The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF - Mike Ashley [60]
Some of the TV channels went off, mainly the digital ones. Channel Five stopped broadcasting as well, but hardly anyone noticed. ITV and the BBC just had news on all the time. Channel 4 played music videos, while BBC2 was given over to re-runs of seventies' sitcoms, which had a strangely soothing quality about them. I watched a couple of episodes of Terry and June, but couldn't get the pictures of the deathly quiet carnage in Japan out of my head.
I took a stroll. Most of the cars had gone wherever they were going and the road was pretty quiet. Since this morning there had been a tank parked at the bottom of our street, following on from reports of looting and violence closer to town.
I'd never seen a tank close up before. It was a pretty grand beast. Katy would have hated it. She was a pacifist, was Katy. Still is, probably. She'd not be coping with all this. I hoped there was no rioting near her house. I hoped she was okay. I considered phoning her again, but didn't really know what I'd say. For some reason I thought about Blackpool. Katy had loved going to Blackpool, loved the prom and the noise and the sweet smell of candyfloss on the air, the clatter of coins in the one-armed bandit trays and the insane laughter of the automated clown at the Pleasure Beach. One year we'd been there someone had made a huge sand sculpture of a tank on the beach. Katy had wondered why the artist couldn't have made something less ugly. All the kids seemed to love it, though.
There was a soldier sitting on top of the tank, the real tank at the bottom of my street, a sub-machine gun in the crook of his arm. He regarded me coolly.
"It's okay," I said cheerfully. "I'm not going to pinch your tank."
He didn't laugh. Didn't even smile. "Did you hear the Government's gone?" he said.
"Gone where?"
"Just gone," he said. "Half of them have left for some bunker in the Home Counties. Some of them are dead. Westminster is burning. No one's in control any more."
I thought about this. "So who's paying your wages?"
He looked at me and blinked, as though he hadn't considered this before. He leaned into the turret of the tank and had a brief conversation with his mate. I hung around for a bit but the soldier ignored me. I wandered out on to the main road and over to Alan's cul-de-sac, but his house was all boarded up. I knocked but there was no answer, so I nipped round the back and borrowed his hedge trimmers again. When I got back to my street, the tank had gone. Mr Raines from number eight, who was in the Territorials, was standing in the road as I approached. He had a sub-machine gun exactly like the soldier in the tank had.
"Where did you get that?" I asked.
"Squaddie gave it to me, just before he pissed off," he said, his face set in a grimace. "Look, there's no Army any more. No law and order. We're going to have to organize ourselves into a ... a Civil Defence Group. Do you have any weapons?"
We both looked at the hedge trimmer. I supposed it could give a pretty nasty cut, so long as you were within fifteen feet of a plug socket. "I'll have a look at home," I said.
I phoned Katy again but got their answer machine. "We've got a Civil Defence Group in our street," I said proudly. I paused. "I love you," I said, then put the phone down.
Katy had left me because I wasn't exciting enough. Because, after my parents died, I just wanted to sit in their old terraced house and go to work and come home and watch TV. But what she failed to take into account was that I wanted to do all that with her, that all that was exciting enough for me. I wondered if she was finding all this exciting now she was with Steve.
A minute later I picked the phone up again and left another message: "I've got some Chinese ready meals and the electrics are still on here, so if you wanted to come over ..."