had been guarding the narrow quay around the sides doubled back swiftly, keen not to be left behind.
Snoop cocked an anxious eyebrow. ‘Chief? We ready?’
‘Yes. Let’s not waste another bloody second.’
Snoop rapped the helm with his knuckles. ‘Chief says go, Jeff.’
Jeff had once been a truck driver. Said he could handle boats, too. He’d piloted the tug up the Thames several years ago when Flight Lieutenant Brooks and his merry men had been sent to reconnoitre the river up to Kingston. He’d managed not to wrap the thing around a bridge support or end up stuck on a silt bank. Jeff seemed to know what he was doing.
‘Right, here we go.’ With a hand that was all knuckles, veins and fading tattoos, he eased the throttle forward.
The diesel engine dropped a note and the tug lurched subtly as the engine engaged. At first Maxwell wondered whether they’d overestimated what this small ugly vessel could pull as it seemed to make no headway at all, the weed-tufted concrete quay beside them showing no sign of receding.
The engine chugged laboriously for a moment, but slowly the tug began to move.
‘Shit, thought we were stuck,’ said Snoop.
With several feet of slapping water between them and the quay, Maxwell finally let slip a barely audible sigh of relief, just as several dozen of the more foolhardy workers emerged out of the rear entrance of the dome to stand on the quayside and watch them pull away. A couple of his boys fired off opportunistic shots in their direction and the emerging crowd dived to the ground amidst the weeds.
Maxwell gave Snoop a glance. ‘Tell those fucking idiots not to waste their ammo.’
Snoop nodded and promptly left the cockpit.
As the tug strained and groaned and the train of one tug and three barges slowly eased away from the quay, Maxwell smiled grimly.
Good bloody riddance.
For the last ten years of his life this drab and increasingly threadbare over-sized circus tent had been his millstone. Many was the night he’d wondered whether the smartest thing he could’ve done was let everyone in on the first night of the crash and let all of those poor bastards get on with it. If they wanted to end up like Wembley Stadium and tearing each other apart for tins of corned beef and bottles of water twelve weeks in, they could be his bloody guests. He could quite easily have delegated the nightmare to Brooks to handle, or one of the Cobra-appointed civilian safety-zone assistants and just walked out the front and gone back home to his South Bank apartment, emptied his drinks cabinet and then emptied his gun. But he’d decided to stay and do the dutiful thing, to be the one to make all the hard decisions these last ten years.
The quayside had sluggishly slipped far enough away for Jeff to spin the wheel and steer the tugboat out towards the middle of the Thames.
Good riddance to all of it.
Those poor bastards left behind probably weren’t going to make it; weakened by months, years, of malnourishment, many of them already falling prey to ailments due to vitamin and protein deficiencies of one kind or another. Anybody with half a wit should have known that the acres of parking tarmac they’d managed to cultivate out at the front was little more than an exercise in window-dressing; smoke and mirrors. What they were growing was just about enough to keep half of them going a while longer - but nothing there that would keep them going through winter.
They were all going to die.
Or maybe they’d end up like those wild children; eating rats, dogs. Eating each other.
He watched the warm afternoon sunlight play across the dome and wondered what moronic government pencil-necks had thought it a bright idea to locate any of the zones in the middle of a city. For that matter, what moronic government pencil-necks had thought the global oil crash would be nothing more than a three-month-long economic crisis that could be more than catered for by setting up a couple of dozen over-sized soup kitchens.
So obvious now . . . Of course, armed with hindsight, he admitted that the old world had been heading towards something like that; an end-of-times event. Not just a twelve-week-fucking-crisis, but The End. He remembered an economist once calling it ‘Petri dish economics’ - where a bacteria feeds on a growth solution, expanding to fill its grow space and finally, upon consuming the last of the free food, it turns on