Last Light (36 page)

CHAPTER 73

4.23 p.m. GMT
Outskirts of London

South of Coventry there had been a roadblock on the M1 which had forced Jenny to take a roundabout route along some A roads clogged with abandoned cars, coaches and container trucks, and one or two B roads - some plugged with discarded vehicles and utterly impassable. She’d got lost at least twice before eventually finding her way back on to the motorway heading into London. She had wasted most of the day, cursing and crying with frustration as time ticked by and she seemed not to be getting any closer to her children. The arrow on the fuel of Mr Stewart’s car had been wobbling uncertainly over ‘empty’ for the last hour. Finding the M1 again cheered her up and seeing the distant sprawl of London ahead, lifted her spirits further . . . until she came across yet another roadblock.

Jenny slowed down as soon as she saw it; a barrier across the M1 and the slip-roads leading on to the M25. It was comprised of triangular blocks of concrete laid side by side, designed to prevent any kind of vehicle smashing through. Behind that was a barrier of barbed wire. And behind that, several dozen soldiers watched her approaching slowly.

She came to a halt in front of the concrete blocks, and climbed out.

‘You can’t come through. I’m sorry, love,’ shouted one of the soldiers across the barricade.

Jenny felt her shoulders wilt with fatigue and despair. ‘Why not?’ she called out.

‘Orders.’

‘Oh come on,’ she cried, ‘what orders?’

‘We’re not to let anyone through, either way, in or out of London,’ the soldier replied.

‘Why?’

The soldier shrugged. ‘Those are our orders, love.’

She felt anger welling up inside her. It erupted so quickly it caught her by surprise. ‘For fuck’s sake! You idiots are sitting here with your thumbs up your arses, and out there,’ she pointed back up the motorway, ‘people are killing each other for water and food.’

The soldier said nothing, his face impassive.

‘It’s like the end of the world out there! Women being raped, people fighting, killing. And you’re doing nothing! Just sitting here!’

The soldier continued to stare silently at her, but then finally, perhaps feeling she deserved some kind of response, he said, ‘I know it’s rough, love. My advice . . . just go back home, sit tight, and wait for this situation to work itself out.’

‘I’m trying to bloody well do that!’ She pointed to the city skyline behind them. ‘I live there! I just want to get home to my children. Please let me through . . . please,’ Jenny pleaded, her voice beginning to break.

She took a few steps forward, until she was almost upon the razor wire, only a yard away from the soldier who had bothered to reply.

‘Please,’ she whispered.

The soldier looked around, left and right, then spoke quietly. ‘Look love, we can’t let your car through, and don’t even think of trying any other roadways in. They’re all like this, blockaded.’ He lowered his voice still further, ‘But . . . there’s plenty of ways in on foot . . . all right?’

Jenny looked around. He was right. She could abandon the car somewhere on the hard shoulder, leave the motorway and walk in. The soldiers might have blocked all the roads, but of course London was a porous urban spread not just accessible by roads - there were cycle lanes, paths, kerbs, alleyways, unused scraps of rubbish-encrusted ground.

She nodded and thanked him quietly for the suggestion. She climbed into the car, turned it around and headed on back up the M1. She drove far enough away that she was sure they could no longer see her and then pulled over to the hard shoulder.

‘So, I’m going to walk across north London then, no problem, ’ she spoke to herself. ‘How far is that? A day’s walking?’

A day, if nothing holds me up.

She had managed to come this far. Home was just fifteen or so miles away now. Not so far. She decided nothing was going to stop her now. She climbed out of the car and looked across the industrial estate beyond the hard shoulder. It was deserted. There was little sign that anything was amiss there . . .

Other than the fact that on any other Friday afternoon there would be half-a-dozen people outside the delivery bay of that sheet-metal works, having a mug of tea and a fag break; there would be smoke coming from the chimney of that ceramic tile factory; there’d be a lifter moving those pallets of goods outside that distribution warehouse . . .

Jenny surveyed the lifeless landscape. Beyond the industrial park, looking south-west towards central London, the direction she had to head, she could see scattered pillars of smoke here and there, not from factories though, but from the shells of cars, homes, shops, where rioting had occurred over the last week.

There was activity in there, people there.

My children are in there.

She picked up the last couple of bottles of water and put them in her shoulder-bag. She slammed the car door and walked across the hard shoulder, swinging a leg over the waist-high metal barrier and stepped on to the grass verge. It sloped down towards the back lot of the deserted industrial estate.

‘Okay, then,’ she muttered to herself.

On Tuesday, or Wednesday, she doubted she would have dared to head into this kind of landscape alone, unarmed. But today was Friday. The last two days in that service station and overnight in that Travelodge, had changed her. She realised if the need came, she could handle herself, she could do what was needed to survive.

She spotted a short length of metal piping lying outside the sheet-metal works. She bent down and picked it up, hefted it in one hand, then in both, and swung it a couple of times, feeling mildly comforted by the
swishing
sound it made through the air.

It’ll do for now.

If she came across any young buck who fancied trying out his luck on her, she decided she would probably just swing first and ask questions later.

She checked her watch. It was just approaching half past; she guessed she had another four hours before the sun hit the horizon. That would be a good time to find some safe, dark corner to huddle up in, and let the crazies, the gangs - whoever it was at the top of the predatory food chain - have their night-time fun.

Nearly home.

Tomorrow, some time in the morning, she was finally going to get home.

And Leona and Jacob will be there, no doubt frightened, but alive, well.

She swished the metal pipe once more into the palm of her hand with a satisfying smack.

‘Okay then,’ she said loudly, her voice echoing back off the corrugated iron wall of the nearest industrial unit.

CHAPTER 74

10.27 p.m. local time
Over Europe

Andy looked out of the window of the 727. It was a civilian plane, one of the fleet belonging to GoJet; one of the bigger budget airlines flying the various European holiday runs. They were over Hungary right now, not far off Bucharest. Outside though, it was pitch-black. No faint strings of orange pinpricks to mark out major roadways, nor mini constellations of amber-coloured stars marking out a town or a village - just pitch-black.

The airliner was packed to capacity, every single seat taken, the vast majority of them filled with soldiers from various mixed, jumbled-up units, all of them stripped of their bulky kit, their webbing and weapons. Amongst them, a handful of civilians, contractors like Andy caught in the chaos, but lucky enough to have been scooped up in this hastily scrambled repatriation effort.

Westley was sitting beside him, the rest of the platoon - just six men - in the two three-seat rows behind them. They were all fast asleep.

‘Can’t believe we’re on our way home, like,’ said the Lance Corporal. He nodded towards the window. ‘What’ve you seen outside?’

‘Nothing, not a single thing,’ Andy turned to look at him, ‘I haven’t seen a single light since we took off.’

‘That’s not so good then, is it?’

‘No.’

‘You think it’ll be as bad back home, you know . . . as it was back
there
?’ Westley cocked his head, gesturing behind them.

‘I don’t know. I think it’ll be pretty desperate. It’s been almost a week now without oil. I don’t know how they’ll be coping. I wish there was some news.’

‘A lad from one of the other units says there’s good bits and bad bits. Some places, like London, where it’s a fuckin’ mess, and other places, like, where it’s okay.’

Andy nodded. He could quite clearly imagine what London was like. It wouldn’t be an easy place to maintain order. It was too large, too many people. He would guess there would be many smaller towns, perhaps the dormitory towns of various military bases or barracks, and areas around key installations, resource depots and storage centres where some semblance of order had been maintained. But the rest of the country, particularly the large urban conglomerations, he surmised, was being left to its own devices. He could see farmers dusting off their old shotguns and changing the birdshot for something a little stronger, jealously guarding their modest crops, and cornershop owners - those that had yet to have their stores stripped bare - barricading themselves in, armed with baseball bats and butchers’ knives.

And how long would that state of affairs last?

His best guess was a month, perhaps two. That’s how long it might take to repair the damaged oil infrastructure; the sabotaged refineries, the blown pipelines.

And it might be some time after that before commercial freight ships and aeroplanes were flying once more, loaded up with oranges from South Africa, lamb from New Zealand, Brussels sprouts from Romania.

Oil companies . . . big business interests . . . they were the first culprits that had sprung to mind. But as far as Andy could see, this had devastated the oil market, irreparably. And when the world recovered . . .
if
the world recovered, it would be hypersensitive to oil dependencies, and the dwindling reserves that were left. There was simply no economic motive - for anyone - that he could see behind what had been happening. There were no winners.

The only way one could work out who might have been behind it all would be to look back in a few months’ time - or perhaps a few years’ time - and see who got hurt the least, or who benefited the most from this chaos. All Andy could see now was that millions, perhaps hundreds of millions of people, billions even, were struggling to survive, simply because somebody had temporarily grabbed hold of the world’s oil drip-feed, and squeezed tightly.

How fragile the world is, how very fragile.

There was that metaphor he had used in the report, one he’d been very proud of and thought quite clearly illustrated the tenuous situation of this interdependent modern world. Stopping the continual flow of oil, even for a very short time, was akin to an embolism or stroke a sick man might suffer. And that’s exactly what this oil strangulation had turned out to be - a global, economic heart attack.

His eyes grew heavy. The soothing rumble and hiss of the jet engines, carrying them over an unlit Europe, was as good as any sedative. A week of stolen sleep finally caught up on him with a vengeance, and as his chin drooped to his chest, his last conscious thought was that Jenny and the kids had probably fared better than most this week.

CHAPTER 75

10.05 p.m. GMT
Shepherd’s Bush, London

The Bad Boys turned up as they had on the previous three nights, appearing, as they did, in surly twos and threes, just after the last glow of dusk had gone from the sky, and the darkness of night was complete. They were not so boisterous tonight she noticed, no catcalling, no wolf-whistling amongst them.

She sensed, for them, tonight wasn’t going to be about recreation. It was going to be about necessity; quenching their thirst and hunger. This little avenue was their
larder
. It had provided them with rich pickings since Tuesday. They were going to keep coming back until every last house had been plundered, and then, and only then, would they move on to somewhere else.

She had been in and out of the house this afternoon, using the few tools Jill kept in the cupboard under the sink to fashion the crudest and most basic of weapons and traps. Hopefully they would prove dissuasive enough to the gang tonight, that they might pick on someone else.

Just one more night.

Leona was certain Mum or Dad would come for them tomorrow. Instinct? Or wishful thinking? Or maybe the alternative, that they were gone for ever, was simply unthinkable.

After finding Mr and Mrs DiMarcio this morning, and worried about the chances of being broken into tonight, she had taken a count of the houses down St Stephen’s Avenue, and how many had already been looted. There were just over fifty homes along the short leafy avenue. Fifteen had been done over by the gang, including their home. Leona had been tempted to wander inside, but remembered Dad’s warning and steered clear of it. She was pretty sure six of the houses had been entered during the course of last night. It seemed like the gang of boys weren’t rationing themselves at all; just breaking and entering until they’d had enough. All of the six homes hit last night had been roughly in the middle, too close for comfort. Jill’s house and a couple of others, remained prominently untouched amidst the gutted shells of the other homes; they stuck out like a sore thumb.

She watched them as they gathered right outside the gate to Jill’s garden.

Their behaviour was noticeably different from previous nights. Not quite so full of cocky attitude, not so noisy. She sensed the seriousness of the situation had finally become apparent to them. This was no longer about having a
larrrf
in the absence of the law; things were becoming serious for them now. It was about getting their hands on what they needed to survive; drink, food. The plunder of Tuesday night - what they’d taken from the off-licence - had obviously been consumed very quickly. The subsequent nights of ransacking had yielded barely enough to keep all of them going. Finding enough to keep them all fit and well was going to become increasingly hard for them. Soon she imagined, after the last house had been plundered, they would turn on each other, as the stakes for survival increased.

From what she could see through the slats of the blind, tonight they all looked sober, thirsty, hungry . . . and for the first time, a little frightened. Perhaps the hierarchy amongst their group was already beginning to fragment.

‘They’re back, already?’ asked Jacob, seeing the look on her face.

‘They’re back.’

His face turned ashen.

Leona forced a smile. ‘Don’t worry Jake. We’ve got our special secret weapons. We’ll be fine. Just remember how well that little boy in
Home Alone
did, eh? He showed them, didn’t he?’

Jacob nodded, trying to match his sister’s bravado.

Outside the pack of Bad Boys grew. She noticed the Smurfettes were no longer with them. What did that mean? That they had been left at what this gang considered their HQ to keep them safe? Because this was
men’s
work - the hunting and gathering, and
their
job was simply to lay down and provide gratification for the boys?

Or worse, the novelty factor had been exhausted and they’d been
dispensed
with?

She spotted the older boy, the one who had stabbed to death the other lad the night before last. He stood in the middle of the street, wearing a vest top sporting the Nike swoosh. She could see him talking animatedly, his hands swooping and flickering around in front of him in that
street
way. He had clearly assumed the mantle of leadership; the others, younger, shorter and less self-assured, nodded with his every instruction.

And then she knew why he seemed so familiar. She had seen him up close before.

50 Cent.

One of the three who had accosted her and Dan on Wednesday. She leaned closer to the window, trying to get a better look.

Yes. It’s him.

He and one of his Wigger protégés had chased after Dan and - she was almost certain now - killed him.

His wrist suddenly flicked towards Leona, and their heads all turned as one to look in her direction.

Shit.

She pulled back from the window, hoping they hadn’t seen her staring out at them. 50 Cent then gestured towards the house opposite, and they looked that way in unison.

They’re deciding which house to go for first. Eeny-meenyminey-mo . . .

That’s what they were doing.

She reached out for her weapon; a rounders bat, with several six-inch nails hammered through it. She had been too eager to cram the end of it with nails, and the wood at the end of the bat had begun to split. So she’d had to wrap sellotape around the end of it to stop the thing splintering and falling apart. She really wasn’t sure whether it would disintegrate the first time she swung it at something, but it was all she had.

Jacob held a plastic Swingball bat in one hand. Leona had knocked a few short nails through the holes of the grid in the middle. She thought it looked like it could do some harm if Jacob managed to swat at someone’s face with it. During the afternoon he had swished it around a few times, getting some practice. Although she was more worried the clumsy little sod would swat himself with it, and she’d end up having to bandage his face up.

They could have left this afternoon - just grabbed some bottles of water and run for it. But to where? No, she’d decided to stay. This is the only place Dad and Mum would know to come to. If they left, then the pair of them would be well and truly on their own.

He held it tightly in one hand now, and whether or not it was going to be an effective weapon, she could see it was giving him a little confidence - that
tooled-up
feeling. It was going to be his comfort blanket tonight.

50 Cent, the gang’s unassailable leader, the one whom she’d seen stab that younger lad the night before, had stopped talking, and now in silence, looked towards Leona, then at the house opposite. He was the one making the decision.

Please no . . . no.

He nodded towards the other house and Leona let out a gasp of relief. The Bad Boys turned their backs on Jill’s and headed
en masse
towards the front door of the house opposite. Leona saw a curtain twitch inside, and in that moment, the name of the family who lived there - the McAllisters, came to her. They had only recently moved in, six months ago. She remembered Mum briefly mentioning them, ‘a nice young couple, with a toddler and a baby’.

She could imagine Mr McAllister inside, just behind the front door and ready with whatever household weapon he’d managed to crudely fashion, trembling so violently his heels would be tapping the floor, but driven by something deep down to fight to the very last for his young family, as Eduardo DiMarcio had done for his wife.

The gang began to smash against the front door, taking turns to kick at it around the handle.

She shot a glance towards their front door, buried behind a barricade of heavy furniture they had hauled across during the afternoon. The barricade would slow the gang down a little. It wasn’t going to stop them though, not if they were determined to get in here tonight.

The McAllister’s front door cracked with the next kick. The next blow caused it to splinter around the handle. A final blow sent it swinging inwards. Last night the Bad Boys had cheered when each front door had caved in, in the same way patrons of a crowded pub might raucously cheer at the sound of a pint-pot being accidentally dropped. Not so tonight. They were less rowdy. More single-minded, more determined.

She saw them stream into the dark interior.

‘Cover your ears Jake,’ she said. He did so obediently.

And then came the chilling, muted noises she had expected to hear - Mr McAllister’s last stand.

It took them an hour to finish what they were doing inside the house. All two dozen of them had pushed their way in. This time there had been no spill out on to the street, no furniture being dragged out and smashed up. No sense of a house-party out of control. It had been much quieter . . . after the screaming coming from inside had stopped, that is.

The light was completely gone from the sky now. When she saw the flickering beams of several flashlights emerge from the front door, she knew it was now their turn.

‘Jacob, go upstairs to our hiding place,’ she whispered.

‘I don’t want to go alone.’

‘Go! Now!’

She could hear his shuddering breath in the dark, or was it hers?

‘Go!’ she hissed.

Leona felt one of his arms reach out and fumble for her, wrapping itself around her waist. ‘Please don’t die.’

‘Shit! I’m not going to . . . die, okay? Please . . . go.’

The arms unwrapped, and she heard his footfall towards the stairs.

Outside, the narrow street was filling up again, as the gang members emerged single file from the house opposite. 50 Cent and several others seemed to be nursing minor wounds. She could hear one or two of them crying out intermittently from the pain of their injuries.

A vague hope crossed her mind that the young father opposite, Mr McAllister, had knocked some of the fight out of them before going down. But after only a few moments, and a few words of discussion, she saw the gate to Jill’s garden being pushed open and a party of half a dozen of them walking up the path towards the front door.

Her grasp tightened on the bat.

The first blow came quickly and sounded deafening, a heavy thud that made the barricade of furniture stacked against the inside of the front door rattle worryingly. She heard a sharp crack after the second blow.

If only Dan was here
.

Several more hard and focused blows landed against the door, and all of a sudden she could see a shaft of torchlight piercing through the tangle of stacked furniture. They’d managed to knock a hole through the flimsy wood of the front door. She turned her torch on and shone it towards the door. She could see a face peering through a jagged hole in the bottom door-panel.

‘Go away!’ she screamed frantically.

The face, momentarily startled, disappeared. She heard voices outside, not whispering, just conferring quietly. Then one of them kneeled down and shouted through the hole. It was 50 Cent.

‘Come on, open the door!’

‘Please, go away!’ she whimpered. ‘We’ve got nothing in here. Nothing!’

‘Yeah right,’ he replied. ‘Don’t fuck with me. Just open up or we’ll kick it in eventually.’

She said nothing.

The voice coming through the hole tried a different tack. ‘Look, you open up, see, and share out what you got in there, and we let you go.’

She wanted to answer him, to ask if he really meant that. But she knew that he was making an empty promise.

His face appeared at the ragged hole in the front door again. She shone her torch on him and he squinted.

‘What you lookin’ like?’ he said, and then produced his torch and aimed it through the hole at her. The light lingered on her face, and then travelled down her body and then up again. ‘Oh . . . I know you. You the bitch I see up in the precinc’, innit.’ He laughed, a friendly, cheeky laugh, or at least it might have sounded friendly in another context.

‘You
my
honey when we get in,’ he grinned. He pushed his hand through the hole in the door, and then panned the torch he was holding around at the barricade stacked against the door. ‘You think this is going to stop us?’ he said laughing. His face disappeared from the hole and then she heard him talking quietly to the others.

They’re going to try another way in.

The lounge windows were the obvious alternative.

She raced back into the lounge from the hall, just as the first brick flew in, sending a shower of jagged shards into the room.

The first of the gang was already pulling himself cautiously in through the window-frame, when his foot found the plank on the window-sill; the plank she had hammered a row of nails into earlier this afternoon.

‘Ouch shit! Fuckin’ something, fuckin’ . . . shit!’ he yelled, pulling his leg back out.

Another of them squeezed in through the window-frame, two hands feeling cautiously for the plank. They found it, and pulled the thing out and flung it across the garden.

‘The tricky little bitch,’ she heard one of them say outside.

The window-frame was full once more with the hunched-over form of another of them trying to climb in, and this time she realised she had to swing.

The bat came down on top of his head, several nails piercing the baseball hat perched on his head, and punching through the skull beneath with a sickening crunch. The boy jerked violently, one of his hands reaching up curiously fumbling to discover what was attached to his head.

Leona yanked hard on the rounders bat to pull it lose. It came out with a grating sound, and the boy flopped back out of the window on to the ground outside.

She heard several of them gasp. ‘Fuck! Bitch killed Steve. She killed Steve.’

A second window smashed, beside the first. She waited with the bat raised, but nothing came through for a few seconds. Then she saw something large filling the second window-frame. It blocked the light coming from the torches outside. It squeezed in through the frame. She switched on her torch and saw it was the bulging form of a bed mattress being pushed through; a makeshift shield, behind which they would be waiting to surge through.