After it Happened Boxset: 1-6 Omnibus Edition, page 78
Climbing down to find Ash had pre-empted him and was waiting at his feet when he landed, he told him he had to stay with Leah today. He was rewarded with a concerned look of misunderstanding, which incidentally was the same look when the dog’s hopes for food were raised, but he followed obediently all the same.
Finding her lounging on boxes of ration packs with her feet up and a nail file gently sculpting the tips of her fingers came as no great surprise, as Dan had come to accept that she was, after all, a girl.
Pointing first at Ash and then to Leah, he gave simple instructions.
“You, stay.” Ash glanced once at Leah, then both looked back to Dan in unison. “And keep the dog with you. I’ll be back before dark,” he said as he turned to leave.
“Hilarious as ever,” came the muttered sarcasm aimed at the back of his head.
Neil had already prepared a bike for him, and he said goodbye to Marie, who mildly scolded him for being soppy. A hint of seriousness crept into her voice, edged with concern, as she asked him, “Are we going to catch a break soon?”
Smiling to reassure her, he kissed her and promised they would. Soon.
He took the wind-up radio and the length of wire which Neil had given him instructions on how to use, and he set off at an easy pace down the road.
Maybe the relaxed atmosphere of being stationary for recuperation dulled his senses slightly, but instead of his usual paranoid alertness, he allowed himself to enjoy the ride. He was in an area of soft, green, rolling hills, which in the absence of people was truly beautiful.
By midday, he had reached the nearest piece of road to the high bluff where the metal museum piece stood proudly. As he nursed the bike carefully through the overgrown grass up the slope, he wondered absentmindedly how long it would stand before nature showed its slow-moving might and reduce it back to the raw materials from which it was made. A long time, he guessed, but still it was an inevitability that every trace of their feats of engineering would become relics. Maybe one day people would look at the remnants of the Seven Wonders and seek answers in ancient texts about their origins.
That musing killed his blissful mood as the thought of human survival hit him hard in the gut. He concentrated on pushing on, of reaching this goal so he could move on to the next. Have something to fix, have somewhere to be, have a reason to get up in the morning and live. That’s how he had lived his life before it all went to shit, and he didn’t like to admit that he preferred it now to how it used to be.
Marie’s words echoed back to him as he struggled higher still: “You were broken before all this happened, so it fixed you in a way. It gave you a purpose again.” He didn’t know if it made him a bad person or not, nor did he really give it enough thought to care, but he had enjoyed the last months more than most of the years before.
No point in dwelling on it, he told himself; it was what it was, and he had a job to do.
Eventually, the bike would go no further through the long grass, and after he had turned off the engine, which had stalled, and pulled all of the foliage from between the spokes of the front wheel, he rested the bike down and trudged the last part on foot.
Neil’s instructions were simple: stick the wire in the radio and put the other part as high up as he could reach.
Neil didn’t know of Dan’s fear of heights, or his healthy respect for the “force of gravity,” as he preferred to call it, but the wire he had given him was thirty feet if it was an inch.
“Thanks, Neil, you bastard,” Dan complained to himself. Bracing one foot into a join of two heavy pieces of metal, he began to climb hand over hand until he reached the ring of sharp spikes and barbed wire designed to stop foolish people attempting to scale the pylon.
Hanging on tightly, he looped the end of the wire, which he had tucked in the top of his vest, over the spikes a few times before casting the rest down to the ground.
Neil had sounded confident when he told Dan this, but now that Dan was the one perched precariously twenty feet from the ground, he suddenly had doubts. Shaking, inch by inch, Dan returned himself to his natural state of having both feet on the ground.
Eager to be away from the scary high thing, Dan picked up the radio and pulled back the heavy-duty sticky tape attached to the back of it so he could force the wire into the aerial socket. Taping it back into place, he spun the winding handle a dozen times and settled down to fine-tune the dial.
Static. He carried on turning the dial millimetre by millimetre.
At 603.5 kilohertz medium wave, the static broke and he could hear a faint voice. Without doubt, a human voice was broadcasting on the other end of that frequency somewhere. In his excitement to hear the words, he held the speaker next to his ear until it occurred to him to turn up the volume. He cranked it to eleven and listened.
As Neil suspected, it was a looped recording, but that didn’t put Dan off, as the chances of something automated still broadcasting after all that time was impossibly small. The words were coming through, mostly, but that wasn’t the problem.
Of all the skills he had, mastery of the French language was not among them.
In fact, of all their group, none of them spoke French other than bits and pieces forced into their brains from their school years, which for most were a distant past.
As best as he could, Dan wrote down the message as he listened to the words loop over and over.
He wrote down everything he could make out, and when he looked at his notes, it seemed to be a puzzle calling to him, pleading for him to understand and mocking his ignorance.
“…tous les survivants. Nous…sécurité…et la famille. Notre…imprenable et a résisté…générations. Nous som…Nous viv…la vie. Nous…Sanctuaire. Fort…Sud.”
Sitting back and lighting a cigarette, he began to logically unwind the clues on his paper.
“Survivants is survivors?” he said aloud to himself as he sketched a guessed translation next to each word. “Security, obviously,” he muttered as he worked on. After five minutes, he read his best estimation of the message back to himself.
“Survivors. Security. Family. Impregnable. Resist. Generations. Life? Sanctuary. Fort. South.” With a pleased smile, he read his notes aloud once more, then his elation evaporated.
As pleased as he was at having figured out a few words of French, he still had little or no clue what the message actually meant.
It could be a call to survivors offering sanctuary.
It could be a threat to outsiders to stay away.
It could be a bloody advertising campaign miraculously still playing so many months after the store closed down permanently.
Either way, it made little difference because he had no indication of where the damned place was. He had no idea how far radio waves could travel, but at a guess it must be hundreds of miles, which narrowed it down to, well, France.
Deflated, he packed up the radio and decided to leave the makeshift aerial booster in situ. He was convinced it had done nothing to help anyway.
Hoping that someone else could piece together more than he could, he stowed his notepad and heaved his small pack back on to retrieve his bike and return to the others.
THE UNDERGROUND MOVEMENT
As Steve gained more strength, his daily excursions around the camp became longer and reached further. He was being helped along on his crutches and twice saw people he knew; one didn’t see him, he was sure, and the other just looked terrified at the guard next to her and turned away.
He couldn’t remember her name but thought she worked on the gardens. Maybe she was from the group they rescued from the shipping containers. Maybe she wasn’t. His memory was terrible since the crash; the trauma, being in and out of consciousness for days on end and his subsequent reliance on opiates had hazed the past badly for him.
He would poke fun at Dan for not learning all the names of the people they lived with, knowing that it bugged him and made him feel a little shallow, but now he was faced with the same prospect. There was only so much room inside a person’s head, and right now his was too messed up to recall the small details. Looking around at the way everyone moved in small groups, some escorted by armed soldiers, made him mindful that this was not a safe place. This was hostile territory. He was living behind enemy lines and he had to portray no threat to them.
Concentrating on appearing weak while he exercised, he started to take note of everything he saw. Within a week, he had almost a half square mile mentally mapped out, all the while asking innocuous questions about which buildings were used for what purpose. He was sure to keep his information gathering as innocent as possible; although he was certain of Jan’s lack of loyalty to the cause, they were always followed by at least one armed guard.
For his own safety, obviously.
“Am I going to get moved back into the normal population?” he asked his nurse, who was painfully moving his leg during a therapy session.
“I haven’t been told anything,” he answered, as he often did when Steve questioned him about the camp. Steve was learning to take the man literally, and phrase his questions as such.
“What were you told when you were assigned to fix me up?” he phrased deliberately.
“To fix you up,” came the gruff answer, followed by a smile touching the corners of his mouth at his own humour. A conversation with Jan was like a game of chess.
Thinking about it, Jan saw no harm in elaborating on his answer.
“Fix you up. Don’t tell you anything. Don’t let you wander off,” he said simply. “And I have to report on your progress,” he finished, putting a sarcastic emphasis on the last word.
“My progress?” Steve asked innocently.
“Yep,” came the reply before he paused to push on Steve’s leg with more effort, earning the pilot a stab of pain. “He wants to know what you are saying about him.”
“He” was obviously Richards, and from the way Jan said it, he was clearly no friend to the South African. The arrogance and insecurity of Richards would be laughable, if only he didn’t have a small army to impose his will on others. Steve was certain that, if left unchallenged, Richards would soon drop the pretence and announce himself as dictator. In any normal society, not that things were normal anywhere nowadays, declaration of martial law was seen as extreme. It was to admit that the bounds of acceptable society, of decent human behaviour, had broken down and that a crushing show of force was required to re-establish those boundaries.
The use of an armed people’s militia, in Steve’s opinion, was now a definite must for any group, but the militarisation of the population and the classifications of type of worker just felt horribly oppressive.
It was an occupation, he decided. That was the best way to describe the sombre feeling in the camp. They were protected, sheltered and fed, but they weren’t free.
Given the choice, he believed that most people would choose risk and hunger if the price for them was their own liberty. Bringing himself back to the moment, he pressed his advantage and directly asked Jan his opinion on Richards.
Staring blankly back at him, giving nothing away, Steve didn’t know whether he would answer or run straight to the man himself to report.
“The man’s an arsehole,” Jan said simply with a shrug, as though his opinion mattered little.
Relief washed over Steve; without this man onside, he had no hope of gaining any further assistance.
“He makes lots of pretty speeches about protecting people, but everyone is only here because he commands more guns.” Jan leaned closer now, dropping his voice further. “I was happy before he turned up, and three of my friends died before we all gave up and all lined up like sheep to be told where to go and what to do.”
He leaned back, as though the conspiracy could be detected through the walls, before adding, “So yeah, I’d like to see him gone, but I don’t see how that’s going to happen.”
Steve also leaned back, although slowly to avoid aggravating his battered body, before responding. “Information is the key,” he said. “Know your enemy,” he quoted, waiting for agreement.
“Know your enemy, and learn about his favourite sport,” Jan said with a smile.
Steve frowned, earning a rare chuckle from his companion.
“It’s a quote from The Art of War,” Steve said, embarrassed at having to explain his jest.
“I know,” replied Jan with a broad smile. “You were quoting Sun Tzu, but I was quoting Nelson Mandela. And I think the man might’ve got this right too.”
Totally confused now, Steve sat and listened as it was explained to him. When he finally understood, he saw that the sport approach might be the best but possibly the riskiest idea he’d heard in a long time.
LE TUNNEL SOUS LE MANCHE
Nobody spoke much as they rolled at a steady speed along the deserted and badly overgrown motorways of the desolate southeast of England. Forced to travel carefully down the middle of the three concrete lanes, the tall weeds sprouting from the central reservation occasionally brushed against their offside windows, just as the encroaching treeline of the nearside forced them away from the hard shoulder. Sporadic clusters of long-abandoned wrecks littered the grey and green monotony, giving brief pauses as they assessed the potential dangers before pushing through.
Ordinarily, the journey would have taken them half a day without having to compete for space on Britain’s overcrowded roads, but having to be ever alert to the danger of ambush as well as vehicle-killing potholes caused by the weather and a total lack of repairs made that trek significantly more ponderous.
Every obstacle forced them to stop and watch as they defended themselves all around to any attack, then they would gingerly press on until the torturous sound of off-road tyres complaining over pitted concrete bore into their brains. At that pace, they eventually turned off the bigger roads and into the once-busy cross-Channel train terminal.
“I remember this place.” Lexi spoke wistfully from the front passenger’s seat. “My dad drove us to France years ago. It didn’t look like this, though,” she said, indicating the ruin and disrepair of the place which once saw thousands of cars making the international crossing every day.
Nobody answered. Not through impoliteness, but more from the air of rhetoric with which she made the distant recollection. People rarely spoke about life before; it was just easier not to think about it.
More cars were abandoned here, the filthy insides of the windows an indication of a once-living cargo. They drove on past, leaving the forgotten souls undisturbed. Not having brightly lit arrows to follow and yellow-vested staff to guide their path, finding the tunnel entrance took time. Driving slowly down a long concrete ramp, a scene of such chaos was unveiled that all four occupants of the car were struck open-mouthed at the carnage which lay below them.
It seemed that one last train had arrived from the continent.
One ill-fated locomotive had seared through the signs bidding them Bienvenue and without a coherent driver to slow their progress had careened straight through the terminal and collapsed in a concertina effect straight into the very end of the lines. Instantly derailed, and forced along by the thousands of tonnes of freight and passenger cars, the train had struck the thick walls and seemingly imploded. Remains of cars were spilled grotesquely across a wide area as the occupants of the train who had been sitting in their vehicles were spewed violently out, and the four looking on could only begin to imagine the horror of such a crash for anyone left alive.
Simon’s thoughts turned to the possibility of any survivors. Not from the crash – that seemed perversely unlikely – but for anyone immune to the… Whatever it was, they would have surely known what was coming. Would have known that they were in for a brutal ending. Putting himself in that situation, he wondered if he would feel some small amusement at the irony of such a final chapter.
Looking at the wreckage once more, he decided that he probably wouldn’t.
Finding their way onto the tracks without suffering a six-foot drop from the platform took much longer, but eventually they were bouncing uncomfortably along the gravelled tracks towards the looming black hole in front of them.
Not one word was spoken until the light in the cabin was snuffed out instantly as they went down the slight incline into subterranean uncertainty. With just a strained sigh from Paul, they began their crossing.
WHILE YOU WERE GONE…
Two hours after she watched Dan ride away looking like an overgrown child on a bike too small for him, Leah was walking the perimeter of their temporary camp for want of anything better to do.
She told herself it was training, that she was learning to work as a pair with Ash just as Dan did, but if she was honest with herself, she was actually playing. She shouldn’t be playing though, she told herself; that was for kids, and she didn’t have the luxury of playing anymore.
Still, training was allowed to be enjoyable, wasn’t it?
She took cover behind a large tree, peered around and waved Ash off to her right, watching out of the corner of her eye as the big, grey dog slunk low and silent across the ground. Moving position again, she gave a single low whistle to call him to her side. Within seconds he joined her, nudging her leg once to let her know he was there. She had barely heard him move until he was close. Repeating this pattern, they moved deeper into the woodland than she had ventured before, and just as she became aware of that fact, a flash of movement ahead snatched her attention.
Sinking low and raising the gun for real, she flicked the fire selector to semiautomatic. Sensing that the mood had changed, Ash dropped into a crouch and sniffed the air. Realising that the wind was blowing from directly behind her, she knew how they had moved so close to something undetected. Silent and downwind, whatever had moved was once again imperceptible.
