hidden. And with no power there was no clean water. People were very quickly dying of cholera, or killing each other for bottled water.
There’d been many small communities outside the cities that were better prepared; foresightful people with beards and chunky-knit jumpers who’d been rattling on about Peak Oil for years and preparing for the inevitable end. The sort of scruffy new-age weirdy-beardies that Leona had once turned her nose up at; that reminded her a bit of her dad. They had their freshwater wells, their vegetable plots, their chickens and pigs.
The one thing they didn’t have, though, was guns. So many of them were overrun and picked clean by the starving thousands flooding out of London, Birmingham, Manchester. Picked clean . . . and in many cases, since there was no sign of the police or the army or any sense that law and order was going to return, the women raped and the men killed. Years of foreknowledge and preparation accounted for nothing. It had simply made them a target.
Survival through those first few weeks and months turned everyone into a brutal caricature of themselves. Everyone had done something they weren’t proud of to stay alive. For a while it was nothing more than a twisted form of Darwinism at work; it was the most selfish who managed to survive: the takers.
Hordes of people emerging from the cities - running from the rioting and the gangs making the most of the anarchy, they choked the roads, endless rivers of people on foot, all of them hungry. At first it was begging, when they came across the well-tended vegetable gardens and allotments and chicken runs out beyond the urban sprawl. Soon it became a matter of stealing after dark. Finally the migrating hordes just picked clean anything they found, and if a person was stupid enough to try and explain they’d been preparing for this for years and tried to stop them stripping his garden clean, then it turned even nastier.
Leona remembered the day their small settlement had been raided by a gang of about thirty men, several years after the crash. By then, they’d assumed roving bands of scroungers were a thing of the past, died out, killed by others or starved long ago. Then one cold winter morning they turned up, armed with guns, some of them wearing ragged police and army uniforms, emerging from the trees, drawn by the smell of woodsmoke.
She shuddered at the memory of what followed and forced her attention back on the playing children. But her mind wasn’t done yet.
They were always men, though, weren’t they? The ‘takers’. Groups of men with guns.
Her mind played flashes of that winter morning; the raping in the barn. The ensuing struggle. Spatters of blood on the snow. Screams. Gunshots.
Stop it.
Leona turned to look at her mother watching the children play; always on guard, always on duty.
That’s why she doesn’t trust men any more. That winter morning . . .
It was why they now struggled on out here on these windswept rigs. In the aftermath of that morning, after the men had gone, Mum had gathered her and Jacob and a few others who’d decided to leave, and she’d left. Soon after, they’d found the rigs, and she’d decided that’s where home was going to be.
What happened that morning to her, in the barn, mum never spoke of. But she’d never trusted men since. Well, that wasn’t entirely true. She trusted Walter, but only because she knew she had a hold over him. He was like a puppy, always eager to please her, always around their quarters, like a live-in uncle, always there.
Mum trusted him and herself. That was it. When they first moved onto the rigs there’d been about eighty of them; mostly those from the raided settlement. Now there were over four hundred and fifty; people they’d encountered in and around Bracton, looking for safety from men with guns. Quite possibly the same ones. And mum had allowed them to join - safety in numbers and all that. Mostly women and children, a few old men.
Leona watched as her mother goaded Hannah to chase down one of the other kids.
But now there’s too many people, aren’t there?
Too many for Jenny to indefinitely remain an undisputed leader. There were grumblings amongst some of them that Jenny Sutherland was unelected and yet making all the rules. A self-appointed dictator and Walter, with the only pair of keys to the gun locker, her lackey.
Leona suspected that one