At the End of the World

by Charles E Gannon

  I shrugged. “We’re not planning on clearing it. Just getting some water, some food, some fuel. And then moving on.”

  Halethorpe leaned back. His smile wasn’t condescending, but it was certainly ironic. “As if such simple plans are ever truly simple in this Brave New World.”

  “Yeah, but it’s still the only plan that makes any sense…Prospero.” Hell, not only did that nickname riff on his own Shakespeare reference, but “Prospero” kinda sounded like Percival. If you had a speech impediment and lisped a lot. Halethorpe blinked at the name. He didn’t say anything, but I saw the surprise in his eyes.

  And I thought, Yeah, so you hear the barrio accent and simple words and you think I can’t read and understand your precious Bard? Homes, you don’t know me. I’ll give him this, though: he looked happy-surprised. Like he was relieved.

  Halethorpe smiled. “Sorry; no sorcery credentials, I’m afraid. But I am glad to meet you all. Very glad.”

  “Yeah, so you let on. Why?”

  Percival upended his shot glass. The locals looked over, reacted as though they’d swallowed vinegar. Which would have been an improvement on what they were drinking. “That question,” he announced, “is an excellent place to resume tomorrow. Which is, I take it, when you hoped to find persons with whom to trade. Same basic needs, I presume? Water, food, fuel?”

  “Got it in one.” I smiled. “Prospero.”

  He smiled back. Good-natured. “I can assist with that. Indeed, I suspect I can help you get most of what you need without even having to trade for it.”

  “What? You mean, for free?”

  “Another topic best left until tomorrow. For now, let’s find you a safe house to sleep in.”

  Steve sounded suspicious: “What’s it cost?”

  Percival shook his head. “Nothing. There’s no housing shortage here. But do bring weapons.”

  “Why?” Chloe asked. “Infected come knocking here in town?”

  “Not usually,” Percival replied as he led the way out of the Obsidian’s taproom.

  October 16

  About 3:30 AM, I wake up. There’s a sound like trash cans being mauled by raccoons. But big ones. And far away. So I slip out from under Chloe’s arm, out of bed, and pad over to look through a gap between the boards across the window. Like in the rest of the town, our bedrooms are on the second floor. (The locals reserve the ground floor for traps and dogs.)

  Way to the south, from behind the naked volcanic cone they call Cross Hill, I can see occasional flashes of light. It’s the same place the sounds are coming from. After a few minutes, it stops. I watch for a while, but nada; show’s over.

  When we met Prospero for breakfast down by the bay, I asked him about what I’d seen.

  “Oh, that,” he says. “That’s just a few stalkers having a go at the funhouse.”

  I’m not sure what creeped me out more: what Prospero said, or the casual tone in which he said it. “Funhouse?” I repeated.

  He nodded, chewing a hard-boiled turtle egg. “A little playground we made for our unsavory neighbors. Some lights and a turntable with rusted pots and pans and old trash-bin lids. If any of the stalkers come close to town during the night, the watch throws a switch and voila: instant diversion.”

  “Cool. But how is it powered?”

  “Solar cells charge a dedicated battery.” He nodded at the roofs behind us. “Lots of solar here, particularly after your Air Force brought it in, not long after they installed wind turbines back in—oh, 1996, I think it was.”

  Steve was eating slivers of his own turtle egg. Slowly. “And how do you know when the infected—I mean, stalkers—are getting too close to town?”

  Prospero shrugged. “The dogs. They get restless.” He waved beyond the town limits. “We kennel a few in abandoned houses on the outskirts, keep an active baby monitor in each. When we hear the dogs start to whine and whinge, that’s when the night watch taps the switch for the funhouse. Have to do it before the dogs bark. Otherwise, the stalkers go towards them—and, likely, us—rather than the decoy.”

  “And that works all the time?”

  Prospero tilted his head from side to side. “Nothing is perfect, but it reduces the problem. We still get one a week or so. Usually a loner, when the wind is out of the north. Carries their scent away from the dogs.”

  “Still, a pretty smart system. Who thought it up?” I was pretty sure I knew the answer.

  “We like to call everything a community effort, here on Ascension Island,” Prospero explained with a shit-eating grin.

  I nodded, grinned back. “Yeah, I thought so. But if wind out of the north carries their scent away from the dogs, doesn’t it carry the scent of you—and the fish you catch—towards the stalkers, sometimes?”

  He picked a fragment of tortoise shell out of his eggs. “We’re careful what we do, and when. No cooking when the wind is blowing south. The fish and turtles are gutted and fileted out on the water: no blood smell ashore. And living right next to the waves drowns out the day-to-day sounds.”

  I nodded, waited for him to finish his scrambled eggs.

  He glanced at me. “You either have a most unusual fixation with my dining etiquette, or you have a more pointed question.”

  “A few, actually. But they can wait until you’re done.”

  “Very polite, but do carry on.”

  “How many survivors are there? We gotta know who, and how many, we’re trading with.”

  Prospero nodded. “Before the plague arrived in economy class, the population here in town was about six hundred fifty. Fifty or sixty at Two Boat, out near the school. Maybe another fifty who preferred living out in the rough.”

  Giselle nodded. “So, seven hundred fifty. Give or take.”

  “And now?” I persisted.

  “Two hundred and sixty-nine, as of three days ago.” His smile was very small and very ironic. “Not that we are counting, of course.”

  “Almost two-thirds dead,” Rod murmured, horrified.

  “Dead or worse,” Prospero corrected. “Some of the last to turn wandered off into the wastes when they couldn’t force their way into the barricaded houses.”

  “How many?”

  He shrugged. “Twenty, thirty. Maybe more. No one was keeping a tally, those days.”

  “What about the bases? Did anyone survive except you?”

  Prospero stared out over the bay. “No. Which certainly didn’t help diminish my pariah status. Some persons still believe I survived because I ran out on my mates.”

  Chloe leaned forward. “Did you?”

  Prospero was clearly starting to get used to her; he just shook his head and smiled. “Ms. Tukkiapik, you are the most refreshingly direct human I have met in…well, in many, many years.”

  “Thanks. Now: did you run away?”

  He shook his head. “I did not. I was in town with a…a friend. I returned to my—the British—facility when reports started coming in about people turning. I arrived just after my leftenant returned from his briefing with the Yank commander. He updated me, sent me back to my billet.

  “I hadn’t been there long enough to get a cuppa when one of my Yank mates calls me. Seems just after I left, he’d gone up to the Golf Ball and found the leftenant snarling and taking pieces out of the duty staff. He’d already wrecked the bloody ops center. Half of the desktops were smashed, and there were guts all over. Even inside the mainframe, which my chum was trying to salvage before the leftenant went after him, too.”

  “And?”

  “My mate got his rifle in hand before the leftenant got him. I grabbed my kit, a pair of birdwatching binoculars that my…my in-town friend kept at my place, and drove back to the Golf Ball. No luck; my mate had locked up the facility and didn’t answer his phone. I drove to another rise overlooking the Yank base. They were shooting each other in the lanes between their tidy little prefab billets.” He shrugged. “Nothing to be done, except take a rough count. Then I came back here. Had to make sure the locals kn
ew what was happening.”

  Giselle had folded her hands, was looking down. “And your in-town friend? The one you were with when you heard?”

  Prospero glanced back at the rugged, barren wilds behind Georgetown. “Gone. Maybe turned. Maybe eaten. Maybe drove back to Two Boats and died of the virus. Anything is possible.”

  Rod sounded like he might throw up. “You never went looking…to find out if…if—?”

  “No, I did not,” Prospero said firmly. “At first, no one could risk leaving. Not until the stalkers finally decided that it was easier to get at the sheep, donkeys, and rabbits on Green Mountain than into our barricaded houses.

  “After a few weeks, a few optimistic survivors reasoned that the danger had passed. They went out looking for missing friends. None of them came back. Not one. Since then, no one travels overland, except to ensure that the funhouse remains operational.”

  I nodded. “So, since you know how many locals are left, and you’ve got a good idea of how many were killed, what’s your guess on how many turned?”

  Prospero smiled. “That is the question isn’t it? I’m guessing at least two thirds of the U.S. base, initially. Add about thirty civilians.”

  “Sounds like two hundred and thirty, total?”

  “Initially, but we’ve seen the buggers devour each other, particularly if one is wounded. And we’ve killed any who come snuffing around here.”

  “So, your estimate of remaining infected is…?”

  “Is utterly unreliable. But the council believes that, after three months, there couldn’t be more than one hundred.”

  I frowned. “And you don’t agree with the council.”

  “The logic behind their calculation is reasonable, but I don’t believe it is complete. Not enough to rely on for future planning.”

  Chloe frowned. “What kind of plans are they making?”

  Prospero steepled his hands. “The council have concluded that since the stalkers are indiscriminate reflex predators, they will reduce their own numbers to a point where we can take the fight to them and clear the island.”

  “You don’t sound convinced,” Chloe said, folding her arms.

  “I’m not.”

  “Why?”

  Prospero hunched forward. “Basic math. We know how much a normal human has to eat to remain alive. Now, modify that by the amount of energy stalkers expend and that they eat meat almost exclusively. That gives us a rough estimate of how many pounds of meat the average stalker has to consume every day.”

  “And?”

  “And they should almost all be dead by now. But they aren’t. And they still travel in packs. Which they wouldn’t do if every other stalker is an imminent threat.”

  “So where are they getting all the extra meat?” Rod muttered.

  I thought I saw where Prospero might be going with all this, but before I could say anything, Chloe leaned toward him. “You think the council is missing something.”

  “I do.”

  “Such as?”

  Prospero nodded. “Well, no one knows a bloody thing about stalker behavior when they’re not trying to devour us. But no creature can sustain full-on homicidal aggression all the time. It would be utterly exhausting and far too expensive in terms of energy.”

  Rod blinked. “So you’re saying that the infected, uh, take a lot of naps?”

  Prospero smiled. “More than that. I believe that if they go long enough without detecting prey, they become torpid.”

  Chloe sighed, her long eyelashes half-closing. “English, please.”

  “He means they go dormant,” I translated, nodding.

  “You agree with him?” Chloe asked.

  I shrugged. “It’s a damn sight more logical than what the councilors are presuming. According to them, only one hundred infected were running around after the first month or so. That’s about eighty days ago. So, in the past eighty days, those one hundred zombies had a total requirement of eight thousand days’ worth of food.”

  “I figure they each need about four pounds of meat every day,” Chloe nodded. “That’s about what a wolf needs to get by. Barely.”

  “Which means,” I continued, “that a population of one hundred infected would need thirty-two thousand pounds of meat to continue to function for eighty days.”

  “I think I’m going to throw up,” Giselle muttered thickly.

  “Then Jeeza, you won’t want to stay around for this.” I gave her a moment to move to a chunder-friendly spot, but she stayed put. “So, were thirty-two thousand pounds of meat available to the stalkers during the past eighty days?”

  Rod nodded. “Okay, let’s start by subtracting the, uh, meat mass, of anyone who could not have been part of that total.”

  “Right. So: subtract the two hundred and seventy survivors here in town, and the one hundred infected. So that’s three hundred seventy humans we know they didn’t eat.” I turned to Prospero. “And how many corpses did you…dispose of?”

  Prospero stared off. “Almost four hundred, between the flu deaths, the stalkers we killed, and their victims. All burned where we found them.”

  I nodded. “Okay. So, from the one thousand people we started with, we subtract two hundred seventy healthy survivors, one hundred infected, and four hundred corpses. That leaves about two hundred and thirty bodies the infected could feed on.”

  “That’s still a lot of meat,” Jeeza observed.

  “Not as much as you might expect,” Chloe said with a shake of her head. “Predators like the infected, or us, aren’t very efficient. Scavengers, like worms or beetles? Different story. But bigger critters leave a lot behind. If they didn’t, carrion eaters—like crows and rodents—wouldn’t have enough to live on.”

  Prospero was staring at Chloe. “And how did you become familiar with such matters, if I may ask?”

  “Living in Alaska. Hunting to put food on the table. And watching what actual predators like wolves and bears leave behind. Which was usually close to thirty percent, give or take.”

  “Okay,” I agreed. “So we start with two hundred thirty bodies. Call the average weight one hundred and fifty pounds. About twenty percent of that is bone and other inedibles. Say only twenty percent is lost to inefficient eating. So only sixty percent of the body mass is useful, or about ninety pounds per body. So two hundred and thirty bodies at ninety pounds each is—”

  “Twenty thousand seven hundred pounds,” Rod supplied quietly, just as quickly as I could have.

  I nodded. “That’s only about two-thirds of what’s needed.”

  “Sixty-four percent,” Rod murmured almost apologetically. “A massive shortfall.”

  I turned to Prospero. “Could meat from the feral animal populations make up that difference?”

  He shook his head. “Fifteen thousand pounds of meat? Only if the last environment survey was off by fifty percent.”

  “And even then,” Chloe added, nodding, “realize that four pounds of meat per infected per day is a really, really low estimate. So I’m with you, English. The council’s numbers don’t wash.”

  “Which is why they’ve had to revise their die-off estimate three times,” Jeeza concluded.

  Prospero was looking around the circle of our faces. “I knew I was going to like you lot.”

  I got up from our seaside table. “So, this island is more screwed than your leaders think. Is that why you want off?”

  His expression became what old novels call “calculating.” “That is a longer topic. Best left until the day’s business is done.”

  “You mean, after we finish trading?”

  “My advice to you is not to trade at all until your position is stronger.”

  “And how are we going to manage that? Hell, we gotta know what your people want, what they need.” I stopped, thought. “Since you guys have to stay so close to home, how do you get enough to eat?”

  Prospero’s answer was a lot more detailed than it needed to be. Here’s what it boiled down to: Georgetown got mos
t of its food from the sea, even more than St. Helena. Not just fish, but turtles and their eggs. But like us, they were in real need of carbs. That’s why the council was trying to outlast the stalkers; there were plenty of basic carbs growing on Green Mountain.

  But while they waited for the stalkers to die off, they were also running out of everything else. Unlike the Saints, who had ten times the population and a free run of their entire island, Ascension’s survivors were living on whatever supplies had been in Georgetown when the virus hit. They were also limited to the water they caught in roof cisterns or purified with solar stills.

  “At least the dogs can make do by lapping up whatever dew collects on the road or the rocks,” Prospero concluded. “Don’t know how they, or the stalkers, stomach that, but they do.”

  Chloe sat straighter. “The stalkers? They drink water from the road?”

  Prospero sighed. “Oh, they do better than that. They drink the water that collects on the runways at Wideawake Field. Probably why they haven’t all gone over to Green Mountain. The runways are actually the best source of fresh water on the island. Damned inconvenient.”

  Steve frowned. “Because it keeps a lot of them close to town?”

  “Not just that. It keeps them sitting on top of the answer to all our problems.”

  “You mean, the base?”

  “Exactly. Its warehoused supplies would meet every need Georgetown has.”

  Jeeza frowned. “That presumes that the infected haven’t torn everything apart, the way they did your communications and tracking building.”

  Prospero shook his head. “They haven’t. I drove up there for the first few weeks. It was a good position from which to watch. Stalkers aren’t superhuman. They can’t smell tinned meat, for instance. And they can’t break into safe-rooms, or padlocked warehouses, or hangars.

  “Furthermore, they don’t stop for gardens. Inside houses, they ignore most grain-based products. As far as machinery goes, they might scat on it or just as likely might not. It’s meaningless to them. The only reason the comm building looked like a tip was because it isn’t much bigger than the inside of a freight wagon and there had been a life-and death struggle in it.”