Lindisfarne (Project Renova Book 2)

by Terry Tyler

  Lucifer.

  "I expect his club and his woman had a say in the matter," I whisper, but Dex tells me to be quiet. Fair enough. This isn't the moment for logical arguments.

  "Well, I didn't die," Wedge carries on, "and now I'm back, and he's going to find out who's in fucking charge."

  You know how on TV and films when the baddie points a gun at the goodie, he never shoots him straight away? He stands there and talks a while, outlining his grievances, which gives the goodie ample opportunity to spot an escape route, or his friends a chance to leap in and stop the execution.

  Well, that doesn't happen. It's all over in a second, before anyone realises what's about to go down.

  Wedge drops the gun, takes a knife from a sheath on his belt, and slits the Kaiser's throat.

  I guess when someone really is going to kill someone, they just do it.

  Kai's eyes go wide and glazed, he clutches his neck, making gruesome choking, gurgling sounds as the blood spurts out, lit up by the torchlight; he falls to his knees and then over onto his side, and he's dead.

  Fucking hell.

  Fucking hell.

  The silence is broken by Bette's screams as she surges forward, falling over Kai, kissing his face and wailing, and Jodie is on her knees, sobbing like a child.

  Wedge stands fast, the bloody, dripping knife still in his hand.

  "I took one for the team. I went down for all of us, and I never gave none of my brothers up, because that's what we do. Dave Hodgson fucked off with my club and my old lady, without leaving me so much as a note to say where they'd gone. I'm taking back what's mine. That's all."

  Lottie. I search for her in the crowd, and see her with Jax, who has his arms around her. I reach out for her; she sees me and holds a hand up, the one that means don't make a fuss, I'm fine. Of course she is; my girl, who can deal with stuff better than I can.

  Everyone is open-mouthed, unable to tear their eyes away from the scene. No one says a word. And Dex—he's smiling. Just slightly, but he is.

  He's nodding. He likes this.

  "Dex," I whisper, tugging at his arm. "Say something. Do something."

  My heart is racing. Before bat fever I'd never even seen a dead body, but this is more shocking than everything else I've seen since last July.

  Wedge turns to Cleary, Parks and Jez. "Take care of the ladies." Then he turns his attention back to the rest of us. "In spite o' what he did, Hodgson was a member of the Hadrian Motorcycle Club, and I'm going to respect him more than he respected me. He'll have a proper send off." He picks up The Kaiser's body as if it's as light as a feather, chucks it over his shoulder, and walks off in the direction he came.

  Jez moves to the place where the body lay; in the torchlight, the grass is red. He jerks his head in Wedge's direction.

  "Anyone who wants can come and pay their respects."

  At first no one moves; people look at each other, talk in low voices.

  'Should we go?'

  'Did that really just happen?'

  'I don't think I can walk, my legs have gone weak'.

  But, slowly, everyone troops after Jez. He and Parks light the way with their torches, and behind them trails Cleary, with his arms around the weeping Bette and Jodie.

  It's like we're all in a dream. It's freaking me out. Why isn't anyone doing anything? Why isn't anyone saying, you can't murder someone in cold blood, in front of a whole group of people? And then it hits me, as it keeps doing, over and over. There is no law. There is nothing to be done. Justice is meted out as the strongest person sees fit, or not at all. There is no refuge, no safe place, or maybe there never was, and safety was only a late 20th and 21st century illusion. But Dex sent Neil away for less than this. If we're one community, surely he must decide that the punishment for murder is immediate exile? The council must put it to the vote—and my daughter, my Lottie who is not quite seventeen, is on that council.

  No. She can't be, not any more. She may be almost an adult, but I won't let her be involved in this.

  Until this night, we'd just been playing at it, all of us, on our little island where we thought the worst danger was not having enough to eat.

  The hum of chatter has ceased now, as we troop in the darkness over the soft, damp grass, up to the gate, where we slow down, stand back, so that each person in turn can pass through. No one hurries, everyone waits their turn. Well, it's a funeral procession. As we walk down the path to the water's edge, my eyes are fixed on the torches that will guide Kai to his final resting place, wherever the hell that's going to be. Is he going to bury him? Will we stand by and watch? Has a grave already been dug?

  Noiselessly, we glide as one down to the boats and, absorbed though I am in the muddle of horror whirling around my head, I glance back and forth; there are no kids here, thank goodness, except Lottie and Jax, who walk silently with their arms around each other; she puts her head on his shoulder. My impulse is to go to her, but Jax is the person she's turned to. Others shuffle along, hands in pockets, lost in their own thoughts. Away from the warmth of the bonfire, the cold damp seeps into my clothes; I feel as if it's permeating my bones.

  We reach the harbour. Over on the jetty I make out the shapes of two of the larger boats, waiting to go out fishing, but Wedge is not leading us there; we follow the torches down to the water's edge, where there are two small rowing boats. The smaller one is packed with sticks, kindling; we stand back as Wedge, Jez and Parks place Kai's body on top. The smaller boat is tied to the larger, which the three of them walk out until they're thigh-high in the water, and all we can see is their silhouettes and the light of the torches, held aloft.

  The night is so still; the tide is starting to come in, and the only sound is the lapping of water against the sides of the boats, the whoosh of the men's legs wading through the waves. Even Bette and Jodie are quiet now, save for a few muffled sobs. I can just make out the black shapes of the men climbing into the boat and rowing away. I hear oars cutting through the water, then that sound, too, grows fainter until there is just silence, and we can no longer see anything but the dull orange glow from the torch. We're waiting, though, in that cold night air, and soon that dull glow grows brighter and bigger, as the boat holding Kai's body is set alight.

  That's the man I was talking to over a beer. The man with a woman who loved him, a sister, who thought he had years and years left to live.

  The flaming coffin floats away on the night breeze, the light grows dimmer. I strain my ears, and hear the larger boat rowing back to the shore.

  I don't want to see them. I want to be gone before they get back.

  Dex takes a few steps out in front of the crowd.

  "Let's all go home, shall we?"

  And we do, we turn and walk back towards our side of the island, the little streets we've made home, while the friends of Wedge and Kai wander off in the opposite direction.

  In the distance I see the lonely silhouette of the castle, against the cloudy night sky. I don't want to be there tonight. I want to be with my friends in our cosy house.

  I take Dex's arm. "Say something. Tell me what you're thinking."

  He puts his hand over mine, where it's tucked through the crook of his arm, and the warmth of it comforts me. "It's how the Norsemen used to send their warriors off to Valhalla. To be honest, I wasn't surprised; I thought something like this might go down, at some point. It was a matter of honour, for Wedge."

  I can't believe my ears. "We're not Vikings, though. That was hundreds and hundreds of years ago, when the world was a barbarous place, and—"

  "It still is. It never stopped being so. People don't change. Only our perception of what's acceptable and what isn't."

  I take my arm from his. "Dex, he murdered him. He slit his throat, in front of Bette and his sister. There is no way of looking at this that makes it okay."

  "He had to do it. For himself. He couldn't be who he is while the person who took from him was still walking around."

  "But it's murder. T
his changes everything about the way we live here, can't you see that?"

  He stops, takes my hand, and looks into my eyes through the darkness. "You're judging this by the standards of the old world. But that's gone. We don't live there any more."

  He puts his arm around me, and leads me home.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Wedge

  The bar of the Monk's Head Hotel is illuminated by many candles, and each member of the Hadrian Motorcycle Club holds a glass containing a large measure of Jack Daniels. Bette and Jodie are not there; they are upstairs, sleeping, courtesy of a Zopiclone apiece. Wedge stands with his back to the bar, his back straight, his chin proud. He has assumed his rightful place.

  "We won't talk about Hodgson again. Ever. The Hadrian is my club, as it always was. Anybody who doesn't like this can fuck off now; I won't try and stop you, but you're with me a hundred per cent, or you're out. Same goes for the women." He beckons to Jez, takes his hand and raises it skywards. "And this here is my new VP."

  There is silence for a moment, broken by Cleary, who turns to the others and holds his glass high.

  "To the Hadrian!"

  The men raise their glasses. "To the Hadrian!"

  "To brotherhood!"

  "To brotherhood!"

  Wedge nods, pleased. That's the first one taken care of, then. He beckons to Cleary to fill his glass.

  "Cheers, and in the morning, get the girls to clean this shit-hole up, will you?" He pats him on the shoulder. "There's a good lad."

  Chapter Fifteen

  Vicky

  The strange thing is that everyone accepts it. Whether they do so deep down, I don't know, but no one wants to talk about it. I try; next day the village is quiet, with no one around, but late in the morning I leave Dex scribbling away on his book and take my hangover up to the hotel, just for something to do. As we're pruning the 'eat before it's putrid' shelf, I ask Rowan her thoughts.

  "I think it's best we forget it, and move on," she says. "Those chaps, they're a law unto themselves. We need them for what they can do, but we don't have to get involved. It was a spectacle for spectacle's sake, if you ask me."

  I see Louise on the way home; she was one of those who left before it happened, so I ask her if she's heard the news.

  "Oh yes, Marcus told me. Two of them had a fight over who was leader, didn't they? And one of them got killed." She shivers. "To tell you the truth I'm not even sure which one Wedge is. But Dex will make sure he stays away from the rest of us, won't he?" Then she starts telling me about her tomato plants.

  At home, I mention it to Phil.

  "It's hard to come to terms with, but it happened," he says, and pats me on the shoulder. "I suspect we'll have worse than this to deal with, as time goes on."

  Great.

  I find Lottie in bed, eating M&Ms and reading a year-old copy of Cosmopolitan. She rolls her eyes as soon as she sees my face.

  "Oh God, are you going to go on and on about what happened last night?"

  "Well, it needs talking about."

  "No, it doesn't. It's so-oo retarded to harp on about stuff that's done and dusted. You can see Wedge's point. All that honour stuff, it's serious shit with bikers." She glances up from the magazine. "Did you bring any chocolate back from the hotel? These M&Ms are well stale."

  It's first on the agenda at the next meeting, on Thursday; the bikers are now welcome to attend, but none of them do. Unlike every other issue that's ever brought up, no one has much to say about it. Paul Lincoln utters a tentative grumble, but Dex raises his hand to quiet him and, to my surprise, Paul shuts up.

  "What happened, happened. It's shocking, but the members of the Hadrian club have accepted it, so perhaps we should, too. If anyone feels unable to stay here because of the events of Saturday night, we'll send you on your way with petrol and food, but I would estimate that you're probably a lot better off here than you might be out on the mainland, right now."

  Nods and mumbles of agreement all round.

  Life just carries on. For us, anyway; I daresay Bette and Jodie feel differently. For me, though, Saturday night was the moment, more than any other, when we said goodbye to everything we once knew.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Alex Verlander

  Before, he'd worked in the dark, behind shaded windows down a busy street. Up on high, he'd observed the old London: the busy worker bees, hurrying about their mundane lives, weighed down by self-imposed stress. The fashionable and the affluent, swaggering into their shops, salons and cafés, the poor and the faceless, all oblivious to the devastation that lay around the corner. He watched the first few weeks after the unknown Patient Zero laid waste to the beautifully timed planning of Project Renova; he saw the looting, the burning, the violence. He watched as the virus took hold and streets began to clear, before he got the call to pack up and head for the small airstrip from which he would make the first stage of the journey to his new home.

  Here he watches still, but now he is a long, long way away, in a light, airy room with a balcony.

  Often, he leaves the monitors with their drone-streamed images and walks out to enjoy the soft, velvet breeze and feast his eyes on the bougainvillea; the pinks, purples and reds are so enchanting that he ponders, daily, on the miracle of nature.

  Hashtag #BeautifulWorld #Inspirational. How he misses Instagram and Twitter.

  Sometimes the weather is oppressive, and he opens the French doors to smell and hear the cloudburst filling the ocean, turning it from azure to gunmetal grey. This, he finds just as beautiful as the gentle warm breezes and blue skies.

  Now, his tan comes from the sun, not spray bottles. His some-time lover, Erika, says this is a welcome change: whatever the product's exotic name, whatever the promises on the packaging, the end result was always the same: clogged orange around the eyebrows, with the underlying smell of stale biscuits.

  Today, he is too busy to enjoy the view from his balcony. He sits with Ludlow, studying the devastated land of their birth.

  "You oughta see South America," Ludlow says, when he comments on it. "'Side from half the cattle ranches where the rainforest used to be, they've bombed the fucking lot." He sniffs. "All the spics gone, thank God."

  Verlander winces; Ludlow insists he was born twenty years too early for 'all that PC bollocks'. Verlander had hoped he'd seen the last of him, but when he boarded the plane, seven months before, he found Ludlow already on board, stretching the safety belt across his girth and complaining about the fuck up of the project, as he'd done at least once a day since the end of July last year. Now, the large man bites into a vast sub filled with chicken and a rainbow mix of salad vegetables. Mayonnaise drips onto his chin, which he fails to wipe away; the sight turns Verlander's stomach.

  "Mayo. On your chin."

  "I know." Ludlow's gnashers chomp once more into his gargantuan snack, and he wipes his face with a paper napkin, leaving an oily residue on his skin that makes Verlander twitch with irritation.

  Ludlow clamps a greasy hand onto his mouse and maximises an image of central Newcastle; here, there is movement. "Still bad up here." He sniffs. "Pity that Ridgeway wanker offed himself. So much for keeping the North under control."

  "Yeah, he was a bad choice. The men have scattered all over."

  "Stupid bastards." He minimises Newcastle and brings up Northampton, now a wasteland. "Shame. I had an auntie who lived there. Used to visit her when I was a kid."

  "Nothing worth saving," Verlander says. He hovers over an image of what looks like a small town of military issue tents and Portakabins, somewhere in Leicestershire. "Look at that. Biggest refugee camp, all gone. Disease got in, not enough military left to keep order." He shakes his head. "I can't get over these morons, destroying their own camps. Why the fuck would you do that? Tanya says secondary diseases are springing up all over." He zooms in on an image of a shallow pit filled with hundreds of burned bodies. "I bet it stinks to high heaven down there."

  Ludlow wipes the back of his hand
across his mouth. "Yeah, well, sooner we flatten all the danger zones, the better. Rounding up is going to take some doing."

  Verlander sits back and turns his head towards the open window; the fresh, salty air is infinitely more pleasing to his nostrils than the fresh perspiration wafting from his colleague's body.

  "Ah, I imagine most survivors will have found their way to settlements by now." He shuts his eyes, and listens to the distant sound of the waves folding onto the shore. "Nearly all the original camps are gone. Interesting how people form their own communities if you leave them to it, and they seem to work better."

  Ludlow makes a loud, guttural noise, and spits into a napkin. Verlander clenches his fists; not long now. He'll be sad to leave the island, but now he's seen the plans for the South Downs he's eager to get started.

  "Where we got, then?" Ludlow asks.

  "Biggest are on the islands. Wight, Man, Arran, Holyhead. Small one on Lindisfarne. Then there's Perranporth, Withernsea, Whitehaven. Hawes in North Yorks. Silloth; that one's a caravan site in Cumbria. Huge one out near Oswestry, must be a couple of thousand. Grantchester, and a place in the Northants countryside. Slapton. Ultimately, Lomax wants every community gone, no matter how small. Problem is, we never got a chance to test immunity. We don't know who's out there."

  Kwisssh! Ludlow guzzles from a can of soft drink. "Every kind of bolshie twat you can think of, I imagine. Then there's the rogue military. Fucking idiots. Half of them have got involved in gangs."

  "Membership of which means not being long for this world, by definition."