“What about the... disease. Is that in the UK?” Maria said.
“We don’t think so,” Vadim told her, thinking longingly about military life, where people just did what you told them without having to discuss it. Well, except for Gulag.
“Except you... we’ll be bringing it,” Maria said.
“We’re not contagious,” the Fräulein told her, though Vadim had no way to be sure it was true. From what he had seen and what Gulag had theorised after initial infection, the virus, or whatever it was, was transmitted by bite.
“That’s it, isn’t it!” Leary shouted, and Vadim sighed. “You’re going to keep us alive to infect us and then release us on England!”
Princess was looking at him. He shook his head. “There would be much easier ways,” he pointed out.
“We need to speak to people, okay?” Harris said. Vadim nodded. The officer cast a glance at Leary, trembling in impotent fear and rage, and then left. The others followed until finally only Maria and her daughter were left.
“Fred had family in Red Hook,” Maria told him. Vadim nodded. She seemed to be deciding whether or not to say anything. “Gloria was with me in the office,” she told him. “I couldn’t get a babysitter. If she hadn’t been with me, I wouldn’t have gotten on the ship.” She made for the door but stopped again. “Maybe the US military will catch up with you, or maybe things are as bad as you say; but one thing I do know. God will judge you.”
“I’m afraid I don’t believe in God,” Vadim told her.
PRINCESS HEADED BACK to her room and Vadim exchanged a few words with Schiller before leaving with the Fräulein. As he made his way downstairs he heard more and more crying, presumably as word of the reality of their situation circulated. Tear-filled accusatory eyes watched them as they passed.
On the main deck level of the bridge tower, he saw Carlsson arguing with an angry-looking woman and a well-fed teenaged boy that Vadim took for his wife and son. A young girl probably a little bit older than Maria’s daughter was looking on, tears in her eyes. As he watched, Mongol came in through the door on the port side, at the opposite end of the corridor from where Vadim stood. The girl turned at the sound of the door opening and let out a scream, and her mother swept her up into her arms.
Mongol squeezed by. Dead or not, he was visibly devastated at the child’s response.
The big medic reached Vadim at the bottom of the stairs, glancing up at the Fräulein a few steps up from the captain.
“You okay?” Vadim wasn’t sure what made him ask this. It seemed ridiculous, in the circumstances. Mongol glanced back at the family.
“We’ve done all sorts of bad things, I can’t tell if it was for the right reason or not anymore.” He turned back to Vadim. “But none of that mattered when I got back home. That” – he nodded back towards the Carlsson girl – “is how my nieces, my nephews, my younger cousins are going to look at me, if we ever make it back. That’s assuming the shamans don’t just have me killed out of hand.” He pushed past Vadim and the Fräulein, heading up the stairs.
“Worried yet?” the Fräulein asked when she was sure the big medic was out of earshot.
“Proud of yourself?” a woman all but shrieked. Vadim looked back along the corridor to see Mrs Carlsson cradling her crying daughter and staring at him.
“This is a powder keg,” the Fräulein said in Russian. Vadim turned to look up at her.
“Do you want to kill them all?” he asked.
She didn’t answer.
“Give me an alternative.”
“Gulag is supposed to be on patrol with Mongol,” the Fräulein told him. Vadim just closed his eyes. It was a problem he was going to have to deal with sooner or later. For a moment he wondered why he couldn’t have just died when the transit cop had shot him beneath Grand Central.
THE SEA HAD grown ever rougher and they had to cling to the rail on their way back along the main deck. White-capped waves broke across the ship, sluicing water all over the deck. They would have to be careful to protect their weapons from salt-water corrosion; Vadim wasn’t sure how long their gun oil would last.
He was pleased to discover that, in his newfound condition, he no longer suffered from seasickness.
They could hear Gulag shouting before they reached the container.
“There is no God!” he screamed. Vadim and the Fräulein exchanged glances. At a guess, the Muscovite was trying to pick a fight with Skull. Vadim wasn’t sure that anyone had ever done that before. The Fräulein hauled the door to the container open. Electric lights provided dim illumination, pallets kept them and their weapons off the wet floor. Their beds were made of packing material. Vadim had no idea where Skull had found the prayer mat. Gulag was standing over the sniper as he performed the Zuhr afternoon prayer. “You’re a fool!”
“Gulag!” The Fräulein sounded genuinely angry. Gulag looked up at them both.
“What? Aren’t we fucking communists?” He pointed at the ruins of his face. “I think we know for sure that God doesn’t exist now.”
Vadim was less sure of that. The virus may have been created as a weapon, but it made no sense in terms of what little he knew about biology. If ever there was proof of the supernatural, this horrible disease would seem to be it.
“Leave Skull alone,” Vadim told him as he stepped into the container. Gulag pointed down at Skull as he bowed down, chanting the words of the prayer.
“Isn’t that against army regulations?” Gulag demanded. Vadim marvelled that Skull could ignore all the shouting.
“Since when did you give a fuck about regulations?” the Fräulein demanded. “When did any of us, for that matter?”
Gulag screamed, startling Vadim, simply because it hadn’t been what he expected. The Muscovite turned away and banged his arms against the side of the container.
“Does this not seem fucking mad to you?” he demanded. “I mean, now, in this situation?” Vadim and the Fräulein were staring at him.
“Skull’s always prayed,” Vadim finally managed.
“The world’s ended,” Gulag said much more quietly. He said it as though he were looking for understanding.
“So what do you want to do?” Vadim asked.
“Other than not attend to your duties and support your comrades?” the Fräulein muttered.
Gulag threw his hands up in the air. “Something,” he managed and turned away, pacing like an animal in a cage. If Vadim didn’t know better, he’d assume that Gulag had taken some kind of stimulant.
“We have a purpose,” Vadim reminded him. Gulag swung round to face him again.
“You have a purpose!” he snapped.
“We have a purpose. The captain has said that you do not have stay with us if you do not wish to,” the Fräulein reminded him through gritted teeth. She’d clearly had more than enough of Gulag.
The Muscovite looked affronted. “See that?” He pointed at her. “You accuse me of disloyalty – have I not been loyal ever since you found me in that pile of corpses, Vadim?”
“You have been loyal in your own insubordinate and deeply aggravating way,” Vadim admitted.
“Exactly,” Gulag said.
“So what is troubling you so much you feel the need to scream at Skull as he prays?” Vadim asked.
“What are we doing?” he asked.
“Could you be more specific?”
“With these people, on this boat? One of them shot me.”
“We’ve all wanted to do that,” the Fräulein pointed out.
“Think about what we’ve done to them! We’re the architects of their misery. They’ll turn on us, and the absolute best we can hope is that we waste a lot of ammunition on them. That’s assuming they don’t catch us with our guard down.”
“For example, when we’re supposed to be patrolling the ship?” the Fräulein asked.
Gulag ignored her and stared at Vadim, who was still trying to work out where the Muscovite had picked up a phrase like ‘architects of their misery’.
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“So you want to kill them all?” Vadim asked. It was a stupid question; of course he did.
“No,” Gulag said. Vadim almost missed it over Skull’s prayers.
“No?” Vadim asked, surprised.
“We need to feed on them,” he told them. “For our own good.”
They both stared at Gulag. Skull continued his devotions. Vadim was impressed that the Muscovite had somehow managed to find something worse to contemplate. They had done so many things in the service of their masters, even before the atrocity in New York, and now here was Gulag trying to outdo that. Vadim was tempted to deal with him now before he did something awful. He could, after all, do a lot of damage on his own.
“Our own good?” Vadim asked instead. It was difficult to get the words out of his suddenly very dry, dead throat. He felt the Fräulein tense next to him. Skull still seemed oblivious.
“We need the crew, I understand that. The rest of are just so much meat. We aren’t people anymore! We’re denying our own nature. Nothing good ever comes of that, it’s moral cowardice.”
Vadim laughed, and Gulag’s face hardened. The Fräulein’s hand inched towards her sidearm, and suddenly Vadim wished he’d taken one of the G3s with him to the meeting. He could see them leaning against the container. “We’re something new,” Gulag continued. “Something perfectly fitted for this world. You want to have revenge on those that have done this, and I understand that, but we could do whatever we want. We could carve out kingdoms in our own image.”
“With you as the king?” Vadim asked. Gulag smiled and shook his head.
“Oh, I don’t want the crown,” he said. He pointed at Vadim.
Vadim started laughing. He was a little worried that he wouldn’t stop. It was so absurd, the bloody imperial fantasises of a petty, violent thug. Revenge might not have been any better, but at least there was a sense of natural justice to it, in Vadim’s mind.
“Don’t laugh at me,” Gulag said, which just made Vadim laugh harder. “Don’t laugh at me!” he was screaming now. “We’ve burned villages! How is this different, except we won’t be doing it for masters no better than the psychopaths who run the Bratva!”
“Has it occurred to you that if we feed, then we end up on a ship full of the mindless dead, which at the very least narrows our chances of keeping the crew alive?” the Fräulein asked, while Vadim managed to get himself under control. Gulag just glared at her.
Something occurred to Vadim. “Princess and New Boy?” he asked.
“We bite them,” he said. “Princess is strong enough, she’ll be one of us. New Boy is weak. I can crack open his skull with my saperka if you want.”
At the mention of Princess, Vadim had felt the Fräulein stiffen next to him.
“So you’ve thought it all out, then?” she said with low menace.
“Do you know how I know Allah is real?” Skull asked from his knees. All three of them turned to look at the sniper as he stood up. “It is because I have become a creature of Shaitan, a ghūl. How can there be an adversary if there is no God?” He turned to Gulag. “To deny our base nature is not moral cowardice, it is far from weakness, it is what separates us from animals. We are at war between our savage selves and our higher selves. That is why I carry a Koran as well as a rifle. I hope that one day I may redeem myself to the point that I will be allowed back into His presence.” Gulag opened his mouth to retort, but shrank back as Skull leaned towards him. “And if you attack one of us you attack all of us; even you, my friend.” He straightened up and turned to Vadim. “With your permission, I’ll go and find Mongol.” Vadim nodded. Skull grabbed a G3 and made to leave the container, but paused. “I apologise if my praying bothered you, Gulag. I shall endeavour to do it out of your presence in future.” He turned back to face the Muscovite. “If, however, that is not possible, do not ever try and disturb me again, do you understand?” Gulag stared at the sniper. Skull staggered to the rail of the violently pitching boat and started making his way aft.
“You want to go your own way when we get to Britain, you may do so,” Vadim told the Muscovite. “Carve out your kingdom if you want. Start here and we’ll ki – destroy you.” He locked eyes with Gulag, and the other man broke contact first. Then he staggered out of the container and headed aft as well.
“He’s going to do something bad, isn’t he?” Vadim asked. The Fräulein nodded. The problem was he was still one of them until he wasn’t.
“Or Skull is,” the Fräulein said slowly.
Vadim turned to stare at her.
“He’s changed. He scares me.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
1400 UTC -2, 22nd November 1987
The Dietrich, North Atlantic
IT HAD BEEN six days since the end of the world.
The sky burned red. Vadim wasn’t sure if it was the result of all the crap the nuclear detonations had thrown up into the atmosphere, the ionisation, something to do with radiation, or another atmospheric effect, but it wasn’t the red of sunset. It looked deeply unnatural. The first time Vadim saw it, he’d wondered if he was just looking at everything through a filter of blood. Was he seeing the sky as the meat he craved so much?
It was still snowing black. It fell from the sky like ash, covering the ship. Vadim was heading aft past the containers, Mongol behind him. Two members of the squad were always on patrol, though it was busy work and they knew it. They also always made sure that someone was in the container to look after the weapons. The patrols were meant to keep the refugees cowed, but their greatest ally had been the rough crossing: most of the living had spent the previous five days hanging on to the ship for dear life and trying not to vomit on each other. It was difficult to stage a revolt when you were struggling to keep your meat and tinned fruit down.
Everyone was sick of meat and tinned fruit.
He had hoped that teaching them how to boil the impurities off the ice they had chipped out of the refrigerator containers would go some way towards improving relations; in retrospect, that had been naïve. He’d been instrumental in murdering their city and had helped kill their entire continent. It was difficult to make amends for that, even with clean water. His approach still silenced whispered conversations when he walked around the castle bridge.
They’d lost around twenty people. Some may have slipped on the icy decks and gone overboard, though he suspected most of them had been suicide. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that. He despised suicide as weakness and cowardice except in the most extreme circumstances, but suspected this brave new world qualified. He quietly investigated where Gulag had been whenever people went missing. On the other hand, he’d overheard a number of the refugees talking of Britain as some sort of Promised Land.
He suspected that they were going to be disappointed as well.
For the most part, the refugees had come together and cooperated with each other and the crew of the ship, but some had behaved with surprising entitlement and selfishness. He had largely left it to the refugees to police themselves, only allowing his people to get involved if it was going to turn nasty. What surprised him most was how little their behaviour seemed to take in the actual circumstances. He smiled grimly as they kicked their way through the icy slush. He suspected that in the USSR, the most selfish ones would have ended up as senior party members. Arseholes were arseholes the world over.
Most of the refugees had been dressed warmly enough for a cold November in Manhattan. They were going to struggle if the temperature kept dropping the way it had, however. That’s not your problem, he told himself. They’re on their own once you make Britain.
Gulag had surprised Vadim and the Fräulein by not doing anything particularly unpleasant beyond goading some of the refugees; assuming he wasn’t responsible for any of the disappearances. Of more worry was Skull. They had seen little of him over the past few days. He turned up for patrol, but he rarely spent time in the container, preferring the cab of the forward crane, where he’d made a sniper’s nest. Vadim had been
putting off speaking to him about that. Part of the point of them all staying in the container was so they could keep an eye on each other, make sure they didn’t lose control of their appetites.
Vadim turned the wheel on the starboard hatch to the bridge castle. Mongol watched on, his peeled and stitched mouth giving him a permanent, obscene smile, but it seemed more and more like the big medic was sinking into despondency. This was understandable; there was little keeping Vadim going beyond loyalty, and fantasies about wrapping his corpse hands around Premier Varishnikov’s fleshy neck. Though deep down, he knew it was just that: a fantasy. The best he could hope for was that Varishnikov had died in a radioactive flash. If not, he would be buried deep in some luxurious bunker.
Vadim pulled the hatch open and stepped over the lip into a stinking miasma that even his dead nostrils couldn’t ignore. The worsening stench of unwashed humanity, constant vomit and overused head facilities almost blunted his appetite.
Almost.
Part of the corridor had been cleared and the Carlsson girl – Vadim was pretty sure she was called Serafina – was trying to play marbles with Maria’s daughter, Gloria, using ball bearings. Their mothers were standing a little further down the corridor, talking to each other. The girls looked up as Vadim and Mongol stepped in, closing the hatch behind them: Serafina blanched, but Gloria just watched them, expressionless. There was something about the child, Vadim decided. She had an old soul.
“Hello,” Mongol said, leaning forward. Gloria still didn’t move, but Serafina screamed, making her mother jump. The child scrambled away and wrapped herself around her mother’s legs.
“What the hell do you think you’re playing at?” Mrs Carlsson demanded. She was a handsome woman, Vadim thought, but the enforced voyage was not doing her any favours. Her features looked slack, there were bags under bloodshot eyes, and her clothes, which looked more suitable for a coffee morning than an ocean voyage, weren’t holding up too well either.
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