by Gary Gibson
The carnage extended throughout the rest of the compound. The main building, a two-storey structure that looked as if it had started out as some rich man’s summerhouse, had a makeshift barricade built across its front steps, while inside I found a cache of ampoules that seemed to have been deliberately smashed.
I explored further within, finding a dozen more corpses, their bony wrists secured with plastic ties. Judging by the tilt of their heads and the dark stains all around them, it was clear their throats had been cut.
After a while I figured out what had happened from bits and pieces of information: there had been a rebellion of some kind. The cult’s leaders had used the supplies of antidote to control their followers, dispensing it only to those who were in their favour. Anyone who didn’t toe the line, it seemed, simply died once the antidote stopped working. I found the evidence in the minutes of mob trials at which the former cult leaders had been found guilty of betraying their own stated principles, before undergoing immediate execution.
Beyond that, I can’t say for certain just what had happened. But in the years that followed, I certainly speculated. I wondered if perhaps only an inner circle of the cult had known about the grand plan to wipe out humanity. And, once the deed had been irrevocably done, perhaps all they needed to do, to keep the rest of the cultists in line, was to threaten to withhold the antidote.
But their leaders were few, and their followers many. Once the promised paradise on Earth failed to materialize, that controlling minority – I felt increasingly certain – must have been faced with overwhelming opposition to their rule. And if those smashed ampoules were anything to judge by, those in charge must have been just as petty and venal as the billions they had sentenced to death. It looked as if they had destroyed the remaining supplies of the antidote rather than allow the rebels to seize it.
With the existing supplies of the antidote destroyed, how was I, then, to survive?
I found a place to sleep in a deserted dormitory within the compound, then spent the next several days looking for anything that might possibly help me survive longer than the next few months. Eventually I found a well-equipped laboratory, but most of the equipment had either been smashed to pieces or burned. This at least explained why the rebels had been unable to synthesize any more antidote themselves.
It took another week of searching, but finally I discovered an unharmed cache of the antidote. It was hidden in a crate at the back of a barn on the very edge of the property, along with lab workbooks detailing the requisite formulae to synthesize more.
I soon formulated a plan that would give me purpose in the coming years. First, I would search for other survivors, if they were out there. Somewhere in the world, there had to be secure facilities with people surviving on canned air, or in underground military complexes built to withstand nuclear or biological attack.
I was telling myself a lie, of course: one that gave me a reason to hold my grief and anger at bay, not to mention the dreadful guilt I felt at the thought that I could have found some way to escape sooner, to warn people of what was happening. Sometimes, the grief gave way to anger, and in my mind I called myself a coward.
Still the tenacious will to live that had spurred me this far refused to let go, and before long I was back on the road, making my way across the vastness of the North American continent. Over the next three years I criss-crossed from coast to coast, and found nothing but deserted ruins slowly reverting to nature. At some point I found another yacht and sailed it back across the ocean.
At times, especially in those first years, my sanity would teeter in the balance. I would have conversations with people I only realized later had never been there. Alice herself came sufficiently alive again, in my mind at least, that I became unable to distinguish reality fully from fantasy. Without the Authority’s intervention, I might well have descended deep enough into my madness to have never been able to return to sanity.
Once I finally sat down and began to read that last diary, just those first few pages were enough to unleash a flood of memories. Even when I had actively been writing in my notebooks, I had rarely, if ever, reread my entries. Now, as I scanned the words, I found myself recalling things I had forgotten or suppressed for most of the last decade.
That was nothing, however, compared to what I found as I read past the point of that other Jerry’s retrieval, and the details of his newfound life here on the island. Before long I had cause to wonder if I had ever really known myself at all.
Like me, he had been placed in quarantine as a precaution against the possibility he might still carry the EVE virus in his bloodstream. Only then had he been allowed to interact with the island’s community of Pathfinders. I read on, his later diary entries becoming as sparse as my own had, although describing incidents and conversations that were entirely unfamiliar to me. I read of his first trips to other timelines, other parallel universes. His observations could so easily have been my own, except that he had never suffered the feeling that something was being kept back from him. But then again, neither had he discovered by accident that he was someone’s replacement.
I gripped the pages harder as I read about his and Chloe’s burgeoning romance, and his feelings of guilt when he thought about his Alice. He wrote of how his long-dead wife slowly ceased to be such a strong presence in his mind; never gone, but part of that other life he had left behind forever.
The time between entries grew and grew. First six months, then a year, as his new life became busier, and he found new demands on his time. But then came a sudden burst of activity within just the last twelve months – not really so long, I realized with a tingle, before my own retrieval.
His final entries detailed things that struck me as deeply humdrum: a few lines here and there recording picnics he and Chloe had taken on the island’s north shore; a handful of observations about recent missions into the multiverse and sketches of some moai. And then, some bad fights with Chloe . . .
I stopped, flipping back a page and rereading the words. He had written of an occasion on which he had struck Chloe with such force he was afraid he might actually have killed her. He went on to describe a previously unrecorded incident when he had beaten her badly with his fists. The details were recorded impassively, with little in the way of emotion.
I felt as if something cold and greasy had clambered inside my belly and taken root there. What had started out as a diary had instead turned into a kind of confession of domestic violence that nauseated me. Their fights had been furious and, to me, incomprehensible. He begged forgiveness for his actions, but his words did not convince even me.
I put the diary down with trembling hands and stared out my window for a long time. I had never struck any woman in my life, nor could I imagine myself ever doing so.
It occurred to me that this might well be the reason for Chloe seeming so reticent in my presence. If I – if he – had been so dreadfully violent, I could hardly blame her for keeping her distance. But then she had reached out to kiss me just days before, and the memory left me sick with confusion.
I could no longer feel any kinship with the man who had written those words, and yet the fact remained that up until the point of his retrieval, I was absolutely identical in thought and history and deed to that other Jerry. How could I – how could he – really have changed so much, that he would commit such monstrous, unjustifiable acts?
I knew I needed to find Chloe and talk to her about this. I wanted more than anything to prove to her that I was different, that I could never be the same as that other me, pouring out his wounded regrets.
Assuming, of course, given what I now knew, she had any intention of talking to me ever again. And who could blame her if she didn’t?
And yet . . . that kiss. It made little sense, even though the memory of it seemed to dominate my thoughts at times.
I remembered, then, what she had said – that she was taking as many missions as she could, to distance herself from the island – and, by implicati
on, from me. No matter: as soon as she returned, for however long, I would go to her and talk with her about what I had read. Assuming, that is, she was willing to listen. Even so, I felt I needed some form of absolution, some way of distinguishing myself from the other me.
I wondered if she even knew he had written of these events in their life.
I put the diary down and found my jacket, a new and more immediate purpose on my mind. There was something I had to do before anything else: something I had to see with my own two eyes.
I stepped back outside, and went to visit my own grave.
FIFTEEN
Chloe had told me that the graveyard lay just beyond the runway of the island’s single, derelict airport. I made my way there on foot, passing the police station where Greenbrooke had interrogated me and Nadia and Rozalia, and saw that same fractured moon hanging low in the sky. I wondered if the island had any boats capable of carrying me all the way to the Chilean coast a few thousand kilometres to the east, and what I might find there, and if any of the other Pathfinders had ever tried.
I kept on past the comms tower, stepping over discarded concrete blocks from some unfinished building project, tangled weeds underfoot and the crickets singing loud enough to drown out my thoughts. Eventually I came to a small plot of land surrounded by a low railing, within which stood a small clapboard building with a rusted iron cross mounted above its entrance.
The plot had perhaps a couple of dozen graves in all. The dedications on every headstone but one were written in Spanish. Most looked old, which meant my predecessor’s was easy to find, since it was clearly much more recent than any of the rest.
I stared down at it for a while before turning away, feeling somehow weightless, as if I could drift away on the steady breeze coming in from the ocean. I knew that seeing your own grave was not necessarily a unique experience. People who went missing, returning long after they had been presumed deceased, would certainly have had that experience, as would those who successfully faked their own deaths. Didn’t everybody wonder what it would be like to attend their own funeral?
But I knew none of them had ever been faced with the knowledge that a body identical to their own lay within that grave.
I decided it was an overrated experience and returned home with every intention of getting seriously drunk.
The first time my doorbell rang, I had collapsed half off the couch in my living room. The second time it rang, I realized I wasn’t hearing things. By the third time, I was hunched over the toilet bowl, vomiting up my breakfast and the half-bottle of home-made whisky I’d worked my way through following my return from the graveyard.
I finally made it to the door on the fourth attempt and found Yuichi standing there.
‘You, uh . . . you don’t look so good,’ he said.
‘What is it?’ I croaked, crushing my eyes shut against the light.
‘Something’s up,’ he said. ‘Kip Mayer asked me to round up all the Pathfinders currently on the island and get us all to the Hotel du Mauna Loa by eight this evening. He’s got something to say.’
I swallowed hard. ‘About what?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘But I think it has to do with Nadia.’
It took me a long while to get ready after he left. I crawled back through to the toilet and crouched, shivering, over the bowl, feeling as if the flesh was about to slough off my bones. But nothing else came up, so I slowly peeled off my clothes and left them lying on the tiles before dragging myself inside the shower. It ran on a battery-powered pump that took a while to get going, and the water was always freezing cold for the first minute or so. I gasped as the icy stream hit me, then leaned my head back against the tiles once it heated up.
All I really wanted to do was crawl back into bed and stay there, but instead I dried myself off and found some fresh clothes before setting back out again.
‘Dear God in Heaven,’ said Randall Pimms when I finally walked into the bar, just before eight. ‘It lives.’
I ignored him and grabbed hold of a stool, to keep myself upright as much as anything else. There was a faint singing in my ears, overlaying the grind and thud of blood flowing like tar through my veins.
‘Get you anything?’ asked Selwyn, one hand on my shoulder.
‘Coffee,’ I grunted.
‘Good idea,’ he replied, peering at my bloodshot eyes. ‘Wait right there.’
I watched him ask Tony behind the bar for the coffee, then looked to see who else was there. Most, if not all, of the Pathfinders were present. Chloe, unsurprisingly, was not. The majority were outside on the patio, standing or sitting around the pool, a few empty bottles bobbing and floating in the murky water.
‘Here.’ Selwyn pushed a cup of hot black liquid into my hands. ‘Strong as I could make it.’
I sipped at the coffee, feeling it burn its way down my throat. I was about to thank Selwyn when Kip Mayer walked in and the others started to trickle back inside from the patio.
‘Mr Bramnik thought it best if you heard it from us first,’ said Mayer, once everyone had found somewhere to stand or sit facing him. ‘It looks as if the Patriots are going to be running their own, parallel investigation into the circumstances surrounding Nadia Mirkowsky’s death. Langward Greenbrooke will be in charge of that investigation.’
The sounds of groans filled the air.
‘This is bullshit,’ said Casey, leaning against a pillar. ‘They’re taking advantage of a fucking tragedy for their own damn reasons.’
A chorus of voices rose in assent. I listened quietly, still nursing my coffee.
‘Wait.’ Mayer raised his hands over the tumult. ‘All right. Okay, shut up.’
The noise finally abated, and Mayer continued. ‘Now listen. Whether you like it or not, this is going to happen. It’s going to mean some changes around here. There’s also talk of a curfew—’
The level of noise rose abruptly once more. I glanced at Selwyn, red faced and shouting his anger almost as loudly as everyone else combined.
‘—but it’s not very likely things will get that far,’ Mayer screamed over the din, ‘as long as you all fucking cooperate!’
‘Casey is right,’ said Rozalia, stepping forward and confronting Mayer with folded arms. ‘I can’t imagine anything more cynical and underhand than what Greenbrooke is doing. If I didn’t like him before, I like him even less now.’
‘Well,’ said Mayer, ‘if Mort Bramnik hadn’t intervened personally, things would be a lot worse than they already are, believe me.’ He looked around us all. ‘There’d already be an island-wide lockdown and a permanent curfew, and not just for the duration of the investigation. My advice is, let the agents do their jobs, and then we can get back to normal faster.’
‘And what if they decide they want to talk to us?’ asked Casey, stepping up beside Rozalia. ‘There isn’t any one of us who doesn’t know what those fucking assholes did to Wallace.’ I glanced over, seeing Wallace sitting quietly in one corner, his face expressionless as he rolled a glass of whisky betwen his hands. ‘Is that the kind of treatment we can expect?’
‘We’re going to monitor the entire process of the investigation,’ said Mayer, before the level of noise could rise again. ‘If any of you do get interviewed, I’ll be in the room with you at all times. That’s my promise.’
‘What’s going on, Kip?’ Rozalia demanded. ‘Why is Mort sending you down here to talk to us, instead of coming here himself?’
‘Yeah,’ said Casey. ‘He’s hardly been seen in weeks, but Greenbrooke seems to be around all the damn time. People are going to start wondering if Bramnik’s ever coming back.’
‘He’s back home right now,’ Mayer explained, ‘on our own alternate, and taking care of business the same as always. Believe me, nothing’s changed, and nothing is going to change.’
‘Fuck this,’ said Casey, stalking past Mayer and towards the door. He paused there and looked back at the rest of us. ‘All this is total horse shit. There’s some underhan
d stuff going on here they’re not telling us about – some cloak-and-dagger crap back wherever the hell it is the Authority come from.’ He pointed his finger at Mayer. ‘So you listen to me. Any one of those sons of bitches comes anywhere near me, and I swear I’ll kill them first.’
‘If the Patriots want to talk to you, Casey,’ said Mayer, his voice level, ‘you’re going to cooperate, just the same as the rest of us.’
Casey stared at him, then took a couple of lumbering steps back towards Mayer, towering over the smaller man. ‘Tell you what,’ said Casey. ‘When you go running back to your bosses, make it clear there’s only so far you can push us before we start to push back. Got that?’
‘Damn right,’ I heard someone say. It sounded like Randall.
Casey turned on his heel, pushing at the door on his way out with sufficient force that it slammed against the wall with a loud bang.
‘He’s right,’ said Selwyn, getting up from his own seat. ‘We’re getting treated more and more like prisoners, Mr Mayer. For those that have been here the longest, our retirement dates have been pushed back so much we’re starting to wonder if it’s ever going to come, and that’s not to mention the increased risks we’re facing on every new mission. Asking us to submit to random interrogations and be happy about it is a step too far, I think.’
I watched as he left, somewhat less dramatically than Casey had. Yuichi soon followed suit, his expression sullen, although he clapped me on the shoulder as he passed me by.
Mayer looked around the rest of us. ‘It’s in your best interests to keep Casey in check while all this is going on,’ he said. ‘Believe me.’
He looked as if he was trying to think of something else to say, then simply shook his head and exited without another word.
I didn’t see any reason to leave until I’d finished my coffee, and the few others remaining didn’t look to be in a hurry to leave either. After a minute, people drifted outside to the pool area, and I heard the low murmur of conversation.