Chapter 5

We had planned to take the small generator down to the petrol station the following day, to have a go at getting the pumps going. Then we were going to do a bit more raiding, and see if we could find any more newspapers – older or newer editions, or different papers. Anything. But Merly and I were awake half the night coughing, and were miserable with sore throats in the morning.

‘Sore throats aren’t likely to be anything to do with the water, anyway.’

‘I hope this isn’t the beginning of the end for us three as well.’

‘Don’t be daft. It’s just an ordinary sore throat. Anyone can get one of those any time.’ I wasn’t completely sure I believed that myself, but it seemed like the right thing to say. We’ve not been in contact with any living being to catch an ordinary sore throat from.

Neither Merly nor I felt like going anywhere. We didn’t really want Persie to go off on her own either, but she insisted that she’d drive to the next village in the hope of finding a shop with some cough mixture. ‘It won’t cure you, but it ought to relieve the symptoms. Don’t worry, I’ll drive carefully. I don’t expect I’ll have much trouble with the traffic.’

She set off quite early in the morning. ‘The shops all open really early these days. I’ll be back in plenty of time to make lunch. You two get a rest.’

But she wasn’t back for lunch. By the middle of the afternoon we were getting really worried, imagining all kinds of dreadful scenarios, and wondering whether to set off on foot in search of her, or whether we should walk back to the first farm and see if I could work out how to drive the other car.

Then we heard a truck in the distance.

‘Oh God. They’ve caught her, and now they’re coming for us.’

The truck turned up the track to our farm, and we wondered whether there was any point trying to hide. But it was Persie at the wheel.

‘I’m sorry. You must have been dreadfully worried. Bloody Jeep!’

‘What happened?’

‘Wait a minute. I’ve got cough mixture for you. Choice of half a dozen different brands. Here. Have some and I’ll tell you the whole story.’

‘Found the next place, no problem. It’s not a village, it’s a small town. There’s another couple of petrol stations and all sorts of things. Found a pharmacy and picked this stuff up. Raided a couple of other shops too...’

‘They’d not been looted?’

‘Looks like only food shops have been looted. Wait. Set off back here. Halfway between the town and the village, damn tyre burst. There’s a spare, and all the right tools to change the wheel were in the vehicle, but can I shift the wheel nuts? Not a chance. Maybe you’ll be able to, Pete, or we might manage with a big socket spanner instead of that stupid little wheel brace. And I’ve seen another of the same model we can nick a spare wheel off. Or five.’

‘So where did you get this truck?’

‘I thought I was still closer to the town than the village, so I set off back to the town, to find some keys and a vehicle. That’s what’s taken me so long. For one thing, I’d judged the distance wrong: I was much closer to the village, so I walked much further than I needed to. Then I broke into several houses to search for keys. I didn’t have the sledge hammer, either, so it wasn’t quick.’

‘How did you do it?’

‘You’re right, I can’t kick them in the way you did.’

‘I was lucky. That door was old and rotten. So what did you do?’

‘Found a good size chunk of stone in the garden. No nice handle like the sledgehammer though. I still couldn’t open the door. But it made a good hole in a window. I had to chuck it pretty hard though – it just bounced off the first couple of times.’

‘You climbed in through a broken window? I hope you didn’t cut yourself!’

‘Safety glass. Just turns to glass pebbles when you break it. I just pushed all the bits out and climbed in. Scratched myself a bit, but no real cuts. No problem, although the front door method is easier if you’ve got a sledgehammer. Found a set of car keys, but they didn’t fit the car outside. Went back in to look for more, but couldn’t find them.

‘The next house had a car outside, too. Eventually I found the car keys. In a corpse’s pocket, upstairs. No water to wash with. Carton of orange juice. It’s a bit strange with soap, and makes an awful mess of the towel, but the owner didn’t seem to care. The car keys fitted, but the car wouldn’t start. Not enough slope on the road to get it rolling at all, never mind bump start it.

‘Found a sloping road, tried to find keys to one of the cars parked on it. By the third house where I couldn’t find any keys, I was getting pretty frustrated. Then there’s this truck in someone’s drive. Corpse right next to the driver’s door – keys in his hand!

‘Can I drive a truck? Well, I can now! Actually, it’s brilliant. You get a great view of the road. I thought I wouldn’t be able to reach the controls, but it’s no trouble at all. It adjusts better than a car. You can move the seat forward and down to the pedals, and then adjust the steering wheel to suit. If I did that in a car, I’d scarcely be able to see over the dashboard, but the truck windscreen comes really low. The visibility is great. And there’s room for both of you beside me, nobody has to sit in the back.’

‘So why bother going back for the Jeep at all?’

‘Well, we ought to get the stuff out of the back of it, but maybe there’s not a lot of point in it otherwise. This must use a lot more fuel, though.’

‘I don’t think that’s much of an issue for us, really. And if we can find some more jerry cans, we can carry a lot more fuel with us anyway. There’s loads of room on the back, and no problems about smell.’

‘We’ll have to work out some straps, or they might bounce out. They could get damaged just bouncing about.’

‘So what other shopping did you do?’

‘Stuff for me and you, mostly, Merly. Pete’ll have to come into town next trip to do some shopping for himself. It’s still all in the Jeep anyway. I didn’t want to spend any time transferring things when it was already so late. It’ll be all right there until you two are feeling a bit better. I only stopped long enough to pick up the cough mixtures.’

‘What sort of stuff, though, Persie? You’re being so mysterious.’

‘Oh, some stuff from the pharmacy. You can guess what. And clothes. This towelling stuff is all very well, but it’s a bit like prison garb, and it’s not always the most practical, either.’

‘And if we do ever meet anyone, it’s a dead giveaway that we’re runaways, not independent survivors.’

‘Independent survivors might be a contradiction in terms, by the looks of it. And anyone who’s actually got a description of the runaways is going to be a bit suspicious of an off-white Englishman with two East Asian women, anyway.’

Laughter, but it hurt our throats.

‘I’ve never thought about it before, but where did your ancestors come from?’

‘Most of them, from England as far back as anyone knows. But my mother’s father, God rest his lovely soul, was from Jamaica.’

‘God? Who’s that?’

More throat-searing laughter. Both Merly and Persie were educated in Roman Catholic schools, so each of them had a strange cultural mix in their upbringing, but it hadn’t succeeded in making either of them religious.

The cough mixtures helped. At least we slept that night. The next day, Persie had the sore throat, too. I really do hope this isn’t the first symptoms of the Big Death.

We had pickled eggs, pickled onions, and salami for breakfast.

‘We don’t have to worry about upsetting each other with smelly breath!’

Don’t make me laugh, Merly, it hurts.

Black tea. With sugar. I wonder if we’ll ever get any milk again? We might find some UHT, condensed milk or powder. They’ll eventually start getting goats’ milk in the camp, I suppose. Maybe the officers already are.

We got the generator going. It was powerful enough to drive the washing machine, but only on the cold wash setting. We tried the television, and weren’t surprised to find that not a single channel was on air. We didn’t have enough power for the kettle, but we were boiling water in pans on the cooker anyway. I wonder how often they had power cuts here, back in the day? All three farms were obviously prepared for them – but the folks in the town don’t seem to have been. Is that just relative wealth, or were they less frequent in the town?

It was four days before we felt like venturing out. We don’t actually have to venture out for months, if we don’t feel like it. But life could get to feel a bit pointless if we just vegetate.

The Jeep was still where Persie had left it. We loaded the shopping into the cab of the truck, which had a fair amount of space behind the seats. The tools went loose in the back.

Merly wanted to look what Persie had got, but Persie told her to wait until we got home.

‘We ought to find – or make – some kind of a box to put things in in the back. The sort of stuff we’re looking for doesn’t really want to be bouncing around loose in the back.’

‘No, I don’t see us needing to do any building work in the near future.’

‘Not in our lifetimes, anyway.’

I wonder what on Earth she means by that.

We could have dressed ourselves to look like a million dollars, but what we really wanted was practical clothes, including some really warm ones for winter. And some decent, tough shoes. And boots.

All just for the taking. And plenty of spares.

‘It almost doesn’t seem worth taking more than one spare set, they’ll still be here when we want them. But there’s plenty of room at the farm, or in the truck if we want to move, and it saves trips.’

‘To search the back of this shop properly, we’re going to need a torch.’

That wasn’t a problem.

‘Batteries might be. There’s a good stock here, but they won’t last forever.’

‘We’ll find a rechargeable one somewhere, I expect.’ And we did. It was more powerful than the first little torch we’d found, too.

We went looking for some sort of box to put in the back of the truck, but what we found was a transport company, with a yard full of trucks. Persie backed one corner of the truck against the middle of the gates, and pushed. The lock burst and the gates swung open. Even easier than the sledgehammer.

All the truck keys, neatly labelled, were hanging on a board in the office. Persie was almost bouncing up and down.

‘I love this truck we’ve got, but it’s pretty rough really. We can have the pick of this lot!’

She found a big walk-through van, nice and clean inside, with the same design of cab as the truck she’d already taught herself to drive.

‘The tyres are in better shape, too. I hope it’ll start.’

It did, no problem. Manoeuvring it out of the yard was another matter.

‘It’d be easier with that one out of the way.’

But that one wouldn’t start.

‘I’m going to bash something before long, I’m not sure I can get it out at all.’

‘They must have a rope somewhere. We could use the truck we’ve got to pull that one backwards.’

It took ages, but eventually we got Persie’s favourite van out of the yard. Unscathed – which was more than could be said for the one she’d towed. Not that anyone will ever care about that one.

‘We’ll never care about our tail lights, but come winter we might want the headlights sometimes. Perhaps we ought to find some spares.’

Persie’s thoughts had clearly been running along similar lines to mine.

‘We might want our headlights I suppose, but it’s probably best to avoid using them if possible. It would be just our luck that that was exactly when someone comes out of hiding who does use aeroplanes.’

‘Are we really going to spend all those long nights in winter in complete darkness? If we can’t use headlights, logically we can’t use house lights either.’

‘We could. Black curtains.’

‘Well. We’ve got clothes, and a better truck. There’s really only two more things I’d like to find, and that’s a tanker full of heating oil, and a stock of bottles of cooking gas.’

‘And more food. It’d be good if we’d got enough to last the winter at least.’

‘Plenty of time. I vote we call it a day for the moment.’

It was a couple of weeks before we found the cooking gas supplier. Breaking in was harder than it had been at the transport depot, but we managed. It’s amazing what you can do when you’ve got a truck and some rope handy, and you don’t care how much noise you make or how much damage you do. Just be careful not to risk damaging yourself or the truck...

We reckoned that a van load of bottles would last several years, but we knew where to get quite a few more after that.

We also found an almost full heating oil tanker, but we couldn’t start it, not even by trying to bump start it, towing it behind our van. That could have been my incompetence in the tanker’s driving seat. I knew exactly what to do in theory, but I’d had no practice driving, and I was scared I might hit the back of our own van if I wasn’t careful. We knew we wouldn’t be able to manoeuvre it into position to fill the tank at home even if we towed it all the way, so at first we were at a loss what to do – until we found a place with a stock of jerry cans. Not wanting to stink our new van out, we retrieved our old lorry to take twenty-five full twenty litre jerry cans. Three times. Two trips with five hundred litres almost filled the tank, and we kept another five hundred litres in the jerry cans in the barn. We considered filling the tanks at the other two farms as well, and decided it wasn’t worth the trouble. The tanker would still be there when we wanted more, and there were still thousands of litres of oil in it. We’d spilt a little filling jerry cans from it, but not a lot, and what did it matter? A little bit of nothing compared with the mess five billion people were making a year ago...

One house we raided for food had a rather fancy radio, which we took home. It was capable of receiving pretty much any signal. Unless it was faulty, there weren’t many stations on air – nothing except occasional long-wave transmissions in languages none of us could understand or even identify. Persie thought one of them might be Russian or Polish, ‘but they could be from anywhere in the world. There could be short wave or FM stations too far away for us to receive, but there’s none around here.’

Persie said that she’d be able to build a long-wave radio transmitter if we found a place with electronic components and some equipment, ‘but we don’t want to give our location away. We might find ready-made CB gear if we’re lucky though. That would have been useful that day the Jeep tyre blew up.’

‘We should only use it in emergency, though. Someone might pick up the signal.’

‘Not very likely. It’s not got much range. And who’s listening? But we’d only want it in emergencies anyway.’

We’ve never found any CB transceivers.

We found more newspapers – nothing newer than the one we had already, but some from the previous couple of days.

We found a bookshop. Of course nearly everything was in Norwegian, which was very frustrating. There were a few books in English, but they were things for Norwegian children learning English, and not interesting at all – apart from a huge Times Atlas. We took that and a globe, just because we loved them, and some maps of our area of Norway and southern Sweden, and one big and one small Norwegian-English-Norwegian dictionary.

‘I really would like to make more sense of those newspapers.’

Persie found some undergraduate level physics and chemistry textbooks. ‘I can’t read the text, but there’s a lot of tables of data I’ll be able to make sense of.’

We weren’t sure why she wanted to do that, but if she wanted them, why not?

We found a school. It had been turned into a temporary hospital. Temporary? It wasn’t going to be a school again, but it wasn’t a hospital any more either. Every classroom – every one we looked in that is, we gave up quite quickly – was full of beds, and almost every bed contained a corpse. Many of them had sheets pulled up over their faces, but many didn’t.

They must have died after there was no-one left to cover their faces. And before that, they were so understaffed that they couldn’t remove the corpses. And before that, they probably had removed a lot. I wonder where to?

I didn’t fancy finding out.

We knew already that the whole situation must have been absolute hell.

Persie wanted to find the physics and chemistry labs. They hadn’t been converted into wards. Persie took various bits of equipment from the physics lab.

‘There’s no radiation monitoring equipment at all!’

‘We used to have some at my school in London, but they got rid of it all when they had to dispose of the radioactive sources. Too dangerous to have them in schools, they said.’

‘Pshaw! Tiddly bits like that? Feeble excuse!’

‘I rather suspected that.’

‘Did they think someone was going to grind the cover off one and eat it?’

‘Or feed it to someone else, I suppose. You wouldn’t notice it in your sandwich.’

‘There’s no shortage of ordinary poisons that would work more quickly and reliably.’

The hospital itself was much the same as the school. ‘If we ever need any medical equipment, or oxygen bottles or anything, we know where to come.’ But we didn’t actually take anything.

We saw our first live rat at the hospital.

Persie and Merly studied the newspapers, and with the help of the dictionaries thought they’d pretty much worked out what they were saying. We couldn’t make sense of it. We couldn’t reconcile the story the authorities had been peddling to the general population with the fact that we’d been shepherded into the shelter. There was no mention of the war in the papers as far as Persie could make out.

‘The accidental release from a bioweapons research establishment theory is complete eyewash. There must be a lot of people who know that. How would it spread so widely, so fast?’

‘Were they suggesting that? Even I know enough to realize that’s nonsense. Was it just some journalist talking off the top of his head?’

‘No, it doesn’t look like it. There’s exactly the same thing in three different papers. Exactly the same wording, in fact, so it comes from some common source.’

‘Still could just have been a journalist. Do we know the papers were independent publications? Even if they were, the common source could be a news syndicate or a freelancer. Especially since they might well have been understaffed by then.’

‘Fair enough, I don’t know much about newspapers.’

‘The authorities are perfectly capable of generating deliberate disinformation anyway, we’ll never know one way or the other.’

‘The authorities had plenty of motivation to generate a lot of deliberate disinformation, if they were trying to hide the war from the people. But why would they do that? And how would they explain the disappearance of everyone who’d actually got the warning, and made it into shelters?’

‘There’s nothing in the papers, as far as I can see, about anyone being in shelters anyway. Weird.’

‘Everyone we know who was in a shelter was supposed to be away from home anyway. But that can’t have been true for everyone. What about everyone in private shelters?’

‘I’m beginning to think that there can’t have been anyone in private shelters at all. There’d surely be people around if there had been. We were in our shelter a lot longer than private shelters are designed for – they’d have starved or had to come out, and then died of whatever killed everyone else. If the authorities sent us inside knowing how long we’d be there, they might not have wanted to put people in the private shelters at all. Maybe they didn’t want to tell everyone else about the war to minimize the amount of damage done by people who knew they’d no chance of survival.’

‘How horribly cynical. It’s looking increasingly like the only explanation though. But there’s still the question of how you hide the fact that a lot of people have gone into shelters.’

‘Maybe not that many, really. A few bigwigs and technologists who are in on the secret, and have cover stories arranged for them. And a few people like us, staying in a remote hotel, for serfs. Probably a few more like that here and there. Then, even if they were supposed to have come home or anything, the confusion of the “epidemic” explains why they’re not home yet. Distressing, but no suggestion of them being in shelters from a war you don’t know is happening.’

‘As far as I can make out, the symptoms could be radiation sickness, but it would take an incredibly organized operation to distribute such a huge quantity of anything so uniformly that people were dying almost everywhere, without there being hotspots where everybody dropped down dead in minutes. It would have to be something with a long enough half-life to let you distribute it before it had all decayed, and short enough that people could come out of shelters within a few months, and it couldn’t be contaminated with anything with a longer half-life – not at any significant levels, anyway.’

‘If it was going to be enough to kill nearly everyone on the planet, surely the people handling it in quantities in the first place would drop down dead on the spot? You could shield it at the place it was manufactured, but there’d have to be a distribution system and you couldn’t have heavy shielding everywhere.’

‘I’m not sure. If it was an alpha or beta emitter, they’re easy to shield. They’re only dangerous if tiny particles get inside you. I think I can see ways that could have been achieved. Nasty.’

‘But surely people would have been able to detect it once it was released?’

‘A bit late by then, but yes, a few people with the right equipment could have done. Maybe they did. Maybe some of them were in shelters already, and others were known cranks. Maybe in some countries it was common knowledge, just not in Norway.’

‘Or maybe not common knowledge, but just one barmy conspiracy theory amongst many. But every explanation looks like a barmy conspiracy theory. It didn’t matter much what anyone thought anyway, they all died. Apart from a few oddballs like us – maybe only us – nobody who’s survived is going to know anything about what they were thinking.’

‘The soldiers on their raiding parties might find newspapers. But what they’d make of them, who knows? Would they even bother to read them? And would it really make any difference anyway?’

‘It might, if it resulted in disaffection.’

‘Deliberate release of a bioweapon seems to me the most likely – or a combination of various weapons simultaneously. With a bioweapon, you wouldn’t get hotspots – as long as everyone gets enough to kill them, it wouldn’t matter if some areas got a lot more. It wouldn’t kill them any quicker, so it wouldn’t be noticed.’

Persie, you would have got along with Tony Ramsden like a house on fire. Or maybe not. Likes sometimes repel. And anyway, this side of you isn’t all there is to either of you. There are big differences.

Aren’t there just. Tony’s knowledge is – was? – all theoretical. Persie’s is very practical, too.

Would Tony have known how to deal with the soldier who was trying to rape Merly? I doubt it.

Oh, and so many other differences.

‘It’s almost as if the shelter was designed to house people whose disappearance wouldn’t raise any significant alarms until everyone else was dead. Why? And if that’s true, did the people who designed it really know how quickly everyone else was going to die, and that the mortality was really going to be a hundred percent? And surely they’d have been in the shelters themselves?’

‘They might have been. Just not the same shelter we were in. In fact, I bet they were. Either they’re still underground, or they’re just not anywhere near here.’

‘Was it even a war at all? If it was, it seems that both – or all – sides lost.’

‘They always do, surely?’

‘Not usually on quite this scale.’

‘I’m almost tempted to wonder whether it wasn’t so much a war, as a cull. Kill off nearly all the population, all but your own friends and family and just enough of the rest to provide the labour you need to support your way of life.’

‘If so, it’s gone spectacularly wrong for them.’

‘Conspiracy and cock-up, you mean.’

‘Actually, has it gone so wildly wrong? We don’t know what’s happening in the rest of the world. The people who arranged it could be living the life of Reilly somewhere, with a few pleb camps elsewhere just to maintain a bit of a gene pool.’

‘I don’t suppose we’ll ever know. In fact, if that’s the real situation, I hope we never do know.’

‘They’d have had to have co-operation between the prime movers in all the major powers. Even if you called that a war, it’d really be a cull in all but name. The only way you could deliver the weapon, whatever it was, would be from aircraft, and you couldn’t get away with that over enemy territory.’

‘Not if they knew you were doing it. But civilian aircraft fly – well, used to, anyway – all over the place all the time, and the equipment might have been disguised as something innocent. It could even have been something genuinely innocent diverted to this alternative purpose. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if there are systems to feed tiny quantities of something into fuel lines, for example, but that would only be any good for radioactive isotopes. Chemicals or bioweapons would be destroyed in the engine.’

‘If it was war, we don’t know that the enemy – whoever it was – isn’t simply biding their time, waiting to take over the rest of the world when the agent, whatever it is, is thoroughly gone.’

‘They might have started doing it. They just haven’t got here yet.’

‘I don’t think so. I’d expect more activity on the radio if that was the case.’

‘I’m not sure about that. I don’t think there’s been all that much activity on long wave for a long time, and all the rest is relatively short range.’

But all that was just speculation. Pawns aren’t privy to the thinking of the players. There was nothing we could do with the information even if we had it.

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