by Adam Baker
'Not much use for it now, though,' said Nikki. 'We can all hitch a ride on Jane's liner.'
'Jane Blanc? That waddling fuck? You really want to put your fate in her hands? Reckon she is going to get you home?'
'Since you put it like that.'
'I'm tired of promises. If you and I want a ride out of here we will have to organise it ourselves. So let's get this tin can ready to go.'
'What about the floor hatch?'
'Maybe we should find some batteries. Big ones. Hotwire the hydraulics.'
'Think it would work?'
'Few minutes of juice. That's all it would take.'
Nikki broke into a loading bay. Three forklifts parked at the back. She disconnected the batteries and loaded them on to a pallet truck. She dragged the pallet truck to the pump hall.
She stripped insulation from the hatch hydraulics and clipped jump leads. She pressed Open. Burst of sparks. Brief tremor from the hydraulic rams. The hatch didn't open.
'Fuck.'
She found a tennis ball. She sat bouncing the ball against the boat hull.
Alan, her boyfriend, used to tell a joke. 'What's brown and sticky? A stick.' He said it was the perfect joke. Elegantly simple. She remembered him reciting the joke at the dining table. Christmas with her parents. But she couldn't recall his voice. They were together two years, but already the memories were starting to fade like a photograph left in the sun.
He came to her in dreams. She glimpsed him in crowds. He shouted to her across busy streets.
Was Alan dead when she left him out on the ice? Could he have been saved? She would never know.
Scuff marks round a frosted floor plate. Big boot prints. Nikki pried the plate with a screwdriver and lifted it up. Ziploc bags of brown powder lying on the pipework.
She cooked a pinch of powder and siphoned the syrup into a hypodermic. A humourless smile.
'What's brown and sticky?' she murmured, as the needle punctured her skin.
Nail sat with Rye in the sub.
'Don't you ever go out?'
'It's cosy in here,' said Rye. She gestured to the bubble window of the cockpit. The crew sat round the fire. 'Besides, conversation is getting pretty repetitive. The women they will fuck. The drinks they will drink. If Jane and Ghost don't actually deliver this ship there will be a lynching.'
Rye blocked the cockpit window with her coat. She took a couple of hypodermics from her holdall. Nail opened a snuff box. He tapped powder into a spoon and cooked the mix with a Zippo.
'You have your doubts?'
'Jane Blanc. Stands before us and promises a floating Shangri- La. Forgive me if I don't get too excited. First day she arrived on the rig we had to run around looking for super-sized survival clothes just so she could dress properly. She's lost her battle with chocolate. She's been vanquished by doughnuts. Suddenly she's going to take charge and lead us all to safety? I don't think so.'
They returned to Hyperion. Jane and Ghost, Punch and Ivan.
'Okay,' said Jane. 'We've got a couple of lights on. So let's power this baby up for real. Let's get it moving.'
They surveyed the ship stern to prow. They met in the bridge.
'We have free access to the bridge and the officers' quarters,' said Jane. 'But from level two downward there are barricades at every door.'
'Plenty of blood around,' said Ghost. 'The crew fought a running battle. Must have been a hell of a fight. They prevailed, I guess. The ship is locked down pretty tight. We're safe, but most of the ship is off limits.'
'So where are the crew?' asked Punch. 'The blokes who built the barricades?'
Ghost shrugged. 'Maybe they spotted land. The ship was drifting. They saw some kind of habitation. They took to the boats and rowed for shore.'
'Habitation? Out here?'
'Hyperion has been adrift a long while. No telling where it's been.'
'Imagine the food down below,' said Punch. 'Caviar. Real eggs. Champagne. All out of reach. I'm not going to loll around in a presidential suite and slowly starve. I say we organise raiding parties. We haven't got enough shotgun shells to kill the passengers, but we've got enough to hold them off while we grab food.'
'Explains the Juliet flag,' said Ghost.
'The what?'
'Blue and white flag near the prow. International maritime signal. Dangerous cargo. Keep clear.'
'See this screen?' said Jane, sitting in the captain's chair in front of the Raytheon console. 'Revs. Engine speed. I'm almost certain these switches govern the propellers.'
Ghost leaned past her. He pressed buttons and turned dials.
'Off-line. If we want more than light, we will need to fire up the turbines.'
'I bet they shut down the engine room,' said Jane. 'When they evacuated the lower decks they must have turned everything off. Standard procedure. The kind of thing people do in a fire drill. Someone will have to go down there and switch it all back on.'
'Shit.'
Jane led Punch and Ghost to the chart room. A wall plan. Hyperion, floor by floor.
'We have free run of the top-most deck. But the engine room is nine levels beneath us.'
'Three thousand passengers, you reckon?'
'A liner like this? Yeah. If the ship is running at full capacity there must be two or three thousand infected down there.'
'Then we would have to move fast and get lucky.'
Infection
Jane explored the captain's suite. She sat at his desk. She found a passport in a drawer. Dougie Campbell. British citizen. Fifty- eight.
An envelope on the desk blotter. A thick sheaf of handwritten notes. Part letter, part diary. Campbell spent half his life at sea. He got lonely. He wrote to his wife every night.
Ship gossip. Most of the crew were east Europeans working for tips. Romanian and Polish. The Romanians hated the Polish. Officers had to mediate.
Jane thumbed through the pages, scanned trivia, searched for the moment it all went bad.
She sat back in the chair and put booted feet on the desk.
The ship docked at Trondheim two weeks into an Arctic cruise. They brought aboard fresh supplies and a couple of new waiters.
Three days out: an incident in a kitchen. One of the new waiters went berserk. He cut himself with a cleaver, then attacked two pot-washers. Deep cuts. Bite injuries. The waiter was restrained and sedated. He was confined to the medical bay.
Thank God no passengers were hurt.
A couple of nights later a group of passengers gathered to sip hot chocolate on deck and watch the Northern Lights. They saw a distant figure at the end of the promenade climb over a railing and jump into the ocean. The figure was wearing a white galley uniform. The figure appeared to be hugging a heavy fire extinguisher to help himself sink.
Passengers threw lifebelts into the sea and raised the alarm. The ship came to an immediate halt. The crew trained searchlights on the sea. No sign of the man.
Quick headcount. The missing man was a pot-washer treated for bite wounds.
The captain radioed ashore for medical advice. Four staff and two passengers had been admitted to the infirmary for treatment. They were delirious, restrained, and bleeding from their eyes and ears.
Representatives of Baltic Shipping instructed the captain to implement full quarantine procedures. Isolate all infected personnel and head for the nearby port of Murmansk.
The ship was turned back from Murmansk. Their maydays were ignored. They tried to approach the port, despite the harbour master's refusal to let them dock, but were fired upon by Russian soldiers as they threw mooring ropes to the jetty. Instead, they sailed west towards Norway.
Patrick Connor. Bosun for nine years. The captain's closest friend. The men stayed aloof and professional during the working day, but most evenings they sat in the captain's cabin and uncorked a bottle of claret. Neither man was supposed to drink. The seniority of their positions meant they were never truly off duty while the ship was at sea. So they sipped wine in secret and enjoyed
their little transgression.
It has been a week since Patrick was bitten. I have had to watch the horrifying progress of this disease. I have had to watch my friend slowly become a monster. It has been the worst experience of my life.
Patrick was bitten on the face. He was bending over Lenuta Grasu, one of the Romanian cabin maids, when she broke her restraint and bit a chunk from his cheek. He immediately washed and disinfected the wound, but both he and the captain knew it would do no good. The disease was transmitted by body fluid like HIV or hepatitis. Once a person became infected they quickly succumbed to dementia. They, in turn, would bite and claw, be driven to transmit the infection any way they could. Rafal, the Trondheim waiter who was the first to show signs of infection, was lashed to a hospital bed. He spat and snarled. He was horribly deformed. There was little chance he would recover.
Dr Walczak, the ship's surgeon, referred to the disease as rabies, for want of a proper diagnosis. By the time they reached Norwegian waters the fourteen-bed medical bay was full to capacity. The staff commandeered a couple of staff cabins for use as treatment rooms. Patrick Connor had volunteered to help Walczak, allowing the doctor to get much needed rest from time to time.
Patrick wrote farewell letters to his wife and children, then allowed himself to be restrained. It took less than twenty-four hours for the disease to take hold. In rare lucid moments he begged for death.
The captain made frequent visits to the medical bay.
This evening Dr Walczak and I had a long conversation in which we discussed the best form of treatment for Pat, the best way to relieve his suffering.
Next diary entry:
We held Patrick's funeral service at noon today, and committed his body to the deep.
The captain liberated a few bottles of Cabernet Sauvignon from the galley. No journal entries for the next three days.
Jane lay on the bed. She scanned the notes. Page after page of carnage. One by one the captain's crew succumbed.
The engines were shut down. Hyperion drifted north of Norway.
They lost the lower levels. They hoped that, by dropping the watertight compartment doors, they would seal infected passengers in the lower cabins. But the passengers found the stairwells before the crew had time to finish building barricades.
First Officer Quinn issued his men with Molotov cocktails. If they held their ground in the stairways, if they drove the infected passengers back down to the lower levels, they might retain control of the upper decks.
I don't think those sent mad by this disease intentionally kill. They are compelled to bite and penetrate, to spread the contagion. Nevertheless I have seen eyes gouged and throats ripped out. Survivors lie injured in cabins and corridors crying for help until they too are overtaken by blood-thirst, haul themselves to their feet and attack.
It was hard to estimate casualties. Captain Campbell conducted a head-count. A minority of the passengers and crew, fewer than a thousand, were declared clear of infection. They treated the injured in the Grand Ballroom.
I wish Dr Walczak was still with us. Quinn tells me the doctor was sighted near the sewage treatment plant just before the lower compartments were sealed. He had no shirt. His back was clustered with spines like a porcupine. He often said he would rather die than succumb to this strange affliction. I suppose he didn't have time to take his life before dementia took hold.
There seemed little chance the captain's journal would reach his wife, so instead he left a warning.
Once a person enters the advanced stages of infection they become extremely hard to kill. Quinn saw a girl cut clean in half when we dropped the watertight doors. She lived for fifteen minutes. She dragged herself across the deck, still trying to bite and tear. The entire lower half of her body had been detached and left behind, nevertheless her legs continued to kick and twist.
Many of the crew armed themselves with knives from the kitchen. Word soon spread. Knives didn't work. Stab wounds didn't even slow them down.
The only effective way to deal with the infected is either to destroy them in their entirety with a weapon such as a Molotov cocktail, or inflict a severe blow to the head.
The captain was shocked to find himself listing the most efficient ways of 'dealing' with the infected. In a matter of days his passengers and crew had become lethal predators.
It is a matter of survival. Those of us who remain must act quickly and ruthlessly to ensure the ship does not become totally overrun.
Campbell wondered if there were some way of scuttling the ship, sending the infected passengers and crew to the bottom of the ocean as a mercy.
Campbell gave the order to abandon ship. He and his crew had been shivering in the cold and dark for days. They were drifting. Navigational instrumentation off-line.
They posted lookouts round the clock in the hope of sighting land. One night they saw what they hoped to see: lights in the distance. Steady, electric light. Too dark to make out detail. The captain estimated they were drifting east of Svalbard. They were probably passing the little coastal township that served the Arktikugol coal field. He ordered his men to take to the boats.
Seventy-four souls.
Hard to believe of all the passengers under my care, all the crew under my command, this ragged handful of exhausted and traumatised people are all that remain.
Campbell gave First Officer Quinn the ship's log and told him to lead the survivors to safety. He saluted his men as they rowed away.
He was alone aboard the ship, the last uninfected individual on the vessel. He retreated to his cabin. He uncorked a Bordeaux.
Campbell could have evacuated the ship with his men, but was determined to play the role of captain to the last.
We all need to believe our lives have some ultimate meaning. I have rank and responsibility. It's not foolish to live your ideals.
Jane woke with a jolt. She had dozed off, crumpled papers in her hand.
She stood at the washstand. She rubbed sleep from her eyes and cleaned her teeth. Toothpaste and bottled water.
'Jane? You there?' Ghost.
'Yeah.'
'Punch and I are going to make a run for the engine room.'
'I'll be right there.''
Jane adjusted her dog-collar. The room reflected in the mirror. A silver-framed photograph on the desk. Captain Campbell and his wife in happy times.
'Okay, Dougie,' said Jane. 'Let's get our boys home.'
The Engine Room
Ghost chose a hatch near the stern. A big, red 'X' sprayed on the door. They dismantled the barricade. A cabin sofa and a couple of TVs. The hatch was jammed shut by a crowbar.
Ghost checked the breech of his shotgun. A shell in the chamber. Safety set to Fire.
Punch hefted a fire axe.
'Lock the door behind us,' said Ghost.
Jane removed the crowbar and cranked open the door. An empty corridor. Ghost and Punch stepped inside.
'Good luck,' said Jane, and heaved the door closed behind them. They heard a muffled, metallic scrape as she slid the crowbar back in place, sealing them inside the ship.
'All right,' muttered Ghost. 'Quiet as we can.'
Ghost checked a hand-drawn map. He had plotted a circuitous route to the engine room. He wanted to avoid communal areas where infected passengers might congregate. If the diseased passengers were truly mindless they would wander all over the ship. But if they retained faint memories of life aboard the liner they would gravitate towards the bars and restaurants.
They hurried down narrow service corridors. Company slogans interspersed with maritime lithographs.
Excellence is our watchword
'Ridiculous,' said Ghost. 'Everything in English except the stuff that matters.'
They passed the entrance of a health spa. The Neptune Wellness Centre. The poolside lit cold, medicinal blue. Upturned loungers. Signs for steam rooms, massage suites, herbal and Finnish saunas.
They heard a faint rustling, flopping sound. Something was trapped at t
he bottom of the empty spa pool making clumsy, spastic attempts to get out. The slapping abruptly ceased. The unseen thing had sensed Punch and Ghost standing in the doorway. It listened to them breathe.
Punch took a step like he was going to investigate but Ghost tugged his sleeve and motioned to keep walking.
Ivan checked the chart room.
'There's an oil heater back here.'
'Fire it up.'
He dragged the oil heater on to the bridge and lit it with a match.
'You know, if we are going to heat this place, it might be a good idea to deal with the captain. He could stink the place out.'
'Yeah,' said Jane. 'Let's put him over the side.'
They dragged the dead man by his boots. They hauled him across the deck. They lifted him by his coat and toppled him over the railing. The captain splashed into the sea. He floated face down for a couple of minutes, then his waterlogged coat pulled him under the waves.
'Probably ought to say something,' said Jane. 'Can't think what.'
'I wouldn't feel too bad about it,' said Ivan. 'That's a better send-off than most people get these days.'
The oil heater burned with a blue flame. The bridge began to heat up. Jane sat back in the captain's chair and unzipped her coat. Something smelled bad. She sniffed her armpits. She stank.
She threw Ivan her radio.
'Back in a minute,' she said. 'Keep my seat warm.'
She checked the officers' quarters. Name tags on each door.
Ingrid Markstrom
Krysta Zimny
She pulled open cupboard drawers. Fresh thermal underwear. T-shirts. Socks.
A bottle of mineral water next to the bed. Jane filled the sink, stripped and washed. Little sachets of conditioner, body scrub and shampoo. The first time she had washed her hair for weeks.