Afterlight

by Alex Scarrow

  Why not join us? We’ve found somewhere completely safe.

  She owed her so much.

  Martha bent down again to scoop up more of Valérie’s things. The dark blue khaki trousers he seemed to wear all of the time - all pockets. Some shorts he wore as underwear, thick woollen socks carelessly balled and inside-out on his bed. It was no different, she decided somewhat nostalgically, to going around Nathan’s messy old bedroom, back in the good old days; untangling his scuzzy smalls from the game controller cables stretched across his unmade bed. Maybe that’s why she enjoyed doing this. It felt like she was back then . . . back in another time.

  Something fell out of the swaddle of clothes she was holding under her arm onto Valérie’s bedding. She looked down at it.

  A loop of hair; a thick tress of curly blonde hair, curled and tied up with a faded pink ribbon. She reached down and picked it up, spreading the soft loop of hair between her thumb and forefinger.

  Oh . . . my . . .

  She could have told anyone who that hair belonged to, even without looking at the ribbon. She’d run a brush through it often enough, trimmed it, plaited it, pulled it into cornrows, pulled it back into a ponytail Lord knows how many times.

  Hannah’s.

  Seeing it there, nestling amongst Valérie Latoc’s bedding, caught her by surprise; it stole a breath from her mouth. The lock of hair had dropped out of his blue trousers. Out of his one-of-many pockets.

  A question arrived unannounced, unsolicited and very much unwelcomed.

  Why was that in his pocket, Martha?

  She looked at the bundle of clothes under her arm. And before she realised she was doing it, she had placed them down and was pulling his blue trousers from the pile.

  That’s the one. It came out of those. Now, why was it in his pocket?

  For a moment she held them at arm’s length; tatty blue army-style trousers, patched and mended several times. The kind of thing men do - pick a favourite item of clothing and hang onto it for dear life, nursing worn holes and unthreading seams, unable to toss them away. She held it at arm’s length not because they smelled of stale body odour - they did, an accumulation of a week - but because . . .

  Because, God help me . . . please no . . . because I might find something else.

  Something that had no reason to be there.

  Her hand drifted slowly towards a hip pocket lumpy with something inside.

  What are you doing?

  She answered that aloud, and dishonestly. ‘I’m jus’ emptyin’ the pockets is all. Can’t wash them with full pockets, right?’ she muttered. How many times had she had to do that with Nathan’s school trousers? Finding endless screwed-up balls of paper; ‘pass-it-around’ notes on exercise book paper, dog-eared Yu-Gi-Oh cards, shredding tissues stiff with dried snot.

  Her fingers unbuttoned the pocket flap and curled inside. She realised her hand was trembling as she did so. A hand wanting to find nothing more than a sweaty old bandanna or a handkerchief.

  She looked down at the lock of Hannah’s hair on the bed and realised with an unsettling lurch in her chest that they’d condemned and killed a man on finding something less. They’d killed Walter because of a solitary gym shoe on his boat. Because they were so absolutely certain what finding that on his boat meant. Because there were those who’d been absolutely certain Walter was guilty even before they’d bothered to look for anything.

  Then her fingers touched something soft inside. Material. Cotton. She felt her heart flutter and flip in her chest. She closed her eyes as she pulled it out, praying it was a just a forgotten strip of bandage or a spare sock; praying it was only that one lock of blonde hair that she needed to find a way to explain away in her mind; to conjure up an acceptable reason for it being there.

  She opened her eyes and stared at the small garment that dangled from her fingers.

  ‘Oh, dear God, no,’ she whispered.

  A pair of sky-blue child’s underpants with a constellation of five dark spots of dried blood on the white elasticated waistband.

  Oh, God . . . no. Not him.

  Chapter 76

  10 years AC

  Felixstowe, Suffolk

  Maxwell watched them dancing on the wharf; an impromptu party that had started only an hour or so after they’d tied up at Felixstowe and begun exploring the maze of stacked freight containers. Many of them had remained unopened all these years, their thick corrugated doors had obviously resisted earlier attempts by people to break in; scratches and gouges where levers and wedges had been banged into the gap between hatch and frame. A decade’s worth of corrosion later, their hinges gave far more easily.

  Each one they prised open proved to be an Aladdin’s cave of treasures. Some of the boys had found a red Lamborghini in one and wheeled it out onto the wharf where they’d been pushing and shoving each other to take turns to sit in the front seat and pretend to drive the thing. The impromptu party, however, had begun shortly after some of them had stumbled upon a container filled with stacked pallets of alcopops and bottles of spirits.

  A fire now shimmered in the afternoon light as the boys took turns in tossing on the bone-dry slats of broken pallets, throwing on bottles of brandy and vodka, delighting in the explosion of glass and rolling mini-mushroom clouds of blue alcohol-fuelled flames.

  ‘S’getting out of ‘and, Chief,’ muttered Jeff.

  Maxwell looked at his pilot, sitting beside him on the foredeck of the tugboat. Even from here they could feel the wavering heat of the boys’ growing bonfire. ‘Relax. They’re just letting off some steam.’

  Maxwell had smiled beneficently when a group of boys had emerged from the maze of containers to present Edward, Nathan and him with some of the bright orange and yellow coloured bottles of Froot-ka they’d discovered. The boys had already started opening and chugging away at them.

  So he’d smiled and told them, since they’d all been such good boys, they bloody well deserved a party. The girlfriends had already been pulled out of their cots from the bowels of the second barge and plied with copious amounts of alcohol and were now, as he watched from afar, busy servicing clusters of boys. It had the look of a Roman orgy; a last-night bender before the end of the world. In fact, it very much had the look of the first few nights of the big crash. Maxwell wondered what would happen if he tried to flex his authority this second, right now - step ashore and announce that the party was over and it was time for them all to go to bed.

  He felt the hair on his forearms stir and prickle.

  They’d refuse, wouldn’t they? One of the older boys certainly would.

  It would be an open challenge to his authority; a dangerously open challenge. He realised the answer to that question was that he daren’t step ashore. It wasn’t a sudden realisation, more a gradual clarification, a truth he’d half suspected for a while that was now, finally, sliding into sharper focus for him. He didn’t truly control these boys, not really. Sure, they were happy to follow orders, follow the schedules and routines that he’d assigned them over the years, happy to cheer his habitual party night opening speech, call him ‘Chief’ and knuckle a salute as he passed them by. But that was because he was the Chief, the guy at the top who made sure every one of them got their perks.

  Another recurring, wake-up-sweating nightmare was that one day he was going to publicly give an order to one of the boys and the boy would turn round and tell him to fuck off.

  That’s how slim your control is, Alan. You’re just one ‘fuck off’ away from a mutiny; from being lynched by these little thugs.

  What kept the boys knuckling their foreheads and nodding politely as he passed was a residual deference to him as their school teacher, as the official authority figure put in charge of Safety Zone 4. But more importantly, he was the man who made the lights happen, the arcade machines go on, who opened the sweetie-box and handed out grog and dope on party nights. He was the man promising them even more of that; promising them enough power that every night they could play on
the games consoles they’d brought along, watch the library of action movie DVDs they had tucked away.

  I’m in charge because I’m the chap who says ‘yes you can’.

  He shuddered at the thought of what would happen when he finally had to start telling the boys they couldn’t have a party. If they’d stayed on at the dome, that day would have eventually come. And not too far off, that day, either.

  With these rigs at least there was the leverage of limitless oil or gas, whatever their generator was tapping for fuel. DVDs, games and girlfriends would keep them busy, keep them happy for the foreseeable. And this container port looked like a useful place to come back to for more booze and fags later on, should he need to sweeten his leadership.

  ‘You okay, Chief?’ asked Jeff.

  Maxwell forced a smile. It felt uncomfortable and ill-fitting and fled quickly. ‘Fine.’

  ‘We heading off again tomorrow?’

  ‘I think we’ll give it a day before we move on,’ he replied, ‘see what other supplies we can forage here first.’

  Getting the boys to mobilise tomorrow morning, with their heads pounding, was going to be difficult. At least back at the Zone the grog was under lock and key. He put some of it out for them once a week, and once it was gone, it was gone. Tomorrow morning, whilst the boys were all nursing their heads, he’d get what was left of that Froot-ka stored down below on the tugboat. After all, if they were going to have to fight their way on, the boys would be all the better fired up for a scrap with a little alcopop buzz inside them.

  He picked Edward out of the milling crowd, his dark face shimmering on the far side of the vodka- and wood-fuelled fire; holding court, relaxed and reclining like a lord on a chaise longue of car tyres covered with fake-fur coats. Beside him, Jay-zee, now proudly wearing the ‘second dog’ jacket inherited from Dizz-ee; the jacket the other boy - Jacob - would have worn alongside Nathan.

  He sensed, with a creeping disquiet, that the balance of power was one day going to swing Edward’s way. The young man didn’t need to bribe the boys with perks or parties. They followed his say-so because he was one of them, because he was like the big brother. He looked right, he sounded right. He acted right. The top dog.

  That bastard’s going to turn on me soon.

  Snoop watched the boys queuing up to take their turns with the girls, shuffling forward with their trousers already undone and round their ankles. Most of the girls - mercifully for them - were so drunk they were barely conscious.

  He watched the boys dancing around the fire like wraiths, playing with burning sticks and daring each other to leap over the flames as they waned. Snoop had tried a bottle of the sugary drink and curled his lip in disgust. In any case, he wasn’t in the mood to get totally smashed. Not like these morons in front of him.

  When they got this off their heads, this stupid and infantile, the boys truly embarrassed him. When they got too rough with the girls, he felt ashamed of them. Watching them now, he wondered what the real difference between them and those feral children was. They looked just as wild and out of control.

  That’s his trick, though, right? Keep ’em happy. Keep ’em bribed. Move from one stash of contraband to the next. Stay one step ahead of his boys. Above all, keep ’em grinning like idiots.

  Snoop shook his head with irritation as two of them started to spray mouthfuls of whisky onto the fire and yipped with glee at the billowing clouds of flame.

  ‘HEY!!’ he shouted. The stupid fuckers were going to set themselves on fire. ‘Stop that shit!’

  They stopped and contented themselves with waving smouldering slats of wood in the gathering darkness and making smoke trails.

  This was the Chief’s plan, wasn’t it? This is the long game. This. Just this. Keep them happy. He wondered if Maxwell had actually bothered to think any further ahead than taking possession of these rigs. Because he had.

  How long does this shit last? Because at some point the hidden treasures that can still be foraged out of a stack of freight containers had to run out, right? It all runs out eventually; the bottles of alcopops, the cartons of cigarettes, the cans of corned beef and baked beans.

  Just like the oil once ran out.

  Then what?

  He wondered if any of the other boys had bothered to think about that. He wondered if Jay-zee sitting beside him, whooping and clapping his hands as he watched the boys getting their ends away, had ever given that a moment’s thought.

  He wondered what Maxwell was going to do once they were on those rigs and running things. Was this going to be their home? A going concern? Or some place to simply strip clean and move on from?

  That’s the future then? Pick clean and move on? That’s all we gonna be?

  Just like locusts.

  Chapter 77

  10 years AC

  Bracton, Norfolk

  Bracton looked unchanged to Leona yet seemed subtly different. As they cycled in silence through the old town, through the modern high street with its fading chain-store signs, towards the docks and gas terminal, she found herself appraising it anew. It contrasted with the choked urban space of London. Here there were overgrown front gardens, parks and greens gone wild, any and all of which could be cultivated far more easily than the cracked concrete spaces in the capital.

  Oddly, it no longer seemed the forbidding and desolate shell she remembered; a place from which dangerous and desperate armed men might emerge at any moment. It was just an empty town, largely in fair condition, certainly repairable and habitable if they chose to settle ashore here.

  Perhaps it was the sunny weather. Perhaps the warm breeze that stirred the birch trees along the high street and down Runcorn Way towards the docks. Perhaps the reassuring continuity of life: the rabbits, foxes and deer that impassively watched them pass instead of scattering at the sound of their bicycle tyres through drifts of dry leaves. It could’ve been any of those things that led her to believe there was a viable future here.

  That was the only purpose left in her life now, she decided. To convince Mum once and for all that the days of hiding were over; that the time had come to move the community off the rigs and back onto the mainland. Just one single, bloody-minded goal that she was going to hang on to. To start over. But that was okay with her. It kept the heartache in a box. It kept it manageable.

  Their bikes rolled across the railway sidings between warehouses and parked forklift trucks onto the skittering gravel and crumbling concrete towards the quay. Finally, a dozen yards short of the water’s edge, with a squeak of brakes, she came to a stop and the others followed suit.

  ‘So there’s the North Sea, then,’ said Bushey, stating the obvious after a few reflective moments. ‘Any idea how we get to your gas rigs?’

  ‘Over there.’ She pointed to a tugboat tied up on a canal lock alongside the large brick gable wall of an old brewery. Tied up there as it always was after Walter had returned it from a water run. ‘We’ll use that.’

  ‘We’ll need to scavenge some marine diesel,’ said Adam. ‘Is there any—’

  ‘Walter normally leaves it topped up,’ she said looking at the others. ‘Always. He’s very reliable. A creature of habit.’

  Adam shielded his eyes from the sun as he stared out across the sea. ‘And how far out is it?’

  Leona shrugged. ‘Take us a morning if we were sailing,’ she said in answer. ‘Over an hour in the tug though.’

  Adam looked back at them. ‘That would be about fifteen miles out?’

  She nodded. ‘About that.’

  ‘On a clear day you can actually see the top of the rig’s com tower from here,’ she added. They all turned to look, squinting for a minute, but it was too hazy a day to pick out anything discernible on the flat horizon.

  ‘You think we beat those others to it?’ Harry asked.

  Leona’s gaze drifted along the perfectly flat sea line. It looked like Maxwell’s boats had had the perfect weather to make it up here - an atypically glass-smooth North Sea. They coul
d only hope something had gone wrong or delayed them.

  ‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘I’m sure we’ve beaten them.’

  ‘They may not even have left yet,’ said Bushey.

  Leona nodded thoughtfully. They could hope that. Who knows?

  ‘You know which way to head, right?’ asked Walfield.

  ‘Of course,’ she smiled. ‘Straight out, north-eastish. On flat water like that we’ll see something soon enough. I’ve done the trip enough times.’

  Walfield laughed. ‘Looks like you have.’

  Adam looked at the tugboat. ‘Do you know how to pilot one of those things? Because I sure as hell don’t. Lads?’

  Bushey and Harry shook their heads.

  ‘Never been on one,’ added Harry. ‘I hate boats.’

  ‘Can’t be any harder to drive than a supply truck,’ said Walfield. ‘I’ll have a go.’

  Leona looked at the men. ‘So, what are we waiting for?’

  They made their way across the dockside towards the vessel, crossed over a small footbridge to the far side of the small lock in which the tugboat bobbed gently, and along the narrow walkway at the bottom of the brewery’s red brick wall, finally hopping aboard the vessel.

  Walfield let himself into the boat’s cockpit and examined the small bank of toggle switches beside the helm.

  Adam tapped Leona’s arm as she looked on. ‘You sure your mother is going to welcome us aboard? I mean . . . otherwise, we really are sort of left out on a limb.’

  She studied him for a moment in silence as Walfield clacked switches and the others clambered aboard. Behind his dark beard, behind skin drawn economically tight against bone and muscle, she saw something of an intelligent young man. She saw eyes that didn’t dart hungrily where they weren’t invited, but instead met hers on the level. She thought she detected someone whose thoughts weren’t on what could be taken, but what could be made.