EDEN (18 page)

Cody leaned forward on the table. ‘You’ve been ashore? Where?’

‘Baltimore,’ Hank replied, ‘where I’m from. When my colleagues split in San Diego I had nobody to run the ship but the damned convicts. Most split to their families but several had nobody to run to. Fortunately they also had enough brains to realise that the biggest threat to their safety was the people around them in the cities. They stayed aboard, and we made foraging runs into the city for supplies before it got too dangerous. We pulled out into deeper water. Some people were trying to board us as we left.’

‘What happened to them?’ Bethany asked.

Hank’s cold blue eyes burrowed into hers. ‘They failed the interview. I got out of San Diego with the skeleton crew we have now. Sailed down through Cape Horn because we couldn't pass the Panama Canal and then up through the Caribbean and along the east coast to Baltimore. A long voyage and we passed every major city along the way: Miami, Charleston, Norfolk, DC. All the same, smouldering and empty by the time we reached them. ‘

‘Boston?’ Cody asked.

Hank shook his head. ‘We didn’t stop there but you could see the smoke from the city from twenty miles off the coast.’

Cody felt his shoulders slump as he stared down at the table before him, a mental image of the smouldering remains of Boston hovering in his mind’s eye, strewn with the rotting bodies of countless emaciated or murdered citizens. Danielle and Maria among them.

His fists clenched painfully as his fingernails dug deep into his palms and a scalding ball of acid lodged in his throat. Cody closed his eyes and tried to exterminate the vision from his mind, to replace it with Boston’s busy streets bathed in sunshine, sandy beaches and the blue waters of Cape Cod Bay. Maria’s cheerful giggling as he walked her along the shore, pointing at gulls and calling them
birdies
.

He felt a hand resting on his fist. He opened his eyes to see Bethany watching him as Hank’s voice returned to his awareness.

‘… nothing much there and Baltimore was empty too. The few people left were wandering around like escapees from an asylum, driven mad by hunger, thirst and disease. We grabbed what little supplies we could and made a plan.’

Jake looked up at the captain. ‘What kind of plan?’

‘The kind,’ Hank said, ‘that keeps people alive, keeps us from losing hope.’ He looked at all of them as he spoke. ‘You said it yourselves: the military pulled out of dodge
before
the storm, not because of it. Our space agency had satellites put up into orbit to do nothing other than look at the sun. Are any of you able to sit here and tell me that they didn’t know what was about to happen?’

Cody stared at the captain for a long beat.

‘What the hell are you saying?’

‘What I’m saying,’ Hank replied, ‘is that they let this happen. They knew it was coming and they stood back and watched it.’

‘Who is
they
?’ Bethany asked.

‘Government,’ Hank shrugged, ‘people of power.’

Jake’s jaw dropped. ‘Jesus, that’s a hell of a stretch.’

‘Is it?’ Hank’s eyes were fixed, probing each and every one of them in turn as he spoke. ‘In the hours before the storm it seems that every major politician in the western world was hurrying off to what was described as a foreign meeting. Every newspaper we found littering the streets spoke of their departure, but not one actually said where they were going.’

The group sat in silence, but Cody was suddenly jolted by a vague memory that infiltrated his thoughts. Looking at the Internet in Alert, at the news of the President’s departure for a foreign affairs conference, joined by Canada’s Prime Minister who was heading overseas.

‘Why the hell would they do that?’ Reece wondered out loud. ‘What’s the good of being a leader if there’s nobody left to lead?’

‘What’s the good of leading a dying world?’ Hank challenged. ‘Population was growing out of control and resources were dwindling. Gas costs were hitting record highs as were those for oil which was fast running out. The whole of civilisation was heading toward a tipping point that could well have seen us collapse anyway. What if they saw a disaster coming and decided that a natural cull was preferable to any other alternatives on the table?’

Jake frowned as he stared at his glass of wine. ‘That’s a risk I’m not sure that politicians would have the cojones to take.’

Hank chuckled and leaned back in his chair.

‘Risk can be viewed from any number of perspectives. You and I see it as a matter of courage. A politician would see it as a matter of self-preservation. It would be an act of cowardice.’

Cody saw Charlotte’s jaw clench as she looked at Jake and Hank.

‘Not all politicians are cowards,’ she hissed. ‘Some work hard for their people.’

‘I can’t think of any,’ Hank uttered.

‘My father,’ Charlotte snapped.

Hank’s blue eyes swivelled to look at her. ‘Your father?’

‘Senator Larry Dennis, Ohio democrat,’ she snapped back. ‘He’s spent thirty years on the floor of the Capitol busting his
cojones
, as Jake describes them, for the benefit of people he will never meet so that you two can sit here and insult him.’

Hank did not react to her tone, his voice level and calm.

‘When did you last hear from your father?’

‘Two days before the storm, via satellite link at Alert. He never mentioned a thing, and I know damned well that he would never have left me up there without trying to let me know what was happening.’ Charlotte kicked her chair away from the table and stood to leave. ‘You two can enjoy your little conspiracy theory as much as you like, but you forget that politicians are human beings with families too and no more likely to abandon them than you or I.’

She whirled away and had taken two paces when the captain’s voice rumbled after her.

‘Miss Dennis.’

There was something both commanding and conciliatory in his tone that brought Charlotte up short. She did not look back as the captain spoke.

‘I apologise,’ Hank said. ‘We’ve all witnessed a lot and sometimes our anger clouds our judgement. I merely find it hard to believe that nobody, anywhere on Earth, knew anything of the solar storm. Please, stay with us for a little longer.’

Cody glanced at Charlotte. She sighed and turned back to her chair, the captain speaking as she retook it.

‘When we realised that even the biggest cities were lost, the crew and I decided that it was likely that people of power would have escaped, fled before the carnage and sought a refuge. It was our hope to find that same refuge and join them.’

The possibility that men had indeed somehow managed to shelter from the fall of mankind in some nameless, distant but safe place appealed to Cody’s hopes as much as the next man’s. The fact that he had detected a distant, coherent radio signal from some far flung corner of the globe bolstered that thought. He looked at Captain Hank Mears and decided that now was not the right time to reveal the existence of the Morse Code message he had deciphered. He could not trust the captain or his crew, and if things turned ugly they would need a bargaining chip to survive.

‘We picked up a signal,’ Reece slurred. ‘Cody heard it.’

Hank stared down the table at Cody. The rest of the team looked at him expectantly and for a moment Cody felt as though he were about to be interrogated.

‘At Alert,’ Cody said, ‘a faint signal. I couldn’t get a location on it and we could barely communicate the signal was so weak, but they heard me and I heard them.’

He looked at Charlotte and wondered, briefly, if the signal might have been from her father.

Hank leaned forward on the table. ‘Are you sure it was a communication and not an emergency broadcast of some kind?’

‘It was a communication,’ Cody confirmed. ‘Somebody’s out there.’

Hank leaned back again. ‘Yes they are,’ he said, ‘and with equipment powerful enough to transmit without the aid of orbiting satellites.’

‘And where,’ Jake asked, ‘do you think that this mysterious refuge of theirs is located?’

Hank smiled ruefully beneath his beard.

‘That’s the catch, isn’t it? We thought it was up here when we detected your beacons. It was in a location that might just be distant enough that other people wouldn’t reach it, the kind of place politicians might choose to hide. The base at Alert was on our charts so we triangulated the beacon’s source and set off from Baltimore in late winter hoping to catch the spring thaw north of the Arctic Circle. We anchored near Grise Fjord to wait out the worst of the weather before moving north again.’

Charlotte shook her head in amazement.

‘You came all the way up here chasing a pipe dream?’

‘What else is there to do?’ Hank tossed her question back to her. ‘Mankind just became virtually extinct. There isn’t anything else for us now. All we can do is hope that people elsewhere had the same presence of mind to escape the disaster and that we can find them. The rest?’ Hank shrugged and down the rest of his wine. ‘That’s evolution for you, the survival of the fittest.’

Cody spoke softly.

‘Darwin never said that. But you’re right that the only people who will make it out of this are those who are best adapted to survive.’

‘The toughest,’ Hank agreed, ‘those unwilling to compromise their survival by dragging the weak along with them.’

Cody shook his head.

‘The opposite. What made humanity great was our ability to cooperate and support each other. If what you say about the politicians is true then what killed humanity is the same selfishness that you refer to. Evolution isn’t about dominating every other species, it’s about passing on the traits that keep us all alive. If only a lack of compromise remains then you’ll die out fast captain, because your ruthless allies will eventually eliminate you, or you’ll eliminate them and end up alone.’

Hank watched Cody for a long time. ‘How would you know so much about it, Doctor?’

‘I’m a biologist.’

The table remained silent for a few moments.

‘You got a name for this new haven of yours?’ Jake asked the captain, ‘if you find it?’

Hank nodded and refilled his glass.

‘We’ll find it’, he said. ‘If there are people already there then it’ll have a name. If not, we’ll christen it ourselves. But for now we’re just calling it Eden.’

The captain raised his wine glass as he spoke.

‘We might be the last people alive on earth who are not right now in imminent danger of dying. But whatever happens we need to find a safe place to live, somewhere with the resources we need to survive and the defences we need to keep it our own.’ He paused. ‘To Eden, ours or theirs.’

Cody slowly lifted his glass. Jake, Bethany, Charlotte, Reece and Sauri followed suit in chorus.

*

Cody pushed the cabin door closed behind him and stood in silence, the alcohol warming his veins and blurring his thoughts. Time seemed to spill past but he could not tell how fast or how slow it moved, just like the bitter waters flowing by outside in the channel.

Fatigue pushed him on and he sat quietly down beside the bed. He thought of his daughter, of his wife, of his parents and of all the people he had ever known who might have since passed on from this life into a great unknown that all feared and yet all must one day face.

Cody reached out and pushed his index finger into the crook of Bobby’s neck.

He searched for several moments before he felt a feeble, erratic pulse threading its way past his touch.

Cody sat for a few moments more and then said a silent prayer that echoed through the empty vaults of his mind. He watched his own hands break the seals on the morphine vials and invert them before punching them into Bobby’s chest and letting them empty into his body, close to his weakening heart.

‘I’m so sorry, Bobby,’ he whispered. ‘I wish this could have turned out differently.’

Cody sat for a long time, hovering somewhere on the abyss of sleep as he felt life slip silently away from the room and leave him with anything but peace.

***

‘Put your back into it, Ryan!’

Cody heaved, his hands slipping on the frosted beam as he pushed his chest into it and the capstan turned agonisingly slowly. He heard the lethargic rattle of the thick chains through their mounts and then the anchor broke free from the seabed and the capstan loosened.

‘Easy now,’ Denton wheezed beside him, ‘bring her up steady so we don’t foul the chain or hit the hull with the anchor.’

Cody kept a steady pace around the capstan opposite Denton, matching him stride for stride until the huge anchor reached the limit of its travel and clanged against the hull mounts.

‘Stowed!’ Denton yelled, and then grabbed a belaying pin from a nearby rack and used a hammer to drive it through a link in the anchor chain into a hole in the capstan. With the anchor secured, Cody released pressure on the capstan.

‘Out on deck,’ Denton snapped. ‘Saunders will want you.’

Cody did not bridle at Denton’s tone. He had decided that he and the team were passengers aboard the Phoenix, visitors who needed to earn their keep. Besides, Denton was a scrawny little shit not worthy of the attention. Cody turned his back on the capstan and walked out onto the main deck. He looked up and saw the beacon still glowing in the dawn light atop the mainmast. Saunders had kept the thing burning up there all night.

The Arctic tundra was striped with shadows and bright beams of sunlight as the distant sun blazed low across the horizon. Cody squinted into the light, shielding his eyes with his gloved hands as he scanned the barren wilderness for some sign of Bradley Trent and the BV.

‘He ain’t coming back.’ Jake patted Cody on the back.

Cody sighed. ‘Idiot, if he’d only waited another day.’

‘Yeah,’ Jake replied, ‘but if we’d given in and joined him we’d have missed our ride. We did the right thing, staying with Bobby. I got what you said last night to Hank, loud and clear. We stick together.’

Cody stared out across the wilderness.

‘Cody?’ Jake asked.

Cody turned to face the old man, who gripped his shoulder tightly. ‘We stick together.’