turned to look at him and saw in his eyes that he was talking from experience.
‘Seriously.’ He rested a hand on the gun’s still-warm barrel. ‘Don’t do this.’
They heard the sound of a door swinging shut and the clang of feet on the metal rungs of the stairs. All eyes drifted up and watched Howard hasten his way down, wheezing and puffing at the bottom of each flight. He was holding something in his hands.
‘Leona, wait, I’ve got—’ he called out from the top of the last flight of steps, the words were pulled away by the wind. Finally, he made his way across the deck, pushing through the crowd towards her, finally spotting Jenny and Leona by the railing. For a moment he gasped, trying to catch his breath.
He’d told her to wait. That meant he must have found something that mitigated the circumstances. She felt the resolve to kill without mercy begin to ebb away. Her hands loosened their grip on the shotgun and she let Adam silently relieve her of it. She turned towards the sweating, gasping old man beside her. ‘Howard, what did you find?’
He opened his left hand. ‘Martha was right.’
She saw a single loop of blonde hair in his fleshy palm. She reached out and touched it with the tip of her finger. The right texture. She picked it up and held the lock of hair to her nose. Her smell.
Hannah.
Unmistakably Hannah.
‘NO! I . . . I did not t-touch her!’ said Latoc. She turned to him and saw his eyes were wide with fear, the last vestige of composure torn from his face like a cheap plastic Halloween mask. ‘Understand . . . God told me I could have the other one . . . Natasha. But not Hannah! He s-said I could have—’
‘Oh, fuck off!’ said Leona, lifting a booted foot off the deck and kicking his groin through the gap between the railings. Both his feet lost purchase on the narrow lip of metal and he flapped desperately with his hands to keep hold of the railing. His unbandaged hand found the vertical stanchion, sliding down the pitted metal, cheese-grating the skin of his hand on the way down. The other arm lost its hold completely; the hand swathed in layers of bandaging gave him little more than a mittened hook to grasp with. He hung there for a moment, bloodied and scraped, wrapped tightly around the base of the stanchion, the rusting post creaking perilously with his weight. He swung, knuckles and sinews in his hand bulging as he clung on desperately. The bandaged hand flapped around the pole, trying ineffectually to get a purchase on it, too.
‘PLEEEAASSE!!’ he screamed, his long Jesus-like locks flickering and dancing in the updraught.
‘My daughter told you to fuck off,’ hissed Jenny, delivering a swift kick at his fingers.
Valérie Latoc’s wide-eyed face and his bloody hand disappeared from sight.
Chapter 80
10 years AC
‘LeMan 49/25a’ - ClarenCo Gas Rig Complex, North Sea
I look at this place and I see something very different to the dome. I don’t see floodlights piercing the night sky. Instead I see candles made from animal fat. I don’t see London’s lifeless horizon of glass tower blocks. Instead I see the North Sea. I don’t hear the thudding beat of a boom-box, I hear the soft murmur of the tide. In the evenings I hear the strumming of a guitar, snatches of conversation from open portholes, the giggle of children’s voices.
And chickens, lots of the stupid little things.
What I see when I look around is a time before the oil age, before the steam age, even. This is what they’ve built out here, a life that I guess wouldn’t look out of place in the middle ages. Minus the ignorance, minus the superstitions, minus the witch burnings.
Who would have thought you could actually turn five rusting gas platforms into a self-sustaining village? They managed it - Jennifer Sutherland and her family and followers.
I used to miss the pre-crash world with its conveniences and distractions. I used to miss a million and one little things during those years we were at the dome. But now I’ve seen this place, I don’t miss that dead world any more. I think this is what the future should look like. Not these ugly rigs, but the plants, the chickens, the animal-fat candles. Life without taking endlessly.
There were a few painful days after we arrived - bridges needed to be rebuilt. These people were so utterly divided