Domain of the Dead (13 page)

“This is delicious,” Nathan proclaimed as he saluted the Captain with his half empty beer bottle.

Even in the modest surroundings of the captain’s dining room Nathan’s lack of refinement shone out. Although he was freshly shaven, his scraggy hair, the napkin tucked into his hastily laundered Nirvana T-shirt, and his abandoned gusto marked him out as uncouth.

Sarah wondered if there was still room for etiquette. In a world of the dead it didn’t seem to matter much.

Wiping his mouth clean of escaped sauce, Nathan declared, “I’d forgotten just how good being clean and being full felt.”

Sarah had to agree. “Yes, this is amazing. I don’t remember when I last had fresh fish.”

Captain Warden lent back in his chair. “You have Commander Patterson to thank for the menu suggestion.” He dabbed his lips with his napkin. “I have to confess, the rest of the crew are sick of fish, but I see it as one of the perks of this posting.”

“It’s not fine French cuisine, but it’s palatable,” Doctor Robertson said.

“Huh!” Captain Warden snorted. “I’m glad it’s not French, otherwise it would be glowing bright green!”

He gave out a loud snigger at his own joke, but the rest of the diners remained quiet.

“I don’t get it, old man,” Jennifer said cheerily.

“Jennifer!” Sarah chastised.

“But I don’t,” she replied.

Captain Warden laughed, “From the mouths of babes.” He looked Jennifer in the eye and smiled. “Have you been listening to sea dogs?”

“Yes, old man,” she said.

“Jennifer, that’s rude,” Sarah said.

“It’s a touch disrespectful, but I won’t make you walk the plank this time, young lady,” Captain Warden said. He smiled and turned to Sarah. “You see, the Captain of a ship is referred to as the Old Man. It’s a term of endearment really, but you shouldn’t address me as such.” He turned back to Jennifer. “It is a bit rude, I suppose. No, you should call me Captain.”

“But I still don’t get the joke, Captain,” Jennifer said, keen to use the proper title.

“No, I suppose you wouldn’t. You see, there were a lot of nuclear power stations in France but with no one to look after them…” Captain Warden made a whooshing noise and then a loud rumbling sound from his throat, all accompanied with the raising and parting of his hands. “They blew up.”

“Oh,” Jennifer said, still none the wiser.

Sarah simplified the concept for Jennifer: “You see, nuclear power stations use radioactive material and that glows green.”

“It feels like we’re being treated like royalty, Captain!” Nathan exclaimed, then stifled a burp. “This is the first beer I’ve had in years that wasn’t stale.”

“Nathan, don’t you think you should go easy on those?” Sarah said.

Nathan ignored her and continued speaking to the Captain. “Not that it isn’t bad, I mean it’s great.”

Captain Warden held up his hand to halt Nathan’s embarrassed rambling. “That’s okay, son. Compliment accepted.”

“It’s obvious that the world is still run by men,” Sarah quipped shaking her head. “Everything has fallen apart, but one priority for getting civilisation going again is beer.”

“On the contrary, beer may not be a priority but it is a byproduct of bread making,” Warden said. “I have a contact who gets me a case now and again. It isn’t contraband as such, just that its manufacture isn’t encouraged by the government.” The Captain looked back over to Nathan. “God knows where they get the hops or even where it’s brewed. Some warlord on a private island somewhere I’ll wager.”

“Well, I’m very grateful for your hospitality,” Nathan said, holding up his drink in salute.

Warden smiled and deep wrinkles spread across his face. “Frozen veg and canned meat are taken for granted onboard ship. Most of the crew moan at the lack of variety in their diet. I guess your arrival has helped the crew to realise just how lucky they are.”

He cast a glance to Doctor Robertson.

Robertson ignored the inference and changed the topic. “How did you managed to survive so long? The last reports of survivors we had would have been more than a year ago.”

“Just lucky I guess,” Sarah said.

“Well, it was more than that,” Nathan said, casting a glance over at Sarah. “Sarah pretty much kept us all together. When the shit came down, no one knew what was happening or why or anything like that. Sarah, she kept her head. Got a few folk organised, rescued a few others like me.”

“How many of you were there?” Captain Warden asked.

“Twenty-seven of us when we found that warehouse,” Sarah said. The math stood out at her. Twenty-seven minus three equalled twenty-four dead. Sarah, in a small burst of hope, corrected the figure—maybe Ryan was okay with the marines on the mainland.

“We cleared the dead fucks out of the place,” Nathan said, furrowing his eyebrows. “What did your guys call ‘em?”

The question took Captain Warden by surprise. “Um… Oh, the marines call them Whisky Deltas. W.D.’s.”

Nathan nodded in recollection. “Yeah we didn’t have much stuff with us. Just one gun and some tire irons, a few makeshift bludgeons and the like. Originally we were just there to try and raid some supplies, but when we got in…” Nathan shot a smile at Sarah. “You called it, what, an Aladdin’s cave?”

Sarah smiled back. “Yeah, the place was stocked to the roof.”

“We blocked the gate after we’d got in just so we didn’t meet any surprises on the way out,” Nathan explained. “Sarah suggested that we could hold up for a while, so she got us to barricade the entrances and check out the warehouse in groups.”

“We lost Mr. Aslam that day and the guy from the supermarket to a bite a few days after that,” Sarah said.

“Jeez, I’d forgotten about him,” Nathan said. “Never could remember his name. Had to keep looking at his name tag. Seems like such a long time ago.”

“It must have been hard for you all,” Dr. Robertson said, unintentionally shifting her gaze onto Jennifer.

“My mommy and daddy died,” Jennifer said.

“It was tough on us all,” Sarah added as she put an arm around the young girl.

Nathan sat back in his chair while pushing his plate away. “A few folk went stir crazy. We had a couple of suicides early on. Just couldn’t hack the moaning outside and the claustrophobia inside.”

Sarah’s thoughts were wrenched back to the roof of the warehouse. It was only this morning but yet that too felt like a lifetime ago. She closed her eyes and felt an almost imperceptible shaking of her head. Her emotions were in turmoil. She hated herself because she had decided not to go on. It hadn’t been a snap decision, a moment of madness brought on by the oppressive conditions. Sarah had measured it out in her mind. She had weighed the difference between the possible enjoyment and misery her life had to offer. She had decided that what scant moments of pleasure she could scrape from her existence would be vastly outweighed by the misery. When Ray had come to her with his appraisal of the food supplies, the balance tipped still further. Now there was a timescale to the futility. Now she knew how long it would last and that that time would inflict more hardship. It seemed pointless to endure it for a few extra weeks. Now there was even a positive side to her death. Now Sarah could add nobility to her suicide. One less mouth to feed would mean more food for those trapped inside.

Sarah suddenly realised it wasn’t the fact she had planned to kill herself that she found disturbing, it was the clinical way in which she had weighed the worth of her life.

“It’s sad when people die,” Jennifer said.

“Yes it is,” Sarah agreed. She lent over and gave Jennifer a full-blown hug. Sarah needed the contact, the reminder of what was good about life. She paused for a moment, soaking up the affection from this young girl and felt guilty for ever wanting to abandon her.

Nathan went on, “Then the Hanson brothers decided that they were going to take their chances, try and get help. Hell, even the radio had been dead for months by that point, but a good few folk said they’d rather risk it than stay locked up inside. You know, even though the radio had been dead for years we always knew we weren’t the only people left in the world.”

“Oh, how did you know that?” Captain Warden asked.

“Was it just the hope?” Doctor Robertson asked romantically.

“We needed to keep our morale up, but it was more logic than faith,” Sarah said.

“Yeah, one night Ray and Sarah got out these marker pens and flip charts and started…” Nathan paused, searching for the right words. “What did Ray call it? Brain dumping?”

“Brain storming,” Sarah corrected.

“How did that work?” Doctor Robertson asked.

“There we were a couple dozen people bunkered up in that warehouse,” Sarah said. “Ray and I guessed that if we could do it, other people would have, too. We came together by chance and got lucky with the warehouse, but as Ryan pointed out, there were much more prepared people and places.”

“Yeah,” Nathan chimed. “Hell, you were always seeing something on the news about some nutter in the hills with like a million rounds of ammo and a personal nuclear bunker.”

“And leaving those apocalypse survivalists to one side, we knew governments all over the world were a thousand times more prepared. I mean, statistically it was impossible to think we were the only ones left alive out of seven billion...”

Nathan butted in, “Ray did that calculation about the lottery tickets.” Leaning over the table with a slightly drunken lurch, his face lit up. “Ray said that the chances of us being the only people left alive was the same as winning the lottery every draw for a year.”

“Well, he was right,” Doctor Robertson said. “I think it worked out at one in four hundred survived.”

“That’s horrendous,” Sarah said.

“High command estimate there are between twelve and seventeen million left,” Captain Warden said. “And if you ask me, that’s a fair number.”

Doctor Robertson added, “We’re not on the endangered species list yet.”

“Seven billion is a lot of walking dead though,” Nathan said.

“No, it didn’t work out that way, although I follow your logic,” Doctor Robertson said. “You see, the majority of deaths didn’t come from bites.”

Nathan and Sarah looked surprised.

“Most people died of disease or starvation. More people died from civil unrest than were infected. In Los Angeles I saw more gunshot wounds than bites.”

“Christ, that’s fucked up,” Nathan said.

“In the first few days after the panic hit, I found myself in a supermarket,” Sarah said. Her head hung low. “I saw this frail old man punched to the floor for the loaf of bread he was holding.”

Doctor Robertson, sensing her guilt, reached out her hand across the table. “There was nothing you could have done, Sarah.”

“His nose was busted up and bleeding and his wife was half kneeling on the floor holding him and crying. I know I couldn’t have stopped that thug,” Sarah said, pre-empting Doctor Robertson’s platitudes. “But I could have stopped to help that old man and his wife. Instead I grabbed what I could off the shelves and ran.”

“Nothing more inhumane than man,” Captain Warden said as if reciting a quote. “We’ve all seen and done things that were unpalatable.”

At that he shot a look over at Doctor Robertson.

“It may be unpalatable, but there’s nothing inhumane about our work, Captain Warden,” Doctor Robertson protested. “We only work on cultures and infected cadavers. We don’t even conduct vivisection.”

“I still find what you and Dr. Frankenstein do distasteful, not to mention dangerous,” Warden replied. “Besides, I don’t see the point in your work. All we need do is keep out of their way until they rot away to nothing, rather than wasting our time tinkering away with the corpses in your lab.”

“What’s to say that will be the end of it?” Doctor Robertson demanded. “What if it lies dormant or re-emerges from its reservoir!” Her voice took on a belittling tone. “The risks involved in our tinkering are minimal and the gains substantial.”

“To you maybe, but what about the collection team!” Warden retorted.

Dr. Robertson felt her jaw clamp shut. She had been thinking about the likelihood of something going wrong in the lab without even considering the soldiers sent out to collect their specimens. Technically they weren’t her responsibility, but it was her work that necessitated the dangerous incursions.

Ever conciliatory Sarah stepped in. “We’re very grateful that your helicopter landed so close to us,” she said.

“Yes, you were very fortunate our marines chose to set down where they did,” Captain Warden said.

“It was very lucky,” Nathan agreed and looked over at Sarah again. “If you hadn’t been up on the roof so early we might never have known you were there. Very lucky—‘cause you had no reason being up there at that time.”

“We do get the collection teams to set down in different areas,” Warden said. “It helps us build up a better picture of how things are playing out on the mainland.”

Having failed to elicit a response from Sarah, Nathan turned in his chair, arm over the back and faced the Captain. He said, “You said they were collecting specimens. I’ve got to admit having those things downstairs—”