‘How dare you!’ she snapped, hoping to sound like an enraged headteacher. Instead it came out shrill and little-girly. She stepped back again, her foot finding a plastic bottle that cracked noisily beneath her shoe.
‘Hey? Where you goin’?’
She saw more movement, they were all getting up now.
‘I’m going,’ she announced. ‘You boys stay here and get pissed if that’s what you want, but I’m leaving.’
‘Look,’ said one of them, ‘why don’t you stay?’ Phrased as a question, as if she was being given a choice in the matter. The nearest boy took another step forward, wobbling uncertainly on his feet and swigging again from his plastic bottle.
Her hand closed around a wooden handle poking out from the waistline of her skirt. She pulled the knife out, feeling emboldened by the weight in her hand.
‘You stay where you are!’ she barked, holding the bread knife out in front of her.
‘I just wan’ you to give me a little luurrve.’
‘Yeah, me too,’ said one of the boys behind him.
‘I’ve got a knife!’ shouted Jenny, ‘and I will fucking well use it. Do you boys understand?’
That drunken giggling again.
‘We’re going to a part-eee,’ one of the others cheerfully announced from the back with a sing-song voice.
‘She’s doing me first,’ insisted the lad nearest her. He lurched clumsily forward, reaching out for her with big pale hands. Instinctively Jenny slashed at one of them.
‘Ahhh, fuck!!’ he screamed, tucking his hands back. ‘Shit! Bitch!! Bitch fuckin’ well cut me!’
A torch snapped on and, for a moment, she caught sight of the boy’s face. Beneath the peak of his hoodie-covered baseball cap she saw the porcelain skin of a child, pulled into a rictus sneer of hate and anger. Surely no more than fifteen, sixteen at a stretch, his big hands, one gashed, reached for the knife. It happened too quickly to remember anything more than a blur of movement. But a moment later she could see the handle protruding from the side of his waist, a dark bloom of crimson spreading out across his Adidas stripes.
The boy cried out, all trace of his puberty-cracked voice gone, now screaming like a startled toddler stung by a wasp. He collapsed heavily onto the floor of the shop, his desperate whimpering accompanied by the clatter of displaced bottles and cans, the scrape of feet as his mates drunkenly clambered forward either to help him or, far more likely, to overpower her now she no longer held her knife.
Jenny turned and ran, stumbling across an overturned newspaper rack, her foot slipping on the glossy covers of a spread of gossip magazines scattered across the shop floor. She headed towards the front of the store and grey daylight, leaving the drunk boys behind her.
This is how it’s going to be from now on, she realised with a growing sense of dread; the world Jacob and Leona will inherit is a world of feral youths, a lifetime of scavenging for the last tins of baked beans amidst smouldering ruins.
The Beginning
Chapter 2
10 years AC
‘LeMan 49/25a’ - ClarenCo Gas Rig Complex, North Sea
Jenny sat up in her cot, a scream caught silently in her throat.
That nightmare again.
There were others, of course. Plenty her subconscious mind could choose from, but that one in particular kept returning to haunt her sleep. It was worse than the other memories perhaps because the boys had been so young, just babies really - drunk, dangerous babies. Maybe because that particular encounter had happened the day after Andy died. She’d still been in shock then, confused. Running on autopilot for her children’s sake, her foggy mind making foolish decisions.
She rubbed the sleep from her face and tucked the nightmare back in its box along with the others, hoping for a few nights of untroubled sleep before another managed to creep out and torment her.
Through the porthole beside her bunk a grey morning filled the small cabin with a pallid light. The North Sea, endlessly restless, seemed calmer than usual today. She could hear the persistent rumble of it passing beneath the rig, feel the subtle vibration in the floor as gentle swells playfully slapped the support-legs a hundred and forty feet below.
Newcomers to their community always seemed terribly unsettled by that - the slightest sensation of movement beneath their feet. Once upon a time, this archipelago of man-made islands had been called ‘LeMan 49/25a’; a cluster of five linked gas platforms, in the shape of an ‘L’, a couple of dozen miles off the north-east coast of