Over by Christmas Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Reading Order & Copyright

  Synopsis

  Contents

  The Story So Far

  Part 1: Behind the Lines

  Chapter 1 - The Front Line

  Chapter 2 - The Seasonal Search for Inspiration

  Chapter 3 - Evidence of an Ambush

  Chapter 4 - Rat Hunting

  Chapter 5 - The Wages of Soldiering

  Chapter 6 - Loyalty

  Chapter 7 - Zero-Hours Soldier

  Chapter 8 - Know Thy Enemy

  Chapter 9 - Fire and Beer

  Chapter 10 - White Circles

  Chapter 11 - I Can See Your Ship From Up Here

  Chapter 12 - Messages From Afar

  Part 2: The Home Front

  Chapter 13 - Never Kiss a Telephone Pole

  Chapter 14 - Even Justice Sleeps

  Chapter 15 - Spies and Fries

  Chapter 16 - Three Victims

  Chapter 17 - A Friend Called Flora

  Chapter 18 - A Woman's Cottage Is Her Castle

  Chapter 19 - Boxed In

  Chapter 20 - Enter Stage Left

  Chapter 21 - An Incomplete Autopsy

  Chapter 22 - Scavengers

  Chapter 23 - Last Aid

  Chapter 24 - A Car Park Cabin

  Chapter 25 - A Burning Clue

  Chapter 26 - The Stink of Guilt

  Chapter 27 - The Sound of a Motive

  Chapter 28 - A Serving of Suspicion

  Part 3: Ambush

  Chapter 29 - Back to War

  Chapter 30 - Wooden Trenches

  Chapter 31 - The Cycle of War

  Chapter 32 - Dug in

  Chapter 33 - The Battle Ahead

  Chapter 34 - Sabotage

  Chapter 35 - Evidence of Victory

  Epilogue - Christmas Day

  Other Titles

  Over by Christmas

  Strike a Match 4

  Frank Tayell

  Reading Order & Copyright

  Co-operation always achieves more than conflict.

  Strike a Match 4

  Over By Christmas

  Published by Frank Tayell

  Copyright 2021

  All rights reserved

  All people, places, and (most) events are fictional.

  The copyright of The Remains of the Day is held by Kazuo Ishiguro, who, in an alternate timeline where the Blackout occurred, also holds the copyright of his play Remaining Days. Tickets for performances in February 2040 are now on sale at the Twynham box office.

  Post-Apocalyptic Detective Novels

  Work. Rest. Repeat.

  Strike a Match 1. Serious Crimes

  2. Counterfeit Conspiracy

  3. Endangered Nation

  4. Over By Christmas

  Surviving The Evacuation / Here We Stand / Life Goes On

  Book 1: London

  Book 2: Wasteland

  Zombies vs The Living Dead

  Book 3: Family

  Book 4: Unsafe Haven

  Book 5: Reunion

  Book 6: Harvest

  Book 7: Home

  Here We Stand 1: Infected

  Here We Stand 2: Divided

  Book 8: Anglesey

  Book 9: Ireland

  Book 10: The Last Candidate

  Book 11: Search and Rescue

  Book 12: Britain’s End

  Book 13: Future’s Beginning

  Book 14: Mort Vivant

  Book 15: Where There’s Hope

  Book 16: Unwanted Visitors, Unwelcome Guests

  Life Goes On 1: Outback Outbreak

  Life Goes On 2: No More News

  Life Goes On 3: While the Lights Are On

  Life Goes On 4: If Not Us

  Book 17: There We Stood

  Book 18: Rebuilt in a Day

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  Synopsis

  Two deaths could be an accident. Three must be murder.

  2039, twenty years after the AIs went to war, plague and famine has reduced the global population to a hundred million. Most of the planet is a wasteland, with only a handful of enclave-nations preserving a dim shadow of civilisation. Technology has regressed to the era of steam trains, telegrams, and sailing boats, but democracy survived and is again under threat.

  Three terrorist insurgencies have swept across Europe, pillaging farms, burning villages, destroying two decades of fragile recovery. Those refugees who escaped the massacres fled to the coast. Like a century before, Calais and Dunkirk have become the front line.

  On the home front, rationing continues, and another ice-age winter has begun. Christmas is only days away, but Constable Ruth Deering’s mood is anything but festive. In the walled city of Dover, a lonely chef is discovered dead, poisoned. What first appeared to be an accident is soon suspected to be the work of a serial killer who is certain to strike again.

  On the front line, Henry Mitchell doesn’t view this as war, just another crime against humanity during the twenty-year-long battle for survival. As hastily built bastions are fortified by a conscript-militia, Mitchell ventures deep behind the lines, hunting for the mastermind responsible for this latest assault.

  In the new British capital of Twynham, a peace treaty with the separatist kingdom of Leicester is in peril. Until it’s signed, the soldiers laying siege to the royalist redoubt can’t be redeployed to the front.

  As rusting tanks are recovered for repair, as new regiments are raised, and spies are sent east, the nation prepares for a war that certainly won’t be over by Christmas.

  Table of Contents

  The Story So Far

  Part 1 - Behind the Lines

  15th December

  Chapter 1 - The Front Line

  16th December

  Chapter 2 - The Seasonal Search for Inspiration

  Chapter 3 - Evidence of an Ambush

  Chapter 4 - Rat Hunting

  Chapter 5 - The Wages of Soldiering

  Chapter 6 - Loyalty

  17th December

  Chapter 7 - Zero Hours Soldier

  Chapter 8 - Know Thy Enemy

  18th December

  Chapter 9 - Fire and Beer

  Chapter 10 - White Circles

  Chapter 11 - I Can See Your Ship From Up Here

  Chapter 12 - Messages from Afar

  Part 2 - The Home Front

  23rd December - Dover

  Chapter 13 - Never Kiss a Telephone Pole

  Chapter 14 - Even Justice Sleeps

  (December 21st - Belgium)

  Chapter 15 - Spies and Fries

  23rd December - Dover

  Chapter 16 - Three Victims

  (December 20th - Twynham)

  Chapter 17 - A Friend Called Flora

  (December 21st - Twynham)

  Chapter 18 - A Woman’s Cottage Is Her Castle

  Chapter 19 - Boxed In

  (December 22nd - Twynham)

  Chapter 20 - Enter Stage Left

  23rd December - Dover

  Chapter 21 - An Incomplete Autopsy

  Chapter 22 - Scavengers

  Chapter 23 - Last Aid

  Chapter 24 - A Car Park Cabin

  Chapter 25 - A Burning Clue

  Chapter 26 - The Stink of Guilt

  Chapter 27 - The Sound of a Motive

  Chapter 28 - A Serving of Suspicion

  Part 3 - Ambush

  23rd December

  Chapter 29 - Back to War

 
Chapter 30 - Wooden Trenches

  Chapter 31 - The Cycle of War

  Chapter 32 - Dug In

  24th December

  Chapter 33 - The Battle Ahead

  Chapter 34 - Sabotage

  Chapter 35 - Evidence of Victory

  25th December

  Epilogue - Christmas Day

  22nd December 2039

  The Story So Far

  The Dover Police Station, Park Street, Dover

  Police Constable Ruth Deering watched the clock as it chimed seven. Her twelve-hour shift was mere seconds from being over. Dover had two police officers: herself and Sergeant Elspeth Kettering. Where Sergeant Kettering had been a police officer in Dover for over twenty years, Ruth had only been in Dover for two months. Before then, Ruth had spent two months with Mister Henry Mitchell’s Serious Crimes Unit in Britain’s new capital city on the Dorset coast, Twynham. Before that, she’d been in the police academy, though she’d grown up in a refugee camp. Since she didn’t know precisely how old she was, technically, she hadn’t lied about her age to join the police, but she had exaggerated. Since every able body was now being conscripted into the army, she’d definitely made the right career choice.

  Twenty years after the Blackout, Britain’s population hovered at around two million, recently boosted by the influx of refugees fleeing European atrocities. Fifteen thousand lived within Dover’s walls, making it one of the more populous cities in one of the more populous countries in the world.

  Billions had died because of the Blackout. Some were killed immediately when the competing digital viruses caused planes to fall from the sky, cars to crash, power stations to burn, and almost every motor to explode. Many more had died when the nuclear bombs were launched. No one knew if that had been caused by the virus, but the bombs’ electromagnetic pulses had brought an end to that first horror, though the real nightmare was only beginning. Famine. Plague. Floods. Droughts. Ice-age winters followed by furnace summers. Billions had died, and theirs hadn’t been a swift death.

  But recently, as springs and autumns lengthened, hope returned. An expedition had arrived from the Pacific. Ships sailed across the Atlantic so frequently they almost had a schedule. The children of European refugees had returned to the continent as settlers and adventurers, mining the ruined cities for lost treasures. Locally, the newspaper had a new rival in a national radio station, inaugurated with a broadcast relayed through booster-stations to the disunited U.S.A. Admittedly, a sniper had used the ceremony to attempt the assassination of the British prime minister and the U.S. ambassador, but Ruth and the rest of the Serious Crimes Unit had stopped the assassin.

  Rationing had been coming to an end. Biodiesel was going to replace coal. Cinemas were re-opening, even if they were only showing very, very old films. The city gates were no longer shut at night for fear of seaborne pirates. Until the war.

  Three organised groups of barbarous killers had swept across Europe, from the north, south, and east. Refugees had fled before them, all aiming for Calais, the Channel Tunnel, and the only certain escape from the horror. But the barbarians were aiming for Calais, too. The first major assault had been halted. Ruth had found herself caught in the middle of the bloody street-battle waged in Calais. They’d held the city, but the barbarians now sniped and ambushed the patrols who ventured any distance from the coast.

  But Calais wasn’t her concern, even if she could often hear the artillery fire, carried by the wind across the twenty-mile strait. She was a copper, and Dover was, for the moment, relatively crime-free.

  The clock chimed seven. She slid the bolt on the door, locking the police station for the night. There were only two cops in Dover, a city of fifteen thousand civilians, more refugees, army conscripts, and allowed-ashore sailors. Only two coppers, but newly conscripted squads of soldiers patrolled the city, night and day, as part of their inadequate training for the front line. Yes, she really had made the right choice to become a cop.

  She walked over to the smouldering fire in the half of the lobby reserved for witnesses and victims, and raked the embers. They had electricity in the police station thanks to the coal-burning power station in the old supermarket on Bridge Street. But the Royal Navy warships burned coal, too. So did the trains linking the populous southern coast with the farms and mines in Wales and Scotland. Factor in Dover’s bulging population, and there wasn’t enough electricity to spare for a luxury like an electric heater.

  Behind the duty desk, a small staircase led upstairs to the apartments where Ruth currently lived. They’d been offices in the olden days, used by detectives and administrators. Over the last twenty years, they’d been home to dozens of different constables who’d come and gone, while Sergeant Elspeth Kettering had remained. She’d grown up in Dover, and joined the police before the Blackout. An institution in Dover, Kettering had refused all promotions to the sprawling new coastal capital on the Dorset coast. Kettering had stayed, and raised a family in the rabbit-warren terrace further along Park Street.

  With the advent of this new war, Ruth’s adoptive mother, Maggie, had come to Dover. Maggie Deering had returned to her original calling, and was once again a surgeon, working in the military hospital in the castle. Sergeant Kettering’s eldest daughter, Eloise, had moved into the apartments above the police station, while Maggie had moved into Eloise’s old room in the terrace. The arrangement suited everyone. Ruth finally had a friend her own age to talk with.

  Upstairs, Ruth found Eloise in the kitchen-living room, adding a small shovel of coal into their stove.

  “Where’d the coal come from?” Ruth asked.

  “I won’t say while you’re wearing your uniform,” Eloise said.

  “Then I’ll go change,” Ruth said, guessing the answer was the power station. Eloise’s father had worked there, until he’d died. Eloise had intended to follow in his footsteps, until the war. Stealing coal was a serious crime, but neither of them had time to gather firewood from the forested wild-lands of Kent, and they’d already been through three blizzard-and-thaw cycles this winter.

  “Should I ask where the Christmas tree came from?” Ruth asked.

  “Elgar and Edwin brought it up this afternoon,” Eloise said. “They said they saw you.”

  “They did? I must have been busy,” Ruth said.

  “They must have been scared,” Eloise said. “I bet they sneaked in while you were on patrol.”

  “They’re scared of me?” Ruth asked.

  “Scared and in awe,” Eloise said. “You know how boys can be.”

  Ruth did. She’d grown up in the Milford Immigration Centre on the ruined outskirts of Bournemouth, where her adoptive mother, Maggie, had been a teacher and occasional physician. Growing up, there had been plenty of children her own age, but they’d come and gone too quickly for any real friendships to have formed. At the police academy, she’d had one friend, Simon Longfield, but he had betrayed her.

  “It is nice to have a tree,” Ruth said. The decorations were a mix of painted paper and scrap metal cut into shape. The tree itself was also made of steel. Two seven-branch, flat silhouettes cut from an old car’s bodywork, and which had arrived pre-decorated with a veneer of orange rust. This year’s was far from the first freezing winter. If anyone brought a wooden tree into a house during the darkest days of the year, it was never to adorn with baubles.

  “What’s for dinner?” Ruth asked.

  “Baked potatoes, and then baked apples,” Eloise said, pointing at the two trays keeping warm atop the stove. “Both of which I got off the ration. And we’ve enough of the seaweed pickle for both of us.”

  “Flash. How was work?”

  “Busy. Always busy,” Eloise said. “But I spent most of it scrubbing the corridors. I swear, if I were in charge, I’d insist the sailors take off their boots before coming into the castle. Not the soldiers,” she added. “They mostly arrive on stretchers. But those admirals who run the navy from the upper rooms, they really need to learn how to wipe their boots.”
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  “You should tell them,” Ruth said.

  “No way, because you know what I heard?” Eloise walked over to the cupboard, and took out two plates. “They want four nurses to join a delegation to Australia.”

  “Australia? Ah, and you don’t want to be sent?”

  “No, I do,” Eloise said. “It won’t be until the war’s over. Since the navy has the ships, they’re organising it from here, so they’ll pick the nurses from here, too. Which means, if I ever want to ride on a kangaroo, I’ve got to smile at the admirals, even if they are messier than my brothers. Did you see today’s newspaper?”

  “Only the headlines,” Ruth said. “Did I miss something good?”

  “They printed a summary of the treaty the prime minister will be signing with Albion. There’s a map, too, showing the route the procession will take.”

  “There’s a procession? In this weather? I bet no one turns out.”

  “It’s free entertainment,” Eloise said.

  “You’d watch a pretender-king march through the streets?” Ruth asked.

  “Oh, I wouldn’t say he’s a pretender,” Eloise said. “But mostly I’d go because it’s over, you know? They’re the last group of separatists, and now they’re laying down their guns. Or their bows, I should say. With every train returning from the front with the injured and sick, it’s wonderful to have this one piece of good news. The paper says that all the soldiers who were stationed in the north will be sent to Europe.”

  “Let’s wait and see if it happens,” Ruth said. “I got a telegram from Anna.”

  “About the signing?” Eloise asked.

  “No, just to say she’s not sure if she’ll make it down here before Christmas.”

  “Oh, that’s a shame. Did she say why?”

  “No.”

  “It’s probably work,” Eloise said.

  “I hope so,” Ruth said. “But I don’t like to think of her alone, in Twynham.”

  “She’s been living alone for years, hasn’t she?” Eloise said. “She’s about ten years older than you, right?”