a solitary policeman. They’d quickly discovered the civilian workers were a greater hazard, using the roadblocks as an opportunity to stop and shake down people for water and food supplies. Every major road and motorway out of London was now a graveyard of cars, vans and trucks - a carpet of immobile metal rooftops, bubbling and blistering from the rust spreading beneath their paintwork. The frames of their windscreens dotted green with small islands of moss, anchored to the perishing rubber seals.
The retail park looked like the dozen others they’d passed by in the last couple of days; even damaged to the same degree, as if a tacit agreement had passed amongst the panicking people of Britain that IKEA, Mothercare, Pets World, B&Q and the ubiquitous McDonald’s were to be ruthlessly targeted and plundered, and the likes of Currys, Carpetright and PC World were to be left well alone.
Leona told Jacob and Nathan to watch the trailer whilst she took the gun and led Helen inside Halfords to find a new bike for the girl.
Jacob watched them disappear into the dark interior then glanced back at the glass front of PC World. It looked utterly untouched. Not a single panel of glass broken, not even cracked. No lights on inside, of course. But, by the muted vanilla glow of late afternoon, he could just as well be in the past again; a Sunday morning before ten a.m. opening time, waiting for the first member of staff to turn up, yawning, nursing a hangover and unlocking the double doors for the first over-eager customer, impatient to get inside and replace an ink cartridge.
‘You see PC World?’ he said, pointing to it.
Nathan turned to look at the unbroken glass.
His eyebrows flickered up. ‘Hey, cool. Ain’t broken.’
Jacob realised that neither of them had seen an expanse of glass as large as this one still intact; not since before. Really quite an odd sight in a world where every window was a frame of snaggle-toothed shards, or snow-white granulated crystals.
Nathan bent down, fumbling for a lump of loose tarmac.
‘What’re you doing?’
He grinned. ‘Gonna smash it.’
‘What?’
‘It’s all ours, Jay. No one’s did it in all this time. So it’s, like, ours to smash.’ He prised loose a crumbling chunk of parking lot which he tossed from one hand to the other with gleeful anticipation. ‘Come on, Jay, we’ll smash it together, on three.’
‘No.’
‘One . . . two . . .’
‘I said NO,’ Jacob barked, stepping away from his bike and letting it clatter to the ground noisily.
‘. . . three—’
Jacob clumsily punched Nathan’s shoulder and the tarmac dropped from his hand and clattered noisily to the ground.
‘Hey! The fuck you do that for?’
‘I don’t want to smash it. I mean, why? Why break it? It’s lasted this long.’
‘It’s a fucking window, man! That’s all. Just a fuckin’ window!’
Jacob’s face hardened. ‘It’s just . . .’
‘What? Just like it was before?’ Nathan looked at him. ‘Shit, Jay, what’s the matter with you?’
‘I just . . . I don’t know . . . it’s done so well to survive this far, you know? It just seems wrong.’
Nathan’s scowl vanished and his faced creased with a bemused grin. ‘Jesus, man. It’s a piece of glass that didn’t get broke. That’s all it—’
He stopped and frowned.
Jacob turned to look towards the glass frontage they’d been discussing.
‘Someone in there.’
Jacob saw it too. Movement in the dark interior beyond. The faint flicker of torchlight and the pale shape of a yellow T-shirt moving between the shelves and stacks of boxed printers and PCs.
‘That one person you think?’ asked Nathan. ‘Or more?’
Jacob squinted. ‘Dunno.’
A moment later the flicker of torchlight snapped off and then they saw the T-shirt grow more distinct as it approached the front of the store with the late afternoon light streaming in through the glass front. The pale T-shirt seemed to be carrying something in its darker arms. As it squeezed through a checkout and emerged through an open door that, once upon a time, would have slid aside with a compliant whoosh, they saw the T-shirt was on a man with pallid skin and a scruffy mop of long ginger hair who was whistling to himself cheerfully.
He was outside and in the sun when he stopped in his tracks, studying them intently. The whistling ceased.
‘Leona!!’ shouted Jacob. ‘There’s somebody out here!!’
‘Hey!’ barked Nathan. ‘All right?’ he said, taking several steps forwards.
The man in the yellow T-shirt lowered the boxes to the ground carefully - boxes with ‘5.1