managing everyone’s expectations and morale . . . keeping the sinking boat as steady as possible.
Because sink was what it was eventually going to do.
The Zone simply wasn’t capable of being turned into a giant farm-stead capable of producing forty thousand calories of food every single day. The workers - two thousand men and women of all ages and a hundred or so children - were eventually going to starve very slowly. Not this winter. Maybe not even the next. But it was going to happen eventually.
Maxwell’s job had become one thing; managing the decline.
Keeping order on the decks as the good ship slowly slid under. The boys - the praetorians - were going to be his rearguard. As long as there was fuel for the generators so they could play their games and have their noisy music and flashing lights once a fortnight, as long as he had a store cupboard of privileges to offer them, as long as he kept them on his side . . . they’d do absolutely anything for him.
One day soon he was going to have to rely on them to evict large numbers of the workers, to make that food downstairs last a while longer. And then again, eventually, he’d have to rely on the boys he most trusted to evict other boys. Until one day, it was just going to be him and Edward ‘Snoop’ Tindall. Then he’d ask Edward to leave. And finally alone here in Safety Zone 4, he’d pull out that rather fine bottle of Bordeaux he’d liberated from the basement of Harrods, kick his shoes off and get comfortable on one of these leather couches. He’d take his time, make sure he enjoyed the entire bottle before blowing his brains out.
See, that was the long game. Divide and conquer, and divide again. Until he was the last man standing.
But now . . . the glimmer of an interesting plan B existed.
He pushed aside the paperwork on the coffee table.
He had allowed himself a little fantasy. A fantasy in which some going concern existed, a going concern big enough to sustain most of his people. In his fantasy, he’d imagined some castle or stately mansion in the countryside outside London. Surrounded by a network of cultivated fields, and farm animals - all that difficult set-up work already done for them. There just for the taking. He’d even managed to gild that little fantasy by casting himself as some sort of jovial medieval baron in his keep surrounded by bountiful fields and dutiful peasants working them for him.
There’d been patrols around London, around the outskirts of London, even into the countryside, but they’d found nothing that could support a wholesale relocation. Just a few small family-sized farms that had been barely coping. Farms they’d stripped clean, of course.
So that’s what it remained, his fantasy. No medieval fiefdom. No Baron Maxwell.
But those boys . . .
Those two well-fed boys and their four hundred-and-something community living on . . . what did they say? An oil rig? And they had power, too?
He sat back and pinched his bristly chin gently between thumb and forefinger.
Chapter 48
10 years AC
Shepherd’s Bush, London
Leona had lost count of the days. She guessed maybe fourteen or fifteen of them had gone by. Obviously Jacob and Nathan weren’t coming. Obviously, they hadn’t made it.
It’s time.
She’d decided that this morning was going to be her last, but had spent the day in a fog of ridiculous procrastination, pondering how best to do it. Pills in bed had been the plan. But then an awful thought had occurred to her that she might not do it right; not enough to kill her outright, but leave her alive with a failing organ, or paralysed. In any case, the chemist on the corner of Uxbridge Road had been stripped of every single medicine.
She’d found a knife and had a trial run at seeing whether she’d have the courage to push it through her skin, all the way so that it severed an artery. Just like last time, she’d baulked at doing it, heaving several times, her forearm marked and scratched with a dozen aborted attempts.
As the afternoon waned into evening she realised the only certain way of doing this was a drop. A drop high enough to ensure she wasn’t left dying in agony with ruptured organs and shattered bones.
She knew a good place.
One last trip upstairs to say goodbye to their bedrooms. Leona had always considered a person’s bedroom to be the