Afterlight

by Alex Scarrow

  ‘I’d like to know where that man came from, and what he’s seen abroad,’ she replied. ‘I wonder if the rest of the world is faring any better.’ She looked down at the sea. Sixty feet below, the net, lowered once more to the boat’s foredeck, rising and dropping on the swells sliding beneath her, was being filled with the goodies they’d found on the shore run.

  Walter nodded silently. She could see he was still shaken by what had happened. She decided to direct his mind elsewhere. ‘So, more importantly, how did your shopping run go?’

  ‘Oh . . . yes, we got most of what was on the list,’ he smiled, ‘and a few little extras for the party.’

  Jenny smiled wearily. Good.

  Life was usually made a little easier after a shore run. Most people got something they’d requested and were less likely to bitch and grumble for the next few days at least. And the celebration party . . . well, that couldn’t come soon enough.

  They were soon to mark the very first anniversary of getting the generator up and running; Leona’s suggestion - a good one, too. The two or three hours of light every evening, afforded by the noisy chugging thing, made all the difference to their lives. More than a small luxury, it was a significant step up from merely managing to survive. It was a comfort; a reminder of better times; a statement of progress; steady light across the decks and walkways after dark.

  Absolutely worth celebrating that.

  Apart from anything else, the party would be a boost for their morale - hopefully shut the whingers and malcontents up for a while.

  ‘Come on, Walter, what extras did you manage to rustle up?’

  Walter tapped his ruddy nose and managed a thin smile. ‘Just a few nice things.’

  The net was full enough for the first load and Nathan flashed a thumbs-up to the people manning the davit. They worked the manual winch and the laden net swung up off the deck with the creaking of polyvinyl cables and the clinking of chains. As it slowly rose away from the rising and falling boat, Jacob, Nathan and the others worked in practised unison, bringing boxes of supplies from below deck and stacking them in the cockpit ready to fill the empty net again. Mostly medicines. But also items of clothing, woollen jumpers, waterproofs, thick socks and thermal underwear. She spotted a basket full of paperback novels and glossy magazines, cellophane-wrapped packs of cook-in-sauce tins, catering-size bags of salt and sugar and flour . . . amazing how, even now, if one knew where to look, what things could be foraged from the dark corners of warehouses.

  Hannah clattered on noisy clogs through the crowd and found them, dragging Leona by the hand after her.

  ‘Uncle Walter, did you find me anything?’

  He hunkered down to her level and winked at her. ‘Oh, let’s just see.’ He reached into the old leather bag slung over his shoulder, made a show of rummaging around inside. ‘I’m sure I must have something in here for you.’ Finally, with a little theatrical flourish, he pulled out a transparent plastic case containing what looked like a row of water-colour tabs and a paintbrush.

  ‘Little Miss Britney make-up set,’ he said handing it to her.

  Her little caterpillar eyebrows shot up to form a double arch of surprise. ‘Wow!’ She threw an arm around his shoulders and planted a wet kiss on his rough cheek. Walter’s face flushed crimson.

  ‘Bit young for grooming, isn’t she?’ said a woman stepping past - Alice Harton, a miserable-faced bitch who seemed to make a life’s work out of mean-spirited put-downs and caustic remarks.

  Walter looked up and shrugged awkwardly. ‘Well . . . I saw it . . . just thought she’d like it.’

  ‘It’s lovely!’ cooed Hannah brightly.

  ‘There, see?’ said Leona, handing the woman a dry now-why-don’tyou-piss-off smile. Alice Harton brushed on past them, shaking her head disapprovingly as she spoke in hushed tones and backward glances to the women with her.

  Jenny squeezed his round shoulder affectionately as he slowly stood up. ‘Don’t listen to that silly cow, Walter. I don’t know what I’d do . . . what any of us would do without you.’

  He smiled at her and down at Hannah. ‘I’m here for you, Jenny,’ he uttered.

  ‘And I got this for you, Hannah,’ said Jacob.

  He produced a Playmobil Princess and Pony set from his sack. It was still in its cardboard and plastic packaging; pristine and not sun-faded. He’d found it at the back of a children’s shop on the high street. Her eyes instantly lit up, as much at the sight of the beautiful pink cardboard presentation box and the unscuffed plastic window than at the two small plastic play figures she could see imprisoned inside.

  ‘Thank you, Jake,’ she gushed, twining her short arms around his neck and plastering his grimacing face with wet kisses.

  The large mess and the hallway outside were crowded with a couple of hundred of the community’s members; those that had put a must-have on the list and turned up in the hope that there was something for them to collect. It was a deafening convergence of overlapping voices raised with pleasure and surprise or groans of disappointment.

  Jacob extracted himself from Hannah’s clinging embrace. Leona thanked him with a squeeze. ‘Thanks, bruv. Two treats today, she’s being spoiled.’

  He shrugged. ‘I used to love Playmobil stuff. It was proper cool. Those things don’t ever break.’

  She smiled. ‘I remember. You had the Viking ship and all the Vikings in your bedroom, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he nodded. ‘So, I umm . . . I treated myself to a present as well . . .’ He reached into his bag and pulled out a small pristine cardboard carton. ‘Viking captain,’ he smiled, opening the box and pulling out the plastic figure. He turned it over in his hands, his fingers stroking the smooth contours of plastic, his eyes drinking in the bright unblemished colours. For a fleeting moment - like a dormant memory stirred by a smell - he was back home in his bedroom, seven once again, sitting cross-legged on the blue furry rug that looked like an ocean, and steering his ship through a stormy furry sea. Beams of afternoon sun warming his face through the window; the reassuring sounds of mum in the kitchen, dad in his study watching the news on his laptop, Leona playing music in her room. A very ordinary Saturday afternoon . . . from another time, another life.

  ‘The arms and legs can move,’ he added thoughtfully, adjusting them in his hands.

  ‘I know, little brother, I know,’ she smiled.

  He looked up and saw amongst the animated faces others like him, staring wistfully at mementos from the past, lost in a fog of nostalgic delight.

  ‘So, there were some men, I heard,’ said Leona.

  He nodded. ‘A couple of them.’

  ‘Chasing the guy you saved?’

  Jacob was reluctant to talk it out right now. It was still way too easy to conjure up an image of the Y-shaped splatter of blood and brain tissue across the concrete.

  ‘We had to shoot them. Otherwise they would have killed the other man,’ was all he wanted to offer just then. Leona was going to press him for more details, but Hannah was yanking impatiently on her hand, keen to show her the princess and pony. Leona relented and squatted down to her level and Jacob watched and smiled as his sister and niece cooed at the marvellously preserved plastic figurines.

  Two men with guns.

  Is it really safe ashore?

  The question annoyed him, made him feel angry and his stomach lurch unpleasantly.

  See . . . if you really want to go ashore, Jay, if you really insist on going ashore and exploring, then that’s what you might be up against. Nasty men. Big guns. You ready for that? You a big enough boy to look after yourself now?

  ‘Yes,’ he muttered under his breath. A gun was going to be just as deadly in his hands as some wild-eyed thug playing fox and hounds.

  ‘What’s up, bruv?’ asked Leona looking up.

  He shook the Y-shaped splatter from his mind and smiled. ‘Oh, nothing.’

  Chapter 10

  Crash Day + 1 11 a.m.

  Suffolk

  Ad
am looked out of the open canopy of their truck as it rumbled south along the A11’s slow lane, towards London. The rest of the squadron’s gunners, inside, were trying to listen to a small radio attempting to compete with the deafening snarl of the RAF transport truck’s diesel engine.

  Today, the second day of the crisis. The situation seemed not to show any sign of abating. On the contrary, the news seemed to be getting worse by the hour. The last soundbite Adam had managed to catch from the radio was that the American military forces in the region had begun redeploying en masse in Saudi Arabia. Although no one from the US Defense Department had made a public statement on this large scale rapid movement of muscle, it was obvious that the troops were being sent to defend critical installations in the Ghawar oil fields, an area that had yet to be wholly incapacitated by the widespread rioting.

  The Middle East was sounding like one big battlefield, the fighting now not just between Sunnis and Shi’as, but between rival tribes, between neighbouring streets, seemingly in every city and town in many of the Arab nations; a chance in the spreading entropy to settle age-old dishonours and more recent disputes.

  Then, of course, there was the bottomless plummet on the markets.

  Adam, with ten thousand pounds of savings in a Nationwide Share-tracker account, had listened with increasing desperation as the FTSE had plummeted this morning to somewhere close to two thousand, losing just over fifty per cent of its value, the government apparently doing or saying nothing to halt the slide until half an hour ago when it announced, out of the blue, that the London stock exchange was being suspended for the day. Shrewdly, before Wall Street was about due to come online.

  A voice on the radio reminded listeners that the Prime Minister was scheduled to make an important announcement at midday. Adam checked his watch.

  An hour or so to go.

  All ears in the truck would be cocked for that one.

  He stared back out of the truck at the road filled with unhurried vehicles going about a normal day’s business and wondered why he wasn’t seeing any signs of panic yet. Why there were so many cars out there making routine journeys.

  But then, of course, none of them had been there at the briefing yesterday. It had been little more than a hasty exchange over Squadron Leader Cameron’s desk; enough to leave Adam with a cold, churning sensation in the pit of his stomach.

  ‘Unofficially, Brooks, we’re getting orders to redeploy the regiment. There’s a lot of rear-echelon chatter buzzing around this morning. The word is we’ll probably be pulling the rest of the regiment back from Afghanistan, Iraq, East Timor and Belize immediately. They want as many boots back on the ground in Britain, as soon as is possible.’

  ‘In response to this oil thing?’

  Cameron nodded. ‘Yes. I’d say someone upstairs is anticipating laying down some degree of martial law in this country; guarding critical fuel depots.’

  ‘It’s going to get that bad, sir?’

  ‘What do you think? We nearly had bloody riots over the duty being paid on petrol a few years back. I can only imagine what sort of fun and games we’re going to have on our hands when petrol pumps start running dry.’ Cameron, agitated, tapped his pen on a desk pad thick with scribbled notes. ‘Our poor bastards, 15 Squadron, guarding Kandahar will no doubt be the last fellas out of the country. That is if we still have enough fuel to keep our planes flying.’

  Jesus.

  Being the last company-strength unit left on the ground in that hell-hole, even on a good day, was going to be hairy. He wondered, when the dust settled in the aftermath of this crisis, what sort of news stories would get top billing in the tabloids: A-list celebrities stranded on holiday islands, X Factor auditions postponed by the oil shock, or the massacre of an entire company of left-behind British soldiers.

  Stranded celebrities, obviously.

  Cameron looked at him. ‘You know this has caught everyone on the hop. Everyone. I can’t believe there wasn’t a prepared contingency plan for something like this. You’d think the Russians buggering about turning off gas supplies in recent winters would have alerted someone to the possibility of an oil switch off.’ He shook his head. ‘I get the impression that everyone up the chain of command is simply winging it. It’s a fucking shambles.’

  Adam nodded at the pad on his desk. ‘So, where are we redeploying?’

  ‘I’ve got a list of places just come in, places the government want troops stationed round. Since we’re perimeter defence specialists we’ve been handed a lot off the top of the list. Oil distribution nodes, government command and control centres.’ He looked down at the list. ‘I’m splitting 2 squadron between you, Dempsey and Carver. You’re taking Rifle Flight one and two down to London. The O2 Dome, of all places.’

  ‘The Millennium Dome?’

  Cameron shrugged. ‘Most probably be a regional emergency coordination centre. It’s not listed as such, but that’s probably why they want guards on the gates there.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Get your boys ready to go. As soon as I’ve got a confirmation order on these deployments I’ll let you know.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Adam turned to go.

  ‘Oh . . . Brooks?’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Good luck.’ The two words came out in a way he’d probably not intended. They sounded unsettling.

  ‘You think it’s really going to get that bad, sir?’

  Cameron tried a reassuring smile, but produced little more than a queasy grimace. ‘Just, good luck, Brooks. All right?’

  He dismissed Adam with a busy flicker of his hand. As Adam pulled open the door Cameron called out for him to send in Flight Lieutenant Dempsey.

  Adam watched the vehicle a dozen yards behind; a couple of scruffy teenage kids in a beaten-up white van, yapping merrily like they hadn’t a care in the world. Beyond them, a Carpet World truck was rolling placidly along, the driver on his mobile. Overtaking in the fast lane a young lad with gel-spiked hair driving a bakery van like it was a performance racing car.

  And life goes merrily on for some.

  He shook his head at the surreal ordinariness of the scene beyond the back of their truck. People going about their business as if today was just another day.

  ‘Surely they realise?’ he muttered.

  ‘What’s that, sir?’ asked Corporal Davies, sitting on the bench opposite.

  Adam looked up at Bushey. He wasn’t the brightest lad in the unit, but even in his bullish features Adam could recognise a growing unease that world events were beginning to out-pace the increasingly frantic news headlines.

  ‘Nothing, Bush. Just singing.’

  The big fool grinned; a stupid oafish Shrek-like grin that was probably never going to end up on a calendar. He turned to look back out of the truck at the white van behind them and leered at the teenage girl in the passenger seat in a manner he most likely considered rakish and charming.

  She returned his unattractive leer with a cocked eyebrow and a middle finger.

  Chapter 11

  10 years AC

  ‘LeMan 49/25a’ - ClarenCo Gas Rig Complex, North Sea

  ‘Mum, you really don’t need to be shovelling this shit,’ said Leona. ‘Seriously, you’re in charge round here, no one would expect you to.’

  Jenny looked up from the foul stinking slurry before her. The odour rising from the warm, steaming bed of human and chicken faeces was so overpowering that she’d been fighting a constant gag reflex until she’d managed to adjust to the unfamiliar habit of breathing solely through her open mouth.

  ‘I’m taking my turn just like everyone else,’ she said, tucking a stray lock of hair behind her ear. ‘If I ducked this job, the likes of Alice would have a field day with it.’

  Alice was a miserable shrew. There wasn’t a day that passed without Jenny hearing some little barbed comment come from the woman’s flapping lips. There wasn’t a day Jenny didn’t regret allowing the woman to join them. She’d been so quiet and meek the first few months,
no trouble at all . . . that is until she’d found her feet; found other quiet voices like hers. Voices that wondered why this community should have an unelected leader; why one woman should be allowed to impose her values, her opinions on all of them, when it was everyone who contributed to their survival.

  Jenny suspected it wasn’t the idea of democracy being shunted aside because it was a temporary inconvenience that so irked Alice Harton, it was the fact that some other woman was in charge . . . and not her. After all, as she constantly let everyone know, she’d had extensive management experience back in the old world; ran a local government department of some kind. Logically, it should be someone like her team-leading, not some workaday middle class mum.

  ‘Sod Alice,’ said Leona. ‘She moans about everything anyway. You’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t with a bitch like her.’

  ‘Still, we all should take turns doing this, Lee. It’s going to be your turn soon.’

  Leona grimaced. ‘Oh, gross.’

  ‘We’ve all got to do our bit, love.’

  Walter nodded. ‘Each digester stops producing methane after three weeks and needs emptying and refilling.’ He gestured at the other two sealed eight-foot-long fibreglass cylinders that he’d rescued from a brewery. ‘Huey and Dewey are doing fine right now. Week after next, I think it’s your name up on the rota to clean out Dewey.’

  The rota . . . The Rota . . . was the community’s closest equivalent to a Bible. It was written out in tiny handwriting on a whiteboard in what had once been some sort of meeting room. There were four hundred community members old enough and fit enough to work one chore or another. Every day Jenny found herself in front of that whiteboard, shuffling names around, shifting groups of people from one chore to the next.

  No one escaped the rota, she insisted, not even herself.

  This task, though, was generally considered to be by far the worst; shovelling the spent slurry from the digester into several dozen four-gallon plastic drums to be taken up to the plant decks and used as fertiliser. There was always someone who refused point-blank to do it; like Alice Harton did, like Nilaya Koundinya who claimed it was unacceptable for someone of her caste to work directly with human faeces. On both those occasions she’d found herself in the middle of a shouting match, ultimately having to threaten eviction if they didn’t shut up and take their turn.