of the sofa.
‘Don’t let the kids come round the back, Jenny,’ he muttered. ‘I’ve got most of this guy’s brains down the front of my shirt.’
His face appeared and he pulled himself up, wincing as he looked down at the thick dark slick across his chest.
‘Daddy won,’ whispered Jacob, the hint of awe in his voice unmistakable. ‘He beat the baddie.’
‘Oh my God, Andy,’ Jenny uttered. And that was all she could say for the moment. The ‘God I Love You’s . . . were all going to have to come later. For now the only thing that Jenny could do was sob with relief.
Andy looked up from the splattered debris of Ash’s head on his shirt and offered his family a goofy grin.
‘Should’ve changed my bloody shirt first. I liked this one.’
Leona and Jenny both managed to push a smile through the tears. Jacob grinned proudly at his father, then studied with a mixture of revulsion and fascination, the bloody mess.
‘What’s that?’ Jake asked, pointing at another rapidly expanding crimson stain lower down the shirt.
Andy looked down, and saw the small, slim handle jutting out from his lower abdomen.
‘Oh, just great,’ he managed to mutter before collapsing.
Epilogue
It’s been a while now since the world collapsed.
I miss Andy. I miss him so much. And his children miss him.
I don’t know how we’ve survived, how we managed to keep going. It’s been a blur to me, just moving from one day into the next. I know we left London soon after that night. I remember Leona had to drag me out of our house, away from our bedroom, where we left Andy.
Leona’s been a tower of strength. I was useless for a long time. She got us out of London, and then we finally found a community in the countryside willing to take us in.
Very kind people, very different - historical re-enactors; the sort of people you would see at those big English Heritage events where they replayed battles from the English Civil War. Normal people with jobs and mortgages (back before the collapse), but with this other parallel life, attempting to revive, to learn the everyday skills of a time long before we had oil doing everything for us. Very different people, unlike any I’ve met before; they had already mastered so many of those skills of survival, the basics like . . . how to make soap, how to make bread from grain. You know? The simple things.
And there’s so much to do, we’re kept busy, which is just as well.
We have several wind-up radios in the community, and from time to time there are broadcasts from the BBC World Service. For a time, just after the first week, it looked like a recovery might be on the cards. Oil lines were being fixed and a trickle of oil was getting through. But things were too broken, too messed up. We heard horror stories coming from the two dozen or so ‘safe areas’ the government had established. The supplies ran out at the end of the second month, and the people crammed inside turned on each other. And the same thing, so we hear, has happened in other countries around the world. America, I think, has been hit particularly badly.
In the months that followed, there was a worrying time . . . there was a limited war between China, India and Russia over the Tengiz oilfields. It started with tanks and infantry, and escalated to a few nuclear bombs. Then very quickly it blew itself out. Perhaps some sanity broke out at the last moment, or perhaps their troops decided to stop fighting. Or maybe they simply ran out of the oil they needed to continue fighting.
Often, in the evenings, when the community gathers together, we discuss who was behind it all. Because, you see, it’s obvious to everyone now that there was someone behind this. The theories are many and varied. The most-voiced opinions are that it was either a Muslim plot to destroy the decadent western lifestyle, or, alternatively, an attempt by America to destabilise all her economic rivals in one go . . . but somehow it went wrong for them too.
I’m not convinced by either theory, but I don’t know enough about politics to offer a better suggestion. Andy would have known. He knew all about that kind of thing.
We’re being kept very busy right now, as I was saying. There’s a lot to do, crops to grow, tend, cultivate or pick. We’re digging a