Back in the centre of the city, the random aggregate of survivors and raggedymen I ever actually spoke to had dismissed such scars – everywhere you looked – with a shrug and a philosophical grunt.
'Cullin' Year,' they'd say. As if that covered – and excused – every anarchic sin, every thoughtless act of destruction that went along with a city entering self-destructive free-fall. All the looting. The thieving. Murdering. Raping. Burning the shop fronts, clogging the river with car wrecks, hoarding tinned foods, slaughtering police horses, coughing and stumbling and spitting blood from lungs on the verge of liquefaction.
Waiting for the nukes that never came.
The Culling Year. It was a crazy time.
Here and now in the airport, the devastation was all that much harder to ignore. The precision of the planes, the carefully mapped elegance of the compound: all distorted, broken, salvaged and left to withdraw behind bristly weeds and the slow creep of rust. The violence had ended years ago, but its effects stood untouched, like alabaster monuments to the insanity of an entire population.
Over my shoulder, the gunfire faded out. I kept running, dragging Bella along by either her coat or her hair – I hadn't stopped to check – and headed for the one aircraft that was patently undamaged: repainted in the garish blue of the Apostolic Church of the Rediscovered Dawn.
Neo-Clergy. Currently trying to kill me.
Somewhere, out between the hungry darkness of the airstrip and the humming lights strung up around the tower, someone shouted. A rasping burst of biblical condemnations, to cover the clattering of clumsy hands reloading rusted hardware. Even further away, booted feet raced towards the racket with the sort of haste one learns to associate with hardcore well-trained military types, and I reminded myself with a groan that most of the barracks emptied their survivors into the Church during the year, with the casual abandon of men swapping one institution for another. I wished the shouting voice would shut the fuck up.
I was a heretic, apparently. A defiler, a philistine, a walking abomination, a devil fit only for immediate destruction and above all else a sneaky motherfucker. I recognised the dulcet tones of the same fat monk I'd 'befriended' earlier that day – playing unscrupulously on the hints of his sexuality he'd betrayed in coy glances and coquettish gestures – then unceremoniously clubbing him over the head with the stock of a rifle when he turned to fetch me some water.
It was a way in, anyway.
And then Bella was shrieking something behind me – 'the bag! the bag!' – and as I turned to assess what was going on, the Kalash' opened up again. Something dull and hard happened to my left arm, and I was pirouetting in my place without meaning to.
'Oh.' I said, wondering why cracked concrete was pressed against my cheek. 'Oh.'
And Bella screaming, and the engines of the aircraft powering up with a whine, and the throb of more guns, and pain and confusion and drugs and more blood than I've ever seen before, and Bong-bong.
The aircraft, flying itself, chiming out warnings about who-knew-what.
I half-opened my eyes; a fissure of light strong enough to spot the curved steel struts of underchair braces, the lifejackets stowed in wire compartments beneath each one, and an ancient packet of dry roasted peanuts. Empty, of course.
Back in the present.
You're on the floor, soldier.
Addled thoughts turned over lazily, wondering how long I had before the hostess came and told me to get up, whether I'd barfed on anyone's hand luggage, whether I could ask someone to get me a coffee. I think reality would have asserted itself pretty soon after that, if the Bliss hadn't flexed in my veins again.
Another proto-climax, building in my groin. Another rush of shivering oddity, and the most distant reports of pain in my left arm, before The signal.
This was before Heathrow. Shit – this was the reason for Heathrow. This was before the Neo-Clergy and Bella and all that.
This was lying alone on my palette, stretched out in the corner of Comms Room 221A, in the eastern wing of the Vauxhall Cross SIS building. Dozing, staring out at the river and wondering at all the other raggedy survivors, curled up in tube stations and mall stockrooms, clustered round oil drum fires and squabbling over rats and pigeons.
I wasn't smug at my own warm little womb of safety – not exactly – but it came close.
London was ugly before the Year. Afterwards, it was…
Different.
Let me tell you: a city looks strange without lights. At night, the sky is black and star-pebbled, just like anywhere else, and if you've lived in London any length of time you know that's wrong. The sky should be yellow- green. Blazing with light pollution, oozing out of the constant clouds. It was like The Cull had stolen the very colour from the sky; flattening all that was civil, all that was advanced. Look at the world now, it said:
Eco-friendly, yeah. But not much fucking fun.
Curled there in my room, mind empty, chin resting on a heap of stolen pillows, it was a well practiced thought process. Five years into this dismal new reality, and there was nothing much left to say about it.
Nothing new to get excited abo…
The signal sparked the consoles to life with a neon-storm and a chatter of code, and I jumped like I'd been electrocuted. Down to reserve power, the building wouldn't even let you switch the bloody dimmers on, let alone the systems. There must be some kind of automated kicker, powering-up for the duration of an incoming signal. Clever.
Five years, they'd stood silent. Consoles growing dusty, covered in tinned-soup spillages and stolen porn, or whatever other luxuries I'd plundered on any given day. For five years the antennae on the roof – concealed ingeniously within blocky, deco architecture – had stood inert, listening to a silent spectrum.
Five years I'd slept in the same room, getting by, scavenging up and down the riverbanks by sunlight, creeping back at night like a bear to its den. I'd always ignored the others who'd adopted the same routine. Old administrators or low-level secretaries, I guess, lucky enough to remember the entry codes to let them in, but never getting past the divisional checkpoints inside the central lobby. All automated. All closed.
But not to me. Not to senior personnel.
Up here there was still the ghost of power. Low-level illuminators at night, self-sealing doors. Solar panels on the roof, I think, though I'd never found them. There was even a functioning vending machine down in the armoury, though the coffee tasted like plastic and the tea frothed with mouse shit. Still, here was safety. Here were sealed doors built to shrug-off a missile-strike, a tunnel beneath the river to the heart of bleak, deserted Whitehall and all the accoutrements of my old life.
Files. Computers. Weapons.
And now a signal.
I thought it was a joke first of all, but that was daft. Who amongst my friends – and there were never many of them to start with – had the means, let alone the diseased sense of humour?
Nobody. Nobody was left. Nobody senior enough to know the codes, nobody who knew how to tap-in up here. Not since the Chief choked on the mushy debris of his own lungs and the two surviving directors were mobbed en- route to a Cobra meeting. Since then, camaraderie amongst ex-employees had been pretty low on the agenda.
The code chattered away like a chorus of angry crickets, transferring to the flickering screen in unbroken columns; flashing green as each security clearance was challenged, negotiated, allowed.
And then a word, immersed in the stream of data.
It scrolled by so quickly I almost missed it. Eyes wide, I convinced myself I was mistaken, and ignored the prickles of sweat wriggling out of my forehead as I hunted it down again.
There.
++PANDORA++
My stomach lurched. Something happened to my heart that felt a lot like a black hole opening in my rib cage. I staggered, I think, because suddenly I was sitting down with my hands out, pressed on the edge of the desk like a safety-bar holding me into the carriage of a rollercoaster.
The word raced past again, bottom to top, a pixellated burst of… of what?
Choirs of angels, rays of light, divine intervention. Who the bastarding hell knows? It wasn't possible, but there it was.
