EDEN

by Dean Crawford

  Sawyer peered sideways at Cody as he paced up and down. ‘Really, doctor? And what would you, the great and the wise scientist, have me do?’

  ‘Work with people, not against them,’ Cody urged. ‘Oppression has always led to discontent and rebellion. Your prisoners will rise up against you sooner or later.’

  ‘Let them,’ Sawyer shrugged. ‘They’ll be replaced.’

  ‘You’re not that kind of man.’

  ‘And how, exactly, would you know that?’ Sawyer asked.

  ‘You’re no killer. You’ve got this little army around you but you’re as human as the rest of us.’

  ‘You doubt my motivation?’ Sawyer asked.

  Cody swallowed thickly. ‘This isn’t about doubt, motivation or anything else. If we don’t all cooperate then no matter how much power you have right now all of it will be for nothing. History shows us that oppressed people will always fight back and will eventually always overcome their oppressors.’

  ‘Is that so?’ Sawyer uttered.

  ‘There’s a saying,’ Cody replied. ‘Those who fail to learn the lessons of history are forced to relive them.’

  Sawyer inclined his head and nodded as he raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Then I hope that you’ll learn this lesson of history.’

  Sawyer turned and fired a single shot that thundered out across the amphitheatre.

  Blood spilled from Bradley Trent’s chest and a fine spray of blood and tissue burst from his back as the bullet passed through and he collapsed.

  ‘No!’

  Charlotte’s shriek was almost as loud as the gunshot as she threw herself down beside Bradley. It took only a single glance at the soldier’s blank expression to know that he had died instantly.

  ***

  29

  Charlotte wrapped her arms around Bradley’s body and buried her face against his neck as Cody gaped at Sawyer in disbelief. Sauri stood immobile, his dark eyes fixed upon their psychotic gaoler. Sawyer reached across and yanked Cody forward, jammed the pistol up against his jaw as he raged into Cody’s face.

  ‘You think I can’t tell the difference between scientists and soldiers, Mister Genius? You think me a fool? Now, about this Eden you mentioned?’

  Cody swivelled his eyes to look down at Bradley’s body, still unable to process the fact that the soldier was gone. In a blink of an eye the man who had featured so heavily in their lives had been extinguished like a candle flame pinched between the fingers of an uncaring psychopath.

  Cody turned back to Sawyer, flushed with an unexpected zeal of his own. ‘Bite me.’

  Sawyer grinned. ‘Not today, but soon.’

  Sawyer gestured to his men as he shoved Cody away. ‘Put them in the cages. They’re on work detail for the morning.’

  The guards grabbed them and shoved them towards the nearest of the cages. Bethany struggled to keep up with Cody as he walked, shrugging off the big hands of the militia guiding them. Behind, he heard Charlotte sobbing as she was dragged off Bradley’s body.

  The guard in front of Cody reached up and unlocked a heavy padlock that sealed the handle of a cage shut. The ragged prisoners incarcerated within barely looked up as the cage door was rolled open to the sound of metal on metal. Cody was pushed inside along with Bethany and Jake and the door slammed shut behind them. Sauri was shoved into a cage to their right.

  Cody turned and saw Hank and Charlotte propelled into a cage further down the line, the heavy door slamming shut and echoing around the amphitheatre as the guards stalked away. Charlotte collapsed onto her knees on the metal floor of the cage, bowing her head and shielding her face with her hands. Hank looked down at her in silence and then turned away to survey their surroundings.

  The prisoners in the cages made no effort to communicate with the new arrivals, instead avoiding eye contact as they recoiled away from them and huddled against the bars of the cage.

  ‘This is what I was afraid of,’ Hank Mears uttered across to them. ‘Now we’re stuck here.’

  ‘Sawyer’s a psychopath,’ Jake said to Cody. ‘I don’t think he’s kidding when he says they’ll eat us.’

  ‘Jesus,’ Cody uttered, rubbing his temples with his finger and thumb as he whispered out to Hank. ‘Any chance that Taylor and the crew will attempt a rescue?’

  Hank shook his head. ‘They’ll run at the first chance they get if Saunders can’t hold them. Nothing here for them and with me cooped up there’s not much to stop them from taking the ship wherever they want to go.’

  Cody nodded, unwilling to think about how quickly their plan to leave Boston had been scuppered by Sawyer’s militia. He caught the gaze of other prisoners trapped in the cages, watching him with defeated eyes. Many slept, presumably exhausted from their labours out on Boston Common. Each prisoner had a bowl alongside them, picked clean of whatever had been within. From the smell, Cody guessed some kind of potatoes and maybe small amounts of chicken. Sawyer’s men might have managed to capture a few domesticated fowl before they became extinct in the wake of mankind’s fall.

  ‘We shouldn’t have come here,’ Sauri said softly. ‘We’ve gained nothing and lost much.’

  ‘Sawyer thinks that Eden exists too,’ Cody replied. ‘We’ve got to figure out a way of getting him onside long enough to get out of here.’

  Hank Mears called across. ‘That radio message you intercepted would be a damned good start.’

  Cody nodded and saw Charlotte look up at him, her cheeks smeared with tears as she launched herself across the cage to bang against the bars.

  ‘You bastard!’ she screamed. ‘You killed Brad! You killed him!’

  ‘Sawyer killed Brad,’ Jake snapped at her. ‘Not us. Not any of us.’

  ‘The message,’ Hank snapped at Cody. ‘What did it say?’

  ‘There was a code.’

  ‘What kind of code?’ Jake asked. His expression was crestfallen, as though the one person he could trust had let him down. Which, Cody realised, he kind of had.

  ‘Morse,’ Cody said, still unable to bring himself to reveal everything, ‘maybe a cypher code or something.’

  A cypher code was a simple means of concealing a message by using alternative figures to represent established alphabetical letters. Done two or three times, even the most complex computers could struggle with the cypher, especially if the cypher-key was based on something truly random. Cody had once based a cypher code for his credit card PIN on the number of birds that flew within fifty yards of his house in a ten minute period.

  ‘You didn’t hear anybody speaking?’ Sauri asked.

  Cody exhaled. ‘Briefly,’ he admitted, ‘a man.’

  Charlotte’s rage faltered as she digested what he had said. ‘An old man?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Cody said. ‘It was a weak transmission.’

  Charlotte’s expression collapsed into something between regret and disgust.

  ‘My father might have sent me a message and you knew about it!’ she raged. ‘You knew about it and you never said a word. We could have sailed past Boston! This never needed to happen!’

  ‘I didn’t know that your father might have the means to be looking for you any more than you did,’ Cody shot back at her. ‘It meant nothing at the time, except that maybe somewhere there were people who had survived.’

  ‘Why hide it at all?’ Jake asked.

  ‘We couldn’t trust Hank’s crew with the knowledge,’ Cody replied. ‘We’d have never got this far. And you wanted to find your father just as much as I wanted to find my family.’

  ‘If I’d known about the damned message I wouldn’t have come here!’ Charlotte snapped. ‘None of us would have come here!’

  ‘Bethany would,’ Cody said in reply. ‘Her brother’s here.’

  Bethany’s head dropped at the mention of her younger brother.

  ‘Whatever the purpose of the message,’ Hank said, ‘the person who sent it must have had electrical power to do so.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Cody agreed as
he glanced at the other prisoners, ‘and we need to keep this to ourselves. It could be our only leverage.’

  ‘Not entirely,’ Sauri said. ‘Charlotte’s father might have sent the message, and she’s here. If Sawyer knows about it then she’s safe.’

  ‘Not necessarily,’ Cody replied. ‘And it means nothing if we’re all dead. We need to find a way to use the information to get us all the hell out of here. We need to stick together.’

  ‘This your idea of sticking together?’ Sauri uttered. ‘You got Bradley killed.’

  ‘No he didn’t,’ Jake snapped. ‘Sawyer killed Bradley because he was the most likely threat, a trained soldier. It removed the potential for rebellion, or so Sawyer probably believes. The rest of us he thinks are just scientists.’

  ‘Regardless,’ Hank replied. ‘I’ll do the damned talking from now on, unless anybody’s got any complaints?’

  Nobody spoke.

  ‘Jesus,’ Cody uttered in exasperation. ‘We need to work together. What’s to stop you from negotiating your own release?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Hank replied. ‘Except that Sawyer will believe what I say because he’ll assume I’m loyal to all of you. You’re his leverage over me, and we’ll let him keep thinking that.’

  Cody shook his head and looked away from the captain. He cast his gaze out of the side of the cage to the one alongside it. Faces looked back at him, scoured of emotion, eyes glazed with the haze of the defeated.

  The shambling, bedraggled mass of prisoners shifted slightly as something moved amongst them. Cody’s gaze drifted down between them as a small hand shoved bodies aside and a pair of big brown eyes peered cautiously between pairs of dirty jeans and grubby sleeves.

  Cody experienced a transient blurring of his vision as he saw the small face look out at him. Soft skin was marred by dirt, the eyes haunted by confusion and fear, but the blonde hair curling down to the shoulders sent a pulse of disbelief racing like a freight train through Cody’s heart. He felt the earth shift beneath his feet, felt his balance fail him as the child pushed through the crowd and a tiny smile flickered in recognition.

  His breath fell from his lips as though torn from within him as the little girl reached out and touched the bars of the cage, her gaze fixed upon his from just a few feet away. Cody fell into the bars of his cage as tears spilled from his eyes and he slid down onto his knees.

  ‘Maria.’

  Suddenly every moment of his suffering was lost into a maelstrom of joy that felt like grief as Cody saw his little girl standing before him, too far to reach and yet now so close. Her voice was tiny as she spoke.

  ‘Dadda?’

  Cody pressed his face against the bars of the cell as though he could push through them by sheer force of will as he cried openly, not caring who witnessed it. He reached out, stretched his hand as far as he could toward Maria, but she was too far away.

  Hands grabbed his shoulders and yanked Cody away from the bars. Cody shouted out, but a hand clamped over his mouth as Jake whispered into his ear.

  ‘Don’t let them see you! They’ll use her against us!’

  Maria’s face collapsed into confusion and grief. Jake released him immediately as Cody gathered his wildly flying emotions and saw the faces of the other prisoners in the cage with Maria looking at them both.

  ‘It’s okay,’ Cody whispered across to Maria, forcing a smile through his tears. ‘It’s okay, everything’s okay.’

  ‘Daddy?’ she asked. ‘Where’s mom?’

  Cody felt his throat constrict and his hands were shaking as he replied. ‘I don’t know.’

  Maria watched him with interest as Sauri moved protectively alongside her. Cody stared at them both for a long moment and then turned to whisper to Hank in his cage.

  ‘You sure you can get Sawyer on-side, with us?’

  Hank nodded. ‘Only way we’re getting out of here is with his blessing. We need to convince him that we’re too valuable to let go. We get back to the Phoenix, sail, and then toss Sawyer overboard.’

  ‘What about my brother?’ Bethany asked. ‘He might be here in Boston too.’

  ‘That’s a long shot,’ Jake said to her. ‘Cody finding Maria was probably a one in a thousand chance.’

  ‘But he did,’ Bethany said. ‘I can’t just leave without trying.’

  ‘He could be in the country by now,’ Hank insisted. ‘Cody’s daughter’s probably here because she was too young to run far. Lucky she’s still alive, got people caring for her.’

  ‘My brother’s seven years old,’ Bethany said.

  ‘Sawyer’s men don’t appear to have eaten any children,’ Charlotte pointed out, ‘or women. Maybe Beth’s right.’

  Hank shook his head.

  ‘You’ve all got to make a choice,’ he warned Bethany. ‘You’re either leaving or staying because we can’t do this piecemeal. One way or the other, my ship is going to sail out of this hellhole and it’s not coming back. I intend to be aboard, and anybody who isn’t there when we weigh anchor is stuck here for good. Make your choice.’

  Hank turned away from them and walked to the bars of his cage. He thumped them with one hand and caught the attention of one of the guards.

  ‘I need to speak to Sawyer,’ he said. ‘He’ll be real interested in what I have to say to him.’

  The guard looked at Hank for a moment as though considering whether to ignore him, but then thought better of it and stalked away.

  ***

  30

  ‘Something’s gone wrong.’

  Saunders stood by the Phoenix’s stern rail and looked out across the channel to the city skyline. The deserted skyscrapers and city blocks were cast in sharp silhouette against the fiery sunset washing across the horizon, mankind’s harsh and angular architecture clashing with the elegant freehand strokes of creation that spanned the skies.

  ‘Maybe they decided to stay overnight in the city,’ Reece suggested.

  ‘I doubt it,’ Saunders said as he lowered his binoculars and packed them away. ‘It’s likely cold, dark and uncomfortable wherever they go. They’d have signalled if there was a change of plan.’

  ‘So what do we do?’ Reece asked.

  Saunders turned from the rail. ‘We wait, and we keep a permanent watch up just in case.’

  As they turned they saw the crew watching them silently from the main deck, shadows amongst the shadows, dark expressions haunting their features. Muir, Ice and the others hovered like vultures near a kill.

  ‘I don’t like this,’ Reece whispered. ‘We’re outnumbered.’

  Saunders grinned. ‘Only by hands. We’ve got the bullets, remember?’

  Reece looked down at the crew, who refused to meet his eye as they lingered in the lengthening shadows.

  ‘Who keeps watch when we’re sleeping?’ Reece asked him as he swiped his black hair away from his eyes.

  Saunders’ grin slipped a little. ‘I’ll skip sleep for tonight, until the captain gets back. ‘Kay?’

  The first mate made his way over to the wheelhouse, Reece staying close by as Saunders kicked a chair into position behind the wheel and eased himself into it. He hefted his shotgun into place, resting it between the handles of the wheel to point down the ship.

  ‘Believe me, son, there ain’t nobody coming at us from here. Now, go into the wheelhouse and get everything ready, just like I said. If the men decide they’re going to try to leave port we need control of the wheel to stop them.’

  Reece nodded. ‘Barricade, right?’

  ‘Damned right,’ Saunders nodded. ‘That’s where we’ll stand until the captain comes back, okay?’

  Reece nodded and walked back into the wheelhouse, shutting the door behind him as he began dragging heavy boxes alongside the door and on top of the hatch to the ‘tween decks before it got dark, praying with every step that they would not have to defend them.

  *

  Taylor rowed the launch silently through the silky black water, Seth matching his smooth pulls and watching o
ver his shoulder as the Phoenix loomed large before them. In the darkness, Seth could only pick the ship out when her masts eclipsed the stars in the night sky.

  The skyline of Boston was as black as the sky above. Even now it seemed odd to know that the vast city lay so close by in utter silence and desolation. Once, bright street lights would have flickered in reflection across the waters of the channel, thousands of office buildings glowing like a galaxy across the shoreline. To see it so dark unnerved Seth, as though he were floating alone in an immense and unpopulated universe.

  He had led Taylor out of the city as soon as he’d realised that Hank, Cody and the rest of the idiots they’d picked up in the Arctic were pinned down. Seth knew an opportunity when he saw it, just like he knew a lost cause. Chasing around for some mythical damned city would get them about as far as looking for goddamned Atlantis, and with Boston now the domain of the insanely dangerous or terminally infected he saw nothing useful to hang around for.

  The launch had been where they’d left it. Sure, they had been forced to wait out the sunset before rowing to the Phoenix, but in total darkness and silence their approach had gone unnoticed.

  ‘We’re almost there,’ Taylor said between heaves.

  ‘Keep your voice down,’ Seth whispered. ‘Sound travels further at night, especially across water.’

  The Phoenix was illuminated by a pair of faint lanterns hung from the stern, their dim light only visible from close proximity to the ship. Seth guessed that Saunders would not want to advertise the ship’s presence to anybody on shore in Boston after dark, a wise move as they had found out to their cost.

  The city was just as brutal a haven for thuggery and violence as Seth had feared, filled with sick citizens wandering in infected crowds and dangerous gangs preying upon them. The sooner they got out of here the better and to hell with Hank and his goddamned Eden.

  Taylor eased up as they approached the ship in silence, the boat slipping through the water without a sound as it drifted to the Phoenix’s bow. Taylor knew that the Phoenix was large enough that boarding her at the stern would be impossible, but beneath the schooner’s bowsprit was a series of looped rigging lines that provided a way up onto the deck.