At the End of the World

by Charles E Gannon

  I had to admit, looking around the group, that my first thought was, “We’re pretty lucky to have Chloe.” Yes, she has the disposition of a badger with a toothache, and yes, she might not be at the highest point of the bell-curve for smarts. But on the other hand, she doesn’t fall too far below that high point and she dwells at the very peak when it comes to nerve and aggressiveness. In short, the traits that had, thus far, made her a total pain in the ass now make her one of the stand-out members of our crew.

  Rodney and Giselle might not be the most impressive physical specimens, but they are kind of a two-part brain-trust, and I got the feeling that both of their awkward social identities were about to slough off like old skins. Shit was real now, and neither of them was recoiling from it. They were leaning forward, attentive, late teenage angst dropping behind as fast as the grey ocean swells.

  Blake was the one that worried me. His eyes were open a little wider than normal and he hadn’t blinked since the captain started explaining how the world was dying around us. His pronounced Adam’s apple was cycling regularly, and he simultaneously looked like he wanted to be anywhere other than in the pilot house and yet also wanted to dive back in the locker with the signal flags I doubted we’d ever use again.

  Johnnie, Giselle’s former squeeze, worried me for the opposite reason. He just sat there, his habitual smile a little dimmer, his mouth hanging open a bit. Frankly, a little bit of anxiety or a sudden sharpening of attention would have been reassuring. But no, Johnnie’s good nature was there in part because he was disinterested in, and not particularly adept at, anything too complex or too serious. It’s fortunate that he is physically larger than average, because on the mental aptitude side…well, I guess you could say he seemed to be on the back slope of the bell curve and if the current situation didn’t sharpen his focus, nothing would.

  Steve, the quietest of the group, is something of a wild card. Just like in all our other meetings, he sat cross-legged, eyes staring at the floor. It looked like he was listening very carefully, but I couldn’t see how the information was hitting him. In general, he was composed, competent, unremarkable: that kind of person who was likely to go through life never making a particularly big stir. In the world we’d left, he would have grown up to be that guy who’d do his job, get his paycheck, receive a minimum raise each year like clockwork. How that personality would translate into our new reality was a complete unknown. Maybe he’d just keep tick-tocking along. Or maybe he’d wig out.

  Willow, the barefoot scientist, just listened to the captain while her eyes grew shiny and even bigger than they usually were. And then, in a few minutes, she was back to normal. Willow is like that. She’s one of those people who not only marches to the beat of a different drum, but doesn’t seem to hear or care about the dominant rhythm. She had become the most popular person on the boat because she clearly didn’t care about popularity and was always friendly to everyone. Willow’s default expression is a big, toothy smile with absolutely no agenda behind it. She knows what she wants, focuses on that, and is happy to encounter whoever and whatever else shows up along the way. Hell, she was the only one of us that really wanted to be on Voyager. So far, she had spent all her time studying fish, or studying books on the ecosystems of the Falklands and South Georgia like they were the coolest things on the planet. That she had now promptly grieved for the loss of all the people on that planet—and then, was ready to get down to business—was pure Willow. I suddenly wished I had spent more time getting to know her and not discount her as a weirdo flower-child.

  The last crewmember is Lice. Which is short for Alice, but she spends so much time scratching at the dark brown rat’s nest on her head that I had almost forgotten her real name. Lice is how she introduced herself, and she seems to take pride in that, along with the other weird behaviors and clothes that kind of make her emo and punk at the same time. Unfortunately, that combo means she never tells you—or even shows you—what she really thinks. She rolls her eyes at everything. Especially anything that involves her parents. I figured the odds were equal that she’d feel personally liberated by the death of the world, that she’d fold in even more, or just wouldn’t care.

  We sat there for at least half a minute, staring at the deck and sneaking glances at each other, before Steve observed, “So, this is pretty much like The Walking Dead.”

  The captain, whose English accent was becoming more pronounced all the time, closed his eyes patiently, started with, “Now don’t be daft. The infected haven’t died. They’re just—”

  Blake jumped up. “Don’t shit us, man. Don’t shit us. It’s like Steve says. Whether they’re dead or not, we are in the middle of The Walking Dead. Wherever we get off this boat, they’re going to be there, waiting for us. Ready to eat us. Probably won’t have had any fresh meat in weeks or—”

  The captain had never touched any of us, for any reason, until that moment. He grabbed Blake by the arm and pulled him off the deck. “Leave off,” he snapped. “This isn’t a bloody TV fantasy. This is real. If you kill the infected, they stay dead. And the rest can’t roam around forever. We can ride this out. And we won’t be the only ones. There’s no end of ships that might have—”

  “Captain,” said Willow.

  “Damn it—what?”

  “Alice is gone.”

  When no one was looking, she had just gone to the side and climbed over.

  Using the engine for the first time in weeks, it took less than three minutes to get to her. Even so, she was damn near frozen by the time we did.

  July 24

  I’ve wanted to write in this journal for a while now, but we’ve been short-handed. It’s been so busy that I just fall asleep as soon as I hit my bunk.

  Lice only got back to work today. Captain kept her below deck since we fished her out of the ocean four days ago, shaking through the borderline hypothermia before she finally went limp as a rag. Since then she hasn’t done much of anything except stare at the bulkhead in her cabin. She eats, drinks, follows simple instructions (which is a change for the better, actually), but that’s it. He never said it, but it’s pretty obvious that this was the closest thing to a suicide watch that the captain could manage on a small working ship like Crosscurrent Voyager. It’s hard to tell if Lice is really any better—she was never much of a talker—but now she’s gone mute and there’s a lot of work to do.

  Part of that increased labor is because of the captain himself: he seems even more gaunt, if that’s possible, and I think he’s getting weaker. What I do know is that he spends more time catching his breath and talking us through increasingly complicated sailing maneuvers and skills rather than showing us by example.

  I don’t know if the others have noticed it yet. Everyone except Willow has burrowed into themselves since we learned of what Rod has dubbed The Walking Non-Dead. We had just started to really work together as a team when the apocalyptic shit hit the fan and short-circuited whatever bonds were growing between us. Besides, the days down here are grey and quiet, and with the southern hemisphere’s winter deepening, the high seas and the constant cold don’t put anyone in a particularly cheery mood.

  It was getting on toward dinner when I dropped by the pilot house, nodded at the captain, glanced at the charts. What I saw there made me check again.

  The captain looked away.

  “Captain, aren’t we going to the Falklands?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Because if we wanted to get to Port Stanley, we should have pulled up out of the Antarctic circumpolar current.” I eyeballed the map more closely. “At least a day ago. Sir.”

  “Two days,” he corrected. “You read a chart passably well.”

  I laid my hand upon the wheel. I suppressed the wild vision of heeling us over to port, regardless of the wind, and heading north toward the Falklands, the equator, to anywhere other than the endless grey peaks and troughs of the winter waves. “Sir, what are we doing?”

  “Making for South Georgia Island.�
��

  “But that’s—”

  “—over a thousand miles away across open ocean. Yes. I’m surprised you didn’t suss it out sooner, while you were playing teacher with Chloe in here.”

  The derisive tone he’d slipped into when he said “playing teacher with Chloe” was like a slap in the face. The captain wasn’t a warm man, but he was never sarcastic—or hadn’t been until now. “Not much of our work is in navigation anymore, sir. Mostly reading and writing.”

  My tone was stiff enough to make him look up. When he did, his eyes were angry, but as I met them, his glare thawed into something like sadness. “I was a right pillock just now, Alvaro. Don’t mind me. You’ve done a fine job helping Chloe.” He looked out at the next high swell the Voyager would have to climb.

  I nodded. “Why are we skipping Port Stanley, sir?”

  “Because the Falklands have gone completely off the air. There were three different radio operators there in the past week, out in smaller towns and coves. Each one started out by sending distress signals but ended by going mad as a hatter. And now, dead air for the last forty-eight hours. Not even a carrier wave. They’re done.”

  I scanned along the revised course he had plotted. “So, King Edward Point?”

  The captain rubbed his lower lip. “Maybe. I hope so. Depends upon whether the last supply run by the Pharos included infected crewpersons or not. If not, then—well, we’ll see. The staff at King Edward Point may not be as welcoming as we’d like.”

  “You mean, they might think we’re carrying the virus?”

  He looked out over the waves again. “They shouldn’t. They’re a research outpost, so they should have heard and understood what I have: that the asymptomatic contagion phase is, at most, about a week and a half. We haven’t met up with anyone since leaving the Galapagos in early June, so there shouldn’t be any worry that we’re a plague ship. But I know some of the personalities at King Edward Point. They might have a different—perception of their duty, in these circumstances.” Still looking out over the waves, he moved his body so that his back was facing me.

  I wanted to ask what different sense of duty might prevail at King Edward Point, and how he had such detailed knowledge of its staff, but his body language told me that, for now, our conversation had ended.

  I went below to help Chloe cook dinner. She isn’t a half-bad cook, but, like all the rest, her taste buds run toward white-bread bland. I’m the guy who has to sneak in a little adobo, recaito, or just a dash of cayenne and cumin when no one else is looking.

  And then they wonder why it tastes better.

  August 5

  We had following seas and the wind astern all the way to South Georgia Island. That was a good, but not great, combo. The wind coming from directly behind meant we had to tack a bit, which, all told, probably cost us an extra day. But the seas became calmer as we edged a bit north, and the grey line of clouds to the south receded. From the Galapagos onward, the captain had warned us that this could be the roughest part of the voyage. But once we were hugging Tierra del Fuego, he added the caveat that the weather and seas had remained mild this year. Which made all of us pretty glad that we weren’t going through in typical weather, because it was still plenty rough and the water was cold enough to kill you in a few minutes if you went overboard.

  South Georgia Island’s glacial peaks popped over the horizon just as the light was starting to dim. I eyeballed the distance, added the time it would take to hook around the south end of the island and swing up along the eastern coast. “We could just make it.”

  The captain locked off the wheel, stepped down from the helmsman’s platform and opened the pilot house’s starboard door. “Reef the main.” By the time the door was swinging closed, Chloe had gone forward, Rod had started securing the boom, and Willow had gone below to get two of the others on deck to secure the canvas with bungee cords.

  Our speed began dropping, and the Voyager heeled a little less. We were obviously not trying for King Edward Point by nightfall. “Risky navigating Cumberland Bay at dusk?” I guessed.

  “Daylight is better,” is all he said.

  He didn’t speak for the rest of the night. Which, at the outset of our journey, wouldn’t have been too unusual. But ever since we had pulled beyond Tierra del Fuego, the captain had become slightly more talkative, even if he hadn’t become more personally communicative. Instead, he reviewed our seamanship in greater detail and started drilling us on all the features of the Voyager—and I mean all of them.

  But this night, as soon as dinner was done, he simply set the watches and went aft to his cabin without another word. That excited some speculation among the others, which kept them busy until midnight.

  I just went to my bunk, wrote this, and wondered if we’ll learn tomorrow why he became so quiet tonight.

  August 6 (first entry)

  As we approached the entrance to Cumberland Bay, the captain jutted his bony chin to the north. “That further gap in the shoreline. That’s the mouth of Stromness Bay. Remember it.”

  I didn’t even need to hear his tone anymore to know that he was not going to tell me why I needed to remember it. Instead, I turned us half a point to port and made sure we didn’t need to adjust the rig too much. The foresail swelled slightly; Voyager pushed through the water more briskly.

  Almost everyone was on deck: captain’s orders. Most of them were gawking at the towering, snow-blanketed mountain ridge that seemed to fly up out of the water to north/starboard. As we followed that granite-toothed wall southward, I leaned forward over the wheel, craning my neck to get a look at the very top of it, if I could.

  The captain shifted in his seat. “Just over thirteen hundred feet at the highest.” He stared at the sails, particularly the tell-tales that fluttered along their edge. “We’ll reach the station in eight minutes. Up ahead, where the mountain sweeps away to starboard, follow its curve. The station is right there.” He reached up, threw the test switch for the boat horn; it glowed green.

  I glanced at it.

  “You eager to toot the horn?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “No, sir. Just wondering.”

  “What?”

  “Why you intend to announce us ahead of time. If the station has been infected—”

  “Then that’s all the more reason to sound the horn. Infected or not, I want to see who—or what—comes out to greet us before we approach the dock too closely. And if they’re still uninfected, I want them to get a good look at us. That way, everyone is less likely to do anything stupid.”

  Which made good enough sense to me.

  Captain sounded the horn. One short blast, one long.

  A few flakes were starting to drift down when we made our long, slow starboard turn, speed dropping as we pulled into the lee of the mountain and I got my first glimpse of King Edward Point. It was larger than I’d imagined. The first building I saw was damn close to a hundred yards long, paralleling the water: the doors looked like it was a combination warehouse and operations site. It, and most of the others, were white with red roofs, all lined up along the edge of a small, flat spur that stuck out from the side of the mountain. It took some careful sailing to swing sharply again to starboard and come up alongside the deep-water mooring at the end of the short concrete pier on the far western side of the base.

  Three figures, wearing surprisingly light down jackets, were waiting for us, hands in their pockets.

  One of them stepped forward, looked up at the pilot house as the captain stepped out. “Took a chance coming here, you did, Alan.”

  “Alan” nodded. “Everywhere is chancy now, Larry.”

  The other nodded back. “True enough. Where was your last landfall?”

  “Galapagos.”

  The man on the shore scanned us kids. “That’s your crew?”

  “It is. They are fair enough hands. Now.”

  “Yanks, all?”

  “Every one.”

  The man shrugged. “Well, you might as w
ell make fast and come in for a cuppa.”

  And that was our dramatic arrival at King Edward Point, or KEP, as the folks here call it.

  August 6 (second entry)

  I had to stop writing because there is some serious shit going down. I thought everyone was done for the day, after catching a drink together in the pub—well, the room the station team has decorated to look like one. But then I heard the captain slip back out of the house where they’ve put us up. So I slipped off my bed and crept out the door after him, toward the outbuildings and the pier.

  Okay, I just read what I wrote, and realized it won’t make any sense to anyone else who might read this. Hell, if I read it a few months or years from now, it might not even make sense to me.

  Once we’d made the Voyager fast at the end of the pier, we started a walking tour of the station. But the captain missed a step when he heard there were only nine staff at KEP. “Who’s missing?” he asked.

  The man who’d spoken to us before—Lawrence Keywood, the station leader—shrugged, “Robertson.”

  “The Government Officer? Why?”

  Keywood shrugged. “He has family on the Falklands, so when the comms from Port Stanley started getting odd, he packed up and left on Pharos. That was six weeks ago.” He sighed; the snow crunched under foot. “I told him that, to my mind, he was heading the wrong way. But it was his family. He had to try.”