ALBION

By John Kay

ALBION: A POST-APOCALYPTIC DYSTOPIAN THRILLER

The walls have ears, the trees have eyes, in Albion.

 2050, a post apocalypse Britain, known now by its ancient name of Albion. James Benedict is just an ordinary man who finds himself caught up in the swirling tides of history, as the society that w

• Language: English
• Publisher: Conscience Media
• Release date: Mar 28, 2019
• ISBN: 9781999640965

John Kay

ohn Kay, writer and lecturer, was born in Park Royal, London and brought up in nearby Hammersmith. He attended a state grammar school in the West London suburbs, an area colloquially known as Metroland, made famous by the celebrated poet John Betjeman. After leaving school at eighteen, he began a career in banking, working for Barclays Bank in central London, a stone's throw from the famed Portobello Market, fashionable South Kensington and up-market Chelsea. After gaining an Honours degree in English Literature from the University of Reading, he later studied for a Master's at the University of Leicester. Having taught at a number of schools and colleges in the south of England, he retired early as Head of Department from one of the largest colleges in the country.

Book preview

Written for my dearly beloved

MARCH 2050

This is here, this is now, and this is real. Looking down over the suburbs, lit by the eerie glow of the city, I feel the night wind on my cheek, standing here on the darkened hillside. I feel a thousand years old, the scars run so deep, the events of my life playing out like an old-fashioned movie in my mind, frame by frame. I can run things backwards and forwards at will, seeing the drained colours of my life, the ages that have passed within me; the boy, the youth, the man.

If you had told me ten years ago that I would be here now, a hunted fugitive, I would have told you that you were mad. Perhaps whoever finds this record can piece the whole thing together one day. Some future historian or researcher, if this should survive, may make some sense of what I have written. But for the time being I shall bury this journal here on the windswept hillside, looking out towards the haunting glow that runs along the skyline, the lights of the vast metropolis.

I glide like a spectre through the teeming city. They do not know me, they do not recognise me; I am nameless, faceless, invisible amidst the throng. Walking between the checkpoints, I am disregarded by the security police and on the rare occasions that I am required to stop, I thrust my dog-eared documents boldly into the faces of the petty officials. A cursory glance and they wave me through; this is not the face of a man on their files, a man with dark hair, a youthful face, unblemished features. The years have taken their toll and there are lines now, a slackness around the jaw and crow’s feet at the corners of the eyes. Any likeness they have of me is a dozen years out of date. A bottle of cheap dye, bought from a back-street pharmacist completes the transformation. My hair, once dark, is now a uniform iron-grey.

I am amongst them once again, flitting back, a ghost from down the years. They fear me, as they fear us all, the ones who have seen through their tissue of lies. They fear the individual voice, for everything and everyone must now conform, bending to one end, which is to serve the Party and the state in this the new, the promised land of Albion.

CHAPTER 1

The past is like a ruined mosaic. As far back as I can remember I have been trying to make sense of all the things that have happened. I have lived by anecdote, by myth and by family legend. The thing is though, however much they try to distort the past, to cut us off from what we were, I know that somewhere, guarded and secure perhaps, within some vast and subterranean vault, there lies the truth, the story, complete and unadulterated, the record of our history.

How strange it is that within the space of just a generation we have become remote from that which once was our everyday existence. What was normal, ordinary, mundane, has somehow become a faded memory, a sort of dream, derided and dismissed by the powers that be as something of no consequence. I suppose that if I thought about it long enough, I could tie it down to the day, the very date in fact, that separates us from that other reality. It was about the time the sickness came that carried away my father and my mother, along with all the others. It happened some thirty years ago, about the time the Party came to power.

I watch them daily, as I have watched them for a generation, gliding by in sleek and shiny automobiles. On the pavements the people warm themselves at flickering braziers or lie in dusty doorways or beg along the margins of the glittering arcades. For this is Albion, the world we thought would never come to pass. I owe it to some future generation not yet born to tell them how it has been with us. You see this is not the story of one man only, it is the story of an age. I realise now that when I started out with Jo, fifteen years ago or more, we were at the fag-end of something, the end of the society we and our parents and grandparents had known.

I have a dream that recurs almost nightly now. Of a youth that was not my youth, of a time before my time. I live it in my nights and carry it through my days, such strange and haunting memories of things that I have never seen, walking through the streets of London and yet a London I have never known, a bright, sun-drenched morning when the pavements shine after a sudden shower of rain and the canopy of leaves casts its shadow across the grass. I see the senate house, not grey and guarded as it is now but white and glistening in the morning light. And there are people, walking, talking, laughing, yes, laughing. Perhaps it is some other person's memory, a memory that was planted in my childish brain a very long time ago.

CHAPTER 2

We have been hiding above the tree line for three days now. We can see the soldiers down in the valley a mile away making a sweep through the village. Houses are on fire and the little slate-roofed chapel is a ruin from the tank rounds they've fired into it. It is, I guess, reprisals for the help they gave us.

They know that we are here but we are well camouflaged, we have had plenty of practice. Every few minutes one of their gunships passes overhead. It would be easy to shoot one down, to knock it out of the sky with one of our missiles, we have a few. But that would mean giving away our position and that is far too dangerous for us. And so, we lie low, hoping that they will pass us by.

They use thermal imaging devices, so we have spread the deflector netting we captured across the entrance to our bolt hole. At least we can see them, we know what they are doing. Even in the darkness they are visible through the night vision glasses as they crawl like insects across the mountainside. Of course, they use the same equipment to search for us. And so, it is a game of cat and mouse. If it came to an all-out fire fight we are out-gunned, but I have the satisfaction of knowing that we’d take a good few of them with us.

Where did it all begin? I have asked myself that a thousand times. Sometime around my fourteenth birthday, I guess. But then again, I wonder if it didn’t start a long time before that. At all events it has something to do with her, she who was with me almost at the start of life. She runs through my life like a thread, the thought of her gnawing always at the edges of my consciousness, part always of my waking days and of my dream-laden nights. I could not escape from her, even if I wished. All that has been most precious to me is woven into the pattern of history.  I return time and time again in my dreams to the memory of her, however much I struggle to forget, to a spring day almost thirty years ago.

We never went into this wanting armed conflict. All we wanted was justice for the masses who exist under the present tyranny. Twenty years ago, ten even, I might have believed that we could turn things round by peaceful means, that there might be a return to democracy. But after they killed Jo everything became clear to me. I saw as if scales had fallen from my eyes that there was only one way to fight them and so I became an enemy of the state, for that is what they have made me.

My name is James Benedict, not that it’s particularly important, my name could be anything, Jack or Bill, or John, I'm sure it won't matter in the end. I’m a platoon leader in the People’s Army. I say platoon, what I should really say is what's left of my platoon. They ambushed us a week ago, most of my people were killed or captured, poor bastards. I wonder if the ones they took prisoner wouldn't be better off dead. They brainwash them or chain them up and torture them, that’s what they do to our people nowadays. They video it all for the prime-time telecasts, you see, a sort of warning that this is what happens to rebels and dissenters. I read that hundreds of years ago the governments of the time used to have public executions and put people's heads on spikes down by the river. They haven't yet got around to doing that but they will, I'm sure of it, given time. Even so, the people come over to us, hundreds every week, those who can make it. It’s getting more difficult though, to sneak out of the towns and cities now, what with the nightly curfews, the armed patrols and the authorities changing the travel documents at such frequent intervals.

When I was a child no-one could have foreseen the way that things would turn out. There was a sort of normality about things, not that I know much about normality, only what I remember vaguely and what I was told by my parents, who grew up in the late twentieth century.  But then the sickness came when I was fifteen and wiped out almost a third of the population of the planet. The government passed the Continuity Act then, an emergency measure that effectively keeps them in power for ever. It might have been repealed once, but the Party has such an iron grip on every aspect of society now that no-one dares to seriously challenge it any more.

There was a time, not so long ago, when people could travel freely around the country, when there were no check points at the entrances to towns and cities, a time before the grim community estates were built, with their razor wire and electric fences and security patrols, where the mass of humanity is now corralled. Thinking about things, it seems as if that was another world and of course, it was.

A thing called ‘conscription’ was introduced about thirty years ago. That was when the Youth Command was started. There had been conscription before, I think, but that was many years ago, around the middle of the last century. When they, the Party, re-introduced it, everyone was forced to serve, from sixteen to twenty-one. Thousands were taken away by force, but in the end, most were willing to go. It was either that or begging on the streets, for there has always been, as far as back as I can remember, a vast and growing ‘underclass’ of the poor, the homeless, the dispossessed, in this great country of ours of Greater Albion.

How did it all happen?  How is it that we find ourselves here? It happened simply because people thought that it could not, not in this land that hadn't been invaded for a thousand years. But then, as if from nowhere, the sickness came and caught us unawares. It was then that the Party seized its chance.

The Party had been around for years, in one form or another, had changed and metamorphosed a dozen times to meet the circumstances, the fashions, of the day. Whatever the Party once stood for was lost in the mists of time. I don’t suspect that even its leaders knew, or, more importantly, cared. The General Election when I was a boy of ten was the last one that had any semblance of meaning in democratic terms. The Party was returned to power with the slenderest of majorities but it was enough. The Party has been in power ever since.

CHAPTER 3

It was spring, round about the Easter holiday; we still used terms like Easter then. The government never tried to ban religion, it’s just that it withered on the vine, Christianity at least, in most of its forms. There are some other religions that are practised, mostly secretly, by their followers, but their adherents mostly keep themselves to themselves, for fear of attracting the attention of the authorities.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not religious, I don’t believe in anything I can’t see or touch. The most solid thing to me is this machine gun resting across my knees. I feel its weight, its coldness, its solidity. There is a purity in its power, validity in its purpose. It serves me well, this weapon that can cut a man down like a dog; I’ve done it a hundred times. I suppose you could say that’s my religion, the religion of death. It wasn’t always like that.

It was one of those perfect mornings you always remember from childhood, fields a pale gold in the early brightness, the grass damp with the dew, the sun catching each droplet of moisture, turning each miniature globule into a tiny diamond, holding within it a heart of purest light.

We lived in a typical little Midlands town, at least it was called the Midlands then, not South-Central Albion, as now.  It was a nondescript little place, with factories and warehouses, streets of run-down Victorian houses, a concrete shopping mall, and on the outskirts, the modern but already shabby assortment of residential estates, some of them what used to be known as council estates, some of them private. A ten-minute walk from the town