EDEN (17 page)

Cody shook his head briefly. Jake looked at his wine glass but said nothing.

‘There is nothing more you can do for him,’ the captain said. ‘If we could help, we would.’

Cody stared at the bubbles in his glass of wine. ‘He needs morphine.’

‘How bad is his pain?’

‘He’s not in pain.’

A silence descended around the table. Cody felt the eyes of the team upon him. Captain Mears studied Cody again for what seemed like hours before he spoke.

‘We can spare two vials,’ he said. ‘Make sure they count.’

Cody noticed above and to one side of the door to the captain’s cabin a ghostly shape haunted the wall. The wooden panels had probably faded over the years as sunlight beamed through the windows, but the crucifix that had once hung there was gone, only the darker wood betraying where it had hung for years. Cody looked at the captain anew and wondered what long held beliefs had collapsed when the world had fallen apart around him.

Bethany climbed down the steps from the wheelhouse into the dining room. She shrugged off her Arctic coat, surveyed the table and slid into the nearest seat to Cody. The captain raised his glass to her too.

‘Miss Rogers,’ he greeted her.

Bethany smiled briefly at the oddly jovial captain, and then her green eyes settled on Cody’s and remained there. Cody offered her a brief nod and she sighed as though a great weight had been lifted from her shoulders.

‘Shall we eat?’ Hank suggested, making an effort to break the sombre mood as he stood from his seat. ‘I must apologise for the nature of our meal as it is hardly gourmet dining. However, I understand that the ladies have done great things in the galley and made a great improvement on Denton’s cooking, which was like eating your own feet.’

Reece chuckled again, the wine clearly going to his head. The captain lifted the lids on the serving dishes, revealing thick slabs of meat and what looked like roast potatoes. Steam billowed up from the thick gravy soaking the food.

‘Christ,’ Reece uttered. ‘It looks like gourmet to me.’

‘The finest polar bear,’ Hank announced, ‘shot just days ago. They’re too inquisitive for their own good. Allow me.’

Charlotte watched as the captain began serving them.

‘You know that the polar bear is an endangered species?’ she uttered.

‘So are we,’ Hank replied. ‘But with most of us now gone, the polar bears of this world will recover just fine I’m sure.’

The wine and the food tasted as though it had been served from Heaven itself. No doubt the potatoes were roasted because they were well past their best and the gravy helped to disguise the tough meat of the bear, but it mattered little.

Cody waited until they had all eaten a few mouthfuls before he spoke.

‘You say that with all of us gone, the bears will do just fine?’ he said to the captain. ‘Just how many of us are gone?’

Hank focused on his meal. ‘Perhaps we should dwell on more light hearted conversation?’

‘No,’ Charlotte replied for Cody. ‘We’ve been up here for months with no knowledge of what’s happened to the world outside, just hints and speculation. We need to know.’

The captain chewed on a thick piece of meat as he surveyed the group. He swallowed and washed the food down with a prodigious gulp of wine.

‘You all feel this way?’

Nobody spoke, but all eyes settled expectantly on the captain’s. Hank set his cutlery down and mopped his beard with a napkin as he spoke.

‘Well, the best way that I can explain it is that your team has probably been in the safest place on Earth for the last six months. If you’ve been hoping to go home forget it. Forget all of it, because home no longer exists.’

Cody leaned forward on the table. ‘Things can’t have fallen apart so quickly.’

Captain Mears stared at Cody down the table as though he were a small, naïve child.

‘Things fell apart within
weeks
,’ he replied, and then exhaled noisily as he seemed to recall the calamity that had befallen mankind. ‘Nobody thought that it could happen so fast.’

‘Tell us,’ Charlotte said, ‘everything, from the beginning.’

The captain took another gulp of his wine and gestured to the vessel around them.

‘The Phoenix was a training vessel,’ he began. ‘I’m a former captain in the United States Navy, retired now obviously. Myself and a few other veterans formed a company and bought the Phoenix with financial help from a local church. We spent years sailing the high seas teaching maritime skills to former convicts, trying to turn them away from crime by showing them that there were other things they could be doing with their time. We were doing okay, too. We were out a few miles off the coast of California with a group of recruits aboard when the Great Darkness came.’

‘Great Darkness?’ Bethany asked.

‘It’s what people call it,’ Hank explained. ‘After the storm there was no electricity, no power, so no lights. People living in the cities didn’t realise how dark it gets at night without streetlights, so they started calling it the Great Darkness.’

‘We saw the same storm,’ Jake said, ‘never witnessed an aurora like it.’

‘Neither had we,’ Hank pointed out. ‘They’re called the
Northern
Lights for a reason. We sat watching the show for a while until some of us realised what we were looking at. About that time we noticed fuses blowing in the wheelhouse and cell phones being fried. We managed to get some of the electrical equipment aboard ship shut off, like I told you.’

‘Then what?’ Reece asked.

‘Then,’ Hank echoed his question, ‘nothing. The Phoenix is a blue-water vessel that can cross oceans and has a good communications suite. We tuned in to stations around the world and listened to them go off the air one by one as the storm swept across the planet.’

Hank looked at his glass for a moment before he went on.

‘At first I kind of hoped it was just the satellites being taken out, losing the ability to relay signals. But then we saw all the lights in San Diego blink out, just like that.’ He clicked his fingers loudly. ‘You ever notice that orange glow you get against clouds on the horizon at night? You don’t see it at sea. It’s the light from cities and towns reflecting off the water vapour in the air. As we stood up there on the deck we watched that glow vanish as every city on America’s west coast went completely dark.’

‘There was no warning?’ Jake asked. ‘Nothing at all?’

‘Toward the end some people got wise to it,’ Hank replied. ‘We heard some radio stations trying to warn people about the storm but I guess most people were standing outside looking up at the sky, not listening to radios. Countries on the other side of the world, in daylight, probably didn’t see a damned thing. The power went out and that was it.’

‘It doesn’t make sense,’ Reece said, slurring slightly. ‘How the hell could something like this tear the world apart so quickly?’

Hank set his glass down.

‘That, my young friend, is due to there being too many people being too damned stupid, including my business partners. We docked the following morning and they all tore off for their homes and families. At that point things weren’t too bad. People just figured that the power would come back on and hey, we’d all be okay again. But as time wore on without information because there was no television, no news, no communication, people instinctively wanted to run to their families.’

Cody saw an image of Maria and Danielle, struggling to contact friends, family, anybody they could for help.

‘Doesn’t sound so stupid,’ he said out loud.

‘It is,’ Hank smiled coldly, ‘if you’re prone to thinking. Tens of thousands of people rushing into and out of cities, crossing states and burning fuel that can’t be replaced because the pumps in gas stations don’t work without power. Before you know it people are scattered everywhere, running about like headless chickens. While they’re doing that, the criminals are having a field day looting whatever they can find.’

‘That fast?’ Charlotte uttered.

‘Within an hour of the power going down,’ Hank nodded. ‘The police had no ability to coordinate or communicate. They were powerless to prevent it. Once the looting had started and people realised that there was something seriously wrong they started hitting the convenience stores. Markets ran out of everything within a day or so. Nobody paid for anything of course, they just took it. Then other people wanted what had already been taken, and that’s when the riots and the violence really got started.’

Cody leaned back in his chair, his belly full for the first time in three months, and stared at the plate before him. Finding food for a small group, even up here in the Arctic, was a feasible proposition. But in a major city of ten million or more, once the supermarkets emptied there was simply no way that the people could feed themselves and no natural resource for them to fall back on.

‘What about water?’ Reece asked. ‘I thought that people could survive for weeks as long as they had water.’

‘No water pressure,’ Jake answered for the captain. ‘With no power stations there’s no energy to get the water to everyone. It was probably the first thing to go after the lights went out.’

Hank nodded.

‘Water first, then the food, then the gas,’ he confirmed. ‘Within a week people were starting to fall sick with dehydration and starvation. They started forming groups, mostly young hoods who would raid people’s homes for what little they had left. Home owners would shoot back in defence of their kids. Before the end of the second week there were dead bodies everywhere and cities started to burn as those with supplies were deliberately smoked out by those who had none.’

‘Then the population fled for the countryside,’ Jake guessed. ‘Looking for food and water?’

‘Exactly,’ Hank nodded. ‘Forget what you’ve seen on television dramas and at the movies: once the power was gone on such a large scale there was no way for it to ever be repaired, for the power stations and drainage systems to ever recover. The collapse was brutal in ways I can’t even begin to describe, and even as millions of people streamed in an exodus from San Diego with gangs of armed thugs cutting them down for food, the Diablo Canyon and San Onofre nuclear plants imploded. Both used pumped sea water to cool the reactors, but with no power to do so the pumps underwent an automatic shutdown as soon as the back-up diesel generators ran out of fuel. A few days later the cooling tanks overheated and blasted radioactive waste all over the damned place and straight into the water table. You don’t want to think about what that did to people in a state where water was already scarce.’

A momentary silence descended once more as Cody imagined the horror of an orderly, stable society crumbling and breaking down in a matter of days only to be poisoned by its own devices.

‘What about the military?’ he asked. ‘Where the hell were they?’

‘That,’ Hank replied, ‘is what we were asking ourselves.’

***

‘Didn’t the government instigate martial law?’ Charlotte asked. ‘Deploy the National Guard or something?’

The cabin creaked as the Phoenix rocked gently on the water in the cove, probably on swells created by an iceberg passing silently by outside.

‘The military collapsed within days of the storm,’ Hank replied. ‘Most bases held out for a few days without power, but as the chain of command fell apart rations dwindled and staff began to worry about their own families, so they dispersed into the population. I can only imagine that senior officers, cut off from communications and unable to get orders from on high, realised that the game was up and abandoned their posts. I can’t speak for other countries but in America there was no apparent military response to the disaster.’

Hank drained his glass as Charlotte shook her head.

‘But the military forces at Alert abandoned the base
before
the solar storm,’ she said.

Captain Mears froze in motion as his cold eyes locked onto Charlotte’s. He set his glass down.

‘So I heard.’

‘They left us here,’ Reece uttered, ‘even their own like Sauri.’

Hank looked at Sauri, who said nothing but nodded once in confirmation.

‘How long before the storm did they leave?’ Hank asked Jake. ‘Could they have been doing something else perhaps?’

Jake shrugged.

‘Possibly, but Alert is a highly sensitive listening post with all kinds of classified equipment and they just abandoned it in a real hurry. My guess is that they either got some kind of warning of the storm or they independently realised what was coming and got the hell out while they could. The fact they just left us here I don’t think was malice on their part — they just didn’t have enough time to come out and gather us all.’

Hank appeared to consider this for a moment.

‘What about the people back home?’ Bethany asked him. ‘What happened after the military collapsed?’

Hank shrugged as though the future had been a forgone conclusion.

‘The winter set in real harsh, especially on the east coast. Without maintenance to major infrastructure most of the bigger cities began to flood during storm swells as the drainage failed. Those that didn’t burned as stale gas burst from pipes or was deliberately ignited by people seeking warmth and shelter. Disease hit pretty fast too, things like cholera and typhoid, while pneumonia and influenza became overnight killers without antibiotics to treat them.’

Hank twirled his empty wine glass in one big hand as he spoke.

‘Most of the hospitals got cleaned out when people really began to understand just how bad things were. There were riots for medicine just like there had been for food and water. It was about then that most people abandoned the cities for the countryside. Even those that survived the initial collapse and made it into the countryside died soon after.’

‘How come?’ Charlotte asked.

Hank shrugged.

‘Hard to tell, but most people who own a gun can’t shoot for shit,’ he said. ‘And animals have a habit of wanting to survive, just like humans. Plus a lot of city folk don’t have a clue about how to gut animals, skin them, cook them and so on, or about how to clean water. Most just drink from rivers and streams thinking it’s somehow natural and clean. God knows how many died from diseases brought on by eating uncooked food or swallowing who-knows-what horrible parasite from an unseen corpse lying in the water upstream, but I can tell you this: it’s as quiet now in the hills as it is in the cities.’