John Adams - Wastelands 2

Winters looked back at the body. “Yes,” he said. “Maybe so.” He paused. “For his sake, I hope that he was right.”

The years since then have been good ones, I guess. Winters is a better leader than I was. The timetrips never turned up any knowledge worth a damn, but the search expeditions proved fruitful. There are more than two hundred people in town now, most of them people that Winters brought in.

It’s a real town, too. We have electricity and a library, and plenty of food. And a doctor—a real doctor that Winters found a hundred miles from here. We got so prosperous that the Sons of the Blast heard about us and came back for a little fun. Winters had his militia beat them off and hunt down the ones who tried to escape.

Nobody but the old commune people remember Keith. But we still have singing and music. Winters found a kid named Ronnie on one of his trips, and Ronnie has a guitar of his own. He’s not in Keith’s league, of course, but he tries hard, and everybody has fun. And he’s taught some of the youngsters how to play.

Only thing is, Ronnie likes to write his own stuff, so we don’t hear many of the old songs. Instead we get postwar music. The most popular tune, right now, is a long ballad about how our Army wiped out the Sons of the Blast.

Winters says that’s a healthy thing; he talks about new music for a new civilization. And maybe he has something. In time, I’m sure, there will be a new culture to replace the one that died. Ronnie, like Winters, is giving us tomorrow.

But there’s a price.

The other night, when Ronnie sang, I asked him to do “Me and Bobby McGee.” But nobody knew the words.

It wasn’t the blood seas that got to him. Or the dead birds that fell out of the sky and rotted on the lawn in crumpled bundles of feathers. Or the plague of flying ants crusting themselves up against the window panes. Or even Marlowe dying in agony as her organs liquidised inside her and gushed out all over the carpet so Simon had to rip the damn thing out. You’d be surprised how much the smell of spleen will permeate a room. Especially when you can’t open the windows because of the ants.

That was all Very Upsetting, make no mistake. Even though he had been about to divorce the silly bitch and nail her for half her estate and the account in Jersey that she thought he didn’t know about. And even though her death was messy and ugly and awkward—embarrassed, he’d left her to it, going into the den to play that jewel-swapping game on Facebook while she screamed and writhed and spat up black strings of blood—frankly, her dying saved him a lot of time and effort because the dumb cunt hadn’t changed her will yet. Easier to inherit than squeeze a decent alimony out of a shit-hot investment banker with a shit-hot investment banker’s lawyer.

Not that all that cash was any use to him at the moment. That was the supreme fucker of it. The banks were locked up. The bankers were either dead or hiding out in holiday houses in Spain and France, fortified in a hurry, private security guards patrolling the perimeters with automatic weapons. At least, that’s what he’d seen on the news before the news cut out.

He missed television. He missed the stock ticker running along the bottom of the business report. Missed the explosions in dusty Third World deserts and the Women Who Kill and plastic surgery reality shows and especially the scruffy animals being rescued from nasty abusive owners by trained task teams of dedicated volunteers. He felt a bit like one of those pathetically mangy pets himself, trapped in Marlowe’s Chislehurst block of flats all alone, with nothing to eat except cans of foie gras and baked beans. (Marlowe had thrown out anything with “organic” on the label back in the early days when rumours about terrorists targeting the food markets was still the prevailing theory.)

And surely it’d be Only A Matter of Time before the government restored order and his satellite TV and sent an elite unit, CO19 maybe, to the rescue? He just needed to outlast the hoodie scum running rampant in the streets.

At least the building still had electricity. After last year’s riots, the body corporate had passed a motion to install generators in the building. (Couldn’t have warm Stoli!) Simon reckoned there was at least a few weeks’ worth of diesel stashed in the basement.

So far he hadn’t had to leave home for supplies. He went shopping in the neighbouring apartments, with a handkerchief doused in Issey Miyake pressed over his mouth and nose to try to obscure the smell. The bodies left him strangely unmoved. It was all very abstract, like some grotesque modern art exhibition, all black puddled insides and swarms of flies that lifted off the bloated grey corpses in a halo when he stepped into the room.

He was much more interested in snooping around, reaffirming the suspicions he’d long fostered about their friends and neighbours. The Pepoys, for example, had a lifetime supply of prescription uppers in their medicine cabinet, which would explain the delirious cheer Alice had brought to dinner parties. He’d never liked her or her over-eager speculative conversation starters: “If you could go to anywhere on holiday where would it be?” Right where I’ve just been, you stupid bint. That’s the whole point of marrying into money. The only pick-me-up Alice Pepoys needed now was a spatula, he thought, grinning spitefully.

He cleaned out her stash of pharmaceuticals just in case. He didn’t mind feeling a bit sorry for himself with Everything He’d Been Through, but he didn’t want to get stuck in wallowing self-pity. Especially if CO19 got delayed.

The Bennetts were even more pathetic. Four of the five bedrooms were lavishly appointed straight from a bespoke decorator’s catalogue; pinstripe walls and inoffensive abstract prints. The fifth was kitted out with a king size bed with a black rubber sheet and a closet containing a parking attendant’s outfit and a camera rigged in the mirrored door.

He took the tapes home with him, along with four tins of sardines, sun-dried cherry tomatoes imported from Italy, water biscuits, a loaf of rye bread, frozen, and, an even dirtier secret than the half-hearted sex dungeon: three months’ worth of Sainsbury’s microwave meals.

On the way back, he thought he heard a baby screaming from the house a block over. But cats fighting make almost exactly the same noise. And he wasn’t going to risk his life for a bloody cat. It wasn’t that he was a man of no conscience. He’d seen that heart-breaking documentary on the pets left behind after 9/11. It had reduced even that cold bitch Marlowe to a sobbing, snotty bundle tucked under his arm on the couch. Even worse than that dolphin movie. He’d be sure to tell CO19 about poor little kitty when they got here, and they could sort it out.

The Bennetts’ sex videos were tedious. He’d seen way worse on the Internet. Which was the only thing still running. All the major networks were down. No TV. No radio. No mobile phone reception. He’d picked up some radio chatter in the beginning; government broadcasts advising people to stay in their homes: pip, pip, keep calm and carry on, which segued into increasingly panicky emergency services reports asking people to report to local medical centres as soon as possible. Then it petered off into static. Occasionally, bizarrely, he’d pick up heavy metal music, as if some radio engineer had walked out and left Shouty Goth Freaks Greatest Hits Volume 13 playing at full blast.

And yet, somehow, by some mechanism he didn’t understand, probably learned from dodgy Arab protestors, the Internet was still working. And the bloody chavs were in control of it.