There were no survivors, and the spinning remains of a blade falling from the sky also killed a woman in the street below who was out looking for her cat.
No one seemed very interested in spending money on an investigation, and the funeral was held in private, an intimate family affair.
Chapter 73
Theo cycled through a country on fire.
The flames were distant, the paths were bumpy and rough.
The air was frozen winter glory, the sky was crystal blue.
In the morning the frost cracked underfoot.
In the evening he huffed out clouds of breath, and watched the golden peach of sunset tangle in the moisture.
Corn and Bea cycled with him.
Corn carried a rifle, slung across his shoulder.
Bea carried water, dried meat of uncertain provenance, a map and a torch.
Occasionally they left the cycle paths, and paused on little country lanes where the birds sang in the hedgerows and the signs pointed to villages of a hundred people, or to the North, or to the South, and didn’t give distances for either of these ideas.
Sometimes they passed food trucks guarded by local police, their Company insignia stripped, or by local men armed with shotguns and fire axes.
Once they passed a doctor’s clinic. A paper sign hung on the door. ALL WELCOME.
A woman pushed a pram away from the clinic, a child gurgling happily within. A woman with a Zimmer frame, bent into a right angle over her support, head bobbing up and down like a hungry deer to check her path as she walked, scowled at them as they passed by.
A queue snaked around the block to a broken hydrant from which fresh water flowed. A couple of teenagers had broken out boom boxes and were entertaining the crowds with home-made raps about revolution, love and how lonely it was smoking cigarettes by themselves cos no girl would give them sweet sweet lovin’.
The day before they reached the prison, they saw a TV on in a lit room, and passed a church hall where sleeping bags had been laid on the floor and tea was being served, and outside a wooden stake where a man had been hung to die of the cold, a sign around his neck: COMPANY MAN.
He hadn’t been anyone senior, hadn’t done anything wrong or exceeded the remit of his job. But his bosses had been faster getting out of town, and people knew him as the man who’d refused benefits when people didn’t fulfil the economic productivity eligibility criteria, so when he’d vanished, no one had looked, and no one had come to take his corpse down for proper burial, until his wife found it two days later, and wept until her lungs spasmed in the cold, and she had to be helped home by her children, who understood only that they were big kids now, and everything had changed.
When they came to the prison, the gates were already open.
A wire-mesh fence enclosed a single-storey yellow-brick building laid out as a hexagon. Buddleia grew from the cracks in the wall, grass from the cracks in the concrete. A single basketball hoop stood at the back, never used. Small square windows, covered with white wire mesh. A guard post was a black-burned shell. The heavy blue-metal doors of the loading bay stood open, and a fox had already been inside and had a piss in the corner.
They left their bicycles at the main entrance, and walked inside. Speakers stood grey and silent. Cold morning light drifted through barred windows and frosted glass. Posters on the wall, torn in two, declared from loose beads of Blu Tack:
WORK FOR
REDEMPTION THROUGH
THE FUTURE IS
MAKING A BETTER
A scuttle of feet, a noise in the grey. Corn swung his rifle round, holding it tight. Theo moved slowly down empty corridors, the bulbs dead, broken glass on the floor, doors knocked out of their frames. A workshop had already been gutted, the tools gone. A room of computers stood silent, screens shattered, the casings dented with hammers, chairs ripped in two, stuffing spread across the floor. In a dormitory a doll had been left tucked up neatly in bed, the only centre of calm in a world ripped apart. In a room of upended green chairs hung paintings in brilliant red and blue. Eyes, huge, gleaming. A child playing beneath a rainbow. A torn canvas where once there had been a picture of a house, smoke coming from the chimney.
A scuttle of feet, a whisper of voices.
Corn’s hands tightened on the rifle. The night before, three men had emerged from the woods by their campsite, and for a while they had just watched each other, no one moving, no one speaking, Corn with rifle in hand, and after a while the men had left, and since then Corn had stood never more than a foot from Bea’s side, and said not a word, and hadn’t put the rifle down, even when he wanted to sleep.
Theo followed the sound.
Pushed open another door, another dormitory of bunk beds, grey metal frames and thin stained sheets. Mattresses were toppled onto the floor, sheets torn up, blankets pulled free. In one corner, the furthest from the door, a small igloo of mattress and blanket had been piled up, encasing darkness. He approached it slowly, crouched down a few feet from the narrow black entrance to this bedding cave. Said, “Hello.”
The darkness didn’t answer.
“My name’s Theo. I’m looking for my daughter. Her name is Lucy. Is she here?”
Silence, except for a slight shifting of sheets within the wall of mattress.
Struggling to keep his voice calm, hold back the panic. “Her name’s Lucy Cumali. Lucy… Rainbow Princess. She was held here, she’s about fifteen years old. I won’t hurt you. I’m not angry. I just want to find my daughter.”
“Gun!” whimpered a voice from inside the burrow. A child’s voice, hard to tell boy or girl, too young to have definition.
Theo glanced back over his shoulder at Corn. “Would you mind waiting outside?” he asked softly.
Corn scowled, looked at Bea, who nodded. With a barely audible huff, he spun on his heel, marched out of the room. Bea squatted down next to Theo. “I’m Bea,” she breathed. “We won’t hurt you.”
A hurried whispering within the den. A muttering of voices in dissent. A final settling on agreement. A stirring of sheets. Then a girl, nine or ten years old, emerged slowly, crawling on hands and knees. She wore several layers of jumpsuit done up over each other, but her lips were blue and her face was bone. At her back eyes blinked and bodies shifted. The girl seemed to think about standing, then changed her mind, and plonked down, cross-legged, a chief guarding the entrance to her territory, and glared at Theo and Bea.
“Food?”
Bea hesitated, then opened her bag, handed over a wrapped package of dry dog meat, a packet of biscuits.
The girl took it quickly, tried to hide her excitement, passed it back to hands that emerged greedily from within the tent, then turned to face them again, stiff as a sceptre.
“Gates got opened week ago,” she barked. “Guards said they weren’t being paid to deal with this shit, they had families to look after, so they upped and went. Couple of parents turned up too, like, busting in and that, but they only took the kids what mattered to them. Some of us ran away. Lot ran away. I said they were dumb. They wouldn’t get nowhere. They’d just get into shit. So we stayed. We look after each other. That’s what we do.”
Theo licked his lips, waited on his haunches, seeing if there were any more pronouncements from this tiny monarch. When it seemed there were not, he glanced at Bea, then back to the girl, and breathed, “Lucy? Did you know Lucy? Is she here? I’m looking for my daughter.”