One of Us Will Be Dead by Morning

by David Moody

  “We’ve got enough,” he says dismissively.

  “We’ve been through this already. Enough for now, maybe, but we don’t know how long we’re going to have to make it last.”

  “It’ll only be a couple of days at most.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I’ve told you. I’ll kayak back.”

  The lights are on in the mess hall. The bright electric glare is starting to concern Matt. “What about fuel?”

  “What about it?” Ruth answers.

  “How long can you keep the generator running?”

  “A few days, maybe as long as a week if we’re careful.”

  “And then?”

  “Then the same principle applies as with everything else. We run out.”

  “And that’s it?”

  “Unless you’re thinking about drilling for oil and setting up a refinery, then, yes, pretty much. And I don’t reckon you’d have much luck. That’s why the scientists left this place untouched. Skek is as barren as it looks.”

  “Great,” Matt says.

  “I thought you lot were supposed to be survivalists,” Paul goads. He seems anxious tonight. On edge. Antagonistic.

  “We’ll survive,” Rajesh tells him. “You might not though, if you carry on like this.”

  “Is that a threat?”

  “Oh, come on, boys.” Natalie sighs. “Grow up, will you? We can ration power if we need to, only use the lights when we don’t have any choice, turn the heating off at night…”

  “As if this place isn’t cold enough already,” Ronan complains.

  “Like I said, I’ll try to get back tomorrow,” Rajesh says, doing his best to quell their collective nerves.

  Ruth disappears to check on Rachel, who’s still sitting with the kid in the dorm. Paul watches her leave. He does a silent head count, working out who’s where. He notices Frank is lashing the handle of the front door with a length of climbing rope. “What’s he up to?”

  “He’s the security guy,” Matt answers. “I guess he’s making the place secure. Just doing what comes naturally.”

  “And look at him.” Paul gestures at Ronan, who’s standing alone at a window, staring out like a nosy neighbor. It’s almost pitch-black out there, barely anything visible at all, but he keeps looking all the same. “What’s he looking for? We’re all inside.”

  “I can hear you, Paul,” Ronan says. “Sometimes it pays to be visible. I’m being proactive in case anyone lands here and starts looking for us. Front-foot positioning.”

  “Give me a break. The only people left out there are dead.”

  “But others will come looking for us eventually. We need them to know that we stand together, that we dealt with the killer and we did it in collective self-defense. Portraying a united front is important.”

  Stuart’s exasperated. “We’re on an island a couple of miles wide in the middle of the ocean and the storeroom is full of bodies. It’ll take more than a united front to explain away what’s happened here.”

  “You’re not listening to me, are you? All I’m saying is it doesn’t matter that Nils was the one who actually killed that boy, we’re all complicit by virtue of the fact we all have the misfortune of being stuck here together at this precise moment in time. We need to make sure we give the right impression.”

  “This isn’t a popularity contest, you jerk,” Natalie snaps. Matt watches her with admiration, wishing he had bollocks as big as hers.

  “No, you’re right, it isn’t. Whoever lands here is going to tar us all with the same brush.”

  “Those who are still alive,” Frank adds unhelpfully.

  “Even in battle you have to be aware of how you portray yourself,” Ronan continues. “I read that somewhere.”

  “In battle?” Matt is barely able to believe the continual tirade of bullshit he’s hearing from his boss.

  “You know what I’m talking about, don’t you, Paul?” Ronan continues, aiming his comments at his company’s second-in-command for support.

  Paul doesn’t respond.

  “This is getting ridiculous,” Matt continues. “We can Skype, we can text and email, we have computers in our pockets, yet we can’t get in contact with someone back home to get us away from this godforsaken place?”

  “That’s exactly what we’re saying,” Stuart tells him, his deceptively calm tone belying his frustration. “You can spend all the money in the world on high-tech communications equipment, but it all counts for nothing if there’s no one at the other end to receive your message.”

  Gavin is leaning against the wall, nervously chewing his fingers. “Do you think we’re looking at this the right way?”

  “What other way is there?” Paul asks.

  “All I’m saying is, if things are as bad back home as I’m starting to think they might be, then might being isolated out here actually be a good thing?”

  “I get what you’re saying, but what about when we run out of food and water?” Stuart reminds him.

  Gavin doesn’t have an answer to that.

  “He’s got a point, though,” Frank says. “Right now there’s a part of me that thinks we might be better off waiting a while before we try and get back.”

  “Just because we can’t get through on the radio doesn’t mean the rest of the world really has fallen apart,” Stuart says.

  Gavin’s mouth is dry with nerves. He clears his throat. “No, but it might have.” He’s staring at the entrance door handle that Frank just secured. “The more I think about our situation, the more confused I get. I mean, are we sure it’s such a good idea locking the door like that?”

  “Of course it is,” Frank says without hesitation.

  Gavin looks increasingly uncomfortable. He has more to say, but he’s not sure how to say it. Deep breath. Here goes nothing. “But we still don’t know exactly what happened to Vanessa.”

  “I told you,” Stephen says from the opposite corner of the room. “We were near the edge of the cliff and she just—”

  “She just came at you. Yeah, I heard that much. Look, I know what you said.… Thing is, though, the kid that Nils killed, he was nowhere near here at the time, was he? Nessa died before we found the boat and the bodies.”

  “I didn’t do anything. How many times do I have to say it?” Stephen gets up to try to argue his case yet again, but the effort’s too much and he has no more words. He slumps back down and lays his head on the table, too tired to keep fighting. “I can only tell you the same thing again and again. I didn’t push her. She came at me and she fell.”

  “What are you implying, Gavin?” Frank asks, concerned.

  “I just think we need to be careful, that’s all. What if he’s telling the truth and she really did try and attack him? None of this adds up, and we’ll never be able to prove what happened to Vanessa now.” Gavin looks directly at Stephen, but Stephen keeps his head down. “Thing is, locks work two ways, don’t they? They keep things out, but they also trap things in.”

  “You do have a point,” Matt says, and now all eyes are focused on him. “That lad Nils killed … he didn’t look like he could fight his way out of a wet paper bag. How could he have caused all the carnage you found on the boat? He was massively outnumbered. There were adults on there too.”

  “The kid was fucking crazy,” Paul says. “He was off his head. Anything’s possible when you’re in a state like that.”

  “Crazy or scared?” Matt asks.

  “Is there a difference?”

  “You tell me. It’s getting hard to tell.”

  “From what I’ve seen and what Stu’s told me, those kids were probably dead long before they reached Skek,” says Ronan.

  “And how d’you work that out?” Gavin demands.

  “Because we had bodies washed up, remember? I think those poor buggers would have had to be facing something pretty bloody terrible for them to want to take their chances in the water.”

  “He’s right,” Natalie interjects. “I looked int
o the faces of those kids yesterday, and even though they were dead, I saw sheer bloody terror on every single one of them. The one thing I know for sure is that I don’t want to come face-to-face with whoever did that to them, so if Nils really has killed the killer, so much the better. Now I’m happy to sit here and wait until help arrives, but if any of you would rather go out there and take your chances, be my guest.”

  WEDNESDAY

  13

  Hardly anyone sleeps properly. Tuesday evening takes forever to end, and the first hours of Wednesday pass equally slowly. Stuart switches the generator off before midnight to conserve fuel, and the silence and darkness that follow are disconcerting. It’s not like the night back home where streetlamps and cars and harsh electric lights take the edge off the gloom. Here, the pitch-blackness has a suffocating choke hold on everything. When the moon and stars disappear behind the heavy cloud cover, all illumination is gone. Your eyes don’t get accustomed to this level of black. It’s relentless. Isolating. While they’re in their beds, the people left alive here are as good as alone, and only when the first telltale signs of morning become visible do they start to look around for one another again. It begins with the faintest glow on the horizon, and as the light gradually begins to strengthen, shadows and shapes slowly start to form. Rather than go back to their very basic prefabricated bungalow, Stuart and Ruth have bunked up in the male-staff dormitory. With Rachel still looking after Louise from the beach in the female-staff dorm, Natalie has chosen to sleep near the kitchen serving hatch, her backside wedged onto one uncomfortable plastic chair and her feet stretched out and propped up on another. Rajesh is sprawled facedown on an adjacent table, his face sleep-scarred by the map he was studying before lights-out. Nils is beside him, flat out on a wooden bench. Frank, Ronan, and Gavin have commandeered the female dorm, leaving Paul and Matt with the whole of the male dorm to themselves.

  What the hell was that?

  Rajesh sits up with a start, immediately awake, certain he just heard something. He rubs his blurry, sleep-heavy eyes and stretches his neck, aching because of how he’s been sleeping. He straightens his spine and massages the small of his back, wincing with pain.

  There it is again.

  There’s a definite noise outside. Something rustling in the long grass around the side of the building, behind where he’s sitting. He might have thought it was some kind of animal if he didn’t know better, but there are no animals on Skek.

  Maybe I imagined it, he thinks. Probably just one of the others moving about …

  He was in the middle of a dream he wishes he could return to. His dad was in it, and his dad’s been dead for a couple of years now. It’s always good to see him again, if a little disorientating. Rajesh thinks the human brain is an incredible thing. All that time since he last saw his old man, yet in the dream he moved as he always did, spoke how he always did, and looked exactly as Rajesh remembers. Dad was giving Rajesh hell as usual, criticizing his westernized lifestyle.…

  The dream and its lingering aftereffects are a momentary distraction: a subconscious coping mechanism. Another noise outside brings him back to reality in a heartbeat.

  Someone’s definitely trying to get in here.…

  They’re at the door now. Rajesh feels sick with nerves. He gets up to look for something to use as a weapon, and he misjudges the available space and clips the corner of a table with his hip, shunting it forward. Its feet drag noisily, immediately waking Natalie.

  She sits up fast, immediately alert. Heart pounding. “What the fuck?”

  “Someone’s outside,” Rajesh replies in an exaggerated stage whisper. He keeps edging forward.

  “That’s impossible.”

  Eyes adjusting to the darkness.

  Natalie on his shoulder.

  They bunch up near the door, crouching down like characters from a Scooby-Doo cartoon. Nils is with them now, and Matt appears at the other end of the mess hall, making more noise than the rest of them combined. “What’s going on?” he asks, struggling to make out who’s who in the gloom.

  “You sure you didn’t imagine it?” Natalie asks perfectly reasonably.

  “Fuck’s sake,” Rajesh replies, annoyed. “Do you think I’m stupid?”

  “I heard it too,” Nils says. “I think it was—”

  His words are abruptly truncated when someone tries to open the front door. It has to be someone and not something because the handle goes up and down repeatedly and the whole door shakes. Then there’s an ominous thump: a body hurling itself against the woodwork, desperate to get inside.

  “We all here?” Paul asks, his eyes slowly adapting to the environment.

  “Yep,” Gavin answers, having done a quick head count. Even Rachel’s left the sedated teenager’s side momentarily.

  The person outside smashes with full weight against the door again, and though no one can make out what they’re saying, they can hear voices. Shit. There’s more than one of them.

  “Open the door,” Stuart says.

  “Are you out of your bloody mind?” Ronan protests, panicking.

  “Could be the coast guard or the police. Better late than never.”

  Nils picks up a fire extinguisher and holds it ready to use as a weapon, just in case. Brutal, but effective. He’ll either club them with it, he thinks, or set it off in their faces to confuse them.

  The door’s rattling and shaking furiously now. Whoever’s out there, they’re not going away. Rajesh unties the ropes Frank secured around the handle last night, then steps back when he’s done. He takes a sheath knife from the inside pocket of his jacket. Natalie stands to one side of the door with her hand on the handle. Nils and Rajesh steel themselves for a possible attack, then give her the nod and she opens it.

  Gray light floods inside—more than expected—and in a sudden flurry of shadows and movement, a figure rushes into the building. Nils raises the extinguisher, ready to bring the base of it down on the now-cowering intruder, but then he stops.

  “Don’t!” A man’s breathless voice pleads. “Please, Nils, don’t…”

  Stuart recognizes the voice instantly. He runs forward to stop Nils from attacking. “Don’t, Nils, it’s Rod.”

  Rod Hazleton picks himself up and brushes himself down. “Thanks, Stuart.”

  “What are you doing back here, Rod? You’re the last person I expected to see.”

  Rod turns around and beckons to someone who’s still waiting outside, obviously unsure. A teenage girl reluctantly enters the building. She looks absolutely terrified; white as a ghost.

  Once they’re inside, Rajesh sticks his head out, looks up and around to check all’s clear, then slips out and fires up the generator. He’s back in less than thirty seconds, and he closes the door behind him equally quickly, shutting out the rest of the world. Harsh artificial light fills the building now, stealing away the shadows and making it impossible for anyone to hide.

  The girl is Rod Hazleton’s daughter, Jayde. She sits at a table with her dad, and they’re quickly surrounded. Matt thinks she looks as lost as he feels.

  “What’s going on, Rod?” Stuart asks.

  Rod can’t bring himself to speak at first. He’s in his late forties and is badly out of shape. It’s clearly taken an inordinate amount of effort for him to get here, because he’s sweat soaked and panting hard. Although his daughter is sitting right next to him, she’s a million miles away. She stares dead ahead, not looking at anything, completely traumatized.

  Natalie sits down opposite and reaches out and takes her hands. “You okay, Jayde?” Natalie has worked for Rod for a number of years and has known Jayde virtually all that time, and though she doesn’t say anything when Natalie speaks, Jayde reacts when they make physical contact. She jumps at first, then visibly relaxes.

  The silence lasts too long. “Come on, Rod, talk to me,” Stuart pushes again.

  Ruth puts a couple of cold drinks on the table and Rod knocks his back. He looks around the room. Some faces he recognizes,
others he doesn’t know. He again tries to speak but he has to stop and compose himself, still overcome.

  “It’s all gone to hell out there.”

  “What has?” Ruth asks.

  “Everything.”

  “Pull yourself together, Rod, you’re not making sense. How come you’re here, and why have you brought Jayde with you? You told me her mum was trying to stop you having contact.”

  “Jayde’s mother is dead.” Rod’s voice is finally clear enough to be audible, strangely emotionless and detached now. Beside him, Jayde starts to cry. Her face remains impassive. There are no sobs, just tears. “Her partner killed her.”

  Jayde starts to say, “Caleb was just—”

  Her father interrupts, unnaturally calm, “He killed your mother in cold blood. He’d have killed you too if you hadn’t managed to get to the neighbor. Thank Christ Mr. Oakes still had my number.”

  “What happened?” Rachel asks, pushing her way to the front of the group. She doesn’t have a clue who this guy is, but the things he’s saying are beginning to sound uncomfortably familiar.

  “He hacked her to pieces, that’s what happened,” Rod answers with scant regard for the effect his words might have on his daughter. “No word of warning and no mercy, by all accounts. Just took a kitchen knife and sliced her up on the street outside his house. Bloody psychopath.”

  “When was this?” Stuart asks.

  “Couple of days ago.” Rod looks distracted and tries to find Ruth’s face again in the crowd. “Who are these people?”

  Ronan squeezes through a gap and offers his hand. “Ronan Heggarty. We’ve spoken on the phone on a number of occasions.”

  Rod just looks at him. “But you should have left by now. Why are you still here?”

  No one answers. A few exchange glances.

  “There was a group of kids booked in for this week, wasn’t there? Where are they?”

  His eyes move from face to face, looking for answers. Some people look away, avoiding his gaze.

  Natalie doesn’t. “They’re dead, Rod. All but one of them, anyway.”

  “Jesus Christ…”