EDEN (11 page)

‘First thing in the morning, you and Sauri need to go hunt something tasty, okay?’

‘Fine by me.’

Cody slammed the cab door shut as they walked to the hangar’s main doors and began hauling them closed. As he watched Bradley drive his shoulder into the metal doors he wondered what motivated the man to make plans to deceive his companions within just days of their problems starting. Cowardice? Selfishness? Stupidity? Nothing quite fit.

The doors crashed shut and Bradley dropped two heavy latches into place to secure them against the storms. Cody decided to take a chance as the soldier worked.

‘Brad, I need you to do me a favour.’

‘What’s that?’

‘I think that Jake is tiring. He’s burning the candle at both ends trying to keep everybody motivated and it’s wearing him down.’

Bradley secured the latches and stood up. He was a couple of inches taller than Cody and probably twenty pounds heavier, all of it muscle.

‘So?’

‘So I want somebody to help him lead the group.’

Bradley looked down at him for a long beat. ‘You think I’m some kind of asshole?’

‘What?’

Bradley’s wide jaw fractured into a grin. ‘You don’t like me. Nobody here much does because I speak my mind and don’t give a damn about what you all think. You don’t want me to help you lead this little group, and who says you’re taking charge anyway?’

‘It’s not about taking charge,’ Cody replied. ‘It’s about having some kind of hierarchy, no matter how subtle. Jake’s the most experienced of us all but he’s too damned cautious. We need to get out of here.’

Bradley’s grin did not slip. ‘Are you thinking of a mutiny, Doctor Ryan?’

‘A vote,’ Cody said. ‘We pull out in a couple of weeks, not a couple of months.’

‘You think that your girlfriend will go for that?’

‘Bethany wants out, so does Charlotte.’

‘I know what Charlotte wants,’ Bradley replied. ‘What about Cain?’

‘Who the hell knows?’ Cody uttered. ‘But if you, Sauri, Bethany, Charlotte and myself all stand together, we’ll win the vote.’

‘Can’t speak for Sauri,’ Bradley muttered. ‘Hell, he can hardly speak for himself. I can test the water though.’

‘Do it,’ Cody said. ‘Or we’ll be half and half and that won’t achieve a damn thing.’

Bradley mulled it over for a moment longer as Cody turned for the accommodation block.

‘Leave it with me.’

*

Bethany walked across the ice toward the accommodation block with a series of hand-written notes clutched in her hand and an anxious expression on her face. Cody looked up at her as he crossed from the hangar.

‘You okay?’ he asked.

‘More bad news,’ she replied as she climbed the steps to the block and opened the door for him. ‘You and Jake both need to see this.’

They walked inside together to see Jake pulling on his jacket. Bethany set the paper down before them on the table.

‘What’s this?’ Jake asked.

Bethany sighed. ‘These are air samples taken over the last four months. I’ve collated them by hand using the sampling kits we’ve got left. Thankfully, they don’t need electricity.’

‘And? Cody asked.

‘Clearest data I’ve ever seen yet,’ Bethany replied. ‘All major pollutants have receded by as much as fifty per cent. That now includes some heavy metals as well as the usual suspects like Carbon Dioxide and Monoxide.’

Jake looked at Cody. ‘Industry’s definitely gone, then.’

‘Manufacturing, vehicles, everything,’ Cody nodded, a fresh pulse of fear inside as he considered this latest confirmation of their isolation. ‘A complete shutdown of the global economy, the end of fossil fuels, maybe even farming.’

‘Methane’s down too,’ Bethany confirmed. ‘A loss of cattle on a global scale could cause that kind of dip.’

Cody sighed in resignation. ‘It’s been months since the storm.’

‘And winter in the northern hemisphere,’ Jake added.

The conclusion was brutal in its simplicity.

‘The world’s never coming back,’ Bethany whispered. ‘It’s really over.’

Jake zipped up his jacket. ‘There’s no way they could rebuild infrastructure on that scale after so long. It’s likely most power stations have been abandoned, millions of miles of power lines fallen or corroded, essential drainage and waste disposal collapsed.’

‘That’s the other bad news,’ Bethany said, and pointed to one of the hand-written notes. ‘There have been faint pulses of some radioactive elements. Not sufficient for an exchange of nuclear weapons but… ’

Cody finished her sentence for her.

‘ …enough for the collapse of nuclear cooling systems, spent rods radiating energy out into the atmosphere across the world.’

‘Any danger to us here?’ Jake asked her. ‘From the fallout?’

‘No,’ Bethany replied. ‘The readings are not far above background.’

Jake looked at Cody, who shrugged his jacket back on.

‘I’m going to the radios again,’ he said. ‘It’s about all we’ve got left.’

*

Cody sat at the Signals Development Position inside Polaris Hall’s communications room, one hand on the digital frequency shift modulator.

The room had become his home from home over the past few months. Inside the building, with no windows in his direct line of sight, he had found himself encapsulated in a fantasy world where he could pretend that he was back at MIT, fiddling with computer analysis of chemicals or calculating gas spectrometry experiments.

The white-noise hiss in the earphones he wore for two hours at a time had metamorphosed from the flat-lining death knell of humanity into a blank canvas onto which he could place any sound he desired. Cody had sat for hours, slowly changing the frequencies by unthinking reflex as he imagined sudden contact from the outside world. The loss of communications had been temporary, an atmospheric aberration. Law and order had been restored. The airplanes were returning. He had imagined the joy their fractious group would share as the landing lights of the big Hercules aircraft appeared again in the sky. The journey home. Holding his beloved Maria for the first time in so long.

The news reports.

The novels and the movies.

The calling all stations please rece
ive
signal… Break… Alert Five….

Cody sat bolt upright in his seat as his warm, cosy daydream was shattered by the signal crackling through his headphones. He grabbed one of them instinctively in his hand and pressed it hard to his ear as he struggled to listen.

‘…… receive… any station, Aler… hear… cannot reach…’

Cody scrambled for the microphone transmit button and punched it down as he shouted down the line.

‘Unknown call sign, this is Alert Five, do you copy?’

A hiss of undulating static roared in Cody’s ears, then the crackling noise again.

‘… Alert Five… mess… ken… Prepare to… coordin… ver…’

‘Alert Five, say again! Repeat transmission!’

The featureless hiss returned, humming with emptiness. Cody sat in silence for what felt like an eternity, staring at the banks of instruments in front of him and wondering if he had imagined the voice he had heard. Surely he could not have gone insane?

The static in his ears burst with noise once more.

‘… sendin… range parameters… digi…orse Code…. Receive…’

Cody was about to reply when a sudden series of beeps and pops of noise filled the airwaves. Cody grabbed a pen and a piece of paper as he scrambled to write down the broadcast of what could only be Morse Code.

The broadcast lasted less than twenty seconds, repeated once, and then the band fell entirely silent.

Cody sat back in his chair and stared at the paper in his hand, filled with a line of mysterious dots and dashes that he had no idea how to translate.

***

‘We go now, damn it!’

Cody burst into the accommodation block and froze as Reece Cain swung a rifle to point directly at him.

Reece was standing with the rifle pulled into his shoulder and another slung across his back, tears streaming from his eyes as he held the entire team at bay. His thick black hair was plastered across his face as though he were looking out from between the bars of a cell. Cody slowly pushed the door shut behind him, cutting off the blast of frigid air as he looked at Bradley and Sauri and realised that neither of them were armed.

Cody looked at Jake. ‘What’s going on?’

Bradley answered, his fists clenched.

‘We went to the stores to draw our weapons to hunt, found this asshole there loading them up. Says it’s time to leave. I think he’s lost his marbles, you know what I mean?’

‘Shut up!’ Reece screamed and swung the weapon to point at Bradley.

‘Shove it, creep,’ Bradley snapped back.

Jake stared at Reece, seemingly unsure of what to do next. Cody stepped forward, put his hands out in front of him.

‘Easy Reece, what’s happened?’

Reece kept his eyes fixed on Bradley, glaring as though he could shoot the soldier with merely a look.

‘I’m going home. Give me the keys to the BV.’

Cody kept his hands up. ‘You can’t take the BV Reece. We need both vehicles because we won’t have enough fuel in one of them to reach…’

‘To hell with the fuel!’ Reece bellowed and swung the weapon to face Cody. ‘There’s no point! There’s nothing left out there. We’re all dead already!’

Cody felt a shiver of apprehension as he realised that Reece was making no sense. He was armed and beyond reason.

‘Then why leave at all?’ Cody asked, as gently as he could.

Reece shivered as he cried in short, sharp gasps. ‘I want to go home. I don’t want to die here.’

‘We don’t want to die here either,’ Cody pointed out. ‘And we might not have to.’

Cody kept his eyes on Reece as the rest of the team’s heads turned to look at him.

Cody spoke slowly. ‘I picked up a signal, a man’s voice, broadcasting.’

Jake was about to speak but Reece cut across him. ‘Bullshit! I’m not falling for it, Cody. I’m leaving and if you stop me I’ll shoot, you understand?’

Cody looked at Reece for a moment longer, then reached into his pocket and pulled out the keys to the BV. He tossed them down onto the table between them.

‘Fine. You go ahead. Save yourself.’

Reece stared at the keys through his bleary, tear stained eyes, and the rifle dropped briefly as he did so.

Bradley lunged forward, one solid forearm smashing the rifle’s barrel down to point at the ground as his right fist flashed through the air. It connected with Reece’s temple with a dull crack that made Cody wince. Reece’s head flicked sideways and the light in his eyes blinked out as quickly as the power had done months before.

Reece crashed onto the floor as Bradley yanked the rifle from his grasp and span it to point at his head.

‘No!’

Jake leaped forward and put himself between Bradley and Reece, shielding the scientist with his body.

‘He’s a liability!’ Bradley raged. ‘Let’s just finish him!’

Cody rushed forward and stood in front of Bradley.

‘He’s not a liability,’ he insisted. ‘He needs our help. You’re no good to us if you’re going to shoot anybody who cracks up.’

Bradley scowled and yanked the rifle up and away from Reece.

Cody stepped back as he looked down at Reece, who was slumped in Jake’s arms and weeping softly to himself, his face buried in his own shoulder.

‘Jesus, what set him off?’ Cody asked.

Jake shrugged helplessly.

‘The sunrise,’ Bethany guessed from behind Cody. ‘It’s got all of us riled.’

‘The hell with that,’ Bradley snapped. ‘What’s this about a broadcast? Were you just saying that to get this asshole to drop the rifle?’

Cody looked at them all.

‘No. I picked up a transmission, ultra high frequency. No idea what it was saying or where it came from.’

‘You didn’t talk to them?!’ Bradley demanded.

‘I could barely hear them,’ Cody shot back. ‘But they were there.’

‘Could have been from anywhere,’ Charlotte pointed out. ‘Maybe even some kind of artefact, bouncing around in the atmosphere from before the silence.’

‘No,’ Cody shook his head. ‘They tried to respond, I could tell. Couldn’t understand what they were saying though, it was such a weak transmission. I’m guessing it may have been direct, not through a satellite?’

‘Unlikely,’ Bradley pointed out. ‘It would take a hell of a powerful transmitter to get a signal all the way up here. What frequency were you on?’

‘Two five zero, decimal eight,’ Cody replied.

Bradley and Sauri exchanged a glance. ‘That’s a military waveband,’ Bradley said.

‘Doesn’t much matter,’ Jake said. ‘Somebody, somewhere, is alive.’

‘Damned right,’ Bradley said, ‘which means we’ve now got a good reason to get the hell out of here. You can argue all you want, old man, but I’m not spending another minute sitting on my ass waiting for the perfect spring day to pull out. I say we call a vote and put this to rest right now.’

‘You just threatened to shoot Reece because he wanted to leave!’ Bethany pointed out. ‘Now you want to go?’

‘I threatened him because he was aiming a rifle at me,’ Bradley snapped at her. ‘We all want out of here, right? It’s time.’

Jake stared at Bradley for a long beat and then looked across at the rest of the team.

‘You all feel this way?’

Cody saw Bethany and Charlotte both nod in rare agreement with Bradley. Bobby and Sauri both said nothing. Cody took his chance.

‘Fine, let’s just do it then. Who wants to leave within the next couple of days?’ he asked.

It felt like a betrayal, as though he were about to commit a crime, but Cody had no choice but to put his own arm in the air first. He saw Jake’s cragged features sag slightly, crestfallen, but did not make eye contact with the old man.

Bradley’s hand shot up into the air. Charlotte and Bethany looked at Jake, stricken with indecision. Bobby hesitated, uncertain.

Sauri slowly raised his arm in the air.

Then Charlotte followed suit.

‘Half and half,’ Jake said. ‘That’s not helping anybody.

Cody felt a pulse of consternation as he realised that the group was in danger of fracturing into two camps. He was about to speak when from behind the table where Reece was slumped down against the wall a pale hand rose up to be counted.