At the End of the World

by Charles E Gannon

  Not sleeping.

  August 18

  Haven’t heard any more transmissions. Wouldn’t mind much if we had: too tired to care.

  For the past four days, we’ve been working like dogs. Most of it has been readying more sheets of punctured steel siding and roofing. There’s also been a lot of dragging old struts and pipes and even light girders into the plant, all to hold up the I-beam support that braces the big doorway which opens out to the pier. It’s gonna have to hold a lot of weight.

  We’ve also been building a pair of platforms, one on either side of the I-beam so that they flank the access lane that runs right out onto the pier. We’re building these platforms like they are stools: solid and able to hold up a lot of weight at their center—unless you pull away one of their legs. Which seems to be the plan.

  Meanwhile, poor Johnnie’s been out on the shallows in the Voyager’s dinghy, lashed to either one of two sets of pilings about forty yards out along the pier. He’s been whacking away at them almost all day long, every day, with the biggest of the whale boning axes. He’s got them whittled down so much that I wouldn’t stand on that stretch of the pier on a bet.

  Silent Steve and I had hard days of a different kind: hiking with the captain. Although he gets winded sometimes—more and more, it seems—he can set a pretty exhausting pace for a while. He led us through two lowland valleys to the hunters’ shelters he’d asked about at KEP. Damned if he didn’t have more stashes there. Apparently he’d had some war souvenirs that some of the hunters had been so crazy about that they’d traded away some of their own stuff to get them. So in addition to what we expected to find in each shed—a portable camp-stove, a lot of wood-pellet fuel, blanket, oil lamp, some canned and dry goods—in one of them, he lifted up the floorboards to reveal a .308 bolt-action with a scope. At the other, it was a .44 revolver. The rifle had plenty of ammunition; the pistol not so much. It was a gun for putting wounded animals out of their misery, apparently.

  With all the caches pulled in, the captain has become a little more generous with the vitamins and other “fortified foods.” Damned if I don’t have more energy, feel more alert, wake up more quickly.

  But it seems to be having the opposite effect on the captain. He’s okay in the middle of the day, but mornings seem to be a little harder for him now, and he racks out a little earlier every night. I never really thought about it, but despite his being as tough as shoe leather, he’s just not that young anymore. Best I can figure, he’s almost sixty.

  I’d write more, but there really isn’t anything more to write about. I spend a lot of time looking at Chloe; she spends a lot of time looking at me. We don’t say anything. But Willow spends a lot of time looking back and forth between us and smiling like she was just given a puppy for her fourth birthday.

  God, is that annoying. Almost as annoying as knowing that tomorrow, we’re going to get up and work ourselves until we’re falling down tired.

  Again.

  August 21

  The radio got lively again this afternoon. Same ship and voice, but the transmissions were a lot more clear. They kept repeating that, if they did not get a reply, they were going to steer clear of KEP for fear that the plague had hit there, too.

  No one replied.

  The captain sat thinking for a long time.

  “You think they might be legit?” Blake asked.

  He shook his head. “No. They’re trying to be sly.”

  “How so?”

  Giselle spread her hands. “Blake, c’mon. They’re trying to sound like they are just a scared bunch of fishermen. Who just might be the last ship that could help the staff at King Edward ever get off South Georgia.”

  “Wait.” Johnnie was frowning. “I thought people were trying to get to South Georgia, not get away from it.”

  Giselle nodded. “Well, they do want to get here—for a while. But eventually, we all need to get off this island. Like the captain pointed out, there’s no way to live here forever. There’s food, but it’s not balanced, doesn’t have all the nutrients we need. And unless we want to burn seal blubber and dried dung forever, there’s no fuel for fires, either. So we might be safe from the plague, but without a way off, we would eventually die because of the environment. And the pirates know that the station team is aware of that. They’re hoping that someone at KEP will get scared and reply, will ask them to come. It will make their job that much easier.”

  Which seemed to shoot the captain out of his chair. “They shall find it anything but easy if they decide to test us here. Everyone: you know your jobs. Get to them. I want them done today, so we can start resting up tomorrow.”

  “Resting up?” Willow asked. “For what?”

  “For giving these brutes a proper reception if they come nosing around here.”

  And yeah, we worked. We looped the chains around the pilings that Johnnie had almost hacked through, threw the chains’ other ends over the plant entry’s reinforced I-beam so that each of them lay on one of the platforms. Then we started threading those chain ends through dozens upon dozens of the hole-punched sheets of steel, the way kids make necklaces out of Cheerios or Froot Loops. Or used to, anyway.

  The captain disappeared with Chloe for a good part of the morning, and we heard rifle shots—maybe a dozen—up the cut that ran into the mountains behind Husvik. Zeroing the new scoped rifle, I guessed.

  When we were done threading the sheet steel on the chains, we fastened their ends to some of the big, rusty try pots for boiling blubber, almost like they were replacement anchors. By the time we were done, the platforms had started to sag under the weight.

  Meanwhile, Willow and Steve had been pouring boiled blubber on that part of the pier that was just landward of the pilings Johnnie had been hacking at. Sounds like an easy job, but it’s not. Try carrying a bucket of melted fat, sometime. Then try spreading it around with a couple of old planks.

  By that time, the captain and Chloe were back. He oversaw our assembly of some more perforated steel sheeting, but this time, just one or two with a light girder or other steel support sticking up through them. Then we had to load them in the Voyager and all of us took turns dumping them heavy-side down in the shallows, most of them along approaches where a small boat might try to run up to the shore in front of the manager’s house.

  It was getting dark by the time the captain had us go to the positions he’d chosen for us, told us what to do, ran us through drills, almost spat in frustration, and told us to go inside and get dinner, get seconds, and then get to bed.

  We were pretty surprised. Seconds on food? And a mandatory “lights out?” Willow wondered, purposely loud, why the captain was giving those orders?

  “Because you’re going to need all your strength tomorrow. And the next day. And every day until you get it right.”

  “Get what right?”

  “The drills you failed to perform properly today. Tomorrow you’re going to do it right. And you’re going to keep doing it until you keep getting it right. Every time. Now go.”

  We did. We ate. We didn’t talk too much. Because we knew that we were all wondering the same thing:

  When will the pirates arrive?

  August 27

  It feels strange to write in a journal, particularly someone else’s. I haven’t written in one of my own since I was eight, or maybe nine.

  So. My name is Willow Lassiter and I am writing in Alvaro’s journal because Captain Haskins asked me to. He said that if you want a record of what happened during a fight, then you need to write it down as soon as you can. He says it’s very easy to forget exactly what happened, particularly once you’ve slept on the memories. Fighting is so fast and chaotic that our minds try to make sense of it in retrospect, and so we start remembering things in a more sensible order than they might have actually occurred. So I agreed to write what the captain insists on calling this “after action report.”

  The pirates didn’t surprise us. Starting three days ago, Captain Haskins put
us on a rotating schedule of watches. One hour each, starting an hour before dawn, and going until sunset. He wasn’t worried about night-time. The possibility that any of the pirates had ever visited Stromness Bay was very low; the chance that they’d be confident navigating it in the dark was about equal to our chances of being hit by a meteor.

  Long before they came into sight, we could see the smoke from their ship. They had probably seen ours, too; there really isn’t any effective way to hide it, and we can’t do without it.

  Steve was the one watching when they came into sight, clearing the headland just west of Busen Point about an hour after dawn. It was precisely when and where the captain told us to expect them, if they came. From about a mile to our southeast, Steve shone the captain’s emergency flashlight on a mirror we had taken from Voyager, and which he kept angled away from the harbor. Within one minute, the captain was on the radio with him, getting a report. After hearing it, he told Steve to keep observing and stay there until the ship drew abreast of Tönsberg Point, which was about three miles from Husvik. Then he was to slip back to us along the mostly-concealed path we’d marked. He’d be pretty much invisible doing it: he was wearing a white wrap made from a torn sail. Even if they were using binoculars, they’d have to be pretty sharp-eyed and lucky to see him from three miles away.

  By now, we could get into position very quickly. Chloe and I had the longest run; all the way to the Karrakatta and up to its pilot house, which was still intact. We listened on the radio; no update from Steve, which meant that the ship hadn’t put any other boats in the water to land anywhere else and so, outmaneuver, or “flank,” us as Captain Haskins likes to say.

  I settled into my perch behind the multiple layers of iron plate with which we had lined the inside of the pilot house. I was the scout and spotter. Chloe would be too busy with her rifle to see everything that might be going on in the places other than where she was preparing to shoot. So watching was my job. So, because I had been given one of the two pairs of binoculars, I was the first one to get a good look at the ship that had come to attack us.

  It was an old, rusty trawler, but a big one, what the captain called a multi-purpose fishing vessel. As it moved past some of the orientation points we had ranged and marked in the water—rocks, debris—I estimated it to be slightly under one hundred and fifty feet in overall length. It had a superstructure, not just a pilot house, and it had a side door in its hull, just aft of the bridge. The midship gunwale was more than a yard lower than the bow. I reported what I saw to the captain.

  I must have sounded a little excited or nervous. The captain’s response was slow, like he was trying to calm an animal or a little child. “That’s very good, Willow. Now I need you to tell me how many people you see and what they are carrying.”

  “I think I see three on the bridge. There are a few on top of the superstructure. They are all carrying guns.” I squinted hard. “I think two are the military assault rifles you spoke about, two more are AK’s, and maybe two are short shotguns.”

  “How short?”

  “Police cruiser, not sawed off.” I was pretty proud that I had managed to memorize all these facts about guns.

  “Good job. But no one on the weather deck, up near the bow?”

  “No, sir.” That was the first hint that something about this ship was odd, but it didn’t seem particularly important just then. Besides, we had more important things to do.

  “Anything else worth reporting?”

  “They have two small boats, sir. Back near the stern. And sir, I think they are wearing the same cold-weather clothing that the team at KEP wore.”

  There was a long pause. “The same kind of clothing, or exactly the same?”

  “British Antarctic Service colors and patches, Captain.”

  We all knew what that meant: station leader Keywood and all the other members were almost certainly dead and the base and all its supplies were gone.

  The ship clattered and clanked closer—the engine sounded like it was about to break down at any moment—standing off from the shore a bit. It slowed, sounded its horn. The pirates waited. One of them scanned the end of the bay with a pair of binoculars. He seemed to be particularly interested in the Voyager, which was anchored well down the shore from his other point of interest: the manager’s house. Although we didn’t have a fire going, it hardly mattered. There was no way to hide the deep trenches our comings and goings had cut in the snow, any more than we could conceal that there was no snow on its roof, or that of the radio house: they always stayed warm enough so that it tended to melt and slide off.

  We had thought that seeing an obviously inhabited whaling station with no people in sight might give them pause. It certainly would have made any of us consider our next move very carefully. But not them. When no one responded to a second sounding of its horn, the pirate ship chugged out a little more black smoke and made for the end of Husvik’s only remaining deep water access: the end of the pier. I swept my binoculars to the rear of the ship: no activity among the dinghies there.

  That was a little surprising, too. We expected that while their main hull pulled up to the pier, they’d also put teams out in any smaller boats they had. That way they’d be threatening us at two or three different locations. But that didn’t seem to concern them. After changing to the second radio frequency, I reported what I was seeing.

  The captain was as puzzled and worried as I was. “Keep watching them, Willow. And stay on this channel.”

  “If they are monitoring, they might hear.”

  “They might. So it’s time to switch to Russian.”

  “Da, Captain.” I said. In the weeks leading up to this day, the captain had asked us all sorts of interesting questions, many of which initially seemed odd. But eventually, we understood the importance of all of them. In my case, he had discovered we shared a language that was not likely to be spoken by many South Americans, unless they were holdovers from the Cold War days. At any rate, it was a better bet than English (too common), French (common enough and too many common root words), and none of us spoke German, Chinese, or Arabic (including Captain Haskins).

  The fishing ship started backing engines as it approached the end of the pier, then swung its stern around very slowly so that the side of its hull gently kissed the remains of the bumpers. Specifically, they were aligning their hull-side door with the end of the pier. “It looks like they are ready to land a raiding team,” I muttered to Captain Haskins.

  “Looks like it,” he agreed. “Alvaro?”

  “Yeah?” said Alvaro, who just used English; he didn’t know Russian.

  “Your motor is idling reliably?”

  “It is.”

  “Good. Standby.”

  “We’re ready. Voyager out.”

  The ship’s side door slid aside, which the crew managed to do with some kind of winch they had rigged from the superstructure. Odd: was the door’s main mechanism broken, somehow? The pilot gently pulsed the engines, keeping the hull snugged against the pier so closely that it creaked and groaned. Much more pressure and it was likely to splinter.

  We all waited, and for several seconds, there was no activity around the open door: just a lightless rectangular hole in the side of the ship. Then there was a sudden rushing noise—steam gushed from the open doorway—followed immediately by screams. Wild, chaotic screams that came out along with the raiders as they fled the steam.

  Except that these weren’t raiders. Not the kind we had thought about and prepared for.

  Naked people came scrambling out on to the pier, their hair matted, their eyes wild and insanely intense. And they kept pouring out.

  All of us realized what we were seeing at the same time.

  “Sod it!” the captain shouted, not bothering with Russian. I swung the binoculars over to his “fighting position:” snugged behind the raised concrete foundation of the foremen’s barracks and protected on either side by old iron try pots. He reached up, pulled a line taken from the Voyag
er. From atop the ruin of a chimney behind him—the only part of the barracks still standing—a large metal gear toppled down to hit a shallow iron bowl. It rang loudly.

  There was enough of a gap in the roof of the main plant that I could see Blake, Rod, and now Steve count to three together, and then swing homemade mallets at the rear legs of the two platforms holding up the weighted chains.

  Both platforms tilted for a moment and then—the three boys scattering away—they came down with a crash Chloe and I could hear almost two hundred and fifty yards away. Without the support of the platforms, the weights on the two lengths of anchor-chain plummeted. The chains were yanked down hard, went taut; their other ends were looped and straining around the pier’s much-hacked pilings. For a second, the pilings held.

  But only for a second. Cut almost all the way through, the pilings snapped, one after the other, loud enough to make even the forty-odd zombies—because that’s what they looked like—stop in the middle of their headlong rush toward land. They stared as twelve feet of the pier was half-pulled and half-fell down into the water. Some of them started to howl at the unsupported planking that now sloped down into the frigid water only eight feet away, but most turned to look back at the ship.

  The door in the side of the hull shut quickly, and smoke started coming out of the funnel.

  The zombies grabbed at the suddenly receding ship, their hands slipping as they tried to get a hold of its sheer sides. Two fell into the water. Two more looked at the gunwale that began at the base of the superstructure, a few yards forward of the door. One of them tried to jump the widening distance. She got half her body over the side, scrabbling to pull herself all the way onto the weather deck. But her desperate handhold had apparently been upon a coil of spooled rope: it unwound and she went down. The other two were already sinking, gurgling and uttering wordless yowls as the water closed over their heads.