out here rely on you. You’ve made this place work. You’ve built a safe haven. It’s sane here, there’s fairness, kindness; it’s like an extended family. That’s a projection of you, Jenny, of your personality; firm and fair, just like you were with the kids. Somebody who could never stand that corporate arse-talk at work, any kind of bullshit, injustice, prejudice. He grinned. That’s why we got it together at college. You remember? You stopped me talking bullshit.
Jenny managed a wheezy laugh - little more than a weak rattling hiss and a half-smile.
Don’t give up, Jenny. They need you here.
‘No they don’t, they’re fed up with me in charge. Anyway, I’ve had enough—’
Don’t let someone else take over, Jenny. Don’t let someone who wants to be in charge take over. You know where that leads.
Andy had always hated politicians. He’d always joked that the best way to filter out the bad seeds was to place a job ad for Prime Minister in a national newspaper and all those that applied would be automatically disqualified. The bad seeds - those were the ones who were going to be jockeying for position whilst she lay here in the infirmary drugged to the eyeballs.
Don’t let anyone else take over, Jen. I’m serious. You’ve made something good here. Don’t let someone turn it into something else.
‘But, Andy, I can’t do it any more.’
Fight for it, Jenny, fight for it. Don’t give up.
Then he was gone. Just like that. Gone. Conjured up and magicked away just as easily by her mind.
‘Andy?’ She reached out with a hand, wincing as taut healing skin stretched across her shoulder blades, and felt the cot where he’d been sitting. She wanted her hallucination back.
‘Andy, please . . . I need you,’ she whispered, settling her head back against the pillow, exhausted, dizzy, spent. ‘Please . . . come . . . back . . .’
Chapter 27
10 years AC
Norfolk
‘I’m glad we didn’t set up camp in there,’ said Helen, nodding towards the slip road with its diner and petrol station alongside it. ‘It just feels wrong, sort of like it’s a . . . I don’t know, like it’s some sort of museum.’
Jacob, Leona and Nathan finished assembling the tents, the kind that required little more than threading thin flexible plastic rods through several vinyl sleeves. They’d picked them up at a camping store along with a small camping trailer designed to attach to a car’s bumper, that they were towing behind their bikes on the end of several lengths of nylon rope.
‘Like one of those little thingies set up in a whatcha-call-it to show you what a typical street looked like in olden times.’
‘A diorama?’ said Jacob.
‘What?’
‘Diorama? Where they sort of make a scene of exhibits and stuff from the past.’
Helen smiled dizzily. ‘Yeah, one of them things.’ Her pale brow knotted momentarily. ‘I think me mum took me to one of those once. All dark streets at night and flickery gas lamps. Must’ve been four or five then.’ She glanced across at the empty buildings. Although some of the smaller windows were still intact, it was clear that both the diner and the petrol station had long ago been thoroughly picked clean.
‘Anyway, glad we’re camping out here on the road, really. I hate going in buildings and finding you know . . . stuff.’
She let the rest of her words go. Didn’t need saying. They knew what she meant; the dried and leathered husks of people.
‘Jay, catch!’
Jacob looked up as Nathan tossed him a sealed tub of freeze-dried pasta. He caught it in both hands. Heavy. Something else they’d managed to find at the same retail park outside Bracton in the camping supplies warehouse. There were gallon tubs of this stuff in storage at the back; freeze-dried ‘meal solutions’ that required only cold water to metamorphose what looked like flakes of dust and nuggets of gravel into a palatable meal. Jacob noticed on the plastic lids covering the foil seal a ‘best by’ date of 2039. This stuff, kept dry, lasted decades. They’d piled a dozen tubs onto the back of the tow cart. Enough food to keep them going for weeks. Certainly enough to get them to London and back.
He scooped out four portions using the plastic ladle inside and poured in four pints of water from a plastic jug; stirring the savoury porridge until the desiccated flakes of pasta and nuggets of ham and vegetable began to swell. Before his eyes the sludge-like mixture began to