SOVEREIGNS OF THE COLLAPSE
BOOK ONE - DEATH BY DECENT SOCIETY
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MALCOLM J WARDLAW
Death by Decent Society
Copyright © 2020 by Malcolm J. Wardlaw.
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or else are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events is entirely coincidental.
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Note to the reader
During this book and its sequels, you may find it useful to refer to maps and other information in the Appendix (see Table of Contents below):
Other Books in this Series
Book 2: The Value System
Book 3: The Church of Nuclear Science
Book 4: Operation Ultimate
Book 5: Nuclear Nightminster
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Appendix
About the Author
Chapter 1
[Broadstairs Garrison, Kent, England, early October 2106]
The cell door banged shut behind Prisoner Aldingford.
Grit shaken from the ceiling settled on his shoulders. Bolts rapped home in short order one-two-three, top, middle and bottom. Hobnailed boots crackled back to the languor of the guard room.
Swaying with exhaustion and shock, Donald Aldingford absorbed his new reality. The cell was only a bit wider than the corridor outside. The single block of wood that formed the bunk took up most of the distance from the door to the far wall, with a thoughtful bit extra for the latrine bucket, which had been even more thoughtfully fitted with a gleaming steel lid. The walls were of white-washed brick. There was no window, just a tiny ventilation grill over the door. The ceiling was of rough-finished planks, through which came creaks and thuds from the offices above.
It was the ache of cold in his left foot that finally prompted him to move and sit on the bunk, pulling off his one remaining shoe from the right foot before stretching out his legs with a long groan—more of pain than despair. He felt as if he had been thrown off a bull and trampled. The most painful wound was a laceration in the top of his right thigh, barely a hand’s width from his groin. The flesh had been sliced open by a splinter from an anti-aircraft shell. Blood from the wound had soaked the front of his trousers during the long walk from the site of the crash. However, it was a gash over his right eye that most concerned him. He touched it, feeling the edges and the scabs of dried blood. The skull behind the wound throbbed. He wondered if his skull was cracked. Finding the wooden pillow an unsympathetic rest for a throbbing head, he sat up, pulled off his jacket and rolled it into a ball to make a pillow. Now he lay amid petrol fumes wafting up from the folds of oily silk and wool.
He supposed he should consider himself lucky. A few inches the other way and the shell splinter would have left him without manhood. A harder bang on the head would have killed him. Of the eight people who had taken off that afternoon, only two were still alive. The other, a young woman, had left the crash site slung over a trooper’s saddle, still out cold with her backside bare to the world. Perhaps she was dead after all.
Had he had been knocked out during the crash or not? He recalled uncomprehending shock on seeing an oak tree of prodigious dimensions directly ahead of the flying boat and he recalled dangling upside down from his left foot in a shower of what he at first thought was frigid water. Between the two memories there was a blank. A blank five seconds? A blank five minutes? No, it could not have been five minutes. Just after his return to the world, the frigid water splashed in his eyes and stung like onions. It was petrol, not water. He shuddered as he relived that searing shaft of terror on realising he was getting doused with petrol. That could not have been five minutes after the crash. The petrol was only beginning to seep down through the wreckage from the fuel tanks in the upper wing. The blank must have been mere seconds.
He could remember little of his escape from beneath tons of flying boat piled up against the oak tree. A white blaze of panic in his mind, wrenching his foot from the trapped shoe and fighting like a desperate animal burrowing and flattening himself with splintered ends of broken aircraft scoring down his back like the claws of a monster, a gasping relief of deliverance to see the wide open sky above and inhale cool, clean air...
So, now he was in some big-shot landowner’s jail. To get back to life would require the payment of a ransom. How big a ransom? Donald was not a big-shot, he was but a humble barrister travelling under the instructions of a client. It would not be a big-shot’s ransom then, but even a humble barrister’s ransom could amount to—what? Six months’ income? There was no way in hell Donald’s precarious finances could survive that kind of gouging. No chance. Zero.
No, if Donald was ever to see his daughters again, it was his client who would have to pay the ransom. And that was the essential question now preying on Donald’s mind: would the client bother? Did he value Donald Bartleigh Aldingford that much?
As he stared up at the rough planks of the ceiling, Donald struggled for optimism.
The words of his grandfather Sir Bartleigh Aldingford came to mind. Sir Bartleigh had dropped dead from a heart attack when Donald was six years old,
