Outpost

by Adam Baker

  'And what do I tell them?'

  'That we've got a ship. It's beached. It's got a big rip in the hull. But we'll get it moving, sooner or later.'

  'I think the current occupants might object. Look over there, out on the island.' Moonlit figures gathered at the water's edge. 'They've come from the ship. A couple of weeks from now the ice-bridge will be complete. The sea from here to the island will be frozen solid. They'll be able to walk right to our door. You think things got better just because the lights are on? We are now officially under siege.'

  The Specimen

  'So are you back in hero mode?' asked Punch.

  Jane was mopping her room. A water pipe had split, spraying water across her bed.

  'I try to help people out, if I can. Mainly to kill time. If the TV actually worked I'm not sure I would give a shit.'

  'You might want to check on Rye.'

  'Any reason?'

  'No. But it's that dog-whistle thing. Sometimes people don't have to say or do anything weird. They just sit there, quietly sipping tea, all the while putting out an ultrasonic scream like they are dying inside.'

  'I'll swing by. Not much I can do until she asks for help.'

  Nobody knew much about Rye. She stayed in her room most of the time. There was a photograph tacked above her bunk. A baby boy. The picture looked old. Plenty of creases, plenty of pin holes.

  Jane sat in Rawlins's office and checked Rye's personnel file. She quit general practice and took a job on a rig three years later. No explanation for the three-year hiatus.

  Jane headed for Rye's room. She would fake a migraine. Ask for painkillers.

  The door was ajar. Rye sat on the bed. She had stripped down to underwear. She dug a knife into her thigh, scratched her name with the tip of the blade. She drew little beads of blood.

  Jane coughed to announce her presence.

  'Before you ask,' said Rye, 'no, I don't want to talk about it.'

  The crew held a toga party. They turned up the heat until the accommodation block was sweltering hot.

  Ghost led a raid on Hyperion. They battled their way to the Ocean Bar and loaded a cart with booze. Smash and grab. Jane told Ghost it was a stupid idea, risking his life for a few bottles.

  'It's vital,' he said. 'If the guys don't let off some steam they'll go nuts.'

  They dressed in bed sheets. They switched on the jukebox and selected Random Play. Punch was bartender. He mixed margaritas. Jane licked salt from the rim of her glass.

  'Salut.'

  Jane enjoyed the party. A few months ago, when she was super- obese, she would have stayed in her room. She couldn't wear a toga. The sheets weren't big enough.

  Punch laid out canapés. Tube-cheese squeezed on to Ritz crackers. Sausage rolls.

  A couple of guys took off their togas and danced in shorts.

  Ghost passed round a couple of joints. He won a press-up contest with Gus and Mal.

  Sian sat behind a table to stop guys staring at her legs.

  Rye joined the party. She didn't wear a toga. She sat near the door and watched the action. She sipped tequila from a paper cup. Jane brought her a plate of food.

  'Margarita?'

  'I don't like the salt.'

  'But you're holding up okay?'

  'You know,' said Rye, 'everyone else on this rig may be desperate to explain themselves, to be understood, but I deal with my own shit.'

  Rye crouched behind a snowdrift. She hunted by moonlight. She watched dim shadow-shapes of Hyperion passengers standing motionless on the ice. She used infrared binoculars. Distance- to-target calibrations, like a sniper-scope. The landscape in negative. Pale, luminescent figures on a black landscape. Body temperature was way down. The figures had barely any heat signature. Rye couldn't understand how they were still walking around. They should be frozen. They should be starved. There were a dozen different ways they should be dead.

  She circled a crowd of passengers gathered at the waterline, mesmerised by the installation lights of the rig. She stalked a man in a dark suit who seemed to have strayed from the herd

  She stepped from behind a snowdrift.

  'Hey,' she called. 'Wanna buy a Rolex?'

  The man turned. He took a couple of stumbling steps towards her, arms outstretched. She zapped him with the Taser. He fell in an epileptic spasm.

  Rye threw a sleeping bag over the prostrate man and bound him with rope.

  She gave the guy another jolt of current. She lashed him tight to a stepladder and dragged him to the zodiac.

  She laid him in the boat. She pulled back the sleeping bag and shone a flashlight in the man's face. Metal erupting from flesh. A dog-collar. The man was a priest.

  'What the fuck are you doing?' asked Jane. Rye had been spending a lot of time on C deck. Jane had tracked her to a vacant storeroom.

  'These freaks rule the world now. They are the dominant species. We better find out exactly what makes them tick.'

  Four tables. Four passengers strapped down.

  'There are dozens of them out there on the ice,' said Rye. She was wearing a lab coat, gloves and a heavy rubber apron. 'They've been there a while. Minus forty and they are walking around in ball gowns and tuxedos. The average guy would succumb to

  hypothermia in a couple of minutes. These folks have lasted days. Something pretty fundamental has happened to their metabolism.'

  'You brought these fuckers on board without telling anyone? I'll help you put them over the side. We'll do it now, do it quick. If the guys in the canteen find out about this they'll break your fucking legs.'

  'These creatures were adrift aboard Hyperion for weeks,' said Rye. 'No sign that they ate or drank. What the hell makes these things tick? Aren't you curious? Do they run on air, or what?'

  'Damn. This guy's a priest.'

  The priest's eyeballs were black. He stared up at her. He didn't blink.

  A Bible on a nearby chair.

  'It was in his pocket,' said Rye.

  'King James. Good choice.'

  An inscription on the flyleaf.

  'David. Is that you? You used to be David.'

  Jane recited the Lord's Prayer.

  'Our Father, who art in heaven . . .'

  The priest slowly lowered his head and closed his eyes.

  'Doc, have you any idea how bad it smells down here? It smells like ammonia. My eyes are watering.'

  'Let me show you something.'

  Rye put on goggles and a mouth mask. She picked up a scalpel.

  'Hey,' said Jane. 'This guy's still alive, all right? He's still breathing.'

  Rye paid no attention. She stabbed Father David in the shoulder. She twisted the blade, dug it in.

  'Whoa. Hold the fuck on.'

  The priest lay, unconcerned, as the knife ground bone.

  'Is he even alive?' asked Rye, talking to herself. 'Undead? Nosferatu? Is that what we are dealing with? I think he still has sensation. He can feel the knife. He just doesn't care.'

  Rye twisted the knife some more.

  'Less blood than I would expect,' she said. 'Look at his face. See his skin? Frost damage. His skin cells are turning to putty. He's slowly rotting. Those Hyperion passengers out on the ice aren't immortal. The cold is killing them sure enough. But it's taking a long while.'

  Rye leaned over the priest's chest, leaving the scalpel imbedded in the man's shoulder.

  'He seems to take a breath every couple of minutes. Can't get close enough to hear his heartbeat, but it must be way down. Basically, he's a vehicle. A chassis. A lump of meat steered left and right. Core body temperature doesn't seem to matter.'

  She stood back and contemplated the priest.

  'Is this what waits for us when we get home? Cities full of walking dead?'

  Jane crossed the room. A table draped with a sheet.

  'What's this?'

  Rye pulled back the sheet.

  'Fucking hell,' said Jane, covering her mouth.

  A flayed body. Jane couldn't tell if it had b
een male or female. Skin and muscle stripped away. A skeletal frame of bone and sinew. The body was still strapped to the table. Hands grasped. It twisted and squirmed like it was trying to sit up.

  'My God. How can it be alive?'

  'He's dying,' said Rye. 'He was stumbling around out there dressed as a flamenco dancer. Blood loss and trauma are killing him as sure as they would a normal person. But it seems to be taking days. These filaments. This stuff embedded in gristle and bone. Definitely metal. It can be magnetised. But it seems to grow like hair. As far as I can tell it radiates from the central nervous system. All this stuff wrapped round his legs and arms can be traced back to his spine. And look at his head.'

  Jane stood over the flayed man. The bloody skull-face watched her approach. Lipless jaws snapped and gnashed. Grinning, biting.

  'More metal, see? Lots more, centred round the brain stem. Seems pretty obvious we are dealing with some kind of super- parasite. This isn't a man. This is a metal organism wearing a skin suit. Limited lifespan. Slowly kills the host. It's like ivy round a tree. God knows where it is from. Tough to kill. I gave one of them a dose of Librium. Should have been fatal. Didn't seem to bother him much. These things have the nervous system of a cockroach.'

  Rye stood back and folded her arms.

  'We have no alternative but to destroy the carrier. This is a terminal illness. Nobody will recover. That much is clear. Memories, personality. All gone. So we don't have to feel bad about killing them. It's pest control. It's not murder. Grenade, if you have one. Otherwise, a shot in the head will kill them stone dead. If you shoot them in the gut, if you blow off an arm or leg, they will keep trucking long enough to bite a chunk out of you. Headshot. Every time.'

  'You're wrong,' said Jane. 'Something is left. Something remains.'

  Jane returned to the priest. She opened the Bible.

  'In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and God said: "Let there be light . . . "'

  Father David thrashed and snarled, then slowly settled like he was soothed by a lullaby.

  'See? He remembers.'

  'You don't know for sure,' said Rye.

  'No, I can tell. He remembers the words.'

  'We have to find out everything we can about these creatures. We can't afford to be sentimental.'

  Jane left. She came back with a shotgun. She put the barrel to the priest's head. He sniffed it.

  'It's all right, Patrick.'

  She blew his head off. Nothing above the neck but a flap of burning scalp. She shot the three remaining specimens. Lumps of brain tissue, flash-fried by gunpowder, lay on the floor and steamed.

  'Clean up this shit and scrub the room down,' said Jane. She pressed the shotgun to the chest of Rye's lab coat. The hot barrel burned a scorch ring. 'You bring any more of these fucks aboard I will personally execute you on the spot. You think I'm kidding? Try me. Just fucking try me.'

  Rye locked the door of her room. She sat on the bed. She shook a twist of foil from the battery compartment of her bedside clock. She tapped the powder into a spoon and cooked the mixture over a Zippo flame.

  She shot up. She threw the hypo in the sink, lay back and relished the warm rush of well-being. A familiar sensation. She had taken the job on the rig to break an addiction to codeine. Seven years of general practice had passed in a blissed-out haze. It was a relief to give in to it once more. It felt like coming home.

  Rye examined her left hand. The tip of her index finger was numb and starting to blacken. When did she become infected? Maybe it was out on the ice when she stunned the priest and tied him up. Maybe it was when she lashed him to the table.

  She used a shoelace as a tourniquet. She stood at the sink with a pair of bolt cutters. She positioned the infected finger between the blades. This, she thought in a dreamy way, is going to hurt like a motherfucker.

  Later, she sat in the canteen and watched scrolling interference on television. Punch asked if she was feeling okay.

  'Fine,' she murmured, pushing her bandaged hand deeper into her coat pocket. 'Walking on sunshine.'

  Diary of Dr Elizabeth Rye

  Wednesday 28 October

  I dressed and re-dressed my mutilated finger. I examined the wound every fifteen minutes. As far as I could tell from TV bulletins I saw in the canteen, there were no reported cases of recovery or remission. This illness is certain death. Yet I hoped for a reprieve. Perhaps I had a chance. Maybe I amputated the finger in time to halt the spread of the disease. Maybe I would be the first to get lucky and cure myself of infection.

  Nothing for nine hours. Then the first glint of metal among the raw flesh. I probed the scabrous wound with tweezers. A metal spine growing out of bone. I jammed the stump of my finger between the bloody bolt cutters and cut it down to the knuckle. I bound the wound and passed out. When I woke, my entire hand had begun to necrotise.

  Metal spines protrude from my palm like fine splinters. My hand feels heavy and numb, but otherwise I am in no discomfort. Codeine. Percodan. I'm so stoned I could walk through fire right now and not feel a thing. I keep my hand sheathed in a glove to avoid detection. I am, of course, infectious. If my illness were discovered I would be quarantined; however I prefer to die on my own terms.

  The sea surrounding Rampart has started to freeze. The refinery will soon be joined to the island by an ice-bridge. The horde of infected Hyperion passengers crowding at the shoreline will be able to reach the rig. If they manage to board the refinery they will roam the passageways ravening for blood. I suspect they will leave me alone. They will take a sniff and decide I am one of their own. I will walk around unmolested while they rip the Rampart crew limb from limb.

  This afternoon I helped Rajesh Ghosh and Reverend Blanc cut ladders and stairs from each refinery leg using oxyacetylene gear. The platform lift is now the only means of descending to the ice. Hyperion passengers may congregate beneath the refinery, hungry for fresh meat, but they will be unable to reach the crew.

  I try to face death with stoic detachment but, let's face it, my state of Buddhistic serenity is the result of heavy doses of morphine rather than any hard-won wisdom. I shoot up every couple of hours. I have a shoe box full of used hypos hidden beneath my bunk. There aren't many syringes left. Enough to last the next few days. If, in months to come, the Rampart crew need to inject medication they will have to rinse and sterilise a used hypodermic. But that's their problem.

  The sensation of snuggling warmth, the Wash I used to call it, feels like coming home. It took me years to quit. Resolution and relapse. I underwent a full year of detox to win back my licence to practise. I lost my house, my child, my job. I had to work at a supermarket. Swiping groceries sixty hours a week just to make the rent on a one-bedroom flat. It was a mercy I wasn't struck off altogether. But I suppose it doesn't matter now. Might as well enjoy the buzz.

  During my time at Kings College I used to watch lung cancer patients in nightgowns and pyjamas wheel their drip-stands out of the hospital back entrance. They would congregate on a loading bay and savour a cigarette. Why quit? The worst had already happened. The damage was already done.

  Last night I felt compelled to go outside, stand at a railing and face the island. Forty below, but I barely felt the cold. I stood there a long while and listened to the whispering voices in my head. Insinuating murmurs in my back-brain, faint like a weak radio signal, too faint to make out words. I have often suspected those infected with this disease share some kind of hive mind. These past few days I have often stood at the railing and watched infected Hyperion passengers mass at the shoreline. From what little I've seen they flock like birds. They move as a crowd. Each individual is slow and stupid, but when massed together they become a formidable tide.

  A crate of booze has been left in the canteen. Vodka, tequila, cognac. Dregs left over from the riotous toga party, along with dried sausage rolls and crackers greased with cream cheese. Ghost gave a speech at the party. He thanked Jane for bringing Hyperion to the island. A transpare
nt attempt to win back the approval of the crew. Jane seized a cruise liner, the most absurdly perfect transport we could hope to find, and managed to wreck it. I'm surprised they didn't build a gangplank and push her into the sea. Yet the crewmen seem strangely passive. The memory of their old lives has faded to such an extent they can't remember anything but the refinery. Nothing else seems real. They haunt the corridors like the sailors of the Flying Dutchman. They have each retreated into their own personal psychosis.

  Mal often sits in front of the TV, watching static and tattooing the back of his hands. Jailhouse method. Biro ink pricked beneath the skin with a bent safety pin. He already had tattoos, but following an acid-burn from spilled caustic soda his knuckles spelt LOVE and HAT. He re-inked the letters and added spider- web decoration.

  Gus has moved into the old gym. Camped among freezing treadmills and steppers. He has painted a bleak moonscape on the wall. He calls the place Tranquillity. He affects a posh accent and has begun to call himself the Duke of Amberley. It began as a joke, but he genuinely gets angry if he isn't addressed as Your Lordship. The crew seem happy to comply. There is a tacit understanding that they all need a holiday from sanity. I wish I could stick around and see how it plays out.

  I suppose I shall endure this illness as long as I can, then jump in the sea. But what if I don't die? What if lack of oxygen and skull-crushing pressure don't kill me? I might find myself stumbling round the ocean floor in absolute darkness. My lungs would be full of water. I couldn't even scream.

  I visited Nail in his room this evening. We made a trade. His arm looks better. I asked him about Nikki. No one has seen her for a while. He said I should go fuck myself.

  Thursday 29 October

  Jane knocked on my door this morning. I was still in bed. I hid my infected arm beneath the blanket then invited her inside.

  She persists in her attempts to redeem me. I'm not quite sure what form this redemption is supposed to take. Maybe I should fall weeping and hug her knees. I like her. She's a sweet girl. Yet she is still young and naive enough to believe people help one another. She has yet to look out of the window and realise the extent to which this great white nothing reflects our personal reality. We are all serving a life sentence. Trapped in the confines of our skull.