They’d left this place a decade ago; the morning after Dad had died . . . in the aftermath of the riots. London’s skyline had been smudged with columns of smoke, the roads and streets cluttered with things pulled out from homes and shops; like some bizarre end-of-the-world street party left for someone else to clean up. And it had been strangely quiet the day they had set off to escape London for good.
Ten summers and winters appeared to have changed little here; last autumn’s leaves lay in small, wind-gathered mounds against the kerb and around the bases of tree trunks lining both sides of the narrow avenue. The front gardens were lost beneath waist-high grass and weeds. She noticed a tile had slipped here and there on one or two of the roofs.
She brought her bicycle to a halt with the squeak of brakes outside one of the houses.
She climbed off the bike, pushed open the garden gate with a creak and stared at the small front garden - liquor bottles and crumpled cans of lager nestled in the tall grass.
Hannah asked her once about their home and the crash. Was there fighting, Leona?
‘Yes, there was fighting,’ she replied. She still had nightmares about that week - ones that woke her with a scream in her mouth. ‘There was a gang of boys that hung around outside. Boys, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen years of age having a party just outside our house every night of that first week.’ Leona spotted the fading peak of a Nike baseball cap and the rusting blade of a flick knife tangled in the long grass.
‘Then finally they got brave enough to start breaking into the houses one after the other. Stealing things, doing horrible things to the poor people inside.’
It must have been frightening.
‘It was, love. Me and Jake did all right. Better than others. We survived it.’
She pushed her way through the stalks of grass, up the short gravel path to the front door. She examined it. It was closed and locked, just as they’d left it a decade ago. It looked like it hadn’t been forced.
It meant he hadn’t beaten her home. Her heart sank. Jake’s not here.
He would have had to force the front door.
She fumbled for something she’d kept on a chain around her neck all these years, never really knowing why, and produced a worn and scuffed latch key that jangled against a brass ankh pendant as she pulled it out of her top. The key slotted into the lock and clicked effortlessly. She pushed the door open and stepped inside.
‘Jacob?’ she called out hopefully. Perhaps he’d forced the back door.
It smelled faintly of damp, of mildew, just like every other building did nowadays. But unlike so many other homes, at least it wasn’t gutted, it wasn’t a mess of things pulled out, inspected and tossed aside or broken; walls sprayed with graffiti. It still looked like a place in which people once lived - just dusty and in need of an airing.
To her left the doorway leading to Dad’s study, to the right the door to the kitchen. There were cardboard boxes on the floor in the hallway, Mum’s handwriting on them: ‘Jenny’s CDs’, ‘Andy’s DVDs’. She knew they’d been considering a trial separation at the time the crash happened. They hadn’t been getting on for a while.
She shook her head sadly. It had taken the end of the world to bring the pair of them back to their senses. At least they’d had a chance to say to each other what needed to be said before . . .
Her eyes stung and she wiped the tears away.
She checked the back door, that too was still locked and unforced. Jacob hadn’t come here last night. Which meant . . .
She closed her mind to what exactly that meant. She didn’t need to do that right now. Not now.
Lee? Hannah’s insistent voice in her head again. What you going to do now?
She looked up the stairwell in the hallway. Up there were their bedrooms, Mum and Dad’s room, and presumably Dad’s body at rest beneath a rotting quilt. She slumped down on the bottom step in the dark hallway and gazed out at the overgrown front garden, the open gate and the quiet leaf-filled street beyond. The morning sun dappled the brick walls of the house opposite. Quite pretty really, poppies in their front garden and cherry blossoms on the tree.
‘I don’t know. I guess I’ll just wait here for a while.’
Chapter 43
10 years AC
‘LeMan 49/25a’ - ClarenCo Gas Rig Complex, North Sea
Walter stared at the scorched interior of the generator room. The rubber pipes had ignited in the blast, then burned and melted. So had the digesters, leaving pools of hardened plastic on the ground. The generator itself was largely undamaged but it had been knocked off its mounting by the blast and the casing was dented in several places.
It had taken him a couple of years of tinkering, foraging and learning to build them a methane-fuelled generator. All that could be done again. At least he’d know better what he was doing second time around. Jenny said she wanted them to have power again. Said it was a beacon of hope for the people; a sign of progress. Something they really needed to see.
He surveyed the mess around him. It was going to take quite some time to get things fixed up again. He needed to find another small brewery with similar sized incubators or . . . he scratched his beard in thought, or he could link up a series of smaller beer-brewing bins, each feeding into the methane tanks independently. Either way, there was a lot of foraging work that needed to be done, a lot of back-and-forth between the rigs and shore. He wasn’t sure he liked the idea of leaving Jenny alone so much. She was still weak and vulnerable and although she could get about a bit, shuffling painfully as her mending skin stretched and pulled uncomfortably, she wasn’t strong enough to get much further than the stairs down to the mess room.
Down there she had a chance to chat with people as they came in for breakfast and evening meals, and she was determined to do that; to show her face, to show everyone it was going to be business as usual.
But it’s not, is it?
That bastard Latoc was slowly pulling more and more people across to his platform to listen to his bloody sermons. He watched them traipsing across the walkway towards the drilling platform four or five times a day. Women mostly, some of them taking their children with them.
He wondered what Latoc’s appeal was. Is it his accent? Is it his looks?
The man was slender and his lean face chiselled in a way that made him look both enigmatic and a little vulnerable. He imagined the older ladies wanted to mother him, the younger ones to bed him. But there were also some of the men amongst his followers; David Cudmore, Ronnie, Howard and one or two others. Whatever Latoc’s phony spiritual message, it seemed to have got through to them as well.
Idiots.
He cursed himself for not having the balls to throw the foreign bastard off the rigs the first time he’d caught him offering prayers in the mess.
Jenny’s support from those not yet under Latoc’s spell was ambivalent at best. They were happy to go along with the routines as they stood: after all, everyone needed to eat. But there were many amongst them who longed for the community to relocate ashore. Others who just wanted to have a greater say in how things were run. They may not have been buying into Latoc’s bullshit, but they certainly didn’t seem to want to loyally rally around Jenny.
Ungrateful bastards.
After all she’d done. The least they could do was show a little support now she needed them.
As he surveyed the burned-out room, muttering his thoughts and grumbles aloud, he heard, through the metal ceiling, the scrape of feet entering the chicken deck above. Feeding time.
The muted murmur of the hens’ stupid cooing rose in pitch and persistence as they realised food was coming their way. The ceiling clicked with the sound of scurrying claws across the floor above as the birds scrambled to get close to those feeding them.
Several feathers and flakes of rust floated down from the ceiling, disturbed by the fluster of hungry birds. There were holes here and there; small ones. Patches of rust pecked at and worked on by the birds. Nothing so big that one of
them could escape through, though. Not yet, anyway.
He returned his mind to the task of cataloguing the things he was going to need to acquire from shore. Trips he could try and combine with shore runs for fresh water and the periodical ‘shopping trip’ in order to conserve the marina’s dwindling store of diesel.
We really can’t stay on these platforms for ever.
As if in answer to his thoughts, another few flakes of dark rust and some more feathers fluttered down.
He heard one of the people above talking; recognised her voice. It was Alice Harton. She had the kind of voice that always seemed to carry. Before the crash she was a manager in a retirement home, which seemed to fit. Walter could imagine the hard-faced cow doing the rounds through a crowded day room, queen of all she surveyed, speaking deliberately loudly, patronisingly slowly, as if talking to a room full of children.
A loud, piercing voice.
Someone else answered, much quieter, murmuring something he couldn’t quite make out.
‘That’s what she said,’ replied Alice. ‘And when I think about it . . . he was quite creepy with them all. Always hanging around them. Not just Jenny, but Leona . . . and Hannah.’
The mousy voice had something to say, again too soft to discern. Walter found himself stepping lightly across the floor, careful not to kick any of the snaking cables. He looked up through a narrow triangular crack, framed by the serrated edges of the rusting floor. Light flickered as someone stepped over him and a feather fluttered down onto his forehead.
‘Well he did, though, didn’t he? Do you remember? He told everyone not to go and look down there for her, didn’t he? Said he’d go look for her himself.’
The softer voice replied with something.
‘Oh, I dunno. I always thought he was a creepy old bastard myself. Hangin’ round the Sutherlands like a fly on a dog turd. Knocking on their quarters at all times. I bet you he was just trying to catch a glimpse of them. Of Hannah.’
Walter’s jaw sagged open with disbelief.
The other woman said something.
‘Oh, yeah, dirty kiddy-fiddler. But he was always all over her, wasn’t he? Holding her hand, hugging her and stuff. It’s not like he was her dad. I’m sorry, but that’s just creepy.’
The quieter woman spoke again.
‘Well that’s what we all thought, wasn’t it? That he was just soppy over Jenny. But now I think about it, I reckon he was just using her and Leona to get closer to the poor little girl, wasn’t he? It all makes sense when you think about it.’
Walter felt his blood run cold. He was half tempted to shout up through the crack that he’d heard what Alice had just said. That she was a dirty-minded bitch and he was coming up there to tell her as much to her face.
‘Oh, yeah,’ said Alice in response to the other woman. ‘Oh, yeah, more I think about it, yeah. It’s possible, isn’t it? He took her down there and maybe this time he did something to her she didn’t like. He went too far. So he panicked and killed her. So, then when the search party came down to the generator room and Jenny found her, he just flipped, didn’t he? Made the generator blow up to cover his tracks.’
The other woman spoke.
‘Or that, yes. Maybe he did pull it off and was waiting for it to blow. All I know is that he was acting very odd about the whole thing.’
Walter felt his heart pounding in his chest. He felt light-headed with panic.
Oh, Christ, is that what people are thinking?
The light through the crack flickered and reappeared as the two women above moved slowly across the floor amidst the chickens.
‘Oooh, that’s a really big egg, look,’ said Alice. ‘Anyway,’ she continued a moment later. ‘If I had kids, I certainly wouldn’t let the dirty bastard near my little ones. No way.’
The other woman said something about Jenny.
‘Well that’s right. Someone should. But she’s such a stubborn bitch. She probably give you a bollocking and throw you off the rigs for spreading rumours. Bloody Jenny’s Law,’ said Alice sarcastically. ‘Bloody Jenny’s Law. Who does she think she is, anyway?’
The other woman stepped across the deck as she spoke quietly.
‘True,’ Alice replied. ‘Maybe he will. He should be in charge. I never really did the church thing before, but you know what he says seems to make so much sense. When I think about it, it was all so messed up . . . and . . . and, wrong. You know? I could imagine God was furious with us. Why not? Why not wipe the slate clean and start again?’
The other woman chuckled as she said something.
‘Oh, but, he is, isn’t he? I think if I was just a little younger . . .’
The two women giggled like schoolgirls as they finally finished feeding the chickens. He heard the wire mesh door to the chicken deck grate across the crap-covered floor and rattle shut behind them.
Walter felt a cold twist in his chest as he imagined others all over the platforms having this kind of conversation. He replayed in his mind every exchange he’d heard this morning, doing the rounds for Jenny, issuing the work tasks. All of sudden every reply, every half-smile offered to him, seemed to be tainted with the slightest hint of distaste.
Is that it? Is everyone saying that I’m a pervert?
But worse than that, if Alice was to be believed. Far worse than that.
Saying I killed Hannah?
Chapter 44
10 years AC
O2 Arena - ‘Safety Zone 4’, London
‘Jay? Jay, man. Wake up.’
Jacob felt fists pummelling the side of his head; the knuckles of some playground bully needling his soft temple. He winced from the pain, groaned and slowly opened his eyes and squinted at the foggy shape leaning over him.
‘Jake, man.’ It was Nathan. ‘How’s the head feelin’?’
His mouth was tacky and dry, his lips stuck together. With a little tug of effort they parted. ‘My . . . head . . . really hurts.’
Nathan laughed, not unkindly. ‘You got whacked well-hard.’
His eyes were focusing - not entirely, it was never going to be 20-20 without a new pair of glasses and he’d lost those long ago. Nathan’s face, grinning down at him, sharpened. Over his shoulder Jacob could see a pale milky white sky . . . no, not a sky. He saw a stretching arc of material. Like sail canvas taut with a strong breeze.
‘Where are we?’
‘The O2 Arena.’
Jacob’s eyes narrowed. For a moment that meant absolutely nothing to him.
‘The Millennium Dome, Jay?’
Dome?
Then he remembered . . . the dome. One of the safety zones.
He struggled up onto his elbows, wincing from the thudding pain in his head. Around him, across an open floor, he could see a dozen or so mattresses; several of them occupied. Surrounding them, a wall of neck-high partitions just like ones you’d find in an open-plan office; businesslike cream cord material surface, perfect for tacking-on Dilbert cartoons and cute kitty calendars.
‘This is the infirmary,’ said Nathan.
Jacob’s hand wandered up to the side of his head to caress his needled temple, only to find cotton wadding and a bandage wrapped around his forehead.
‘You had a real big bump on your head, like a tennis ball. And a nasty cut.’
It felt like a hangover. He’d had only one of those before - one time in Bracton when Walter had found a crate of Glenfiddich and they’d all toasted each other in the yacht’s cockpit into the early hours.
‘Where’s Leona?’
Nathan hesitated.
‘Nathan?’
‘I think she . . . escaped.’
Jacob only had a hazy memory of what preceded his world going black. A large exhibition hall full of computer games. And . . . and pale, long-haired children, a whole crowd of them chasing them through the dark.
‘We were rescued by some people from this place. They were nearby an’ heard our gunshots.’
Gunshots . . . yes, Jacob definitely rememb
ered gunshots.
‘There was a bit of a fight an’ stuff and they rescued us,’ said Nathan, helping Jacob to sit up. ‘And Leona . . . she, well I reckon she escaped out the other way.’
Jacob closed his eyes for a moment. Relieved. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Yup,’ Nathan replied quickly. ‘She’s probably halfway home to let your mum know. Thing is, she’ll be okay, right?’ He grinned again. ‘Anyway, Jake, man, you really, really gotta get up an’ see this place.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Oh, yeah. It’s the fucking business. Got lights and ‘lectric and everything. And there’s like, thousands of people. You feel like gettin’ up yet?’
Jacob nodded eagerly. His head hurt like a bugger and he felt nauseous enough to hurl. But sitting up on the mattress he felt a little better . . . and excited.
Nathan offered him a hand and pulled him up off the cot. ‘Wanna try stand?’
Jacob grasped his hand and slowly got to his feet. ‘So, what are the people like?’
‘They’re friendly,’ replied Nathan. ‘You know, we could stay if we wanted? They already said that’s okay.’
He led Jacob towards a gap in the partition wall and stepped out onto a wide concourse. Jacob’s jaw dropped at the sight of a nearby suspension arc rising up from the ground, tethered by an apron of thick iron cables, to converge with two dozen more arcs at the apex of the dome’s canvas roof. To his right, he could see a long curving boulevard of shopfronts, cafés and restaurants, just like a real high street; like an indoor town.
The open space before him, though, was busy with people: men and women pushing trolleys of fresh vegetables, heading up the boulevard with gardening tools in their hands. A man, pulling along several five-gallon drums of water on a trolley, nodded politely at them. Although they all wore their own clothes, many patched and faded, they also all seemed to be wearing a turquoise armband.