Noah's Ark: Survivors (6 page)

“My pleasure,” Lucya said.

“Johnny!” Jake ran into the staff officer’s cabin.

He found his superior, half lying, half sitting against the wardrobe. The quarters were bigger than Jake’s, not exactly spacious, but there was enough room to circulate freely. Jake froze, staring at Hollen. Blood soaked the carpet around him, and more continued to trickle from the bullet wound to his chest.

“Shit,” Lucya said from his side. “Is he still alive?”

“I…I don’t know. How do we tell?”

Lucya dropped to her knees and put her fingers against Johnny’s neck, feeling for a pulse.

“Nothing. I can’t feel anything. I think he’s dead, Jake.”

She pulled her hand away, stood slowly, and backed away from the body. The two of them remained there, in stunned silence, not sure what they should say or do.

Finally Lucya spoke.

“We should get Max down here. I’ll go and find him. You need to tie Ibsen up before he comes round. Johnny must have a belt or a tie or something you can use.”
Jake said nothing. He was still staring at his colleague, processing what had happened.
 

“Jake.” Lucya placed a hand on his shoulder. “I’m going to go and find Max. Tie him up, okay?”

“Yeah. Um, yeah, sure, you’re right. I’ll tie him up.”

Lucya left the cabin and Jake began to search for something he could use to secure the captain.

Johnny appeared to have very few clothes in his cabinet. The first drawer was full of magazines, mostly about building ecological houses and green energy generation. The second drawer was full of knick-knacks that he must have picked up from various ports of call. Cheap souvenirs, tat made for tourists. The third drawer held some clothes, and bundles and bundles of letters. Johnny wasn’t married, and had never mentioned a girlfriend, or boyfriend for that matter, so Jake wondered with whom all the correspondence took place. He realised just how little he knew about his immediate superior. They had never really been friends, though they had got on well enough, he thought. Yet looking through these possessions was like rifling through the drawers of a complete stranger.

A click behind him caused Jake to snap out of his train of thought. He looked around expecting to see Max or Lucya. Instead, for the second time he found himself looking at the wrong end of a gun.

“Your girlfriend isn’t here to save you now, sonny,” Ibsen said. He was having trouble standing up straight, clearly still somewhat concussed.

“I still don’t understand why you think we must die, Captain?” Jake blurted out the first thing that came to mind, playing for time. He stood slowly as he spoke.

Ibsen grabbed the open door to steady himself.

“Because it is God’s will, Jake. You can see that, can’t you? God meant for everyone to die today. Punishment for our sins against this planet, no doubt. But by a freak of nature, we survived.”

“Maybe it was God’s will we survived?” Jake took a step towards his captain.

Ibsen fired the gun.

Thirteen

L
UCYA
RACED
THROUGH
the labyrinth that was deck three. She charged straight past the express elevator that would, under normal circumstances, have carried her to the bridge. But the ship was without power, so in the dim glow of the emergency lights she carried on to the stairs and started to climb.

Seven decks later, she arrived at the bridge out of breath. There was a group of passengers outside, banging on the door, shouting angrily.

“You can’t hide in there all day. We demand to know what’s going on,” a large woman dressed entirely in red called out in a high-pitched voice.

“You ask us to go to our cabins, but how are we supposed to do that when there’s no light in half the ship?” another passenger bellowed. He held his hands cupped around his mouth as a makeshift megaphone.

Lucya could hear more angry people approaching. This was, she decided, not the best place to hang around for long. She couldn’t imagine Max was on the bridge. Given his nature he wouldn’t have stayed in there listening to the angry mob, he would be out there confronting them. She headed back to the stairs, went down a deck, and outside to where she had last seen fires burning.

The air outside had cleared considerably since she had been on her mission to free the burning lifeboats. Most of the fires were out, and the ash in the atmosphere had drifted away on the breeze. It was cold again; the arctic chill bit at her cheeks.

She found Max organising a group of older men, fighting one of the remaining fires. A storage locker filled with deck furniture was burning furiously. The men were armed only with tiny red fire extinguishers that they must have found somewhere inside, in a bar perhaps. Max was showing them how to aim at the base of the flames for maximum effect.

“Max. Max!” Lucya called at the top of her voice. The hiss of the extinguishers discharging in bursts made it difficult to be heard. She sprinted over and pulled him round to face her.

“What’s the panic?” Max asked, clearly surprised to see her.

“Johnny’s dead.”

Fourteen

A
T
THE
PRECISE
instant Captain Ibsen pulled the trigger, Jake lunged towards him. A tenth of a second’s hesitation and he would surely be dead. Instead, he knocked Ibsen through the open door and the two of them crashed to the floor of the corridor. The gun clattered to the ground and skidded away from the men.

Jake had never been in a fight in his life. He had absolutely no idea what he was going to do; his plan had extended no further than avoiding being shot. Now he’d achieved that, he had lost momentum, and therefore the advantage. Ibsen was stunned, but his considerable size and weight gave him the upper hand. He rolled over so that he was astride Jake, and dealt him a heavy right hook to the cheek. Jake saw it coming, and though he wasn’t able to avoid it entirely, the fact he had begun to move his head away meant the blow lost some of its force. Even so, as the captain’s knuckles connected with his face, he felt a flash of pain like he had never experienced, and his vision lost its focus. Instinctively, he lashed out with both hands curled into fists. Ibsen grabbed the left hand, but the right caught him in the gut, winding him. Jake tried to wriggle free, but the big man was not so easily beaten. Ibsen pinned his left hand to the ground and wrapped his right around the younger man’s throat. For Jake the world came back into sharp focus, then started to fade as the supply of oxygen to his brain was cut off. He wriggled and squirmed, but to no avail. He could feel the life begin to drain out of him, and once again found the sense of calm he had felt the first time the gun had been pointed at him that day.

The gun. Where was the gun? His head began to swirl. He saw Lucya standing over him. Why wasn’t she helping? Lucya turned into Jane, his estranged wife. She was holding a baby, his baby. He reached out to touch the infant, which was when he realised he still had a free hand. Gathering all his will, he refocused his eyes. Ibsen’s face was deep red with the effort of pinning him down and strangling him. With a monumental effort, Jake thrust his free hand forward, stabbing his fingers into the captain’s eyes. Ibsen roared with pain and flew backwards, releasing his grip as his hands flew up to his face. Jake pulled his own hand away and rolled onto his side, choking, gasping for breath. Ibsen was on his knees. One hand covered his eyes and blood streamed down his face. The other thrashed around wildly, trying to find its target. Jake tried to roll onto his front, to crawl away, but as he did so a hand found his ankle and closed around it in a grip that nearly crushed his bones. He felt himself being dragged backwards, and pawed helplessly at the smooth surface of the linoleum floor, desperately trying to escape the claw-like grip. When a second hand grabbed his other ankle, he knew the game was up. He had no strength left, nothing with which to fight back. The image of Jane flashed before his eyes once again. Her lips were moving, she was saying something, speaking almost silently.

“The gun, Jake. Get the gun,” she mouthed.

He looked around desperately, but there was no sign of the gun. Ibsen was reeling him in, and there was nothing he could do. Then he spotted it. A shadow on the dark floor. A tiny glint of light reflected from the shiny surface as his head was dragged past it. Not the gun, but a shard of glass from the smashed champagne bottle. His right hand shot out and he grabbed it just as Ibsen got a hand on his waist and yanked him towards him. Jake was still face down, and Ibsen put a knee in his back, pinning him to the floor. He could feel him lean over him; the hairs on the back of his neck stood on end as he felt those hands approach once more. With one final effort, he gripped the glass and thrust it behind him as far as his hand would go. Ibsen was a big target, and his proximity meant Jake couldn’t miss. He felt the glass meet resistance, and pushed it as hard as he could with a grunt. The sharp edge of the shard cut into Jake’s hand. Ibsen gasped. Jake felt hot blood spurt out around the glass. He had no idea if it was his own or the captain’s.

“No! What have you done? What…what…” Ibsen rasped, then gurgled. He keeled over onto his side. As he did so Jake felt the glass slide out of his hand, cutting it even more deeply. Freed from the weight of the captain, he attempted once more to roll himself over. But he was spent; he had no energy left. With blood pouring from his hand, he passed out.

• • •

When he came round, Jake found himself lying in his own bed, back in his cabin. For a brief, blissful moment, he thought perhaps the recent events had all been a bad dream. The sight of Max, Lucya, and Grau crowded round the end of the bed quickly put paid to that idea.

“Welcome back,” Lucya said softly, smiling.

“No, don’t try and get up, not yet. You need some more rest.” Grau was the only one of the three seated.

“What happened? Where’s the captain? Did you find him? He’s gone crazy, he wants to kill us all. We have to stop him, he’s got a gun!” Jake lifted his head as he tried to sit up, felt dizzy and immediately fell back onto the pillow.

“Slow down there, fella.” Max came round the side of the bed. “The captain’s not going to be doing any killing, you saw to that.”

“I slowed him down? You got to him in time to tie him up?”

“Jake.” Lucya glanced uneasily at Grau. “The captain is dead. There was a fight, do you remember?”

“Of course I remember! Sorry, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to snap. What I mean is, I haven’t lost my memory. I know what happened. But how can he be dead?”

“You stabbed him, with a piece of glass.”

Jake pulled his hand out from under the bed cover and looked at it, remembering how the bottle had cut it open, remembering the blood. His palm was neatly and comprehensively bandaged.

“I’m thinking of specialising in hand wounds. You two are certainly keeping me busy,” Grau said, looking from Jake to Lucya.

“Listen, you did what you had to do, son.” Max tried to reassure him. “Given the state we found you in, it was pretty clear that you had to defend yourself. That piece of bottle went straight into Ibsen’s heart. He would have been dead within minutes. The cut was deep. Nobody could have saved him.”

“He said that we were supposed to die, that it was God’s will. He was mad, I’ve never seen anyone like that before.”

“I must share some responsibility for what has happened here,” Grau said, a grave look on his face. “I couldn’t say anything before because of patient confidentiality.”

The others looked at him expectantly.

“Captain Ibsen has been seeing me regularly with a stress-related condition. I was of the opinion that it did not affect his capacity to run this ship. Clearly, I was wrong.”

“This isn’t your fault, Doctor Lister,” Lucya said. “Today has hardly been normal circumstances, it’s been enough to send anyone over the edge.”

“That is possible, and I appreciate your kind words. Even so, at sea we are meant to expect the unexpected, to deal with unplanned and dangerous events. I should have made a recommendation to the company that the captain be given leave, to rest.”

“Look, this is not your or anyone else’s fault, Doc,” Max said. “We can debate this all we like, it doesn’t change what happened here. We have more pressing things to discuss, like what we do now. Jake, you understand you’re in charge now, right?”

The thought had not occurred to him, and Max’s words hit him with almost as much force as the captain’s punch to the face. His head began to spin. He, Jake Noah, had just killed a man. He was responsible for taking a human life. And now he was responsible for safeguarding three thousand more human lives aboard this ship. Possibly the last three thousand human lives on the planet. If the rest of the world had been destroyed as the broadcast had suggested, he was in charge of the rest of the human race. With that thought, he passed out again.

• • •

“Nothing. No response to my distress calls. No radio chatter. Nothing on the shortwave. I can’t even pick up any navigation beacons,” Lucya said, setting down her headset on the dull grey communications console.

“We mustn’t give up hope,” Silvia said. She and Lucya were the only two people on the bridge. They had used the fire escape staircase that went directly from the bridge all the way to the roof of deck thirteen in order to enter without being seen by the angry mob camped outside the main door.

“You’re right,” Lucya said. “Just because nobody is transmitting, it doesn’t mean there isn’t anyone around to transmit. For all we know, that asteroid may just have knocked out the electrics. We still don’t really know what happened to the northern states and other countries.”

“But what do I tell passengers? It’s not just out there that things are getting difficult. There are groups massing all over the ship. Whatever we decide to do, we need to announce it.”

“That’s down to Jake now. We have to wait for him. In the meantime, we stick to what Johnny told us to do; his orders still stand.”

There was a clanging noise, and a hole appeared in the ceiling. A pair of feet dangled through it, found the ladder, and grew into legs, and eventually into Max.