneed old security guard, but instead feared bumping into some drug-crazed hermit.
He ignored her and peered into the gloom beyond. Directly ahead of him there was a curving wall, and to his left concrete steps followed the curve and descended into darkness.
He snapped the torch on.
‘Leon, please,’ said Mum.
‘Let me just get a look . . . There might be something we can use.’ He took the first half a dozen steps down and out of sight.
‘Leon!’ snapped Grace after him. ‘Listen to Mom for once!’
He ignored her and slowly picked his way down, circling clockwise and descending until the last of the meagre daylight was gone and it was just the stark beam of the torchlight ahead of him. Finally the steps came to an end. He panned his torch around.
He was in what looked like a bunk room. There were four metal-framed beds, a filing cabinet, several folding chairs and a small table. The concrete walls were painted a mint green and were marked with scuffs and scrapes. On one wall was a cork pinboard with a number of yellowing paper notices tacked on to it, a Playboy calendar with curling pages, a small poster of some ridiculous-looking puffy-haired rock band called Bon Jovi and a bunch of baseball cards.
‘Leon?’ Mum’s voice echoed down the stairs. ‘You OK?’
‘Yeah,’ he replied. He crossed the small bunk room and panned his torch on to the calendar.
Jeez. 1986. It was nearly thirty years old. The place was a time capsule.
He panned his torch around some more. There were two doors. He tried one, which led to small toilet cubicle. The porcelain bowl was bone dry and feathered with spiders’ webs. He tried the other door and discovered there was a splintered, ragged hole where a handle had once been. Somebody must have forced it, smashed their way in sometime in the past, as they had the padlocked door at the top of the steps. He pushed the door and aimed his torch inside the room beyond.
‘Oh . . . you’ve got to be kidding me . . .’ he whispered. ‘Bazinga.’
By candlelight, they drank greedily from the cans of orange juice, then, their thirst finally quenched, they turned to the other tins for something to eat. Each tin was clearly marked with plain, no-nonsense text on a pale military-grey label.
BEANS IN TOMATO SAUCE: 400GMS, 2 SERVINGS. CALORIES: 400
MINCED PORK: 100GMS, 1 SERVING. CALORIES: 130
SKINNED POTATOES: 250GMS, 2 SERVINGS. CALORIES: 160
Leon talked with his mouth full. ‘This must be some kind of old nuclear bunker or something.’
Mum nodded, her mouth bulging with food. ‘Missile silo.’ She finished chewing and swallowed. ‘Your grandad once told me they’re dotted all over East Anglia from the Cold War.’
Leon looked up at her and watched her hungrily digging into a can of peaches with her finger, trying to scoop one out. He was reassured by the tone of her voice. For the first time in twenty-four hours, it sounded more like her normal self, not clipped and fragile . . . not the vocal equivalent of a glass tumbler perched precariously on the edge of a table.
She sounded like Mum again. Which was a relief. Leon had listened to Dad and ‘stepped-up’ . . . and hated every
second of it. He was far happier tagging along than leading.
Now they had food and juice in their bellies, and somewhere safe and tucked away to sleep. For the first time in forty-eight hours of not knowing if life was going to be measured in minutes or months, it looked as if they were going to be OK for a good while. The store room was stacked with cardboard boxes of tinned food and drink. It was as good a place as any to ride out the apocalypse.
‘Missiles?’ said Grace. ‘You mean, like . . . nuke-u-lar ones?’
‘Nuclear.’ Mum nodded. ‘Uh-huh. But they’re not here any more, love. They closed these sorts of places down back in the late eighties, I think.’
‘Isn’t there, like, radiation or something to worry about?’ asked Leon.
‘I don’t think so.’
Leon put down his tin of corned beef and rummaged through some of the boxes nearest him. ‘They’ve got, literally, everything here. Not just food, but medicines and stuff.’
‘Good.’
‘Any aspirin?’ asked Grace. She patted her sling gently. ‘My arm’s been killing me for ages.’
‘I’ll look . . . ahh.’ He pulled out a carton of pills. Like the food, it was labelled clearly and blandly.
‘Oh, now you both need to be careful . . . medicines have a shelf life,’ said Mum. ‘They may not be safe to—’
‘Mum?’ Leon looked at her. ‘Relax, OK? They’re aspirin. Nothing more.’
She nodded, returning his smile. ‘Yes, I suppose you’re right.’
Leon opened the packet and popped a couple out of their foil for Grace, and a couple for himself. ‘The worst that happens with aspirin is they get less effective with age.’
‘You know that, or you’re just guessing?’ asked Grace. She was also sounding more like her old self now.
