Afterlight Page 5

  The young man’s helpless face was replaced with shaking camera footage of an enormous oil slick, entirely aflame, spreading across a slim shipping channel. The towering pyramid of fire tapered into a thick black column of smoke that, in terms of scale, reminded Adam of photos of the pyroclastic cloud above Mount St Helens. The morning sun was lost beneath it. The sea that should have been a bright blue was a dull twilight grey. Beneath the shaking pixellated footage, red tickertape indicated further explosions in the Strait of Malacca.

  ‘And that, of course, is a very dangerous scenario. Just by taking Saudi Arabia and two or three of these other key producers out of the loop we’re looking at a shortfall of fifty-five to sixty-five per cent of the world’s oil production capacity right there.’

  ‘Now that sounds quite serious,’ said the anchor with a thoughtful frown spreading across his tanned face. ‘Presumably we can expect some sort of impact on us here in the UK. Are we going to be looking at queues at the pumps?’

  The expert stared back at him, not studio-savvy enough to dial-back the look of utter dismay on his face. ‘Uh . . . no, you . . . you’re missing the point. It’s a lot more serious than that. In the oil markets, we call this type of . . . of scenario, well there are a number of what are called Perfect Storm Scenarios—’

  A cocked eyebrow from the anchor. ‘Perfect Storm?’

  The expert nodded silently.

  Dead-air time. The anchor prodded him gently. ‘Which means what exactly?’

  ‘Enough wild-card events occurring synchronously to completely shut down oil processing and distribution—’

  ‘Affecting, of course, the price per barrel; presumably a major blip on the price of other commodities. So, this kind of an interruption of oil availability . . . how long before we can expect to feel the impact of this on our wallets? How long before we—’

  ‘You really don’t get it, do you?’

  The anchor stared at his studio guest, his mouth hanging open.

  ‘It’s a Perfect Storm . . . there’s no contingency for it. We’re screwed.’

  Adam glanced at the men in his unit, silent now, boots shuffling uncomfortably beneath the tables.

  ‘We . . . we’re a net importer,’ the expert continued, ‘a net importer of oil and gas. More importantly, we’re a big importer of everything else . . .’

  The anchor nodded, an expression of practised gravitas easing onto his face, as if he’d known exactly how serious things were all along.

  ‘. . . Food, for example,’ continued the expert. ‘Food,’ he said with added emphasis. ‘There’s very little storage and warehousing in the UK because it’s a drain on profit. What we have instead are “just-in-time” distribution systems; warehouses that need only store and refrigerate twenty-four hours’ worth of food instead of two weeks’ worth. As long as haulage trucks and freight ships keep moving, it works just fine. But, no oil,’ the expert shook his head, ‘no food.’

  The anchor’s eyes widened. ‘No food?’

  ‘We could well be looking at a severe rationing programme, perhaps even some form of martial law to enforce that.’

  ‘Martial law? Oh, surely that’s—’

  ‘A Perfect Storm . . . we’re into uncharted territory this morning.’ The expert’s voice was beginning to waver nervously. ‘There’s no way of knowing how serious this could get . . . or . . . or how quickly. Believe me, there are industry doom-sayers who’ve long been pointing to this kind of event as a . . . as a global paradigm shift.’

  ‘A global . . . a what?’

  ‘Paradigm shift. A . . . well, a complete global shutdown.’

  Adam turned to look at his men. Silent and still. The last time he’d seen the lads like this was when an unexpected third six-month extension on their rotation to Afghanistan was announced to them last year.

  A moment later the first mobile phone began to trill.

  Chapter 8

  10 years AC

  Bracton Harbour, Norfolk

  They all heard it and froze. It was unmistakable and instantly recognisable, an after-echo peeling off the myriad warehouse walls, across the open quayside and slowly petering out.

  ‘That was a gun,’ said Walter.

  Like it needed saying.

  Jacob lowered a sack full of boxes and plastic bottles of pills through the storage hatch into the boat’s fore cabin and stood up straight, squinting as he scanned the buildings overlooking the quayside. ‘It sounded pretty close to me.’

  ‘Maybe we should leave,’ said Bill. He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose and glanced anxiously out of the cockpit. ‘Just leave the rest of the stuff and go.’

  Walter was giving that consideration. They could always come back another day. But then if it was a rival group of survivors staking a claim, attempting to frighten them off, they’d be buggered. Bracton was their only source of essentials.

  Another shot.

  ‘Dammit,’ the old man muttered unhappily.

  ‘Shit, man, that was definitely closer,’ said Nathan, his face in an involuntary nervous grin.

  ‘Are we going or what?’ asked Bill.

  Walter’s eyes narrowed. He remained where he was on the quay, scanning the buildings for signs of movement. Undecided.

  ‘Walter?’

  Dammit . . . we can’t just go. He knew that. They needed to find out who was out there, what they wanted. Bracton was all they had.

  ‘My gun,’ he said, ‘pass me my gun.’

  Kevin reached down into the cockpit for the shotgun and passed it over the narrow sliver of choppy water to Walter.

  ‘What the hell are you doing, Walt?’ asked Howard. ‘There’s just you, me, Dennis and Bill . . . and the boys. We can’t get into a fight!’

  Walter was tempted to jump in the yacht, run up the sail, turn the motor on and flee. But that would be it. They needed to clear the marina, the warehouses, the brewery’s freshwater well was already being tapped by themselves, and wasn’t fair game for anyone passing through.

  ‘We can’t leave,’ he snapped irritably. ‘We have to find out who that is.’

  ‘S’right,’ Nathan nodded, ‘this place is ours, man. They need to know that.’

  Jacob picked up the assault rifle from the foredeck and hopped across onto the quay to join the others ashore.

  ‘Hey, gimme the gun,’ said Nathan.

  ‘It’s okay, I’ve got it.’

  ‘But I got better eyesight, Jay.’

  Jacob made a face, tight-lipped.

  Walter nodded. ‘He’s got a point. Best give the SA80 to Nathan.’

  Jacob passed the gun over to him resentfully.

  Another couple of shots rang out across the open space of the quayside.

  ‘Jesus!’ hissed Dennis ducking down in the boat’s cockpit.

  ‘Look!’ shouted Nathan, jabbing a finger towards the loading bay of the nearest warehouse. From the dark interior, out through large, open sliding doors, a man emerged, staggering frantically towards them. He’d seen them, was making his way towards them. He cried out something - it sounded garbled or perhaps foreign.

  Following him, two more men appeared from the doorway, both armed. They walked unhurriedly after the first. He wasn’t going to run anywhere. He looked weak and spent. No danger of him escaping. One of them shouldered his gun and fired off a shot. It pinged off the ground a yard away from the staggering man, sending a puff of concrete dust into the air, and ricocheted in the general direction of Walter and the others.

  ‘Fuck!’ the old man hissed, raising his shotgun. ‘Ready your weapons,’ he uttered to the others.

  Nathan raised the assault rifle to his shoulder.

  ‘Safety,’ muttered Walter, ‘lad, you need to take the safety off.’

  ‘Oh, yeah.’

  The man being pursued continued to stagger towards them. They could see now he’d already been hit in the thigh, the left trouser leg was dark and wet with blood.

  ‘Aidez-moi . . . aidez-moi!!’
he gasped, his eyes wide with terror beneath a mop of dark curls of hair.

  Another shot whistled past the man, almost clipping his shoulder, and thudding into the fibreglass side of the boat.

  Fuck this.

  ‘STOP RIGHT THERE!!’ bellowed Walter.

  The two men slowed, but didn’t halt.

  The wounded man collapsed several yards in front of them. He groaned with pain as he clutched his thigh in both hands, sweat slicked his olive skin, sticking dark ringlets of hair to his face.

  ‘Ils essayant de me tuer!!’ he gasped. ‘They going to kill me!’ he said again with a thick accent.

  ‘I SAID STOP!’ shouted Walter again, shouldering his shotgun and aiming down the barrel at them, now standing only a dozen yards away. One of them was wearing a police anti-stab vest, the other a grubby pair of red tracksuit bottoms and a faded khaki sweatshirt. Both of them, like Walter, with lank hair tied back into a ponytail and a face of unshaven bristles.

  ‘Out of our fuckin’ way,’ snapped one of them. ‘He’s going to die.’

  Walter realised he was trembling; the end of the shotgun’s barrel was jittering around for everyone to see.

  ‘You just . . . just bloody well stay back!’ shouted Walter, breathing deeply, shakily, the air whistling in and out of his bulbous nose.

  One of the men looked up at him and shook his head dismissively. ‘Shut the fuck up, you old fart.’

  The man in the stab vest took a quick step forward and lowered his gun at the foreign man on the floor. ‘This is how we deal with dirty fucking Paki wankers.’

  The wounded man screwed his eyes shut and uttered the beginnings of a prayer in French.

  ‘You . . . y-you can’t just . . . shoot him,’ cut in Jacob. ‘It’s not right.’

  ‘Yeah?’ said stab vest. ‘Is that right, son? Am I infringing his fucking human rights?’

  Jacob swallowed nervously. He nodded. ‘It’s just not . . . you can’t!’

  ‘Yeah? You get in my way I’ll do you next, you little prick.’ The man levelled his gun at the Frenchman’s head. ‘Fuckin’ scum like this . . . only way to deal with—’

  Walter’s shotgun suddenly boomed, snapping stab-vest’s head back and throwing a long tendril of hair, blood, brains and skull up into the air. The other man looked up, startled, and swung his weapon towards the old man.

  Instinctively Nathan squeezed several rounds off from his assault rifle. Only one of his shots landed home, punching the man at the base of his throat. His knees buckled and he dropped to the ground like a sack full of coconuts.

  ‘Oh, fuck!!’ whispered Walter. ‘Oh, fuck,’ he wheezed, ‘I didn’t bloody mean to. Damn thing just went off in my hand!’

  Red tracksuit’s legs scissored on the ground as he gurgled noisily, his hands clasped around his throat as if throttling himself, blood quickly pooling on the gritty concrete beneath him.

  ‘Walter . . .’ said Kevin from the back of the boat. He stood up, eager to clamber ashore and get a closer look at the mess. ‘You blew his head off!’

  ‘Dammit! Kevin, sit down and be quiet!’ snapped David.

  ‘Oh, shit, man!’ said Nathan, his features ashen. ‘He’s dying! What - what the fuck are we gonna do?’

  They watched the man squirm on the ground for a moment.

  ‘We have to do something!’ shouted Jacob. ‘He’s bleeding everywhere! ’

  Walter stared, dumbfounded, smoke still curling from the barrel of his shotgun.

  ‘He’s dying,’ said Bill. ‘We can’t help him.’

  Walter nodded.

  ‘We could take him back to Dr Gupta,’ said Jacob bending down to peer at the man convulsing on the ground.

  ‘Don’t be stupid!’ snapped David. ‘He’s bleedin’ out! He’ll be dead before we get him back.’

  The sound of the man’s gurgling, bubbling breath filled the space between them.

  ‘Then, shit, we ought to . . .’ Nathan started, looking at the others. ‘You know? We can’t leave him like this!’

  Walter nodded, finally roused from a state of shock. ‘Yes . . . Christ. Yes, I-I suppose you’re right,’ he said quietly. He placed the shotgun carefully down on the ground and tugged the assault rifle out of Nathan’s rigid hands.

  ‘Best close your eyes, mate,’ he said to the man on the ground.

  The man struggled to say something. Bubbles and strangled air whistled out through the jagged hole in his throat, whilst his mouth flapped uselessly.

  ‘Look away, boys,’ he said to the others.

  Walter aimed, closed his own eyes and fired.

  Chapter 9

  10 years AC

  ‘LeMan 49/25a’ - ClarenCo Gas Rig Complex, North Sea

  Jenny looked down and watched Dr Tamira Gupta take charge of lifting the wounded man out of the boat. Tamira - ‘Tami’ as she was more commonly known - small and delicate, her dark hair pulled back out of the way into a businesslike bun, bossed the men and boys as they eased the man out of the cockpit.

  ‘Be very careful,’ she heard the woman bark at Jacob and Nathan as they lifted him into the net swinging just above the rising and falling foredeck. The man groaned weakly as he flopped across the coarse netting. Tami threw a blanket over him to keep him warm then signalled those above manning the davit to start winching him up.

  The net rose from the bobbing deck, swinging its catch in the fresh breeze. The sea was beginning to get a little lively, swells slapping against the nearby legs sending up small showers of salty spray.

  ‘So what the hell happened?’ Jenny asked Walter.

  He leant forward on the railing, watching the net slowly rise, and Dr Gupta clambering up the rope ladder onto the spider deck. He breathed deep and swallowed, looking like someone ready to vomit.

  ‘Walter?’

  ‘He was being chased like it was some kind of . . . of a bloody fox hunt. The poor sod was already wounded, saw us moored up on the quayside and getting ready to go and made straight towards us. The blokes chasing after him . . .’ Walter took another breath and watched the swinging net slowly rise for a moment.

  ‘The two blokes chasing him fired shots at him that nearly hit us. In fact, they didn’t seem to give a shit that they nearly hit us. They came over, standing right over him and were about to execute him when . . . when . . . the bloody gun just went off in my hands.’

  ‘You killed them?’

  Walter wavered for a moment, wondering whether he ought to tell Jenny that one of the men had been killed outright, but the other, they’d had to shoot like a wounded animal. ‘Yes, we killed them.’

  To his surprise she nodded approvingly. ‘Well, then you did the right thing.’

  ‘We checked around nearby. Didn’t find anyone else. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t more of them out there.’

  Jenny nodded.

  ‘Seems like they were after this Frenchman for a bit of fun.’

  ‘French?’

  ‘He spoke something before he passed out.’ Walter shrugged. ‘Been a long time since I’ve been in school - it sounded like French to me.’

  They watched as Tami climbed the last steps of the stairwell onto the cellar deck.

  She pushed her way through the crowd gathered around the davit cranes, pulled the netting aside and knelt down beside the man, quickly checking the wound, the man’s pulse.

  ‘I wonder how far he’s come?’ asked Jenny. ‘From mainland Europe?’

  Walter shook his head. ‘Or perhaps further? He’s quite dark. Could be from somewhere Mediterranean, possibly Middle Eastern?’

  ‘You think that made him a target? You know, being an outsider, a foreigner?’

  Walter tugged on the grey-white bristles of his beard, the slightest tremble still in his fingers. ‘By the look of those two men chasing him . . . who knows? Thugs with guns. You know the kind.’

  Jenny nodded, biting her lip. ‘I was starting to hope the mainland was a safe place again. I was hoping vicious bastards like that ha
d died out long ago.’

  Dr Gupta finished making an initial examination and had him transferred to a stretcher to be taken up to her infirmary. Jenny quickly excused herself to let Walter oversee the unloading of the boat whilst she pushed her way past the onlookers gathered along the railing.

  ‘Jenny,’ called out one of the women. ‘You going to tell us what happened?’

  ‘Not now,’ she called over her shoulder. She quickly climbed the steps to the cellar deck and joined Dr Gupta as she packed up her medical bag.

  ‘Tami, how is he?’

  ‘He has lost a lot of blood from the wound. I cannot see if there are any broken bones in there, or fragments. I will need to clean him out and take a look. He is also very malnourished by the look of him. In a very sorry way, I am afraid.’

  ‘Will he live?’

  She shrugged. ‘I really don’t know, Jenny. We have got plenty antibiotics to combat any infection and I’ll sedate him right now and take a look inside the wound, make sure there is no internal bleeding. I will see how we go from there.’

  ‘All right, I’ll let you get on with it.’

  Dr Gupta flicked a stiff smile at her then headed after the stretcher, being manoeuvred awkwardly up the next stairwell to the main deck by half a dozen pairs of hands.

  ‘Careful, Helen!’ she barked out at one of the youngsters she’d drafted to help heft the stretcher. ‘Both hands, please!’

  ‘I’m doing my best!’ the girl replied haughtily. ‘He’s heavy, though!’

  Jenny watched them go, pitying the poor sod being rattled around on the stretcher, moaning with every jar and bump.

  I hope he pulls through. There’s about a million questions I’d like to ask him.

  Walter puffed up the last of the steps and stood beside her, his red blotchy face dotted with sweat. ‘It all happened so quickly.’