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  ‘Shot,’ Bethany said, ‘back of the head.’

  Cody saw the bloody exit wound of shattered bone and blood soaked hair.

  ‘He can’t have been here long,’ Cody pointed out. ‘The body’s in too good a shape.’

  ‘Less than a week,’ Bethany agreed. ‘Somebody was here, and they were armed.’

  Cody hurried back to the group as he tore off his gloves and mask and filled Hank in on what they had learned.

  ‘What about the others?’ the captain asked. ‘Any others shot?’

  ‘Much older remains of cholera victims,’ Bethany informed him. ‘There’s not much left of any of them.’

  Hank was about to reply when Bradley’s voice cut across him. ‘I see movement.’

  Bradley’s comment caused everybody to duck down and move into the shelter of the cathedral’s steps, keeping clear of the bodies nearby.

  ‘Where away?’ Hank demanded.

  ‘Far side of the intersection,’ Bradley replied.

  The broad streets ahead were bathed in sunlight, and as he watched Cody saw a bedraggled figure shuffle into view with a slow, awkward gait. Moments later more followed, their heads hanging low.

  ‘They look like zombies,’ Jake uttered.

  Cody frowned as he watched the shabby looking crowd slowly wander across the intersection. Their faces were dark with dirt, their hair falling past their shoulders and their ragged clothes hanging from their emaciated frames.

  ‘Must have heard the gunshot,’ Hank uttered as he cast a dirty look at Bradley. ‘We saw people like this in Baltimore, driven insane by sickness and thirst.’

  ‘Best we go around them,’ Jake said, ‘just in case.’

  ‘Just in case of what?’ Bradley asked, ‘just in case they’re flesh-eating monsters? Jesus Christ.’

  The soldier stood up and strode out into the street, put two fingers in his mouth and whistled loudly.

  ‘Brad, no!’ Charlotte hissed.

  The crowd of people stopped and slowly turned to look at Bradley. Then, they began shuffling toward him.

  ‘Hey,’ Bradley shouted at the crowd. ‘Any of you tell me where the nearest Dunkin’ Donuts is?’

  The crowd continued toward him, began stumbling as they attempted to run. Cody saw faces blank with exposure, shock and terminal illnesses. Eyes were sunken into bruised orbs, skeletal jaws and cheekbones protruded through paper-thin skin, tongues hung limp from cracked lips.

  Bradley’s jaunty expression slipped as the crowd began to rush him.

  ‘Get into cover!’ Jake shouted at the soldier.

  Bradley started to back up and raised his pistol. ‘You all back off now, y’hear!?’

  The crowd kept coming, a mournful wail swelling from their ranks as they rushed in a tumbling wave of pitiful desperation toward Bradley. Cody realised that in their extreme famine and sickness, the once ordinary citizens had deteriorated into a mindless mass of humanity blindly wandering the city streets.

  ‘Take them down!’ Hank yelled as he burst from cover.

  Bradley fired at the nearest of the onrushing crowd, a man whose beard reached to his chest and whose face was infected with deep lesions that weeped thin yellow pus down his cheeks. The shot hit him in the chest and propelled him backward into the crowd behind him, his collapsing body trampled in the rush. Others fell over him, tumbling to their knees, but the crowd kept coming as though poured from a bottle, flowing over the obstacles with blind instinct. Cody saw mouths devoid of teeth, infected lesions bloodied and decaying, greying skin and thin, straggly hair advancing in one awful mass of suffering humanity.

  The crowd let out a wail of anguish and fear at the sound of the gunshot, primeval reactions to danger, but like some unstoppable machine bent on self-destruction they continued toward Bradley even as Hank and Sauri opened fire, cutting them down one by one.

  Bradley fired twice again, and then the crowd were upon him and too close to shoot. Cody saw the soldier swing his pistol into a man’s face and send him flying onto the cracked, moss covered asphalt. A man grabbed the soldier, trying to cling to him as he screamed in a tearful rage. Bradley shook the man off and turned as he fell to his knees, drove a heavy boot into the man’s face that flicked his head back with a sound like a snapping twig.

  Cody dashed forward and grabbed Bradley, pulled him back by his shoulder as he yelled at him.

  ‘They’re not harming you! They just want help!’

  Hank’s voice shouted out above the commotion of gunfire and screams.

  ‘Cease fire!’

  Sauri and Hank fell back from the onrushing horde as Cody and Bradley joined them. Together with Bethany, Taylor and the rest they began jogging away from the feebly pursuing crowd.

  ‘We go around, cut through to the next block!’ Hank snapped. ‘Let’s avoid any more confrontations, understood Brad?!’

  The soldier nodded as they ran and cut right through a service alley filled with litter and decomposing bodies. Cody leapt over them as he ran, then burst out into the adjoining street and cut right again. They kept running until they could no longer see the shuffling masses pursuing them. Cody slowed as they reached Brookline and waited for the others to catch up.

  Jake laboured in last, his chest heaving as he waved his hand up and down.

  ‘Let’s not do that again,’ he gasped, ‘or you’ll have another damned corpse on your hands.’

  Charlotte took the lead and they walked in silence for a further hour, skirting bodies lying in the streets in their hundreds. Many had decomposed sufficiently that they were more bone than flesh, pale white scalps flecked with ugly clumps of wiry hair, skeletal arms poking out of tattered clothes still attached to bodies picked clean by countless marauding rodents.

  They reached St Elizabeth’s shortly before noon, the sun warm and the day surprisingly bright. The clement weather contrasted sharply with the silent city and the macabre remains haunting the lonely suburbs.

  As they climbed a hill that looked out to the south, Hank waved his hand for them to slow. Since leaving south Boston they had seen no further wandering tribes of crazed survivors, nor indeed any signs of life other than birds and the occasional packs of dogs that showed their heckles and fangs in defiance before fleeing. Now it became obvious why.

  ‘We can’t go much further,’ he said.

  Cody looked ahead and felt his guts twinge as he saw the bright green woods and mossy roads give way to an ashen wilderness of skeletally dead trees and odd, patchy lawns and fields. Houses had been stripped of their paintwork and the bodies of both humans and animals lay strewn across the roads.

  ‘What the hell happened here?’ Bradley uttered.

  ‘Plymouth nuclear storage facility would be my guess,’ Hank replied. ‘This is the fallout from the cooling station. Acid rain, radiation, you name it.’

  ‘Christ, should we even be here?’ Seth asked. ‘What about radiation poisoning?’

  ‘Most of it will have been washed away into the soil over the winter,’ Jake replied. ‘But that explains the state of those people we saw wandering Boston. They were suffering from radiation poisoning.’

  ‘Where’s your house?’ Bethany asked Charlotte.

  ‘It’s along here,’ Charlotte replied, gesturing to a leafy side street that narrowly skirted the dead zone ahead of them.

  Charlotte led them to a once handsome Colonial style house that overlooked Chestnut Hill Reservoir. Multiple bedrooms, triple garage out back, surrounded by chestnut trees and with broad lawns that were now becoming overgrown with tall weeds. She stopped and a hand flew to her mouth as she surveyed the shattered windows, the busted front door, signs of small fires peppering the window ledges.

  Bethany put her arm across Charlotte’s shoulders. ‘I’m sure he’s not in there,’ she whispered. ‘He would have got out.’

  ‘You want me to check it out first?’ Bradley asked her, moving close by her side.

  Charlotte shook her head, gathered herself. ‘No, we go
together.’

  Bradley followed Charlotte inside, his pistol at the ready in case anybody leaped out at them. Cody followed with the rest of the team.

  The interior of the house felt cold, long since devoid of the warmth and light of human occupation. The once deep carpets were filthy and littered with the debris of old leaves that had blown in, scraps of fallen wallpaper and peeled paint from the front door.

  Charlotte walked into the living room and Cody saw a large canvas of a Revolution-era sea battle dominating a modern looking fireplace. Pictures lined the walls, some of them of Charlotte, her father and a good looking woman in her fifties. Charlotte pulled one of them from the wall and shoved it into her rucksack.

  ‘People were here,’ Bradley said as he gestured to the fireplace. Thick ash filled its base. ‘They burned stuff to keep warm.’

  ‘Make this quick,’ Hank said to Charlotte, scanning through the broad windows for any sign of people outside.

  Charlotte hurried through the house from room to room but found nobody in the building. Cody wasn’t sure if she was relieved or upset not to have found her father, but Charlotte turned instead to a small office and stepped inside.

  Redundant computers dominated a study. Cody saw a fax machine now splattered with bird droppings and leaves piled up against the base of a book cabinet, the books long gone.

  ‘That’s what they burned,’ he realised, ‘the people that were here.’

  ‘Dad’s books,’ Charlotte said sadly as she looked at the cabinet. ‘He would have been appalled.’

  Charlotte turned to the back wall. A smaller cabinet stood before it, filled with small pieces of china and glass trinkets. She squatted down and heaved against it. The cabinet shifted easily and exposed a wall safe. Charlotte reached up and spun the locking mechanism back and forth, clearly knowing the code by heart.

  The safe opened and she reached inside as a flash of delight filled her expression.

  She retrieved an envelope and showed it to Cody.

  The envelope was adorned with her name, written in a hasty script.

  ***

  26

  Charlotte tore open the letter, her hands shaking as she unfolded the single page within.

  Her eyes began flicking across the page as she read, and a slow creeping horror filled her features with dismay as the rest of the team gathered in the doorway to the study.

  ‘What does it say?’ Bethany asked softly.

  Charlotte’s shoulders slumped and she handed the letter to Cody as she turned away and stared out of the office window. Cody read the letter to the rest of the group.

  Dear Charlie,

  I can only hope that someday you find this letter. I have so little time to write. I am being recalled to the city. A car is already here with a Secret Service escort and I have been prevented from contacting anybody. I have asked to gather some belongings in order to leave this note for you.

  I know nothing of what has happened but whatever it is, it must be of monumental importance. In my experience, such panicked demands are rarely born of good news. Whatever happens I hope that you are safe and well and that you might read this upon your return. I dearly hope that we shall speak again soon.

  I shall try to contact you at Alert as soon as I know more and am able to do so.

  Lots of love,

  Dad

  ‘They were pulled out,’ Bradley said. ‘Same time as the Canadian forces at Alert most likely.’

  ‘And the politicians,’ Hank noted, ‘all of them heading for that foreign conference, the location of which was never revealed.’

  Cody lowered the letter and looked across at the captain.

  ‘You were right,’ he conceded. ‘They knew. They knew what was coming and they tried to evade it without telling us, without telling anybody.’

  ‘Maybe they didn’t know,’ Charlotte said in a weak voice. ‘For sure, I mean.’

  ‘I doubt that,’ Jake said from the doorway.

  Cody let the letter fall to the office floor as he stared out of the window past Charlotte to the sunny, silent streets outside. The people charged with the service of the citizens of their country had deliberately abandoned those people to their fate and fled to an unknown haven to wait out the fall of mankind. Cody thought of all the children, men and women: the young and the old and the infirm left without food, water or warmth, left to the uncaring brutality of those stronger than themselves. People like Maria. Hot rage simmered like a disease deep in the pit of his belly, poison running through his veins as he turned and barged his way out of the office.

  ‘Where the hell are you going?’ Bradley demanded.

  Cody did not reply as he walked out of the house and struck out along the road that circled the reservoir, heading toward Oak Square. Bethany hurried out of the house after him.

  ‘Cody, wait.’

  Cody did not stop walking. Bethany jogged alongside him. ‘We need to stick together and wait for…’

  ‘I’ve been waiting nine months,’ Cody shot back. ‘I’m not waiting another second. I need to know, Beth, that’s all there is to it.’

  ‘So do I!’ Bethany shouted. Cody stopped as she grabbed his arm. ‘I have a brother too, remember? I have family. I’ve waited all this time but now I don’t know what I’ll find and that scares the hell out of me.’

  Cody rubbed his temples. ‘I’d rather know than not.’

  ‘Then let’s do it together,’ Bethany replied. ‘Storming off on your own won’t help anybody, least of all your wife and daughter.’

  Cody saw Hank and the others walk slowly out of the senator’s home and across the unkempt lawns.

  ‘Make it quick, Ryan,’ the captain said. ‘Sooner we’re done here, the better.’

  Cody looked at Charlotte. Her face was stricken, like shell-shock, her eyes vacant. Cody thought of the radio transmission that he’d picked up at Alert and the coded coordinates within it. The urge to tell her about it was overwhelming but he refrained once more. Hank Mears and the Phoenix were too important to them all now. Without the ship they could never reach Eden even if they knew where it was.

  Cody turned and started walking. He waited until Bethany joined him, and let their path drift away from the others until he felt sure that nobody could hear them. He kept his voice quiet as they walked.

  ‘I need you to do something for me,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I need you to memorise something, in case anything happens to me.’

  Bethany looked up at him as they walked, her eyes filled with caution. ‘Okay.’

  Cody took a deep breath.

  ‘There were coordinates in the message I intercepted at Alert.’

  Bethany did an admirable job of keeping her features impassive as they walked, looking straight ahead. Cody kept his voice low as he went on.

  ‘They were sent using Morse Code, presumably because of the weak signal. I managed to decipher them using a code book at Polaris Hall.’

  ‘Why haven’t you told anybody about this?’ she whispered.

  ‘You think we’d have got this far if I had?’ Cody challenged. ‘Hank and his men would have sailed directly for their mysterious Eden and left us behind. I didn’t want anybody to know until we’d had the chance to come back here, if only once.’

  Bethany did not reply.

  ‘This is our only chance to find our families,’ Cody added. ‘Keeping this quiet is the right thing to do, for now. Are you good with this?’

  Bethany was silent for a long time before she replied.

  ‘I’ll do it,’ she said finally. ‘What do you need me to memorise?’

  ‘42N70W,’ Cody said.

  Bethany recited the coordinates as they walked until she could recall them at will.

  The group rounded the reservoir and crossed into Oak Square. The bright sunshine and gentle breeze seemed docile and comforting yet the residential suburbs were haunted by the chill of abandonment, the houses like hollow caves, the streets strewn with
litter and the rustle of leaves whispering of a past never to be revisited.

  Cody saw in his mind’s eye Maria in the back seat of the family car, or taking her first steps in the park near their house, or erratically throwing pieces of bread to ducks and pigeons and laughing as they gobbled the morsels up.

  Patchwork weeds laced the asphalt as Cody turned onto Perthshire and hesitated. The road stretched away from him and with a pulse of anxiety in his belly he spotted the front of his house. Neat white clapperboard, two storeys, an unkempt lawn.

  Maria’s voice whispered to him amid the leaves drifting across the street as he bolted forwards and ran to the front of the home that had filled his mind and thoughts for so many long months. Raw grief ripped at his heart as he saw the shattered windows, the scorched woodwork and the front door hanging from its hinges. The once neatly trimmed hedgerows were tattered and in disarray as he vaulted over them and rushed up to the front door.

  The faint smell of wood smoke filled the house as he stepped inside.

  ‘Maria!?’

  He heard the guttural distress in his own voice as it echoed through the lonely house, a tremor of grim realisation of his worst fears. Cody dashed from room to room, each filled with upturned furniture and debris blown in from outside on the winter storms.

  It took him only minutes to ascertain that the house was empty, but he kept searching manically for some evidence of where they had gone. He emptied cupboards. He overturned tables and chairs. He rifled through drawers in the kitchen and then stood and stared down at the new tiles on the kitchen floor, lost beneath a scattering of rodent droppings and crumbling leaves blown in through the wrecked kitchen door.

  Cody stumbled into the lounge and saw Maria’s play-pen standing empty in the centre of the room. He turned away and thumped his fist against the unyielding walls over and over and over again until somebody grabbed hold of him and their arms wrapped around his neck. Cody crumbled into the embrace as his legs quivered and gave way beneath him. He dropped slowly to his knees as his life bled from his eyes into the soft hair crushed against his face as Bethany held him tight against her.