For Those In Peril (Book 2): The Outbreak (14 page)

After
teaching them the basics, I showed Daz and Sophie how to steer the boat under
sail. Mostly it was about setting them just right so that it went in the
direction you wanted it to, with little need to touch the wheel. By the time I
disappeared into the cabin to get some food, they were taking turns, using the
wake to judge who could steer the straightest course. To be honest, neither of
them was doing particularly well, but they weren’t doing too badly considering
they’d been on the boat for less than a day. 

Down
in the cabin, I went over to where Claire was changing the dressings on Tom’s
wounds. She turned to me. ‘I wish I had something better than gin to keep these
sterile. I really don’t want him getting an infection on top of everything
else.’

I
rubbed my chin nervously, feeling the roughness of fresh stubble. ‘How’s he
doing?’

‘Really well,’ Claire applied a new dressing to Tom’s shoulder, ‘apart from the
fact he’s still unconscious.’

I
watched Claire as she worked. ‘No sign of him coming round?’

‘No.’
Claire sounded glum. ‘I’m beginning to wonder if that head wound is worse than I
originally thought.’

‘How
much worse?’

‘I
really don’t know, but worst case, he might be bleeding into his brain. If
that’s happening …’ Claire’s voice faded out.

I
stared down at Tom. He was someone who was usually filled with energy and life;
always on the move: it was unnerving to see him lying so still. ‘Is there
anything we can do to try to help him wake up?’

‘Not
really; not without knowing exactly what the problem is. We’ve just got to wait
and see.’ Claire adjusted the position of the tube which snaked from Tom’s
chest. ‘Have you seen the news this morning?’

‘No,
not yet. Anything positive?’

Claire
picked up the remote and switch on the television. ‘Judge for yourself.’

On the
screen, a newsreader sat, stone-faced, behind a desk, shuffling through his
papers as if he was searching for something. Eventually he found it, but he
seemed to have to read it twice before he was ready to speak. He cleared his
voice and began, ‘This is the latest update we have. Er ...’ He scanned his
notes again. ‘It seems that last night’s attempt to eliminate the HRV outbreak
in Glasgow has failed.’

Claire
stood up. ‘“Eliminate the outbreak”? That’s a great euphemism for killing half a
million people. They’re being careful not to say what they did; not a single
mention of them bombing the whole city back to the Stone Age.’

I
ignored her and kept my attention focussed on the television, but I couldn’t
help thinking that she was right.

‘The
virus has now moved beyond Glasgow and into the surrounding areas. General
McDonald has announced a new strategy to try to contain the outbreak and limit
its spread. Rather than trying to set up a cordon around the infected areas,
they have established two lines of defence: one to the south along a range of
hills known locally as the Southern Uplands; and another to the north. Naval
blockades have also been set up in the Firth of Forth and the Firth of Clyde to
prevent anyone infected with the virus from getting out.

‘Meanwhile, the Prime Minister has been meeting with other European leaders and
NATO commanders to discuss what needs to be done. In a statement released
earlier today, he stressed that every effort is being made first to contain the
outbreak and then to eliminate it.

‘In
related news, the outbreak of HRV which started in Miami two days ago is
spreading rapidly across the US. Since the State and Federal Governments didn’t
initially realise the events in the city had been triggered by the virus, they
only began to try to contain the outbreak yesterday. These belated attempts seem
to have failed and there are reports of other major outbreaks in Atlanta and
South Carolina. It’s still not clear if the outbreaks in Miami and Glasgow are
related, but it seems that a transatlantic flight between the two cities landed
just a few hours before the HRV outbreak started in Glasgow, suggesting a link
between the two. As a precaution, all commercial flights across the world have
been grounded until further notice. However, there are already as yet
unconfirmed reports of similar outbreaks in other cities as far apart as Rio,
Hong Kong and ...’

I’d
seen enough, and I turned off the television. The Government and the army had
been more than ready to sacrifice Glasgow to try to stop the outbreak, and now
it seemed they were willing to do the same with most of the remaining population
of Scotland. There must be close to four million people living between the two
defensive lines which had been set up, and it seemed there would be no way for
anyone caught between them to get out. That meant there’d be no way to avoid the
infection.

Suddenly, Tom moaned, moving for the first time since we’d been knocked down by
the bomb blast. Claire sat down on the bench beside him. ‘Hey, how’re you
feeling?’

Tom
licked his lips. ‘Where am I?’

Claire
put the back of her hand on his forehead. ‘We’re on Ben’s boat.’ She lifted up
his wrist and felt his pulse. ‘Do you remember?’

Tom
opened and closed his mouth slowly. ‘Yeah.’ His eyelids drooped and then closed.
‘It’s the virus, isn’t it? We were trying to outrun it.’ He opened his eyes and
looked at me blearily. ‘Did we get away?’

‘Yeah,
we got away.’ I smiled at him, glad he was finally awake. ‘At least, for the
moment.’

‘So
what happened?’ Tom made a feeble attempt to sit up, but Claire put a firm hand
on his chest, holding him down. He didn’t seem to have the strength to fight it.
He cleared his throat and winced in pain. ‘I remember watching the bombs come
down … then …’ A look of concentration spread across his face; after a few
seconds he gave up. ‘Then it all gets a little hazy.’

I
folded my arms, thinking back to the night before. ‘The last one landed a bit
too close. We got hit pretty hard, but we made it through in one piece; more or
less.’ I pointed to his chest.

Tom
glanced down and saw the tube coming out of his chest for the first time. ‘What
the hell’s that all about?’

Claire
walked over to the galley and filled a glass with water. ‘You fractured a rib
and it punctured your lung.’ She went back to Tom and held his head up as he
took a sip. ’I needed to drain the air out.’

Tom
blinked slowly. ‘I don’t remember.’

Claire
put the glass down beside him. ‘You’ll have lost your short-term memory when you
got knocked out.’ She put her hand on his forehead again, trying to judge his
temperature. ‘It’s not unusual.’

Tom
tried to sit up again and this time Claire let him, but he only made it halfway
before the pain got too much and he slumped back onto the seat. He closed his
eyes. ‘My shoulder hurts.’

 ‘I’m
not surprised. You dislocated it.’ Claire offered him another sip of water, but
he batted the glass away.

‘Did
I?’ With that Tom drifted off again.

I
leant forward, concerned. ‘Is that okay?’

‘Yes,
I think he’ll be fine. He’ll just need to rest.’ The relief was clear in
Claire’s voice. ‘Although I’m not looking forward to removing that tube and
sewing up the incision without any anaesthetic; It’s going to hurt like hell.’

‘What’s for supper? I’m starving.’ Tom was properly awake now, his eyes
following me keenly as I rummaged through the cupboards. As usual, there had
only been me on the boat on the run up from the Canaries and I‘d expected to be
able to pick up more supplies while I was in Glasgow. This meant I didn’t have
much left on board, and certainly not enough to feed five people for any length
of time. Daz, Claire and Sophie sat around the table with Tom, all looking at me
expectantly. We’d dropped the sails and were drifting with the current somewhere
between the town of Largs on the mainland and the island of Cumbrae, which lay
off to the west.

 ‘Not
much.’ I inspected the contents of the last food cupboard I’d searched. ‘All
I’ve got is a couple of cans of baked beans and a packet of supernoodles.’ I
turned to the others apologetically, ‘I meant to pick up some supplies
yesterday, but I never got the chance.’

‘Hey,
food’s food, isn’t it?’ Daz looked round, grinning, but he saw he was getting
little support from the others.

‘Well,
it’s all we’ve got, so it’ll have to do, whether you like it or not.’ I turned
back to the cupboard and emptied it.

***

The
following morning we lay off Brodick, a small ferry port on the island of Arran,
and contemplated the shore. We needed supplies and we needed fuel, but we
couldn’t be certain if it was safe to go ashore. I hoped the islands out in the
Firth might be safer than the mainland, but I had no way of knowing whether or
not this was true. The news on the television wasn’t much use. It was now filled
with what amounted to little more than propaganda, and none of it seemed to
match with our own experiences.

They
still hadn’t mentioned what had happened to Glasgow and they were still
pretending that the best chance people in the infected zone had was to stay
inside and keep themselves to themselves. I felt sorry for those who believed
them: given what we’d seen so far, I figured that since they’d been abandoned by
almost everyone, there was little hope for them. I just hoped they didn’t
realise it, not yet at any rate; I wanted them to live the briefness that would
be the rest of their lives in hope. We knew the real situation, but at least
with the boat it seemed like we had a way out. There was still talk of a naval
blockade on the Firth, but we’d seen no evidence of it yet.

Brodick was little more than a cluster of shops, cottages and other buildings,
but it offered the possibility of supplies close to the shore. It seemed likely
that the ferries, which were its only connection to the mainland, would have
stopped running before the outbreak reached the nearest mainland port, and it
was possible that the infected which had been swept down the river after Glasgow
was bombed hadn’t made it this far before they finally drowned. I surveyed the
land: nothing moved, but smoke circled up lazily from a couple of chimneys,
meaning there was still life in the small community.

I
dropped the anchor, and Daz and I set to work inflating the dinghy and fitting
the engine. Once we had it in the water, we climbed in and puttered towards the
shore. Soon, we were alongside the harbour walls and I tied the dinghy to a
rusting iron ladder before we climbed up and onto the quay. Daz looked around.
‘What now?’

‘There’s a shop up there,’ I pointed to a small, white-washed building with
boards advertising various newspapers on either side of the door, ‘I guess we
should try there first.’

As we
walked along the dock, I surveyed my surroundings, worried about what we might
find, but with the exception of the gulls which wheeled and circled overhead,
everything remained still. When we reached the shop, we found it was closed. Daz
was rattling the shutters, trying to judge how easy it would be to break in,
when there was an explosion and the shop’s window disintegrated in front of us.
I spun round to find two men standing in the middle of the street, each armed
with a shotgun.

I
called out to them. ‘Hey, don’t shoot, we’re okay. We’re just looking for some
food.’

The
man on the right raised his gun and I saw his finger shift onto the trigger.
‘Daz. Run!’

We
sprinted for the dock as the man fired again, sending splinters flying from the
door where we’d been standing just moments before. Back at the ladder, Daz
climbed down first and I quickly followed, glancing back at the two men; they
were now standing at the entrance of the quay, shotguns resting in the crooks of
their arms: it seemed they weren’t out to kill us, just to drive us away, and it
had certainly worked. I jumped the last few feet into the dinghy, landing in it
with a loud
whop
. I steadied myself before untying it, annoyed and a
little worried that we were heading back to the boat with nothing to show for
our efforts.

‘They
tried to kill you?’ Sophie was shocked by Daz’s retelling of the events on
shore.

‘I
don’t think they really meant to hurt us.’ I was trying to bring a sense of calm
back to the boat. ‘I think they were just warning shots’

‘Warnin’ shots? Any closer an’ they’d have blown our bloody heads off!’

‘Daz,
you’re exaggerating.’

‘Am
no’!’

‘Either way, why were they shooting at you?’ Tom had raised himself slowly and
painfully into a sitting position.

‘I’m
guessing it’s because we’re strangers.’ I leant back against the cooker in the
galley. ‘They were probably worried we‘d bring the disease to the island. Most
likely they were just trying to keep themselves safe.’

Tom
shrugged. ‘I suppose you can’t really blame them.’

‘No, I
guess not,’ Claire stood up and paced around the cabin, ‘but we still don’t have
any food.’ There was a note of concern in her voice.

Looking at the clock, I realised it would be low tide in a couple of hours. ‘I
think I know where we can get some, but it’s probably best if we move down the
coast a bit first. We don’t want to run into those men again.’