by Frank Tayell
“Radio? What radio?” I asked.
“The one Kim’s going to build,” Annette said.
“We were talking about it on the boat,” Kim said. “It started when I was trying to explain why the ship-to-shore radio stopped working. Do you remember me telling you about my time in America?”
“You were a student on a year abroad,” I said. “It’s where you learned to shoot.”
“I loved the family I was staying with. I…” Sorrow flashed across her face in that common expression everyone has when they think about those who must inevitably be dead. “While I was there, I did some work at the local radio station. I didn’t get paid, of course. It was more for fun, and it mostly was.”
“You were working as a technician?” Sholto asked.
“No, it was reading the news, the weather, that kind of thing. Because of the accent,” she added.
“Because a British accent is more trustworthy?” I asked.
Sholto laughed.
“No, it definitely wasn’t that,” Kim said. “After the news, they had a segment where people would phone in and do their best impression of me. Most people settled for doing their worst. It was pretty popular.”
“And you said we could build a radio station,” Annette said, bringing us back on topic.
“The transmitter on the island was destroyed, but we can make a new one,” Kim said. “I was talking about it with Collette and Francois. We were really talking about a way for ships to communicate with Anglesey. With the sat-phones, that problem’s half-solved, but a radio station would have other uses.”
“A music station would be welcome,” Sholto said. “As long as you let a song play right to the end before cutting to a commercial break. Of course, there won’t be any adverts, will there? You know, there’s a music exchange down near the bakery? It’s essentially a way to collect unwanted tablets, phones, and laptops, storing them against the day we’ll need them, but they’re copying all the music and movies. Along with the CDs on the island it should be enough for a varied playlist. Maybe it would even encourage people to record something new.”
“A news programme would be invaluable during the election,” I said. “We’re going to have public debates, but this would be a way for more people to hear what the candidates have to say.”
“Imagine it,” Kim said, laughing. “There’s some poor survivor living on the roof of a multi-storey car park, using the last of her batteries to power a radio, knowing this’ll be the final twist of the dial, her only hope of salvation. Then she hears it. Other people. She leans in closer to the tiny speaker, and what, precisely, does she hear? An election debate.”
Sholto and I laughed, too. Annette looked puzzled.
“That’d be good, though, wouldn’t it?” she asked.
“More or less,” Kim said. “And that was the plan. Yes, we’ll broadcast whatever’s useful for the survivors on Anglesey, but since the distance the signal will travel is a function of how high we build the transmitter, there’s no real reason we can’t construct something that can broadcast across Britain.”
“But, realistically,” Sholto said, “what are the chances that, after all this time, anyone is wasting batteries on checking for a radio signal?”
“That’s why you have the drones,” Annette said.
Now it was my and Sholto’s turn to look puzzled. “Drones?”
“A concept that Francois taught her,” Kim explained. “There was a bit of a storm, and Annette wasn’t feeling very—”
“Hey! You promised not to tell,” Annette said. “And you were sick, too!”
“True,” Kim said. “Francois was trying to distract us, and he doesn’t know very many stories, certainly not many that could be considered soothing, so he talked about the airfields he’d flown in and out of, and that brought us onto drones.”
“Right, so the radio station tells people we’re here,” Annette said, “and that they should hang flags from the windows, like at the safe houses. We use the satellites to find then, and then the drones can go and take them supplies. I guess we could include one of those sat-phones. Then we could speak to them and find out if they need to be rescued, or if they can make it here on their own. And that way, you see, we can also use the satellites to look for cows.”
It was simple. It was obvious. It would work. Not the part about ice cream and cows, but the rest was well within our abilities. “We’d need to find some drones,” I said. “The satellites will tell us which RAF bases are intact, but we’d have to send people in to find out if there are drones still in the hangars.”
“Forget the RAF,” Kim said. “Francois knew from where the French operated theirs.”
“It’d be like George’s railroad,” Sholto said, “but on a global scale. I mean, why keep it to Britain? Why not Europe? Africa? America? The radio signal won’t carry, but we can broadcast from a ship.”
“The airfield took a battering,” I said. “It might not be possible for anything, even something that small, to land. You know the person to ask? Scott Higson, the baker. He said he was a pilot. He’d be able to tell us.”
“Are we going to try it?” Annette asked.
“It won’t be easy,” Kim said. “And there will be a lot of problems to sort through, but I think so. Once we’ve found the drones, there’s virtually no risk to anyone here, just a lot of work.”
“Good,” Annette said. “Find the people and then find the cows. What? Animals are important, too.”
The sun dropped. The shadows lengthened. Sholto and Annette sat with the tablet, going through images of distant places, playing spot the cow. Every few seconds, Daisy would join in, stabbing her finger at the screen with a victorious yell of “cow!” There wasn’t a cow, or any suggestion of survivors, but it was a wonderfully tranquil end to a most peculiar day. We were together. In that moment, it was all that mattered.
Chapter 10 - Anglesey
2nd September, Day 174
I woke at four with the obvious solution to half of our problems. Careful not to wake Kim, I went down to the kitchen. The light was on and Sholto was up.
“Can’t sleep?” I asked.
“Haven’t gone to bed,” he said. “I just got back from the docks. The Harper’s Ferry has arrived.”
“How… how is it?”
“I’d say we need this radio station more than we realise,” he said. “Rumours and half-truths get repeated across the island until they become fact. The Harper’s Ferry isn’t a hospital ship. Not technically. Those things were almost as large as a Nimitz aircraft carrier. I guess Mister Mills knew and must have told Mary O’Leary, and I never asked.”
“What are you saying?” I asked.
“A hospital ship had beds for a couple of thousand patients, with the staff to care for them, and the defensive weaponry and crew to protect them. You’ve never seen one? Did you ever see one of the nuclear-powered super-carriers?”
“Only on the TV. They were like mobile cities.”
“A hospital ship isn’t much smaller. It is, literally, a hospital. There’s no way a fishing trawler could tow one back. Not even one as large as the Santa Maria, and I should have known. I paid for it, didn’t I? I mean, yeah, if you were describing it to a civilian, you’d call it a hospital ship because it’s certainly not a warship. No, the Harper’s Ferry is a support ship, a tender. Think of it as an ambulance boat. A place for the helicopters to land, and the patients triaged before being flown either to the real hospital ship or to a shore-based military facility. It was deployed with the troops providing training, logistics, and communications support for that police action in North Africa. There are a few Rangers and some Special Forces to complement the ship’s Marines, but we’re mostly talking about the walking wounded. After this long, that’s all who’s left. The others, the more seriously injured, died.”
“How many?” I asked.
“Dead? I don’t know. Alive? A hundred sailors, fifty medical staff, and forty Marines from the original
crew. There’s another two hundred soldiers, sailors, and civilians that you could call patients or passengers. I’m not sure of the ratios of injured to hale, and after months becalmed on an angry ocean, there’s not many who can be described as hearty, but it adds up to three hundred and ninety-six souls.”
I weighed that up. “You say it has a helipad, what else? If we had the fuel, could the ship sail again?”
“The boiler’s cracked, the propeller’s broken, and most of the electronics are fried. They’ll know in a couple of days whether it can be fixed. As to how long that will take, it’ll depend on what parts are needed. They’ve got a helipad, but no helicopter. I asked, and there was bitterness in the reply. I think the pilot took it in search of help, but never came back.”
“What about MRIs and CT scanners and other medical equipment?” I asked.
“No, they’ve nothing we don’t already have in the clinic. That’s why we need the radio station, and preferably one with a call-in show so people can ask the questions that we forget. Like how many people were on board.”
“I’ll add building a telephone exchange to our list of morning’s chores,” I said. Sholto didn’t smile. “It’s more survivors,” I continued. “That’s good. That’s what we should celebrate. It may not be a floating city, but it’s not like anything has changed.”
“I thought I’d be going back to America with a few hundred soldiers and sailors.” He walked over to the kettle, glanced up as if seeing the rest of the sleeping household above, changed his mind, and took out a saucepan instead. “I had an idea that we could set up a railroad like George did.” He filled the saucepan with water and placed it on the stove. “We’d broadcast a radio signal hundreds of miles from the coast, we’d have a helicopter or three to collect survivors, and then we could bring them back here.”
“You still can,” I said.
“Not on the same scale,” he said. “Not in time. In another year, after a harsh winter, how many people will be alive out there? In two, whoever’s here will be it. Maybe we’ll have found another five thousand. Maybe ten thousand at best, but that’ll be it. That will be humanity.” He gestured at the tap. “Running water. We take it for granted, but for how long will the treatment plant remain operational? All the talk has been about the power plant and what we’ll do if it has to be shut down, but what’ll we do if we have no clean drinking water? Four hundred souls, not two thousand soldiers. Yes, you’re right, nothing has changed.”
“What about Sophia Augusto?” I asked, wanting to shift the conversation into less gloomy territory. “Did you see her? You were friends, weren’t you? Before the outbreak, I mean.”
“I knew her,” he said. “I don’t know if she’d call me a friend, and I’m not sure there are many people I’d have described as that. There was Max, of course, but he’s as dead as anyone else. I guess Sophia is the only living person who actually knew me, or some part of me. It went… strangely. We’re both alive, and when we’d established that, we found we had little to talk about. Certainly, not much in common. I guess you could say that though we knew of each other before, we didn’t really know each other. But what was I expecting? I kept her on the hook so she could smuggle me past border controls. It wasn’t exactly the relationship of two friends.”
“Ah.”
“Yeah, I guess, after everything that’s happened these last few months, I was starting to believe the hype, that I was this crusading hero trying to save the world. I was just another gangster with a better motive than most.”
The water began to bubble. I opened a cupboard and took out a tin of coffee.
“You want to talk about it?” I asked.
“Not really. There’s not much to say. I think I knew it, deep down. Whether I hold myself responsible for all that happened or not, it wasn’t my fault, yet I still have a lot for which I must make amends. We might not apportion guilt for what people did during the outbreak, but that doesn’t absolve me from what I did before. I’m not sure how long my penance will take, but I know in what form it has to be carried out.” He forced a smile. “Enough gloom. You’re right. Four hundred people. Let’s be glad of that. And fifty doctors, nurses, and technicians, that’s a boon. What about you? Why are you up? A bad dream?”
“The opposite,” I said. “I think I have the answer, admittedly not to the question I went to bed asking myself. Svalbard wants to protect the seed vault. They won’t give us the oil unless we give them a power source. We have electricity so let’s bring the seeds here. They’ll only last for a year in the permafrost without power. They’ll last longer in the freezers. It’s a temporary solution, but there’s no permanence to anything anymore.”
“Right. Right.” He leaned back, and I could see his brain trying to fix on the problem. “There’s transportation. How would you manage that?”
“That fishing trawler has an insulated hold, doesn’t it? It’s got an ice machine to keep the catch frozen? That’s how we move it. Ideally, we’d find some larger vessel capable of moving them in one go, and if we can’t, the Santa Maria would do.”
“It’s the obvious solution, assuming that the people on Svalbard go for it,” he said.
I poured the water into the mugs.
“I’ll speak to Mary this morning,” I said. “Hopefully that means one less problem to worry about.”
“You’re really settling into this, aren’t you,” Sholto said. “Running your own little country.”
“I’m hardly running it,” I said
“Not yet, but give it a few years, and you will be.”
“If we have a few years, and I suppose that’s what I’m trying to ensure.”
“What about the election?” he asked. “How’s that coming along?”
“It’s all rather straightforward, really,” I said, and began outlining my plans. We sat and talked, and soon the conversation moved away from the future and to the past, and the political campaigns we’d been involved in. We talked until, soon after dawn, our laughter woke the rest of the house.
A night’s sleep hadn’t dampened Annette’s enthusiasm for a radio station, or for drones. If anything, it had leached into Kim. As they went to inspect the runway at Anglesey’s small airport, I was ordered to take Daisy to the school.
There was a lot of excited chatter among the handful of staff and parents. After I’d deposited Daisy with Dr Umbert, I found the reason for it outside.
Mary O’Leary was in the playground, her wheelchair pulled close to the solitary adult’s picnic table. On that was a tray of tea, a couple of bread rolls with enough crumbs to suggest there had recently been a lot more, and an almost empty jar of jam. Two women sat on either side of the tray. From their bearing, both were military though there was no rank or insignia on their boiler suits. One was around my age. She looked exhausted, but her mouth was fixed in a slightly bewildered grin. Her eyes were on the classroom window behind which the class of the youngest children stared back. I raised a hand and waved at Daisy. Daisy waved, and the other children copied. The woman began raising her left arm. She stopped. Below the wrist was a stump where her hand should be. She raised her right arm instead and gave the children a brief wave. Her expression changed. There was still that edge of bewilderment to it, but the exhaustion had been replaced by one of triumphant joy.
The other woman was older. At least fifty, but probably older than that. Her hair was iron-grey, cut short. Her skin weathered and tanned. She turned her piercing green eyes to me, and gave me a searching look.
“Admiral, may I introduce Bill Wright,” Mary said.
“The author of the journal we’ve been hearing so much about?” the older woman asked. She had the Scandinavian twang of a Minnesotan.
“The very same,” Mary said. “Bill, this is Admiral Janet Gunderson, and Captain Annabeth Devine.”
“Admiral. Captain,” I said, shaking their hands. “From the Harper’s Ferry?” It was an unnecessary question. “I didn’t think such a small ship would have an adm
iral in charge. Gunderson?” The name was vaguely familiar, as was the face, though from before the outbreak, and I don’t think I’d ever met the woman in person.
“I’m a doctor,” the admiral said. “I was on an inspection tour when the outbreak occurred, and on shore when the orders came in recalling all personnel. I made it to the Harper’s Ferry, but wasn’t going to take up space on a helicopter, not when there were patients in need of more treatment than the ship’s facilities could provide. After three days at sea, we were told to sail due south. We were still in helicopter range of the USNS Hope and kept sending our patients to better treatment. Or so we thought. I was in the operating theatre for most of that time. Three weeks in, the electronics failed. What did you call it, Prometheus? When the engines stopped working, we knew it was an EMP. It’s hard to mistake when your electronics die. Restoring power to the engines took a week, but we didn’t have enough fuel to run both the engines and the desalination equipment.”
“The boats found us,” the captain said, reaching for one of the rolls. “Sailing boats.”
“They’d set out from Africa, simply wanting to get away,” Gunderson said. “It makes me wonder how many other craft set out, and how many of those found nothing but a watery grave. We put our Marines onto a yacht and sent it to the last position of the USNS Hope. She’d been overrun. Zombies. Since then, we’ve been dead in the water, sending the yachts to shore to find help. For sure, they found water and sometimes food, but no help. Just the undead.”
“Was that Africa?” I asked.
“Senegal, Mauritania,” the captain said. “Even Cape Verde. It’s the same everywhere. It’s good to be on dry land again.”
“The Harper’s Ferry’s your ship?” I asked.
Devine shook her head. “I’m a Marine. Military police. We were gathering evidence for a war crimes trial. IED,” she added raising her stump. “The day before the outbreak. The admiral got me out of there, but a missing hand wasn’t a serious enough injury to be evacced from the Harper’s Ferry. I think that tells you everything you need to know about what it was like.”