Chapter 1: The Last One
Firstly you should know that this is a novel I have been working on for some time. Three years in fact. Second, this chapter has been copyrighted.
I won't say much more; the story will tell you. The title is a work in progress, as is the majority of the text.
I hope you enjoy it.
I
The body was too heavy to be carried.
She dragged it like a bag of denial. It was not like the others. Not like the children’s bodies that she could sling over her shoulder and pretend were sacks filled with compost or wheat. It was a man’s body. A man she had never known. He was wearing an open white shirt which revealed a white, hairless chest. His face was scratched from the brambles they had encountered on the journey. There was a bloody cut, still dripping, circled around his neck like a bloody necklace. Flies were encircling and surrounding and jaunting them both like members of the press. He had a face that could have been handsome. All she could think about was how blue his lips were. The sky was not blue, it was an early-rising, smoking on the deck in a rocking chair, blush. It was still, no sounds of birds or cars. No sound of anything but her own ragged breathing. The air was frozen, sharp, peppermint. Her eyelashes had frost on them. Her breath was smoke in front of her. She was strong for her age. Not many seventeen-year-old girls could drag a full-size man, even with the help of a blanket that she brought along to facilitate her dragging. Her boots were making crunching sounds as she walked along the road encrusted with snow and gravel like sleepy, morning eyes. They had been her father’s boots. He had given them to her when he’d left to go up top one morning. ‘One day,’ he’d said. He was always saying those two words, the two words that meant something would happen in the future, something was going to come. When he’d kissed her he’d left a cold kiss on her forehead. She remembered the sound of his boots as he walked along the old platform and up the stairs, leaving Jack in her hammock sadly swinging from side to side. He’d left the boots in her hammock with a note inside them. ‘Never lose your shoes,’ it said – her father, always the practical one. And there was a number scratched on the bottom 41825. Jack did not know what the number was for. And she did not understand where her father was going or when he would be back. Jack wore the boots wherever she went. That morning was no exception. She felt safe in them, as though her father’s assurances and mutterings of advice were warming each footstep. Sometimes she muttered his sayings to herself on her lonely walks up top, on the surface of London, to dispose of the bodies. She wore them on her scavenges and hunts through the underground tunnels and through the expeditions that were organised to hunt for food and ammo. She awoke other times, thinking she’d heard her father's footsteps and she would throw her eyes open and stare at the archway leading to the staircase, stare at the emptiness, at the air particles that should have been making way for him, shifting and bunching up around his presence. As dawn began to crawl up the sky, Jack reached the post where she would dispose of the body. It was a cross, standing limply in the surroundings of what was once an old park, slightly wonky from months of having bodies hung from it. There were hundreds and hundreds of nails sticking out like fingers trying to scramble and escape from the wooden beams. On the horizontal beam, on the left hand side, the last man’s hand still lingered, flies irritating the flesh, frost glinting like crystals from the finger nails. Jack found this unpleasant, but swallowed her disgust. She had seen a lot worse hanging from the Scarecrow post. She’d had to help remove a lot worse from a live person too. She did not like to think about what had taken the rest of the man before this one. She knew if she let herself think about it, it would keep her up all night. It took her half an hour to heave the man up onto the box which she could then use to support his legs whilst she hammered away at his hands. She always hammered through the wrist first because attaching the nail to bone was crucial for the body to stay upright. She’d had far too many a body that had fallen flat on its face, bits of its hands still firmly stuck to the cross in defiance because she’d torn the tissue trying to get the body to stay upright. Some of the other draggers hammered through the neck. But Jack thought this was disrespectful and she knew, if she was one day in the same dead position, that she would not want nails through her neck even if it did make the job of holding them up easier. Once the man was firmly attached to the cross, Jack surveyed her work for a moment glancing around to check that she wasn't being watched, wasn't prey for an incoming predator. This was the 74th man she had nailed to the post. The 74th man that’d been found dead in the tunnels or under piles of rubble. They couldn’t leave them where they were. They’d attract unwanted predators. It had been agreed and decreed, they’d be taken to the posts for sacrifice. Jack didn't know what he'd died of. Most presumed starvation and thirst or blunt head trauma from a falling object when the bombs came. His skin was sunken and grey, tight against bone. He was sentenced to be a meal, not to have a burial. Even through the guilt that rose up in her when she would walk away from the bodies, and knew what would come for them, she knew she would keep doing it, knew that there would be a 75th man and 76th. An 100th. An 1000th. The world did not stop dying. People did not stop dying. It was the only true thing Jack knew. She stayed with this man longer than usual. She crossed her legs and sat opposite him, thinking of the necklaces she and her father had found in old abandoned buildings on the outskirts of the city when they'd first gone on scavenger hunts up top. The necklaces had a man dangling from a cross with a thorn wreath around his head. ‘Who is he?’ Jack had asked curiously. She had never seen such a strange pendant on a necklace. ‘I don’t know,’ her father said, scrutinizing the object. Jack kept it in her satchel along with other scraps she had collected. She saw it as something beautiful but terrifying, something small but lasting and impressionable. When she wasn’t dragging dead bodies, Jack spent the mornings tuning her father’s crackling radio that he’d nicked from an old overturned jeep on the way to London Bridge, listening to the list of names that reeled off as she swung silently from her hammock hanging above one of the underground tunnels. ‘Missing,’ the woman’s cold, tear-rolling-down-a-window-pane voice would say. And she would read the names as though they were items on a shopping list. Then she would say, ‘pronounced dead’ and the list was even longer. Once Jack had murmured a short prayer of respect under her breath, an Icelandic prayer that her father had taught her – may these frozen bones rest, these frozen bones sleep – (though she knew he would not sleep, or rest) she bundled up the sheet along with the hammer and leftover nails, slung it over her shoulder and began the walk back to underground entrance. London was dead: a rotting, decaying mouth. Each underground station, each famous monument was no more than a memory of rubble, a broken, dying tooth in the mouth of a world that had swallowed them. Jack remembered her father telling her about the big screens in the cities, the talks around the round tables with important leaders from all over the world. She remembered him telling her the words ‘danger’ and ‘threat’ and ‘our nation’ and the bombs falling and the people running. Now, they lived underground like rats, hiding away from the falling skies and those that searched the rubble and buildings for life, for food. The landscape was black and white. Dead. Snow. The few trees that were left were bare, scorched of life but still sparkling from the frost that had settled. The houses had slumped rooves that had been half-heartedly reconstructed with blackened corrugated iron before everyone had given up and fled for the tunnels. Dust and coal lingered on the streets, a reminder of a time when death fell from the sky and splatters its shards everywhere. She passed a group of men marching away from her, guns slung over their shoulders, armour covering their faces, arm bands with the equals sign dashed across their arms. Tics, she called them. And the name had caught on. They were irritating, encroaching on your business, a nuisance. 'They're here to keep the peace,' the voice on their plugs said. 'That is all.' They’d always get news announcements through their plugs, the small devices inserted into the back of their necks that connected them to the network of other thoughts and memories and people across the country. But nobody knew who the voice belonged to, only that he had some sort of authority. Most of the authority had gone when the bombs fell. They said there were too many of us. The radios said there were too many people and there wasn't enough food. They said that our population was out of control, our people out of control. A problem. Arguments. Pointed fingers. Buttons pressed. Regret. When the bombs fell and the world went black, they scuttled around on their own for a while. Others gathered in areas, other cities. There was a hub of them in Birmingham, another by Dover. Rumours circulated like a spider's web. There was a man. He was developing things. He would bring us back. He would bring everything back. Then, there came the big screens and the radio channels, the plugs stuck in the back of their necks to monitor their thoughts. There are bad people among us, they said, who want to do us harm. Jack had seen the Tics march down into the tunnels and pluck people from where they sat, where they lived. They had struggled and cried out and she had not seen them again. Jack had heard from someone that they called this saviour, this man who had brought them back from the dead Four Eyes because he wore glasses with big lenses and because he was always watching. But Jack knew that wasn't all. She had seen the Tics stealing food rations, seen them cackling drunk on the dirty alcohol brewed by the junkies in the stations to the North in Camden, kicking sleeping children awake because they were blocking exit pathways. Jack knew that they were really there to keep an eye on them. She picked up the nail that had fallen out of her sheet and stuck it in her mouth so half of it was still hanging out like a cigarette. It was a habit she’d gotten into when she’d been her father’s mechanical assistant, passing him tools and nails. Sometimes he put her on his shoulders and she would have to hammer things into the ceiling of the tunnels that they would call their home for a short while, before being moved on or moving on to keep afloat. Sometimes he called her ‘my little spanner.’ He told her she was the fixer of broken things. ‘You fixed my heart,’ he said and Jack knew he ached with the thought of his wife, Jack’s mother. Although the nail didn’t have any on it, it tasted of blood. Jack clambered through the small tunnel that she'd managed to forge through the rubble as a way to reach the post quicker than usual. The old underground sign post was bent completely over and most of the colours had dissolved, but Jack could still make out the B and M advertising Bermondsey station. She stumbled down the old lift shaft, grasping onto the broken bricks on the walls for more grip. When she reached the bottom, where the bombs hadn't quite reached, the ground began to level out and she could hear the quiet mumbling of voices. She passed a group of children, barefoot, grubby faces. They leapt to their feet like frightened animals and dashed back down the tunnels into darkness before Jack could toss them anything from her blanket, from the hammock package she always carried around with her. 'Home isn't a place that stands still. Home is wherever you take it,' her father used to say. She moved with her hammock and her radio and her boots and she’d set up camp in the entrance to the tunnels, listening to the dead, waiting for his name. The tin was a little further down the station, on the right hand side, built into where the control station would have been. She called it the tin because it was the size of a tin, smelt of old tinned beans, and housed the sourest man in all of Below. Lan Hidgus. Jammy bastard, Jack called him. He wore a floppy cowboy hat, chewed gum that he’d somehow managed to scavenge from someone up top in the shiny buildings on the other side of the river and stared far too long at Jack’s chest and backside whenever she graced him with her presence. Jack had vowed not to succumb to him. Her father had hated him. A lot of people hated him. But she had been desperate. She’d needed the money once she realised that her father could be away for longer than usual. Her father was the one who offered to help others, to carry loads for the elderly women, to cook meat for the amputees in the make-shift hospital at Elephant and Castle, constructed in the links to the old Northern Line. She had stumbled around asking anyone she could find if they needed anyone to carry their rations, search for food, look after their children whilst they travelled up top in search of work and food, but Jack had seen far too many shaking, anxious heads, to know that everybody just wanted to mind their own business these days. Most didn’t even talk to one another let alone show any sign of wanting to help. There was one place, apart from Lans’ which Jack refused to try. Soho. Red drapes. Black hearts. The smell of cinnamon and sweat emanating from the gaps in the bricks. Girls younger than Jack would approach her in the tunnels or entrances sometimes when she walked by, ‘only one cut,’ they would say, running their finger nail down her arm. ‘Two cuts, for you,’ another would say. An old woman who wore a scarf around her head and had long curling fingernails approached her. ‘They like red heads,’ she’d said. When she’d smiled, her teeth were black and rotting. Jack had recoiled and ran away. Jack gave up trying to find work elsewhere and had walked high-headed to the tin. Lan had known her at once because she looked the spitting image of her ma. ‘Same hair,’ he said, and he’d rubbed a couple of the red strands between his fingers. Jack didn’t like being compared to her ma. Her mother was a woman she’d tried to forget. A woman with glassy eyes and pale skin and bruises under her eyes. ‘Come with me a minute, darling,’ she used to say in a voice that sounded like silk. This was just before the bombs came and they lived in a house with a lilac coloured door. Sometimes she’d taken her to the roof of a building and stood there feeling the breeze. ‘I want to go home,’ Jack would murmur, but her mother would just close her eyes and open her arms out so she was in a cross shape. ‘Can you feel that, darling?’ she would say. It was the only time Jack saw her smile. ‘Can you feel it?’ Jack did not reply. ‘Just want work,’ she’d said to Lan in her gravelly voice. The retired doctor with the ward in the depths of the old Elephant and Castle station had said she’d consumed so much soot and dust after the bombs hit that she would always have a deeper voice, a chesty cough. ‘And you came to me?’ Lan had said. He liked feeling powerful and Jack hated herself for letting him. In her head she repeated apologies over and over to her father who despised Lan more than those that dropped the bombs. Whether it was because of a row they’d had before Jack was born or because he was always keeping more rations for himself than giving them to others, she could not say. But having worked for him for longer than two years she knew that he was a scumbag, an asshole, a jammy bastard – all sayings she had got from her father. Lan had been put in charge of issuing rations and firewood and arms and order to their quarter. And he was always keeping stuff for himself. ‘How much?’ she had said, avoiding his question. ‘How much…?’ ‘How many cuts?’ she’d said. ‘Ah,’ he’d said. He was circling her. ‘That depends. How often can you work?’ ‘Every morning,’ she’d said. ‘I can give you two cuts,’ he’d said. They called them cuts because it was like taking a chunk from you. A cut. A share. A half. ‘But if you don’t show up you get nothing.’ Jack thought he seemed extremely reasonable. She had come prepared to beg. ‘Fine,’ she said, going to turn out of the room. ‘Jack?’ he’d said. She stood stock still and turned to face him. He threw a blanket at her, containing a hammer and nails. ‘You’ll be needing those. They’re out back.’ He was referring to the bodies, the piles that were carried from the surrounding tunnels and entrances. She gulped. The hammer was covered in blood. *
That morning, she rapped on the door of the tin three times before letting herself in. Lan was chewing gum, his saliva clicking around in his mouth. When she entered, he grinned and drew the substance out before popping it back in his mouth again, like bad kids used to do in old Sunday morning cartoons. ‘Jack,’ he said when she came in and closed the door behind her. She avoided his eyes, her hood was up and shielding her face from view. She wanted to spend as little time in the tin as possible. She put the blanket, hammer and leftover nails that she’d managed to retrieve from the cross on the table. ‘Post is holding up ok, for now,’ she said. ‘Might need to put up another next month, when the rain comes.’ It was only when she lifted her head slightly that she noticed they were not alone. There was another man, who looked completely out of place in Lan’s old rattling, cowboy tin. This man was wearing a long black coat with an armband round the top of his arm and had thick black gloves on that came up to his elbows. His hair was brown and lay in a ring around the back of his head and over his ears, completely absent on top of his head. He wore glasses, thick-rimmed spectacles with the thickest lenses she had ever seen so they amplified his eyes ten times. She had never seen someone actually wearing glasses and she marvelled at the sight. He too was chewing gum. He smiled at Jack and revealed a set of perfectly white teeth. ‘Hello Jack,’ he said. His voice was more upbeat than she’d been expecting. ‘Hello,’ she said. She kept her head bowed and played with the nail that had previously been resting in her mouth. ‘Jack this is Mr Eyes,’ Lan said. ‘He works in the Towers.' Jack frowned. What was a scientist doing down here then if they were from up there? She’d heard rumours on the Net that the surface was evolving, rising again from the ashes that had been dealt to them when the bombs hit. She'd heard some had taken refuge in high towers where they'd burned the stairs and they were using supplies that they could harvest themselves on the rooves and indoors. But there was nothing for them down here. Only burnt floors and eye-avoiding faces. So what was he doing here? His eyes fixated on her and she suddenly felt very aware of everything she was doing as though she was being watched. It reminded her of a book she'd found on her scavenger hunts in Peckham. The cover was a faded deep blue with a pair of eyes and large yellow spectacles staring back. Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. ‘How do you do?’ he said, reaching out a hand. Jack did not take it. ‘I’ll be here at 6am tomorrow,’ Jack said. She turned to walk away, but Mr Eyes spoke. ‘Jack would you like to join us? I was just telling Lan about the evaluations in the Towers…’ ‘Ah yes,’ Lan said. Jack faced them and shook her head. ‘Why ever not?’ the man said, genuine curiosity in his eyes. ‘I have to go,’ Jack said and she turned again. ‘Is it your father?’ he asked. Jack stopped dead. How did he know about her father? She did not want to turn to face him again, but she did. What if he knew where he was? ‘My father,’ she repeated. ‘Such a pity, he would have made a great soldier.’ ‘A pity?’ she said. ‘Too opinionated,’ Lan muttered. The distaste for Jack’s father was mutual. She could almost taste his sneer. ‘Couldn’t take orders, sir.’ ‘Why everyone can learn to take orders,’ Mr Eyes said, fixating his stare on Jack. ‘You just have to know the right thing to persuade them with.’ Jack stared at him, hard. He knew something. She knew it. He knew something about her father. She could feel it in his cold dagger eyes, the smile flickering around his lips like the beginning of a fire. ‘But alas, I suppose it doesn’t matter now. He’s gone. Soldiers are no use missing.’ He turned back to face Lan who smiled politely at him. ‘My father…’ Jack went, and when Mr Eyes turned to face her once again, she bit her lip. She so badly wanted to ask the man more questions. But she knew she’d have to pay something, do something to get what she wanted – that was the way of the world now - and that was not necessarily something she wanted to do. She’d waited two years, two years, listening to those footsteps on the concrete that never came. Her heart was pounding in her chest. Her father. Her dad. ‘You’re my spanner, Jack,’ she could hear him say it, could almost taste his smell of wood, of sweat, of musty cereal. ‘Your father has been missing for some time,’ Mr Eyes said. He looked at the floor. ‘I’m afraid it has been so long that we’ve had to pronounce him dead.’ Jack could not stop thinking about that word as she made her way back down the tunnel towards London Bridge, to her hammock spot. The pathways were dark and she used her plug to light her way, listening to others around her talking on the Net about the gangs nearing the East. When she came to the platform, the children she’d seen before were there and they scattered, heading for the other end of the station. She pulled her hammock off her back and began to prepare for bed. Her father. Dead. It was so final. Dead. Death. But the way her father had left had not been final. It had been an ellipsis, a hanging mark, there was something more for him to say. He couldn’t just leave her hanging like that, like a question mark, like her mother on the top of that building, her arms out, feeling, smelling death at her finger tips. She knew her father was not dead. She had a feeling. She was not one to listen to feelings. She listened to her instincts yes, but that was an inbuilt warning trigger and her father had taught her to listen to it, but to be wary of it. ‘Like a stray cat,’ he’d said, ‘you can follow it all you like and it won’t even glance your way, but sometimes it can unexpectedly turn and bite you.’ She could still feel him in the crunch of her boots on the dry, dry earth each morning. She could still hear his words burning through her ears, could still feel the cold kiss on her forehead, his smell on the blankets she nestled in at night. He couldn’t be dead, she repeated to herself that night as she lay in her hammock, gently swaying back and forth flickering around her plug with her thoughts trying to find something to distract her. She looked down at her feet wrapped in his old boots; her footsteps had not stopped being warm.