Afterlight (46 page)

 

‘He’s what?’

‘Dead.’

Maxwell stared at Snoop. ‘Dead?’ His tone of voice demanded further explanation. Immediately.

‘It looks like they had a fight, Chief. Had a fight over one of the girls. There was a new girl Dizz-ee was breaking in.’

‘New girl?’

‘I didn’t recognise her, but then she was beat up quite bad. I suppose the white kid, Jacob, took a liking to her and Dizz got jealous.’

Maxwell shook his head angrily. ‘You were meant to look after the pair of them.’

Snoop shuffled uncomfortably. ‘I was. I was taking care of Nathan and . . .’

‘And what? You decided to put that stupid moron Dizz-ee in charge of Jacob?’

Snoop could only nod.

‘What the fuck were you thinking?’

He could have been honest; could have told Maxwell that he was up for a laugh last night and that Nathan seemed a whole lot more the party type than Jacob did. So, he delegated the boring one of the two to that fuckhead, Dizz-ee. But the old man would probably throw a hissy fit if he did.

Instead he lowered his gaze to the floor. ‘Okay, I messed up.’

‘Jesus Christ, not fucking half! Of the two of them,’ said Maxwell softening his voice. ‘Of the two of them, Jacob Sutherland was the one who could have given us the
most
leverage.’

‘I know that, Chief,’ Snoop mumbled.

Alan Maxwell ground his teeth with irritation. ‘Well, it’s done now. No point crying over spilled milk. Here’s what you’re going to have to do. Tell the other lad . . . Nathan . . . tell him that Dizz-ee got a little too out of his head and for some reason took a disliking to his friend. I’m sure you can come up with some plausible reason. Maybe he found out somehow that I wanted to make these two new lads second-in-commands and he didn’t like the idea.’

Snoop nodded.

‘You tell Nathan you found out what happened. In your anger you went down there and killed that moron, Dizz-ee. Understand?’

‘Yes.’

‘Hopefully Nathan will be grateful to you for that.’

Snoop nodded.

‘Help yourself to a joint and a bottle of booze. You go and bond with him, commiserate with him, get pissed together and tell him you’re really cut up about what happened. Tell him he’s in our family now and we look after each other. Got it?’

‘A’ight, Chief.’

‘Now, what about the girl?’

‘The girl?’

‘Yes, the one they were fighting over.’

‘Oh, yeah. She was worked over pretty bad. Dizz-ee was breaking her in personal. Not a pretty sight.’

‘Could she tell a different story?’

Snoop could see what Maxwell was thinking; kick her out of the dome, or silence her.

‘No, she was all beat up and stoned on some of our shit. Don’t think she knows what planet she’s on any more.’

‘Where is she?’

‘Out of the cattle shed now. I put her back with the workers.’

‘Okay.’ Maxwell nodded. ‘Okay, that’s that little crisis sorted then.’ He turned to Snoop. ‘You go keep Nathan on our side, all right? You and him are going to be like blood brothers from now on. And you’re going to assure him that when we leave in a few days’ time, it’s a fucking peace envoy; a meeting of minds . . . a pooling of resources.’

‘Okay.’

‘You charm the fuck out of him, Edward. Because if he’s not onside, then we may have to fight our way on. Do you understand?’

‘Sure.’

‘And I’d rather not have to. If there’s a load of fuel-making going on there, we
do not
want to damage those rigs any more than is necessary to take them.’

Snoop bit down on his lip and balled his fists inside the pouch pocket of his hoodie.

‘I know.’

‘Right then, Edward, you know what you’ve got to do.’ Maxwell dismissed him with an angry waft of his hand. Snoop turned to go, then stopped.

‘Chief?’

‘What now?’

‘We still going soon?’

Maxwell looked up from a pad of paper on which he was scribbling. ‘Yes, of course. The sooner the better. I’m going to assemble the boys this evening.’

‘What you goin’ to tell ’em?’

‘New beginning, Edward. A new home with enough electricity that every night they can watch their DVDs, play their games.’ Maxwell smirked. ‘Think they’ll like the sound of that?’

Snoop nodded. He was certain the boys would love the sound of that. That was pretty much the level their minds operated on. ‘Sure.’

‘Right, well piss off and do what you’ve got to do.’

Snoop nodded and headed back towards the small north entrance. Maxwell watched him go before turning back to his pad and the list of supplies they needed to stow aboard those barges before they were ready to go.

The storage floor beneath the stadium might still contain enough stores of food to pad out their daily broth for another year, but it was the dwindling supply of twenty-litre jerrycans of diesel that concerned him. They went through two of those each time the boys had their party night. Maxwell had already experimented with reducing the nights to once every month, but the boys had begun to play up, taking their frustrations, their boredom, out on the workers. Instead, over the last few months, Maxwell had been starting up only one of the R16Cs instead of the normal two. It had meant losing some of the floodlights outside the arena, it had meant disabling some of the lighting system, it had meant pulling the plug on some of the least used arcade booths, but the boys, so far, hadn’t noticed. Most of them were usually too pissed and too stoned to care.

His recurring nightmare, the one that woke him at least every other night in a cold sweat, was the one where he was standing on the stage in the middle of the boys and saying ‘Sorry, lads, I’m afraid that’s it. There’s no more booze left, no more drugs, no more power for the arcade machines.’

Every time he had that nightmare it ended, for some reason, with him being tied to a hastily cobbled together crucifix and paraded along the boulevard outside the central arena, carried through the workers, screaming and spitting at him before being taken out of the dome and planted amidst a pyre of firewood. Why his nightmare took on a bizarre medieval theme he couldn’t figure out; why young Edward Tindall seemed to be dressed like a member of the Inquisition, why the boys all looked like monks, baying for his blood as he squirmed on the cross and his skin bubbled and blistered in the flames . . . it really didn’t matter. It scared the crap out of him.

The sooner they were settled in on that gas rig and up and running again, the better.

Maxwell sucked in a deep breath to settle his nerves. If those little thugs knew how much they actually frightened him . . .

 

 

 

S
he 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 fucking 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.

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.

‘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.’