Dave Hutchinson: Sleeps With Angels

Rae and Willem wound up in adjoining rooms; it wasn’t planned that way, but Rae wasn’t surprised and Willem probably didn’t even give it a second thought.

She had met Peter at university in Nottingham. She was doing English Literature, he was studying nanotechnology. “We complement each other perfectly,” he joked, and in a strange way he was right. After they graduated, he got a job with a little nanotech startup in Eindhoven and she followed him to the Netherlands, finding a job teaching English at a local school, and she stayed there until she retired forty years later. The little startup became one of the powerhouses of the European nanotechnology revolution, and Peter became a senior vice president in charge of research. He was still there when La Silence descended on the world. They never married, never had children, and they were about as happy as two people can be. And then, one weekend in October, he was gone.

It happened quickly but without any fuss. Peter went into the office on Saturday morning, just like he always did, to catch up on the administrative stuff he never seemed able to clear during the week. Rae went shopping at the local market, bought some food for a dinner party they were having that evening, came home about lunchtime, and decided to have a nap before she started to prepare for the party.

Sometime later, she had a dreadful nightmare. She dreamed that she woke up and the bedroom was full of smoke and the smoke was alive. It was surging back and forth across the bedroom in waves, sometimes coalescing into complex solid geometrical shapes, sometimes forming faces. It was buzzing, far far down at the bottom limit of her hearing. It smelled like jacaranda and when she breathed it in it tasted of pear drops and made her go back to sleep.

She opened her eyes and bright autumn sunshine was streaming into the room. She felt better than she had in years.

She got up and went downstairs. Someone was moving around in the kitchen. It sounded as if they were opening and closing cupboards and drawers, as if they were looking for something. Peter was always doing that, trying to find something he had mislaid.

“Pete?” she called. “What have you lost now?” She got to the kitchen doorway and stopped, suddenly frozen.

It was Peter in the kitchen, going through the drawers and cupboards looking for some lost thing. But it was Peter with a full head of brown hair, Peter as she remembered him from the first time she’d met him, young again.

“Pete…?” she said, so quietly even she barely heard it.

Peter looked at her and smiled, and suddenly the air was full of music, a bouncy half-familiar tune, and Peter opened his mouth and started to sing in a gorgeous baritone completely unlike his usual scratchy off-key voice, “Don’t worry, be happy…”

Rae didn’t hear the rest of the song because she had started to scream, and she kept on screaming, and for quite a long time after that the world had to get by without her.

Gottlieb hadn’t been kidding. The Household Cavalry’s pocket nation was very well-stocked, and the hotel was in beautiful condition. The dining rooms were oak-panelled, the furniture heavy and solid, the beds — even if she hadn’t spent the past five days sleeping in the car — deliriously comfortable. The food was among the best she had ever tasted.

“We have three Michelin-starred chefs,” Gottlieb told her at dinner that evening. “Fresh produce from farms in Hertfordshire. Fish is a bit scarce, though. We don’t get any sea-fish at all.”

“There are fishermen on the French coast,” Willem said.

The Captain raised an eyebrow. “I didn’t know that. Do you think they’d be up to trading with us?”

“They’re a bit… cliquey , Captain,” Rae said.

“That’s an understatement.” Willem sipped what had turned out to be a truly excellent burgundy. The Household Cavalry had access to some of the best wine cellars in the country. “They have their own country too. La Republique Sangatte , they call it. We wanted to ask them if they could bring us across the Channel, but they shot at us. We shot back.” He shook his head. “Not a good outcome.”

Rae reached out and squeezed his forearm gently. “They trade a bit, up and down the coast, but I don’t think their hearts are in it, really. They’re still trying to come to terms with what happened.”

“As are we all,” Gottlieb said soberly.

“How was it here?” Rae asked.

Gottlieb sat back and looked at the remains of his steak and kidney pie. He sighed. “We were on a night exercise on Salisbury Plain,” he said. “We bivvied down, and the next morning two-thirds of us were gone.” He looked out of the window. Beyond the glass, the street was gently sinking into a buttery golden twilight, perfectly peaceful. “We couldn’t raise anyone on the R/T, couldn’t pick up anything on the battlefield net. Nothing.” He looked at her and shrugged. “I expect it was much the same for you two.”

Willem nodded. Rae said, “It does sound familiar, Captain.”

“Yes. Well, we marched to the rendezvous point and there was nobody for us to rendezvous with. We went into the nearest village and there wasn’t a soul about. The telephones were working, but nobody answered. Electricity was on, but there was nothing on television and the internet was down. We borrowed a few vehicles and drove to our assembly point and our vehicles were there but…” He shrugged again. “No people. So we transferred to our vehicles and drove up here. All the way back up the A303, then down the Westway into central London. Nobody. No other vehicles. We stopped off in a couple of villages on the way, but they were all the same.”

“And so you set… this place up?”

“Some of the men wanted to try and find their families. We let them go. Most of them came back after a while, without their families. We needed somewhere to live, somewhere to… cope . My commanding officer decided to fortify Oxford Street.” Gottlieb smiled. “I gather he was very fond of Selfridges.”

Willem said, “Your commanding officer…?”

Gottlieb shook his head. “Not here any longer, I’m afraid.” He drained his own wine glass. “We have made contact, over the years, with other countries — although not with North America. I rather think there isn’t a living soul in North America. Our best guess is that only a fraction of a percent of Humanity is still here.” He put his glass down. “The gentleman who’s coming will tell you more about what we’ve found.” He stood and looked at them. “Ms Peterson, Mr Van Rijn, I have an early start in the morning. If you need anything, just dial zero on any of the house phones and one of my men will answer.” He bowed fractionally. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

After the Captain had left, Willem and Rae sat drinking their wine in silence. Finally Willem turned to Rae and said, “I think —” and Eddy Colorado chose that moment to toddle into the dining room and walk up to the table.

“Eddy,” Rae said, ignoring Willem’s tight-lipped expression of annoyance. “How can we help you?”

The little Belgian looked awkward and out of place in his brightly-coloured clothes. He said in the fractured English of which he was insanely proud, “Mrs Rae, I must visit the Emirates.”

Some nuns found her wandering near Eindhoven. She was entirely out of her mind and suffering from borderline malnutrition. The nuns took her in and fed her and bathed her, and to their great credit they didn’t throw her out when, in her madness and thinking it was what they wanted, she made Jesus appear briefly among them.

Gradually she got well, or at least learned to fake normality, she was never sure. She got used to the idea that, somehow during her wanderings, she appeared to have shed thirty years. Her hair was long and dark again, her wrinkles were gone. Her periods had started again. The liver-spots had disappeared from the backs of her hands, to be replaced by a single tiny black dot, the size of a pinhead, on each fingertip. She wondered about all this for quite a while.