her head again. What you going to do now?
She looked up the stairwell in the hallway. Up there were their bedrooms, Mum and Dad’s room, and presumably Dad’s body at rest beneath a rotting quilt. She slumped down on the bottom step in the dark hallway and gazed out at the overgrown front garden, the open gate and the quiet leaf-filled street beyond. The morning sun dappled the brick walls of the house opposite. Quite pretty really, poppies in their front garden and cherry blossoms on the tree.
‘I don’t know. I guess I’ll just wait here for a while.’
Chapter 43
10 years AC
‘LeMan 49/25a’ - ClarenCo Gas Rig Complex, North Sea
Walter stared at the scorched interior of the generator room. The rubber pipes had ignited in the blast, then burned and melted. So had the digesters, leaving pools of hardened plastic on the ground. The generator itself was largely undamaged but it had been knocked off its mounting by the blast and the casing was dented in several places.
It had taken him a couple of years of tinkering, foraging and learning to build them a methane-fuelled generator. All that could be done again. At least he’d know better what he was doing second time around. Jenny said she wanted them to have power again. Said it was a beacon of hope for the people; a sign of progress. Something they really needed to see.
He surveyed the mess around him. It was going to take quite some time to get things fixed up again. He needed to find another small brewery with similar sized incubators or . . . he scratched his beard in thought, or he could link up a series of smaller beer-brewing bins, each feeding into the methane tanks independently. Either way, there was a lot of foraging work that needed to be done, a lot of back-and-forth between the rigs and shore. He wasn’t sure he liked the idea of leaving Jenny alone so much. She was still weak and vulnerable and although she could get about a bit, shuffling painfully as her mending skin stretched and pulled uncomfortably, she wasn’t strong enough to get much further than the stairs down to the mess room.
Down there she had a chance to chat with people as they came in for breakfast and evening meals, and she was determined to do that; to show her face, to show everyone it was going to be business as usual.
But it’s not, is it?
That bastard Latoc was slowly pulling more and more people across to his platform to listen to his bloody sermons. He watched them traipsing across the walkway towards the drilling platform four or five times a day. Women mostly, some of them taking their children with them.
He wondered what Latoc’s appeal was. Is it his accent? Is it his looks?
The man was slender and his lean face chiselled in a way that made him look both enigmatic and a little vulnerable. He imagined the older ladies wanted to mother him, the younger ones to bed him. But there were also some of the men amongst his followers; David Cudmore, Ronnie, Howard and one or two others. Whatever Latoc’s phony spiritual message, it seemed to have got through to them as well.
Idiots.
He cursed himself for not having the balls to throw the foreign bastard off the rigs the first time he’d caught him offering prayers in the mess.
Jenny’s support from those not yet under Latoc’s spell was ambivalent at best. They were happy to go along with the routines as they stood: after all, everyone needed to eat. But there were many amongst them who longed for the community to relocate ashore. Others who just wanted to have a greater say in how things were run. They may not have been buying into Latoc’s bullshit, but they certainly didn’t seem to want to loyally rally around Jenny.
Ungrateful bastards.
After all she’d done. The least they could do was show a little support now she needed them.
As he surveyed the burned-out room, muttering his thoughts and grumbles aloud, he heard, through the metal ceiling, the scrape of feet entering the chicken deck above. Feeding time.
The muted murmur of the hens’ stupid cooing rose in pitch and persistence as they realised food was coming their way. The ceiling clicked with the sound of scurrying claws across the floor above as the birds scrambled to get close to those feeding them.
Several feathers and flakes of rust floated down from the ceiling, disturbed by the fluster