Immediate Events Last Light

8/4/2019 Immediate Events Last Light

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IMMEDIATE EVENTS THAT COULD TAKE PLACE AFTER PUBLIC

REALIZATION OF THE DOOMS DAY (As illustrated by Alex Scarrow):

The Tengiz refineries hit, Hormuz blocked, pan-Arabian unrest triggered by an

attack on something like the Kabah - all these events within twenty-four hours of

each other. Exactly as described.

No. No trains, no coaches. It looks like theyve stopped everything.

And the airports, added the man standing next to her. Thereve been security

alerts everywhere, it seems. There were tanks rolling up outside Heathrow I

heard.

The next few weeks were going to be truly apocalyptic. A young girl like Alison,

with no advance knowledge of what was coming, unprepared, no stocks of food,

or water . . . reduced to living like a cave-dweller and at the mercy of a very

brutal form of Darwinism? Shed not have lasted long. She almost certainly wouldhave been one of those who failed to make it out the other side.

itll catch everyone by surprise, no one will know whats happened until all of a

sudden there are soldiers stationed around every petrol station and food shop

. . . you dont want to be the last person to react to this . . .

During the night most of the Cassandra recommendations had been discreetly

put into action. Internal travel arteries had been locked down. and all airports,

sea ports and rail stations had been successfully closed. Throughout the morning

the process of blocking the main motorways had begun. Each blockageexplained as either a severe traffic accident, or some truck losing its load across

all four lanes.

Most of the main oil storage depots had, by now, been garrisoned with soldiers.

The oil out there in the wider distribution system; the tankers, the bigger petrol

stations - all of them would need to be requisitioned at some point, but that was

a very visible process, and could only be done at the last possible moment.

The trick here was going to be not to spook the general population. Malcolms

advice had been that they had to keep them doing whatever they normally do,

for as long as possible. That was his job, the Prime Ministers job, to keepeveryone happy and calm for as long as he could. Malcolm had wryly quipped

that Charles role now was to be nothing more than the string quartet on the

promenade deck of the Titanic. Just keep them happy with your reassuring smile,

and words of encouragement.

They had to get their hands on as much of the oil and food as was spread out

there in warehouses and oil terminals.

As they entered the tinned goods aisle, Leona was aware that it was noticeably

busier than the other areas in the supermarket they had walked through; half-a-

dozen shoppers, like herself, warily eyeing each other up, whilst filling theirtrolleys with canned goods. As she, Dan and Jacob wheeled their trolleys down


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towards them, there was a moment of shared communication, eyes meeting, and

barely perceptible nods of acknowledgement.

controlled distribution, Petrol rationing

Wheeling the trolleys out across the supermarket car-park towards Daniels van,Leona noticed the first of many, many cars turning into the parking area from the

high street. One after another, a steady procession, stopped only when a

pedestrian light further up the street turned red.

Prime Ministers Speech: I am asking all of you to work together with me. We are

going to need to ration the food we have, restrict the sale of petrol and diesel to

key personnel, in short, pull together, like we did once before, sixty years ago

during the Second World War.

She surveyed the car-park. Whereas thirty minutes ago it was half full, now it

was jam-packed, with cars, and people on foot, flooding in. She could see severalminor altercations occurring in different places, as people squabbled over

shopping trolleys, or jostled in the entrance to get inside against the flow of

shoppers coming out.

Jacob leaned through the front seats. Leona, he said, is the world going to

end? No, dont be silly Jake, she replied, but things are going to be a little

difficult for a while.

It looks like were going to be totally screwed. He said theyre going to ration

petrol and everything else.

Somebody on the telly was saying we could all be starving by the end of the

week.

But now here he was on the rooftop or balcony of some building looking down on

a street thick with black smoke from a burning car, and people running

erratically. His usually well-groomed appearance, the smartly side-parted hair,

the navy-blue suit and tie had been replaced with the look of someone who had

been roused from sleep after an all-night vigil.

Law and order has apparently vanished from the streets of this country in the

last six hours, since the Prime Ministers disastrous lunchtime press conference.Amongst the chaos down there, below us, we have distinctly heard the sound of

gunfire several times in the last few minutes, the reporter continued, gazing

down on the smoky scene below.

There have been unconfirmed reports of military personnel guarding key

locations, using live rounds on civilians. There have been hundreds of eye-

witness reports describing fights over food, killings in many cases. This is a truly

horrifying scenario, Sean, being played out on every street in every major town

and city in the country . . .

Reports have been coming in from foreign correspondents throughout theafternoon. A similar pattern of events seems to be occurring in many other


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countries. In Paris, unrest that started in the suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois, has

spread across the city, with many buildings now on fire, and reports of many

hundreds of deaths amongst the rioters. In New York, the announcement of a

city-wide emergency food rationing ordinance was met with demonstrations on

the streets that quickly escalated to a full-scale riot.

The amber-hued streetlights outside along the avenue, which had only minutes

ago flickered on, went out.

Jenny had seen things in the last few hours that she never imagined she would

see in a country like this; a civilized, prosperous country, with the exception of

the odd gang of youths on the roughest of estates, it was a place where one

largely felt safe.

Andys warning, his advance warning . . . the one they should have heeded a

little earlier than this, had sort of paid off, kind of. Of course, if shed listened to

him four or five years ago, theyd be living in some secluded valley in Wales,with an established vegetable garden, a water well, some chickens maybe, a

generator and a turbine.

An empty motorway. Such a strange and unsettling sight, she decided. At least,

it was in this country. An empty motorway with weeds pushing up between the

cracks in the tarmac - that was one of those iconic images of a long-dead

society, a post-apocalyptic world. Well, they were halfway there, the weeds

would come soon enough.

thoughts and worries, but also aware of how strangely silent it was. No planes,

no distant rumble of traffic, nothing at all on the motorway, not even military

traffic, something Jenny had thought they might see a lot of.

Reduce population migration from the cities. It was the first step in disaster

management - you have to control the movement of people as quickly as

possible.

Look, said Jenny, weve been walking since yesterday lunchtime. Were thirsty

and hungry. Weve got money. We just wanted to buy a bottle or two of water,

and maybe a few sandwiches. The man shook his head disdainfully. Money?

Money doesnt mean anything right now.

. . . burning across the city. It looks like Beirut, or no, more like Baghdad the day

after the fall of Saddams regime. Ive never seen anything like this in Britain, the

riots last night, the total lawlessness. I have heard there were isolated areas of

order, and in some smaller towns weve heard the fire service was still

functioning, and the police were seen, although largely unable to intervene.

There has been no further comment from the Prime Minister or any senior

government representatives.

On either side, every shop window was gone, and the goods spilled out on to the

street; washing machines, TVs, clothes, newspapers and magazines, spreadacross from pavement to pavement. It seemed most of the damage and mess


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was focused around the many grocers, Halal mini-markets and takeaways. A

hundred yards down, she could see the pale squat block that was the police

station for Shepherds Bush.

It was so eerily quiet. She looked back out at the street through the double doors

they came in through. Uxbridge Road should have been humming with traffic,the pavements thick with pedestrians and groceries, fruit n veg, laid out on

benches and tables, alongside cheap mobile phone covers and dodgy SIM cards.

But instead it was like some western ghost-town. She half expected tumbleweed

to come rolling past.

Most of the shop windows were gone along this road as well. He was surprised at

how little it had taken to rip apart the veneer of law and order; at least within

central London. No one was starving yet, probably not even hungry. But the

mere mention of food rationing by that moronic Prime Minister had driven them

all into a state of panic, further exacerbated by the hysterical way the media had

responded and then the nationwide power-out last night - sudden, without any

warning.

You know I cant imagine a world without electricity . . . power. Theres so many

things we take for granted, arent there? Losing it for a few days like this . . . and

look at us. He smiled. Living like cavemen.

He said oil was like the twentieth-century version of the Roman slave economy.

Weve grown used to having it. It does everything for us. It makes power, its

used to fertilise crops, in pesticides, to make medicines, every kind of plastic . . .

basically we use oil in absolutely everything.

Look at them, look at us, everyone in fact . . . weve just had our slaves taken

away from us. Were all like those pampered aristocrats after the French

Revolution, seeking refuge without their servants to tend them, incapable even

of tying their own shoelaces.

Yeah? Who here knows how to do the basic things to survive? How to grow their

own food? Plan an allotment to provide enough sustenance all year round? How

to locate drinkable water? How to sterilise a small cut so it doesnt become

infected? How to make a loaf of bread?

I suppose, when the rules go, no matter which country you live in, were all the

same. Were just a few square meals, a power-cut, a sip of water away from

doing things we never dreamed we would, from being a bunch of cavemen.

This whole situation was like some post-apocalyptic scenario; the glimmering

firelight from the bonfire, the debris and detritus strewn across the tarmac, the

flickering torchlight and the frantically scrabbling crowd inside the building, the

noise, the chaos.

Jenny looked around. He was right. She could abandon the car somewhere on the

hard shoulder, leave the motorway and walk in. The soldiers might have blockedall the roads, but of course London was a porous urban spread not just accessible


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by roads - there were cycle lanes, paths, kerbs, alleyways, unused scraps of

rubbish-encrusted ground.

And how long would that state of affairs last? His best guess was a month,

perhaps two. Thats how long it might take to repair the damaged oil

infrastructure; the sabotaged refineries, the blown pipelines. And it might besome time after that before commercial freight ships and aeroplanes were flying

once more, loaded up with oranges from South Africa, lamb from New Zealand,

Brussels sprouts from Romania.

Its running out, you know? he said. Theres a lot less of it than people think . . .

oil. Yes, a lot less than the publicly stated reserves. They decided there were

simply too many of us all expecting our oil-rich luxuries, all expecting our big

cars, big homes, and an endless supply of power and oil to feed them. It wasnt

going to last for much longer. They knew that fact long before anyone else. And

they knew that there were going to be wars, horrific wars, most probably with a

few nukes being thrown around . . . for the last of that oil. And you dont want

that - nukes being thrown around. They knew economic necessity, oil-hunger,

would drive us to destroy ourselves. And I suppose you can see it from their

point of view, after struggling so hard for . . . well, one could say, since the

Middle Ages, they didnt want to see it all thrown away.

Everything, I mean, everything - all starting with two passenger jets crashing

into New York - everything since then, my friend, has been about one thing;

getting the world ready for this . . . the culling.

Afterwards:

Normal people with jobs and mortgages (back before the collapse), but with this

other parallel life, attempting to revive, to learn the everyday skills of a time long

before we had oil doing everything for us. Very different people, unlike any Ive

met before; they had already mastered so many of those skills of survival, the

basics like . . . how to make soap, how to make bread from grain. You know? The

simple things. And theres so much to do, were kept busy, which is just as well.

Just after the first week, it looked like a recovery might be on the cards. Oil lines

were being fixed and a trickle of oil was getting through. But things were too

broken, too messed up.

In the months that followed, there was a worrying time . . . there was a limited

war between China, India and Russia over the Tengiz oilfields. It started with

tanks and infantry, and escalated to a few nuclear bombs. Then very quickly it

blew itself out. Perhaps some sanity broke out at the last moment, or perhaps

their troops decided to stop fighting. Or maybe they simply ran out of the oil they

needed to continue fighting.

Were being kept very busy right now, as I was saying. Theres a lot to do, crops

to grow, tend, cultivate or pick. Were digging a well, down to the clean water-

table below us, and we have animals that need looking after. Jakes landed themain role as chicken tender; feeding them, collecting the eggs. When hes a little


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older, hell also have to cope with killing them on occasion, plucking them,

gutting them.

Anyway, were alive, and my kids will mend eventually. And things will eventually

knit themselves back together again. All those empty cities, full of burned-out

homes, and looted shops . . . one day people will migrate back to them. When itall eventually comes back together again, I think its going to be very different.

Just like all those other ages; the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Steam Age . . .

its been and gone. Hopefully what replaces it will be a world less greedy, less

obsessed with having things; trinkets and baubles, gadgets and bling.

I wonder what my childrens children will make of the weathered and faded mail

order catalogues theyll undoubtedly come across, everything lavishly powered

by electricity; giant American-style fridge freezers, those extravagant patio

heaters, electric sonic-pulse hi-spin toothbrushes, automatic can-openers. God,

did we really get that lazy?

Authors Note

Last Light started out four years ago as a result of my stumbling across a phrase

being repeated over and over by two posters for a forum. They were hotly

debating a geological issue and this phrase kept cropping up: Peak Oil. Being

capitalised like that suggested that this was some sort of technical term in

common use by those in the know. Curious, I Googled it. And so, to indulge in an

appalling clich, a journey of discovery followed. Out there in internet-land are

hundreds, perhaps thousands, of websites devoted to Peak Oil. I should perhaps

explain what the term means before going any further. Simply put, it refers to

the point at which all the easy-to-extract oil has been sucked out of the ground

leaving only the really hard to get to, very expensive to refine, stuff. Now, there

is a great deal of debate amongst geologists and petro-industry experts about

how much oil there is left in the ground. It ranges from either a doom n gloom

scenario that weve already peaked and its rapidly running out, to a naively

optimistic view that we have another fifty or sixty years of untapped oil. Im not

going to make a call on that debate here. But what no one disagrees on is how

utterly reliant we are on the stuff. If youre reading this, having read the book,

you dont need me to reiterate here the warnings Andy offered his family. The

fact is, with globalism having run its course, the world is now inextricably linked

as one large, interlocked set of dependencies; we get our sausages from this far

flung country, our trainers from that far flung country, our plasma TVs from yet

another far flung country . . . and so on. Whether were about to run out of oil, orwhether the world is approaching a clash of religious ideologies or an economic -


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possibly military - showdown between the new economic superpowers and the

old; whether the worlds climate is on the cusp of a dramatic change that could

imperil billions and lead to mass migration; whichever one of these scenarios lies

ahead of us, to be so completely dependent - as we are here in the UK - on

produce grown, packaged and manufactured on the other side of the world . . .

well, thats simply asking for trouble. Last Light is the book Ive wanted to, no,needed to write since . . . well, since 9/11. Its not really a book about Peak Oil -

that was merely the starting point for me. No, its a book about how lazy and

vulnerable weve allowed ourselves to become. How reliant on the system we

are. How little responsibility we are prepared to take for our actions, for

ourselves, for our children. Somewhere along the way, in the last two or three

decades, we broke this society of ours; whether it was during Blairs tenure of

power, or Thatchers, Im not sure. But somehow it got broken. And here we are,

the ghastly events of 7/7; the increasing prevalence of gang related gun crime in

London; legions of disaffected kids packing blades to go to school; a media that

night and day pumps out the message - screw everyone else, just get whatsyours; reality TV that celebrates effortless transitory fame over something as old-

fashioned as achievement; corporations that rip off their employees pension

funds; a Prime Minister deceiving us into entering an ill-conceived war; and

politicians of all flavours putting themselves and their benefits first. All these

things, I suspect, are the visible hairline cracks of our broken society that hint at

the deeper, very dangerous, fault lines beneath. And all itll take is some event,

some catalyst, for the whole thing to come tumbling down. Damn . . . this has

turned into something of a rant, hasnt it? That wasnt my intention. Ah well sod

it, authors note is my one opportunity to get things off my chest without having

to worry about plot, character and pacing. Anyway, Id like to think that a whiff ofLast Light will remain with you once you snap the cover shut. Im hoping Andy

Sutherland achieved something; that the world looks slightly different to you now

- more fragile, more vulnerable. After all, to be aware is to be better prepared. I

dunno . . . is it just me? Or do you get that feeling too? That somethings coming,

something on the horizon . . . a correction of some sort?

Immediate Events Last Light

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