Free Bar None by Tim Lebbon Page B

that became maddening after thirty seconds. The only TV picture was a blank screen with the words "Hold for a speech from the Prime Minister." We held for a while, then turned it off. The final radio broadcast, which one or the other of us turned on quite often before it suddenly ended three weeks after the plagues, played "Wonderful World" over and over again. Before the end of the world, that song never failed to make me cry. Afterward, Louis Armstrong's grizzled voice and wondrous lyrics inspired melancholy rather than sadness. The thing was, from what I could see from the folly up behind the Manor, it still was a wonderful world, though one where humanity suddenly had so much less involvement.
    From the very beginning, we had all been of one mind. The Manor was stocked with food and, more importantly, a cellar full of wine and beer. We could fight our way across the shattered landscape to here or there, but none of us had knowledge that hinted at anything better elsewhere. So the alternative course of action was to remain in the Manor and see what happened. Eat. Drink. Remember.
    Even Jacqueline, who professed to hating the taste of real ale, enjoyed several bottles each night after our first week together.
    It was not that we were trying to shut out reality by drowning it in alcohol. That wasn't it at all. It was simply that we had much better things to remember than what was happening to us there and then. The past was a happier place, and beer was a happy way to get there.
    Except for Jessica. Maybe ten years older than me, she never gave a clue about what she had lost, who she had left behind. She never actually told me outright that there was no one, but I gleaned it from her eyes, her casual acceptance, and the fact that she seemed more content than any of us with her lot.
    "It's a fine day when the end of the world comes, and all you have to do is drink beer," the Irishman said one night.
    I agreed with him. "Real ale apocalypse," I said. He started giggling, I laughed, and the two of us stayed up drinking until the early hours, unable to talk through our tears.
    We head off again and this time I drive slower, taking more care, edging past wrecked cars and watching out for debris on the road. And deer. I did see it, I know that, no matter that none of the others saw. It was there, staring me out and willing me to fall, and fall I did. So much must have changed.
    But it's not only newly confident animals that pose a danger. There are plenty of broken branches and leaf slicks from the winter, and here and there something larger blots the way; half a bumper from a crashed car, a Wellington boot, a crash helmet with one side caved in. I pass by a beer barrel standing on its end, one side gashed open. Soon after that there's a full bathroom suite smashed across the road—sink, toilet, bath. It's old—the bath is cast iron—and the scum stains are still visible beneath winter's slime. There are no vans or lorries close by, nothing to explain what this bathroom is doing here. And I realise that this is now a world of mystery. Before the plagues—before the end—something like this could have been investigated. Perhaps the sanitary ware carried manufacturer's codes, or even labels saying where and when it was bought or fitted. Its owners could be tracked down, and an explanation offered as to why it had ended up smashed and strewn across a dual carriageway. Now, with everyone dead, knowledge is rarer than ever before. Mystery is the order of the day. It's a wilder world we lived in, one where there doesn't always have to be a reason.
    I wonder what the conversation is turning to back in the Range Rovers. We've been housebound for six months, apart from a few short, hesitant trips beyond the Manor's boundaries. Now we have given up everything we had on the word of one man, a man who came and went in the blink of an eye. I've always been guilty of self-doubt, but now it crushes in, crowding me with images of Michael's