Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2019 by Man Sunday Ltd
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Orbit
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Simultaneously published in Great Britain and in the U.S. by Orbit in 2019
First Edition: April 2019
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2018962798
ISBNs: 978-0-316-44945-8 (hardcover), 978-0-316-44947-2 (ebook)
E3-20190308-JV-NF-ORI
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
A note on spoilers
Epigraph
Chapter 1: The end
Chapter 2: The traveller
Chapter 3: Who are you?
Chapter 4: Traveller’s tales
Chapter 5: Marmalade
Chapter 6: The theft
Chapter 7: Running before the wind
Chapter 8: The bay at the back of the ocean
Chapter 9: I own her
Chapter 10: Paddling blind
Chapter 11: Tilting at giants
Chapter 12: Landfall
Chapter 13: The tower
Chapter 14: A glimmer of light
Chapter 15: The fever
Chapter 16: Shooting the albatross
Chapter 17: Woe
Chapter 18: John Dark
Chapter 19: A bond
Chapter 20: Kel Kun Demal
Chapter 21: Key ay voo
Chapter 22: Loo garoo
Chapter 23: Freemen
Chapter 24: An itch between the shoulder blades
Chapter 25: The Homely House
Chapter 26: Tannhäuser
Chapter 27: False start…or there and back again
Chapter 28: Onwards, alone
Chapter 29: First sight
Chapter 30: Be careful what you ask for…
Chapter 31: Quarantine
Chapter 32: Visitors
Chapter 33: The truth will set you free (and other lies)
Chapter 34: Liars lie
Chapter 35: A choice made
Chapter 36: A reunion betrayed
Chapter 37: The now
Chapter 38: The then
Chapter 39: True north
Acknowledgments
Discover More C. A. Fletcher
For the midnight swimmers—and all past and present members of the Two O’clock Tea Club.
Especially Jack, Ari, Molly and Hannah.
May your beaches always have fires, dogs and laughter on them, whatever the weather.
A note on spoilers
It’d be a kindness to other readers—not to say this author—if the discoveries made as you follow Griz’s journey into the ruins of our world remained a bit of a secret between us…
C.A.F.
A man stole my dog.
I went after him.
Bad things happened.
I can never go home.
Chapter 1
The end
Dogs were with us from the very beginning.
When we were hunters and gatherers and walked out of Africa and began to spread across the world, they came with us. They guarded our fires as we slept and they helped us bring down prey in the long dawn when we chased our meals instead of growing them. And later, when we did become farmers, they guarded our fields and watched over our herds. They looked after us, and we looked after them. Later still, they shared our homes and our families when we built towns and cities and suburbs. Of all the animals that travelled the long road through the ages with us, dogs always walked closest.
And those that remain are still with us now, here at the end of the world. And there may be no law left except what you make it, but if you steal my dog, you can at least expect me to come after you. If we’re not loyal to the things we love, what’s the point? That’s like not having a memory. That’s when we stop being human.
That’s a kind of death, even if you keep breathing.
So. About that. Turns out the world didn’t end with a bang. Or much of a whimper. Don’t get me wrong: there were bangs, some big, some little, but that was early on, before people got the drift of what was happening.
But bangs are not really how it ended. They were symptoms, not cause.
How it ended was the Gelding, though what caused that never got sorted out, or if it did it was when it was too late to do anything about it. There were as many theories as there were suddenly childless people—a burst of cosmic rays, a chemical weapon gone astray, bio-terror, pollution (you lot did make a mess of your world), some kind of genetic mutation passed by a space virus or even angry gods in pick-your-own-flavour for those who had a religion. The “how” and the “why” slowly became less important as people got used to the “what”, and realised the big final “when” was heading towards them like a storm front that not even the fastest, the richest, the cleverest or the most powerful were going to be able to outrun.
The world—the human part of it—had been gelded or maybe turned barren—perhaps both—and people just stopped having kids. That’s all it took. The Lastborn generation—the Baby Bust as they called themselves, proving that irony was one of the last things to perish—they just carried on getting older and older until they died like people always had done.
And when they were all gone, that was it. No bang, no whimper even. More of a tired sigh.
It was a soft apocalypse. And though it probably felt pretty hard for those it happened to, it did happen. And now we few—we vanishingly few—are all alone, stuck here on the other side of it.
How can I tell you this and not be dead? I’m one of the exceptions that proves the rule. They estimated maybe 0.0001 per cent of the world population somehow escaped the Gelding. They were known as outliers. That means if there were 7,000,000,000 people before the Gelding, less than 7000 of them could have kids. One in a million. Give or take, though since it takes two to make a baby, more like one in two million.
You want to know how much of an outlier I am? You, in the old picture I have of you, are wearing a shirt with the name of an even older football club on it. You look really happy. In my whole life, I haven’t met enough people to make up two teams for a game of football. The world is that empty.
Maybe if this were a proper story it would start cal
m and lead up to a cataclysm, and then maybe a hero or a bunch of heroes would deal with it. I’ve read plenty of stories like that. I like them. Especially the ones where a big group of people get together, since the idea of a big group of people is an interesting thing for me all by itself, because though I’ve seen a lot, I’ve never seen that.
But this isn’t that kind of story. It’s not made up. This is just me writing down the real, telling what I know, saying what actually took place. And everything that I know, even my being born, happened long, long after that apocalypse had already softly wheezed its way out.
I should start with who I am. I’m Griz. Not my real name. I have a fancier one, but it’s the one I’ve been called for ever. They said I used to whine and grizzle when I was a baby. So I became the Little Grizzler and then as I got taller my name got shorter, and now I’m just Griz. I don’t whine any more. Dad says I’m stoical, and he says it like that’s a good thing. Stoical means doesn’t complain much. He says I seemed to get all my complaining out of the way before I could talk and now, though I do ask too many questions, mostly I just get on with things. Says that like it’s good too. Which it is. Complaining doesn’t get anything done.
And we always have plenty to do, here at the end of the world.
Here is home, and home is an island, and we are my family. My parents, my brother and sister, Ferg and Bar. And the dogs of course. My two are Jip and Jess. Jip’s a long-legged terrier, brown and black, with a rough coat and eyes that miss nothing. Jess is as tall as he is but smooth-coated, narrower in the shoulders and she has a splash of white on her chest. Mongrels they are, brother and sister, same but different. Jess is a rarity, because dog litters seem to be all male nowadays. Maybe that’s to do with the Gelding too. Perhaps whatever hit us, hit them too, but in a lesser way. Very few bitches are born now. Maybe that’s a downside for the dogs, punishment for their loyalty, some cosmically unfair collateral damage for walking alongside us all those centuries.
We’re the only people on the island, which is fine, because it’s a small island and it fits the five of us, though sometimes I think it fit us better and was less claustrophobic when there were six. It’s called Mingulay. That’s what its name was when you were alive. It’s off the Atlantic coast of what used to be Scotland. There’s nothing to the west of it but ocean and then America and we’re pretty sure that’s gone.
To the north there’s Pabbay and Sandray, low islands where we graze our sheep and pasture the horses. North of them is the larger island called Barra but we don’t land there, which is a shame as it has lots of large houses and things, but we never set foot on it because something happened and it’s bad land. It’s a strangeness to sail past a place so big that it even has a small castle in the middle of its harbour for your whole life, and yet never walk on it. Like an itch you can’t quite reach round and scratch. But Dad says if you set foot on Barra now you get something much worse than an itch, and because it’s what killed his parents, we don’t go. It’s an unlucky island and the only things living there these days are rabbits. Even birds don’t seem to like it, not even the gulls who we never see landing above the wet sand below the tideline.
North-east of us are a long low string of islands called the Uists, and Eriskay, which are luckier places, and we go there a lot, and though there are no people on them now, there’s plenty of wildlife and lazy-beds for wild potatoes. Once a year we go and camp on them for a week or so while we gather the barley and the oats from the old fields on the sea lawn. And then sometimes we go there to do some viking. “Going a-viking” is what Dad calls it when we sail more than a day and sleep over on a trip, going pillaging like the really ancient seafarers in the books, with the longships and the heroic deeds. We’re no heroes though; we’re just scavenging to survive, looking for useful things from the old world, spares or materials we can strip out from the derelict houses. And books of course. Books turn out to be pretty durable if they’re kept away from damp and rats. They can last hundreds of years, easy. Reading is another way we survive. It helps to know where we came from, how we got here. And most of all, for me, even though these low and empty islands are all I have ever known, when I open the front cover of a new book, it’s like a door, and I can travel far away in place and time.
Even the wide sea and the open sky can be claustrophobic if you never get away from them.
So that’s who I am, which just leaves you. In some way you know who you are, or at least, you knew who you were. Because you’re dead of course, like almost every single human who ever walked the planet, and long dead too.
And why am I talking to a dead person? We’ll get back to that. But first we should get on with the story. I’ve read enough to know that I should do the explaining as we go.
Chapter 2
The traveller
If he hadn’t had red sails, I think we’d have trusted him less.
The boat was visible from a long way off, much further than white sails would have been against the pale haze to the north-west. Those red sails were a jolt of colour that caught the eye and grabbed your attention like a sudden shout breaks a long silence. They weren’t the sails of someone trying to sneak up on you. They had the honest brightness of a poppy. Maybe that was why we trusted him. That and his smile, and his stories.
Never trust someone who tells good stories, not until you know why they’re doing it.
I was high up on Sandray when I saw the sails. I was tired and more than a little angry. I’d spent the morning rescuing an anchor that had parted from Ferg’s boat the previous week, hard work that I felt he should have done for himself, though he claimed his ears wouldn’t let him dive as deep as I could, and that anchors didn’t grow on trees. Having done that, I was now busy trying to rescue a ram that had fallen and wedged itself in a narrow crack in the rocks above the grazing. It wasn’t badly injured but it was stubborn and ungrateful in the way of most sheep, and it wasn’t letting me get a rope round it. It had butted me twice, the first time catching me under the chin sharply enough that I had chipped a tooth halfway back on the lower right-hand side. I had sworn at it and then tried again. My knuckles were badly grazed from where it had then butted my hand against the scrape of the stone, and I was standing back licking my fist and swearing at it in earnest when I saw the boat.
The suddenness of the colour stopped me in my tracks.
I was too shocked to link the taste of blood in my mouth with the redness of the sails, but then I have little of that kind of foresight, none at all really compared with my other sister Joy, who always seemed to know when people were about to return home just before they did, or be able to smell an incoming storm on a bright day. I don’t much believe in that kind of thing now, though I did when I was smaller and thought less, when I ran free with her across the island, happy and without a care beyond when it would be supper time. In those days I took her seeming foresight as something as everyday and real as cold water from the spring behind the house. Later, as I grew and began to think more, I decided it was mostly just luck, and since she disappeared for ever over the black cliff at the top of the island, not reliable luck at all.
If she’d really had foresight, she would never have tried to rescue her kite and fallen out of life in that one sharp and lonely moment. If she’d had foresight, she’d have waited until we returned to the island to help her. I saw the kite where it was pinned in a cleft afterwards, and know we could have reached it with the long hoe and no harm need have come to anyone. As it was, she must have tried to reach it by herself and slipped into the gulf of air more than seven hundred feet above the place where waves that have had two thousand sea miles to build up momentum slam into the first immoveable object they’ve ever met: the dark cliff wall that guards the back of our home. She wouldn’t have waited for us to help though. She was always impatient, a tough little thing always in a hurry to catch up with Ferg and Bar and do what they did even though she was much younger. Bar later said it was almost like she was in such a hurry
because she sensed she had had less time ahead of her than the rest of us.
We never found her body. And with her gone, so was my childhood, though I was eight at the time and she only a year more. Two birthdays later, by then a year older than she would ever be, I was in my mind what I now am: fully grown. Although even now, many years after that, Bar and Ferg still call me a kid. But they are six and seven years older than us. So Joy and I were always the babies. Our mother called us that to distinguish us from the other two.
Though after Joy fell, Mum never called any of us anything ever again. Never spoke at all. We found her halfway down the hill from the cliff edge, and we nearly lost her too. Far as we could make out she must have been careering down the slope, running helter-skelter, maybe mad with grief, maybe sprinting for the dory with some desperate doomed hope that she could get it launched and all the way round the island against the tide to rescue a child who in truth could not have survived such a fall. She never spoke because she all but dashed her brains out when she stumbled forward, smacking her head into a rock as she fell, temple gashed and watery blood coming from her ears.
That was the worst day ever, though the ones that followed were barely lighter. She didn’t die but she wasn’t there any more, her brain too wounded or too scarred for her to get out of herself again. In the Before she’d have been taken to a hospital and they would have operated on her brain to relieve the pressure, Dad said. But this is the After, so he decided to do it himself with a hand drill: he would have done it too, if he had been able to find the drill, but it wasn’t where it should have been, and then the bleeding stopped and she just slept for a long, long time and no more fluid leaked out of her ears, so maybe it was best that he didn’t try and drill a hole into her skull to save her.
I hope so, because I know Ferg hid the drill. He saw me see him, but we’ve never, ever spoken of it. If we did, I’d tell him I admire him for doing it, because Dad would have killed Mum and then would have had to live with the horror of that on top of everything else. And, even though she’s locked away inside her head, you can sit and hold her hand and sometimes she squeezes it and almost smiles, and it’s a comforting thing, the tiny ghost bit of her that remains, the warmth of her hand, the skin on skin. Dad said that day was the darkest thing that ever happened to us, and that we’re past it, and that now we have to get on and live, just like in a bigger way the worst thing happened to the world and it just goes on.
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