by David Moody
He scares himself so badly he occasionally freezes. What if he takes a step in the wrong direction and treads on outstretched fingers? He imagines the sickening crack of young bones beneath his boots, and it makes him feel sick to the stomach. Or what if he trips in the darkness and finds himself flat on the ground, face-to-face with one of the dead…?
A couple of times during the long hours now ending, the ferry itself seemed to sob with grief. It reminds him of the way the rented house he shares with Jen seems to moan and sigh under its own weight at night, floorboards and pipes expanding and contracting with changes in temperature, cracking and popping. But, here on the boat, the noises are different and far more ominous. The ruptured metal hull groans as if it’s in pain. The exaggerated grinding sounds are like prolonged, distorted screams, and Matt’s left in no doubt that, sooner rather than later, something’s going to give. It all feels uncomfortably close to collapsing under the strain. Three times now since nightfall the beached belly of the boat has dropped. It’s probably only millimeters each time, but to Matt each movement feels like the beginning of a stomach-churning free fall. He reckons the wreck of the Heavenly Vision probably weighs several tons, but it feels painfully lightweight. Fragile, even. He imagines a chasm opening up along the center of the dead ship as it buckles and bends, then pictures himself falling through the gap into the ice-cold waters below. His mind continues to wander, and in his head he’s deep below the waves and still sinking, unable to breathe or get back to the surface. The water-wrinkled, ghost-white fingers of dead kids reach out for him from the murk, pulling him deeper down as quickly as he tries to swim up. Desperate for breath. Lungs burning …
Focus. Snap out of it.
The light levels and the temperature have slowly changed, but the stench remains the same. It’s as bad now as it was when he and Paul first got here. He thinks he’ll never get used to it, no matter how long he’s here. In fact, the longer that is, the worse it seems to get. He pees at speed in the pitch-blackness, and when he leaves the bathroom, he realizes just how much brighter it is outside now. The first tendrils of dawn’s early gray light have started to creep in through the windows and add detail to the shadows. Rather than sit back down and wait for the nightmare to come into full focus, he instead climbs the slippery metal steps up onto the deck.
He’s drenched in seconds. Sea spray and driving rain combining to leave him completely waterlogged. He doesn’t want to go back down again and so looks for alternative places to shelter. He spies the bridge of the ship and half-walks, half-slips along the wooden decking toward it. If only he’d thought of this last night. It would have been an infinitely better place to have spent the time; though ice-cold it would have been fresher and less enclosed and oppressive than the morguelike lower level. He finds the body of a crew member on the floor near the back of the small cabin, but once he’s covered the dead man’s face with a fire blanket, it’s easy to convince himself the body isn’t there. He tries not to dwell on having recognized the face. Matt remembers him skippering the boat when it carried them over to Skek last Friday morning. Christ, that feels as if it were a lifetime ago.
The control panel Matt’s now leaning against is as dead as everything else. He idly flicks a few switches and presses a couple of buttons, but nothing happens. Wait. There’s a key. He never imagined you’d start something as big as this ferry with the turn of a single key like his heap of car that’s sitting on his front drive back home, he hopes. He goes to turn it, but then stops. What’s the point? They’re not going anywhere. It’ll just make a load of unnecessary noise and attract unwanted attention, if it does anything at all.
“Do it.” The voice takes him by surprise.
He turns around and sees Natalie standing behind him. “Oh, so you’re talking to me this morning then?”
“As long as you don’t do anything stupid.”
“What are you doing out here?”
“I could ask you the same question.”
“Couldn’t stand it down there any longer. It’s all right for you in your little cabin. All I’d got was a load of corpses and Paul for company. Don’t know which was worse. What about you?”
“Just wondered where you’d disappeared off to,” she nonchalantly answers.
Matt notices that she’s still carrying the bow and arrow. “Will you put that damn thing down? You’re making me nervous.”
“There’s other things on this island for you to feel more nervous about, believe me. Now turn the bloody key.”
He does as he’s told, and it is just like starting his car because as he moves the key a quarter turn clockwise, a couple of the lights on the panel in front of him illuminate. The single lightbulb above his head starts to glow too. He’s about to turn it farther but stops himself. “No point, I guess. Don’t need the engine. We’re not going anywhere.”
He looks around for Natalie, but she’s already on her way back belowdecks. She moves at double his speed, and by the time he’s reached the bottom of the staircase, she’s back in her room again. Paul’s still where Matt left him—sprawled out and fast asleep—so Matt knocks on Natalie’s door like a kid waiting to see the head teacher. He gingerly opens it and sticks his head round. “Mind if I come in?”
She doesn’t answer, but she doesn’t object either, and he takes that as a positive. She’s sitting on an office chair at a stunted, rubbish-strewn desk, messing with a computer and waiting for it to boot up.
“Did you not think to try the power before now?”
“I was too busy keeping my head down, trying not to be found.” She doesn’t look up. “I’d have got round to it eventually.”
Matt lets himself into the room fully. It’s so small that they’re at opposite ends but are almost touching. He watches her as she stares at the computer screen, arms folded and impatient.
“What are you doing?”
“What do you think I’m doing? I’m trying to get online. Thought I might be able to get a message out to someone.”
“You might struggle. I haven’t had a phone signal since I got here.”
She looks over her shoulder at him despairingly. “You think I don’t know that? I have to try, though, don’t I?”
He leans back against the wall and looks out the grubby window to his right. The water feels perilously close here, washing up against the glass, far higher up the hull than it should be. Yet this little room feels safe. It’s still warm from last night. He can feel the residual heat from the cocoon of fire blankets and life jackets Natalie used as bedding. “Nice pad.”
“Fuck off before you get any ideas. It’s mine.” Her answer comes quickly, and he thinks he detects the faintest glimmer of a smile in her reflection in the monitor. He’s relieved. The Natalie he got to know over the weekend is still there. “It stinks, it’s small, and it’s uncomfortable, but it’s a little oasis in here. Just enough room for one. Perfect.”
The outer wall is white-painted metal; the others are covered to shoulder height with dated faux-oak cladding. A notice board dead ahead has all kinds of rubbish pinned to it. Sun-curled notices and faded safety posters.
“You reckon any of that was important?” Matt anxiously fills the silence with noise. “That rota’s six weeks out-of-date.”
“Does it matter?”
“I don’t know. It might. What if there’s something up there about the kids that were on board? Some contact details or something?”
“Maybe.”
“That could be useful though, don’t you think? There’s probably all kinds of stuff that might be useful on here if we can get to it before it gets too waterlogged. We should have a look through it at least. In fact, I reckon we should strip the boat. We could do it between us.” Now his mind is racing. “Hey, what about flares? You think if we set off a flare someone would see us?”
“We’ve already got flares. Be quiet, Matt. I’ve never heard you talk so much. Are you nervous or something?”
“Yes,” he answers without h
esitation. He thinks there’s no point beating around the bush anymore.
The computer’s finally ready. A familiar boot-up chime in an unfamiliar environment. It sounds out of place and unexpectedly reminds them both of home. Thankfully no passwords are required to gain access. Natalie digs the mouse out from under a pile of papers and shakes it to find the pointer. The clunky old machine is slow to respond, and it takes more effort than it should to drag the arrow down to the browser icon. It’s made worse by the uneven angle of the desk, but she gets there in the end. She pauses before clicking.
“Come on, Nat, we don’t know how long the power’s going to last.”
She waits a second longer because she knows how much this matters.
Deep breath.
Click.
It takes an inordinate length of time for the program to open.
For a while there’s hope as the window fills with graphics and text, but it’s just a cached page, and when Natalie clicks on a new link, all she gets is a message that no network connection is available. “Fuck.” She clicks again and again and again and again in frustration, like she thinks the computer will have a change of heart and connect. Now the machine asks if she wants it to try looking for other available networks nearby. “There’s nothing nearby, never mind a fucking network.”
She throws the mouse across the desk. Matt slumps against the wall. His heart sinks, and the bitter disappointment makes him realize he’d staked a hell of a lot on being able to get a message home. “Shit. Shit.” He hides his frustration, clenching his fists.
Natalie has turned around and is watching him. “Stop holding it in.”
“What?”
“It’s okay to be angry. Let it out or you’ll give yourself a coronary.”
“I can’t.”
“You can. I know you’re an introvert, but you’ll choke on it if you’re not careful.”
She’s right and he knows it. Matt punches the wooden cladding, leaving a fist-shaped indent in the cheap woodwork.
“That’s more like it,” she says.
It hurts but it feels good, so Matt does it again. And again. And again and again …
“What the hell’s going on in here?”
They both look around and see Paul standing in the doorway, staring at Matt and the hole he’s punched in the wall.
“How long have you been there?” Matt asks.
“Couple of seconds. I heard you knocking seven shades of shit out of something and I panicked. Thought you might have been killing each other.”
“We were trying to get online,” Natalie explains.
“Well, that’s not gonna happen, is it?” Paul says unhelpfully. “Want me to take a look?”
“All yours.” She gives up her seat willingly. “I hate computers.”
“All due respect, Paul,” Matt says, rubbing his throbbing knuckles, “what difference is you looking at it going to make? Doesn’t matter who’s sitting at the keyboard, there’s no network connection.”
Paul takes the chair and stretches his fingers like a concert pianist about to start a recital. He opens a few windows on the screen, checks some settings, then closes them again. “You’re right.”
“Yeah, I know we’re right.”
He stares at the screen. “Doesn’t make sense, though. If there’s no network, why was there a computer here?”
“Who cares?” Natalie says.
“I do.”
Paul flicks through folders and directories, opening and closing documents and spreadsheets.
“What exactly are you looking for?” Matt asks.
“Don’t know. Anything, really. Probably nothing … just looking.”
Matt’s had enough. The small room feels overcrowded now with three of them. Despite everything, he’s hungry. His empty stomach growls for attention. He heads back into the main part of the ferry. He has it in mind that there must be something here to eat. There might have been some kind of snack machine or concessions stand selling confectionary and drinks to pacify the kids being ferried to and from the island. Failing that, he thinks, there might be something in the abandoned luggage that’s lying around. Is it too soon to be turfing through the children’s belongings? It feels wrong, but he knows he probably doesn’t have any choice if he wants to stay alive.
They’re dead, I’m not.
Yet.
He has to be mercenary, even though it’s against his nature. None of this stuff is of any use to the kids now, but a little food might mean the difference between life and death for him and the others. The more he thinks about it, though, the more he realizes it’s probably not so much a choice between life and death, it’s more about choosing between dying now and dying later. As long as they’re stuck on this bloody island, it feels like they’re just prolonging the inevitable.
He’s standing right on the edge of the mountainous pile of bodies, trying to work out if he’s really going to do this, if he can do it, and whether it’ll be worth it. Frozen, ice-white faces are looking in his direction like cursed porcelain dolls, glazed eyes fixed on him, unblinking. It’s like they’re warning him, Don’t touch our stuff … we’ll get you if you touch our stuff.
Matt leans down and teases a kid’s brightly colored rucksack out from under a corpse. He’s gentle at first, but when it doesn’t move, he’s forced to tug a little harder. A dead arm flaps over and slaps down onto another body like cold meat on a butcher’s counter, and for a second he thinks he might be about to trigger a gruesome avalanche of dead flesh. He takes a few steps back just in case, but only one more body is disturbed. It rolls over onto its belly and lands on top of another, locking the two of them together in an uncomfortable and unnatural embrace.
The bag he’s picked up is wet. The floor’s wet here too, he notices. The wreck is slowly flooding. Matt takes the rucksack to drier ground and mooches through its contents, regretting his intrusion into its late owner’s brutally truncated life. There’s a lifeless mobile phone, its case plastered in faded boy-band stickers. A well-used hairbrush. A rolled-up magazine and a copy of one of those YA books that’s become an increasingly unsatisfactory movie franchise. He went to see the first film in the series with Jen. He quite enjoyed it, though Jen wasn’t impressed, so he tempered his enthusiasm.
Now he holds a waterlogged diary with a padlock holding the clasp secure, all its secrets locked away forever. Such innocence. Such naïveté. He wipes his eyes and continues his grim scavenging, figuring that he should take whatever he can find here, no matter whom it belonged to or how the person died. He pockets a Mars bar he finds in the pocket of a discarded jacket, and a packet of throat lozenges from inside another dead child’s coat. Some crisps. A packed lunch in a plastic box labeled GEORGIA PETERS—YEAR 8. He uncovers a mound of drenched luggage and is about to start working his way through it when he’s disturbed. He looks up, feeling guilty like he’s been caught stealing. Natalie’s calling to him from the other end of the wreck, and he walks back toward her, already making excuses. “I was just looking for some food. I thought there might be something to eat. It’s not like they’re going to need it anymore and I—”
“Not interested,” she says abruptly, and she pushes him back into the little office. “Look at this.”
Paul’s gotten something up on the computer screen. It’s a low-res, black-and-white camera image. The quality is desperately poor.
“What is it?”
“It’s here,” Paul replies. “The boat. Basic CCTV.”
Matt squints at the screen, trying to work out what exactly he’s looking at. It’s like doing one of those old Magic Eye 3-D pictures he used to like as a kid: a mass of visual static until you squint at it in a certain way, with a certain focus. Once part of the picture starts to become clear, the rest takes form. He now recognizes that the tramlines running up the center of the screen are the edges of the aisle between the rows of seats running the length of the Heavenly Vision’s lower deck. He ducks out of the office and looks up. A small,
cheap-looking camera is mounted above the door where the wall meets the ceiling. He instinctively waves.
“Yeah, yeah,” Paul says. “We see you. Stop dicking about.”
“So what are you thinking? Does having CCTV make this place any safer?”
Paul clicks through a series of three camera icons near the bottom of the screen, and each time the image changes. Another camera looks back along the inside of the boat, and a third is up on deck near the bridge. “We might be able to use it if we can keep the power running long enough.”
“Do these cameras stream or record?” Natalie asks.
“No idea. What difference does it make?”
“A massive difference. I think you’re both missing the point.”
“Enlighten us then.” Paul is still idly cycling through images.
“Isn’t it obvious? If these cameras were running before the boat hit the rocks, we might actually be able to see what happened here.”
“We know what happened. A fucking bloodbath is what happened. What’s done is done.”
“I think we should watch it,” Matt says. “Natalie’s right. It won’t change anything, but if we can find the kid Nils killed on the footage, we’ll be able to watch him and figure out when he flipped. There might be some kind of signal, some kind of giveaway. Shit, we’d be in a much stronger position if we can tell when someone’s about to change.”
