Last Light (39 page)

CHAPTER 80

10.03 a.m. GMT
Shepherd’s Bush, London

Leona stirred in the complete darkness. For a second she wondered where she was, and then remembered. She tried to move her arms and legs, but they were numb, and when she did finally manage to coax some movement out of them, she felt an explosion of pins and needles in all four limbs.

She pushed the hatch open, and a pale morning glow flooded into their hidey-hole. She realised she must have actually managed to fall asleep in there.

‘C’mon Jakey,’ she said to her little brother. He stirred quickly, his yawn no more than a tired squeak.

She climbed out, helped Jacob scramble out, and then, wary that there might still be members of the gang hanging around, they stepped lightly across the room to the hallway.

She glanced into each room. There was no one. The rooms had all been ransacked, of course.

They tiptoed down the stairs and quickly came across the results of last night’s ruckus on the ground floor.

The lounge, the kitchen, Jill’s study, were completely trashed. It looked like the entire house had been gently lifted a couple of yards off the ground, and then dropped. She noticed a row of shallow craters along the lounge wall, and realised they were bullet-holes. And she noticed a fair amount of blood splattered along the skirting-boards, and smeared across the smooth parquet floor of the entrance hall, as if a body had been dragged, or someone badly hurt had tried to drag himself away.

The barricade built from the stacked kitchen chairs, table, and a couple of heavy chests had been pushed to one side and the front door was dangling from one last screw holding the top hinge to the door-frame. It swung with a gentle creak.

She found two bodies in the kitchen. They both looked younger than her, perhaps fifteen, sixteen; smooth, young, porcelain faces, eyes closed as if sleeping - they looked almost angelic lying side by side amidst a dark, almost black pool of blood that had spread during the night across most of the kitchen floor. Several of the MDF kitchen units sported jagged splintered bullet-holes. Under foot, shards of glass crackled and popped against the tile floor.

Jacob wandered in before she could stop him.

‘Oh,’ he said.

‘Jake, out . . . go on.’

Jacob didn’t budge, fascinated by the two corpses, ‘They’re dead aren’t they?’ a hint of awe in his voice.

‘Yes, Jake, they’re dead.’

‘Did someone shoot them?’

‘Yup.’ She counted a dozen jagged holes around the kitchen. Someone had fired off a lot of bullets in here. One of the dead boys was clutching a kitchen knife, beside the other one she spotted a baseball bat.

Hardly an even fight.

She recognised both of them as being members of the gang that had been preying on the avenue these last few nights. She had guessed that the fight last night must have been between the Bad Boys and some other group - perhaps a rival gang from White City.

But these other ones had guns.

She led Jacob out of the kitchen, literally dragging him away from the bodies, which he studied with an intense fascination.

And then she saw him, through the open front door, lying amongst the weeds in Jill’s front garden; caught the slightest movement.

‘Go into the lounge and stay there,’ she commanded Jacob.

‘Why?’

‘I’m just going to take a peek outside.’

Jake nodded. ‘Be careful, Lee,’ he whispered as he padded across the hallway and sat down in front of the shattered screen of Jill’s extravagant TV set and stared at it, willing it to come on.

She stepped out of the house, cautiously advancing on the body writhing slowly on the ground.

She recognised him.

50 Cent.

Closer now, she could see he’d been shot in the shoulder, his crisp white Nike shirt was almost entirely coloured a rich, dark sepia, and he lay on a bed of pebbles now glued together by a sticky bond of drying blood. He looked weak, he had lost too much blood during the night to last for very much longer. She would have thought the underlings in his gang would have returned for their leader.

Apparently not.

So much for the notion of gang loyalty - not so much this lifelong brotherly bond, as she’d heard many a rapper say of his homies - instead, more like a group of feral creatures, cooperating under the intimidating gaze of the pack alpha. When it came to it, they’d all scurried off, leaving the little shit bleeding out on the gravel.

In one hand he held a pistol, which he tried desperately to raise off the ground and aim at her, but he had only the strength to shuffle it around on the ground.

He looked up at her, recognised her face and smiled. ‘My honey,’ he grunted with some effort. ‘Help me.’

Leona knelt down beside him and reached out for the gun. He hung on to it, but she managed to prise it loose from his fingers with little effort.

‘I need help,’ he said again, his voice was no more than a gummy rattle.

This was probably an opportune moment.

‘You recognised me last night, didn’t you? You were the one who asked me for a fag up at the mall.’

The boy said nothing.

‘What did you do to my boyfriend?’

50 Cent shook his head almost imperceptibly. ‘He ran.’

And then she noticed the ankh pendant nestling amongst the stained folds of his T-shirt.

Dan’s pendant.

Leona knew right then that she didn’t need to hear the lie in his voice to know what had happened to Dan. With a movement so swift that there was no room for any internal debate, she aimed the gun at his head, closed her eyes and pulled the trigger.

There was an overpowering stench that hung in the warm midday air; a mixture of rotting cabbage and burning rubber. She noticed several thin wispy columns of dark smoke on the horizon. London wasn’t exactly ablaze, just smouldering in one or two far-off places. But that burning smell certainly carried. After a while, Leona decided she’d rather breathe just through her mouth.

They walked up Uxbridge Road, which was even more cluttered with detritus than it had been on Wednesday, the last time she had been out. She noticed one or two bundles of clothing amongst the piles of rubbish that turned out to be bodies. She made a point of distracting Jacob as they walked past the closest of them. He didn’t need to see any more stuff like that, not so up-close anyway. They walked past Shepherd’s Bush Green, over the large roundabout, which was normally surrounded by a moat of stationary cars, vans and trucks beeping, honking, getting nowhere fast, but was now just an isolated island of grass with a large, pointless, blue thermometer sculpture in the middle. On the top of it, a row of crows patiently sat and watched them.

Where did all the pigeons go?

She wondered whether the bird world mirrored the human world. The crows were the gangs, and the pigeons were nervously hiding away somewhere else.

‘I’m scared,’ muttered Jacob.

‘Don’t be, we’ve got this now,’ she replied calmly, lifting her shirt an inch or two to reveal the gun stuffed into the waist of her jeans.

‘Can I fire it?’

‘No.’

‘You had a go,’ he complained.

‘It went off when I picked it up,’ she lied, feeling the slightest unpleasant twinge; the thin end of something she knew was going to inhabit her dreams for years to come.

‘Can I hold it then?’

‘No.’

They walked over the roundabout towards Holland Park where the homes came with an extra zero to their price tag, and looked a good deal grander than their humble terraced house. Here, she noticed, there had been less rioting and looting. The road, although still cluttered with some debris, was a lot clearer than it was back over the roundabout in Shepherd’s Bush. Leona guessed the people there had so much less need to loot. There’d be well-stocked larders in every home, and the chavs and hoodies who normally populated the corners round here, were probably up in those grand three-storey town houses helping mother and father work their way through the wine collection.

‘I’m sure we’ll find something to drink and eat round here,’ she said. ‘It looks much less messed up than back home.’

‘This is where the really rich people live,’ he said.

She nodded, ‘Yeah, and they always seem to do all right when there’s a problem.’

Five minutes later they spotted a small convenience store tucked down a cul-de-sac, lined with hanging baskets of flowers; very
villagey
, very pretty and largely untouched by the last week’s chaos. Metal roller-shutters had come down, probably at the first sign of trouble, and apart from a couple of dents in them where someone had tried their luck smashing through, and one of the large windows behind had been cracked but not shattered, it looked like the store had yet to be looted.

‘Is there food in there?’ asked Jacob.

Leona nodded. ‘I think as much as we need. Stand back.’

She aimed the pistol at a sturdy looking padlock at the bottom of the shutter, and grimaced as she slowly squeezed the trigger.

Jacob yelped with excitement, hopping up and down as the gun cracked loudly. The padlock fragmented into several jagged parts and the glass door behind the shutter shattered.

‘Yeah!’ shouted Jacob, as the smoke cleared and the glass finished falling. ‘Wicked!’

‘Stay out here,’ she said.

She pushed the shutter up and stepped inside the shop, holding the gun up in front of her, shakily panning it around the gloomy interior.

‘Okay,’ she called out to Jacob. ‘Looks clear.’

He joined her inside.

It was a small convenience store, a baker’s and delicatessen. The meat was spoiled, she could smell that and a few blue spots of mould had blossomed on most of the bread. There was, however, a heartening array of tinned produce on the shelves, and two large fridges full of bottles and cans, all of them of course warm, but that didn’t matter.

She pulled out a bottle of water and gulped it, then handed it to Jacob. He shook his head.

‘Not thirsty?’

‘Yeah, but I want Coke,’ he replied, reaching into the fridge on tiptoes and pulling out a litre bottle.

‘Mum would have a fit if she saw you drinking that. It’s just sugar and chemicals.’

Jacob shrugged as he twisted the cap off and slurped from the bottle.

‘I can’t believe this,’ she said, with a big grin spreading across her face. ‘We’ve struck a gold-mine.’

‘No more pilchards,’ added Jacob, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand and belching.

Leona looked back at the open shutter. ‘Let’s grab what we need quickly. Other people may have heard the bang.’

They found a tartan wheelie bag nearby, one of those shabby things that only old blue-rinsed ladies seem to favour, and filled it with as many tins and bottles of drink as they could squeeze in. Leona found some wire hand-baskets and filled those with some more tins and bottles. She gave a couple of lighter basket-loads to Jacob to struggle home with, filled the wheelie bag, and stacked another couple of baskets full of supplies on top of it.

As they emerged out of the convenience store on to the cul-de-sac, they saw several people warily approaching the entrance, presumably lured by the sound of the padlock being shot off and the glass shattering. The nearest to them, an old couple, eyed the pair of them cautiously.

‘Is the shop uh . . . open now?’ the old man asked.

Jacob, grinning, piped up. ‘Yup, open for business.’

The old couple nodded gratefully and quickly disappeared inside.

‘We should go,’ said Leona, ‘it’s going to get busy here.’

They headed out of the cul-de-sac and turned right on to Holland Park Avenue, towards the Shepherd’s Bush roundabout. They passed a few people along the way, who eyed their plunder with interest, and hurried along swiftly in the direction they had come from.

‘We need to be careful,’ she said, ‘when we get closer to home, there might be some who will try and take what we have.’ She patted the bulge on her hip, the heavy, cold lump of metal there felt reassuring.

Heading back past the grand town houses, Leona saw dozens of people curiously emerging on to their balconies and the twitching of countless curtains and blinds. The streets might have been all but deserted, but there seemed to still be plenty of people around, hidden away in their homes. At least here there were.

They approached the roundabout, the crows still sitting atop the big blue thermometer in the middle, watching events with idle interest. Leona spotted someone in the middle of the road up ahead, walking around the central island briskly.

A woman in a white, cheesecloth skirt, holding her shoes in one hand, her back to them as she rounded the grassy island and began to disappear from view.

Her hair, her movement, it was all so very familiar.

‘Mum?’ she called out, but not loudly enough. The woman carried on, leaving them behind. Leona could only see her head bobbing around the far side of the roundabout’s island.

‘Mum!’ she shouted, her voice breaking. The cry echoed off the tall buildings either side of the road and the woman on the far side of the roundabout stopped dead.