The man needed to be given a reason.
Roman nodded to the crewmen. “Hold him back against the rail. Spread his arms out.”
The American struggled, but his defiance was half-hearted.
“Looks like somebody’s taking a trip overboard,” said Dunn with a grin on his rattish face, but the man was wrong. Nobody is dying today, Roman decided. Especially not for that prick, Dunn’s, amusement.
Roman pressed up close to the American and looked him hard in the eyes. “I think you’ll find that pain and personal loss is preferable to death. It will help you to focus on something tangible – a pain you can feel. Losing part of yourself can be cleansing. I know from personal experience.”
The man looked confused.
Roman swung his sword and lopped off the American’s left hand. It tumbled backwards into the sea. The man screamed, blood jetting from his wrist. Roman prodded his chest with his spear arm and shoved him back against the railing, cutting short his screams. The man’s eyes were wide as Roman spoke to him.
“Now your loss is plain for all to see. You are not the man you were anymore…so be someone else. Find your pride instead of a bottle, and focus on the pain I have given you. It will remind you that you’re alive. One day, if you choose to seek me out, you may try to exact your revenge. Focus on that, the future, not the past.” Roman stepped away from the man and let him resume his howling. He sheathed his sword, turned to Dunn, and said, “Get his arm patched up and then leave him alone. He’s paid the cost for his actions and should be treated the same as anybody else.” The petty officer was white as a sheet, but he nodded vigorously as Roman left him to his duties. He wanted blood. I gave it to him.
At the inner edge of the aft-deck, near the giant shutter doors that led to the ship’s vast equipment house, was the man Roman had been hoping to see. The man was rough and slender, wrapped in an oversized jumper, but there was no mistaking his identity. When Roman was sure nobody else was watching, he gave the man a great big smile. “There you are, Harry. I’ve been looking for you.”
Harry smiled. Wrinkles creased at the corners of his eyes. “The mighty Roman has returned to us.”
“A name given to me, not asked for.”
“Maybe you should tell people your real name, then. They would have no need of silly nicknames.”
“I tell my name to friends – and you’re the only one.”
“I’m honoured.” Harry nodded over to where the one-handed American was being carried across the deck to receive medical attention. “A bit of a bloody business you were involved in, there. You do enjoy your drama.”
“They were going to kill him. I did him a favour.”
“Doubt he sees it that way.”
“He will, if he has any sense. If not, he’s free to take a swipe at me and I’ll take his other hand.”
“Come on,” said Harry, shaking his head and smirking. “Let’s take in some air and chat for a while. And talk normally, instead of giving me that whole warrior routine you give everybody else. You sound like a right prat. I almost miss the way you used to talk when I met you, blud.”
Roman huffed and nodded. “Just my way of having a bit of a laugh, innit? Got to entertain myself somehow, geezer.”
Harry smiled. “That’s better. You almost sound a like a real person again. Sometimes I think you imagine yourself a lord with that sword at your hip. I preferred you as a gangster. Steph would be laughing her arse off if she could hear you sometimes.”
Roman nodded. “You ever wonder if she made it?”
Harry sighed and shrugged. “I doubt it. I know she was working in a bar in Manchester when things went bad. Manchester wasn’t good.”
“Well, we can hope she’s out there someplace, I guess.”
Harry nodded. “She was a tough chick. If anyone could make it, it’s her. She used to keep us two in line.”
Roman chuckled, but inside he pushed aside memories of his past. The man he’d been before the infection had a complicated past. The new world was miserable and dangerous, but it was simpler at the very least and it gave everybody a fresh start.
The two of them strolled over to the portside promenade deck where they leant over the gunwale and stared out at the frigid sea of the English Channel. Harry took in a deep lungful of air. “Beautiful, isn’t it? Did I ever tell you I used to own a little boat years back? I had it docked in Southampton.”
Roman nodded. Harry had been a successful businessman once, but had lost it all to booze long before the world had ended for everybody else. Harry had been a broken, grief-stricken soul years before everyone else became one. “Tell me about her,” Roman asked his friend. It was good to talk about old times with a friend, although he preferred to hear the stories from others than speak of his own dirty past.
Harry stared into space and smiled. “It was a 60-footer princess yacht, the name Blue Saloon painted on her bow. Huh, I guess even then I loved the booze a little too much. It was never empty of a crate or two of wine.” Roman nodded. Harry had been an alcoholic when they’d met, but had cleaned himself up soon after. He’d been clean and sober for almost the entire time they’d been friends, but Roman knew that alcohol had taken a lot from his friend. The death of his wife and son in a car accident had pushed him to the brink of madness and booze had been the only understanding friend he could find. He drank to forget the things he lost, but all he did was lose whatever few things he had left.
But even the apocalypse hadn’t tipped Harry off the wagon. He turned his nose up at any drop of plonk placed in front of him. He was a stronger man than most, by far. But sometimes Roman sensed a brief glimmer of weakness in Harry’s eyes lately, like he was getting tired.
“I had some of the best times of my life on that boat,” Harry chuckled, “even if I was on the firewater at the time. My son used to love dangling a fishing line into the water, trying to catch crabs near the seawall. He never caught anything, bless him, but he always enjoyed it. It was the hope of catching something that kept him there, I think. My son was always optimistic; he always saw the best outcome for everything. He took after his mother in that way. I was the opposite. I wished you could have met him.”
Roman patted his friend on the back. “Me too.” He knew that even now, years later, the wounds were still raw. Harry’s memories of his wife and child were like flayed skin that never healed. “At least you didn’t lose your son to this shithole existence,” Roman said. It was the only upside he could think of. “Most men did.”
Harry ran his hand along the gunwale and nodded. “I know. If anything I’m lucky that I didn’t have to watch him get torn apart by the dead.” Harry sniffed in another deep breath of sea air and changed the subject. “You think they will ever truly rest again, the dead? You’ve been out there on land. What do you think?”
Roman stared out at the cold grey sea and thought about it. “I don’t know,” he said honestly. “The dead are falling apart at the seams, but most of them still walk. I think they’ll keep going until there’s nothing left of them but dust and bone. Even then they might not stop.”
“Maybe they’ll stop when there’s nothing left of us,” said Harry.
“Maybe you’re right, although it’s a bloody miserable thought. You haven’t got any cheerier with age, have you?”
The two of them laughed and Roman stared out at the boats and ships floating beside the Kirkland. All of the men and women on the ragtag group of vessels were safe and well-fed for the time being, but he often wondered what their end game was, their plans for the future. Were all these people, families and strangers, content to float around the seas for the rest of their lives? Would humanity ever regain the earth? Samuel spoke of an army. Was that what they needed? An army to reclaim what they had lost?
He thought about the day he and Harry had fled their carpentry workshop in Wolverhampton, hoping to escape the infection. They made it all the way to the south coast without finding anything resembling safety. They stole a dinghy f
rom the back of a trailer and threw themselves into the sea from a dockside in Kent. They had floated aimlessly for days before Samuel’s fleet picked them up. Back then, Damien had been grateful to the sea for keeping the two of them safe, but now he had begun to hate it for its vast nothingness.
“We’re heading inland,” he told Harry. “You’ll get to see for yourself what the dead are like.”
“Inland? Why?”
“To search for the cripple.”
“I thought you killed him. Isn’t that why you went ashore, to make him dead?”
Roman nodded. He didn’t tell Harry how Samuel was obsessed with making sure the man on crutches was dead. If he was honest, he didn’t understand what the big deal was. Of course, the cripple needed punishing for trying to blow up the Kirkland, but being wounded and on land was as certain a death sentence you could give a man. The issue had been dealt with. Roman had dealt with it. So why did Samuel give me a tonne of shit for it?
Harry rubbed at his eyes. He was starting to look very old. His short brown hair was turning greyer by the day. For some reason, the news that they were going ashore saddened him, which was the opposite reaction Damien expected. Usually the members of the fleet were excited at the briefest glimpse of the land they’d long abandoned. It was like coming home.
“How are the headaches?” Roman asked is friend.
Harry shrugged. “They come and go. At the moment I am waiting for them to go. But no worries; there’s nothing can be done. What happened with the cripple? I thought escaping you was impossible, or so the people around here like to whisper when you’re not listening. You’re quite the living legend.”
Roman sighed. “I shouldn’t be. I failed my mission. The dead got in my way. The cripple was wounded well enough, though. That’s the difference between the living and the dead. The living run away when you shoot at them.”
Harry seemed to wince for a moment, but then his face became an expressionless mask. “How did it feel? Trying to kill another human being?”
Roman looked down at the 9mm tucked into his belt beside his sword. Samuel had given it to him, but he had taken it only reluctantly. There was something dishonourable about a gun. It made killing too easy. He plucked the weapon free and examined its brushed steel contours and machine-cut grooves. Then he tossed it into the sea. “It’s not something I wish to do again,” he said earnestly.
Harry nodded knowingly. “Killing a man is different to slicing up an already-dead man.”
Roman had not enjoyed the feeling of firing at the cripple. He had done many bad things, but murder was not something he relished. “The cripple would have killed us all if he’d gotten his way. He deserved to die.”
“But you don’t want to go searching for him again, do you?”
“It’s an unnecessary risk and one I don’t understand. Even if the cripple lives, he can’t hurt us on land. He’s doomed out there on his own with a gunshot wound. I don’t know what Samuel is so concerned about.”
“Others call him captain, or sir.”
“The same fools call me Roman.”
“If only they knew your real name, Damien.”
“Damien was the man I used to be. Only you knew that man.”
Harry smiled knowingly. “Only I know the man you still are. You may have sharpened an antique sword you found in a museum and attached a rusty spear to your stump, but I still remember the lost youth you were when I met you. You’ve come a long way. You should be proud. You gave up drugs and violence for courage and honour, but that doesn’t mean you have to go running into danger everywhere you find it. You should take an easier job like mine. We were both tradesman; I could get you work in the ship’s tool room.”
Damien looked out over the sea, at the two hundred boats and ships. Soon they would all be sailing north to meet with the coast, and he would once again be going ashore to contend with the dead. And perhaps the living. They are no better. What Harry was suggesting was a nice thought, but it was beyond Damien’s reach. A man with one hand and a hundred battle scars did not simply lay down his sword and start making replacement engine parts. That was only the surface of it, though. The deeper truth was that Damien felt more at ease ashore amongst the dead than on the claustrophobic ship amongst the living.
Harry placed a hand on his shoulder. “People aren’t as bad as you think, you know?”
“The people aboard this ship are. They’ve become like the zombies out there. No one thinks for themselves, they just follow orders.”
“Perhaps. But some of them might surprise you.”
“They haven’t yet.”
“Give it time.” Harry squeezed Damien’s shoulder.
“Time is the only thing I have left,” said Damien. He turned away from Harry, shrugging his hand away, but then reconsidered and turned back around. “And an old friend, of course. I still have that.”
“More than most have, nowadays,” said Harry.
“Then I must be blessed.”
“Or cursed. It means you still have something to lose.”
Damien sighed and glanced back out at the sea. Never you, Harry. I must never lose you.
HUGO
“Zut alors!” Hugo sidestepped to avoid tripping over the woollen sheep that stared innocently up at him from the cabin floor. He picked it up and stuffed it into the gap between the dusty television and the cabinet on which it stood. “Daphne, Sophie, will you please pick up your things? You’ll send me overboard one of these days.”
His two young daughters were sitting on the yacht’s cosy sofa, playing with a set of cards atop the oak-veneer dining table. The eight of spades had fluttered overboard some time ago, but all the other cards were still present.
“Désolé, papa,” they said in unison with the voices of innocent choirgirls. They were growing up – eight and nine – but they were still just children.
“Please, my loves, speak English. We are surrounded by them, so you will do better to talk as they do. In fact, we may be the last French speakers alive, as much as it pains me to think about, so don’t waste effort with a language no longer used.”
“But we are French, papa.”
“Nobody is anything anymore. We’re all just…people. And most people speak English, so we shall also.”
“D’accord,” said Daphne, making her younger sister giggle.
Hugo laughed, too, but he gave his eldest daughter a stern look of disapproval. “No more, okay?”
“Okay, papa.”
Hugo smiled and left the cabin to go out on the deck. Dozens of other boats surrounded him on the sea, both big and small. The largest ship was the frigate in the centre of the fleet, where the kind man, Samuel, gave his orders. The smallest boats were mere single-mast sailboats that struggled to stay afloat when the winds were bad. Hugo had witnessed more than a few go under during the nastier storms. The English are not the sailors they think themselves to be.
Despite his longing for home – a modest cottage on the outskirts of Brest – Hugo was grateful for the safety of the fleet. What Captain Samuel had done, bringing so many sailors together and providing refuge to the weak and weary, was a kindness beyond most men. Whilst the world had been crumbling, most men thought only of their own survival, but not Samuel Raymeady. True to the humanitarian he’d been as the head of the monolithic Black Remedy Corporation, Samuel had turned his resources to rescuing those lost and frightened. The fleet, now a thousand bodies strong, sailed as a testament to the man. The world had ended, but Samuel Raymeady had kept the human race alive. And for that, all men should love him. As I do. My daughters live because of him.
When France had fallen to the biting jaws of the dead, Hugo had made immediately for the marina where his small yacht was berthed. The carnage and bloodshed he witnessed during the short journey had horrified him enough that he would gladly never set foot on land again. He had gawped in horror at his countrymen tearing into one another, children and men alike. He had spectated impotently as a coach full of
pensioners caught alight in the ensuing riots. The old men and women burned alive inside, with nobody doing a thing to help them. It had not been the dead who had done that. We were the real monsters when things fell.
The marina had been teeming when Hugo arrived, and desperate people were begging to board the various boats departing. Many forwent begging in place of outright stealing. Hugo himself had needed to wrestle with a fat man who sought to take his keys and steal the éternuer from him. Hugo had won that battle when he drove his keys into the man’s left eye, leaving him screaming on the jetty and half-blind. Hugo’s daughters had not spoken to their father for days after that. I barely blame them.
But he succeeded in sailing them free of their homeland and into the English Channel. There, he and several other seafarers had chanced upon the HMS Kirkland. A dozen boats – fishing trawlers mostly – already surrounded the frigate but a messenger had been quick to inform each newly arriving party that they were free to join the growing fleet and that all supplies would be shared out equally. Regular landing parties early on, raiding both French and English coastlines, had been successful in liberating great caches of food, whilst the fishermen of the fleet caught bountiful loads of fish. Life was still greatly lacking, but it seemed that life was becoming a little less about survival and a little more about rebuilding. It was the best any man could hope for in the savage new world. I do sometimes miss being on land, though. Can we live out here forever?
A sudden yip! from behind him made Hugo turn around. Houdini – named so because of his talent for getting in and out of the strangest places as a pup – was sitting on the coachroof above the yacht’s main cabin. The tan and white Papillon often chose to spend his time outside, watching the hustle and bustle of the surrounding boats and fishermen. Even in the rain the dog preferred to remain outside, although in the high winds Hugo would carry Houdini inside the cabin. Such a small dog could easily be swept away.
Hugo reached up and patted the dog on its head. “What are you up to, mon ami?”
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