EDEN (28 page)

Bradley followed Charlotte inside, his pistol at the ready in case anybody leaped out at them. Cody followed with the rest of the team.

The interior of the house felt cold, long since devoid of the warmth and light of human occupation. The once deep carpets were filthy and littered with the debris of old leaves that had blown in, scraps of fallen wallpaper and peeled paint from the front door.

Charlotte walked into the living room and Cody saw a large canvas of a Revolution-era sea battle dominating a modern looking fireplace. Pictures lined the walls, some of them of Charlotte, her father and a good looking woman in her fifties. Charlotte pulled one of them from the wall and shoved it into her rucksack.

‘People were here,’ Bradley said as he gestured to the fireplace. Thick ash filled its base. ‘They burned stuff to keep warm.’

‘Make this quick,’ Hank said to Charlotte, scanning through the broad windows for any sign of people outside.

Charlotte hurried through the house from room to room but found nobody in the building. Cody wasn’t sure if she was relieved or upset not to have found her father, but Charlotte turned instead to a small office and stepped inside.

Redundant computers dominated a study. Cody saw a fax machine now splattered with bird droppings and leaves piled up against the base of a book cabinet, the books long gone.

‘That’s what they burned,’ he realised, ‘the people that were here.’

‘Dad’s books,’ Charlotte said sadly as she looked at the cabinet. ‘He would have been appalled.’

Charlotte turned to the back wall. A smaller cabinet stood before it, filled with small pieces of china and glass trinkets. She squatted down and heaved against it. The cabinet shifted easily and exposed a wall safe. Charlotte reached up and spun the locking mechanism back and forth, clearly knowing the code by heart.

The safe opened and she reached inside as a flash of delight filled her expression.

She retrieved an envelope and showed it to Cody.

The envelope was adorned with her name, written in a hasty script.

***

Charlotte tore open the letter, her hands shaking as she unfolded the single page within.

Her eyes began flicking across the page as she read, and a slow creeping horror filled her features with dismay as the rest of the team gathered in the doorway to the study.

‘What does it say?’ Bethany asked softly.

Charlotte’s shoulders slumped and she handed the letter to Cody as she turned away and stared out of the office window. Cody read the letter to the rest of the group.

Dear Charlie,

I can only hope that someday you find this letter. I have so little time to write. I am being recalled to the city. A car is already here with a Secret Service escort and I have been prevented from contacting anybody. I have asked to gather some belongings in order to leave this note for you.

I know nothing of what has happened but whatever it is, it must be of monumental importance. In my experience, such panicked demands are rarely born of good news. Whatever happens I hope that you are safe and well and that you might read this upon your return. I dearly hope that we shall speak again soon.

I shall try to contact you at Alert as soon as I know more and am able to do so.

Lots of love,

Dad

‘They were pulled out,’ Bradley said. ‘Same time as the Canadian forces at Alert most likely.’

‘And the politicians,’ Hank noted, ‘all of them heading for that foreign conference, the location of which was never revealed.’

Cody lowered the letter and looked across at the captain.

‘You were right,’ he conceded. ‘They knew. They knew what was coming and they tried to evade it without telling us, without telling anybody.’

‘Maybe they didn’t know,’ Charlotte said in a weak voice. ‘For sure, I mean.’

‘I doubt that,’ Jake said from the doorway.

Cody let the letter fall to the office floor as he stared out of the window past Charlotte to the sunny, silent streets outside. The people charged with the service of the citizens of their country had deliberately abandoned those people to their fate and fled to an unknown haven to wait out the fall of mankind. Cody thought of all the children, men and women: the young and the old and the infirm left without food, water or warmth, left to the uncaring brutality of those stronger than themselves. People like Maria. Hot rage simmered like a disease deep in the pit of his belly, poison running through his veins as he turned and barged his way out of the office.

‘Where the hell are you going?’ Bradley demanded.

Cody did not reply as he walked out of the house and struck out along the road that circled the reservoir, heading toward Oak Square. Bethany hurried out of the house after him.

‘Cody, wait.’

Cody did not stop walking. Bethany jogged alongside him. ‘We need to stick together and wait for…’

‘I’ve been waiting nine months,’ Cody shot back. ‘I’m not waiting another second. I need to know, Beth, that’s all there is to it.’

‘So do I!’ Bethany shouted. Cody stopped as she grabbed his arm. ‘I have a brother too, remember? I have family. I’ve waited all this time but now I don’t know what I’ll find and that scares the hell out of me.’

Cody rubbed his temples. ‘I’d rather know than not.’

‘Then let’s do it together,’ Bethany replied. ‘Storming off on your own won’t help anybody, least of all your wife and daughter.’

Cody saw Hank and the others walk slowly out of the senator’s home and across the unkempt lawns.

‘Make it quick, Ryan,’ the captain said. ‘Sooner we’re done here, the better.’

Cody looked at Charlotte. Her face was stricken, like shell-shock, her eyes vacant. Cody thought of the radio transmission that he’d picked up at Alert and the coded coordinates within it. The urge to tell her about it was overwhelming but he refrained once more. Hank Mears and the Phoenix were too important to them all now. Without the ship they could never reach Eden even if they knew where it was.

Cody turned and started walking. He waited until Bethany joined him, and let their path drift away from the others until he felt sure that nobody could hear them. He kept his voice quiet as they walked.

‘I need you to do something for me,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘I need you to memorise something, in case anything happens to me.’

Bethany looked up at him as they walked, her eyes filled with caution. ‘Okay.’

Cody took a deep breath.

‘There were coordinates in the message I intercepted at Alert.’

Bethany did an admirable job of keeping her features impassive as they walked, looking straight ahead. Cody kept his voice low as he went on.

‘They were sent using Morse Code, presumably because of the weak signal. I managed to decipher them using a code book at Polaris Hall.’

‘Why haven’t you told anybody about this?’ she whispered.

‘You think we’d have got this far if I had?’ Cody challenged. ‘Hank and his men would have sailed directly for their mysterious Eden and left us behind. I didn’t want anybody to know until we’d had the chance to come back here, if only once.’

Bethany did not reply.

‘This is our only chance to find our families,’ Cody added. ‘Keeping this quiet is the right thing to do, for now. Are you good with this?’

Bethany was silent for a long time before she replied.

‘I’ll do it,’ she said finally. ‘What do you need me to memorise?’

‘42N70W,’ Cody said.

Bethany recited the coordinates as they walked until she could recall them at will.

The group rounded the reservoir and crossed into Oak Square. The bright sunshine and gentle breeze seemed docile and comforting yet the residential suburbs were haunted by the chill of abandonment, the houses like hollow caves, the streets strewn with litter and the rustle of leaves whispering of a past never to be revisited.

Cody saw in his mind’s eye Maria in the back seat of the family car, or taking her first steps in the park near their house, or erratically throwing pieces of bread to ducks and pigeons and laughing as they gobbled the morsels up.

Patchwork weeds laced the asphalt as Cody turned onto Perthshire and hesitated. The road stretched away from him and with a pulse of anxiety in his belly he spotted the front of his house. Neat white clapperboard, two storeys, an unkempt lawn.

Maria’s voice whispered to him amid the leaves drifting across the street as he bolted forwards and ran to the front of the home that had filled his mind and thoughts for so many long months. Raw grief ripped at his heart as he saw the shattered windows, the scorched woodwork and the front door hanging from its hinges. The once neatly trimmed hedgerows were tattered and in disarray as he vaulted over them and rushed up to the front door.

The faint smell of wood smoke filled the house as he stepped inside.

‘Maria!?’

He heard the guttural distress in his own voice as it echoed through the lonely house, a tremor of grim realisation of his worst fears. Cody dashed from room to room, each filled with upturned furniture and debris blown in from outside on the winter storms.

It took him only minutes to ascertain that the house was empty, but he kept searching manically for some evidence of where they had gone. He emptied cupboards. He overturned tables and chairs. He rifled through drawers in the kitchen and then stood and stared down at the new tiles on the kitchen floor, lost beneath a scattering of rodent droppings and crumbling leaves blown in through the wrecked kitchen door.

Cody stumbled into the lounge and saw Maria’s play-pen standing empty in the centre of the room. He turned away and thumped his fist against the unyielding walls over and over and over again until somebody grabbed hold of him and their arms wrapped around his neck. Cody crumbled into the embrace as his legs quivered and gave way beneath him. He dropped slowly to his knees as his life bled from his eyes into the soft hair crushed against his face as Bethany held him tight against her.

*

‘It’s getting late.’

Hank stood outside Cody’s house and squinted up at the sun in the sky above, its path now crossed by rippling blankets of diaphanous cloud drifting in from the north.

‘We can make the city before sundown,’ Jake guessed, ‘then get back to the beach before dark. It’ll be a push though.’

‘You two seen any bodies laying about recently?’ Hank asked Taylor and Seth.

Taylor shook his head. ‘Residents must have cleared out before the looting or the disease hit here.’

‘Might have got more warning,’ Jake said as he sipped water from a bottle. ‘If they saw the city go up in smoke they could have pulled out for the country. They could even have gone south before the nuclear station went bust.’

Charlotte looked out to the south-west and finally spoke.

‘You get out much past Worcester and there’s nothing but wilderness and small towns all the way down to Connecticut. Out west it’s the Big Indian Wilderness, New York state and Pennsylvania. Plenty of big country to hide in.’

‘If you know how,’ Hank pointed out.

‘They gonna be much longer in there?’ Bradley asked.

‘They’ll be as long as they need,’ Jake cautioned.

‘He’ll be okay,’ Charlotte said. ‘Takes a while to process what’s happened and pick yourself up, is all.’

‘I’m sure your father didn’t abandon you,’ Jake said. ‘It sounded like he had no choice but to leave right there and then.’

‘But to where?’ Charlotte asked. ‘With whom? And how? If they didn’t get out before the storm arrived then how could they have travelled anywhere?’

‘The politicians quit several hours before the storm,’ Jake said. ‘Likely they knew it was too big to handle. Air Force One could reach anywhere on the globe.’

‘Yeah,’ Bradley agreed, ‘but only within the time frame allowed. If they had, say, six hours’ warning then the farthest they could go would be six hours’ flying time away, right? That’s probably about three thousand miles in any direction, assuming they took off immediately.’

Hank looked at Charlotte’s letter, which he had picked up off the floor where Cody had dropped it.

‘The senator did not e-mail or call his daughter,’ he mused out loud. ‘He could have made a call easily enough without hindering his travels, or sent an e-mail via his cell phone. But he does nothing. Why?’

‘That suggests to me that he was prevented from doing so,’ Jake replied, ‘maybe to keep word from getting out.’

‘Exactly,’ Hank said. ‘They kept this whole thing air-tight so that they could get out before the panic or the storm set in. Complete media blackout followed by a literal global blackout.’

‘Organised exodus,’ Bradley agreed. ‘Fits with your little theory of a safe haven but it doesn’t tell us where the haven is or how to get there.’

‘No,’ Sauri said from nearby. ‘But it does tell us something important.’

‘What?’ Jake asked.

Sauri guzzled from his water bottle and then spoke. ‘The storm hit after sundown here in the USA, east coast time, right? The news reports on the Internet said that the politicians had flown for their overseas conference in the early afternoon. At that time of year, it means about five hours’ of time to flee before the storm hit.’

Hank clicked his fingers.

‘Good work. Five hours. Assume an hour to pull in all the officials that the president would want to take with him, close political allies, military heads, plus experts like engineers and doctors that any haven would need. He could get maybe four hundred aboard Air Force One and have select aircraft from around the military do something similar.’

Jake nodded, seeing the direction the captain was taking.

‘They could have saved thousands of lives,’ he agreed, ‘especially the kind of people who agreed with them politically and militarily. They set up a temporary base somewhere within range of all participating aircraft and wait out the storm.’

‘And then they come back?’ Sauri asked.

Hank looked around them and shook his head.

‘Maybe, but I don’t reckon they’ll ever be able to get this all going again.’ He gestured at the houses around them. ‘We had nearly four hundred million people in this country before the storm. God only knows how many are left but I’d wager there won’t be enough of them with the skills or manpower to rebuild and replace everything before it all rots.’