After it happened book 9.., p.1
After It Happened (Book 9): Home, page 1
part #9 of After It Happened Series
After it Happened
Book 9: Home
Devon C Ford
Copyright © Devon C Ford 2020
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without prior written permission from the publisher.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any person or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. No affiliation is implied or intended to any organisation or recognisable body mentioned within.
Published by Vulpine Press in the United Kingdom in 2020
Cover by Claire Wood
ISBN: 978-1-83919-035-3
www.vulpine-press.com
For Cora
Impatient to meet us, you arrived way too early.
For almost four months we sat next to your cot in hospital, worried ourselves stupid over every surgery, until we finally brought you home.
You’re always perfect to us; our newest member of the writing team.
Part One
Steve
PROLOGUE
The radio set, once so old and out of place but now representing the pinnacle of their technological capabilities, crackled and buzzed through the earphones of the woman sat in front of it. Her face registered such concentration that her consciousness appeared to have vacated her body as all of her being was focussed on interpreting the sounds coming to her.
Anne Kershaw turned around in her chair and translated the final message.
“Got to go now,” she said, “have baby to feed. Stay Safe. D.”
Steve smiled, giving her his own farewell to send before leaving the small, dingy office that had been sequestered for use as a radio room. His limp was still pronounced, and parts of his body still ached from the exertion of their coup despite the weeks that had passed since.
He needed to sleep. Needed to eat. Needed a shower.
“I need a holiday,” he grumbled out loud to himself as he reached the sunlight outside and closed his eyes briefly to let it soak in.
“What’s that, boss?” an eager young voice asked, startling him slightly so that he had to recover himself before he answered.
“Nothing,” he told the young man who he would have referred to as a boy in the world so recently gone, “just moaning. And you don’t need to call me that, you know?”
“Okay, boss.” The boy smiled, adjusting the belt holding his trousers up. It was either too large or the weight of the pouch pulled it down with gravity to threaten to expose his skinny backside to the world with every other step.
“Walk with me, George,” Steve said, setting off towards the main body of their camp which was alive with activity. Activity, he mused, and a lot more hope than it had seen before. “Perimeter?” he asked.
“All clear.”
“Any activity to report from the guards with the farming parties?” Steve enquired.
“None.”
“Any joy with more fuel stores?”
“Reg and his lot aren’t back yet,” George said with a frown. “Due back this morning but they might’ve been delayed. It’s like that sometimes, stuff just happens.”
Steve stifled an exasperated sigh. He liked the kid, but he seemed to lack the ability to have any kind of internal monologue.
“Yeah,” the boy said, having thought about it a little more, “they’re only a few hours overdue so they probably found something interesting.”
“Probably,” Steve answered, keeping his annoyance in check because he knew it was unfounded. “Come find me when they get back and I’ll go see them.”
Steve took a stroll back towards the main building still standing in their little settlement that had once represented oppression and power by force. It had been repurposed as Richards’ military headquarters, and after the fall of his regime Steve had found himself summarily elected as the leader of their people.
He was a natural leader, a former Royal Air Force helicopter pilot, but the similarities between him and Richards started and ended at the fact that they had both been commissioned officers in Her Majesty’s armed forces.
Steve was a calm, methodical, empathetic and capable man focussed only on the survival and happiness of the people he was responsible for, whereas Richards had envisioned a dictatorship which he ruled over with supreme authority.
He tried to plead with them that he was old; old before his time at least as the injuries from the helicopter crash he barely survived should have killed him. He tried to reason with them that there were better people among them capable of leadership, and all of them would be more suitable candidates for the task of running their group. He outright told them that he didn’t ask for the job, but when it was put to him that he had the job anyway because he was the one, the central point, the fulcrum of the movement to overthrow their captors and free them, he had to admit that he did put his name in the hat by those actions alone.
It had taken over a week for the air of excitement and violence to die down after their hostile takeover. It took even longer for the blood to wash away from the stone steps of the headquarters building he climbed then, glancing involuntarily down at the spot where Richards had died and seeing where the porous stone had soaked up the man’s lifeblood to leave a permanent reminder. Steve took that reminder as a lesson in what happened to insane people who tried to control the will of others, whereas other people saw it as something more positive and ultimately less ominous.
Just as he had tried and failed to refuse the job of leadership, he had tried to refuse the trappings that came with it. It wasn’t that he didn’t want a private room with a double bed he shared most nights. It wasn’t because he didn’t enjoy having an ornately decorated office older than he was to sit in and perform the duties of a leader, but he tried to refuse them all the same because that office and that private room had belonged to Richards.
He wasn’t the same, he told himself often. Lizzie had assured him of that fact, knowing what the brooding man was thinking every time his mood darkened at some reminder of his predecessor. Every day he tried to prove the differences between him and Richards to everyone else, as well as to himself.
Making contact with Dan and the others, hearing of their struggles and losses on their long and meandering journey south, had been the single biggest uplifting experience he had felt since he first got the working helicopter off the ground so many months and a lifetime before. That brief period of elation until the fuel had run out, coupled with the lack of aircraft maintenance that had damn near killed him, paled into insignificance just knowing that they were safe. That they still lived, with the sad, odd exception, and that his little Nikita was still kicking arse and taking names.
He missed them, and more than once he had imagined himself just landing the helicopter on the Dorset coast and joining Mitch and Adam on the adventure instead of turning back to go through everything that came after. He spent nights awake thinking that if he had, then Jack might still be alive. He tortured himself with all of those what ifs so much that he had blurted them all out to Lizzie one night, letting the calm, stoic woman hear his fears and soothe him with empathetic logic.
She felt the pangs of guilt for not joining them too, she told him. She’d considered how different things would have or could have been if she’d just upped and gone with them, admitting that her fear of the unknown and of the potential for the endless discomfort of travel were the main reasons she didn’t join them.
She also admitted that a big deciding factor in why she didn’t go was because Steve chose not to. That made him feel even worse for his selfish and wistful thoughts of abandoning them all to run off on the adventure, but he kept that to himself after Lizzie had spoken.
He doubled down on his focus of leading a lot of people from imprisoned despair back into a thriving, enjoyable life as a co-operative society; just like the model they lived by back at the prison.
There were farming parties going out every morning and coming back every night. There were guard rotations and rosters to be organised and delegated, and finding trustworthy, intelligent people who were interested enough to undertake the tasks was a constant source of annoyance. Finding people to take on more responsibility would have been easier if they lived with a currency system, but in a world where everyone was cared for by the whole equally, he found that many of those willing to take on more stress were unsuited to the jobs because they were looking for the next job up the chain to be easier than the one they already had.
There were parties going out to pick clean every conceivable item from the rest of the world, much like they had done at the prison, but when they numbered over three hundred even the biggest hauls vanished in startlingly quick time.
Every minute of the day was spent putting out the metaphorical fires that people brought to him, and each time he dispensed the logical, common-sense answer to whatever problem they threw at him, he felt either like a fraud or else just pissed off that nobody would take the initiative for themselves.
He followed the old model just like they had created when he had willingly stayed in the old prison and taken a position of responsibility based on his previous experience. He spoke to the different people who had taken on the jobs like farming and scavenging. Like storing the food and items recovered f
rom the outside world.
He spoke with them to find out who was who, and when he had gauged it as best he could he invited those people to take on a leadership role. He had men and women in charge of guards, in charge of exploration and scavenging parties. He had people in charge of medical services, stores, citizens representatives…
He had all of these things, but when the world simply refused to give him a break, he realised that what he needed most of all was a deluxe model Dan with optional Ash.
SLIM PICKINGS
Reg, who once admitted that it wasn’t his name but a moniker awarded to him in jest that simply stuck, was starting to panic that he was overdue to return home. He hadn’t been with their new leader before they met at Richards’ camp; in fact, they hadn’t even met that he knew of until after Richards managed to get himself killed for being a bastard.
Reg had technically been one of Richards’ guards, although he preferred to be outside of the stifling rigidity of the town walls in the open air, and roved around under the banner of exploration as he was adept at finding things they needed.
In the world before he had been a logistics manager for a haulage firm, and when the shit first hit the fan, he had known what things were likely to be transported from where, proving himself to be an unexpected wealth of resources in the form of that previously uninteresting knowledge. What they had been before was a subject that seemed to start every conversation nowadays, as though a person was only worth what they knew or what they could do, but he guessed that was just how life was.
Finding a stash of canned goods and enough trucks with diesel still in their tanks to make it worth staying and draining as much as possible had put them hours overdue but that wasn’t the source of his unease. He couldn’t say exactly why he felt uneasy, only that he had a tickling sense of discomfort at the back of his mind similar to the feeling he got when he suspected someone was watching him.
He was no military man by any stretch of the imagination but he was sensible, and he was careful never to take unnecessary risks and leave himself and his people exposed. He put guards with guns up in high places whenever he stopped his scavenging convoy and he kept a kind of managerial overview so that he knew what was happening everywhere as others performed the tasks he gave them. He had people siphoning fuel into the tanker truck they used, which Steve had smiled at because apparently it reminded him of one his group used to have.
The air around them was filled with the loud noise the small generator powering the pump made as the collection hose was moved from fuel tank to fuel tank to suck up all of the precious, oily fluid they relied on for as long as it was still viable. They were careful, after ruining a handful of vehicles, not to draw up the jelly-like substance that settled to the bottom of the fuel which clogged every fuel filter in seconds.
The additives and biocides used to make the diesel viable was running out, and unless anyone could figure out how to refine crude oil they were staring down the barrel of the remaining days of transport courtesy of fossil fuel.
Reg fell into his thoughts for a moment, contemplating what would happen when it finally ran out or degraded too far and they had to start using horses which others were sent out to look for. They were already using them for some of the agricultural work as only a few people knew how to work the massive machines to plough and seed the ground.
He scoffed lightly to himself at the thought. The term agricultural was usually used to describe things that were rough and rudimentary. Simple and almost derisive. The truth was that those machines represented some of the most cutting-edge technology the human race had achieved, and he recalled a conversation with the old guy who knew about these things and told him about satellite-controlled seeders that mapped the field to within half an inch of accuracy from space and ran on a kind of autopilot, only requiring a human to press the start and stop buttons.
Those days were gone, obviously, as the satellites needed constant adjustments to keep them working, and as all of those people – so far as he knew – were long gone then so was that technology.
“Did you hear me?” a voice asked behind him, bringing him back to the present.
“Sorry,” Reg said as he turned to see one of his collection crew, “what?”
“I said there’s people here,” the man told him.
“Friendly?” Reg asked, not wanting another conflict mainly because the inevitable run-ins with others played hell with his schedule.
“Don’t know, but they’ve got guns.”
“We’ve got guns, lad,” Reg said tiredly, wondering why he had to explain that finding a shotgun in a house in the country or else taking a weapon from a dead police officer’s body was just a fact of life. In his opinion, going around unarmed and trusting in the inherent kindness of human nature was little more than outright stupidity.
The young man shrugged at him as though he didn’t care much for the fact; he only felt like he should report the matter to the man in charge, otherwise he’d have to consider a solution to a potential problem all by himself.
Reg sighed. “Are they coming towards us?”
“No, just watching.”
“Then we watch them right back,” the older man explained as he glanced at his watch to worry over their timeline once more. “If they want to come and talk then we talk. If they don’t, then we leave them be. We’ve got enough mouths to feed as it is; no sense in looking for more if they’re doing fine by themselves.”
The man who had reported the information backed away without answering. His opinion differed to Reg’s but he didn’t feel strongly enough to argue.
Reg was of the opinion that other people had the job of going out and talking to survivors, whereas his job was to take out convoys of empty trucks and bring them back full. He didn’t much care for digging potatoes out of the ground and he had no burning desire to extend his feeling of power or manhood by strutting up and down a perimeter wall holding a gun in endless boredom. This was his job, and the news that there were people watching them made no difference to him unless they interfered with his operation.
He walked the short distance to where the little generator thrummed angrily to suck the fuel from the big tanks of the trucks sitting terminally stationary on long-dead tyres and called out loudly to ask how long they needed. The man operating the pump looked up and cupped a hand over his ear. Reg lifted his hands and tapped his right index finger on his left wrist where his watch was, and the man glanced at the tanker before turning back to him and holding up all of the digits of his free hand.
Five minutes, Reg thought, standard answer of a man who doesn’t have a clue how long the job will take. He didn’t doubt that if he returned in five minutes the answer to the same question would remain unchanged.
He hated inaccuracy. He’d always hated it and when his drivers got caught up behind motorway pile-ups or delayed through roadworks and had to stop driving to meet the legal requirements on their time behind the wheel, it threw him into a flurry of reorganisation that he cursed but secretly enjoyed.
It wasn’t just that one load that would be delayed, but the return load he’d organised to maximise potential because an empty truck on the road represented a wasted opportunity and a further waste of fuel and driving time. He’d have to organise new drivers, change routes as well as collection and drop-off times. At least he didn’t have to factor in the crossing to the continent any longer, and that in itself represented a massive reduction in his stress levels.
Of course, there was the fact that almost everyone he knew had died, and that the world no longer turned on the process of profit and earnings and that none of the services he relied on to keep him warm and fed existed any longer, but he dismissed all of those things because there was quite literally nothing he could do about it.
Reg chewed his lower lip as he thought, the scratchy hair of his beard grown out of a lack of need to shave for appearances sake tickling his lips. Deciding that the little luck he possessed shouldn’t be stretched too far in case he needed it in the near future, he opted to call it a day.
