Piracy: The Leah Chronicles (After it Happened Book 8) Read online

  “Maybe you should,” I said, “but seriously, some of these sections are going to be impassable next winter.”

  “I know,” Dan answered having dropped back to normal, “Neil is planning to take his little army of fixers on our three main routes in summer and fill in the worst bits with gravel and cement to smooth it out.”

  We drove in silence for a while.

  “What do you think has really got into Marie?” he asked carefully.

  “You, probably,” I said bluntly, “it usually is anyway.”

  “Ouch,” was all he replied before holding another period of quiet contemplation, where he no doubt went over the last bickering session they had shared.

  “Why are we still doing this?” I asked. “I mean, we don’t need any food or anything, so why are we still scavenging?”

  Dan craned his neck to check in his mirror, satisfied that he still led the convoy of three vehicles, and took a deep breath as he considered his answer.

  “It’s comforts mostly,” he said, “things like spices that we can’t make ourselves here. The processed chemical products like bleach. The medicines. We’re using up the last bits of what the world had before and why shouldn’t we?”

  He glanced at me to see if the rhetorical question had prompted any deep connection before continuing.

  “Have you noticed how people are slowly getting out of the habit of taking a paracetamol for a headache and instead drinking more water? Most headaches are dehydration and we are adapting to it, slowly. People are using herbal remedies where before they’d go to pharmacies and expect someone else to solve their issue for them. Everyone is going back to a simpler way of life because we’ve lost all of our modern comforts, but it’ll take a couple of generations until we’ve got over the easy life we had before.”

  I thought about that, realising that what he was saying was true. We were returning to the old ways for a lot of things, but I still missed luxuries like sweet-smelling shower gels and deodorants. We had started making our own soaps in the last year, when the increase in our livestock allowed for the fat to be used for other things, but it was never the same. I guessed that Dan was right though; if I’d never experienced a decent shower gel then I wouldn’t notice anything wrong with our homemade chunks of soap.

  “I dunno,” Dan said to bring me back to the present with a change of subject, “maybe I’m just being too much of a bloke about Marie. I don’t have that maternal instinct that she does.”

  I said nothing and just let him drive.

  Hypermarché

  I’d never had the chance of a foreign holiday in my ‘before’ days, but Dan had visited France a few times either by car ferry or via the ‘Chunnel’, as he called it. He always said that the big supermarkets there were like a day out by themselves as most Brits had never seen their like back home.

  He said you could literally buy everything you needed in there. You could have an empty house and kit it all out in one single trip; everything from every grocery product known to mankind to white goods like massive American fridge-freezers and garden furniture. They literally stocked the lot. Many had cafés inside as well as full pharmacies. They were their own butchers and bakers. He told me about one where they even sold new cars which you could drive away if you felt so inclined.

  These places saw thousands of people every day, all cramming into the acres of available parking and smacking their car doors into each other’s rides without seeming to give a shit. Dan joked that he reckoned brand-new cars in France actually came with a few dents in the sides just so that they didn’t feel out of place among their peers.

  This one was one of the biggest he had ever seen, and it looked like a whole town under one roof to me. We drove in slowly, looking for the easily detectable telltale signs of human life which were massively obvious to anyone with their eyes open. After seven years the world had reclaimed so much of what we had already taken that the buildings were covered in green weeds to make unnatural-looking natural structures. Mother earth didn’t make straight lines, Mitch always said as he quoted one of the first lessons of camouflage and concealment. Break up the straight lines of you and your kit and you’ll be hard to detect as long as you don’t break the other rules.

  As we pulled into the entrance to the massive singular complex in our rolling convoy I marvelled at the sheer scale of the place and wondered out loud why we hadn’t cleared it five years ago.

  “Because we wouldn’t have had the manpower to empty it or the storage for the stuff we’d take,” Dan said. “Plus, it was a little more important to become self-sufficient for food than it was to live off canned beans.”

  We drove a slow loop of the parking area, seeing that every one of the cars there sat on flat tyres and sported that post-apoc rusty grime colour that was so popular everywhere, and came to a squeaky rest outside the main doors.

  No sign of life at all. No indications of human activity. But then again if I had taken over that place then I would be certain to not use the main entrance. I said as much to Dan who nodded as though I told him something he already knew. If I followed it logically it would be right as he was the one who had taught me almost everything I knew.

  He killed the engine to the open-backed truck we drove as the two dogs sparked into life from the rear section. It wasn’t a crew cab as such as there were no seats there, but there was as storage space which fit two German shepherds easily enough. Dan made himself visible to the other vehicles, indicating that they should stay where they were while he made a loop of the perimeter. I climbed down and let the dogs out, glancing up at the building that was so large it would take half an hour at least to do a thorough circuit.

  Mitch and Adam jogged up, kitted out and ready to work. Dan pointed at them and then to the far end of the building, then pointed at he and I before doing the same with the other direction.

  “Split,” I said, “dog in each direction that way.”

  Dan thought for a second then nodded, pointing at Adam who fell in step beside him as Mitch and I set off.

  “Find it, then,” I said to Nemesis who bounded away to criss-cross the ground no further than twenty paces ahead of us. I wasn’t worried as I was certain the place was abandoned, but having Nem range out ahead of us would provide enough warning to raise my weapon should it be required. I walked in a relaxed way, not tactically in a tiring crouch, and rested my right hand on the trigger guard of my gun to stop it swinging around on the sling attached to my vest. Mitch cradled his own rifle, longer and heavier than mine, in both arms and tucked it close to his body as though we were both on a gentle stroll and only happened to be heavily armed and armoured by chance.

  “How’s the little one?” I asked him, seeing his usually blank face break out into a broad smile of pride and happiness.

  “She’s grand,” he said, “and Alita’s taken to it like a fish to water.”

  “Aww,” I said, unsure of how to answer such fatherly pride especially with the heavy weight I had pressing on my own mind.

  “You’ll have to come and see her when we get back,” he said, eager to share the happiness of his own daughter who was less than a month old. “She gets bigger and stronger every day.”

  “I will,” I lied, not wanting to have such a worrying premonition given how exhausted Alita had been the last time I had seen her. Lucien had held the tiny bundle with deft hands and made all the right noises when, in stark contrast, I looked like I was attempting to defuse a dirty bomb with less than half a minute on the clock.

  The ‘baby boom,’ as Marie had called, it was probably a by-product of a safe environment; we hadn’t seen a shot fired in any of our four allied settlements since the bloodbath in Andorra, and people drifted away from thoughts of survival and started doing what we did best: self-replicate.

  I tried not to think about it, to push it away and block it out. I just couldn’t imagine myself even being pregnant, let alone forcing a whole human being out of my…

  Focus, I told myse
lf as I raised my gun to peer through the scope.

  “See something?” Mitch said softly.

  “Thought I did,” I lied again, inventing some half-seen movement ahead to change the subject and enforce some silence. Nemesis hadn’t changed her behaviour at all which indicated pretty clearly that there was nothing within smelling or hearing distance, but we scanned through our optics until we reached the corner of the building where it was closest to the tall fence surrounding the non-public parts of the complex. I lowered the end of my gun and stacked up on the corner, waiting as Mitch tapped a hand on my shoulder and stepped wide to raise his own rifle and scan the next quarter-mile of straight-sided building.

  “Clear,” he said after a heartbeat, but that didn’t stop me pretending to remain at DEFCON 3.

  We said nothing until we reached the next corner when it was my turn to step into the open and raise my weapon, my muscles tightening as I saw two shapes in my field of view. I relaxed as I instantly recognised the shape and movement of Dan.

  “Clear,” I said, “friendlies in the open.”

  “Roger,” Mitch replied automatically, relaxing as he stepped out and lowered his weapon. We walked towards them, sending Nem to bound ahead to fuss at Ash who tried to ignore her as he watered the overgrown bushes sprouting from everywhere. It made me wonder how much pee that dog actually carried and how he decided to ration it to leave a few squirts on every minor landmark he encountered.

  “No sign?” Dan asked us. I shook my head, sensing Mitch doing the same beside me.

  “Us neither,” he said, “can’t believe this place hasn’t been touched in years…”

  “This end should be better,” I said, indicating the huge vehicle bay doors ahead of me and behind Dan and Adam.

  “If we can get them open,” he said as he rubbed a hand over his stubbled chin.

  “I’ll go back and get the others to drive round,” Adam offered, waiting for Dan to hand over the truck keys for our ride. He took them and jogged away as Mitch started to inspect the control box for the shutters. He prised open the box with his knife and peered at the contents as he tapped the tip of the blade against his pursed lips like some tradesman trying to figure out the cheapest way to drag out a job and quote an extra amount.

  “Needs a power supply,” he said. “Neil will probably be able to work some witchcraft on it, I don’t doubt.”

  Neil could. He cut away the thick insulation around the cables running to the box and attached jump leads to the battery on his makeshift fuel truck, stepping back smartly as he issued a slightly feminine noise at the sparks from the live wire. Mitch had removed the bit that needed a key to activate the mechanism, so Neil used a tool of his own to force the shutter into the ‘on’ position.

  With a juddering shriek the roller shutter jerked upwards like some mechanical zombie reanimated from death, rising higher up to expose the dusty dankness of the air inside. We all stepped back in distaste at the stale, oxygen-deprived atmosphere inside as the opening shutter exposed ranks of stacked boxes covered in thick dust. With just as sudden a noise as it started, Neil killed the mechanism to return us to silence.

  “Big place to clear,” I offered.

  “On two legs anyway,” Dan answered. I smiled, telling Nem to search with the command of ‘find ’em’ and watched her streak away as Ash whined and danced on the spot waiting for permission to join the hunt.

  “Seek,” Dan said simply, rocketing the dog away like he’d just set light to his tail.

  “And now,” Neil intoned solemnly, “we wait.”

  I didn’t get the film reference, like usual, but the others found his impression as amusing as always. We didn’t have to wait long, despite the enormous size of the place, because both dogs returned within a few seconds of each other.

  We went inside, finding the reason why they had returned so quickly was because the public part of the huge store was blocked off by closed doors from the back sections. Nothing on the stacks of boxes gave much away, and the effort of opening them would probably reveal a whole lot of nothing useful in the form of rotted food or the spoiled contents of tins and jars, so we carried on into the store properly.

  Heavy bolts into the doorframes gave way easily and allowed us into the main aircraft-hangar building of the main part of the store and something immediately hit me as strange. The air had a thicker quality, like it was some kind of greenhouse. It was on the verge of being damp and felt instantly more difficult to breathe.

  I turned to Dan, seeing his own nose wrinkling up as I pulled my the fuck? face.

  He returned it with his dunno shrug.

  Non-verbal communication. The pinnacle of inter-personal relationships.

  We sent our dogs away, pacing out from our entrance into the vast building with our guns up as we waited for the sound of clattering claws on dusty polished concrete floors to echo away. The way they worked, with Nem sent to the left and Ash sent to the right, they would meet up somewhere in the centre depending on who cleared their areas the fastest. As I stalked through what used to be the fresh food counters, set out like a marketplace, I could see the long-ruined pieces of meat withered away to nothing after having been eaten by whatever small bugs had found their way inside since the closed for the last time. The fruit and vegetables left only dark traces where they had rotted.

  We were in the wrong section to where we wanted to be as there was nothing useful to us there, but we waited for the dogs to return before we split and searched. They came back after a few minutes, panting from the exertion with their tongues out to shed the body heat they had generated.

  “What the…” Dan said, standing up from where he had bent down to Ash, “he’s wet.”

  “Wet?”

  “Yeah,” he said, perplexed, “come on.”

  He led the way in the direction that Ash had first gone, and I followed with Adam and Mitch behind us as I glanced back to Neil. He nodded without me saying or indicating anything, agreeing that he would stay with the others while we went to explore.

  I didn’t see it from the front, mainly because I’d gone around the other side, but one edge of the building was given to a glass-roofed section like an indoor garden centre. As soon as we approached the heavy plastic curtain strips separating the two parts we could feel the hot dampness seeping through. Dan used the barrel of his weapon to poke it in between a gap and step aside to raise the curtain enough for me to step through. I sent Nem ahead of me, with Ash following, and walked inside where I instantly felt my skin prickle with sweat. The dogs snuffled around, legs moving fast and noses to the ground as they tracked the myriad of scents to no particular conclusion.

  The skylights were open, and the plants had grown tall as though the sunroof was left open on a car and plants had been left on the cloth seats. It was like a sweaty patch of jungle inside a supermarket and seemed totally bizarre to me.

  What was most annoying was that there was nothing useful in there, so we returned to the others to tell them what we’d found. Neil shrugged it off as irrelevant, leading the way towards the aisles of chemicals and organising his team of helpers to start ferrying trolleys of everything back to the trucks. Mitch and Adam went back to keep watch on the vehicles before I could volunteer myself for the task, which left me lugging boxes of tablets until my sulky looks at Mitch resulted in his offer to swap spots.

  “Come on, lad,” he said loudly to Adam for my benefit, “let’s speed this up. You take over for a while, Leah?”

  I sat on top of the truck cab for the next hour as Nem lounged in a patch of nearby shade, watching as the train of boxes came from the shutters to fill the backs of the trucks. Dan called a stop so that people could eat and drink, and because I’d been sat on my arse for too long I climbed down and stretched my back before going back inside.

  I wandered between the aisles until I found the section where they sold the things I was after, struggling with some of the words on the unfamiliar packaging. I found them next to the condoms, whi
ch I thought was either weird, sensible or else very ironic.

  “Leah?”

  I jumped and suppressed a yelp as Dan’s voice came from the end of the aisle, and I managed to shove the two packets up under the back of my vest and distance myself from the shelves as I took three fast paces towards the sound of his voice.

  “Sup?” I asked him, making out like I was just strolling through.

  “Just checking where you were,” he said suspiciously, eyeing me like I was hiding something, “what were you doing?”

  “Looking for mouthwash,” I said as I snatched the lie out of thin air.

  “Next aisle,” he said, “with all the toothpaste.”

  “Oh, cool. Thanks,” I said as I smiled widely and walked past him, turning as I went to keep my back from his sight. “I’ll be back out in a minute,” I told him as I walked backwards past the end of the aisle before I grabbed two big bottles of mouthwash and scurried back outside. I glanced back to make sure I was out of sight before transferring the two pregnancy tests into the left leg pocket of my combats.

  The trucks were filled and the fuel collection went without a hitch. I ate my food as they took turns and spun the wheel on Neil’s jury-rigged pump to bring the diesel up from the reservoir underneath the fuel station. It was late in the afternoon by the time we had returned to Sanctuary, but instead of the hot shower with fruit-scented shampoo I was looking forward to, we found panic.

  Recording for Posterity

  Leah leaned back from the leather-bound ledger and eased out her aching back, remembering that day with startling clarity for a number of reasons. She recalled how simple it had been to write using a computer keyboard, especially the ability that the lost technology afforded to be able to hit delete instead of having to mess up a whole page by my scribbled crossings out. She had never been one of those girls who had developed neat, pretty handwriting but instead had followed the Dan school of literacy and scribbled words like a spider had run through ink then skittered across the page, but only after the spider had chugged down half a bottle of vodka and hoovered up three lines of the finest Colombian marching powder.