John Adams - Wastelands 2

He’d been glued to Marlowe’s Powerbook, trawling YouTube, his only link to the outside world. He spent hours bouncing from clip to clip, compulsively shoving cashew nuts into his mouth, washing them down with her Ardbeg. If the footage was anything to go by, the looting was still in full swing.

Occasionally he heard the roar of engine noise in the distance, which inspired him to keep the curtains closed at night. But Marlowe’s neighbours weren’t the type who coveted designer trainers and iPods and the other shit the kids on the clips were still going after. And anyway, why would they bother with the suburbs when the little scum had the whole city as their playground?

He spent the next couple of days mainlining Colombian coffee and Ardbeg and popping Alice Pepoy’s uppers and a course of expired antibiotics, because he’d seen enough zombie movies to know that the only thing worse than rampaging hordes of dead-eyed creatures is dying of something embarrassing like an infected toenail. (And he had stubbed his toe on the doorframe, when he dragged Marlowe’s corpse, wrapped in twelve layers of garbage bags, out onto the front lawn where it wouldn’t be so very much in the way, no doubt exposing himself to all kinds of horrible bacteria in the process.)

Mostly he stayed in bed, the laptop balanced on his stomach, which was admittedly a little more padded than normal. He needed to get to the gym; his abs were turning into jelly. Too much stale bruschetta and salty snack foods. But the one in the building’s basement stank like an abbatoir and the Stairmaster was practically alive with maggots.

He scrolled through the comments sections of the videos. “The yoof shall inherit the earth” was the most common slogan, outnumbering the diehard spam streams ten to one. He clicked on a link titled “Chelsea Deth Rap”, spooning duck pâté into his mouth with his fingers while he waited for it load.

A grainy image of a teenaged moron cruising along in a black BMW SUV, arm lolling out the window, miming along to out-of-sync lyrics, mediocre bass tinny in the backgroud. The yoof shall inherit the earth, all right. Pity they can’t fucking rhyme. Or spell, Simon thought, checking out the mangled language superimposed on the screen: “When the birds is dieng/the peoples is crying/when the rich are fuked/they ain’t got no luck/our time is here/yeah, our time is here/is right fukin now.

Christ.

He clicked the link to another one (“apacolypse now innit”), the Gherkin burning in the background, a kid wearing a balaclava dancing in front of it, a Sprite bottle filled with what had to be petrol in one raised hand. Simon couldn’t hear what the kid was shouting at the camera or iPhone or whatever; the sound of exploding glass and screaming smothered his voice.

Another clip showed a group of kids roaring through Harvey Nichols on dirt bikes, casually swiping perfume and make-up displays off the shelves with golf clubs. Marlowe had practically lived at Harvey Nicks. Her closets heaved with Vivienne Westwood corsets that were decades too young for her.

The only survivors seemed to be the kind of kids you saw shambling around the sink estates. Hollow-eyed yobs with acne-faced girlfriends cluttering up the pavements with pushchairs and streaming-nosed toddlers. “Underprivileged”, my arse, Simon thought, bitterly. Not exactly starving African children. Living off benefits, leeches on society. Breeding like cockroaches and sucking the life out of the country. Human scum, the lot of them. Taking the piss.

Parasites like them were the reason he voted Conservative. That and tax cuts.

He did find some diversity, hidden deep in the results pages: a young Nigerian or Somali girl or something (who can tell, honestly?) with a shaved head and metal shit in her face, demonstrating first aid techniques and basic water filtration in a series of clips. In another video, a gloating young Eastern European lunatic with a husky voice and a ponytail and a grease-stained t-shirt, sitting in his basement, ranting into his webcam in a hilarious accent about “viral Ragnarok” and “zis is vot happens ven you don’t vaccinate your children.”

Simon realised that he hadn’t seen a single person over thirty on any of the recent clips. He hoped this was because people his age couldn’t be arsed. But he was beginning to doubt it.

Feverishly, he clicked on clip after clip, desperate to find someone—anyone—who looked like his sort of person. His age. His type. Nothing. And that’s when he had The Epiphany.

CO19 were never coming.

He, Simon Thomas St. Martinborough, was the last of his kind.

He half-skidded, half-ran to the full-length mirror in the walk-in-closet, taking a moment to admire himself before searching out the truth in his reflection. You’d never say he was 38. (A wannabe silver fox, Marlowe had called him. At 23 years his senior, she could fucking talk.) His scruffy beard was peppered with silver. His hair was dirty and sticking up in places. But his skin glowed with oily pink health and his eyes were wild, full of intensity and fire. He looked like a man who had survived a Terrible Thing. He looked Enlightened. He looked, in short, like The Chosen One.

His reverie was interrupted by roaring engines. Aston Martins, if he was any judge of fine luxury motor vehicles (and he was). He quickly reached for the light to turn it off. No point letting them know he was here. He poured the last slug of whisky into his glass and sat waiting in the dark for the damn yoof to fuck right off. Which is when they lobbed the Molotov through the downstairs window into the study, where it just so happened he’d been storing all the liquor he’d rescued from the neighbouring apartments. It went down, or rather up, like a bomb.

The house filled with churning clouds of hot black smoke faster than he could have imagined was possible. He grabbed the closest thing to hand—one of Marlowe’s trendy terrorist-chic scarves that had been all the rage several years back—and wrapped it round his face and scrambled for the exit.

He launched himself down the stairs, hearing the crack and pop as the glass buckled in the study, feeling the white heat against his skin. He almost got lost in the hallway, disoriented by the smoke and, yes, all right, the whisky too. But all the way through the dreadful choking gauntlet he felt himself buoyed by a sense of invincibility. And yes, even a kind of inner peace.

He fell out the front door, gasping great big lungfuls of the cool night air (mixed in with the sweet stench of Marlowe on the grass half a foot away) and turned to see her 750,000 quid love nest alive with flames. He felt a surge of exhilaration. He was alive. He was It. The Guy. Untouchable! And watching the flat spewing great gobs of greasy smoke out of its faux-Tudor windows, Simon had his second epiphany of the day. There was a Master Plan at work. A Grand Design. Simon had a destiny to fulfill. Just as soon as the sun came up.

Eyes gritty from smoke and lack of sleep, he wandered out into the morning, making for the high street, passing a dead horse from the nearby riding stables lying in the centre of the road, its skin undulating with maggots.

Obviously, it was intended for him to walk. He’d smashed the window of every luxury car for three blocks (the Messiah—yes, Messiah—couldn’t be expected to show up driving a Toyota) but not a single one had the keys in it. He wondered if Miss Nigeria’s instructional YouTube videos included how-to-hot-wire-a-car. Too late now. The Powerbook was long gone, together with his previous life. Besides, the roads were clogged with burned-out buses and overturned cars.

He couldn’t believe Chislehurst High Street was the same place. The storefront windows were jagged dark holes; the delicatessen’s doorway was blocked by fallen debris; the Waitrose a burnt out, stinking shell. An Audi R8 had rammed through the estate agent’s window; he could make out the shadowy figure of the driver crumpled over the wheel. And everywhere, bloated bodies.