Silent Tide by Alex Scarrow

Author:Alex Scarrow [Scarrow, Alex]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: GrrBooks
Published: 2021-03-13T16:00:00+00:00

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Sea Breeze Campsite was a caravan and camping park that had enjoyed a good fifty years of business before it finally went under in the shitty wipe-out year that was 2021.

The combination of gradual decay, lack of investment, the years of austerity and the final straw – the year of Covid – were the reasons for its inevitable demise. The seven-acre camp site with one hundred and seventeen trailers and fifty-three vacant hard stands, for those visitors with their own camper vans or caravans, had had a good innings, but time had eventually been called.

The business had gone bankrupt, its thirteen staff laid off, and a firm of accountants were brought in to determine what money, if any, could be made from selling off the trailers and land.

It hadn’t been a quick process, and eleven months on not much had happened, other than the once-tidy lawns around each plot had become islands of tall grass, hiding the wheels and stands of the trailers, and various weeds had begun taking advantage of the cracks and potholes in the tarmac drives and cycle paths.

Sea Breeze Campsite was a ghost town now.

The accountants overseeing the bankrupt camp had hired a permanent security guard to reside there for the first six months, but eventually they’d given up on that. There was nothing of much value to watch over once the camp’s office huts, grocery shop and licensed clubhouse had been stripped of their tills, computers and vending machines.

It had become the place of choice for errant teenagers to hang out, smoke and get trashed. A number of the trailers had been broken into and were surrounded by a constellation of crushed beer cans, broken alcopop bottles, empty capsules of nitrous oxide and used condoms.

Right now, though, at this precise moment, Sea Breeze Campsite stood empty and alone, save for a few feral cats and opportunist foxes.

And one solitary human occupant.

Here, lived a man on his own. Living by candlelight.

Living off of an ever-decreasing stash of money. Living a cat’s ninth life that was also, he suspected, counting quickly down.

His nights were disturbed, sometimes by foxes squaring up to each other, and occasionally by kids messing around where they shouldn’t.

He spent the nights watching and waiting.

The days were when he felt safest sleeping.

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