Page 29 of 59 Minutes

FRANKIE

The sound comes from inside the churchyard.

Four women, none younger than sixty, wear pink T-shirts under open coats.

On their chests, carefully stitched sequins spell out ‘Chagford Rock Choir’.

They hold hands tightly and catch each other’s eyes, voices breaking then harmonising as they somehow find the fortitude to sing an a capella version of ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’.

They have no microphones, no speakers, and their voices are almost lost to the evening wind.

Frankie barely noticed the church earlier, when they rushed past it to get to the shop, but now sees it glowing like a beacon. Light streams up from the grounds and paints the old stone walls golden.

She’s always loved graveyards. The stillness, the reminder that it’s all happened before and it’ll all happen again and, if you’re lucky, someone will read your name aloud centuries later and, just for a moment, wonder who you were.

Soon there will be too many bodies to bury anywhere formal.

She thinks of London, all those people in the street, on the tube, whizzing around in taxis.

In just over half an hour, they’ll be turned to powder, their ashes too toxic to be scattered by anyone who loves them.

Do they all know that? Are they all lying motionless on the floor right now like they’re in a Radiohead video, the catastrophic realisation of their fate too heavy to bear?

A large stained-glass window glows above the entrance archway.

The church sits in a dip with the graveyard sloping gently towards it.

The church door is open and people inside squirm for space.

She’s reminded of news footage after earthquakes and landslides, the dusty bodies of survivors moving molasses-slow through community spaces.

The song finishes and the choir women huddle. Then, still holding hands, one of them counts to three. They start a new song, their performance so tight it’s like they’ve prepared for this moment their whole lives. They sing, ‘We Have All the Time in the World’.

It is simply too much. As she carries on up the slope, wishing Otis would hurry up, a loud metallic voice booms from behind.

She turns as megaphone-amplified words crackle out from the window of a muddy pick-up truck growling towards her, the noise so distorted it’s just an angry roar.

‘… shelter … home … authorised … shoot … danger … shelter …’

The patchy megaphone drowns out the choir’s singing but their mouths are still moving, eyes on each other, fixedly ignoring the truck. Frankie is reminded of the band on the sinking Titanic .

Under the dust, the truck is the colour of flames, and it crunches its way up the road, clipping cars indiscriminately. On the roof of the truck, a flashing light rotates, it looks taped on and not remotely official, but who is she to know?

The truck pulls up beside her, engine idling to a rumble.

It’s big, far taller than her so that even if all the tinted windows were down, she’d not be able to see inside fully.

It’s the kind of truck a crew of builders might use, her dad used to get picked up in this kind of thing when he was a brickie in the nineties.

She thinks, just briefly, of puffs of smoke out of windows, wages in brown envelopes, early starts but early finishes too so Dad would slink home half-cut after drinking the afternoon away and weaselling his way into some random woman’s bed.

Or he’d come back steaming so Frankie and her brother, Seb, would scramble, run to an auntie’s house or hide together in one of their bedrooms.

Frankie doesn’t like it. Not the memories or the reality, which pants its diesel breath in front of her.

She flinches when the megaphone withdraws and the window slides fully down.

Two men sit in the front and both wear balaclavas.

Sprigs of beard poke through the mouth holes, their eyes are in shadow.

What she can see of their clothes look like old army shirts, the type popular in the nineties.

The ones the Manic Street Preachers and greebo lads at school wore.

She would scoff at these blokes, were this not a nuclear emergency and – more urgently – if the man in the passenger seat wasn’t holding a gun.

She swallows and takes a step back.

It looks like a rifle, not that she knows anything about guns, but it’s long, thin and horrible.

‘You need to get inside your home,’ the man in the passenger seat says, the megaphone now out of view but the gun in his hand poking casually out of the window like it’s nothing.

His voice is low, almost amused. Another man in a balaclava sits mutely in the driving seat, his blank head facing forward.

‘I’m going back now,’ she says.

‘What’s your address?’ the passenger says, running his eyes over Frankie, her messy hair, her chest shrouded in baggy clothes. They think I’m alone.

‘My boyfriend will be here any minute.’

The man’s face shifts under the skin of the balaclava as his cheeks curdle around a smile.

‘You sure about that?’ He has the same accent as the villagers but it sounds rougher, looser.

A mouthful of gravel. She is ever more aware of her own flat Mancunian tones even as she tries to soften them, finding herself using the peacekeeping tones of her mother.

‘Please don’t worry about me,’ she says, attempting a smile. ‘Our place isn’t far and there are other people who need your help.’

‘We’re not offering help,’ another amused voice says from deeper in the truck. A third man whose voice is muffled but whose meaning is clear. For a moment, no one says anything. Where is Otis? She looks behind her, but he’s still not there.

‘What he means,’ the man in the passenger seat says to Frankie, his voice more friendly, ‘is that it’s not optional ’cos we’re getting everyone to safety. Get in, love.’

‘But our car is just around that corner,’ she says, pointing up past the church.

‘Oh, there’s no way through there,’ the passenger says, with a slight laugh. ‘You’ll never make it to your place if it’s that way.’

‘We can get there on foot,’ Frankie lies, ‘it’s not far.’

‘You heard what my brother said,’ the driver says, his voice quieter than the others. ‘You’ll never make it. The only way to survive is by getting in with us.’

Frankie takes a step back. ‘I need to wait for my boyfriend, he’ll be here any minute.’

‘We’ll come back for him,’ says the passenger, his dark wool-ringed eyes finding Frankie’s. ‘We’ve got everything you’ll need at ours.’ He smiles again. A salesman’s smile. ‘Plenty of food and water. Comfortable beds.’ His irises are dark, the lashes the same rusty brown as his beard.

The old ladies are still singing. She looks at them, pleading with her eyes but they’re not looking her way.

The man in the driver’s seat gestures their way and says something inaudible.

The passenger laughs, an elbow drifting casually out of the window, megaphone loose in one hand, gun in the other.

‘My brother says we’ve got better music at our place, too.

The Devon Militia, my love, are always prepared.

Now pop that back door open and slide in. ’

She cannot get inside this truck. That is Frankie’s overriding thought. She’s never heard of the Devon Militia, but she knows red flags when she sees them.

‘Frankie!’ she hears Otis and turns to see him jogging towards her from the square, a hundred metres or so away.

He has a six-pack of water bottles in one hand, a bulging Spar bag in the other.

Thank god. How did he manage to find the water?

She starts to walk back to him, the relief nearly buckling her.

But then she hears the truck door opening, heavy boots landing on the tarmac behind her.

She feels arms wrap around her from behind and even as she’s screaming Otis’s name, even as she sees him throw his precious cargo on the ground and sprint, she is being turned and bent over, folded into the truck head first.

Her body hits the back seat of the truck, her face slamming into the lap of a terrified teenage girl, who screams in alarm. The man who grabbed Frankie laughs as he jumps in behind her and pulls the door closed.

The truck squeals away.