by Frank Tayell
15th July
A squall the night before had soaked the now exposed hut. The three remaining walls had soaked up the water and then collapsed shortly after dawn. Nilda sat on the jetty, staring forlornly out at sea. She had reconciled herself to death, but now that she had the smallest glimmer of hope on which to grasp, she found her every attempt frustrated. The only things of use in the remains of the hut, like the folding chairs and tables, were made of metal. Metal didn’t float. Not easily, and not in any sense that was meaningful to her. Idly, her hand reached out to pluck an errant splinter from the jetty. She held it up. Then she looked down at the wooden jetty and she laughed.
18th July
Pulling out the nails holding the wooden planking of the jetty to their supports had been time consuming. She’d had to wear down a groove next to each nail and then carefully lever it out. In her eagerness, she’d lost two to the sea. But now she had a stack of planks, and a neat pile of nails.
“So what’s next?” she asked the empty beach.
21st July
She had nailed the planks together, one layer underneath, the other on top, each layer holding the other in place. It was time for a test. The raft floated, not on the waves, but a few inches below them.
“That’s good enough to get out of the bay, isn’t it?” she muttered as she dragged the raft back on to the beach. “Yes. Yes. It is. But that’s not going to be good enough. No. Not good enough. What’s missing? Sides! I need sides!”
She looked about for other materials. She could see none. Biting down her frustration she began another long walk around the island. She followed the cliff edge, peering down to the rocks below in the hope something might have been washed onto them. There was nothing. She went inland and scoured the forest floor, and then she returned to the ruins of the boat, going over it again and again. But she had done that many times and, when night fell, was unsurprised that her search had once again come to naught.
22nd July
She threw another branch onto the fire. It was important to keep the bonfire blazing. There was only a slim chance anyone would see it. Slim chances were all she had. She stared at the raft. There was nothing on the island, nothing to make sides except the wooden jetty itself.
“Then make it smaller,” she said. “Use the planks to make the sides.”
Slowly, methodically, not allowing herself to give in to anger at herself for not realising the obvious earlier, she took her raft apart.
24th July
Raft Mark-Two was much smaller than the first, but it had sides. She took it out to the shallows. It sank a few inches, but for a moment she stayed dry. Then the water began to seep through the gaps. Wet and miserable, frustrated with yet another setback, she dragged her raft back to shore.
“Tar, that’s what the Navy used, wasn’t it? Didn’t they used to call sailors ‘Jack-Tars’? Well that’s what I need,” she muttered. “But how do you make tar. It’s a by-product of oil, right? And that doesn’t help me at all. What else could I use? Beeswax? There aren’t hives on the island.” She had looked.
She growled in anger. She had tried screaming, but that had done nothing more than leave her throat raw.
“Tar. Oil. Wax. Rubber,” she muttered to herself as she slowly turned in a circle, trying to see the obvious that she’d so far missed. Then she saw it.
“Plastic.”
There was enough of it on the beach, though less than when they’d run aground. She’d taken to collecting it, piling it up in the tumbledown house. It had given her something to do.
She grabbed a handful from the beach, sorting it, finding the pieces she thought large enough. Then she banked up the fire, moved the raft close to it, and began melting the plastic onto the gaps.
The first piece caught in her hands, burning onto her fingers. She ran down to the sea, plunging the hand into the waves. She had to peel the melted plastic off her hand, taking a layer of skin with it. For some reason she found that funny.
She tried again, this time laying the plastic in place and holding out a burning branch from the fire close to it. It worked. She felt she’d proved the principal. How long the seal would hold, or how effective it would be, she wouldn’t know until she tested it. And she couldn’t do that until she’d sealed at least most of the gaps.
25th July
It began to rain. The fire went out.
31st July
She’d had to wait for the rain to stop and the raft to dry out, but she’d sealed about three quarters of the raft. She was impatient. She didn’t want to wait. Three quarters was enough, she decided, at least for a test. She took it out to the shallows. It worked. Mostly. When she dragged the raft back to the shore she found a quarter of the plastic had simply washed away. She used up one more of the precious few matches to relight the fire. As she waited for the flames to take, she gathered more plastic from the house. Then she realised that the raft was too wet. Again, she would have wait until the wood had dried.
6th August
She took the raft out. It was completely sealed this time and eighty-percent of the seals held. She took it back to the shore. Whilst she waited for it to dry, and with no cloth for sails, she turned her mind to oars. During the wreck, one had been lost over the side, and the other had landed on the rocks. One oar would not be enough. As she would be taking little food with her, she couldn’t risk becoming adrift on the vast ocean. Once more she examined the wreckage of the boat, the hut, and the litter on the beach. The metal uprights from the bunk beds would do as a pole. She had the nuts and bolts to attach it to something flat and with that, the craft could be propelled through the water. That only left finding that flat piece of… what? There wasn’t time to carve something from wood, but there was the lifeboat. Using brute force as much as the serrated edge of the spade, she hacked away at the wrecked ship’s hull.
9th August
The rains came again, harder and more persistent than before.
30th August
All the seals held. She had taken the raft out, paddling a short way from shore. She had wanted to keep going, but it was getting dark. She would leave first thing in the morning. She sat by the fire, throwing on branch after branch. Whatever happened, whatever the weather, in the morning she would leave. Nothing would keep her on the island. Watching the flames, she fell asleep.
She was woken by a crunching sound. She jumped to her feet. There it was again. She peered out into the night. She thought she could make out a figure. No, figures, two of them, and they were coming up the beach. The undead. They had found her. She bent, scrabbling on the ground for the spade. Let them come, she thought, she was ready.
“I’m ready,” she said it out loud.
“Are you? What for?” a voice asked.
Nilda froze. Of all the things she’d expected, human beings were not amongst them.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“Francois Coultard, madam. Sargent-Chef de la Brigade des Forces Spéciales Terre de la République Française.” He snapped off a wry salute. “We saw your fire, we thought we’d ask if you would mind sharing it.”
“You’re French?”
“He is. I’m not,” the other person, a woman, said. “Is it just you here?”
The Frenchman stepped closer to the fire. He wasn’t in uniform, but more a civilian approximation of it. On his back was a rifle. A pistol was holstered at his belt, next to a knife. On the other side he wore a small axe. She considered the woman’s question, and then the man’s weapons. They made her cautious, but she could see no purpose in a lie.
“It’s just me. The others are dead. We came here on that boat.” She pointed towards the shadow of the wrecked lifeboat. “They died. Radiation poisoning. Their graves are over there.”
There was a hiss from the Frenchman, and he pulled something out of his pack. By the way he waved it in the air, then at the ground, then at the water lapping against the beach, Nilda guessed it was a Geiger counter.
“Non,�
� he said. “It is fine. Just a little above background. The same as we measured on the ship.”
“I’m sorry about your friends,” the woman said, as she approached Nilda. Nilda thought she was going to put a comforting arm around her. Instead she draped a long coat over Nilda’s shoulders.
“Here,” she said, as she pulled on the lapels to close the coat over the tattered remains of Nilda’s clothing. And then the woman paused and looked into Nilda’s eyes. A long searching moment later, she nodded.
“My name’s Kim,” she said. There was another pause. Eventually she added, “what’s yours?”
“Oh. Yes. Nilda.”
“How long have you been here?” Kim asked.
“I don’t know. Weeks. No, it’s been longer than that. A month. Two? It was a few weeks after the evacuation that we… I left Penrith.”
“Then you’ve been here nearly six months,” Kim said, gently.
“Six months?” Nilda shook her head in disbelief.
“You must have found fresh water here,” Kim said.
Nilda nodded.
“And food?”
“Fish. Crabs. Dandelions and stinging nettles,” Nilda said. “Nothing else. I tried to catch birds. It wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be.”
“Better than you’d find in most English restaurants before the end,” the Frenchman murmured.
“But you say the other people died of radiation poisoning?” Kim asked as she threw a glance over at Francois.
“They came from Glasgow. The bombs, you see. They were…” She stopped
Kim nodded her understanding.
“We’ll have to send a team to properly check this island. If it is safe, then we’ll be moving some people here. An uncontaminated island on the route to Norway is important.” She saw the confusion in Nilda’s eyes. “You don’t know where you are? You’re about thirty miles from Iona. If the wind had been blowing the other way this place would have been coated in radioactive fallout. You were lucky.”
“Lucky?”
“Well, okay, maybe not lucky. Look, we’re based out of Anglesey. We’ve got the power plant working again. There’s food, and there’s as much safety as you’ll find anywhere on this planet. And as far as we can tell, we’re the largest community left in this corner of the Atlantic. You can come with us if you want. But if you want to stay here, I’m sorry, but you will be getting company. We really do need islands like this.”
“You can have this place,” Nilda said. “Just let me get off it.”
“Of course,” Kim said softly.
She nodded to the Frenchman and led Nilda down the beach to a small boat.
“Wait,” Nilda said, one foot in the dingy.
“What?”
“My raft.”
“Your what?” Francois scanned his flashlight across the beach. “You mean that thing?”
“You try and build something better with no rope and no tools,” Nilda said defensively.
“Hmm,” the Frenchman grunted.
“Can we tow it with us?” Nilda asked. “I want to see if it… well, if it floats.”
Francois looked questioningly at Kim.
“Fine,” Kim said.
The Frenchman attached a line to the raft and pushed it out into the water. Nilda climbed into the dinghy, and they were soon heading out towards the waiting ship. The raft stayed afloat until they were out of the bay. A wave, barely noticeable to Nilda, passed under the dinghy then swamped her improvised craft. It began to sink. Francois let go of the rope with a shrug. Nilda turned away from the island towards the waiting ship, and the future.
31st August
Nilda watched the sun slowly rise above the horizon, turning the ink-black sea into a kaleidoscope of grey. She hadn’t tried to sleep. Kim had offered her a bunk in one of the cabins, but there were other people there. Having gone through her story once with Kim, she didn’t want to do it again.
Instead, she had found a quiet spot at the boat’s stern, inside an enclosed viewing platform. The walls and ceiling made of some transparent glass, or perhaps crystal, certainly the ship was too luxurious for it to be plastic. She ran a hand along the savage gash that cut deep into the bench’s comfortable fabric. She supposed a battle must have been fought on the ship. From what Kim had told her, battles of one sort or another had been fought everywhere on the planet. Her eyes were drawn once more to the ocean, empty of everything but the frothing white caps churned up by the boat’s engines. The island had disappeared below the horizon whilst it was still dark. She’d fought her own battle there, though she wasn’t exactly sure who or what her foe had been, nor whether she had won.
There was a muttered cursing, followed by a quiet rebuke as two figures trudged out from around the side of the boat and down to a row of large barrels crammed into a walkway between two sets of sloping solar panels. It was a man and a young girl. She was bundled up in a jacket too big. He wore nothing but a shirt, the sleeves rolled up to show the tattoos covering his arms. Taken with the scars and the gold tooth that glinted when it caught the early morning sun, he had an almost piratical appearance. The slightly sinister impression was dispelled when he gave a soft laugh after the girl dropped a rope he threw to her. With unexpected patience he showed the girl how to tie the barrels to the deck. Judging by her increasingly vocal protest, the girl was not happy at being awake at such an early hour.
The girl, she realised, must be around Jay’s age. Nilda closed her eyes, expecting to cry, but found she was unable. There was too much life, too much normality, around her yet she felt strangely detached from it all.
The moment Nilda had set foot on board, Kim had hustled her down to a large cabin and nearly pushed her into the shower. Nilda had washed and offered a muted thanks when she was given clothes that were clearly the other woman’s spares. She had tried not to sound ungrateful, it was just that the experience of being so unexpectedly rescued didn’t feel real. No, she corrected herself, it was discovering that there were people out there still willing and able to rescue others that she found hard to believe.
Kim had explained what had happened; how the virus was an accident which Sir Michael Quigley had taken advantage of to seize power, how the bombs had been part of a nuclear attack of which every government had their part, and how there had been a mutiny across the world as military units had baulked at the orders which would have destroyed the human race. The end result of it all was a few thousand survivors carving out a life on Anglesey and chaos everywhere else, with only a few occasional radio signals hinting that out there, somewhere, others might have survived.
Nilda weighed the news. Objectively she knew that it was bad. But she didn’t feel in any way disappointed. Her focus since the outbreak had been on survival, then revenge, then on dying, and then on building the raft. She had given no real thought of what she would do when she made it to land, and as she sat in relative comfort, watching the patient man and sullen girl, she realised that she had never expected to survive the ocean crossing. The raft was nothing more than an elaborate method of suicide.
“Mind if I sit? I brought coffee,” Kim’s voice cut through her thoughts. Nilda looked up. She hadn’t heard the woman approach.
“Thank you,” Nilda murmured, moving along the bench.
“Here.” Kim held out a thickly sliced sandwich. “The meat’s tinned, but the bread’s fresh. Or it was fresh when we left. There were a string of grain ships on route from Trois-Riviers to Rotterdam when the outbreak hit. The government in Ottawa recalled them. The ships turned around, then the Royal Navy was sent out to hijack them. They turned around again, but turning around a freighter isn’t as quick as wishing it. By the time they were set on a course for the UK the first bombs had fallen. And so we have grain. More than we need and more than enough until we can get the farms working.”
Nilda took the sandwich, tried to remember how to smile, took a bite, and found she wasn’t hungry.
Kim placed an insulated mug next to Nilda, t
hen took a sip from her own. “You know what I want?” the woman chattered on. “Chocolate. Not powdered cocoa, and not just a bar, but a real luxury assortment. Something with truffles and pralines. The kind you’d get knowing that you’d regret the expense the moment they were gone, yet would enjoy every bite all the more because of it. Since that’s not on the cards, I can only offer you coffee.”
“Thank you,” Nilda said. She knew the younger woman was being kind, offering conversation as an alternative to introspective gloom. The things that people had talked about when the world had been normal, the usual niceties of family and friends and life itself, all now seemed taboo. She looked around, seeking inspiration for some neutral topic. She settled for asking, “is this your boat?”
“Mine? With a name like the Smuggler’s Salvation? No, it’s Miguel’s.” Kim nodded towards the man near the boat’s stern.
“Ah,” Nilda took another look around, taking in the sleek profile, the comfortable though ripped seats, and the solar panels. “Let me guess. He made his money from computer games and named the boat after one of them?”
“Oh no, he renamed the boat when he took control of her. He was an actual smuggler, mostly from El Salvador up into the U.S. He definitely wasn’t one of the good guys, but,” she shrugged, “that was the old world. In our new one that began back in February, all that counts is that he saved lives. When the news started broadcasting the outbreak, he did what pretty much everyone who had a boat did, he headed out to sea in the hope he could wait it out. The difference between him and most other people was that he had food, water, and fuel. He didn’t head up to Greenland—”
“Greenland?”
“That’s where most people in the boats headed. It was the one place, other than the UK, that wasn’t broadcasting that they had been overrun. And that was only because the few people who lived there had already headed off into the tundra. But Miguel, he took his boat and decided to cross the Atlantic. And that was how he was caught up in the mutiny. You know, the naval battle I told you about? His ship was sunk and he ended up in the water. Then this boat came drifting along. The crew were dead, but they were still on board. He cleared the ship of the undead, then helped with the rescue. And that’s how the boat ended up, like so many others, on Anglesey.”
