Afterlight (37 page)

She hesitated. Dizz-ee cocked his head at the girl. ‘Come in,’ he smiled. ‘It’s safer inside than out. Safe zone, this.’

The girl stared at him for a moment. ‘Okay,’ she said and stepped slowly forward through the gap in the barrier, her eyes darting warily between Dizz-ee and Flav, the guns in their hands and their official-looking orange jackets.

‘Bit
young
aren’t you?’ she said to Flav. ‘To be . . . like, “staff”?’

Flav stiffened and for a moment she thought the young lad was going to slap her in the face. Dizz-ee didn’t want his fresh meat all puckered and purple on the first night, so he stepped forward. ‘Oh, Flav’s man enough,’ said Dizz-ee, ‘bro’s thirteen, aren’t you?’

Flav nodded.

‘Come on.’ Dizz-ee smiled warmly, offering her a hand. ‘Come, I’ll show you round.’

 

 

 

‘I
f I’d known he was some sort of bloody preacher,’ said Jenny.

Dr Gupta nodded as she replaced the dressing on her shoulder. ‘He does seem very good at it.’

A gusty day today; wind moaned softy at the porthole of her cabin, anxious to be let in. Clouds scudded across the blue sky. The dark-grey sea below them was frosted with lively white horses.

‘Five times a day now he holds prayer meetings over there,’ said Walter, nodding through the glass at the outline of the drilling platform. ‘You can see when it’s prayer time, the north walkway’s thick with his groupies making their way over.’

‘I should have evicted him,’ uttered Jenny, wincing as Dr Gupta gently rubbed some antiseptic cream onto her shoulder and neck. She should have realised then, when he’d turned up at her request to discuss the matter of prayers at mealtime, that the only way to sort the problem out was promptly returning him to shore with a bag of supplies to help him on his way.

She hadn’t realised how quickly support for him was going to grow. It looked like fifty to sixty people were part of his ‘church’ already. Every time she heard that football whistle being blown from the far platform she turned to see which of her people started to put down their tools and make their way over; more every day, it seemed.

‘Yes,’ said Walter quietly. ‘He’s nothing but trouble.’

‘The problem is, Jenny, people want their faith,’ said Dr Gupta. ‘And that’s what he’s offering them.’

Jenny nodded. Tami was right. She’d worked so hard to ensure that there was nothing divisive such as
religion
to add to the numerous difficulties with living out here. She remembered back in the early days, in the first few years after the crash when things were at their darkest, all manner of bastardised, radicalised hybrid faiths had begun to emerge. Faiths that justified the most brutal treatment of those who begged to differ, brutal treatment of strangers or people who just didn’t look or sound right.

Even the community they’d been living with deep in the woods outside Newark had begun to develop its own twisted version of Church of England Christianity. There was an ex-parish vicar who opened their community meetings with a sermon and a prayer. The prayer Jenny could even go along with, occasionally murmuring the words with everyone else. But the sermons were gradually becoming more and more hate-filled and poisonous; blaming the Taliban, al-Qaeda and some pan-Arabic, pan-Islamic plot to destroy the decadent West. The words were beginning to make sense to some of the people there. It gave them someone to blame, an ethnicity to universally despise and a justification to turn away many of the faces who emerged from the woods asking for food and shelter.

Jenny had vowed to keep this place just as free of that kind of bigotry as she had of vulture-eyed young men who might want to turn this refuge into their own personal harem. So, there were the rules.
Jenny’s Laws.
No public prayers, no preachers, no organised faith and no prayer room, to list but a few of them. Those who needed to commune with God were at liberty to do so, but quietly and privately.

Dr Gupta was right, though. She never realised how many of the people here wanted to hear Latoc’s Old Testament nonsense; needed some sort of spiritual guidance. Someone to tell them once a week that God was smiling on them, that they were doing the right thing, pleasing Him, that everything, one day, was going to be all right. They wanted to be reassured that the loved ones they’d lost in the chaos, the riots, the fights for supplies, or died from drinking bad water or spoiled food, were in a better place now and would one day be reunited with them.

This was a shit world everyone had inherited. Completely shit. Every day a tedious and repetitive grind for survival. The lights that Walter had managed to power with his generator had been their
only
luxury - a glimpse of the wonderful past and a promise from her, and Walter, that the future was going to get better.

It’s no wonder they were turning to someone like Valérie Latoc. From what she’d heard second-hand, he was telling them all the things they craved to hear; that this was all for a reason, part of a bigger plan and they were a big part of this bigger plan. If she’d been a little smarter about things, she could have done the same; moulded some version of a faith to suit their ends. Just enough to give them all some comfort and certainty that they were right to be out here, struggling together for some future goal and that God was jolly pleased with them. And, of course, that God was quite content with the community being run by Jennifer Sutherland.

That’s all she’d have had to do. But she’d have felt like a fraud.

Instead, like a stupid tyrant, she’d laid down the law, and now someone had arrived who was feeding on that need like a hungry mosquito on a bare forearm.

‘So why don’t we just say his probation is over, Jenny?’ asked Walter. ‘Tell him his time’s up and you’ve decided to let him go.’

Jenny shook her head. ‘I’m not sure I can now, Walter. I think if I told him to go we’d have a riot on our hands.’

‘So what can we do?’

She looked out of the window at the far platform. Perhaps there’d be a cap to this? So what if near on sixty, or even a hundred, members of their community appeared to be regulars now at Latoc’s prayer service? There were over four hundred and fifty people here. He still only had a minority. Provided his church-goers continued to do their bit on the work rota and there were no silly dictums from the man that said women had to shroud themselves from head to foot, or they could only eat fish on a Friday, or some other bizarre and illogical article of faith, then perhaps they might not need to turn this into a confrontation.

Maybe the novelty would wear off. Maybe Valérie Latoc wasn’t as polished a preacher as he thought and his turnout would eventually begin to wane. It was early days yet.

‘I don’t think there’s anything we can do other than see how this goes,’ she said finally. ‘If he’s a whacko, some kind of radical nut, then he’ll trip himself up eventually. He’ll end up preaching something that someone doesn’t like. They’ll fall out over it and then I’ll have to step in to soothe some egos. Far better that, than I appear like some sort of brutal bitch dictator that they can all rally against. Right?’

‘And if he’s not?’

‘Not a religious whacko?’ Jenny shrugged. ‘Then we don’t have a problem, do we? As long as we’re all getting on nicely then I suppose we have a manageable problem.’

Dr Gupta nodded slowly. Walter was tight-lipped.

It was a plan of sorts, but not one she was entirely sure about.

 

 

 

M
axwell paced slowly along the base of the perimeter wall, looking inward across the endless rows of plants. His modest kingdom, tended by hundreds of workers dutifully wearing their turquoise armbands. Under other circumstances, in a different time, some might have called this a work camp . . . perhaps even a concentration camp. But then, Maxwell mused, they’d have missed the point and judged it unfairly. This wasn’t a place to punish people or to annihilate a subset of the population. It was what the ruthless bloody business of survival tended to look like; some had to work the fields, some had to guard the walls, and some had to administrate.

He shook his head.

‘So anyway,’ he said, aware that both the boys had been walking with him a while and were still none the wiser as to why he’d had them brought out here to tour the perimeter with him. ‘I’ve been doing some thinking since I spoke to you last. When was that? Two, three weeks ago?’

Jacob and Nathan looked at each other. They’d lost track of how many days they’d been here. Maxwell smiled; the Zone had that effect. He squatted down and examined a small bed of late-sprouting rhubarb stalks that they were experimenting with.

‘So you lads were telling me about your journey to London. That you didn’t see a great deal going on out there?’

‘We didn’t see no one, really, did we, Jay?’

Jacob shook his head. ‘Not really. Nothing anything like this size. There was a guy called Raymond . . . and those wild kids.’

Maxwell stroked his chin. ‘Hmm. See, I hoped there would be plenty of other groups like ours. After ten years, you know, I was hoping some of the smaller groups of survivors might have pooled together. That we’d start seeing village-sized groups emerging out there.’

Both boys shook their head. ‘Ain’t nothing like that,’ said Nathan. Maxwell shook his head sadly. ‘What a complete balls-up we made of things, eh?’

The boys looked at each other. Neither seemed to know what to say.

‘Well, it’s not
your
fault,’ sighed Maxwell, running a hand through the tight grey curls on his head. ‘You were just small boys back then. No, it was
my
bloody generation, we’re the ones that ballsed everything up. We got too busy chasing money . . . pffft.’

He let the stalk of rhubarb go and stood up. ‘Anyway,’ he continued, ‘so that got me thinking about the place you came from? On those gas rigs? It would make a great deal of sense for both our groups to hook up. To share resources, skills . . . that kind of thing. I mean, it seems like all we’ve got left is each other. Right?’

‘That’s right, Mr Maxwell,’ said Jacob.

‘You two seem like decent enough lads to me. You’ve behaved yourself over the last few weeks. Pulled your weight on the chores you’ve been given. You’re both bright lads, nice an’ polite. So I’m guessing you’ve been brought up by decent enough people. Not a bunch of crazies. Am I right?’

Nathan nodded his head. ‘They’re really nice people.’

‘All - what was it? - three hundred-and-whatever? Good men and women are they? Peaceful lot?’

‘Four hundred and fifty . . . or thereabout.’

‘Actually there’s hardly any men at all,’ added Jacob. ‘Mostly women and old people.’

‘Yeah,’ Nathan laughed self-consciously, ‘s’pose we was sort of the men, weren’t we, Jay?’

Maxwell nodded thoughtfully. ‘And who’s in charge there? Do you have some government official? An ex-Member of Parliament or something? I’m sort of hoping there’s something left of the government that I can hand over the reins to.’ Maxwell sighed and smiled wearily at the boys. ‘What I wouldn’t give to be able to take a break and let someone else take charge for a while.’

‘There’s my mum,’ said Jacob. ‘Jenny Sutherland.’ He made a face. ‘I’m afraid she’s not a member of any government, though.’

‘She’s pretty cool,’ added Nathan. ‘She’s in charge. Runs things pretty much on her own. But she’s, like, totally fair.’

‘So why the hell are they stuck out on a gas rig of all places?’

‘Safety, mainly,’ replied Jacob. ‘We moved about five or six years ago. There were bands of scavengers making it too dangerous on the mainland.’

Maxwell looked at Nathan. ‘It must have been bloody hard, moving, starting again from scratch.’

Nathan shrugged. ‘I dunno . . . I guess. Me an’ my mum joined them a year after.’

‘It was hard at first,’ added Jacob. ‘But we were lucky. The nearby town was a freight port. There was loads of warehouses full of shipping containers of supplies. We wouldn’t have managed otherwise. We had a couple of boats and we were ferrying stuff from there nearly every day at first. Wasn’t a big deal ferrying stuff. I mean the rigs are just off the coast. You can just about see them from Bracton. Maybe fifteen miles out, wouldn’t you say, Nate?’

He nodded.

Maxwell cocked his head. ‘Bracton?’

‘Yeah. It was a port and a gas refinery. All the underwater pipes from the rigs came into there.’

‘Whereabouts is that?’

Both boys looked at each other for a moment. Not a shared glance of suspicion; more wondering how best to explain. ‘Sort of north-east curve of East Anglia,’ replied Jacob.

‘It’s down a bit,’ said Nathan. ‘South of Great Yarmouth.’

Maxwell nodded, he knew where they meant. He’d spent his youth living in Southend. He’d even visited Great Yarmouth for a camping holiday with his grandparents in the early eighties. Alan remembered it being pretty grim then during the height of the recession; a cheap and not too cheerful holiday resort, a wet summer that year and an incessant chilly offshore breeze that swept across the deck of the town’s dismal pier. And miserable-looking, cold, grey-skinned families holidaying on the cheap; all beer, fags and arcades.

‘All right,’ he said, ‘I’m going to send some of my boys up there to introduce themselves, say “hi” and see if we can arrange a talk with your mum. And, given we’re all a little wary of strangers these days, I’d like you two to lead them up there and make the introductions.’ He cocked a dark eyebrow. ‘What do you think of that?’

Both of them grinned.

‘You’re right, Mr Maxwell,’ said Nathan. ‘Better if we go along. Mrs Sutherland won’t lower no ladders for a bunch of blokes she don’t know, not with guns. No way. Ain’t that right, Jay?’