Free Afterlight by Alex Scarrow

end up on a calendar. He turned to look back out of the truck at the white van behind them and leered at the teenage girl in the passenger seat in a manner he most likely considered rakish and charming.
    She returned his unattractive leer with a cocked eyebrow and a middle finger.

Chapter 11
    10 years AC
    ‘LeMan 49/25a’ - ClarenCo Gas Rig Complex, North Sea
     
     
     
    ‘M um, you really don’t need to be shovelling this shit,’ said Leona. ‘Seriously, you’re in charge round here, no one would expect you to.’
    Jenny looked up from the foul stinking slurry before her. The odour rising from the warm, steaming bed of human and chicken faeces was so overpowering that she’d been fighting a constant gag reflex until she’d managed to adjust to the unfamiliar habit of breathing solely through her open mouth.
    ‘I’m taking my turn just like everyone else,’ she said, tucking a stray lock of hair behind her ear. ‘If I ducked this job, the likes of Alice would have a field day with it.’
    Alice was a miserable shrew. There wasn’t a day that passed without Jenny hearing some little barbed comment come from the woman’s flapping lips. There wasn’t a day Jenny didn’t regret allowing the woman to join them. She’d been so quiet and meek the first few months, no trouble at all . . . that is until she’d found her feet; found other quiet voices like hers. Voices that wondered why this community should have an unelected leader; why one woman should be allowed to impose her values, her opinions on all of them, when it was everyone who contributed to their survival.
    Jenny suspected it wasn’t the idea of democracy being shunted aside because it was a temporary inconvenience that so irked Alice Harton, it was the fact that some other woman was in charge . . . and not her. After all, as she constantly let everyone know, she’d had extensive management experience back in the old world; ran a local government department of some kind. Logically, it should be someone like her team-leading, not some workaday middle class mum.
    ‘Sod Alice,’ said Leona. ‘She moans about everything anyway. You’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t with a bitch like her.’
    ‘Still, we all should take turns doing this, Lee. It’s going to be your turn soon.’
    Leona grimaced. ‘Oh, gross.’
    ‘We’ve all got to do our bit, love.’
    Walter nodded. ‘Each digester stops producing methane after three weeks and needs emptying and refilling.’ He gestured at the other two sealed eight-foot-long fibreglass cylinders that he’d rescued from a brewery. ‘Huey and Dewey are doing fine right now. Week after next, I think it’s your name up on the rota to clean out Dewey.’
    The rota . . . The Rota . . . was the community’s closest equivalent to a Bible. It was written out in tiny handwriting on a whiteboard in what had once been some sort of meeting room. There were four hundred community members old enough and fit enough to work one chore or another. Every day Jenny found herself in front of that whiteboard, shuffling names around, shifting groups of people from one chore to the next.
    No one escaped the rota, she insisted, not even herself.
    This task, though, was generally considered to be by far the worst; shovelling the spent slurry from the digester into several dozen four-gallon plastic drums to be taken up to the plant decks and used as fertiliser. There was always someone who refused point-blank to do it; like Alice Harton did, like Nilaya Koundinya who claimed it was unacceptable for someone of her caste to work directly with human faeces. On both those occasions she’d found herself in the middle of a shouting match, ultimately having to threaten eviction if they didn’t shut up and take their turn.
    This isn’t a popularity contest, she told herself daily. Remember that.
    ‘Next week is it?’ asked Leona.
    ‘Yup,’ replied Walter.
    ‘Fantastic,’ Leona replied drily. ‘And do I get your help as