Blood Line: What if your family was the last left alive? (The Blood Line Trilogy Book 1)

by Michael Green

  Jane’s baby was born in June. They named the little girl Cora Audrey Chatfield after her great-great-grandmother, but the child was always called Audrey. Unfortunately, Jane remained depressed. Katie, pregnant and spending less time working, found herself increasingly looking after her cousin’s baby. She confided to Sarah that she was pleased the child was a girl and not a boy. Given the anger that Jane felt after her rape, an infant Tom could have been at risk.

  Mark, for his part, wished Audrey had been a boy. He was acutely aware that the family was short of males. Christopher had had a vasectomy. In the second generation there were three females, with Steven the only male. In the third generation there were now five females, Nicole, Zoë, Holly, Gina and Audrey, with Zach the only male. An accident, or the death of any one of the three remaining fertile males, would seriously impact on the family’s ability to survive.

  In the early hours of an August morning the whole family gathered at Katie’s bedside to witness the birth. Sarah took the role of midwife, with Jane and the children in close attendance.

  ‘It’s a boy,’ announced Sarah after what had seemed an eternity.

  ‘It’s a boy, it’s a boy!’ Mark yelled in jubilation, slapping his son on the back.

  Steven, however, didn’t share his father’s elation; he’d seen the concerned look on Jane’s and Sarah’s faces. They handed him the child wrapped in a towel. He stared down at his son, a malformed infant with a harelip and strange, rolling eyes.

  The baby died later the same day. Silence and gloom descended on the family. The following morning they buried the tiny body in a corner of the orchard, and Steven carved yet another wooden cross. The cross read ‘Johnnie Henry Chatfield’. The baby had been named after his great-grandfather. The grief Steven felt at the death of his son matched the intensity of the anger that his sister’s rape had provoked. It threatened to overwhelm him.

  Perhaps it was Katie’s loss, and the realisation of just how precious a child’s life is, that helped Jane to become more accepting of Audrey. Gradually her love for her daughter grew and, as it did, the anger deep inside her began to subside.

  Steven and Katie’s relationship changed too. They were still strongly attracted to one another physically, but the invisible force seemed stronger than ever. They would still engineer situations where they were alone, only to let the opportunity for intimacy slip by. Though they often wanted to, they never made love again. It was an unresolved and unhappy situation.

  Mark fretted about the future of the family. Without more pregnancies and in particular without more males, how were they going to survive?

  Mark dropped the bombshell late one evening in October, after the children had gone to bed. ‘I think’, he declared, once he was sure he had everyone’s full attention, ‘we should sail to England.’

  ‘What?’ The rest of the family looked at him incredulously.

  He continued undaunted. ‘It’s a matter of survival. Our gene pool just isn’t big enough. We’re too closely related. That’s almost certainly why Katie’s baby was malformed.’

  ‘Why England?’ Christopher asked.

  ‘Something in our genes has given you, me, our children and our grandchildren immunity to the pandemic. I think Paul might have survived too and probably his children and grandchildren.’

  ‘Maybe, but are they still alive now?’ Sarah asked. ‘I don’t know how long we would have survived if you hadn’t found us.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Mark said, seizing on her argument. ‘We need the security of numbers.’

  ‘But even if Uncle Paul and his children have survived, going to England doesn’t solve the fundamental problem,’ Jane pointed out. ‘Paul is your brother. His children are our first cousins. The gene pool is still too narrow.’

  ‘What if …’ Mark asked, pausing, preparing to play his trump card, ‘the immunity goes further back than my parents? It could go back to my grandparents — perhaps even further. Last we heard Aunt Margaret was still alive and so were all my cousins. If the immunity goes back beyond my parents there may be dozens, perhaps hundreds of descendants in England — descendants who have married and had children, and thereby broadened the gene combinations.’

  ‘I’m not risking my children’s lives sailing halfway round the world on a maybe,’ Jane said firmly.

  ‘You’d be safeguarding their lives. Steven, tell them — we’d have no difficulty in sailing to England, would we?’

  Steven had been sitting quietly, listening to the arguments. He was still undecided as to which view he was in sympathy with. ‘There would obviously be some risk, but I’m sure we could make the journey safely.’

  ‘Well, there’s no way I’m leaving Gulf Harbour to go on a wild-goose chase to heaven knows where,’ Jane said stubbornly. She spat the words out with such force that she almost ended the debate. Sarah and Katie nodded.

  Christopher had so far said nothing. ‘It’s a huge decision,’ he said finally, ‘and one that shouldn’t be taken or dismissed lightly. I think we should all sleep on it.’

  Steven agreed; he was becoming increasingly torn between the idea of remaining with the community he’d worked so hard to establish, and the adventure of sailing around the world. Something else was subconsciously drawing him towards the trip — escape from the stress of his unresolved relationship with Katie.

  Jane was defiant. ‘I’ve done all the thinking I need to do.’

  Nevertheless, by the end of the evening a truce was called. They all went to bed to sleep on it.

  They were to sleep on the subject for many nights. The issue polarised the family. Steven gradually warmed towards his father’s suggestion, but the three mothers, Katie, Sarah and Jane, were totally opposed to leaving the safety of Gulf Harbour.

  Christopher acknowledged he was torn between the two camps. He agreed there was merit in his brother’s view of the need to enlarge the numbers in the community, but he felt sure Jane and his daughters weren’t going to change their minds.

  In the end, it was Christopher who carefully weighed up the pros and cons, the arguments and counter-arguments, and suggested a solution. ‘It’s clear,’ he said to Mark, ‘that our daughters don’t want to make the journey.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Katie said, looking up briefly as she sipped her wine. Sarah and Jane signalled their emphatic agreement.

  ‘But on the other hand, we do need a larger gene pool. We need to ensure we have a healthy new generation not only for their sakes, but for our own. We will need their support when we become too old for the hard labour needed to keep this community operating. That means finding fresh blood, more distant cousins or, better still, unrelated survivors.’ He paused for a few moments, wrestling internally with the problem. ‘Yet we don’t know for sure whether anyone’s still alive in England, or anywhere else in the world for that matter.’

  ‘And we need to find out,’ Mark interrupted impatiently.

  ‘I agree, so what I suggest is that you and Steven make the journey to England, and the rest of us stay here.’

  ‘No,’ Jane said, her voice raised and hysterical. She was going to ensure her views were taken into account.

  ‘Things are different now,’ countered Christopher. ‘It’s fifteen months since … since The White Witch visited, and I’m sure there’s no one else alive — not in this part of the world anyway. In any case, you wouldn’t be alone, I’d be here and so would Sarah and Katie. We’re more than capable of looking after one another.’

  ‘I don’t like the idea of breaking ranks,’ Mark said. ‘We should stay together.’

  ‘I don’t see that you’ve got much choice,’ Christopher continued, glancing across at his daughters and Jane.

  ‘It makes sense,’ Steven agreed. He’d been listening carefully to the arguments. ‘Who knows what we might find in England? Even if anyone’s still alive, we don’t know what shape they’ll be in. It could be that our situation here is better than anything we might find.’

  ‘Exactly
,’ Jane said, seizing on her brother’s point. ‘We could risk our lives sailing to England and, even if we made it, have to turn around and come all the way back again!’

  Again the debate raged long into the night and continued unresolved the following day.

  Eventually, reluctantly, Mark agreed that he and Steven would make the journey alone. If they found survivors in England, and the conditions were attractive, they would return to Gulf Harbour and collect the remaining members of the family. They agreed on a departure date of May the following year, each faction secretly hoping the other would change their views in the intervening months.

  Those months were frantically busy as the family launched a two-part plan. This entailed redoubling their efforts to ensure the Gulf Harbour complex was in the best possible shape. The gardens were planted to capacity, crops sown on the farm, additional animals located and fenced, grains milled.

  At the same time, preparations were made for Mark and Steven’s journey. With Steven busy working on maintenance, Mark was left to undertake the majority of the tasks in connection with the voyage. He found himself hard pressed to get everything completed in time.

  First he had to choose a suitable yacht for the journey. Eventually he settled on a fifty-foot steel ketch called Archangel. The vessel had accommodation for ten, which was one reason Mark chose it. He continued to harbour hopes that the rest of the family would change their minds and join the voyage. If they did, Archangel was large enough to transport the whole family.

  From Archangel’s log he gleaned that the boat had already circumnavigated the globe twice, so he was confident of its seaworthiness. Despite that, he worried endlessly about the voyage and the dangers that lay ahead. He repeatedly asked himself whether he was right to split the community, but always came back to the need to increase the gene pool.

  Apart from getting Archangel ready for the voyage, Mark and Steven had to prepare themselves. Neither of them had done any blue-water sailing before, let alone attempted to sail around the world. With no satellite navigation systems available, they had to learn to take sights and become competent navigators. After long days working, they would settle down in the evenings to practise their navigation and to learn as much as they could about offshore sailing.

  Archangel’s fuel tanks were filled to overflowing. The internal tanks were then supplemented with an assortment of plastic diesel containers lashed along its stanchions. Also stowed on deck were two life rafts and a dinghy.

  Down below, sets of charts, navigation tables, sextants, chronometers, tools, bolts and screws were squirreled away. A second water maker was fitted. Fishing lines, rifles and ammunition were stowed, in case they were needed to supplement the stores with fresh food. Finally, during April, Mark began loading food for the voyage. Stocks of precious tinned food, smoked fish, dried meat, biscuits and a wide range of bottled food were all stowed.

  ‘How much more do you need?’ Jane asked her father late one evening. She had been working for weeks, bottling produce into sealed jars and carefully packing them into wooden boxes lined with straw.

  ‘As much as we can get on board,’ he replied.

  Mark was still harbouring hopes that she and the other members of the family would change their minds and accompany them on the voyage. Jane didn’t realise it, but he was loading enough food for them all. However, to his dismay the family’s female members never wavered in their resolve. They weren’t going to risk the lives of their children on what Jane never ceased to speak of as ‘a hare-brained scheme to sail to the other end of the earth’.

  22

  Early one morning in mid-May, the family assembled on the quayside beside Archangel. They hugged one another, crying openly. Mark and Steven climbed aboard then, unready to say goodbye, climbed off again. Eventually, after more tears, Christopher let go Archangel’s lines and she motored slowly out of Gulf Harbour. Mark and Steven watched as their family, becoming smaller and smaller, waved frantically. When he could no longer see them, Mark swung Archangel out towards Rakino Island and the unfamiliar ocean beyond.

  Neither Mark nor Steven had spoken a word since they had left the marina. Each moved instinctively about their respective tasks, immersed in his own thoughts. Mark was thinking this must have been how early explorers felt when they sailed off into the unknown. The rest of the family, left behind at Gulf Harbour, would be experiencing the same emotions as the families of those early explorers. There was no escaping the possibility they might never see one another again.

  Steven had installed a single-side-band radio at Gulf Harbour in the hope those left behind could maintain contact with Archangel. While theoretically the system could bounce signals off the troposphere to anywhere in the world, in reality it often relied upon networks of operators relaying messages over shorter distances. Those networks no longer existed.

  Mark had taken care to prepare the family for the fact they would almost certainly lose contact. There was also the added complication that if Steven and he were told of a problem at Gulf Harbour, there was no way they would be able to get back in a hurry to sort it out. And likewise, if Mark and Steven had a problem on the voyage, Christopher and the remainder of the family didn’t have the skills to come to their aid. Mark and Steven were resolved to keep any problems they encountered to themselves and they suspected those ashore would do the same.

  Mark was well aware that blue-water sailing had been described as long periods of boredom punctuated by short periods of extreme terror. Since this was their first-ever blue-water voyage, boredom didn’t immediately set in. They found a multitude of jobs to keep themselves busy.

  They’d decided to sail non-stop to England, plotting a course that kept them well clear of land. As they moved east towards South America, the weather fronts sweeping past them grew in frequency and intensity, but all the time they were gaining experience and learning how to manage Archangel.

  Despite Mark urging the rest of the family not to be alarmed if radio contact was lost, it was he who became agitated when he couldn’t reach Gulf Harbour as they neared Cape Horn.

  ‘I think we should go back,’ he said suddenly to Steven. It was their fourth day without contact. ‘Maybe something’s wrong.’

  ‘There was no hint of trouble when we spoke to them last.’

  ‘I don’t like it,’ Mark said grumpily.

  ‘You said yourself that we’d lose contact sooner or later.’

  ‘I know, but I didn’t expect it to happen this soon.’

  ‘It could be anything. The atmospherics, a faulty aerial, or we could simply be out of range. If we turn around now we’ll probably lose our nerve.’

  ‘Or the rest of the family might decide to come with us.’

  ‘They won’t change their mind. If we go back now, we’ll never make the journey.’

  Mark knew his son was right.

  ‘I think we’d better reduce sail,’ Steven added, pointing to the threatening clouds gathering on the horizon behind them and ending further debate.

  Mark nodded. The wind was already freshening, the tops of the swells beginning to be lifted off and thrown forward in white streaks onto the waves heaped in front of them. They only just had time to get the mainsail reefed before the full force of the storm hit.

  The second aspect of blue-water sailing — short periods of extreme terror — was about to be impressed upon them, and not for a short period; the storm blew for five and a half days.

  Mark and Steven had little control over the situation. They reduced sail to a scrap of trysail and left Archangel to run before the storm. Most of the time they lay in their bunks, listening to the ferocity of the wind howling through the rigging and feeling the shuddering as Archangel was lifted by the huge following seas and swept forward into the troughs ahead. They felt helpless; the violent motion sapped their reserves of energy and spirit.

  Carrying only a scrap of sail, Archangel was driven relentlessly past Cape Horn and into the Atlantic Ocean. But as the storm abated, th
e strength flowed back into their aching bodies. All thoughts of turning back had been blown away. They’d turned the corner literally and figuratively, and were now heading north for England. They felt as though they were nearly there.

  But that wasn’t the case. They still had thousands of miles to travel. Every day at the appointed time, Mark would twiddle the dial on the radio and transmit to his family in New Zealand, but the only reply he ever got was the spitting of static.

  They encountered two gales in the South Atlantic, but having survived the great storm off Cape Horn they took these in their stride. When the wind died in the doldrums and the sails flapped helplessly in the oppressive air, Mark didn’t hesitate to start the engine. When the winds returned, they settled down again to the relative tranquillity of sailing.

  A week after they’d passed through the doldrums, Mark was woken by Steven’s excited yell from the cockpit, ‘Ship on the port bow, about five miles away.’

  Steven had already changed course and was closing on the vessel by the time his father stumbled on deck. Dawn was breaking; they were able to make out the detail of the cruise liner as they sailed towards it. The liner was a sorry sight, wallowing in the waves. Its once-pristine paintwork streaked with rust, the name Northern Princess was faded by the sun. There was no sign of life. They sailed close by, luffed their sails and sounded a siren. There was no response.

  ‘Surprised she’s still afloat,’ Mark said. He’d long ago deduced that the absence of shipping was because most vessels had already either gone to the bottom or drifted ashore and been wrecked.

  Steven pointed to the anchor chain hanging straight down from the hawse pipe. ‘She must have dragged anchor. Do you fancy a look on board?’

  Mark shook his head.

  ‘Think I’ll take a look,’ Steven said, as he stripped off his clothes. ‘I reckon I should be able to climb the anchor chain.’