Free Empty World by John Christopher

food with him, but did not need it. In the kitchen of the pub there was a deep freeze, which he was careful not to open, but a stock of tinned foods as well; and in the bar he found two tins of potato crisps packets, and racks holding bags of nuts and cheese biscuits. He spent the night on a huge imitation leather settee in the lounge, with a curtain to cover him. He had seen no rats, and thought the menace might be over, but he was careful about securing doors and windows before he settled down.
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    Neil had a bath next morning in the guest bathroom, a spacious white-tiled room with lozenges of stainedglass set in the window and a long Edwardian bath raised on a dais and approached by a couple of wooden steps. Although the morning was quite warm, he shivered a little as he washed himself; at the farmhouse he had been in the habit of taking the chill off with a kettle of boiling water.
    Later, he hunted through the town for another car. Most he examined were lacking an ignition key, and where he did find one the petrol tanks were either empty or too low to be worth the risk of setting out. A couple of cars had both key and petrol, but would not start. Those two stood out in the open, and he discovered their batteries had dried out in the summer heat. He concentrated after that on garaged cars, which had been protected from the sun.
    When his luck turned, it turned properly: a Jaguar XJ automatic, looking as though it had just been driven from the showroom, and in fact with less than 2,000 on the clock. Neil climbed in gingerly, awed by the splendour, and found keys in place and a fuel gauge registering nearly full.
    He was almost afraid of driving it, and studied the controls a long time before making the attempt.Despite that he was taken by surprise by the automatic drive, and dented a wing getting out of the garage. He was angry with himself. There was no-one to criticize or blame him, but he felt bad about damaging so beautiful a machine. On the road, though, his annoyance evaporated in the pleasure of driving. The smoothness of it was amazing after the Mini, and there was the exhilaration of speed when he got on to the open road. A squall of rain blew up, and he pressed buttons in search of the wipers. The first he tried filled the air with music from a cassette player. It was not entirely to his taste—a classical ­symphony—but after so long hearing only the sounds of nature it seemed like magic.
    He drove on through the morning, and was in the outer London suburbs before he halted. It was a shopping centre, transfixed in a Sunday morning that would never end. The blank fronts showed fading signs—Four Hour Cleaning . . . This Week’s Special Offer . . . Frying Tonight. . . .
    That one was a fish-and-chip shop, and out of curiosity, Neil went inside. Someone had gone through a familiar routine of preparations, before crawling away to die. There was oil in the vats, a traycontaining a dried-up pulp that still smelt fishy, a bucket full of the withered remains of chipped potatoes. He prowled on, and in a back room found sacks of potatoes, somewhat soft and wrinkled, but apparently edible. He could not work the burners in the shop, but he should be able to find an open hearth somewhere and make a wood fire. He stuffed potatoes into his anorak pockets, and filled an empty milk ­bottle with oil; but after sniffing poured it back. It smelt rancid, and there would be no difficulty in finding more. This was a land of plenty, after all.
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    He made his fire in the back parlour of a shop nearby, where he also found a frying pan, an unopened bottle of corn oil, and a tin of sausages which he fried up with the potatoes. The result was greasy and not particularly nice, but it filled his belly.
    When he went out again he looked over to where he had parked the Jaguar, not very neatly, in the road opposite. It had rained while he was making the