Afterlight

CHAPTER 68
10 years AC
O2 Arena - ‘Safety Zone 4’, London



Time.
She quietly eased herself up off her mattress. It was almost completely dark inside the dome. Some light spilled up against the canvas roof from the arena; there were still floods on in there that provided just enough ambient light for her to make her way through the maze of partitioned clusters of beds.
The quietness around was filled with the steady metronome of deep breathing, the murmurs of uneasy dreams and distant echoing noises coming from the dome’s centre, of young male voices and the clatter of activity.
They’re still at work.
She made her way into the piazza, across the open floor and past the infirmary, a hundred yards down the curved boulevard towards the east entrance and waited for a while amidst a jam of parked-up flat-bed trolleys and wheelbarrows to check the whereabouts of tonight’s guards.
There were usually three pairs of them; one pair always meant to be on the front gate, the other two pairs at different stages of walking a lap around the entire perimeter of the Zone. Adam had told her the boys were quite often guilty of shirking off. Either all six of them clustered around the gate and neglected to bother walking the perimeter at all, or only one pair would go for a perfunctory wander every now and then. Ironically, he said, it was that lack of consistency that made sneaking out that much harder; there was no knowing for sure how many would be on the gate. She sat and waited in silence for a moment, listening for the light scuff of trainers, the soft murmurs of conversation, watching for the bobbing glow of their cigarette tips.
She was travelling light; nothing more than a couple of scuffed old one-litre plastic bottles with screw caps. Water they could find as they went, but food . . . well, if they were lucky it was only going to take a few days to make their way back home.
No sign of any jackets nearby. Quietly, she slipped out of the dome through the main entrance.
She cursed the silver-blue light of an almost full moon, shining boldly down on the plantation. To her left, a hundred and fifty yards away, was the quayside and the Thames glittering beautifully. She could see the long low outline of the family-sized paddling pool over there, but no sign yet of Adam and the others waiting for her.
It’s right out in the open.
Adam couldn’t have picked a worse place for them to rally. There was no shade from the moonlight to hide in; anyone looking eastwards, across the plantation towards the river, was surely going to see their dark huddled forms beside the pool. Leona had been hoping there’d be clutter around it: shopping trolleys, wheelbarrows, buckets, watering cans . . . items they might have hidden amongst.
She looked towards the area of the plantation where she’d been working this afternoon; the tall rows of beans and peas, tall enough that she could hide down one of the leafy alleys. From cover there she could keep an eye on the pool and wait for the others to turn up.
She scooted low and quick across the open ground from the entrance, reaching the nearest grow troughs of kale and spinach leaves and hunkering down amongst them. These were barely three feet high and she was flat on her face to stay hidden amongst them.
She raised her head, chancing a hasty glance towards the front gate. It was almost impossible to pick anything out; there wasn’t the glistening reflective backdrop like the Thames to silhouette against, instead, all she could make out was the long line of the encircling barricade and where the gate was, the low hump of the garden shed the boys sometimes played cards in.
Then she saw the faint tip of a cigarette move upwards and glow brightly for a moment. She followed the tip as it moved down again and then remained still. She thought she could hear the soft murmur of voices coming from there.
So there’s at least two by the gate.
She crept along the aisles of kale and spinach, heading towards the taller aisles of peas and beans. Bent double, almost on her hands and knees, she loped a dozen yards at a time then dropped down to huddle amongst the grow troughs to check again on the whereabouts of the boys.
She wished she could have seen exactly how many were gathered at the front. She’d spotted only one cigarette glowing. That could mean anything; just one of them or all six of them over there. And if only one or two of them were on the gate, then the other four could be anywhere; patrolling the perimeter, or quite possibly hunkered down some place quiet and sheltered enjoying a discreet crap.
She made her way further along the low rows of rustling leaves until finally, with some relief, she was amongst the aisles of climbers. At last she could straighten her aching back.
Walking upright, but with careful deliberation, she made her way down the row. At the end of it she could see the Thames glittering like a tray of cheap diamonds. The far end was nearest the pool. If she waited there she’d be able to see Adam and the others coming.
She picked up her pace, walking swiftly between the narrow walls of swaying leaves. Their rippling movement was unsettling; stirred by the soft breeze rolling down the aisle, hissing and fluttering in unison, each time her peripheral vision screaming nervously that a shifting stalk was an arm reaching out to grab her.
She was too busy cursing the full moon’s brightness and the state of her own jangling nerves to pick out the dark prone form stretched across in front of her and before she could stop herself she was splayed on the ground.
‘Shit!’ she hissed under her breath.
It was a body. For a moment she feared it was one of the boys sleeping on the job; perhaps stoned, drunk, passed out. She scrabbled away from it, expecting the confused murmur of someone waking. But there was no movement.
She stopped and gingerly crawled back until she was kneeling over the body. By the moonlight she could see a glistening black slick beneath the head.
Blood.
A moment later, a dark form emerged through the foliage, gently easing aside the bamboo supports. ‘For f*ck’s sake, could you make any more noise?’ whispered Walfield. She recognised the man’s Manchester accent and the dark handlebars of his moustache.
‘Did you kill the guard?’ she asked.
Walfield looked down at the body and nodded. ‘Stumbled on the bugger whacking off on the beans.’
That didn’t seem right to her. ‘You actually killed him whilst he was—’
He nodded, looking down at the body. ‘That’s Jay-D. Big piece of nasty shit he was. Don’t shed any tears for him, love. If you knew how many women he’s f*cked up over the last couple of years . . . well.’ He shrugged. ‘It was shank the f*cker or let him swing his rifle on me,’ he continued matter-of-factly. ‘Anyway, now we have a gun and a pouch full of clips.’
‘Where are the others?’
‘I dunno. We can wait for ’em here.’ He sighed. ‘F*ck knows why Brooksie decided the pool was the best place for us to rendezvous, it’s right out in the bleedin’ open.’
He gestured at her to hunker down and they waited, scanning the pale wall of the dome, almost luminous by the glare of the moon. Anyone running along the bottom of it towards the paddling pool would have stood out like shadow puppets on a cinema screen.
Five minutes passed before they finally heard the soft pad of approaching footsteps. She saw several dark shapes emerge from the gloom, coming up their aisle. They too nearly tripped over the body.
‘What the—’
‘Shhhh!’ hissed Walfield. ‘Lads - it’s Danny here!’
‘Shit. You do that?’ asked one of them.
‘Aye, nearly tripped over the little f*cker having a wank.’
Either Bushey or Harry giggled.
Adam and the others joined them. ‘Sorry we’re late. There were four of them chilling out right outside the dome’s main entrance. Buggers just wouldn’t move on.’
Leona looked at the men. ‘We’re all here. So, let’s go.’
Adam turned towards her, picking out her silhouette. ‘We heard them talking about it. They’re definitely headed towards your settlement.’
Bushey snorted drily. ‘The stupid twats have no idea what it is, though.’
‘They think they’re going to some sort of bloody castle.’
‘I heard one of them say Alton Towers, for f*ck’s sake.’
They were laughing, but it made sense. The jackets were children really, big children with guns, but children nonetheless. That’s how Maxwell was treating them - telling them what they wanted to hear, letting them believe what they wanted to believe.
‘They’re planning to leave tomorrow night,’ said Adam.
Her heart stuttered. ‘Tomorrow night?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh, God, then they’ll get there first!’
‘Not necessarily. If we leave now and push hard—’
‘There’s no time to waste,’ she finished for him.
They looked at each other, quicksilver faces, eyes lost in dark shadows.
‘Then let’s go.’
Adam led the way up to the end of the aisle, taking them to the quayside and the river’s edge. They turned right, staying close to the end of the plantation, all of them dropping down to a back-aching scooting run as the tall rows of pea and bean vines gave way to a waist-high field of tomato plants.
Finally, they arrived at the eastmost end of the barricade wall, where the patchwork sheets of corrugated iron overhung the quay and a spiral of razor wire looped over the edge and down onto a river bank of glistening silt.
Ahead of them, over the six foot high barricade, stretched a no-man’s land of crumbling concrete and fading lines of paint marking out coach parking bays. Beyond that, the long dark warehouse outline of a building that had once been the Beckham Football Academy.
Adam spoke in a low murmur. ‘All right. We could go over the wall here, and we’re out or . . .’
‘We need more guns,’ said Leona.
The men looked at her.
‘We need more guns,’ she said again. She pointed along the wall, in the direction of the gate and the low hump of the garden shed.
Adam nodded. ‘She’s right.’
Harry jabbed a finger at the wall. ‘Sir, we can be over this and gone in—’
‘We need the guns,’ replied Adam. ‘And a hundred yards that way are five more we could grab.’
Walfield nodded. ‘S’right.’ He grinned. ‘And a chance to give the little shits a farewell kicking.’