and made a face. ‘Maybe if he does it again . . . I’ll, uh . . . I’ll have a quiet word.’
Dr Gupta looked at him and shook her head, tutting. ‘Not good,’ she muttered. ‘Not good.’
Chapter 32
10 years AC
Thetford Forest, Norfolk
‘I turned this little bit of the oasis over to, well, you can see,’ said Raymond, pointing towards rows of runner bean and pea vines, ‘to climbers mainly - vertical crops. You get a much better space-to-yield return.’
Leona nodded. ‘We’ve done the same on the rigs.’
‘It must be tight for space on there.’
‘We manage. There’s a surprising amount of surface on which to grow all sorts of things; every ledge, every walkway, every deck, we have things in pots.’
He chuckled. ‘What about sea salt? It’s in the air. That must make it hard to grow things.’
‘Where we are it’s not so bad as say someone trying to grow vegetables in a garden on the seafront, where the wind whips up spray and spoils everything. We’re high up. The upper decks where everything is growing . . . it’s like a hundred feet above the sea.’ Leona silently appraised Raymond’s vegetable plot. ‘Do you grow enough to get by on?’
‘The tomatoes, the peppers, the oranges I showed you earlier, it’s enough to sustain two adults. Tanya had it properly balanced to feed the pair of us indefinitely without taking up too much of the space. She didn’t have the heart to uproot all these tropical plants and replace them with food plants. So, it turned out we had enough space to keep our rain forest ecosystem, and still grow enough fruit and veg to tide us over. I just follow the plans and planting schedule she drew up. Anyway,’ he said, ‘at a push I could grow stuff outside the dome in the woods, or pick mushrooms, berries . . . even trap rabbits. The forest is crawling with them.’ He grinned. ‘And it’s not as if I’ve got anyone else to share the woods with.’
She looked out through the foggy perspex at the dark outline of trees. Raymond was right. He had little to worry about on that score. Thetford forest seemed to be all his.
‘I often wonder how many people are alive out there,’ she said after a while.
‘In the UK?’
She nodded.
He sucked in a breath. ‘I did the maths once. I reckoned on about two to five million now . . . roughly five to ten per cent of the population was my guess.’
‘That many? It doesn’t seem like there’s anywhere near that many people around.’
‘Oh, yeah,’ he said. ‘I think it’s possible so many survived because the die-off here in the UK was so rapid. A slower attrition rate would have meant those small groups that have survived to today would have had more competition for resources. Think about how much is still out there. You can still find edible canned and packet food if you know where to look. If the die-off had been slower, those harder-to-find things would have been picked clean by now by those who were hanging on. You’d have nothing left now. So, ironically, I think if we’d coped slightly better and more people had managed to hang on and last longer, it would be harder for the survivors today.’
Leona frowned doubtfully. ‘So where’d you suppose these two to five million people are then? We’ve seen no one really, not since we left.’
‘Of course not. You’ve been on the road all the way, haven’t you? Think about it, any groups struggling to survive within eyesight of a road would have long ago been paid a visit by a starving mob. Picked clean and wiped out.’
‘They’re all hiding then?’
‘Basically. Tucked away in woods and forests, nestled discreetly in Welsh valleys, remote farms. Shit, I could even imagine city centre rooftop communities, as long as they were careful . . . the top of an office block with all that roof space? The top floors with all those large office windows would make a perfect greenhouse.’ Raymond seemed tempted to sit down and plan out the viability of such an existence, then stopped himself. ‘The point is, those who managed to lie low long enough to outlive the . . . the . . . the unprepared, until there were too few to present a problem, it’s those people that are alive today, just hidden away somewhere. Trust me. There’s plenty more people out there than you think.’
They could hear the sound