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  ‘There was no warning?’ Jake asked. ‘Nothing at all?’

  ‘Toward the end some people got wise to it,’ Hank replied. ‘We heard some radio stations trying to warn people about the storm but I guess most people were standing outside looking up at the sky, not listening to radios. Countries on the other side of the world, in daylight, probably didn’t see a damned thing. The power went out and that was it.’

  ‘It doesn’t make sense,’ Reece said, slurring slightly. ‘How the hell could something like this tear the world apart so quickly?’

  Hank set his glass down.

  ‘That, my young friend, is due to there being too many people being too damned stupid, including my business partners. We docked the following morning and they all tore off for their homes and families. At that point things weren’t too bad. People just figured that the power would come back on and hey, we’d all be okay again. But as time wore on without information because there was no television, no news, no communication, people instinctively wanted to run to their families.’

  Cody saw an image of Maria and Danielle, struggling to contact friends, family, anybody they could for help.

  ‘Doesn’t sound so stupid,’ he said out loud.

  ‘It is,’ Hank smiled coldly, ‘if you’re prone to thinking. Tens of thousands of people rushing into and out of cities, crossing states and burning fuel that can’t be replaced because the pumps in gas stations don’t work without power. Before you know it people are scattered everywhere, running about like headless chickens. While they’re doing that, the criminals are having a field day looting whatever they can find.’

  ‘That fast?’ Charlotte uttered.

  ‘Within an hour of the power going down,’ Hank nodded. ‘The police had no ability to coordinate or communicate. They were powerless to prevent it. Once the looting had started and people realised that there was something seriously wrong they started hitting the convenience stores. Markets ran out of everything within a day or so. Nobody paid for anything of course, they just took it. Then other people wanted what had already been taken, and that’s when the riots and the violence really got started.’

  Cody leaned back in his chair, his belly full for the first time in three months, and stared at the plate before him. Finding food for a small group, even up here in the Arctic, was a feasible proposition. But in a major city of ten million or more, once the supermarkets emptied there was simply no way that the people could feed themselves and no natural resource for them to fall back on.

  ‘What about water?’ Reece asked. ‘I thought that people could survive for weeks as long as they had water.’

  ‘No water pressure,’ Jake answered for the captain. ‘With no power stations there’s no energy to get the water to everyone. It was probably the first thing to go after the lights went out.’

  Hank nodded.

  ‘Water first, then the food, then the gas,’ he confirmed. ‘Within a week people were starting to fall sick with dehydration and starvation. They started forming groups, mostly young hoods who would raid people’s homes for what little they had left. Home owners would shoot back in defence of their kids. Before the end of the second week there were dead bodies everywhere and cities started to burn as those with supplies were deliberately smoked out by those who had none.’

  ‘Then the population fled for the countryside,’ Jake guessed. ‘Looking for food and water?’

  ‘Exactly,’ Hank nodded. ‘Forget what you’ve seen on television dramas and at the movies: once the power was gone on such a large scale there was no way for it to ever be repaired, for the power stations and drainage systems to ever recover. The collapse was brutal in ways I can’t even begin to describe, and even as millions of people streamed in an exodus from San Diego with gangs of armed thugs cutting them down for food, the Diablo Canyon and San Onofre nuclear plants imploded. Both used pumped sea water to cool the reactors, but with no power to do so the pumps underwent an automatic shutdown as soon as the back-up diesel generators ran out of fuel. A few days later the cooling tanks overheated and blasted radioactive waste all over the damned place and straight into the water table. You don’t want to think about what that did to people in a state where water was already scarce.’

  A momentary silence descended once more as Cody imagined the horror of an orderly, stable society crumbling and breaking down in a matter of days only to be poisoned by its own devices.

  ‘What about the military?’ he asked. ‘Where the hell were they?’

  ‘That,’ Hank replied, ‘is what we were asking ourselves.’

  ***

  17

  ‘Didn’t the government instigate martial law?’ Charlotte asked. ‘Deploy the National Guard or something?’

  The cabin creaked as the Phoenix rocked gently on the water in the cove, probably on swells created by an iceberg passing silently by outside.

  ‘The military collapsed within days of the storm,’ Hank replied. ‘Most bases held out for a few days without power, but as the chain of command fell apart rations dwindled and staff began to worry about their own families, so they dispersed into the population. I can only imagine that senior officers, cut off from communications and unable to get orders from on high, realised that the game was up and abandoned their posts. I can’t speak for other countries but in America there was no apparent military response to the disaster.’

  Hank drained his glass as Charlotte shook her head.

  ‘But the military forces at Alert abandoned the base before the solar storm,’ she said.

  Captain Mears froze in motion as his cold eyes locked onto Charlotte’s. He set his glass down.

  ‘So I heard.’

  ‘They left us here,’ Reece uttered, ‘even their own like Sauri.’

  Hank looked at Sauri, who said nothing but nodded once in confirmation.

  ‘How long before the storm did they leave?’ Hank asked Jake. ‘Could they have been doing something else perhaps?’

  Jake shrugged.

  ‘Possibly, but Alert is a highly sensitive listening post with all kinds of classified equipment and they just abandoned it in a real hurry. My guess is that they either got some kind of warning of the storm or they independently realised what was coming and got the hell out while they could. The fact they just left us here I don’t think was malice on their part — they just didn’t have enough time to come out and gather us all.’

  Hank appeared to consider this for a moment.

  ‘What about the people back home?’ Bethany asked him. ‘What happened after the military collapsed?’

  Hank shrugged as though the future had been a forgone conclusion.

  ‘The winter set in real harsh, especially on the east coast. Without maintenance to major infrastructure most of the bigger cities began to flood during storm swells as the drainage failed. Those that didn’t burned as stale gas burst from pipes or was deliberately ignited by people seeking warmth and shelter. Disease hit pretty fast too, things like cholera and typhoid, while pneumonia and influenza became overnight killers without antibiotics to treat them.’

  Hank twirled his empty wine glass in one big hand as he spoke.

  ‘Most of the hospitals got cleaned out when people really began to understand just how bad things were. There were riots for medicine just like there had been for food and water. It was about then that most people abandoned the cities for the countryside. Even those that survived the initial collapse and made it into the countryside died soon after.’

  ‘How come?’ Charlotte asked.

  Hank shrugged.

  ‘Hard to tell, but most people who own a gun can’t shoot for shit,’ he said. ‘And animals have a habit of wanting to survive, just like humans. Plus a lot of city folk don’t have a clue about how to gut animals, skin them, cook them and so on, or about how to clean water. Most just drink from rivers and streams thinking it’s somehow natural and clean. God knows how many died from diseases brought on by eating uncooked food or swallowing who-knows-wh
at horrible parasite from an unseen corpse lying in the water upstream, but I can tell you this: it’s as quiet now in the hills as it is in the cities.’

  Cody leaned forward on the table. ‘You’ve been ashore? Where?’

  ‘Baltimore,’ Hank replied, ‘where I’m from. When my colleagues split in San Diego I had nobody to run the ship but the damned convicts. Most split to their families but several had nobody to run to. Fortunately they also had enough brains to realise that the biggest threat to their safety was the people around them in the cities. They stayed aboard, and we made foraging runs into the city for supplies before it got too dangerous. We pulled out into deeper water. Some people were trying to board us as we left.’

  ‘What happened to them?’ Bethany asked.

  Hank’s cold blue eyes burrowed into hers. ‘They failed the interview. I got out of San Diego with the skeleton crew we have now. Sailed down through Cape Horn because we couldn't pass the Panama Canal and then up through the Caribbean and along the east coast to Baltimore. A long voyage and we passed every major city along the way: Miami, Charleston, Norfolk, DC. All the same, smouldering and empty by the time we reached them. ‘

  ‘Boston?’ Cody asked.

  Hank shook his head. ‘We didn’t stop there but you could see the smoke from the city from twenty miles off the coast.’

  Cody felt his shoulders slump as he stared down at the table before him, a mental image of the smouldering remains of Boston hovering in his mind’s eye, strewn with the rotting bodies of countless emaciated or murdered citizens. Danielle and Maria among them.

  His fists clenched painfully as his fingernails dug deep into his palms and a scalding ball of acid lodged in his throat. Cody closed his eyes and tried to exterminate the vision from his mind, to replace it with Boston’s busy streets bathed in sunshine, sandy beaches and the blue waters of Cape Cod Bay. Maria’s cheerful giggling as he walked her along the shore, pointing at gulls and calling them birdies.

  He felt a hand resting on his fist. He opened his eyes to see Bethany watching him as Hank’s voice returned to his awareness.

  ‘… nothing much there and Baltimore was empty too. The few people left were wandering around like escapees from an asylum, driven mad by hunger, thirst and disease. We grabbed what little supplies we could and made a plan.’

  Jake looked up at the captain. ‘What kind of plan?’

  ‘The kind,’ Hank said, ‘that keeps people alive, keeps us from losing hope.’ He looked at all of them as he spoke. ‘You said it yourselves: the military pulled out of dodge before the storm, not because of it. Our space agency had satellites put up into orbit to do nothing other than look at the sun. Are any of you able to sit here and tell me that they didn’t know what was about to happen?’

  Cody stared at the captain for a long beat.

  ‘What the hell are you saying?’

  ‘What I’m saying,’ Hank replied, ‘is that they let this happen. They knew it was coming and they stood back and watched it.’

  ‘Who is they?’ Bethany asked.

  ‘Government,’ Hank shrugged, ‘people of power.’

  Jake’s jaw dropped. ‘Jesus, that’s a hell of a stretch.’

  ‘Is it?’ Hank’s eyes were fixed, probing each and every one of them in turn as he spoke. ‘In the hours before the storm it seems that every major politician in the western world was hurrying off to what was described as a foreign meeting. Every newspaper we found littering the streets spoke of their departure, but not one actually said where they were going.’

  The group sat in silence, but Cody was suddenly jolted by a vague memory that infiltrated his thoughts. Looking at the Internet in Alert, at the news of the President’s departure for a foreign affairs conference, joined by Canada’s Prime Minister who was heading overseas.

  ‘Why the hell would they do that?’ Reece wondered out loud. ‘What’s the good of being a leader if there’s nobody left to lead?’

  ‘What’s the good of leading a dying world?’ Hank challenged. ‘Population was growing out of control and resources were dwindling. Gas costs were hitting record highs as were those for oil which was fast running out. The whole of civilisation was heading toward a tipping point that could well have seen us collapse anyway. What if they saw a disaster coming and decided that a natural cull was preferable to any other alternatives on the table?’

  Jake frowned as he stared at his glass of wine. ‘That’s a risk I’m not sure that politicians would have the cojones to take.’

  Hank chuckled and leaned back in his chair.

  ‘Risk can be viewed from any number of perspectives. You and I see it as a matter of courage. A politician would see it as a matter of self-preservation. It would be an act of cowardice.’

  Cody saw Charlotte’s jaw clench as she looked at Jake and Hank.

  ‘Not all politicians are cowards,’ she hissed. ‘Some work hard for their people.’

  ‘I can’t think of any,’ Hank uttered.

  ‘My father,’ Charlotte snapped.

  Hank’s blue eyes swivelled to look at her. ‘Your father?’

  ‘Senator Larry Dennis, Ohio democrat,’ she snapped back. ‘He’s spent thirty years on the floor of the Capitol busting his cojones, as Jake describes them, for the benefit of people he will never meet so that you two can sit here and insult him.’

  Hank did not react to her tone, his voice level and calm.

  ‘When did you last hear from your father?’

  ‘Two days before the storm, via satellite link at Alert. He never mentioned a thing, and I know damned well that he would never have left me up there without trying to let me know what was happening.’ Charlotte kicked her chair away from the table and stood to leave. ‘You two can enjoy your little conspiracy theory as much as you like, but you forget that politicians are human beings with families too and no more likely to abandon them than you or I.’

  She whirled away and had taken two paces when the captain’s voice rumbled after her.

  ‘Miss Dennis.’

  There was something both commanding and conciliatory in his tone that brought Charlotte up short. She did not look back as the captain spoke.

  ‘I apologise,’ Hank said. ‘We’ve all witnessed a lot and sometimes our anger clouds our judgement. I merely find it hard to believe that nobody, anywhere on Earth, knew anything of the solar storm. Please, stay with us for a little longer.’

  Cody glanced at Charlotte. She sighed and turned back to her chair, the captain speaking as she retook it.

  ‘When we realised that even the biggest cities were lost, the crew and I decided that it was likely that people of power would have escaped, fled before the carnage and sought a refuge. It was our hope to find that same refuge and join them.’

  The possibility that men had indeed somehow managed to shelter from the fall of mankind in some nameless, distant but safe place appealed to Cody’s hopes as much as the next man’s. The fact that he had detected a distant, coherent radio signal from some far flung corner of the globe bolstered that thought. He looked at Captain Hank Mears and decided that now was not the right time to reveal the existence of the Morse Code message he had deciphered. He could not trust the captain or his crew, and if things turned ugly they would need a bargaining chip to survive.

  ‘We picked up a signal,’ Reece slurred. ‘Cody heard it.’

  Hank stared down the table at Cody. The rest of the team looked at him expectantly and for a moment Cody felt as though he were about to be interrogated.

  ‘At Alert,’ Cody said, ‘a faint signal. I couldn’t get a location on it and we could barely communicate the signal was so weak, but they heard me and I heard them.’

  He looked at Charlotte and wondered, briefly, if the signal might have been from her father.

  Hank leaned forward on the table. ‘Are you sure it was a communication and not an emergency broadcast of some kind?’

  ‘It was a communication,’ Cody confirmed. ‘Somebody’s out there.’ />
  Hank leaned back again. ‘Yes they are,’ he said, ‘and with equipment powerful enough to transmit without the aid of orbiting satellites.’

  ‘And where,’ Jake asked, ‘do you think that this mysterious refuge of theirs is located?’

  Hank smiled ruefully beneath his beard.

  ‘That’s the catch, isn’t it? We thought it was up here when we detected your beacons. It was in a location that might just be distant enough that other people wouldn’t reach it, the kind of place politicians might choose to hide. The base at Alert was on our charts so we triangulated the beacon’s source and set off from Baltimore in late winter hoping to catch the spring thaw north of the Arctic Circle. We anchored near Grise Fjord to wait out the worst of the weather before moving north again.’

  Charlotte shook her head in amazement.

  ‘You came all the way up here chasing a pipe dream?’

  ‘What else is there to do?’ Hank tossed her question back to her. ‘Mankind just became virtually extinct. There isn’t anything else for us now. All we can do is hope that people elsewhere had the same presence of mind to escape the disaster and that we can find them. The rest?’ Hank shrugged and down the rest of his wine. ‘That’s evolution for you, the survival of the fittest.’

  Cody spoke softly.

  ‘Darwin never said that. But you’re right that the only people who will make it out of this are those who are best adapted to survive.’

  ‘The toughest,’ Hank agreed, ‘those unwilling to compromise their survival by dragging the weak along with them.’

  Cody shook his head.