Tipping Point (Project Renova Book 1) Read online

  Tipping Point

  Terry Tyler

  ©Terry Tyler 2016

  This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.

  Any resemblance to actual events, locations or persons, alive or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or otherwise, without the express written permission of Terry Tyler.

  All rights reserved.

  Thanks to my dear husband who, six years ago, encouraged me to put fingers to keys again, and also to my proofreading sister, Julia,

  to the supportive book blogger community, to the treasured readers who have stayed with me as my writing evolves,

  and to those newer readers who have taken a chance on me.

  "Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity."

  ~ Marshall McLuhan, Canadian philosopher

  CONTENTS

  Prologue: August 2024

  Chapter 1: Safe House

  Back Then

  Chapter 2: Smoke and Mirrors

  Chapter 3: Travis and Kitson

  Chapter 4: The Gathering Storm

  Chapter 5: Billy Stokes and Nick Greenaway

  Chapter 6: Tipping Point

  Chapter 7: The Beginning of the End

  Chapter 8: Monday, August 19th

  Chapter 9: Escape

  Chapter 10: Travis and Kitson

  Chapter 11: On The Road

  Chapter 12: Lachlan and Wedge

  Chapter 13: Zomchav

  Chapter 14: Travis and Aria

  Now

  Chapter 15: A Lawless Society

  Chapter 16: Dex's Secret

  Chapter 17: Sisterhood

  Chapter 18: Travis and Aria

  Chapter 19: December

  Chapter 20: Scott's Story

  Chapter 21: Project Renova

  Chapter 22: What Scott Knows

  Chapter 23: New Year

  Chapter 24: Safe House

  Chapter 25: Rampage

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  Tuesday, 27th August 2024

  "Guy with gun alert, Mum!"

  Lottie yanks my arm, and we melt back into the shadows between our house and my friend Claire Robertson's, which has been in darkness since shortly after Shipden was cordoned off from the rest of the world. Quarantine was announced on 26th July; a week later, all four of the Robertson family were dead.

  I crouch down, and glance back into the garden where, back in May, we sat on the grass chatting, laughing and drinking at one of Claire and Tony's famous barbecues. Tony stood proudly at the range, beer in hand, expecting Dex to join him flipping steaks, but my Dex waved him off with a remark about not conforming to gender stereotypes, and arranged a water fight for the kids, instead. Claire lent me a dry top when I got soaked, deflating Tony's hopes of a wet t-shirt contest.

  A silly, fun day. A hundred years ago.

  "Now—he's walking down the other way!" Lottie hisses, and I snap my attention back to the moment. I need to stay alert, more than ever before in my life. Now is not the time for rose-tinted reminiscence; Dex and I had words when we got home that night, because I thought he was flirting with Claire's sister. Well, he was.

  "Let me go first." My heart's inching its way up my throat as I creep past numbers twelve and fourteen, Lottie padding after me, until we reach the sandy path that leads to the cliffs. I look back; Gun Guy has his back to me, smoking a cigarette, talking to his mate. They've grown slack over the past week, clearly not expecting escapees at one o'clock in the morning. I'm guessing these two are just hanging around waiting for the trucks to arrive.

  No way are we getting into those trucks.

  I ease open the gate to the cliff path, and Lottie slides through, behind me. I can smell the beginning of autumn in the air. September. Back to school.

  My daughter's academic education ended on 26th July, too.

  "Stay low," I whisper. Lottie's as tall as me, with a more athletic build, like her father; she takes up more room. I'm aware of every sound behind me. The night's so dark, silent apart from the distant whoosh as waves break on the shore, way below.

  And the sound of gunfire floating up from the town.

  The gradient up the path is slight, but I soon realise how unfit I am, worse with the pack on my back. The going is hard, and I have to close my mouth to prevent audible huffing and puffing, but we're gaining ground, every step taking us further away from those two men with their guns.

  Men with guns, in Shipden, Norfolk.

  A quaint seaside town with old fashioned hotels and B&Bs, for families and groups of OAPs. Crab fishing, a thriving artist community, and tribute bands on the pier.

  So it was before so-called ‘Bat Fever’, which Dex believes comes not from a dirt poor village in the Central African Republic, as per the official statements, but from a laboratory somewhere in the UK.

  If I stop to think about it, I feel as though I'm losing my mind, so I try very hard to concentrate on the practical and remember Dex's instructions, because if it wasn't for him, my daughter and I would probably be dead. Like the Robertsons, Amy and Jack Williams, the Hanns, and all the rest of them.

  "Fuck!"

  Lottie stumbles, and a second later it seems like the whole world is lit up by floodlight, though it can only be the men's torches.

  "Oi! You up there!"

  I turn round and see my own panic mirrored in my daughter's eyes. "We'll have to go down the cliff."

  "Where?"

  The desperation in her voice helps me stay calm. I have to. "Here. We can do it. I'm sure it's not that steep, not this bit." I grab her arm. "Come on. And stay low!"

  The cliff's edge is just a few yards to our left. I drop onto my front, that wretched pack weighing me down like a huge, lumpy tortoise shell, and feel over the edge, where the ground falls away. Sand, no jutting rocks. Good. I inch my leg out; the slope is fairly gentle, not a sharp drop. Not yet, anyway. Oh, if only the night was clear; just a bit of moonlight would help. We have torches, but if we're going to use them we might as well march back to the soldiers, tap them on the shoulder and introduce ourselves.

  I glance back.

  They're walking up the hill, gaining on us, shining their torches this way and that.

  "We must be on the far side of the fence by now," I hiss. "It's not a sheer drop; I think it'll be okay."

  "Mum!" Lottie's whisper is too loud. "What do you mean, you think it'll be okay?"

  "We've got no choice. Come on. Sit down, in case it suddenly gets steeper."

  I hear her breathing behind me, loud and fast, as we shuffle down the slope. The sand is cold and damp beneath my hands, the going gets steeper, and I grab handfuls of the marram grass to steady my path.

  "You okay?" A gust of chilly night breeze carries my words away.

  "I don't think they know where we are," Lottie whispers. "They're just talking."

  "Shush, then." I stop. "Keep still. Let me listen." I can hear the voices. They're growing fainter.

  Not worth the risk of going back up, though.

  "Keep going," I whisper. The waves still sound miles away.

  "Mum—I'm slipping—"

  Whoomph! Lottie's leg appears on my right side; her hand clutches at my shoulder as her body slams up against me. She pulls me over with her, and together we slide down the uneven sandy trail, hurtling down and down into the darkness.

  Chapter One

  Safe House, Elmfield Village, Tyne and Wear

  Ten Weeks Later ~ Nov
ember 2024

  Winter's coming, bringing with it a whole new bunch of problems.

  Only yesterday, Heath remarked that it was most considerate of civilisation to have collapsed in the summer, so we had the warm weather in which to get used to it.

  Heath manages to make light of even the darkest days. This is good, mostly.

  I'm shivering under the duvet, and my nose is cold. Lottie used to complain that she was 'freezing' as soon as there was the slightest nip in the air, so I'd set the heating to burst into action at six-thirty each morning from early October until April. We didn't think about it. We just flicked that switch.

  When my mum was growing up, not everyone had central heating, and, whenever Lottie moaned about being cold, Mum would say, "Yes, well, you're supposed to wear jumpers in December, not lacy camisole tops," and tell us about childhood mornings lying in bed, bracing herself to throw back the covers and step out onto cold lino.

  Lottie doesn't complain any more. I think she likes sleeping in her clothes. She's young enough to consider everything a novelty.

  I wear my socks in bed now, even though I used to moan at Dex for doing so. It's better to live according to the seasons, instead of existing in an artificial atmosphere. I can deal with the cold thing; I'm not a total wimp. But I can't get used to sleeping alone.

  Dex will be here soon. He will. There's no way on earth he's done all he did for us, only to get himself killed, or held somewhere. He's too clever.

  Even though the others don't say so, though, I know they suspect we've seen the last of him. That he's gone. Dead, maybe. But I'd feel it if he was.

  All the same, I'm sure there's something Kara and Phil aren't telling me. I sensed an undercurrent as soon as we arrived, but I'd never met them before, so I couldn't start advertising my paranoia like a lunatic.

  I put my hands underneath my sweatshirt to warm them, and slide them down to my hip bones. They're jutting out. I can't help being slightly thrilled about this. All those years I longed to be as slim as I am now, but couldn't find the willpower. A few months of this strange new life, and I'm baring-my-midriff-with-confidence slim, proper slim, for the first time since my teens. I could publish a book about it, if the internet still existed. The Global Pandemic Diet. Make a ton of money. Except that money doesn't mean anything now, either.

  When we talk about what we miss, we all agree that those pieces of paper with pictures of the king's head are easy to forget. As soon as the twenty-first century stopped turning, wealth indicated by numbers on dead screens or pockets full of notes became irrelevant.

  The old rules disappeared and values changed, almost overnight.

  "Three days of no power and no water, that's all it takes for modern society to disintegrate." Dex told me that.

  How lacking in resources we are. I read a lot now; I found a book about the first outbreak of the Black Death, in medieval times. Around half the population died and, although it wreaked sociological havoc, the survivors just got on with their lives. Ploughing their fields, drawing water from wells, tending their livestock, preserving food for winter. Now, though, we don't have those skills, nor any internet to show us how.

  We're trying to educate ourselves, because one day there will be no food left to scavenge.

  Talking of food, which we do a great deal, I was getting nostalgic about ice cream yesterday, but Heath said we would lose our taste for junk food surprisingly quickly, and that if I had it now I probably wouldn't like it as much. I'm not convinced. I'm a former ice cream freak. Lottie and I loved our dessert-fests in front of the TV. Banoffee cheesecake. Salted caramel Häagen-Dazs. Butterscotch sauce. No wonder I put on weight.

  When the final power outage became a permanent one, my ever-practical daughter suggested we might as well enjoy our last ice cream binge before it all melted. We sat at the kitchen table with all the tubs out, digging in and giggling, until we felt sick. Lying on the settee groaning sort of sick. When you say 'no more' to salted caramel Häagen-Dazs, you know you've had enough.

  Now, my two pairs of trousers are both too big, and I have cheekbones. Occasionally I catch a glimpse of my reflection in a mirror and hardly recognise myself; this is how I'm supposed to look, as nature intended. I'm fitter than I've ever been before, too; who needs Pilates? I look healthier, stronger. I like the new me. I used to spend so much time and money sun-tanning and waxing, moisturising and exfoliating, when all I needed was a sparse diet and plenty of exercise.

  I wonder if my grandmother is looking down from a cloud, nodding, with her 'I told you so' smile.

  The other day, Lottie recoiled at the sight of my three-inch dark blonde (okay, mousy brown) roots in the way that only a teenager can, and suggested swiping a highlighting kit from a chemist, but I can't justify using that amount of water on a non-essential. Knowing my luck, there would be some emergency and I'd be left waterless, with my head a mass of tin foil packages.

  I smile to myself at the thought, and immediately feel guilty for concerning myself with trivialities like the colour of my hair. And even for smiling, because my mind is playing back the scene across the road on the night I knew Lottie and I had to leave Shipden; it slips back into my head at least once a day.

  It's Tracy Mathis, covered in blood, kneeling over her injured son in her front garden, screaming for help, while two men zoomed off on Jason's motorbike.

  The soldiers took Jason away in their truck to get medical care (allegedly), but they wouldn't let her go with them. I went over to comfort her while she sobbed, I couldn't do anything else; I felt so helpless. We weren't particularly friendly, but she was a neighbour.

  "We ought to take her with us," I told Lottie, as we shoved our stuff together, even though I didn't see how; Tracy was slow, chunky, even more out of shape than me, and I couldn't see her tiptoeing up a cliff with a backpack.

  "She won't want to come," Lottie said.

  "We should ask, though."

  I did, in the end.

  "How can I leave, with Jason in hospital?" She looked at me as if I was crazy. "And we're not allowed; that's what the quarantine's for. So we don't spread it round the country."

  "Tracy," I said, "it's everywhere, already." The electricity was off. The water was off. The country was on the verge of total collapse, but Tracy insisted that 'they' would sort 'it' all out soon, and everything would go back to normal.

  I wonder how she fared, after we left. I still feel bad about her.

  And thinking of Tracy always gets me remembering that other thing.

  A group of youngsters had pitched their tents down on the beach, after campers on their site came down with the fever. About ten of them. They were making the most of it; I'd see them drinking, lighting fires, dancing.

  A few days later they were all dying. I found one of them, a young girl not much older than Lottie, running up the cliff, terrified. She'd woken to find her boyfriend dead in the sleeping bag beside her.

  "He felt rough yesterday, but he thought he just had a hangover," she told me. She kept wailing, over and over, "We thought it was a hangover!" I took her back to our house, let her take a bath, calm down and sleep on the sofa. I said she could stay with us, but in the morning she'd disappeared, along with two cartons of orange juice from the fridge and a packet of paracetamol, so I imagine she was ill, too. We never saw her again.

  The light outside tells me it's about half past seven, so I take clean underwear and nip down the landing to the bathroom. We pee in tupperware containers, which are emptied into holes we've dug in a field down the road, then disinfected. How to manage without flushing loos is never mentioned in TV shows or films about life after global disasters. Must be because gunfights and post-apocalyptic comradeship are more thrilling to watch. Viewers don't want to see their favourite hunky road warrior sidling off into the woods with a roll of Andrex, I suppose.

  There are six of us in the house: Lottie and me, Kara and Phil, and Heath and his son, Jackson, commonly known as Jax. Jax is around Lottie's age, w
hich is handy; they have their own language, the way sixteen-year-olds do. None of us knew Heath and Jax before. Kara met them when they were raiding the same shop; they were on their way to the west coast of Scotland, by motorbike, from Eyam in Derbyshire, where he and Jax were lodging with a relative. Before, he owned a small bike garage a couple of villages away.

  I've read about Eyam in my book about the Black Death. During the second major outbreak, in the seventeenth century, the village was hit early, and the residents made the selfless decision to quarantine themselves rather than spread the infection.

  When Bat Fever arrived, three hundred and fifty-eight years later, they isolated themselves in the same way, instead of leaving an infected zone as so many others did, up and down the country.

  "The vicar said we owed it to the memory of those who died before, because the village's economy was based around the 'plague village' tourist trade," Heath told us. "I didn't expect more than a few to agree, not these days, because we're more selfish now, aren't we? But almost everyone did." He had tears in his eyes when he told us about it. In some ways, then, we'd been through the same experience, being shut off from the rest of the world. Except that Eyam didn't have military barricades at all access points.

  When a week had gone by with no new cases reported, he and Jax decided to pack up and see where the wind blew them.

  "This is how we're meant to live," he says. He's exhilarated by the new world. Says he was born in the wrong century. "If it wasn't for Jax, I wouldn't have even had a mobile phone." He's proud of this. "And as for social media sites, I think they're the devil's work."

  He'll get on well with Dex.

  Most surprising is Lottie, who's been complaining about being bored since she was eleven. I expected a continual background whine about the lack of iPads, iPhones, iWatches and the various other accessories that kept her constantly logged on to virtual life, but she's glad to be rid of them.