Pieter nodded, his brow low and untroubled over his face. The granite will and resilience was something they all had, even if a sea of broiling terror lay underneath—and Max had no doubt they were all scared shitless. But in this world, you had to look strong, even around your closest friends. Twingo Glare, some called it.
Pieter disappeared into a side room, and a moment later the whine of an old air-raid siren started up, thrumming through the corridors of the observatory, rattling Max’s bones. He and Bill headed for the stairs, descending together, side by side, and stepped through the open main doors. Friends and companions they had known for these long decades sent their affections with a single flick of their eyelids. Then they were moving out across the grass, descending the hill, and the doors were barricaded shut behind them.
There was no room for soppy goodbyes. It was the only chance they had of surviving this.
They raced towards the town ahead as the siren spooled up to its full wail. The screaming in the forest continued to rise above the racket. It would be on them within the minute. Without a word to one another, sensing each other’s thoughts, they broke into a run towards their lives’ work.
Max Vandeborn had founded Twingo off his own back, along with Bill Bateman, just weeks after the End. The entire city of London, all of England—maybe the world—had been stripped of all its people in a single moment, leaving merely a few scattered random survivors. All there had been then was the whistling wind and millions of pieces of empty, deflated apparel littering the streets, left by their departed owners where they fell during the morning commute. They hadn’t even known if there had been any other survivors. But what else had there been to do?
Max had been a city banker, Bill an e-commerce entrepreneur. Buying and selling was what they knew, all they knew. And so with an empty, naked and deathly silent world staring them in the face, they had collected supplies from the infinitude of unattended supermarkets, picked a spot, nailed up a sign, and opened the business. And they had waited.
For weeks they had waited like that. But neither of them had been fazed. After the shock of the End, little fazed a survivor. Bill had lost a family of five, young wife, kids, a big five-bedroom townhouse in plush Muswell Hill. He’d been barely thirty then, but his face was on magazine covers. A real gold-star deal. After the End, he shut down, went cold, and the businessman within took over. That was how he coped.
The End was fine with Max. All he’d had was a pet chinchilla, and the damn thing had bitten him every time he went near it. He had no attachments but his money. He might have lost it all when the world’s microprocessors fizzed and turned to ash during the End, and all those ones and zero that passed for currency in the bank computers vanished right along with all those people, but you could always make money where there was demand. And he was betting on a lot of demand now the bottom had fallen out of everything.
It had been the Maxwell and William Trading Post then. It came to be called Twingo much later. The place began as a fenced-off chunk of homes and shops on the edge of the park, and spilled onto Her Majesty’s—as Max insisted they still were, and always would be—lawns, leading up the dome of the Royal Observatory upon the hill. Capping the central thoroughfare, conveniently blocking off the entire width of the street, was a transport lorry with a full complement of brand-new Nissan Twingos.
Some places were named after great men, battles, or ideas. Some were named for glory or in remembrance. Some, it seemed, were named for the sheer hell of it.
They reached the first of the huts, having slowed to a walk to stir confidence. They nodded in turn to each of the armed men and women standing atop the roofs of homes they had built with their own hands. They each nodded back, then went back to scanning the treeline. Max felt a spark of pride.
Soon, they had left Her Maj’s lawns behind and strode over the tarmacked thoroughfare, past stalls and stores, warehouses, and stock pens. The children, sick, and elderly were holed up inside the deadbolted concrete store sheds, each the nexus of a cluster