Afterlight (17 page)

Then things flashed white. That’s all she remembered.

 

 

 

Alan Maxwell looked up from the numbers he’d been scribbling on the dull pink cover of the back of the emergency protocol manual. He looked out of the window of his temporary base of operations - a small office above the Starbucks, overlooking the dome’s main entrance plaza. The floor was thick with lines of cots, most of them occupied. Hundreds of them. And there were hundreds more of them out of view, in the open area of the London Piazza, further round the dome’s circumference.

The figures, untidy but accurate, were telling him what he already knew. That stored below the dome’s main central arena - where Kylie Minogue had performed only a few months ago, where Take That had been intending a reunion concert with Robbie Williams in a few weeks time - on the endless low-ceilinged mezzanine floor, there was water and high-protein meal packs for sixty thousand civilians for twelve weeks.

Alan had been down there on the first day to inspect the floor. His first impression had been one of awe; that somebody, somewhere up the emergency authority’s rickety chain of command, had actually made sure their job was done to the letter. It seemed that someone - God bless them - had actually been ahead of the game for once, making sure Safety Zone 4 had everything it needed to fulfil its role providing a safe haven to sixty thousand civilians. Pallets of cardboard boxes, plastic-wrapped and waiting, filled the floor as far as he could see. As well as food and water, there were four emergency generators, all of them running noisily, with enough diesel to run them day and night for three months.

A section of the mezzanine floor was filled with crates of medication, antibiotics, anti-inflammatories, refrigeration units, already plugged in and humming, filled with bags of blood and insulin. There was equipment enough, still boxed and waiting to be unpacked and assembled, to set up a dentist’s surgery, even an operating theatre.

Alan had been amazed that in a bloody useless country such as this, a country that seemed to teeter on the brink of complete collapse every time more than a couple of inches of snow fell, so complete and thorough a job had been done at such incredibly short notice.

Heartwarming in a way, that when push came to shove, when it
really
mattered, there were civil servants who could tick the right boxes and make sure the job got done.

But that was a couple of weeks ago now.

That was back when he thought - as did everyone else - that this was going to be a disastrous, worldwide, three- or four-week Katrina-like event. An event that would shake the world. Rouse everyone from their complacency and remind the world’s leaders and policy-makers that in the pursuit of endless economic growth and rising profit margins, the world had become a terribly fragile thing.

That’s what he’d thought.

Four or five days of civil unrest, maybe a week of it; that’s what he’d been expecting. Those civilians unable to seek refuge in one of the safety zones would be borderline malnourished, perhaps suffering from water-borne infections. And, yes, there’d be deaths . . . thousands of them most likely. Those caught up in the rioting. Those caught breaking curfew. Those caught red-handed looting. The streets of every UK city, town and village would be a horrendous mess that needed to be cleaned up. Every service stretched to breaking point as the country recovered. That was how bad he thought it would get.

Then there’d be years of litigation; years of pointing fingers and blaming the government for not seeing it coming, the oil industry for not ensuring some sort of redundancy in its supply chain. Then, of course, once the world was put back together again, the endless documentaries on TV hungrily picking over the finer details, examining what had gone wrong, and dramas reliving those few summer weeks, spinning out of the grislier details into stories to fill broadcast schedules. Alan had imagined TV channels would dine out on the oil crash for many, many years to come, as once they had on 9/11.

But he’d had all those thoughts two weeks ago.

Since then it had become patently clear to him, if not also to many of the emergency volunteer staff working for him, that this crash was far, far worse than a Katrina-like event. What made it worse, what made it a different order of event entirely, was the fact that it had hit
everyone.

Where, with the victims living on the rooftops of New Orleans, or crammed into the Louisiana Superdome, there was an outside world ready to step in - albeit sluggishly - to drop supplies, to airlift those stranded, to roar in with convoys of National Guard troops to restore law and order, in this case, there was no one.

His eyes drifted across the cots, the orange-jacketed emergency workers dotted amongst them.

No one coming. He’d had a digitally encrypted communications line with GZ - Government Zone - in Cheltenham set up here in his Starbucks office. The emergency committee were based in GZ, complete with several senior echelons of civil servants, a sizeable garrison of troops and, already, sixty thousand civilians within its compound receiving emergency rations and medical care. The first few days they’d been assuring him that extra troops and policemen were on their way. That he should calm down because SZ3 - Wembley Stadium - was doing just fine and they had
only
police holding their perimeter, no military personnel at all. They told him he just needed to hold tight, keep letting in those who turned up looking for safety, keep order, and stay calm. Yes, things were a complete bloody awful mess, but they would settle down by the end of the week and then there’d be the
real
work to do.

This morning, though, the line to GZ was jammed with competing calls coming in, and too few communications officers to deal with them. He finally got through to a harried-sounding junior emergency worker who admitted they were having some teething problems of their own. And this time, finally, acknowledging that, no - surprise, surprise - there weren’t any military personnel spare to send over. The young man hadn’t been particularly interested in his daily situation report either, suggesting that he write it up from now on and fax it over.

Alan was back on hold again, a whisper of crackling static and a digital tone that beeped every thirty seconds; been that way for the last hour.

The figures scribbled in front of him told him far more than he was getting out of GZ. So far, according to his people, they’d processed into the dome about two thousand civilians. Pretty much all of them in the first week, and merely a trickle in the second. The thick crowd pressing against the wire in week one had thinned out after word had spread amongst them that SZ3, SZ5 (Battersea) and SZ7 (Heathrow) were letting in far more people, far more quickly.

There were still a few every day. They usually seemed to turn up in the evenings as the sun settled and the distant sporadic noises of gunfire, isolated hoots and screams echoed out over the still, dark rooftops of south London as the night-time shenanigans began.

His workers let them in, no more than a dozen at a time, as per his standing orders, registered their details and listened with ashen faces to what they had to say.

Alan had sat in on a few of these faltering conversations, letting the orange-jacketed workers, usually professionals, care-workers, gently coax out their stories.

And, listening, it was increasingly obvious there was nothing beyond their spirals of wire, beyond the reach of their floodlights, nothing but a shambolic landscape of smouldering cars, smashed windows and cluttered streets, and small gangs of feral chavs happily getting by on what still sat on shelves in shops. There was nothing out there that was going to rebuild itself.

Alan had three thousand people inside the dome already. Three thousand mouths to feed. Far fewer than the sixty thousand he’d been instructed to allow in. But then, he tapped the pen against the pad in front of him . . .

If he closed the door on any more civilians now, if it remained just three thousand mouths to feed, then the crates and boxes, stacked floor-to-ceiling on the mezzanine floor below, would keep them all going for roughly five years. More, probably, if he sent out his soldiers to scavenge, if he reduced the rations being handed out daily.

‘Five years,’ he uttered quietly. Just saying that sent a chill through him. If that’s what he was considering - considering in terms of keeping things together here
for years
- then it really was a worldwide first-class fuck-up; a modern-day equivalent of the collapse of Rome, of Sodom and Gomorrah.

It really was all over, wasn’t it? All over, except for isolated places like this.

The line went dead. Without thinking, he dialled GZ again and got the digital beep of a busy line once more.

He looked out at the cots, the slowly milling crowd gathered around a long row of benches where warmed breakfast rations were being doled out. He looked across the plaza, at the floodlights mounted on tall tripods beaming cold and clinical over them, despite the pale grey dawn seeping in through the wall of glass at the front. It was bright enough that those floods didn’t need to be on. He thought of all four generators thudding away down on the mezzanine floor, eating slowly and surely into their stockpile of precious diesel.

‘Shit,’ he muttered, putting the phone down and standing up.

It was time for a major rethink.

 

 

 

D
r Gupta watched the ceremony unfold in sombre silence, the north wind gusted mournfully through the spars and struts around the drilling deck, as Dennis, Howard and David carefully lowered the small wrapped parcel of Hannah’s body towards the surging sea below, boiling with swirling white horses this morning.

Beside the opening in the deck - a grille pulled aside to allow them to lower her through, the very same grille they’d all been waltzing on just a week ago - Walter and Jacob stood, both spilling quiet tears into their hands.

The two people who should have been standing there, watching her go, were absent. Jenny, in the infirmary, drugged to the gills and fighting a fever.

And Leona.

She turned to look over her shoulder at the far-off accommodation platform, and yes, she could just about make her out; a forlorn, lonely figure standing on the helipad and watching the ceremony.

Jacob had tried talking her down. Tami had tried to talk her into coming down at least to see Hannah buried. She’d tried explaining that the healing of that awful pain in her chest could only begin with the saying of a proper goodbye. Leona, stubborn as her mother, simply refused to come down and remained up there as she had the last couple of days. All day long, a lonely vigil up there with only the swaying tomato plants for company. As far as Tami knew, she’d not come down to sleep. The Sutherlands’ cabin looked unchanged; Jenny’s cut hair was still on the floor, Martha’s hairdresser’s scissors, comb and brush remained where they’d been dropped on the end of one of the cots.

Valérie Latoc offered a prayer as the bound corpse inched its way down. Martha stood beside him, her hands clasped, her dark cheeks shining with tears, her shoulders hitched.

‘. . . such a precious spirit, a gift from God. An innocent who only knew this world and not the old one; not spoiled by the luxuries and privileges and distractions of that time. Here she found love, safety and happiness. And here she . . .’

Tami detected the grief in the man’s voice. He too had been touched by Hannah; his nurse, his carer, his little guardian angel.

The distant silhouette remained perfectly still, anorak flapping in the breeze. Tami could only imagine the poor girl’s lonely torment. She needed to be right here, to see how many lives her daughter had touched; to see all the children in her class crying, to see the others, even the likes of Alice Harton, shedding genuine tears for her.

And she truly needed to witness her daughter’s wrapped form slide into the water and fade into the depths. Closure; the way back to them, back from her lonely vigil up there, back to the land of the living - it could only begin with closure.

Tami could see, though, even from here, she could see it in her resolute stillness on the edge of the helipad. She’d seen it in the firm set of her jaw earlier; the lifeless gaze of her eyes and the calm, stubborn way she’d politely refused to come down for the ceremony.

Leona had no intention of coming back to them.

Tami suspected she knew how this ended. Tomorrow morning, perhaps the morning after, Leona was simply going to be gone; at some point during the night, she was simply going to step out into the darkness and be gone.

Valérie Latoc finished his prayer and a solemn ‘amen’ rippled amongst those gathered around the hole in the deck. The old men lowered the linen bundle the last few yards towards the sea. A rolling wave rose up and soaked the cloth, rolled the body off its harness and took her away.

Jacob and Walter squatted down by the edge and together tossed a small plastic figurine after her. It tumbled and spun in the gusting wind between the platform’s legs, pink and bright and finally lost amidst the grey froth.

Walter held Jacob closely as his shoulders heaved; more than a family friend - Walter was family. Tami wished Leona was down here, too, so she could hold her; let her open her heart onto her shoulder, soak her jumper with tears.