“No, no, no,” he called out, seeing Margaret heading for the bathroom.
He ran after her, just in time to have her close the door on him.
“Bollocks,” he grumbled.
After that, he sat on the floor in the hallway, guarding the door. He passed the next hour whittling his name into the skirting board with the tip of his blade.
“It’s free,” Margaret called out, finally opening the door.
Carl had been sat in the same position for so long that he found it difficult to get up. As he was doing so, Chuck appeared with a towel in his hand.
“No,” Carl said adamantly,
struggling to his feet and barring Chuck’s way.
Chuck stared down at him, raising an eyebrow.
“No,” Carl repeated with an extended finger pointing up at the big man. He then scuttled off into the bathroom and locked the door before the confrontation could develop any further.
While waiting for his turn, Chuck returned to the living room. Amy was sprawled out on the floor, teasing the drooling Digby by waving his chew in front of him. Margaret was totally engross
ed in the TV, watching BBC News, while holding onto a bottle of whiskey, which Tom was staring at fixedly. Muz and the kid were stood out on the little wedge of a balcony. Chuck went out to join them.
“The port authorities have expressed concerns
,” the TV was saying as he strode past, “that, with the levels of hysteria being so high, people may take it upon themselves to find a means to cross the channel unlawfully. They warn that anyone caught doing so will be prosecuted and may face the prospect of a jail sentence.”
Just as Chuck had hoped, the
vantage point from the thirteenth floor balcony certainly afforded an expansive view of the surrounding area. Up here, they were way above most other blocks on the estate. From this angle, only one other equally tall tower obscured a small portion of the view.
In the distance, past the defined line of the A41, over the stretching fields of Hertfordshire to the north, he could just make out a military cordon.
Great lengths of coiled razor wire ran through the bare fields. There were short sections of what might be called a wall, made of sheets of corrugated iron driven into the ground but these were few and far between. Beside those panels, trenches had been dug. Chuck strained his eyes but he wasn’t sure whether he could see men holed up in them.
“We’re so close,” Muz muttered without taking his eyes from that far off
line cutting through the open expanse.
The a
rea that had most captivated Chuck’s attention were the few square acres, almost hidden by a tree line that had been completely enclosed in tall corrugated iron panels and surrounded by that cruel-looking razor wire. Within the compound, midway along each of the four sides, there stood a watch tower made of scaffolding. That place had to be a forward command centre, Chuck thought.
Muz’s eyes
drifted over the fields that spread between this estate and that far off cordon. They were littered with human bodies. Those afflicted who had wandered too close to the perimeter of the quarantine had been swiftly struck down by rifle fire. Who would have thought that London would ever see such a tragedy? Beyond that military defensive line though, there still lay a world of relative normality, a world in which somewhere his wife and daughter were praying he would still find his way back to them. The desire within Muz to escape this madness grew stronger now for seeing the perimeter so tantalisingly near.
“I can’t believe we’re so close,” Mux reiterated.
“If you wanna see dem army men close up,” Jay told him, “you can get a good look from the flats dat look down on the A5.”
Muz turned to him, the boy suddenly becoming more interesting than the view.
“Are you telling me there’s a cordon line even closer than that one?” he asked.
“That’s what I said, innit. The A5, cuz.”
Without another word, Muz marched back inside and made his way to the front door. Chuck followed him with Jay also in tow.
“Everything alright?” Amy asked, as the men strode over her.
“Fine,” Chuck responded.
As Muz hastily fumbled with the keys for the front door and the gate, he could hear Carl happily singing away to himself in t
he bathroom. It was amazing what a hot shower could do to lift a person’s spirit. Muz could have been wrong but it sounded like a Shania Twain song.
“Which is going to be the best flat?” Muz asked Jay over his shoulder, as he strode down the communal corridor.
“Er… dat one,” Jay pointed out a flimsy chipboard door that had literally been kicked in half courtesy of Tom.
Entering this new flat, Muz paid little attention to the place. It did however
, strike him as being in a better state of cleanliness than their chosen accommodation, despite the old person smell. Opening the door to the balcony, he stepped out.
Jay had been right. This place
looked west, standing high above the A5 that had to be no more than thirty metres away. This stretch of the road looked more like any other residential street than an A-road. Using the pre-existing barrier the lines of tall terraced town houses formed, their windows had been boarded up from the inside. At every westward junction, the adjoining roads had been blocked off with huge concrete slabs topped with razor wire. Piles of more bodies lay before them in the street.
“How far south does this length of the cordon follow the road,” Muz asked Jay, unrealistically expecting the youth to know the answer.
“It’s da same all da way down dat way as far as I been,” Jay told him. “And I come up here from West Hendon, bruv.”
Muz
’s face seemed to pale a little as he looked at Chuck.
“
We’ve been heading north,” he said in barely more than a whisper. “And all the time, the western edge of the cordon has been little more than half a mile away.”
Chuck didn’t have anything to say in response and instead chose to examine the road blocks below.
“I said we should have kept going west,” the copper continued, still looking at Chuck. “Back at Colindale nick, I said we should have kept going west.”
Chuck still didn’t respond.
“Yeah, but it don’t matter though, fam’,” Jay told him. “The army ain’t lettin’ anybody through. Look at dem dead people, man. Dey weren’t all zombies, you get me?”
“What are you saying?” Muz asked.
“I seen one person, right. No way was dey infected. Dey was still proper normal but dey was trying to climb one of those road blocks. I was gonna do the same. This army guy on a roof was, like, shouting at him to stop but he kept trying to climb up. Next ting, bang. The army guy fired his gun and the man dropped like a sack of shit. Swear down.”
“The military is firing on survivors?” Muz asked incredulously.
“No lie, bruv.”
“I don’t care,” the copper stated after a moment’s thought. “We’ve got to try
to get through.”
“What? Are you crazy?” Chuck said, breaking his silence. “You heard what the boy just said.”
“I ain’t no boy, bruv.”
“I don’t care,” Muz said again. “According to his story, they tried to reason with the man. That means they’ll give us chance to talk before they consider shooting.”
“Nah, man. You don’t wanna go anywhere near dat road,” Jay warned. “It’s suicide. For real.”
“I don’t care,” Muz stated yet again but his voice was weary now. “I’ve got to get out of this God forsaken hell hole.”
“Please don’t blaspheme,” Margaret said from the doorway to the flat, having followed them to see what they were up to.
Muz looked forlornly at her.
“Come back to the other flat,” the woman said. “I think young Jay here should tell the others just what he saw and we should then discuss our situation as a group.”
Illogically reluctant to let
the perimeter of the quarantine zone out of his sight, Muz turned away from the woman and looked back out over the balcony. He thought it strange that the boarder also marked the edge of his borough. As intimately as he knew the streets this side of the A5, he couldn’t name a single road on the other, never having patrolled them.
Over the backs of the terrace houses directly to his front, there lay a small wooded area with
a modest lake just beyond. To the rear of that body of open water, there stretched the lawns of a park. The common land had been hastily protected with more razor wire and several watch towers. Its acres of grass were obscured by green tents, various helicopters and military and construction vehicles.
“Shit, get back inside,” Chuck said, ducking below the level of the balcony’s handrail.
“What’s wrong?” Muz asked, looking down at him with a perplexed expression.
“We’ve been pinged,” Chuck answered, still hunched over and making his way through the door.
“What?”
“They’ve got a bead on you.”
“Who’s got a what?” Muz asked, becoming more and more confused with each question.
“Woah, look at your chest,” Jay said to the copper
, before he too ran back into the flat.
Muz looked down to see the brilliant red dot of a laser sight dancing around his torso. Looking back at the houses below, he saw, using the incline of a roof for cover, a marksman with his rifle trained on him. Slowly, he backed up into the flat.
“Told you, cuz,” Jay said. “Dey mean business, innit.”
“Jay?” Muz said.
“Yo.”
“Shut up.” It wasn’t the boy’s fault, Muz told himself, but that stupid accent was beginning to get on his nerves.
Re-entering their flat, Muz went and sat silent on the sofa, moody and deep in thought. Not long after, Carl came out of the bathroom.
“Oh, oh, oh. I wanna feel free, yeah, to feel the way I feel. Man! I feel like a..
.,” he sang as he opened the door but stopped on seeing Chuck stood just the other side.
“Like a what?” Chuck asked dryly.
Carl ignored him, walking past into one of the bedrooms.
“That’s a beautiful voice you’ve got,” Chuck called after him.
He heard the other man mutter something in return but couldn’t make out what it was.
“Is Jay short for James or Jason, young man?” Margaret asked the youth in the living room.
“It’s not my real name,” Jay replied, wiping his baseball bat clean on a T-shirt he had found lying over the back of a chair. “It’s my street name, innit.”
“So, what is your real name?”
Jay looked around suspiciously at everyone in the room, trying to determine whether he could trust them.
“It’s Tim
, but yous all better not call me dat,” he warned. “Only my mum calls me dat..., called me dat.”
“So why the nickname?” Amy now asked, doing her best not to smirk.
“’Cos Tim’s stupid, innit,” Jay told her. “You can’t sound boss wiv a name like dat.”
“But why Jay?” Margaret asked.
“Jay, like as in blunt, innit,” Jay told her, as though it should have been obvious.
“I’m sorry. I don’t understand,
” the elderly lady responded.
“Zoot? Reefer? Spliff? Joint?
” Jay said, rapidly running out of similes.
“Oh, he means cannabis cigarettes,” Amy told the older woman, putting it into words she should understand.
“Yeah,” Jay confirmed.
“You named yourself after
a colloquialism for cannabis cigarettes?” Margaret asked with dismay.
“Yeah.”
“Are you sure we can’t call you Tim?”
“Name’s Jay,” Jay told her stonily.
“The boy’s an idiot,” Chuck said, towelling down his fat hairy chest in the hallway, having had by far the quickest shower so far.
“Hey man, what’s your problem?” Jay challenged him.
“And he’s got an attitude problem,” Chuck continued.
Jay kissed his teeth
at the big black man, pursing his lips and sucking air in between them. Chuck knew it for the insult it was.
“Nothing a little discipline wouldn’t sort out though,” he said.
After a while, Carl came back into the living room, having spent a long time blow drying his thick grey hair with the dryer Amy had purloined from another flat. He had put a lot of effort into combing and styling it into the correct parting. When he had finished, it looked a damn site better than the greasy filthy mess it had been.
“Is beautiful,” Tom declared with beaming grin.
Carl ignored him.
“Yeah, I’ve got a semi,”
Chuck joined in, pulling on his clean trousers.
“Shut up,” Carl now bit.
“What is semi?” Tom asked.
When Chuck demonstrated by partially extending a fin
ger in front of his groin, the Pole bellowed with laughter.
“I not have semi but is very pretty.”
“Yeah, well, at least I don’t look stupid in those trousers,” Carl tried to fight back, pointing at Chuck.