Afterlight (54 page)

‘Dennis . . . Howard!!’ gasped Walter turning to him. ‘For fuck’s sake! Please . . . don’t do this!!’

‘You brought this on yourself, mate,’ grunted Dennis.

Walter writhed and twisted in their grip as they shunted him through the gap until he teetered on the very edge of the platform, nothing between his overhanging toes and the sea but one hundred and eighty feet of blustering air.

‘PLEEEASSE!!’

Both men locked their free arms around the railing to brace themselves against Walter’s weight, teetering and swaying over the edge. They both looked at Valérie, awaiting his nod for them to release their grip on Walter’s upper arms.

‘It’s HIM . . . NOT ME . . . it’s HIM!!’

Then, all of sudden, his desperate twisting and struggling was too much for Dennis to maintain a grip, the left arm pulled free and Walter swung around with Howard still struggling to keep a hold onto the right arm. Their eyes met over Walter’s shoulder.

‘Oh, God, no . . . !’ he whimpered. ‘Please . . . please . . .’

Howard grimly pressed his lips together. ‘I’m really sorry, Walt,’ he whispered. He let go and Walter pitched forward. He tumbled, spinning end over end, his hands bound behind his back, white-knuckled and clenched as if in prayer, his legs scissoring in a futile attempt to right himself. Nearly six seconds of descent, then he disappeared into the roiling suds that spilled between the platform’s legs.

 

 

 

I
t was approaching twilight when they decided to stop. Leona hadn’t worn a watch in years, but if she was going to hazard a guess at the time, then she would have said it was after eight in the evening.

Last night they’d hurried away from the Zone along the Blackwall Tunnel, expecting a hunting party of Maxwell’s praetorians to be in hot pursuit. But no one had followed. Halfway along the tunnel, at its lowest dip, they’d had to wade through a puddle of stagnant water almost chest high. The result of ten years of rain and the accumulation of Thames water leaking through crumbling and neglected fissures in the structure.

An hour later they’d emerged into moonlight again on the far side, north of the Thames. They decided to hole up for the night on the first floor of an office block, sleeping fitfully between quiet cubicles and dust-covered desk tops.

Today’s going had been slow. Leona had hoped they’d be out into the countryside by the end of the day, but instead they were still trudging along the M11 approaching the junction bisecting the M25. Beyond that was ‘outside’ London, according to Harry. But it was still very far from being outside the foreboding urban landscape looming down on either side of them.

‘There they are again,’ said Adam quietly.

Leona turned and looked over her shoulder.

A hundred yards down the motorway she could see them; about a dozen people, pale and ragged, old and young alike.

‘There’s a few more of them now,’ she replied.

Adam nodded.

It had been about midday that she’d first spotted someone, as they picked their way along a high street. A curious face peering out of the dark gloom of a window above the empty shell of a shop.

Scavengers, Adam had said. No better than those wild children. He said they saw them here and there, but never in large numbers; pitiful, lonely figures managing somehow to continue to find scraps in the city.

‘Never seen that many at once. They seem to be getting a little less nervous,’ he said.

They were closer, and no longer darting to hide every time one of them turned round to check where they were.

‘Why do you think they’re following us?’ asked Bushey.

‘They see your uniforms.’ She nodded at the faded and patched khakis Adam and the other men were wearing. ‘Maybe they think you’re, like, representatives of the government or something.’

‘They want us to help them,’ she said.

Walfield shrugged. ‘We can’t.’

‘Not saying we should,’ replied Leona. ‘But that’s why they’re following us.’

 

It was an hour later that Leona and the others finally stopped. It was a beautiful moment that stopped them; in a way a reassuring thing, that life goes on quite happily without mankind’s help. Just as the last pale stain of day was being chased by long shadows across the motorway, they watched in stunned silence as a small herd of deer ambled across the four lanes of the motorway passing within feet of them, their dark eyes expressing only a casual curiosity and not fear as they trotted by.

Here were several generations that had never known roads filled with moving vehicles, roads that could kill them. Or people that could shoot them.

Leona stretched a hand towards the nearest of the animals, a large doe bringing up the rear. She felt its hot breath coming in gentle puffs as it paused to sniff her outstretched fingers curiously.

‘Hello,’ she said softly.

It snorted wetly then broke into a trot to catch up with the others as they began to weave their way through a logjam of vehicles and down an off ramp leading into a cluster of low office blocks.

Adam shouldered his gun without a word of warning and fired a solitary round. An old stag, one of the largest animals in the group, dropped heavily to the ground with a clattering of its horns against the boot of a rusting Renault estate. The rest of the herd scattered, their pale rears bobbing like ghosts amidst the gathering gloom.

‘Meat,’ said Adam. ‘Jesus, I haven’t eaten fresh meat in . . .’ he looked slowly round at them, a widening smile spreading beneath his beard. ‘Shit, I can’t even remember.’

‘Come on, lads,’ said Walfield to the other two men, ‘let’s get something for a fire.’

Leona nodded, glad at least that he’d not shot the doe that had sniffed at her hand.

 

‘But they all seemed so young.’ Leona chewed on the hot gristle in her greasy hands. ‘I mean, those three smaller boys at the gate, they must have been eleven . . . twelve?’

Walfield shrugged and tossed another slat of fence wood onto the fire, sending a shower of sparks up into the sky. The deer’s skinned and cleaned carcass hung from an improvised spit, dripping fat into the fire as it cooked; one hind leg already pared to the bone in places where cuts of meat had been removed.

‘The younger the better,’ he replied after a while.

Adam nodded, finishing a mouthful. ‘Child warriors. They’re often the most fearless. Certainly the most ruthless.’ He swigged warm water from one of their plastic bottles. ‘Maxwell was no fool. He set up his boys’ army as “auxiliary staff”, initially to help out the emergency workers. That’s how it was for a couple of years until he staged that coup and had them turn our own guns on us and kick out the rest of the lads in our platoon.’

He picked meat from his teeth. ‘There’s a long history of dictators using child soldiers as a psychological weapon on their own people.’

‘East Africa,’ added Walfield. ‘Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea . . . I remember reading about some warlord who ruled over something like a quarter of a million people with just a couple of hundred boys with guns. It was their totally
psychotic
reputation that did it. Kept all them people in line.’

‘Boy soldiers,’ added Adam, ‘because they haven’t lived long enough to understand right from wrong, to “grow” a morality. Older soldiers - men - have lived long enough to have wives, girlfriends, younger sisters, younger brothers, perhaps even sons or daughters of their own. It makes them pause for thought. At the moment of committing an act of atrocity, it gives them a reason to hesitate. And that moment . . . that second of hesitation can mean the difference between killing an innocent civilian or not.’

He sighed. ‘If you want your people to be totally immobilised by absolute fear, you need a militia that can kill and r—’ He was going to say ‘rape’, but casting a quick glance at Leona, he decided not to. There was no knowing what she’d been through in the arena. He could guess; beaten repeatedly for sure . . . and most probably worse. So far, she’d shown no sign of wanting to talk about it.

‘You need a militia that can do the really
bad stuff.
Do it without batting an eyelid. Enjoy it, even. A powerful force of mind, that is.’

Bushey looked up at him. ‘What is?’

‘The arrogance of youth. You can do wonders with that kind of energy, that kind of self-belief. You can put the world to rights . . . or create dangerous little monsters.’

Leona shuffled uncomfortably on her rump. ‘Not all kids are bad.’

‘No,’ Adam smiled at her. ‘Not all bad.’

‘Jacob wasn’t bad,’ said Leona. ‘Didn’t have a bad bone in his body.’

Adam said nothing. He didn’t know anything at all about her brother. He’d only seen the lad from afar being given the red-carpet treatment by Maxwell; one blond-haired teenager, one black teenager, neither looking wild or malnourished.

‘Nathan wasn’t bad either,’ she added. ‘Do you think he’s with those praetorians now?’

Adam shrugged. ‘I suppose. Do you think he’s actually going to lead Maxwell to your home?’

She wiped her hands on a tuft of dry grass stalks beside her. She stared into the flames for a long while, the still night filled with the crackling of fire and greasy fingers being sucked. She wasn’t sure what a young man like Nathan would do in that situation. He’d always been a good friend to Jacob. He’d always been good with the younger children. But if he was with them, then he was with
very
different people at this moment in time. She really couldn’t imagine what was going through his mind right now.

But there was one thing she was sure of. ‘He loves his mum,’ she replied eventually, as if that completely answered the question.

It was then they all heard the skittering of a small stone kicked carelessly across the motorway. It was somewhere out in the darkness beyond the flickering light cast by their fire. Adam snapped the torch on and panned it down the tarmac.

Caught in the glare, one hand held up beseechingly, a lean face crumpled as it winced at the intense beam. It was one of the people . . . the scavengers.

‘P-please . . .’

A man of about forty or fifty. Dark grey tangled curls framed a creased and gaunt face.

‘Fuckin’ hungry,’ his voice croaked.

He was wearing what looked like a threadbare police uniform; a fraying sleeve well on the way to dropping off its seam at the shoulder.

‘Poor bastard,’ she whispered.

Walfield racked his gun and shouldered it in one swift motion.

‘NO!’ shouted Leona. She raised her hand at him. ‘No! Stop it! Can’t you see? He’s just hungry! That’s all!’

The man was cowering on the road, his hands and arms cradling his head. She could hear his breathing, fluttering with fear. But he wasn’t running.

‘He just wants a little food,’ she said. She turned back to face Walfield, Adam and the others. The smell of meat being barbecued had to be an almost unbearable smell for them.

‘We could give them some,’ she said.

The men stared at her. She could see they weren’t sure it was such a good idea.

‘We can carve off enough to do us for tonight, and let them . . .’ she gestured out into the darkness to where she imagined the rest of those people were eagerly waiting to see what was going to happen, ‘let them have the rest of it. After all, we’ve got guns and I’m sure there’s no shortage of deer or rabbits between here and home.’

Harry nodded earnestly. ‘She’s got a point.’

‘Let’s show them a small kindness,’ she said, annoyed at the emotion in her voice. ‘I don’t suppose they’ve seen any of that in a long time.’

Adam turned to Walfield. ‘All right. Danny, lower your gun, mate.’

He got up and produced a long kitchen knife that he’d liberated from a kitchen supplies store earlier. ‘Hold this,’ he said, passing the torch to Bushey. Then he started to hack at the large browning carcass on the spit. Fat dripped and spat on to the fire as he cut at one of the rear legs and eventually pulled it free. Then he worked on the other, tugging it loose a moment later with the sound of cartilage snapping.

Held by the hooves he carried a haunch of still sizzling meat in each hand and stepped out into the gloom towards the man.

The man’s eyes remained on the food.

‘There you go, mate. This is for you and the others out there,’ he said, placing it on the road in front of him. Only when he’d backed up a few steps did the man come forward.

‘Thanks,’ he uttered quickly before reaching for each hoof and dragging the haunches off into the gloom, leaving a glistening trail of grease on the road.

They returned to their own meal and ate in sombre silence, listening to the faint sounds further down the motorway; murmuring and cries, the occasional sound of garbled half-words exchanged between them.

‘We better try and get some sleep,’ said Adam.

‘You’re kidding, right?’ said Bushey. ‘With them wild people out there?’

‘I think they’re harmless. All the same, we probably ought to take turns keeping an eye open.’

Adam sorted them into three watches. Leona and Walfield took the first watch, keeping the fire ticking over and listening to the noises the people were making. A couple of hours later, when Bushey and Harry relieved them, there was nothing to be heard but somebody moving far off down the slip road and amongst the dark streets of Chigwell. It could have been the children, it could have been dogs, it could have been that small herd of deer.

 

 

 

M
axwell watched his boys messing around on the dodgems. They’d teamed up into groups of three; one in each car and two to push. Howls of delight and good-natured banter filled the deserted seaside fairground as they bounced heavily off each other.