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  The ship sailed onward, ever closer to the city, past the Maritime Park and the big piers and the state Court House until they reached the entrance to Fort Point Channel and Rowes Wharf. As the ship moved into the shelter of the city so the wind that had buffeted her for so many long weeks died down to a flurry of light flukes, and Cody felt the warmth of the morning sun beat down upon his skin.

  ‘Shorten sail!’

  Hank’s voice thundered across the decks in the sunlit silence as the small harbour came into view a couple of hundred yards away. There were no boats moored there.

  Under Hank’s guidance the crew swarmed over the rigging and hauled in the ship’s sails as the engine was started and Saunders began the delicate task of turning the schooner about.

  ‘We’ll anchor off shore and facing out of the harbour,’ Hank said as he joined Cody near the bow. ‘I’m not taking any chances that survivors might try to board us. At least we’ll get some warning from out here.’

  Cody frowned as he glanced at the wharf. ‘We’ll be lucky to find anybody.’

  ‘True, but we’ve also been lucky to get this far at all,’ Hank replied. ‘We’ll use the launch to get ashore.’

  Cody nodded. There was little point in risking the ship by mooring her directly alongside the city. ‘What about the crew?’

  ‘What about them?’

  ‘Who’s going ashore?’

  Hank thought for a moment. ‘I’ll leave Saunders in charge. The men won’t cross him, he’s too well liked.’

  ‘They out number him,’ Bethany pointed out.

  ‘Not when he’s armed.’ The captain looked at Charlotte. ‘Are you sure your father would have left you something here?’

  Charlotte nodded. ‘There’s no way he would have taken off without trying to warn me. Since my mom died he’s always been there for me.’

  Hank turned to help lower the ship’s launch as Cody scanned the city.

  Although with the pristine sunrise glinting on the tower blocks and the calm water it seemed at first glance that everything was normal, it was obvious to Cody that the city was dead. The silence, for one thing. The roar of airliners landing at the airport, the whisper of distant traffic in the city streets and the flashes of sunlight glinting off car windows as they cruised by were all gone. The windows of many larger buildings were vacant black holes where glass had been shattered, their walls stained with black smudges of fire damage. The masts of boats in the harbours were jumbled just like those at St John’s, and a column of grey smoke rose slowly up from somewhere in the city to mar the perfect sky.

  ‘If we’re lucky,’ Bradley said, ‘there’s nobody left alive.’

  ‘Speak for yourself,’ Bethany snapped back at him.

  ‘We have no idea what’s waiting for us,’ Hank silenced them all. ‘So we go in armed, we move quietly, and if I say we’re leaving then we’re leaving. Too slow and you’ll become permanent residents here again, understood?’

  Cody nodded as the captain turned away and strode across to the wheelhouse.

  The warmth in the air meant that the deckhouse windows were open, Saunders manning the wheel as the crew hollered commands at him. The diesel engine chugged into life as the Phoenix began a slow and careful rotation in the water, her rudder at full port lock as she swung gently around until her stern faced the city.

  ‘Rudder amidships! Anchors away!’

  Saunders spun the wheel back as the crew dropped both bow and stern anchors into the rippling grey water. The chains rattled and crashed as the anchors sank deep into the harbour, and then suddenly the noise faded and echoed away into nothingness.

  ‘Secure!’

  The diesel engine cut out a few moments later and the ship fell eerily silent. Only the sound of water lapping against the hull and the occasional call of a seabird wheeling above them broke the silence. Cody looked out across the immense city looming over them as though silently beckoning them toward the doom suffered by so many countless souls.

  ‘It’s like a giant graveyard,’ Bethany whispered beside him.

  Saunders’ voice cut through the silence. ‘Stand by the winch!’

  The Phoenix had a single launch lashed to the forward deckhouse roof. Cody and Jake worked the manual winch, which lifted the launch off the ship and lowered it into the water alongside.

  The captain and Bradley appeared from below decks, each armed with a rifle and carrying several small-arms between them. Cody was surprised when the captain shoved a 9mm pistol into his hand.

  ‘You ever fired one of these before?’ Hank asked.

  ‘No,’ Cody replied, seeing a sudden vision of his late brother’s pistol.

  The captain explained the weapon and finished with a warning. ‘Fifteen rounds plus a spare clip. If, God forbid, you have to shoot then count down your rounds in your head. You don’t want to get caught out with no bullets and your back to a wall, okay?’

  ‘Got it,’ Cody replied with less confidence than he felt.

  The captain led the way down into the launch, followed by Jake, Bethany, Charlotte, Bradley and Sauri. Reece remained on board, but both Taylor and Seth climbed down the rope ladder into the launch alongside them. Cody noted that both men were armed with pistols much like his own, but figured that the captain wanted both men close by so that he could keep a watch on them.

  Taylor pushed the launch clear of the Phoenix’s hull and Seth yanked on the oars, his arms coated in a purple haze of tattoos that blended into each other in a demonic mess of knives, blood and skulls. The launch pulled away from the ship and turned for the shore.

  Cody sat at the prow and watched as the city loomed over them as they crossed the bay. The sun was up above the skyline now, the broken cirrus clouds above scattered across the pearlescent blue.

  Seth rowed the launch up to a triangular beach of golden sand nestled between the causeway and Harbour Walk. Cody saw Taylor nervously fingering the trigger of his pistol, his eyes searching the silent city for any sign of an impending attack.

  The launch eased in and slid onto the sandy beach as Cody jumped out. Bethany and Bradley leaped out with him and together they hauled the launch up onto the beach. A detritus of discarded plastic cups and bags, old bits of cardboard and other junk littered the beach and floated near the water’s edge.

  ‘We’ll have to cross the city to get to the state house,’ Charlotte said, her voice sounding oddly loud. ‘That’s where my father’s offices were.’

  ‘What about the family home?’ Cody asked her.

  ‘St Elizabeth’s.’

  ‘Good,’ Cody replied. ‘That’s less than a mile from Oak Square. Two birds, one stone.’

  ‘What’s in Oak Square?’ Taylor asked.

  ‘My daughter,’ Cody replied and turned to face the sailor. ‘Got a problem with that?’

  The big man appeared momentarily surprised by Cody’s attitude and blinked slowly. ‘No.’

  ‘What’s the plan?’ Cody asked Hank.

  The captain checked his rifle and set the safety catch.

  ‘We stay together as a group,’ he replied. ‘I don’t want to risk us losing each other out here or coming under attack from who knows what. We find the senator’s home and office, check them out. If we have time, you get to visit home too. Then we’re gone, understood?’

  Cody turned and led the way up the beach. There was no way in hell he was leaving without checking out his home.

  The beach opened up onto a boulevard and residential streets lined with apartments. In the warm spring sunlight everything again seemed normal at first glance, but Cody was struck by the change that had occurred so rapidly in the nine months since he had last set foot in the city.

  The once pristine asphalt roads were already smothered with a thin network of mosses that had taken hold. A winter of fearsome nor’-easters, the storms that frequently battered the eastern seaboard, plus frosts, snow and a lack of use had cracked the road surfaces and nature had taken its course, roots and weeds thriving.<
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  ‘The city’s already being reclaimed,’ Bethany said as they walked, ‘seems fast though.’

  Cody realised why when he smelled a foul odour staining the air, drifting out of the myriad streets as though the city were exhaling its last rotten breaths.

  Sewage lined the sidewalks. With pumping stations out of commission and unchecked storm surges flooding the city, raw human effluent had spilled through the streets and amassed near blocked drains. Now, with the spring thaw, the streets had been effectively filled with biological nutrients in which foliage was already taking hold.

  Cody looked up and saw that many of the apartment buildings and stores lining the boulevard were without windows, exposing the interiors to the brutal elements and hastening their inevitable decay. Thick beds of rotting leaves lined the sidewalks, litter gusting along the roads in the breeze as they walked. Cody experienced a deep sense of loss as he strode through the silence, at what once had been and what he saw now. All of the innovation, all of the technology, all of the hopes and dreams and futures of countless souls eradicated in a single and unstoppable act of nature on one terrible night. The silence clung to them and enveloped the city in its lonely embrace. Cody realised that he could hear no songbirds, and the shore was far enough behind them that he could not hear the water. He felt as though he were walking through a gigantic, abandoned model.

  The team behind him were likewise silent, eyes scanning the vacant buildings and abandoned homes. Some were capped with roofs burned to cinders, jagged strakes of blackened timber striking up into the flawless blue sky, towers of soot-stained brick and peeling paintwork.

  ‘It’s like we’ve been gone for years,’ Bethany said.

  ‘Weather’s gotten into many of the buildings,’ Jake confirmed. ‘Nothing much is going to survive a few Boston winters.’

  They walked through the residential area and out into south Boston’s Broadway. Cody saw an American flag hanging limp from a pole outside a large bank. It had been left at half-mast, perhaps by the staff who had once worked inside. The portico frontage still stood proud but the entrance doors were smashed, glass still littering the steps.

  ‘There’s nobody here,’ Bradley said. ‘This was a big city.’

  The captain replied as they walked, his rifle carried at port-arms and ready for the slightest hint of danger.

  ‘It happened real fast,’ he said. ‘Here in Boston it was real cloudy when the Great Darkness came so unless people heard about the solar storm on the television they wouldn’t have known much about it. They’d have gone to bed believing all to be well, and woken up in the morning to the beginning of the end. I’d bet that some people died never knowing what caused all of this in the first place.’

  Cody had never before considered how abrupt and complete the end had been when it had finally arrived. He thought of all the Hollywood movies he had seen as a child, with their huge asteroids, deadly plagues and warmongering aliens. Yet when the real end had come it had been silent and even beautiful. He recalled the vibrant, bright aurora above the Arctic Circle, a shimmering veil of colour that had concealed the deadly particles of energy raining down through the atmosphere to swamp electrical grids around the world.

  A sudden line entered his mind as he walked.

  ‘Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth,’ he said.

  ‘What’s that now?’ Bradley murmured.

  ‘Matthew, five-five,’ Hank replied. ‘What’s your point?’

  ‘The storm took out technology,’ Cody said. ‘But there are millions of people around the world who don’t own even a kettle. They may have been unaffected by what’s happened, may not even know that the rest of the world has fallen.’

  ‘Those with nothing will have had nothing to lose,’ the captain agreed.

  ‘The hell with that,’ Bradley uttered. ‘You all want to go back to living in huts made of dried dung and eating bugs for a living, that’s your call. I want MTV and my goddamned car back. Speaking of which, why the hell are we walking? Couldn’t we grab a working vehicle or just sail the launch round into the Charleston?’

  ‘They don’t work, dumbass, that’s the whole point and anyway we don’t know who’s watching,’ Hank replied. ‘It’s easier to keep a low profile if we stay on foot.’

  ‘Harder to get away, too.’

  The streets were littered with vehicles, abandoned when they had run out of gas or their circuits had fried during the solar storm. Massachusetts Avenue was packed with silent, empty cars left nose to tail with their doors open. Cody could envisage the mass exodus from the city, the jammed streets and panicked citizens seeking to flee the looting and the starvation. He blinked away images of screaming, hungry children and deadly conflict between warring families, unable to bear the hollow fear deep in his guts as he thought of Maria.

  As he turned north onto a street dominated by a large cathedral, Cody slowed as he saw bodies strewn across the road ahead amid the debris. Flocks of birds fluttered as they swarmed across the bodies and a couple of feral dogs looked up as Cody appeared, their jaws drooling with meat.

  The team stopped behind Cody.

  ‘They’re all dead, guys,’ Bradley uttered. ‘What are we waiting for?’

  ‘Disease,’ Bethany said, and looked at Cody. ‘Will you help me? We need to check them out, see what happened.’

  ‘Seriously?’ Cody asked. ‘Can’t we just go around?’

  ‘We need to know what we’re dealing with here,’ Bethany insisted. ‘If we’re hunting around for supplies we may pick up illnesses ourselves. The more I know, the better I can treat us if we get infected.’

  ***

  25

  ‘Wait here,’ Bethany said.

  The team obeyed as Bethany donned gloves and a mask, handing an identical set for Cody to wear before they strode toward the nearest corpse, an African-American woman lying on her back.

  ‘The dogs,’ Cody cautioned her. ‘They’ve been eating the dead bodies.’

  Bethany hesitated as she looked at the animals. Both were mangy, their fur matted and their eyes glowing with the strange light of true wild animals. Both were also large, powerful animals. Cody recalled that all so-called toy-dogs were the result of mankind influencing evolution, selective breeding creating novel forms of animal that had no ability to survive in a natural environment. All dogs had ultimately evolved from wolves, and only those with the size and strength to dominate like a wolf could live in a world devoid of humans. He knew that all small dogs would have died of starvation or predation shortly after the Great Darkness and that in a similar time frame all other dogs would have become feral and developed pack structures, completely eradicating thousands of years of domestication in a matter of weeks.

  Bethany stepped back as the two dogs growled, saliva drooling from their jaws as they bared their fangs, their heads lowering as they turned to face the intruders.

  ‘They see us as prey,’ Cody whispered. ‘Back up, real slow.’

  Before anybody could stop him, Bradley aimed his pistol and fired a single shot.

  The report cracked out like thunder and echoed away across the city. One of the dogs shuddered and dropped as though its legs had been whipped from beneath it as the other whirled and fled down the street. The birds took off in an enormous clatter of wing beats as they climbed up into the blue sky above.

  ‘You idiot!’ Charlotte slapped Bradley hard across the shoulder. ‘You want everybody to know where we are?’

  ‘There’s nobody here,’ Bradley replied without concern.

  Hank turned and glared at the soldier. ‘You screw up like that again I’ll put the next bullet between your eyes. Understood?’

  Bradley held the captain’s gaze without fear, but he did not retaliate.

  Cody turned back to the dozens of bodies before them, strewn across the street like discarded dolls. Bethany approached the woman's corpse.

  Even from ten yards away Cody could see that her eyes had been pecked out by bird
s and that her belly, once swollen with internal gases, had ripped open as cleanly as though sliced with a surgical knife. The decayed innards swarmed with maggots, a cloud of flies buzzing like smoke on the air above her, but the woman’s skin was slack and her bones protruded through some parts of her limbs and chest. Cody stayed a few yards back from the corpse.

  ‘Any ideas?’ he asked.

  Bethany briefly examined the corpse and then stood up. ‘Cholera again,’ she said, ‘probably been here a few months. The cold of winter slowed the decay.’

  ‘Lovely,’ Cody replied, looking further up the street and keeping thoughts of Maria out of his mind. ‘Same for the rest of them?’

  ‘Hard to be absolutely sure,’ Bethany admitted as she moved from body to body, ‘but they all have a classic symptom called washer-woman’s hands, caused by massive dehydration. My guess is that the cathedral was used as a hostel, infected water was drunk and the pandemic spread.’ She looked at Cody. ‘Which means that they had no useful medicines or antibiotics here.’

  ‘The area’s already stripped clean,’ Cody replied, ‘probably right after the storm.’

  ‘This is why things deteriorated so fast,’ Bethany said as she gestured to the corpses behind her. ‘People didn’t know the simple basics of water treatment when they couldn’t get it out of a tap or bottle. All they had to do was boil their water for ten minutes and it would have been fine.’

  ‘Maybe they couldn’t,’ Cody said. ‘Plenty of trees lining the streets but none have been stripped of their branches.’

  ‘Which means people were already too far gone when supplies ran out,’ Bethany said. ‘Too much panic, not enough thought.’

  Cody looked at another body near the cathedral steps. The corpse seemed fresher than the others. He walked across to it and looked down.

  A man who had died somewhere in his twenties. Painfully emaciated, wearing several jumpers, two pairs of pants and a hat, presumably to keep warm. Despite the rigours he had endured Cody could tell that he had not lain long outside the cathedral. One of his eyes was still in its socket, not yet attacked by the birds.