Katja

 

MY NAME IS Katja Mleczko. Today I am 43, making me the oldest person in the Pendle Islands.

When I was born, most people lived to at least 70. Even older. There were people more than 100 years old. Impossible to imagine that now, after the Flood and the Rising. Even to the ones alive before them, like me, it seems unreal, a dream. Our children, with little or no memory of the world as it was - for them, I think, it's easier.

This life ages us fast. My generation took it all for granted; spoilt. Now we're where our ancestors were two, maybe three hundred years before. If that. Our only medicines are the ones we make ourselves. There are folk remedies - a piece of mouldy bread on a wound makes a crude antibiotic, they used it for centuries before penicillin - but still, illnesses that would have been nothing when I was a child claim more lives each year.

I've had nine children. The first came eighteen months after the dead things went back into the sea. The last, eight years ago, almost killed me. After that, I took precautions, although I was widowed soon after. I have had no lovers since; I'm past that now.

I married Danny Mleczko. He took charge after the dead things went away, and I soon saw he was interested in me. He was still a boy, in most respects, but he was sweet, beneath his brashness. We became lovers; when I fell pregnant, we married. It wasn't much of a ceremony - there was no priest - but Hassan did his best. He was the next most senior soldier present, so he officiated.

The Chinook never flew again. Any other survivors we met we reached by boat, or they found us. The strangest were a small group from Manchester, who drifted to us on makeshift rafts. They were workers from the CIS tower, led by a bright young woman called Vicky. They'd survived on the roof of the building. Somehow she'd kept them going, fighting off the attacks, downing passing birds with lumps of stone. She set them 'targets' for the day (she was in sales.) When the dead things stopped attacking and the food got scarce, she made them build rafts from flotsam and jetsam. She was a natural planner and organiser; I remember her fiancé had survived, too, and no sooner had they got to Pendle than she started organising her wedding. I was one of the bridesmaids. Vicky's still alive. She's the second oldest person round here now. We've become good friends.

There's nothing much left to scavenge from the old world. We have what survival skills we've learned the hard way, or from books we salvaged. A few generations ago, my family would've known all this. Now we're learning it all again.

We rear sheep, raise crops, and farm fish. The waters are full of them now. We collect driftwood, cut peat, fell trees for fuel and to build small boats to commute between islands.

We survive.

We tried to raise Windhoven afterwards, in the hope the miracle might have come in time for them too, but we heard nothing. We never heard from anyone else. Perhaps we're the last humans of all... but I can't believe that. Or simply don't wish to.

Danny became a fisherman; one day he went out in one of the boats and didn't come back. It happened; still does. I married him out of necessity - we had to survive, raise children, make homes and communities - but I loved him in the end. But never as I loved Ben Stiles. I wish I could've; he deserved it. But such things are not a matter of choice.

Three of my children were stillborn. A fourth died in infancy - pneumonia - and another died in a stupid accident, running on a fell. He fell, broke his neck. He looked very like Danny. Bad luck in the Mleczko genes, perhaps. I don't know.

It hurts to remember these things, even now. But I must.

I have three sons still, and a daughter. Our population is growing slowly, but it grows, repopulating the islands.

We're nearly all gone now, the ones who were there at the start. Some have lasted longer than others. Jo died only a couple of years after that last battle; she never really recovered from losing Chas. Strange how, with so much changed, someone can still die of a broken heart.

Hassan died last winter. He was the last of the soldiers. He passed on all he could in the years before. The Islands have four healers now, carrying on what he taught them. My daughter is one of them.

She looks somewhat like my mother.

I called her Marta. The skies are always grey. I can't remember the last time we saw the sun, and it's almost always cold. The winters are bleak and killing, often claiming the old and very young. This winter may be my last.

But, little by little, the waters are relinquishing the ground they claimed, yielding new lands, thick with silt and richly fertile. Grass soon covers them.

I remember old nature documentaries from my childhood, of baby turtles hatching and scrambling down the beach to get to the sea. So few of them made it. Birds and crabs picked most of them off long before they reached the water. Darwinism in action. I am haunted, I suppose, by all the ones who never reached the sea. It's the price paid for having survived.

I suppose the regret will be bred out of us soon enough.

I wrote an account of the flood and my journey to Pendle shortly after arriving, in what little free time I had, so that at least other survivors would know what we'd gone through. It's the least you can do, for the dead.

Other than a bullet between the eyes, if that's what it takes to give them rest.

Not that we have any bullets left. Now it's back to bows and arrows, spears, crude swords and knives. With so much machinery obsolete from lack of fuel or ammunition, there's no shortage of metal...

Robert and Ben left their accounts too; I've put our stories together here. There are some parts of their stories I've written in myself.

When Ben died, he touched my mind, somehow. A last kiss, of sorts, I supposed at the time. But I saw - experienced - his death. And not just his: Robert's as well. Perhaps because Ben was speaking through the corpse, perhaps because Robert loved me. I'm not sure. I wrote down all that I could remember afterwards.

I thought long and hard about including them here, but in the end I decided to.

Writing materials are hard to come by, and we improvise. Parchment made from sheep's hide, ink from sloes gathered from blackthorn bushes. I've gathered the old, scribbled notes and transcribed them over the years. The ink is fading on them, the paper starting to crumble or become mildewed. It's important they be remembered, Robert and Ben. Between them, they helped save us all.

I played my part, of course; I saved lives and, without me, Ben wouldn't have found the strength to do what he did. But still, I've often felt like a witness rather than a participant.

Although that may be about to change.

There's a small island, one of the furthest out from us to be settled. One of our fishing boats made landfall there last week. There were half a dozen dwellings on the island, small stone and wood huts dotted round the slopes. All empty.

They found blood on the walls of one house. Most of the sheep were still there. A few had stampeded off one of the steep edges of the fell and had drowned, their bloated, bedraggled bodies floating in the shallows.

That last touch of Ben's mind when he died. Forgive me. At the time, I thought he meant for leaving me, for dying. But Ben knew that his remedy might not be permanent. Another reason for putting this record together.

If one day Ben started to lose control, if the Deep Brain's rage and fury began to surface again, the only chance to control it would be to take another mind into it as his had been taken. Strengthen the mix. The Deep Brain had forged a link with his mind. Ben would've had to do the same.

Forgive me.

I hope I am wrong.

Not just for my sake. If it's true, what happens when my control begins to slip? I'll have to forge the same link with someone else, to follow me when the time comes. Someone I loved. As Ben loved me. Someone with the strength to do what must be done.

And I think of my daughter, the healer, my best-loved child.

In ancient times, they made sacrifice to the sea gods. Is that our future? Have we come full circle?

I don't want to believe it. But sometimes, when I sleep, I think I can hear the sea. Even when I know it's calm and silent. I hear voices where there are none, can be none, because there's no-one there.

And... there is something else. That is why I am writing this last piece.

Last night, at dusk, I walked along the old Pendle Row, past the Inn's ruins to the bridge, overlooking the bay. It's receded in the last few years, but there's still deep waters out there. I saw movement down in the shallows, so I looked.

They were only there briefly, for a moment. Then the moon hid behind a cloud; when it came out again, they were gone.

There were three of them. One was small and lean, wiry and quick. Another was tall and gangly. And the third seemed to have long, wild hair, and when it - he - moved, it was with a limp.

The men in my life, taken by the sea.

They beckoned me.

And their eyes glowed green.