Outpost (31 page)

Each
time the vehicles nudged the boat Nikki heard the shriek of abrading metal. She
worried the repeated impact of the cars might rupture the hull. She spent an
hour climbing back and forth along the length of the boat. Her boots slipped on
slick metal. She strained to push cars away with her feet. She was tied to the
mast by a short leash to make sure she could quickly get back on board if she
fell into the sea.

Once
she was free of the car-slick she sat with her back to the mast and caught her
breath.

Survival.

Once
it was all stripped away, her job, personal loyalties, her name and history,
what was left? Just the fact that she was alive and aware, adrift on a vast
ocean.

She
tuned the radio.

'Hello?
Hello? Hailing all vessels. Can anyone hear me?'

She
heard a man's voice, a calm and measured murmur. She couldn't make out words.
It was some kind of looped broadcast. It had faded in and out for days.

She
looked to the horizon. The azure tint of distant daylight was mottled with
heavy cloud. A storm heading her way.

Nikki
stretched and composed herself, got ready to confront her next opponent like a
boxer waiting for the round-one bell.

Rye
crossed the island, drawn by the lights of
Hyperion.
She wandered through the lower decks of the ship. The infection had spread down
the entire right side of her body. Her flesh was blistered and scabrous. Metal
filaments broke the skin of her right arm, her right leg and hip, and punctured
her clothing. It didn't hurt. Her body was numb.

She
was still Elizabeth Rye. Her mind was clear. She yearned for madness. She
desperately wished her consciousness would fog and dissolve.

Rye
had seen, during the dissections she performed aboard Rampart, how this strange
parasite infiltrated the nervous system of its victims. She wondered why the
same metallic strands had yet to invade her synapses, choking off memory and
emotion. She wanted to be dumb and thoughtless. She expected her disintegrating
body to pace the ship for weeks to come propelled by the strange organism, long
after her own consciousness had vacated the shell. But it hadn't worked out
that way. She was still present and aware.

Most
of the passengers had gravitated to the vast lobby. Rye drifted through empty
restaurants, a vacant cinema, a children's play area with ball-pit and slide.

She
amused herself in the sports centre for a couple of hours. She played table
tennis against a wall. Her mutated body retained good movement.

She
shot hoops. She powered up the golf simulator and thwacked balls down a digital
fairway.

She
found a mini-nightclub. No music, but the glitter ball still revolved. She hopscotched
across the dance floor. Each tile lit up as she stood on it.

She
wondered where the other passengers had gone.

Rye
sought out the medical bay. Maybe she could load a hypodermic with morphine
and put herself to sleep like a sick dog. Mix it with bleach, oven cleaner.
Press the plunger. Feel good. Press the plunger some more. Lie back and let
corrosives melt her brain.

A
friend from medical school got a job on a cruise ship. He had an easy time. He
ate, flirted and swam. All he had to do was listen for coded Tannoy
announcements.
'
Dr
Jones to the white
courtesy phone,'
meant he should head to Medical. 'Dr
Jones to the red courtesy phone,'
meant he should hurry to Medical
to deal with an emergency. He dreaded the message 'Dr
Rose please report to the
Neptune Bar,'
because Rose was the code-word for a coronary. Most passengers were elderly. At
least one heart attack per trip. Someone sprawled on a restaurant carpet
turning blue. The ship's doctor would have to grab his resuscitation kit and
haul ass.

Rye
followed signs to Medical. Arrows and a little red cross.

Sjukhus

The
infirmary had been ransacked. Instruments scattered across the floor. Bloody
bed sheets bunched on the examination table. Blood sprayed up the wall. It
looked as if an army surgical unit had treated hundreds of battlefield
casualties then cleared out. The doctor aboard
Hyperion
had obviously done heroic work
in his attempts to treat infected passengers before he too succumbed or was
torn apart.

Rye
felt hungry. She followed sombrero signs to the Tex Mex Grill. She wanted to
crunch nachos.

She
climbed stairs and walked down a passageway. Her path was blocked by a
watertight door, one of the heavy steel hatches that had immediately dropped
like a portcullis when
Hyperion
ran
aground and took on water.

Rye
put her ear to the hatch. She could hear faint music. 'Gimme Shelter'. Muffled
voices. Men talking, laughing. The Rampart crew on the other side of the door.
They must have taken over the Grill.

Rye
was overcome by loneliness. She leaned against the wall and wept.

The
casino. A plush, Monte Carlo gambling den. A couple of roulette wheels, a craps
table and a bar.

A
showgirl lay dead and rotting on the floor. Sequins and pink ostrich plumes. A pulped
mess where her head used to be.

Rye
stepped over the body and approached five men sitting round a blackjack table.
They wore ripped and bloody dinner jackets. One man was so far gone he was
virtually a pillar of dripping metal. He was fused rigid and would clearly
never leave his chair again. The croupier was slumped like he had fallen
asleep. His head had melted into the table. The other men retained movement in
their arms. There were cards and chips scattered on the green baize. The least
inhuman of the bunch, a passenger who still retained half a face, acted as
dealer.

'Ah,'
he said. 'Fresh blood.'

Rye
took a seat at the table.

'Ready
to lose your money?' asked the dealer, shuffling his cards.

'It's
nice to hear another sane voice.'

'This
thing, this contagion, seems to strike people different ways, as you have
evidently discovered. Some people die outright. Not sure why. One bite and they
keel over. Must be like a peanut allergy. But sometimes, if you're unlucky, it
takes your body but not your mind. You're not one of the passengers, are you? I
don't think I've seen you before.'

'I'm
from an oil refinery near here.'

'The
ship ran aground?'

'Yeah.'

'Do
you know what is happening out there in the world?'

'No,'
said Rye. 'Not a thing. You?'

'Nothing.
Just rumours. We circled for weeks trying to find a port. Then there was an
outbreak. It must have been with us all along. An infected crew member perhaps,
hiding the disease from his colleagues. Who knows? Who cares? Here we are,
waiting for the end to come. The cowards. The ones too chicken to slit our
throats or leap into the sea. Doomed to live.' The dealer shuffled cards. 'Have
you ever played blackjack?' he asked.

'It
seems like a good time to learn.'

Rye
saw men and women suffer and die during her time on a cancer ward. Most
accepted the end of their lives with stoic resignation. Youngsters calmly
faced death even though they had yet to live. Joked as they were wheeled into
the operating theatre, joked as they got shot full of chemotherapy or blasted
with radiation.

Rye
knew she was a coward. She wanted to die, but it had to be quick and painless.
She had seen scalpels scattered on the floor of the medical bay. She should
have put a blade to her eye and punched it into her brain, but couldn't bring herself
to do it. She wanted an easy exit. She wanted to slide into unbeing like she
was drifting off to sleep.

Rye
searched the ship for the means to kill herself.

She
found shelves of barbecue equipment in a kitchen cupboard. She pictured
Hyperion
chefs organising a spit roast
for the passengers. Handing roast pork baguettes to rich clientele as they
stood in anoraks watching whales break water in the distance.

Rye
toyed with the idea of releasing a propane valve then striking a match, but was
too scared to go through with the plan. What if she didn't die? The fireball
from a couple of tanks would quickly dissipate. She might sustain third-degree
burns. Lie immobile in a delirium of pain. She knew, from her own experiments,
that a person subject to advanced-stage infection was tough to kill. It might
take her days to die.

She
found some extension cable but the cord was too thick to make a noose. She
wished she had a gun. If she had a pistol she could sit at a window, press the
barrel to her temple, then distract herself by studying the view. She could try
to name the constellations and, as she did so, casually switch off the world
like it was a TV show that no longer held her interest.

A
wasted life. Lousy doctor, lousy parent. Easy to blame the drugs, but her life
was a downward spiral long before the first taste of codeine. A debilitating
malaise that dogged her since childhood. Each day poisoned by a deep conviction
that nothing was worthwhile. No matter where she went, or what she did, she
could never quite bring herself to give a shit. But maybe there was something
she could do. A final moment in which she could vindicate her life.

She,
of all the Rampart crew, could pass through the liner with impunity. If the
shambling mutants saw Jane or Ghost they would seize them and tear them apart.
Yet when Rye walked by they seemed unaware of her existence. Rye could wave a
hand in front of their faces, click fingers, push them around. They didn't
react.

So
maybe she should exploit her freedom to move around the ship and build a bomb.
She had already found a cache of propane tanks. There must be reserves of
diesel somewhere aboard. She still had a radio. She could warn the Rampart
crew. Give them time to evacuate. Open the tanks, release the valves, flood the
plant rooms with fuel then strike a match. There were a few
Hyperion
passengers out on the ice, but
most were aboard the liner. She could incinerate them all. Fry the ship.
Cleanse the island. And end her own life in an instant. An explosion of that
magnitude would be instant extinction. The Rampart crew would watch from the
rig. They would see the blast. They would appreciate the gesture. After all,
Hyperion
seemed beached for good. If it
blew sky high, she would die a hero.

Woozy
logic. A little voice warning that she wasn't thinking straight. She was
spiralling into fantasy. She would get everyone killed.

Rye
looked for the diesel tanks.

She
found a multilingual brochure. '
Hyperion - Queen of the Seas'.
A fold-out floor plan. She headed
for the Staff Only plant zones of the ship.

She
saw a man sliding along a corridor wall. He was shirtless. His back was a mass
of spines. The eartips of a stethoscope hung from his trouser pocket.

'Doc?
Doctor? Can you hear me?'

No
response.

'My
name is Rye. I'm a doctor too. What's your name? Can you hear me? Can you tell
me your name?'

The
man slowly turned to face her.

'What's
your name? Tell me your name.'

'Walczak.
My name is Walczak.'

They
sat in the stalls of the ship's cinema. A ripped screen framed by a proscenium
arch.

'For
a while I thought we had it contained,' he said. 'We locked infected passengers
and crewmen in the clinic. We had them quarantined. But people didn't want to
hand over their relatives. They didn't want to see them locked up with the
screamers we had strapped to the beds. So they hid them in their cabins. Sons
and daughters. Husbands and wives. Gave them aspirin, brought them meals, hoped
they would get better. That's how the virus spread. We formed a posse. A couple
of officers, a few crewmen. We knocked on doors. Took people by force. Plenty
of anger, plenty of kicking and screaming.

'It
was the same when it turned to war. Battles in the corridors, on the decks.
Guys would confront a gang of infected people, all set to hack and burn, then
realise their own wives and children were among the crowd. What would you do?
Would you kill your children if it came down to it? I mean, do you have kids?'

'Yeah,'
said Rye. 'I have a son.'

They
walked to the Grand Lobby.

'This
is where it kicked off,' said Walczak. 'This is where the carnage truly began.
Everyone gathered for a banquet. Trying to forget their troubles. About thirty
infected passengers broke out of the infirmary and headed this way. Blood
everywhere. Stampede. It was mayhem. That was the point we lost control.'