EDEN (33 page)

Moments later he felt sick as he saw Seth drive the belaying pin into Saunders’ wound. The old man writhed and screamed in agony as metal grated against bone.

***

Cody leaned back against the thick bars of his cage as he waited for Sawyer’s henchman to return for Hank. The vast amphitheatre echoed with soft shuffles and the murmurs of other prisoners, and in the cage to Cody’s left he could see Charlotte asleep and Hank sitting with his chained crucifix in his hand, fingering the icon in thoughtful silence.

Cody fixed his gaze back upon Maria.

She lay asleep on a pile of old jackets in the cage to his right, covered in a shawl and watched over by a young girl of maybe twenty years old called Lena who seemed to have taken Maria under her wing. Her protector’s face was stained with grime and her cheeks hollow with starvation but she lay alongside Maria as the little girl slept, unwilling to leave her side.

Sauri watched over the both of them.

Cody had learned much from the young girl in the past hour. Lena Harris had been a downtown bank clerk, she had told him, before the storm hit. Two brothers, both parents, a nice home just outside the city. The perfect suburban image of the American Dream realised. Both her parents had been killed in the riots in Boston as they tried to find food for their family: her mother had been gang raped and shot, her father beaten to death. Her brothers had died attempting to protect Lena from more rapists weeks later. Lena had been caught but had escaped without molestation soon after, only to land in the hands of Sawyer’s men a few months later as she scavenged the city for morsels in the bitter snows of winter. She had made little attempt to escape, barely able to walk let alone run.

Lena had found Maria in the cages and instinctively protected the tiny girl. Half of the people in her cage had suffered likewise, seen families murdered or die from exposure or disease, and they too were protective of the young in their company no matter whose child they might have been.

Such humanity in the wake of unspeakable barbarism, like small flowers blossoming amid smouldering plains of ash, tugged hard at Cody’s heart.

‘How long has she been here?’ Cody whispered across to her as he looked at Maria.

Both Charlotte and Bethany were watching them in the darkness, Jake standing opposite Cody to block the view of the guards lingering near the exits.

‘Two months, give or take,’ Lena whispered back. ‘I don’t know about other militia in the city but I’ve never seen Sawyer kill or harm children.’

‘Wow,’ Jake murmured, ‘he’s all heart.’

‘Anybody ever escaped?’ Cody asked her.

‘Sure,’ Lena replied. ‘The guards often brawl among themselves and people slip away when their backs are turned, but not for a long time now.’

‘How come?’

Lena cast him a foreboding look through the bars of her cage. ‘You see the walls outside when you came here, the bodies?’

When Cody nodded, Lena sighed and gently stroked Maria’s hair.

‘If Sawyer’s men capture an escapee, they bring them here and throw them back into the cages. Then, they take the closest friend or family of that escapee and strap them to the fences outside to die.’ Lena looked down at Maria. ‘That’s how they guarantee obedience. They punish the innocent.’

Cody swallowed thickly as he looked at Maria.

‘And the rest of the prisoners?’ he asked her. ‘Sawyer said that they’re food.’

Lena nodded. ‘If things get hard, yes,’ she replied. ‘They’ll take the oldest or weakest and kill them to eat. It was worst in the winter, but nobody’s been taken for a while now.’

It was said with such a frank expression that Cody wondered briefly if Lena’s mind had gone, that she was no longer capable of being emotionally moved by the horrors that she had witnessed. Then he watched her hand stroking Maria’s hair and realised that he did not fear for his daughter, that his instincts and her actions assured him that Maria’s protector was still sound of mind. Only her soul had been scoured of its emotion, as though she were somehow hollow like a ghost, a shadowy reflection of the young girl she had once been.

‘I don’t understand how Maria got here,’ Cody said. ‘How did she survive the Great Darkness?’

‘She was with a group,’ Lena replied. ‘A bunch of scientists from MIT so I was told, stuck together after the storm. Wives, friends, family or whatever, they tried to make a go of it and get out of the city.’

Cody sighed in relief as he realised that his colleagues at the famous institute must have guessed what was happening before the rest of the population. They would have gathered together, made calls, got wives and parents and children alongside them, stockpiled and prepared for the onrushing collapse of civilisation.

Maybe Danielle made it out with them too, with Maria, but got separated somehow.

‘You hear anything of her mother from the people at MIT?’ he asked. ‘Her name was Danielle.’

Lena’s eyes flicked to Cody’s at the mention of the name, and he saw within them a grief that seemed to have become a constant companion in all of their lives as she whispered in reply.

‘She died.’

Cody swallowed as silent tears flooded his eyes once more. ‘How?’

Lena’s reply seemed to come from far away. ‘They were attacked, by looters searching for food. The children were sent south with younger survivors to flee while the parents stayed to hold back the looters. I guess they failed.’

Cody buried his head into his arm, tried to hold back the disbelief and the shame that he felt. He had not been there. He should have been there. He had fled when his family needed him the most and now his wife was dead, nothing but a memory.

‘The group held out for a few months before they were attacked,’ Lena whispered in the darkness. ‘They looked after the children, kept them safe. I guess Sawyer’s men picked them up soon after and brought them here. Maria’s never been alone, Cody. There was always somebody looking out for her.’

Cody felt fresh grief sweep across him as he heard the young girl trying to console him, after all that she had endured. He felt Bethany’s hand rest on his shoulder but he could not bring himself to look at either of the women.

‘I heard you all talking earlier,’ Lena said, ‘something about signals, from outside the city?’

Cody, relieved at the change of subject, managed to master his grief. For reasons he did not want to think about it was getting easier each time to swallow his pain, like a bitter pill or a noxious fume endured so many times the brain becomes immune to it.

‘There may be other survivors, organised people,’ he said. ‘But we don’t know where they are.’

‘You called it Eden,’ Lena replied. ‘People talk about it from time to time, a safe haven.’

‘Just like I said,’ Hank whispered from somewhere behind them.

‘What have you heard?’ Cody asked her.

Lena shrugged and her shoulders slumped slightly as though fatigue was slowly wearing her down.

‘Rumours mostly,’ she replied. ‘A lot of survivors believe in it, and that somehow people will come back with working machines again and everything will be restored to the way it once was.’ She looked up at Cody. ‘You think that it’s true?’

Cody stared at her for a long moment. The temptation to lie and to tell her that everything was going to be all right was almost overwhelming, but when he looked at his daughter, alive and well, he knew that he owed Lena more than that.

‘No, it’s not true,’ he said. ‘Things will never be the same again.’ Lena nodded to herself in silence as though she had known all along as Cody went on. ‘Silicon chips have been burnt, cables will have frayed, power-stations are crumbling, materials and pipelines decaying. It’s already too late, Lena. The world we knew is gone and it won’t come back in our lifetimes.’

A silence descended in the cages around him and Cody realised belatedly that every pair of eyes were watching him. A lone voice spoke up, tremulous with age.

‘You sure about that, son?’

‘I used to work at MIT,’ Cody replied into the darkness. ‘If there was any chance humanity could recover from this, believe me I’d champion it. But there isn’t. All we have is each other.’

Heavy footfalls alerted Cody and he turned away from the cage bars as a muscular man stepped up and shoved a key into the locking mechanism of Hank’s cage.

‘You,’ he snapped as he pointed at the captain, ‘with me, now.’

Hank stepped away from the bars as the door was hauled open and stepped outside. Another of Sawyer’s thugs snapped a pair of handcuffs around the captain’s wrists and shoved him in the general direction of the exit.

Nobody said anything until Hank and his escort were out of sight.

‘You think he’ll do us right?’ Jake whispered, almost to himself.

‘We don’t have much choice but to trust him,’ Charlotte uttered as she glared across at Cody. ‘Can’t trust anybody else.’

Cody did not reply but Bethany shook her head. ‘We should trust in ourselves. Hank will sail out of here if he gets the chance. He owes us nothing.’

‘Better than being stuck with Cody,’ Charlotte snapped.

Cody ignored her as he turned back to Lena.

‘Do you know who Sawyer was, before the storm? How did he come to lead these people?’

Lena shook her head, her eyes heavy with sleep. ‘I don’t know. I don’t want to know.’

Cody sighed as he looked about the vast hall and listened to the moans of the sick and the weak, a hymn of mankind’s suffering echoing around what had once represented the power of government and the security of democracy. All gone now. Mankind had lost far more than just the ability to light and heat buildings or power vehicles: he had lost the will to succeed, the spark of resilience and innovation that had driven him to excel and overcome. Mankind had given up, and only those born of more brutal minds held sway over the beleaguered remains of a once great nation.

‘We’ve got to get out of here,’ Cody whispered, ‘even if Hank doesn’t manage to turn Sawyer.’

A man with lank, greasy black hair and dull eyes shook his head as he squatted nearby.

‘Ain’t gonna happen, boy,’ he murmured. ‘You heard what the lady said. You run, we die. You won’t get out of this cage because we won’t let you.’

Cody looked up and saw that the other thirty or so people in the cage were still watching him in silence, but the air in the cage had become charged as though a live current seethed through the air between them.

‘They’ll
eat
you,’ Cody said. ‘Is that what you want?’

The old man shrugged his emaciated shoulders, a bitter smile fracturing his jaw.

‘Ain’t much left to live for is there? Why worry about it?’

*

Hank Mears was prodded by a chunky guard into an office one storey above the great hall, where a long mahogany table was surrounded by chairs. At the head of the table sat Sawyer. He leaned on the table with one arm as the other shovelled steaming chunks of meat and roasted potatoes and vegetables into his mouth. He looked up briefly as he ate and gestured with his fork to a seat opposite.

Hank walked to the seat before Sawyer’s goon could shove him there and sat down, watching the meat that Sawyer ate. Sawyer noticed the direction of his gaze.

‘Dog,’ he reassured the captain between mouthfuls.

‘That’s all right then.’

Sawyer popped the last morsel of what had once been a man’s best friend into his mouth and dabbed at his lips with a napkin. He sipped a pale brown liquid from a glass and frowned at it.

‘We haven’t quite got this stuff right yet,’ he said. ‘Alcohol brewed from potatoes. It’s called
potch
, from the Irish drink. Some of my crew learned to make it in prison.’

‘I’m shocked,’ Hank uttered as he glanced at the guard standing nearby. ‘They seem such nice boys.’

Sawyer watched Hank from the corner of his eye as he drained his glass and dabbed again at his lips.

‘You’re no scientist,’ he said. ‘What’s your story?’

‘Navy,’ Hank replied. ‘I was at sea when the storm hit.’

‘Safest place to be,’ Sawyer said. ‘You should have stayed out there. Why come to Boston?’

Hank eased himself back in his chair. ‘Eden.’

‘You won’t find it here.’

‘I’m not looking for it here,’ Hank reasoned. ‘My idea was that most people would have died in harsher climes in the north due to the hard winters there, so we’d be safer. The cold oceans are as abundant with life as the land is empty, so we could sail and fish on the move, only coming ashore for fresh water. It was working well enough when we detected a radio signal, very weak, coming from the far north.’

Sawyer’s expression changed, his gaze fixed on Hank.

‘You’ve got a working radio set?’

‘Partially,’ Hank admitted, ‘a spare that we had in the ship’s hold, packed in a powder store below the sea-line. It must have protected the circuits from the solar storm.’

Sawyer absent-mindedly dabbed at his lips with his napkin as he went on. ‘So you’re the captain of that ship, correct? And this signal you detected?’

‘I’d hoped we’d found Eden,’ Hank explained. ‘We sailed north and found those scientists stranded up on Ellesmere Island. The signal we detected was their distress beacons. We picked them up and sailed south.’

Sawyer scowled and tossed the napkin onto the table. ‘Then you’re of no use to me.’ He looked up at the guard. ‘Get this asshole out of here.’

The escort moved behind Hank and reached out for him. Hank jerked up and backwards out of his seat, the back of his skull thumping into the man’s nasal bridge with an audible crunch. The man grunted as his eyes rolled up into his head and he slumped backwards against the wall. Hank turned and drove a heavy boot into the guard’s face, his jaw crunching under the blow.

Sawyer bolted out of his seat, one hand reaching for a pistol at his side, but Hank turned toward him and simply stood still.

‘I haven’t finished yet,’ the captain said.

Sawyer looked at his fallen henchman, one hand fingering the butt of his pistol as he looked back at Hank.

‘Make it worthwhile,’ he replied, ‘or you won’t leave this room alive.’

Hank smiled, deflecting Sawyer’s bravado. ‘The scientists detected another signal at their base, before I got there. The coordinates of that signal are encoded. To have been detected so far north they must either have been emitted by a powerful source or relayed by a satellite that is still functional in orbit.’