EDEN

by Dean Crawford

  ‘I’ll get it out of you, Ryan,’ he spat.

  ‘Turn the ship around,’ Cody replied, ‘and you’ll get what you want.’

  The captain watched Cody for what felt like an eternity before he spoke.

  ‘We can’t go back now and there’s no longer any good reason to. By nightfall we’ll be well clear of Boston.’

  ‘Then throw me over the side!’ Cody yelled. ‘Let me go back!’

  Sawyer moved to stand over him, the demonic grin plastered across his face.

  ‘Not a chance, my young friend,’ he chortled. ‘You’re staying right there, just for the goddamned hell of it. Unless you tell us where Eden really is.’

  ‘I don’t know!’ Cody raged. ‘Those were the coordinates I wrote down, the ones sent to Alert! I don’t know why they’re in the goddamned ocean and I don’t care anymore! Just cut me loose and let me go back to Boston!’

  Sawyer’s expression slipped into despair as he realised that Cody was telling the truth.

  ‘If I did all of this for nothing,’ he growled, ‘then so did you.’

  Sawyer stood up and turned his back on Cody.

  Cody squirmed against the bonds tying him to the mainmast. Sawyer chuckled in delight as he climbed the steps out of the hold. Cody looked up and saw Hank staring down at him. There was no pity on the captain’s features. His voice carried down to Cody softly as the crew closed the hatch.

  ‘She’s gone, Cody,’ he said.

  Cody did not reply. He kept his gaze fixed upon the captain’s until the hatch slammed shut above him and only the weak light from the lantern illuminated his world.

  Cody sat alone in the darkness for several minutes as he stared blindly into the shadows. Maria’s image hovered in his mind’s eye, watching him in silence. But for the first time in all of the long months that he had sought her there was no longer any emotion. He laughed, his lonely chuckles echoing through the hold. He had been a fool, such a fool to think that he or Maria could survive in this horrible world, a world stalked by men who were no longer men at all. It would have been better if she had died in the storm, if he had died, or even if his deranged brother had killed them all when he’d had the chance all those months before. Maybe that was what had driven Peter Ryan to the heartless excesses he had achieved, to threaten the weak and the helpless. Maybe the old guy in the cage at the state house had been right: that there was just no sense in caring anymore, because there was nothing left to care for.

  He felt as though he had been bled by medieval hardship of his ability to feel anything.

  In the darkness he felt the fragments of his remaining compassion and love slip away like phantoms into the night. The pressure on his chest lifted, the seething grief and overpowering helplessness faded like fluke winds as the gentle rolling of the Phoenix through the rough seas outside rocked him in a lullaby.

  For a moment his mind remained empty of thought and then he realised that he finally understood. After all these years, he finally realised how it was that people like Sawyer and Hank could be the way that they were. Something inside, something powerful and ancient and harboured by all men had simply vanished, disappeared, become extinct. Their empathy, their tendency to rage when witness to injustice and suffering had simply been switched off. No concerns, no fears, no consequences to their actions.

  Life was simply a series of events, flowing one after the other, and as each passed and another presented itself so they forged ahead, uncaring of each other and of themselves.

  Cody smiled in the brutal shadows. It did not require rage. It did not require injustice. It did not require loss or pain or hatred. It required nothing, the loss of all that it was to be human and humane. Cody felt a cold ball form somewhere deep inside him.

  There was really only one thing left to fight for.

  Cody turned his head and saw in the faint light shards of the barrel that had shattered when he had last been in the hold, fighting for his life with Denton. They were scattered near the main mast. Cody shuffled around the mast and used his boot to pin a splinter and drag it across the deck. He then kicked it backwards with his heel into the mast behind him.

  He grabbed it in his fingers and turned it, began to work the edge against the rope binding his wrists. He knew that the ropes would have been tied well but he diligently kept the edge of the wood rubbing against them. There was no rush. There was nothing to fear.

  There was nothing to care for any longer.

  It took twenty minutes, but he felt the rope part and the pressure on his wrists ease as the splinter frayed and then separated the rope. Another five minutes of working his wrists and easing them between the ropes and he finally yanked them free as the cords fell away.

  Cody rubbed his sore wrists and looked quietly about the hold, his mind clear and devoid of hubris or doubt. He saw the fragments of the shattered barrel cast into the corner of the hold nearby. A belaying pin in its mount on the wall of the hold. The ropes he had just freed himself from.

  The lantern, flickering nearby under the weak power from its battery.

  Cody walked across to the barrel and gathered the pieces of wood, then stacked them in the centre of the hold. He turned to the ropes and used wood splinters to shred the rope into fine fibres that he bundled up into a ball and set beside the stack of wood.

  He turned and walked across to the lantern and lifted it off the hull. He knelt back down alongside the ball of rope fibres and took off his belt and shirt. Then, carefully, he turned the lantern upside down and plucked the small battery from its base. The hold was plunged into near total darkness but for a sliver of light peeking through gaps in the hatch above him.

  Working by touch alone, Cody used the metal edge of the lantern to slice off the battery’s plastic sleeve on the negative side, careful to leave half of the sleeve remaining. A strip of paper insulator covered the cap of the battery beneath the sleeve.

  He put the battery in his lap, and then reached into the base of the lantern. He fumbled for a few seconds before he felt a wire. Cody yanked the wire out and then used the lantern’s metal base to strip the wire back to the copper.

  Cody picked up the stripped battery and slipped one end of the wire under the insulator. Then he grabbed a small piece of the shredded rope fibres and wrapped them around the other end of the wire before pressing them against the battery’s negative contact.

  The battery immediately sent current flowing through the thin wire and Cody saw it glow red hot in the darkness. The small bundle of fibres smouldered with smoke moments later as he touched the hot copper to them. Cody blew gently on the fibres and saw bright embers flare as they burned, and then a flickering flame burst into life within the bundle.

  Cody lowered the burning kindling into the stack of wood, then grabbed his discarded shirt and tore off one sleeve. Slowly, he lowered the sleeve into the flames. Steam puffed off the shirt as the dampness boiled off, and then it caught with writhing flames that began to coil their way slowly up the sleeve.

  Cody held onto the shirt for as long as he could bear and then draped it across the inside of the stack of wood. Burning from within, the wood began to char as a flickering red light filled the hold and thick smoke boiled upward toward the hatch.

  He stood back as the fire began to crackle and spit, then crouched down as the smoke began to fill the hold. He wrapped the remaining strips of shirt around his face, and gripped the belaying pin in his fist as he watched the flames writhe up toward the hatch.

  ***

  41

  Hank stood in the wheelhouse and watched squalls of rain spilling from the turbulent sky above. The sun was peeking through ethereal veils of falling rain, the pale orb hovering motionless as translucent clouds scudded before it.

  Bethany sat nearby, her brother on her lap. Hank guessed the kid as maybe seven or eight years old. Bethany held the boy as though he were her own, staring out to sea through the windows and watching the crew toiling out on the rain swept decks.

  �
��He lied,’ Sawyer seethed from behind the captain. ‘He’s hiding something.’

  ‘Not necessarily,’ Hank replied. ‘He could have written the coordinates down wrong.’

  ‘We’ll never be able to figure out where this Eden of yours is now,’ Sawyer uttered and smacked his hand down on the map table. ‘That idiot just cost us everything.’

  Sawyer stormed out of the wheelhouse and slammed the door behind him. Hank watched him stagger unsteadily across the Phoenix’s heaving deck to talk to one of his henchmen, who were keeping watch on the crew and struggling to stand upright.

  ‘Do you think Cody’s telling the truth?’ Bethany asked.

  Hank nodded slowly in reply. Fact was, Cody had nothing left to trade and wanted only to return to his daughter, presumably now his only remaining family. He had no reason to lie about the coordinates. That meant that they represented something else. Hank looked down at the map, at the patch of ocean some ten miles off the coast Massachusetts. Not far from Boston. He thought of Charlotte Dennis, of her father’s senate career and began to wonder whether the coordinates Cody had recorded might not represent Eden but something entirely different.

  The distress beacons they had recovered from the Arctic were still broadcasting as they had been during the entire voyage down from Alert. If somehow Senator Dennis had tried to contact his daughter at Alert, then he would not have wanted her to attempt to get into Boston. He would have known how dangerous the city had become. Thus, he might have sent her coordinates that she would have understood.

  Hank glanced over his shoulder to starboard. The city skyline of Boston dominated the horizon beyond the nearby docks. He could still see a haze of black smoke staining the sky above the city, the immense fire being fuelled by the nor-easter howling through the lonely streets.

  He turned back to the ship. Drifting veils of sunlight beamed down onto the glittering surface of the ocean, turning the clouds ahead an even darker shade of blue grey. A white gull swooped across the ocean surface, brightly lit by the brief flare of sunlight. Their path looked ominous and threatening, the white gull free to escape it. Hank touched the crucifix at his neck.

  ‘Are you satisfied now?’

  Bethany’s voice was small but filled with venom that stung Hank with unexpected force.

  ‘I have done nothing more, or less, than you have,’ he replied without looking at her.

  Bethany’s smile was cold, empty. ‘Providence, isn’t that what you call it? Leaving the fate of others in the hands of a higher power?’

  Hank gripped the wheel tighter, but his gaze was drawn to the child sitting just yards from where he guided the Phoenix away from Boston. Young, defenceless, dependent on adults for his own survival. We were all like that once, Hank realised. Where would he have been without his own parents? Could he have survived alone in this world, as it was now, as a child?

  ‘I can’t save everybody,’ Hank insisted. ‘Any more than you can.’

  Bethany might have shaken her head, or maybe it was just rolling with the sway of the deck as the Phoenix heeled gamely into the waves. He couldn’t tell, but her voice reached him as though from afar.

  ‘I notice you didn’t take the chance of leaving your own escape to providence,’ she said. ‘Any more than I did.’

  Hank’s guts twisted and he felt waves of anguish spill over him just as the waves outside crashed over the schooner’s bows. An image of a tiny five year-old girl wandering through the streets of Boston, followed by hungry dogs, filled his mind and sent a bolus of puke surging up into his throat.

  And then he realised. Senator Dennis would not have left his daughter’s survival to Providence any more than Cody had. He would have arranged something. A single word flickered through his mind. Rendezvous. Charlotte Dennis’s words from months before echoed through his thoughts: I used to sail with my father out of Cambridge Bay in his yacht.

  Charlotte Dennis knew how to sail. The coordinates were a place to meet.

  He saw Sawyer shouting at his men to keep their weapons trained on the crew, and as hate for the psychopath filled his veins he finally made his decision.

  ‘Bethany,’ he said. She looked up at him. ‘We’re going back. Hang on to something.’

  Bethany grabbed the side of her seat and her brother as Hank braced himself against the wheel and then drove all of his weight against it as he hurled it to starboard.

  The Phoenix heeled over as though she had been struck by a tsunami, the deck pitching and the topsails flagging and cracking like thunder as the wind spilled from them. The entire hull shuddered as though alive and a wall of white spray burst over the bows as she took the full force of the ocean across her hull.

  Hank leaped out from behind the wheel and charged the wheelhouse door as the ship pitched wildly over. He burst through it onto the heaving deck as he saw Sawyer and his henchmen tumble like skittles across the sodden planking toward the port bulwarks.

  Hank’s voice thundered out to his crew, who had balanced instinctively against the wild gyration of the deck.

  ‘Take the ship back!’

  Seth turned first, leaning easily into the ship’s steeply inclined deck as he turned and drove his forehead into the nearest of Sawyer’s henchmen. The man staggered as Seth grabbed his jacket and spun him around to hurl him down the deck toward the ocean.

  Hank saw the man fly through the air and smack into the bulwarks with a dull thump, his eyes rolling up into their sockets.

  Hank rushed upon another of the shaven-headed freaks as he struggled to his knees and swung his boot fully under the man’s jaw. The thug’s head snapped back as his neck broke and his teeth flew in a spray of blood across the deck. Hank grabbed at the man’s assault rifle and searched for Sawyer.

  The psychopath was scrambling across the Phoenix’s deck, his pistol in one hand as he aimed at Hank.

  A gunshot burst out as Hank dove to his right into the cover of the mainmast, Sawyer’s shot splintering wood from the giant mast as it narrowly missed Hank’s shoulder. The Phoenix surged in the rolling waves as she pitched back in the opposite direction, searching for her natural point of balance on the tumultuous seas.

  Hank stretched out and fired at another of Sawyer’s men, hitting him square in the back as he fought with one of the crew. The thug fell to his knees in time for the crewman to swing a fire-axe into his skull and cleave off a huge chunk of bone and brain that skittered like a bloodied crab down the ship’s deck.

  ‘Hold your fire!’

  Hank heard the screamed command from Seth coming from the bow, and saw the sailor pointing frantically at the midships. For a moment Hank didn’t get it, and then suddenly a raw fear surged through his body as he realised what Seth was pointing at.

  Smoke was billowing from the main hatch.

  ‘We’re on fire!’ Seth yelled.

  Hank leaped to his feet in horror as he stared at the thick grey smoke boiling from inside the ship. In an instant the fight turned to an uneasy alliance as the new threat presented itself and Sawyer broke from cover with his eyes fixed on the smoke. Hank whirled and pointed at Seth.

  ‘Get on the pumps!’ he bellowed. ‘Get a line down there, now!’

  Hank turned and dashed for the wheelhouse, desperate to regain then wheel before the Phoenix was overcome by the towering seas. He was almost there when he saw Bethany standing behind the wheel, holding the ship steady and turning the bow back into the rolling waves as Sawyer’s voice rang out across the decks.

  ‘Kill the bastard! Kill Ryan!’

  Hank turned as Sawyer’s remaining henchman staggered to his feet from where Seth had hurled him and plunged unsteadily down the main hatch toward the hold.

  ‘No!’ Hank yelled. ‘Don’t open the hatch!’

  The henchman ignored him and vanished from sight. Seth staggered to the hoses as the ship’s deck levelled out again.

  ‘Get the lines down there!’ Hank yelled at Seth. ‘Flood that compartment right now!’

  Hank s
hielded his eyes against the stinging smoke that spilled out from the ‘tween decks and began enshrouding the ship in a choking fog as Seth dragged the hoses toward the hatch.

  *

  Cody crouched in the darkness, his face pressed against the deck planking as smoke boiled and writhed in dense banks above his head. His eyes watered and stung, his breath rasping as the thick smoke penetrated his thin veil and poisoned his lungs as though somebody were forcing a heavy, hot blanket into them.

  The writhing fire in the centre of the hold had spread, glowing through the thick smoke like a demonic lighthouse. Flames climbed the pillars and crawled like a living creature across the deck, reaching out to scorch anything in its path.

  Cody breathed softly, struggling not to cough and fill his lungs further with the lethal black smoke. He was almost certain that he would pass out before Hank’s men rushed to contain the blaze when the main hatch suddenly burst open and one of Sawyer’s henchmen loomed in the light.

  A rush of air swept into the hold and almost instantly the flames soared as though somebody had poured gasoline onto them. The blast of heat and flame sent the thug reeling backwards from the hatch. Cody burst upright from where he crouched and rushed forward, jumped up to grip the edge of the hatch and hauled himself up into the ‘tween decks.

  Cody leaped to his feet, the belaying pin heavy in his hand as he swung it at the militiaman’s face with cold blooded rage.

  The heavy iron pin punched through the thug’s eye socket and burst his eyeball like a water balloon. The thug screamed in agony and fell to his knees as Cody swung the pin again, this time down on top of the man’s exposed skull. The blow shuddered through Cody’s arm as the pin stove the skull in with a muted crunch. The thug slumped onto his back, his body twitching as though a live current were surging through his limbs.

  Cody dropped the belaying pin and grabbed the dead thug’s assault rifle. He turned amid the thick smoke and flames that leapt out of the hold and scorched the ship’s timbers around him.