8
Victoria led
us through cobblestone streets that looked ancient. Bleakholt seemed like it
had stood silent through several centuries. It was a town that had seen
generations of people be born and then die, leaving nothing behind them but
their gravestones. I looked down at the cobbles and wondered how long ago they
were laid. How many people had walked over the bumps of stone in the last
hundred years? Would this generation be the last after the infected finally broke
through the defences?
People
walked past us, stared for a second, and then went on their way. A sense of
purpose cut into their faces, as though they were London commuters hurrying to
work. The smell in the air was ripe, the stench of a compost mound nearby. We
walked through twisting streets toward the centre of the settlement. It was a
circular open space with a statue raised in the middle, a fountain to the left
of it, the water long-since dried up. Benches littered the stone and decorative
flowers filled stone plant beds.
We walked
across the square and into a building. The architecture dated it at a couple of
hundred years old. Patterns were chipped into the stonework on the front of men
on horseback, spears raised, anger cut into their faces. A marble plaque on the
wall marked it as the Mayor’s office.
“So you’re
the mayor?” I said to Victoria, who walked in front.
“No such
thing as a mayor anymore. Mayors are voted democratically, and this isn’t a
democracy.”
The stale
air of the office smelt chalky. A staircase jutted up at the end of the lobby,
a framework of steps carved from grey stone. Our footsteps echoed. There was
the thud of my limp, the patter of Melissa’s feet, the scuffling of Justin’s.
I remembered
visiting the town hall in Manchester once. It was ten times the size of this, a
busy hubbub of council workers whisking up and down the corridors. It was a
school trip, and I remember the teacher telling us to take a good look around.
He stood in the entrance and took a deep breath.
“Think about
your future, kids. You can be anything you want to be. Even mayor.”
Things
hadn’t fallen that way for me. I didn’t grow up and have a budding political
career, but I did follow in my teacher’s footsteps. I got an English degree and
teaching qualifications. After that I spent my time discussing the merits of
the Tempest with a bunch of disinterested teenagers. I never enjoyed it, and
all the time I thought there must be something more to life. There had to be
something waiting round the corner that one day I’d finally see. Well, the
outbreak put paid to that.
Later, in my
late twenties, Clara and I visited the town hall. We walked in, hands apart,
neither of us speaking because we’d fought that morning and none of us wanted
to make the first move. I stood in the exact spot my teacher had once stood,
heard his words again.
“Think about
your future, kids. You can be anything you want to be. Even major.”
Adults
shouldn’t make promises like that to kids. They shouldn’t make them believe
there’s more to life than there really is. The reality is that life is a dull
grind. Even in the apocalypse nothing changes. Instead of working all day to
get a pay check to get food, we spend all day walking. Foraging. Scraping by,
keeping our bodies ticking.
What was the point?
***
Victoria led
us into her office. She dismissed her guards with a nod, and they took their
places either side of the door. One of them held a baseball bat against his
shoulder as if he were waiting to get subbed on to a game. His face was chubby
and a faint smile hung on his lips as if he were always on the cusp of laughing
at a joke. The other stared straight past us, as though he’d been forbidden to
look at us.
“Victoria…,”
the one with the baseball bat said. His tone was questioning.
Victoria
gave him a sharp look. “I don’t think they’re about to ambush me, Steve. You
can wait outside.”
Victoria
walked behind a desk and sat in a green Winchester chair, the back of it
enveloping her slim frame. She opened a drawer, took out a pouch of rolling
tobacco and started to roll a cigarette.
The office
was full of dark mahogany and oak furniture covered in varnish that had started
to fade. The borders of the ceiling were decorated with spiralling patterns
that spoke of excess. It amazed me that somebody took such care into the tiny
details of a place where people rarely looked. On the right wall there was a
hideous painting. It was a metre wide, big enough to hang in a gallery. On it,
a cavalry soldier rode atop a horse. The horse was white once, but now it was
covered in trails of blood that started at its hooves and spread up its legs
and across its muscled body. The horse’s face was demented with anger, and it
twisted its head toward the centre of the frame as if it was looking out at the
viewer. The fury in its eyes seemed to come out of the painting and fill the
room, and I could only stare at it for a couple of seconds before I had to look
away.
“Park your
arses,” Victoria said.
Justin,
Melissa and Lou took the three seats in front of the desk. Alice and I stood. Alice
folded her arms, pressed them tight into her chest. Her face was set in a
grimace. I could tell her leg was hurting her from whatever had happened when
the stalkers separated us, but she refused to sit down.
“I want to
see my son,” she said.
Victoria
held the strip of paper to her lips, licked the adhesive and sealed the
cigarette.
“Mind if I
smoke?” she said.
“Rather you
didn’t,” said Melissa.
“Well you’re
in my office, so I guess I’ll do what I feckin’ please.”
She put the
cigarette in her mouth, flicked a lighter, and ignited the end. The paper
crackled, and she blew smoke into the air. I sucked in the smell, felt it
reactivate the old cells in my brain that still clung onto addiction. I guess
you never got over it. I took a step forward, put my hands on the desk and
leant over it.
“First
things first, she needs to see her son,” I said.
Victoria
shuffled the chair away from the desk a little and crossed her legs. “The boy
is fine. A damn sight better than the condition we found him in, anyway. He
looked like the pictures you see of kids in the blitz.”
Alice took a
step forward. Her face was turning red as though she were about to explode.
Alice was capable of the most intense anger you ever saw when her son was in
danger. The first time we met, she had knocked me out cold. If Alice was angry
it was best to either let her simmer down or just step away.
“Better
watch what you say about the boy. We’re feeling a little sensitive,” I said.
Victoria
blew out a plume of smoke. It rose to the ceiling and dispersed. “Kid looked
like he’d been through hell. Take it your his ma?” she said, looking at Alice,
a hint of scorn in her expression.
I could feel
the anger bubbling in Alice from where I stood, almost like the tremor of an
earthquake. It seemed to me that levelling criticism at a mother over the
treatment of her son was a pretty stupid idea. It wouldn’t do us any good to
get mad though. The guards waited outside, ready to storm in at the slightest
sign of trouble. And beyond these doors, there was a whole town full of people
who didn’t have much time for strangers.
I gave Alice
a glare that I hoped she took to mean ‘calm down.’ I stood back and crossed my
arms.
“Listen,” I
said, “We didn’t come here to take your shit. Tell us what the hell is going
on. Why did you keep us fenced in?”
Victoria
stretched her hand across the desk, let it rest. The bones jutted out of her
wrist, and her veins were thick blue chords that pressed against the skin. She
put the cigarette in an ashtray, ran her hand through her hair.
“I should
apologise,” she said. “I’m feeling the pinch at the minute. Got a few things
going on, and I shouldn’t take it out on you.” She looked at Alice. “I can’t
imagine how far you’ve travelled, what you’ve had to do. I shouldn’t criticise.
Your boy is fine, and I’ll make sure you see him soon as we’re done.”
Alice
nodded.
Victoria
carried on. “Guess I should tell you a little of Bleakholt. The last bastion of
Scotland, as I call it. Nobody else calls it that, mind.”
“Start with
why you kept us locked up,” I said.
She nodded.
“Simple. We’ve got to take precautions here.”
There was a
knock at the door. Victoria looked up.
“Come in.”
Another
knock.
“Come in,
god dammit, are you deaf?”
A man opened
the door and walked into the room, and I recognised him as the guy who had
driven the quad. Grease stained his jacket, and black stalker blood covered his
t-shirt like a watermark. Up close the pock-marks on his face were more
pronounced. I couldn’t tell if it was from a childhood disease or just a severe
spell of acne that had gone but had left behind a grim reminder. He had shaved
his head so sharply that thinking about him doing it made me wince. There was something
glum about him, like something was going on in his mind that he tried not to
show.
“I’ve been
to see the geek and dropped off the body,” he said.
Victoria
nodded. “Did Charlie say was it good enough?”
“He said it
was a ‘good specimen’. Guy’s a weirdo.”
Victoria
smiled. She looked up at Lou, Justin and Melissa. “I’d like you all to meet
Billy Hardy, the self-proclaimed toughest guy in Bleakholt.”
Lou
swivelled on her seat to face Billy. When she saw him, she shrank back in her
seat. Her eyes widened, and though she tried to hide it, there was a trace of
shock in her face. Billy stared back at her. His face grew pale. He looked away
and tried to dismiss the sight of her, pretended like the strange look between
them had never happened.
“Good to
meet ya,” he said. He drummed his fingers on his leg and looked at the door.
“Need anything else?” he said to Victoria.
She nodded.
“You might as well stay. I was just going to tell them about our fine town.”
Billy folded
his arms. He kept his glance anywhere but in Lou’s direction. “Here we go,” he
said. “Story time.”
Victoria
smiled. “Guess I like to brag a little too much. But it’s with good reason.”
She looked at me. “How long do you suppose we’re going to last?” she asked.
I scratched
my chin. My throat felt tight, I needed water. My back ached, my limbs felt
tired, and the cut on my knuckles stung.
“I don’t
know anything about this place,” I said.
“No, not
Bleakholt. I mean us. Our species.”
Lou crossed
her legs and leant back in her chair so far that it threatened to tip over.
“It’s been sixteen years and we’re not dead yet.”
Victoria
shook her head. “We’re not dead. But we’re dying. Here in Bleakholt, we have
more funerals than births each year. Food supplies are shrinking across the
country. Fuel is depleting. And excuse me for being blunt, but people are
getting dumber. Education has been put to the wayside in place of survival, and
knowledge is dying. There’s no progress. To summarise, we’re starving, dying
and getting stupid.”
The words
rang chords of belief inside me. I’d thought this way once. Back in Vasey, I’d
seen people scraping by, doing nothing to ensure their long-term survival.
Instead they let their lives drag from one minute to the next. I’d tried to
change that by planting crops and building defences, but it was futile. When
they were threatened with their own survival, people didn’t give a shit about
the long term. Every selfish second was precious to those who counted them.
“Tried that
once,” I said. “Didn’t work.”
Victoria
drummed her fingers on the desk, her nails tapping on the wood. They were rough
and jagged, and she'd bitten most of them down. “What happened?” she asked.
I put my
hand to my chin. My beard felt scratchy on my fingers. “People are too damn
selfish to think about the future.”
Alice leaned
in. “I never saw Vasey before it collapsed, but surely some people were willing
to help?”
I nodded. “A
few. But their voices were drowned out by the selfish ones.”
Victoria
closed her eyes, nodded. “That’s what I found too. But when I got to Bleakholt,
I saw something here. Not much, just a thread of survival at first, but I knew
that if someone could unravel it, there was something great underneath. That
was seven years ago. Now, everything is different. This really is salvation.”
Lou arched
her eyebrows. “Seen a lot of places promising that.”
“Oh?” said
Victoria. “How many places have you seen with a hundred acres of flourishing
crops? Renewable wind energy? Solar power too, or as much as our shitty weather
permits. Fuel generators, a school, engineers, carpenters. A science programme.
Even children.”
It sounded
too good to be true. It was everything I had planned, and failed, to do in
Vasey. Yet if she were to be believed, Victoria had managed it. I hadn’t seen
much of Bleakholt since arriving here, but it seemed like a place where the
people had purpose. Maybe all it took was a strong leader to follow everything
through. Perhaps I had been too weak in Vasey.