can’t take in any more.
The figures, untidy but accurate, were telling him what he already knew. That stored below the dome’s main central arena - where Kylie Minogue had performed only a few months ago, where Take That had been intending a reunion concert with Robbie Williams in a few weeks time - on the endless low-ceilinged mezzanine floor, there was water and high-protein meal packs for sixty thousand civilians for twelve weeks.
Alan had been down there on the first day to inspect the floor. His first impression had been one of awe; that somebody, somewhere up the emergency authority’s rickety chain of command, had actually made sure their job was done to the letter. It seemed that someone - God bless them - had actually been ahead of the game for once, making sure Safety Zone 4 had everything it needed to fulfil its role providing a safe haven to sixty thousand civilians. Pallets of cardboard boxes, plastic-wrapped and waiting, filled the floor as far as he could see. As well as food and water, there were four emergency generators, all of them running noisily, with enough diesel to run them day and night for three months.
A section of the mezzanine floor was filled with crates of medication, antibiotics, anti-inflammatories, refrigeration units, already plugged in and humming, filled with bags of blood and insulin. There was equipment enough, still boxed and waiting to be unpacked and assembled, to set up a dentist’s surgery, even an operating theatre.
Alan had been amazed that in a bloody useless country such as this, a country that seemed to teeter on the brink of complete collapse every time more than a couple of inches of snow fell, so complete and thorough a job had been done at such incredibly short notice.
Heartwarming in a way, that when push came to shove, when it really mattered, there were civil servants who could tick the right boxes and make sure the job got done.
But that was a couple of weeks ago now.
That was back when he thought - as did everyone else - that this was going to be a disastrous, worldwide, three- or four-week Katrina-like event. An event that would shake the world. Rouse everyone from their complacency and remind the world’s leaders and policy-makers that in the pursuit of endless economic growth and rising profit margins, the world had become a terribly fragile thing.
That’s what he’d thought.
Four or five days of civil unrest, maybe a week of it; that’s what he’d been expecting. Those civilians unable to seek refuge in one of the safety zones would be borderline malnourished, perhaps suffering from water-borne infections. And, yes, there’d be deaths . . . thousands of them most likely. Those caught up in the rioting. Those caught breaking curfew. Those caught red-handed looting. The streets of every UK city, town and village would be a horrendous mess that needed to be cleaned up. Every service stretched to breaking point as the country recovered. That was how bad he thought it would get.
Then there’d be years of litigation; years of pointing fingers and blaming the government for not seeing it coming, the oil industry for not ensuring some sort of redundancy in its supply chain. Then, of course, once the world was put back together again, the endless documentaries on TV hungrily picking over the finer details, examining what had gone wrong, and dramas reliving those few summer weeks, spinning out of the grislier details into stories to fill broadcast schedules. Alan had imagined TV channels would dine out on the oil crash for many, many years to come, as once they had on 9/11.
But he’d had all those thoughts two weeks ago.
Since then it had become patently clear to him, if not also to many of the emergency volunteer staff working for him, that this crash was far, far worse than a Katrina-like event. What made it worse, what made it a different order of event entirely, was the fact that it had hit everyone.
Where, with the victims living on the rooftops of New Orleans, or crammed into the Louisiana Superdome, there was an outside world ready to step in - albeit sluggishly - to drop supplies, to airlift those stranded, to roar in with convoys of National Guard troops to restore law and order, in this case, there was no one.
His eyes drifted across the cots, the orange-jacketed emergency workers dotted amongst them.
There’s no one coming for us.
No one coming. He’d had a digitally encrypted communications