Sovereigns of the Collapse Book 2

by Malcolm J Wardlaw

  The destination of this flow was Camden industrial asylum. His fellow flow displayed immense variety in their reactions to the sack of the glory train. Some laughed and replayed the begging and death agonies of the young troopers killed, others held their silence or even yelled back vituperation that slaughter of innocents was the work of glory crooks. Several fights broke out. Amid all this confrontation, no one paid the slightest notice of the big, dirty labouring type in their midst. He looked and smelled just like the lower orders of their own type. The flow passed under the white poles and gun barrels of the armoured cars’ Long 75s at the end of the turnpike—the ultramarine gatekeepers watched from the terrace of their blockhouse, all benign, now and again exchanging a wave with friends out in the flow. They knew well they must remain in good standing with the mob.

  Lawrence walked on deeper into the asylum, feeling rising confidence. He was through the toll and safely inside a place where he could merge against the natural throng of hive activity. Or, so he believed. He had never been inside an industrial asylum before. Indeed, he knew almost nothing of geography outside the Grande Enceinte. He had never served in Old Greater London. By his own preference, he had sought postings as far as possible from home. That was one reason he spent over three years living up on the edge of the world in Oban.

  He knew from Sarah-Kelly that North Kensington basin lay adjacent the Ladbroke Grove and White City forts of the Grande Enceinte. White City fort stood at the north-west corner of the Central Enclave. Ergo, he knew the rough direction from Camden asylum to North Kensington basin. What he did not know was the route. Was there a public drain by which he could avoid the ultramarine turnpikes? He did not know. Further, it would be dangerous to ask a stranger such a question unless he had a most fine reason for doing so. He had no such reason.

  The flow was steadily dissipating around him such that he no longer felt the cover of being in a thick flow. As he moved deeper into the asylum, so the flow dispersed into the dense warren of side lanes threading amongst the brick and wooden toy houses in which the population lived. He finally came to a long stretch of wide open and empty road running beside a complex of black wooden buildings. They were the largest constructions he had ever encountered in his life—that included St Paul’s Cathedral of the Central Enclave. Innumerable sooty brick chimneys sprouted amongst the sheds. Clearly this was a factory. It must have shut while its workers were off attacking the glory train. Indeed, as he continued with a diffident manner, self-conscious that he was now walking alone, he approached a pair of cast iron arched gates as big as those of a canal lock, bearing the establishment’s name: Chance and Buckley Industries. He recognised it. This factory manufactured and refurbished trucks for General Wardian.

  A conflict of instincts paralysed him. He possessed a smattering of street know-how from his early years with General Wardian as a trooper. He had shared his late teen years with lads mostly drawn from industrial asylums like this one. From this background, he knew strangers were not welcome in asylums. Strangers were thieves, keen-eyed carrion on the hunt to snatch vital tools honest folk needed for their living. Strangers were wreckers from radical groups, social vandals, the enemies of all respectable folk. Already a burly tough with a stave was peering through the bars of the gates at him. The tough was joined by another. They glared at him. Lawrence turned and retreated along his route, to find four more faces staring at him from lanes leading into the workers’ districts.

  He adopted an apologetic, hasty manner, as if he had day-dreamed his way off a route he knew too well to pay attention to. It was essential to keep moving, to present the impression of bustling intent. He must suppress the urge to take cover down one of these lanes. Workers’ districts were savagely intolerant of strange faces. Any visitor had to (politely) make plain their business to the first person they met, else risk a tickle from a crowbar.

  He acted out his haste along empty streets, passed from stare to glare to threatening step forward. The street opened out onto an area of gravel and weeds about as big as a rugby pitch, which is to say, it was large enough to feel like an ant crawling across white paper without being so extensive as to swallow a lone man. The lone man was on a stage, frowned upon by a scathing audience of windows and lanes and more black sheds. Evidently Wednesday was not market day in Camden industrial asylum. Fear was starting to gain a hold over him. The exit from the far side of market place led straight to the toll of a turnpike. He could see the pole blocking the way and black ultras strolling about killing time. The sight so frightened him that on raw instinct he dived off to the left into a lesser street. It wound about amongst the toy houses, getting narrower. The air smelled of cramped domestic life: fried onions, fresh bread, boiled cabbage, smoke, latrine buckets, carbolic soap. The fresh bread in particular tortured his starving guts. These were homely, clean, hard-working people, the bedrock of humble decency. Their world was home, work, marketplace, neighbourly chat and home again. They eyed the passing stranger, whose filthy overalls and blond stubble betrayed the habits of a layabout, someone to be held in contempt. Had Lawrence been a man of ordinary build he would have been beaten up and thrown to the ultramarines. As it was, the bystanders were content to sneer at his muddy backside disappearing from their lives.

  The meandering lane started to climb, the toy houses came to an end and the lane simply stopped at the edge of bushland. Lawrence knew what this meant. He took one long, large stride and rolled forward, disappearing into the long grass. He had departed the asylum into wilderness land. It might be a few acres or it might be square miles. It might be claimed by a local ‘gangster’ warlord, who would crucify Lawrence for trespass if some lackey discovered him. Well, let them come. Lawrence still had his slingshot, which the troopers in the stinger had puzzled over and stuffed back in his pocket. After a little cautious exploration, he acquired six rounds of ammunition. He found a little brook too. It smelled clean. He drew long and deep from it and relaxed, all his muscles becoming liquid on the soft underlay of decades of dead leaves. Nothing could have prevented him from dropping clean off into a sleep of utter depletion of mind and body.

  *

  Thunder woke him in the night. He lay staring up at the lightning on the clouds. It was a minute or so before he realised lightning does not flash under clouds like that, nor does thunder arrive with such an abrupt concussion, nor is it led by a hollow whistling. The Naclaski guns were firing from the Grande Enceinte. He stood up as the guns blasted off another salvo. For a micro-moment, the compress of chimneys and cramped roofs of Camden industrial asylum shone in the photo-flash of the guns. He reached a count of six before the boom arrived. So, the Grande Enceinte lay just over a mile away. It was not such especially valuable information for one whose prime concerns were shelter and food. He was shivering, his knees quivered weak from hunger and he had no means of moving far from where he was. His situation was not promising.

  What he needed was a plan.

  He quickly dismissed any notion of moving at night. It would be far too dangerous to go back into Camden asylum in the dark. Any stranger caught blundering about lost in those back lanes would get pinioned and handed straight to the ultras, who were bound to be on the alert for a six foot two blond man in brown overalls with a pierced left ear. He could scarcely make their task easier.

  Hopefully with daylight he would be able to see the lie of the land from this vantage point, especially any public drains leading out of Camden. He should also be able to view the marketplace. If it became busy, he would go down to it and use his wit to get food. He simply could not go on without sustenance. Beyond that, he needed friends. No one could survive in an asylum without a home. Somewhere amongst the scores of young men he served with in his teens there must be at least one who came from Camden.

  It was while he was dozing in and out of sleep, huddled into a ball trying to wrap grass around himself for warmth, that a name dropped into his mind.

  Yes of course. Section Leader Kalchelik.
The man who had demonstrated to Probationary Basic Aldingford the entertainment value of a 20mm rifle called Long Tall Sally. Kalchelik came from Brent Cross industrial asylum, where his family ran a business. He was always gloating that his twenty years were nearly up and he would soon be back home with a nice pension and a not-too-stressful place in the family business. Truth be told, Kalchelik was something of a lag. If he had not enjoyed killing surplus, he would never have got anywhere in General Wardian.

  So that was the plan. Get to Brent Cross and find the Kalchelik business. It was a dead cert. they would help. Despite some initial squeamishness, Lawrence had become a dedicated and courageous hygienist. Kalchelik’s appraisal had brought promotion to leading basic after only six months’ service.

  A plan makes all the difference in the world for a man wandering the wilderness. Lawrence strode with confidence down to the market place, where he earned a breakfast of a chunk of sugar beet, half a turnip and a pint of clean water for helping a stall holder unload coal from a wagon. Lawrence feigned a severe speech impediment to avoid revealing his public-school accent. A couple of ultramarines with a team of six Night and Fog haulers turned up to reclaim the coal wagon, at which Lawrence slunk away behind a pile of barrels. It was not hard to vanish here. The market place was a constantly intermingling, noisy place of auctions, bawling traders amidst sacks of grain, rice, apples, crates of eggs, live piglets, chickens, ducks, rats, dead seagulls, rooks, sparrows and other birds. The more prestigious traders sold guard dogs, horses and leather goods to buyers in black suits and colourful bow ties, who probably worked for the factories of Camden. Lawrence would love to have known whether the Value System goods reached these parts, but dared not attract attention by browsing.

  With his breakfast finished he started to work his way out of the market place towards the north end of the asylum. He guessed this was the most likely place to find a public drain to Brent Cross if there was one. While he was crossing the central road of the market place, he heard a motorcycle approaching. Private motor vehicles were a rarity in the asylums. Perhaps it was owned by some factory director. The breakfast and the anonymous melée of the market had cheered him up enough to linger a few moments to get a look at the bike. It sounded like a big one from its thrumming rumble and indeed, as it emerged from behind a wagon, he saw it was a wide, four-cylinder machine with massive brake drums and a beautifully sculpted fuel tank.

  When he lifted his eyes to the rider, normal reactions shut down with shock. Pure instinct from his years of fenland combat seized control, lurching him sideways down a gap between a couple of stalls. He heard the bike pass behind him. It did not stop.

  The fright echoed around inside him for long minutes while he found a backwater area to recover—a remote corner of the market where rotting food got left to be picked over by scrawny women and their urchins. Master-Sergeant Ratty lived in Camden industrial asylum. He rode a big motorbike. It was not actually stunning news. Ratty did after all have a proper Camden accent. A crazy after-shock of relief swept over Lawrence and he started laughing. Imagine the look on Ratty’s face had he recognised Big Stak! That would have been a sight almost worth dying for... Then again, this was not such a funny business. He simply had to get out of Camden and hope he did not run into more Value System shareholders whilst roaming Brent Cross—if he could get there.

  His explorations proved there was no way out of Camden by public drain. Every road away from the marketplace came to a turnpike toll or else petered out into wild bushland on the hillside to the north—Lawrence now realised this hill led up onto the famed Hampstead Heath and its notorious horse-breeding gangsters. However, the railway line to the west did offer a way out. This was the same line down which the glory train had come the previous day. Lawrence observed working men wandering in and out from its route, apparently without any hindrance. He had no other choice, so he joined them.

  Before he had covered many paces, he realised why this was not a popular route. It ran at the bottom of a concrete ravine where light barely reached. The only clear route was along the railway line, which was kept clear of major obstacles by the trains. The rest of the way was impassable due to banks of weeds, pools of mud, fallen trees and great stinking screes of rubbish built up from decades of abattoir waste, dead cats, tarry drooling chemical tailings, rusty ironmongery and even some half-eaten human corpses, all disposed of by the upper world. The established path curved well clear of these screes to avoid the eternal feeding frenzies of rats and cats and seagulls and even the odd vulture. Lawrence gripped his slingshot loaded in his pocket, ready to whip it out and swipe any man or beast that confronted him. In fact, the human traffic proved to be docile, the opposing streams keeping to their own rail, avoiding eye contact. Lawrence guessed these were craftsmen of various types, as most carried bags of tools and wore denim dungarees.

  The line curved and disappeared into the black depths of a tunnel, from which the roar of falling water called. The stream of people flowed to the right just prior to that ominous black mouth, ascending a zig-zagging path up the broken wall of the ravine. It emerged onto a wild, unkempt area where trees grew out of ruins of Public Era vintage, amongst which ran a path worn through a foot of top soil to old Public Era black tarmac. Lawrence had no difficulty flowing the flow as it wound through the trees and shells of what had once been mighty structures with walls of reinforced concrete a yard thick. He supposed these had originally been tall buildings demolished to comply with Naclaski. He felt safe here, amongst these rough-and-ready artisans. No Value System shareholders would come this way.

  The path ran through a hole in a wall and out onto what was clearly a public drain, albeit heavily overgrown with nettles and brambles. That was good news: no glory trucks, no armoured cars, no ultramarine wagons ever came this way. What encouraged Lawrence was that the drain ran away from the morning sun—that meant north west, the direction of Brent Cross. It also climbed, another hopeful sign that he was getting away from the low, central area of the London basin. There were no trees here. They must have been harvested long ago. Along one side of the drain ran an unremitting brick wall topped with broken glass and outward-curving spikes. This was probably the frontier of a gangster’s petty domain, most likely the horse-breeders of Hampstead Heath. The other side gave into a wilderness of thick bushes and swamps.

  A middle-aged man had collapsed across the path near the top of the hill. Everyone just stepped over him and kept going, so Lawrence did the same. The poor bastard looked dead anyway—he probably took a heart attack after the long climb. A little way after that, the path crested the hill to provide a viewpoint, where a number of men had stopped to get their breath, have a cigarette and admire the scene. It was worth a few minutes’ pause. The full northern flank of the Grande Enceinte stretched across the landscape. It looked rather like a thin, red-toothed belt, due to the regularity of the Naclaski forts. The specifications of the Grande Enceinte were the boast of the decent society that sheltered behind it in the Central Enclave. A circumference of nineteen miles containing a safe zone of seventeen square miles, approximately axe-shaped with the cutting head to the east, twenty Naclaski forts, two billion bricks, all gleaned by the hands of Night and Fog gangs from Public Era ruins and re-fashioned into a safety feature as high as a mature oak tree. The battlements looked over a bare area of rubble and wasteland called the Strip. It was from here that materials had been gleaned to construct the Grande Enceinte—that was why Lawrence now had such a clear view. The Grande Enceinte manifested decent society’s terror of the mob after the Sack of Oxford in 2073. Its construction, along with that of many other safety features at that time, had enriched the ultramarines into leeches bloated with gold. That was why the ultras were everywhere today. Fortunately, their Ultramarine Guild was a club of profit-seekers, greedy and obsessed with material fripperies whilst lacking the collective ambition to challenge sovereign power—at least to date. This much every young glory cadet was taught in the Securitici
an A course at officer training school.

  That heavy red stump to the far right must be White City fort. Lawrence’s heart jolted in excitement. That blue expanse must be North Kensington basin. It looked tiny. In reality, it was large enough for flying boats—sizeable ones—to land and take off, according to Sarah-Kelly. He guarded himself against sentimentality—it was highly unlikely she was down there. She disliked her family too. It was something basic they had in common, although Lawrence had never been able to pin down exactly what caused her feelings.

  He turned away from the view and kept going. About an hour later he grew wary again as the smoking chimneys and long black roofs of an asylum considerably larger than Camden loomed up. As he feared, the path ran up to a check point announcing the gates of Brent Cross industrial asylum together with a list of offenses that carried the death penalty. The frontier was manned by guards dressed in a fanciful uniform of bamboo armour and leather helmets. Their inspection of passports was not fanciful. Lawrence veered off to the right into a scrubby wasteland to consider his options.

  There was only one option: scouting. Build up a mental map of the locale to seek out any weak points in the frontier. Time passes swiftly when the mind is so absorbed. The wan sun of late November sped over its arc to beam at him pale orange in a cooling evening. By this time, he had discovered several back ways into Brent Cross. The problem was, they were all dangerous.