goin’ to your old home an’ stuff?’
Nathan nodded. ‘Sure.’
‘We’ll treat ’em good, you know? Ain’t gonna be like no pirate raid or nothing. This’ll be our new home. All workin’ together an’ shit. Pooling what we got.’
‘Yeah, I know.’
Snoop looked at him. A long hard look that suggested there was more that he wanted to say. ‘Me and you, Nate. Know what I’m saying? Me and you.’
Nathan could hear that gently probing tone in Snoop’s voice; a tone of voice that was asking whether he could be trusted, even if he wasn’t using those words.
Nathan smiled uneasily. ‘Sure.’
‘One day . . . you know? Maxwell . . . he won’t be around for ever.’
Nathan turned to look at him. Snoop grinned. He slapped his shoulder. ‘Later. I gotta go see how much more shit we got to bring up from the mezz.’
Chapter 66
10 years AC
O2 Arena - ‘Safety Zone 4’, London
They stood in silence amongst a cluster of several dozen large green plastic water butts. They were filled with human waste collected from the latrine cabanas inside the dome. The air above them seemed to shimmer with the warmth of fermentation. The odour of rancid shit was so powerful Leona felt like it was coating her tongue, the back of her throat, lining her lungs.
‘Jesus, Brooksie, why the fuck d’you have to pick this place to meet?’ said one of the men.
‘Why do you think? We got a little privacy here. Just make it look like you’re taking a leak.’
The men obediently circled around a pile of waste and pretended to fumble at their flies.
‘Right then,’ said Adam, ‘let’s start talking. We won’t have long before the whistle goes.’
‘So,’ said Leona, trying to look like she had some purpose being here standing amongst four men supposedly taking a piss break. ‘These guys were in your platoon?’
‘All that’s left of our unit,’ replied Adam quietly. ‘This is Sergeant Danny Walfield,’ he said pointing at the man standing opposite her. Dark, almost black, hair, had been kept cropped relatively short, an untidy cut that looked as if shears had been used. On top it was going thin. He had a thick moustache curving down either side of his mouth, like the black neoprene-grip handlebars of a racing bike. She guessed he was in his mid-thirties.
‘All right, love?’ he grunted. She nodded back.
‘And this is Lance Corporal Sean Davies. But everyone calls him Bushey.’
A slightly younger man with long curly ginger hair pulled back into a bulky ponytail and a scruffy, wispy goatee around his mouth. ‘Hey,’ he said with a small self-conscious wave.
‘And Lance Corporal Davey Potter.’
Thinning a little at the temples, long brown frizzy hair swooped down either side of his narrow face to unite with a thick grizzly beard he’d clearly not bothered to tame in years. He pushed his round-framed glasses up his nose. ‘They call me Harry,’ he said in a tone of voice that sounded as if she ought to have already guessed that. She cocked her head, not sure what he was getting at.
‘On account of the glasses and the surname. Potter? Remember them books?’
The books? Then she got it. She remembered them. Jacob hated those bloody books.
‘Right, I get it.’ She looked at his unruly hair. ‘I’m surprised they don’t call you Hagrid.’
He shrugged. ‘Well, I had short back and sides back when I joined the platoon, didn’t I?’
‘And this,’ Adam said to the three men, ‘is Leona.’
They exchanged formal nods. Like Adam, like every other worker here, they were wiry-lean; every last ounce of surplus fat burned away years ago as a slow and steady downhill curve of calories in their diet was waging a war of attrition on their bodies; slowly but surely starving them to death.
‘Right, so like I was saying lads,’ he said, ‘Leona’s the one that came in last month, after those two boys. All three of them came down together from this other settlement in Norfolk.’
‘Norfolk is it?’ said Harry. ‘That’s where we was based.’
Adam carried on. ‘Their settlement is a going concern, not another crash ’n’ burn. It’s doing just fine and it’s quite a big settlement, right?’
She nodded. ‘About four hundred and fifty of us.’
The men looked at each other, stunned.
‘That’s right,’ said Adam. ‘And the thing is, lads, Leona says we’d be welcome there.’
‘You got food . . . you know, like for ever?’ asked Bushey.
Leona nodded. ‘We’ve been self-sustaining for the last four years.’
‘It’s not just fucking vegetables?’
‘We have fish, loads of fish. We have