Afterlight by Alex Scarrow

Author:Alex Scarrow
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Conspiracies, Fiction - Espionage, Petroleum industry and trade, Fiction, Petroleum engineers, Suspense, Technological, Thrillers, Suspense fiction, Crime & Thriller, English Mystery & Suspense Fiction, Thriller, Espionage & spy thriller
ISBN: 9781409118022
Publisher: Orion Books Limited
Published: 2010-08-15T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter 47

10 years AC

O2 Arena - ‘Safety Zone 4’, London

Maxwell watched the doors swing to, shutting out the annoying din coming from the arena. The noise reminded him of the cheap seaside camping holidays his parents used to take him on when he was a boy; amusement arcades, slot machines, bumper cars, two-penny-push machines. The incessant blinging and flashing lights; simpletons all around him quite happy with that.

He shook his head. The world was full of simpletons.

Although somewhat less full now.

He returned to the task at hand. An audit of the supplies left downstairs on the mezzanine floor. That floor had been full once. Now the subterranean space was mostly bare green linoleum, dotted with islands of pallets of goods; shrinking islands.

Day to day life for Alan Maxwell had become a precarious balancing game; a very complicated game, the principal goal of which was to eke out what was left downstairs as long as possible without his people realising how little of it was left.

So far he’d played the game very well; lasted much longer than he thought they would. Some food was being grown outside; the basics, dreary vegetables of one kind or another, some fruits too. But nowhere near enough to keep over two thousand people alive indefinitely. What it was doing was helping to pad out the supplies of tinned foods, making what they had go a lot further.

Most mealtimes his people were served thick broths and soups, of which their freshly unearthed vegetables constituted most of the volume. The few dozen tins of corned beef added to the mix made it almost palatable. This summer’s crop had been better than last, but come winter, when there was very little left to dig out of the troughs of earth outside, they were going to be once again wholly reliant on these dwindling islands of canned food.

Month on month, year on year, the game he played was about reducing the amount of stored food he handed out. An accountant’s game of allocating calories per head; lowering the calorie count in a carefully controlled way. Giving less to those deemed least useful to the community; managing everyone’s expectations and morale . . . keeping the sinking boat as steady as possible.

Because sink was what it was eventually going to do.

The Zone simply wasn’t capable of being turned into a giant farm-stead capable of producing forty thousand calories of food every single day. The workers - two thousand men and women of all ages and a hundred or so children - were eventually going to starve very slowly. Not this winter. Maybe not even the next. But it was going to happen eventually.

Maxwell’s job had become one thing; managing the decline.

Keeping order on the decks as the good ship slowly slid under. The boys - the praetorians - were going to be his rearguard. As long as there was fuel for the generators so they could play their games and have their noisy music and flashing lights once a fortnight,

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