Afterlight Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1 - 2010 - Eight days after the Oil Crash

  The Beginning

  Chapter 2 - 10 years AC

  Chapter 3 - 10 years AC

  Chapter 4 - 10 years AC

  Chapter 5 - 10 years AC

  Chapter 6 - 10 years AC

  Chapter 7 - The Day of the Crash 10 a.m.

  Chapter 8 - 10 years AC

  Chapter 9 - 10 years AC

  Chapter 10 - Crash Day + 1 11 a.m.

  Chapter 11 - 10 years AC

  Chapter 12 - 10 years AC

  Chapter 13 - Crash Day + 1 1.15 p.m.

  Chapter 14 - 10 years AC

  Chapter 15 - 10 years AC

  Chapter 16 - Crash Day + 2 4.45 a.m.

  Chapter 17 - 10 years AC

  Chapter 18 - 10 years AC

  Chapter 19 - 10 years AC

  Chapter 20 - Crash Day + 2 weeks

  Chapter 21 - 10 years AC

  Chapter 22 - Crash Day + 27 weeks 5.45 a.m.

  Chapter 23 - Crash Day + 27 weeks 6.15 a.m.

  The Journey

  Chapter 24 - 10 years AC

  Chapter 25 - 10 years AC

  Chapter 26 - 10 years AC

  Chapter 27 - 10 years AC

  Chapter 28 - 10 years AC

  Chapter 29 - 10 years AC

  Chapter 30 - 10 years AC

  Chapter 31 - 10 years AC

  Chapter 32 - 10 years AC

  Chapter 33 - 10 years AC

  Chapter 34 - 10 years AC

  Chapter 35 - 10 years AC

  Chapter 36 - 10 years AC

  Chapter 37 - 10 years AC

  Chapter 38 - 10 years AC

  Chapter 39 - 10 years AC

  Chapter 40 - 10 years AC

  Chapter 41 - 10 years AC

  Chapter 42 - 10 years AC

  Chapter 43 - 10 years AC

  Chapter 44 - 10 years AC

  Chapter 45 - 10 years AC

  Chapter 46 - 10 years AC

  Chapter 47 - 10 years AC

  Chapter 48 - 10 years AC

  Chapter 49 - 10 years AC

  Chapter 50 - 10 years AC

  Chapter 51 - 10 years AC

  Chapter 52 - 10 years AC

  Chapter 53 - 10 years AC

  Chapter 54 - 10 years AC

  Chapter 55 - 10 years AC

  Chapter 56 - 10 years AC

  Chapter 57 - 10 years AC

  Chapter 58 - 10 years AC

  Chapter 59 - 10 years AC

  Chapter 60 - 10 years AC

  Chapter 61 - 10 years AC

  Chapter 62 - 10 years AC

  Chapter 63 - 10 years AC

  Chapter 64 - 10 years AC

  Chapter 65 - 10 years AC

  Chapter 66 - 10 years AC

  Chapter 67 - 10 years AC

  Chapter 68 - 10 years AC

  Chapter 69 - 10 years AC

  Chapter 70 - 10 years AC

  Chapter 71 - 10 years AC

  The Journey Home

  Chapter 72 - 10 years AC

  Chapter 73 - 10 years AC

  Chapter 74 - 10 years AC

  Chapter 75 - 10 years AC

  Chapter 76 - 10 years AC

  Chapter 77 - 10 years AC

  Chapter 78 - 10 years AC

  Chapter 79 - 10 years AC

  Chapter 80 - 10 years AC

  Chapter 81 - 10 years AC

  Chapter 82 - 10 years AC

  Chapter 83 - 10 years AC

  Chapter 84 - 10 years AC

  Chapter 85 - 10 years AC

  Epilogue

  Author Notes

  Afterlight

  ALEX SCARROW

  Orion

  www.orionbooks.co.uk

  An Orion Books ebook

  First published in Great Britain in 2010 by Orion Books

  This ebook first published in 2010 by Orion Books

  © Alex Scarrow 2010

  The right of Alex Scarrow to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book

  is available from the British Library.

  eISBN : 978 1 4091 0817 7

  This ebook produced by Jouve

  The Orion Publishing Group Ltd

  Orion House

  5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane

  London, WC2H 9EA

  An Hachette UK Company

  www.orionbooks.co.uk

  To Jacob, Leona and Nathan. I started out using you guys as inspiration for the characters and about halfway through this book realised I wished I hadn’t. You’ll see why. This book is dedicated to the three of you.

  Also by Alex Scarrow

  A Thousand Suns

  Last Light

  October Skies

  Acknowledgements

  This book required a lot more research than I expected it to. The person to whom I’m most indebted is Chris Gilmour, a man with a lot of experience in the North Sea and knowledge of the oil and gas rigs out there. Without his help this would have had to be a very different book.

  I also owe a big thanks to my hardcore team of beta readers; John Prigent, Robin and Jane Carter, and Mike Poole, who waded through my first draft and returned copious notes of feedback.

  Finally, as always, Frances, for the many thorough read-throughs and attendant margin notes that help me turn my unintelligible ramblings into ‘books’.

  Prologue

  There are many names for what happened in 2010: The Big Die Off, The Crash, The Long Darkness, The End of the Oil Age. It was the week that crude oil was stopped from flowing and the world catastrophically failed.

  My head still spins when I recall how quickly it all happened. A complete systemic collapse of the modern, oil-dependent world within the space of a fortnight. Events chased each other around the globe like a row of dominoes falling. It started with a series of bombs in the Middle East. Bombs deployed in the holiest of places that set the whole of the Middle East on fire with a religious civil war; Shi’as fighting Sunnis fighting Wahhabis. Then, later on that first day, I remember there were other explosions; an oil tanker scuttled in the busiest shipping channel in the world, a gigantic South American refinery, an oil processing hub in Kazakhstan . . . and a dozen more. By that evening, something like ninety per cent of the world’s oil production capacity had been disabled.

  What we were spoon-fed by the news on the first day was that oil prices were going to skyrocket, and that . . . yes, we’d be in for a sharp and protracted recession.

  It was on the second day, or maybe the third, that everyone began to wake up and realise that billions of people were very quickly going to starve . . . and that was in the western world, not the Third World.

  The moment people collectively understood what ‘no oil’ actually meant, that was the tipping point; the point of no return. Panic and rioting swept like wildfire through every city and town in every country. No nation was immune. At the end of the first week of anarchy, as cities smouldered and streets lay quiet, littered with shattered glass and looted goods, broken and spoiled things, most of the tinned, preservable food was go
ne. Around the world, ready-to-harvest crops that might have been speedily gathered, processed, tinned and shipped to provide emergency supplies to feed us as the dust settled and we picked ourselves up . . . well, all of those crops rotted in the fields because tractors were sitting with empty fuel tanks . . . the Big Die Off began.

  For a long time after the crash, the world really was dark. With no generated power, there were no lights at night except for the flickering of campfires, candles and oil lamps; the pinprick signs of life of small communities dotted here and there that had found a way to keep going. The UK resembled some collapsed east African state; a twilight world. Empty towns, burned-out farms with gone-to-seed fields, empty roads, abandoned cars.

  And I must admit, I’d completely lost hope. I was ready to face the fact that where I was, I was going to slowly starve until my weakened immune system finally succumbed to a minor cut or a cold or tainted water.

  Then I met her. Ten years after the crash, I met her.

  She lived in a community of the weak and the vulnerable, living in isolation aboard a cluster of rusting gas platforms in the North Sea. There were four hundred and fifty of them living there and, I realise this only now, back then that was quite probably the largest self-sustaining community left in Great Britain.

  She was to become the driving force for recovery. It was this remarkable woman who kept things together as we rebuilt our country from the abandoned ruins of the Oil Age.

  I’m an old man now, too bloody old. If we still used the pre-crash calendar it would be the year 2061 as I write this.

  Today, the world has lights again, computers, even trams and trains, technology that was once taken for granted before the crash. It’s a very different world. There are far fewer people, owning far fewer things. The skyline no longer bristles with telecoms pylons sprouting satellite dishes and mobile phone antennae. There are no longer garish advertising billboards or phallic mine’s-bigger-than-yours high-rise office towers. Instead, our horizons are broken by a sea of wind turbines, big and small.

  I think of it as her world.

  She helped make it. She helped define it. I see her stubbornness, her determination, her common sense, her sense of fair play and her maternal wisdom in everything around me.

  But sadly she’s a footnote in history. The e-books being written on the Oil Crash by academics today tend to focus on the things that went wrong in the first weeks and months of the crisis. Not on the rebuilding that began ten years later.

  So her name is a small footnote. Just a surname in fact.

  Sutherland.

  But I met her. I actually knew her.

  Adam Brooks

  21 December, 51 AC [After the Crash]

  Chapter 1

  2010 - Eight days after the Oil Crash

  North London

  ‘I’m really, really thirsty, Mummy.’ A quiet voice - her son.

  ‘Yeah,’ whispered her daughter, ‘me too.’

  Jenny Sutherland realised they’d not stopped since the first light of dawn had made it possible to pick their way through the rubbish strewn streets without the help of a torch.

  Her mouth was dry and tacky too. She looked up and down the deserted high street; every shop window a jagged frame of threatening glass shards, every metal-shutter-protected shopfront was crumpled and stove in. Several cars, skewed across both sides of the road, smouldered in the pale morning light, sending up acrid wisps of burning-rubber smoke into the grey sky. She glanced at the stores either side of them, all dark caves within, but all promising goods inside that had yet to be looted.

  Jenny would much rather have stayed where they were, out in the middle of the road, well clear of the dark shadows, the interiors. But water, safe bottled water, was something not to be without. Her children were right, this was probably as good a place as any to see what they could find.

  ‘All right,’ she said.

  She turned to her daughter, Leona, and handed her one of their two kitchen knives. ‘You stay here and mind Jacob.’

  Leona’s pale oval face, framed by dark hair, looked drawn and prematurely old; she had eyes that had seen too much in the last few days, eyes that looked more like those of a haunted veteran from some horrible and bloody war than those of a nineteen-year-old girl. A week ago at this time of the morning Jenny could imagine her daughter lying under a quilt and wearily considering whether to bother dragging herself across the university campus to attend the first study period of the day. Now, here she was being asked to make ready to defend her little brother’s life at a moment’s notice with nothing better than a vegetable knife whilst the matter of a drink of water was seen to.

  ‘Mum,’ she said, ‘we should stay together.’

  Jenny shook her head firmly. ‘You both stay here. If you hear me shout out to run, you run, understand?’

  Leona nodded and swallowed nervously. ‘Okay.’

  ‘Mummy, be careful,’ whispered Jacob, his wide eyes hidden behind cracked glasses and bent frames.

  She ruffled his blond hair. ‘I’ll be fine.’ She even managed a reassuring smile before turning towards the nearest shop: a WH Smith’s newsagent.

  She could see it had been repeatedly visited and picked over in the last week from the litter strewn out of the doorway and into the street. It was surprising, even now, after so many days of chaos, how worthwhile finds could still be had amidst the debris - a can of soda pop here, a packet of crisps there. Looters, it seemed, weren’t the systematic type; the shadowed corners of a floor, the spaces behind counters, the backs of shelves, still yielded goodies for someone patient enough to squat down and look.

  She stepped towards the shop, her feet crunching across granules of glass. Outside the door - wrenched open and dangling from twisted hinges - sat a news-board bearing a scrawled headline from last Wednesday.

  OIL CRASH - CHAOS ACROSS LONDON

  Wednesday seemed so long ago now; it was the day this country flipped into panic mode, completely spiralled out of control. The day the government suddenly decided it needed to be honest and tell the public that things had become extremely serious; that there would be severe rationing of food and water and there’d be martial law.

  Actually, Wednesday was the day the world panicked.

  She’d witnessed snarling fights, torn hair, bloodied knives, things set on fire, bodies in the street casually stepped over by wild-eyed looters pushing overladen shopping trolleys, and woefully few police, who watched, powerless to stop any of it. A madness had descended upon everyone, particularly here in London, as people desperately scrambled to grab what could be taken, and were prepared to kill in order to keep hold of it. Jenny remembered the news stories of the Katrina survivors in New Orleans; those stories paled against what she and her children had seen.

  She stepped inside, holding her breath as she did so.

  Standing still, she let her eyes adjust to the dim interior. Like every other shop it looked like a whirlwind had torn through. The floor was a mash of spoiled goods, newspapers, magazines and paperback novels; shelves dangled precariously off the walls and a row of fridge doors stood open, the contents long since emptied.

  A plastic CD case cracked noisily beneath her shoe as she slowly moved deeper into the store, her eyes working hard across the carpet of trampled and soiled stock, searching for an overlooked bottle of water, a can of Coke. Something.

  ‘You okay, Mum?’ called Leona.

  ‘I’m all right!’ she replied, hating the feathery sound of growing fear in her voice.

  The sooner they cleared London the better. After that . . . Jenny didn’t have a clue. All she knew was that this city was death now. There were too many people tucked away in the dim corners of every street, cowering in dark homes, ready to use a knife or a smashed glass bottle or a gun to take what they wanted, or keep what they had. She really had no idea what they’d do once their feet hit a B-road flanked by open fields. She entertained a fanciful notion of living off the land, Jacob trapping rabbits and
cooking them over a campfire; all thick jumpers and outdoors rude health. Almost idyllic, just like that old BBC show, The Survivors. If only Andy was with them . . .

  Not now, Jenny, not now.

  Her husband - their father - was gone. Dead in the city.

  Crying comes later when we’re clear of this place. All right?

  She thought she saw the glint of a soda can on the floor - dented, but quite possibly still full of something sickly sweet and bubbly. She was bending down to pick it up when she heard a noise. A plastic clack followed by a slosh of liquid. An instantly recognisable sound; that of a plastic two-litre bottle of some drink being casually up-ended and swigged from.

  ‘All right?’ A boy’s voice, a teenager perhaps; the cadence wavering uncertainly between choirboy and manhood.

  Her eyes darted to where the voice had come from. Adjusted to the dark now, she picked out a row of four . . . maybe five of them, sitting on crates, buckets, boxes. She could see the pale outline of sporty stripes and swooshes, trainers and caps, and the soft amber glow of several cigarette tips.

  ‘Uh . . . fine . . . thanks,’ she replied.

  ‘You after somethin’?’ Another voice, a little slurred this one.

  ‘I . . . I was looking for something to drink,’ she replied, taking one small step backwards. ‘But forget it, you can have this shop. I’ll try another.’

  Keep your voice calm.

  ‘Don’ matter,’ said the first voice, ‘we got loads. Wanna share?’

  She heard a snigger. Several cigarette tips pulsed and bobbed in the dark. She recognised the smell - a familiar odour from long ago, from college days, the same smell she picked up occasionally off the dirty laundry Leona brought back from university. Dope.