EDEN (8 page)

Bradley Trent slapped his own head with his hand. ‘I thought you damned people were supposed to be geniuses? You’re telling me that overnight the entire planet’s gone to hell and we’re stuck up here on our own?’

Jake looked at the team around him and his gaze fell on Cody.

Cody rubbed his head with thumb and forefinger as a dull ache spread between his eyes.

‘Without power and infrastructure, food will run out in a matter of a few days,’ he said, hating the sound of his own words as images of Maria filled his mind. ‘Fresh water will disappear from cities as the pressure in the system is lost. No central heating and as it is winter most of North America will freeze. People will try to flee the cities, searching for food and water. Federal and State government will be totally overwhelmed. They’ll try martial law but it won’t work. There are nearly four hundred million people in the United States and without modern farming and transport they’ll be facing mass starvation in just a few days.’ He hesitated as the enormity of what was happening struck him. ‘The same things will happen across the globe, in every country, to billions of people.’

An image of Maria’s face, smiling and laughing on the computer monitor, swelled in his mind as pain pinched at the corners of his eyes.

Cody looked up at Jake. ‘Jesus, we’ve got to get out of here, right now.’

Cody turned and burst out of the accommodation block and across the ice, scrambled up a bank near the edge of the compound until he looked out across the dark and barren plains toward the south where sheer cliffs and mountains maintained a lonely vigil against the Arctic storms.

Across the horizon, a faint glow of pink light shone like the distant star that it was.

The bitter chill bit deeply through his three sweaters as a fine hail of snow swept across the ridge before the wind, but he felt nothing but a horrified numbness that encapsulated his body in a rigor of despair. Cody’s legs failed and buckled beneath him as he crumpled to his knees in the snow, his gaze fixed upon the feeble rays of sunlight sweeping the heavens a world away.

The thought of his little girl trapped in a world collapsing into anarchy and despair filled him with an acidic horror that scalded through his veins.

‘Oh God, what have I done?’ he gasped.

Tears spilled from his eyes, running as far as his cheeks before they froze into globules of ice.

Foot falls crunched through the snow behind him, and Cody swiped a sleeve across his face as Jake joined him on the ridge. Cody did not look at Jake, his eyes glued to the distant sun as though its light were the only thing keeping him alive.

A heavy Arctic Jacket fell gently across his shoulders as Jake laid it there, ice crystals pattering against the fabric as they skimmed through the frigid air. Cody reluctantly pushed his arms into the sleeves as he heard other footfalls joining them on the ridge.

Jake slowly squatted down on the ice beside Cody and stared out toward the distant sunlight.

‘You know that we can’t leave here, Cody,’ he said. ‘It’s much too far. We’d never make it.’

‘The snowmobiles,’ Cody snapped. ‘We’ll tow supplies.’

Jake shook his head. ‘We couldn’t take enough fuel and food with us. It’s more than a thousand miles to the nearest settlement. We’d die long before finding anybody.’

Cody felt the rage of a lifetime swell inside him, as powerless to escape as he was. It seethed and seared and then imploded into helplessness.

‘I can’t leave them,’ he managed to rasp. ‘I can’t.’

‘You already did,’ Jake said. ‘But right now all you can do is stand up.’

Cody looked at Jake, who stuck out a thickly gloved hand.

A thousand conflicting thoughts and memories passed in utter silence through Cody’s mind. He wanted to leap off the ridge and start running south. He wanted to punch Jake in the face for not understanding. He wanted to find a gun and turn it on himself for his stupidity and his selfishness. He wanted to die. And he wanted to live.

Cody took Jake’s hand and got to his feet.

‘We need a plan,’ Jake said.

***

My dearest Maria,

I don’t know where to begin.

It is hard to write these words. Something inside of me wants to destroy everything, to burn and break in fury at the cruel blow that fate has delivered us all. My every thought is with you. I cannot sleep for the fear that infects me, of what you may be going through and for rage at my inability to help you. Nothing in my imagination could have prepared me for such terrible suffering, yet I know that it pales into insignificance compared to what you must be facing right now.

Despite our shared horror at what has befallen mankind, we have managed over the past few days since the solar event to formulate a plan of action. Jake has become the rock of our team almost overnight. He has, I suspect, the least of concerns as he has no family to worry about. Bobby, an orphan, appears also to have risen to the challenge. The rest of us labour through our duties like robots, unable to free our thoughts from family and loved ones. For all we know, as we work our cities burn and citizens are dying in countless numbers.

Like all of them, I can only hope and pray that somehow the spirit of human cooperation and companionship that allowed us to rise above our fellow species on this planet will shine through once again, and save those dearest to us from the unimaginable fate of succumbing to the disaster that hangs over us all.

*

‘We’re on our own.’

Jake’s voice had sounded small in the immense darkness outside the observatory.

Cody had stood alongside Bethany, the rest of the team beside them. Hoods raised, puffs of their breath billowing out into the cold air. The entire group had been overwhelmed with a sombre resignation that had reminded Cody of the soldiers who had fought in the trenches of the First World War or stormed the beaches of the Cotentin on D-Day: still alive and yet doomed. The futility of their situation had hit hard but they had remained silent as Jake spoke.

‘We’ll shift the rest our gear to the Alert base and live there permanently. There are more resources, the fuel tanks are larger and we’ll be able to monitor the airwaves using their equipment. We can only hope that somebody’s still out there that can make some kind of rescue attempt.’

Nobody had argued.

‘We’ll re-route all power to the smallest accommodation block to conserve fuel. Everything but the snowmobiles can freeze to hell for all I care. Brad? How much fuel does the base hold?’

Bradley had shrugged. ‘Two or three month’s when full, about half that right now.’

‘Good,’ Jake said. ‘That’s for the whole base. We might last a year or more if we conserve it down to a single building. We’ll need to create an inventory of the remaining food and then take a good look at some of the snowmobiles they’ve got there. It’s a long shot but maybe, somehow, we can figure out a way to drive them far enough south to get us out of here once the winter breaks.’

‘I thought you said that was impossible?’ Charlotte had asked. ‘That we couldn’t carry enough fuel?’

‘It is,’ Jake had admitted, ‘at the moment. But staying here indefinitely is what’s really impossible. Maybe we can jury rig one of the vehicles to carry enough fuel to get us down to Eureka.’

Cody had mentally pictured the outpost of Eureka, hundreds of miles away on the southern tip of Ellesmere Island. No longer permanently occupied, it would likely hold stores and supplies, perhaps even fuel.

‘Let’s get to it,’ Jake had clapped his gloved hands in the darkness, the sound echoing out into an icy oblivion, and in that one motion had condemned the team to a winter north of the Arctic Circle.

*

The interior of the storage facility at CFS Alert was utterly black as Bradley Trent unlocked a side door and slipped inside, Sauri close behind. The door slammed shut with an echo that chased around the big metal building.

Bradley flicked on a flashlight and the beam sliced through the darkness, illuminating ghostly tendrils of diaphanous mist that swirled on the freezing air and glistening ice clinging to the interior walls like galaxies of tiny stars. Crates and boxes were stacked high on pallets, marked with labels that denoted the contents: jackets, boots, snow chains, bathroom necessities.

‘Where’s the food stored?’ Bradley asked.

Sauri gestured toward the far side of the building, where ranks of empty metal racks stood near a wall that faced the accommodation block. Bradley hurried over, his flashlight sweeping the empty racking.

‘Jesus, they cleared us out.’

Sauri said nothing as Bradley hunted up and down the racks and rifled through nearby cardboard boxes. The soldier lifted a tin from one of the boxes and stared at it in disbelief. In the darkness and in the harsh beam of the flashlight, his sudden laughter seemed almost demonic.

‘They left us the biscuits!’ he roared.

Sauri said nothing as Bradley turned and hurled the tin against the wall of the building with a crash of cold metal against cold metal. The tin rattled to the floor as Bradley hammered a gloved hand against his head.

‘Why didn’t they come and get us?’ he shouted. ‘Why leave us here to rot?’

Sauri looked at his companion for a few moments. ‘We won’t rot. Much too cold.’

Bradley stared at Sauri for a long beat. ‘Well thanks genius, glad to see your cup’s still half goddamned full.’

Sauri looked at the boxes of biscuits. ‘How many tins?’

Bradley glanced down at the pallet of five cardboard boxes.

‘Twenty five,’ he uttered.

‘Between eight people,’ Sauri replied. ‘Three boxes each. We can have raffle for last one.’

Bradley shook his head and began chuckling to himself. Sauri said nothing. Bradley’s chuckle faded away as he looked at the biscuits.

‘We’ll keep the biscuits.’ He looked across at Sauri. ‘Just you and me.’

‘But the others will need… ’

‘They’re not our responsibility,’ Bradley snapped, his head down as he rummaged through the rest of the boxes. ‘We’ll stash these out back somewhere.’

A long silence as Sauri digested what he had heard. ‘We are here to protect Jake and his team.’

‘We were,’ Bradley corrected him as he hefted a stack of tins across the building toward a distant rack. ‘That was before everything went to hell.’

‘It is our duty.’

‘It’s our damned duty to get home,’ Bradley shot back as he slid the tins out of sight behind boxes of Arctic clothing. ‘Where are you from, Sauri?’

‘Inuvik.’

‘Great. I’m from Yellowknife. You think that Jake and his little crew will want to head our way if we get out of here? You heard them.’

‘They need us. We have the weapons.’

‘We’ll give them a rifle and wish them the best of luck,’ Bradley retorted.

‘If there’s no power, everybody in Yellowknife will have left or died,’ Sauri pointed out. ‘Too cold without power.’

‘That’s up to us to find out, right?’ Bradley challenged. ‘You’re either with me or you’re with them. Decide.’

Sauri looked at Bradley for a long time, and then shouldered his rifle and began carrying the tins across the building.

*

It took several hours to shuttle their belongings across the rutted and rolling ice valleys of the plain, the headlights of the snowmobiles flickering in the eternal night like lonely stars wandering an empty universe.

Cody drove back and forth between the two camps, one eye always cast toward the faintly glowing horizon as he worked, unable to break his thoughts away from his wife and daughter. They could see that same glow, brighter where they were. The pain of separation was a dull ache that infected his chest, throbbing with each beat of his heart as though he were already bleeding out.

The base at Alert was shrouded in darkness but for a pair of lights that illuminated the accommodation block on the south west corner. Cody guided his snowmobile through the snow blustering across the beams of his headlights and turned in alongside the main block.

Bethany and Charlotte appeared at the door to the block and began hefting boxes and crates from the sledge behind him as Cody watched Jake’s heavily laden snowmobile follow him in. Jake killed the engine on his snowmobile and joined Cody as they walked up into the block.

‘You guys done yet?’ Jake demanded as he yanked his hood back.

Charlotte hauled the block door shut as Bethany joined them and dumped a crate on top of a pile near the window.

‘We’ll get this lot logged,’ Bethany said, ‘but it’s not looking good.’

‘What isn’t?’ Cody asked.

Charlotte jabbed a thumb out toward the main buildings. ‘Brad’s just gone through the stores and there’s no food. Looks like the soldiers took everything with them.’

Cody felt a new fear twist his stomach as he realised the depth of their situation.

‘They cleared out everything?’ Jake uttered in disbelief.

‘The whole damned lot,’ Bobby Leary confirmed. ‘All we’ve got is supplies for maybe a month at most.’

‘That’s all?’ Cody asked. ‘There’s no way we can stretch that out until the spring.’

Jake dragged his hand down across his beard. ‘Jesus Christ, did they
want
us all to die out here?’

Reece Cain walked into the block from the rest room and gave a bleak laugh.

‘May as well have done,’ he muttered. ‘Ration packs, water bottles, sterilisation packs — you name it, it’s gone.’

Cody’s mind raced as he tried to hold back thoughts of his daughter and think for a moment.

‘Survival,’ he said. ‘They were thinking about their own survival.’

Jake nodded as he sank back against a tower of boxes. ‘They knew what was coming. Maybe their listening devices picked up the coming storm?’

‘But then who sent the airplanes?’ Bethany asked.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Jake said. ‘They cut us loose and now we’re on our own. We either live or die, understood? There’s nothing to gain by us hating whoever decided to leave us out here.’

‘Got to be worse for Brad and Sauri,’ Charlotte said. ‘Their own comrades abandoned them. Their own countrymen.’