Afterlight

CHAPTER 61
10 years AC
O2 Arena - ‘Safety Zone 4’, London



She opened her eyes at the sound of the voice. Soft and friendly. A man’s voice. She saw a lean face half lost behind a dark beard.
‘They made a mess of you, didn’t they?’
She said nothing; her mouth was dry and sticky.
‘Here,’ he said, gently sliding a hand under her head and holding a plastic beaker to her lips. She sipped a mouthful and swallowed.
‘They brought you in early this morning. You’ve come from the cattle shed, haven’t you?’
She wasn’t entirely sure where she’d come from. Just a room, somewhere. A room without a window.
‘When they started up their brothel, there were quite a few girls ended up like you. Girls who weren’t ready to play.’ He studied her face a moment. ‘They really went to town on you, didn’t they?’
She sipped some more water.
‘I’m Adam, by the way. Adam Brooks.’
Her lips were still too sore to try saying much, but she managed to croak her name.
‘Fiona or Leona?’
She nodded at the second name.
His eyes narrowed. ‘You’re the girl that arrived at the gate several weeks ago, aren’t you?’ He seemed certain of that. ‘Yeah, that’s you. That little thug Dizz-ee let you in.’
She nodded. ‘Dizz-ee . . . thash him.’ Her top lip felt like a bloated slug lying across her teeth - slothful and heavy.
‘He’s a nasty piece of work, that boy.’
She could have told the man that the nasty piece of work was dead, but quite honestly it was too much work for her sore face, and there were a roomful of raw memories that would come with that effort.
Adam let her head gently back against the pillow. ‘You rest. I’ll go and get the duty nurse - there may still be some ibuprofen lying around.’ She closed her eyes and remembered nothing else.
A couple of days later she felt recovered enough to make her way to the soup kitchen and join the sombre queue of workers waiting in line to be served. She was given a bowl filled with a watery and tasteless mush of cabbage and onions. She thought she spotted several baked beans floating in amongst the muddy liquid and a small sliver of something grey that might possibly have been meat.
Tasteless, but all the same she spooned it in automatically after she’d found an empty table on the edge of the seating area.
‘Mind if I join you?’
She looked up and recognised the man she’d spoken to. Adam.
She nodded at him.
‘How are you feeling, Leona?’
She shrugged. She felt nothing. Empty; just a human frame going through the necessary rotations of life: eating, shitting, sleeping.
‘You’re up already, though. That’s good.’
There was something else, though. Something that was keeping her going. ‘It’s ’cause I want . . .’ she held a hand to her jaw, feeling a painful twinge. One of her back teeth had been split when that bastard had backhanded her. The hot soup had found a way down to the tender root. ‘I want to go . . . home.’
Adam looked up at her. ‘Home?’ He sat down at the table. ‘Do you mind if I ask where the hell you came from? Because as far as I’ve seen, there’s no one out there. No one, that is, apart from wild people in rags.’
She continued eating in silence, carefully spooning the hot broth into the side of her mouth less battered and bruised. ‘A community,’ she replied eventually.
‘We patrolled all the way down the Thames estuary on a barge. All the way down to Canvey Island. That was a few years ago.’ He shot a glance at a couple of boys standing watch over the queue, wearing their orange vests. ‘Before Maxwell’s coup. Never saw anything that came close to being called a community. We even took one of the trucks and half the platoon through London and out into the Sussex countryside. I suppose we were hoping to see something - woodsmoke, a tilled field, a horse and cart. You know? Something. Some eco-village, some government enclave still holding out. Somebody we could join with and leave this place behind. Not that I told Maxwell that’s what we were hoping to do. But the lads and I found absolutely nothing.’ He shook his head. ‘Just f*cking wilderness.’
He smiled sadly. ‘Who’d have thought we’d all be so bloody crap at surviving?’
She looked up at him and saw in his lined, gaunt face, a man who was much younger than he appeared to be behind that dark beard.
She was tempted to tell him about Mum’s community; to reassure him that there was someone else out there, but caution kept her silent.
Then she had a fleeting recall of something Dizz-ee had been saying to Jacob; goading him to attack. Snoop told me we’re leaving this place. Gonna go live on your place. Cool, uh? Said your mum’s the big boss there.
Oh, God.
First thing we gonna do when we get there is f*ck your mum. Shit, man, reckon we’ll all have a go at her.
They already knew about the rigs. Jacob must have told them.
‘Look, Leona, are you anything to do with the two boys who were picked up last month?’ asked Adam.
Two boys? Nathan must have survived the ExCel Centre as well.
‘Black boy and a white boy. Only, apart from those two and you, the only people we’ve seen approach the zone in the last couple of years are those wild kids. Sometimes they come begging for scraps, you know, when they’ve run out of dogs to eat.’
Her eyes remained on the bowl in front of her.
They know.
‘There’s rumours floating around, Leona. Rumours of another big community like ours. That that’s where you and the two boys came from?’
She knew her face was giving her away. ‘Not true,’ she said evenly.
Adam lowered his voice a little and leaned forward. ‘But, if it was true then I would be very worried for them.’
‘Why?’
‘Especially if Maxwell and his boys knew where exactly they were.’
Her mouth was hurting. She’d already spoken more words today than her jaw wanted her to. ‘Why?’
‘Because we’re dying here.’
Dying? She’d taken a look out at the acres of green in front of the dome; row upon ordered row of vegetable crops; a soup kitchen not unlike theirs back home. They seemed to have managed thus far on what they could produce.
‘You grow food,’ she replied.
Adam’s lips curled with a derisory sneer. ‘It’s not enough. Nowhere near enough. There are two thousand, two hundred and seventy-nine people living here. What we’ve managed to produce out there would sustain less than half that number. This is our third year of trying to grow our own stuff. Last summer was better than the first. This summer was worse than either. I don’t know whether we’re doing things all wrong; same crops in the same soil, or the soil’s being over-used . . . there are no bloody horticulturists here.’
‘Where . . . where do you get . . . ?’
‘Where’s the rest of the food coming from?’
She nodded.
‘A stockpile. A rapidly shrinking stockpile.’ He dipped his spoon into the murky broth in front of him and slurped a mouthful. ‘Last time I had a look down there was over three years ago, and it was three-quarters gone even then. Maxwell’s got us all out there every day, tending those plants, tilling the soil, turning the crap from the latrines into the earth to make it more fertile, but it’s largely window dressing.’
He leant forward again, lowering his voice still further. ‘It’s for show, that’s all it is. To keep everyone busy, to assure them there’s a future here, that there’ll always be food for everyone.’
He was almost whispering now. ‘But there isn’t. It’s a f*cking sham.’ He looked down at his bowl. ‘Only half of what’s in there came from the vegetable garden out front - the rest is tinned goods.’
Leona looked down at her own bowl and studied the grey liquid.
‘When we finally run out of what’s stocked downstairs, then we’re all going to be screwed. That’s when things will turn f*cking nasty here. Maxwell knows that. The bastard has known that for the last ten years.’
‘Why . . .’ She pursed her lips, and felt an ache course across her face. ‘Why did he not . . . start growing . . . earlier?’
‘I don’t know. I suppose he started out thinking a decade’s worth of supplies was enough to see us through. That some relief effort would have come to the rescue by now.’
Leona remembered a conversation with Dad from a long time ago; asking him why the world carried on using oil if they knew it was running out. That was just silly, wasn’t it? He’d replied that people had a tendency to instinctively stick their heads in the sand; to expect to be rescued by someone or something else - technology, market forces, whatever.
Old habits: a hard thing to change.
‘I think he’s been expecting it all to fall apart at some point. His plan has been to delay that for as long as possible.’ Adam laughed. ‘A bit like the Titanic, really; assuring the second, third and steerage class passengers that all’s well, meanwhile organising a life raft for himself and his thugs.’
She recalled Dizz-ee’s grin again. Shit, man, reckon we’ll all have a go at her.
‘Leona, where’s home? Where did you come from?’
Her eyes narrowed and she looked away.
‘Look, I’m not spying. I’m not one of them. I’m too old.’ He gestured at the two praetorians standing nearby, overseeing the long queues of workers, bowls in hand, waiting to be served from a steaming urn. ‘Maxwell trusts only the young ones. He only recruits young lads because he knows exactly how to control them. That’s how this whole f*cking prison camp works. Those boys are being kept well fed, the rest of us he’s gradually starving to death. Look at me.’
Adam pinched the back of one of his hands. The skin bunched like parchment, then slowly settled back. ‘I really can’t fake that. I’m starving, just like everyone else here. Another year, maybe two . . . all the workers are going to be dead. And those boys, and Maxwell, will be having a big party at your place.’
Shit, man, reckon we’ll all have a go at her.
‘Norfolk,’ she said. ‘We came . . . we came down from Norfolk.’
Adam stopped, smiled. ‘Seriously?’
‘What’s funny?’
He shook his head. ‘Not funny, just . . . just a coincidence. I used to be based in Suffolk, at least my regiment was. Up in Honington. You know it?’
She shook her head.
‘Royal Air Force regiment,’ he replied. ‘Back when the crash happened we were assigned to this safety zone to guard it.’
Adam began talking about his old life, a tour in Afghanistan, but her mind was filled with a nightmare; she saw hordes of orcs raping and pillaging The Shire. She saw young boys glistening with bling in their neon-orange jackets in a tightly packed, cheering crowd, like boys around a schoolyard fight; each of them taking their turn on her mother, then Dr Gupta, then Martha . . . and all of them with Dizz-ee’s leering, grinning face.
‘Adam . . .’
He stopped talking.
‘Can I . . . I . . . trust you?’
He stared at her silently for a moment. ‘Can we trust each other?’
‘I . . . have to leave. I have to . . . warn my mum. Those boys . . . I think they know where we came from.’