"Hawke, Simon - The Wizard of Camelot 1 - The Wizard of Camelot" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hawke Simon)

I had managed to remove my family from London, but to support them, I had to
return to the city myself. There were damn few jobs around for anyone, and what
work was available paid very little and was often done for barter. Thanks to my
military background, I was fortunate to find employment with the Metropolitan
Police Department or, as it was and is more commonly known, New Scotland Yard.
They were woefully understaffed considering the job they had to do, and the pay
wasn't much, but it was still a great deal more than what most other people had.

Given the distance between Loughborough and London, as well as the price and
rationing of what little petrol reserves were left, there was no possibility of
commuting every day. While the rail lines still ran somewhat sporadically, half
the time the trains were stalled, or else the tracks were torn up by angry
citizens, wanting to strike back at the government in any way they could, all of
which meant I couldn't spend much time with Jenny and the girls. During the
week, I lived in London, in a grimy, bug-infested, little flat, the cheapest I
could find, and weekends, as often as I could, I went to see my family. The
strain of separation was severe on all of us, but there was simply nothing else
to do. Somehow, I told them, I would eventually find a way to work it out.
Surely, things couldn't keep on growing worse. Yet, day by day, they did.

Most people never realize how fragile a thing a city truly was in those days,
how little it took to disrupt its equilibrium. A sanitation strike would have
the refuse piling up in mountains within only a few days, bringing out the rats
and giving them a place to breed, and creating an eye-watering miasma of decay
that hung over the city like a poison cloud. A power blackout would bring a city
to a standstill, turning people into feral, looting beasts that preyed on one
another in the darkness. A labor action disrupting the delivery of food and
supplies would cause shortages and price gouging, and an oil crisis, whether
genuine or artificially induced by profiteers, would result in a shortage of
petrol at the pumps, traffic tied up by cars waiting in long lines, and tempers
flaring dangerously. All these things and more had happened in the past, and yet
each time such an event occurred, people had simply settled back into their
usual routines as soon as it had passed and continued to take everything for
granted, as before. And that was how we got into the mess now known as the
Collapse.

It wasn't something that happened overnight, of course. Like a snowball rolling
down a mountain slope, it had started slowly, growing and gathering momentum as
it went, until it turned into an avalanche that swept over everything in its
path. The warning signs had been present for years, only they had been largely
ignored. Even when things began to fall apart, people chose not to believe it.
One is tempted to lay the blame on governments and multinational corporations,
but the fact, is that the people, all the people, ultimately shared
responsibility, because we should have been the ones to stop it.

There were those who saw it coming, to be sure, who had seen it coming for
decades, and their numbers had grown considerably in the years immediately prior
to the Collapse, but unfortunately, they were still not numerous enough to make
a difference. They had tried to do something and had failed, and their failure