EDEN (31 page)

Cody blinked. ‘Big suits?’

‘The politicians!’ Sawyer shouted in praise as he lifted his arms up toward the senate ceiling, his voice echoing. ‘Our beloved leaders who fled just hours before our wonderful world came tumbling down. Those hallowed men who left us to face the Great Darkness alone.’

‘We don’t know,’ Cody replied.

Sawyer looked at him pityingly. ‘You don’t know?’

Hank Mears spoke for the first time.

‘We had the same idea,’ he said. ‘But so far we’ve not found anything to suggest where they might have gone.’

Sawyer looked at the big man with interest. ‘How would you have known, if you were stuck up in the Arctic?’

‘We had the Internet,’ Jake replied, ‘and a military airfield close by. The troops ducked out a few hours before the storm hit, left us there much like the politicians left the rest of the world behind.’

Sawyer appeared to lose his psychotic aura for a moment. ‘What storm?’

‘You didn’t know?’ Cody asked in amazement.

‘Do I sound like I know?!’ Sawyer raged, the pistol thumping up against Cody’s head.

Bethany stepped forward. ‘A solar storm,’ she said, ‘the biggest in recorded history. It shorted the power grids of every industrialised nation, stopped the power. Everything fell apart after that because the damage was so widespread there was no way to fix everything fast enough to prevent total collapse.’

Sawyer lowered the pistol, stared at Bethany. ‘Every nation? You mean the whole world?’

‘There’s nothing left, anywhere,’ Bethany confirmed. ‘Apart from this supposed safe haven that people keep talking about, if you believe in it. Eden.’

Cody saw something flicker like a lost shadow behind Sawyer’s eyes, a hint of regret and dismay at the scale of mankind’s downfall. For a brief moment the psychotic leader was gone and was replaced by a small and broken man.

‘The military left before the storm?’ Sawyer echoed her comment as he turned away thoughtfully. ‘So they must have known.’

‘They knew,’ Hank Mears nodded. ‘Question is: what did they do about it, and where?’

‘There were no warnings here in Boston?’ Charlotte asked Sawyer. ‘No attempt to let the people know?’

Sawyer shook his head. ‘We just woke up in the morning and there was nothing. Only thing I remember is seeing news reports about bright aurora over Mexico. Boston was covered by heavy cloud, so we didn’t see much of anything.’

Cody stepped forward. ‘We’re all in the same boat here, and our country had emancipation for a reason. Starting anew with slaves isn’t going to work because it didn’t work before.’

Sawyer peered sideways at Cody as he paced up and down. ‘Really, doctor? And what would you, the great and the wise scientist, have me do?’

‘Work with people, not against them,’ Cody urged. ‘Oppression has always led to discontent and rebellion. Your prisoners will rise up against you sooner or later.’

‘Let them,’ Sawyer shrugged. ‘They’ll be replaced.’

‘You’re not that kind of man.’

‘And how, exactly, would you know that?’ Sawyer asked.

‘You’re no killer. You’ve got this little army around you but you’re as human as the rest of us.’

‘You doubt my motivation?’ Sawyer asked.

Cody swallowed thickly. ‘This isn’t about doubt, motivation or anything else. If we don’t all cooperate then no matter how much power you have right now all of it will be for nothing. History shows us that oppressed people will always fight back and will eventually always overcome their oppressors.’

‘Is that so?’ Sawyer uttered.

‘There’s a saying,’ Cody replied. ‘Those who fail to learn the lessons of history are forced to relive them.’

Sawyer inclined his head and nodded as he raised an eyebrow.

‘Then I hope that you’ll learn this lesson of history.’

Sawyer turned and fired a single shot that thundered out across the amphitheatre.

Blood spilled from Bradley Trent’s chest and a fine spray of blood and tissue burst from his back as the bullet passed through and he collapsed.

‘No!’

Charlotte’s shriek was almost as loud as the gunshot as she threw herself down beside Bradley. It took only a single glance at the soldier’s blank expression to know that he had died instantly.

***

Charlotte wrapped her arms around Bradley’s body and buried her face against his neck as Cody gaped at Sawyer in disbelief. Sauri stood immobile, his dark eyes fixed upon their psychotic gaoler. Sawyer reached across and yanked Cody forward, jammed the pistol up against his jaw as he raged into Cody’s face.

‘You think I can’t tell the difference between scientists and soldiers, Mister Genius? You think me a fool? Now, about this Eden you mentioned?’

Cody swivelled his eyes to look down at Bradley’s body, still unable to process the fact that the soldier was gone. In a blink of an eye the man who had featured so heavily in their lives had been extinguished like a candle flame pinched between the fingers of an uncaring psychopath.

Cody turned back to Sawyer, flushed with an unexpected zeal of his own. ‘Bite me.’

Sawyer grinned. ‘Not today, but soon.’

Sawyer gestured to his men as he shoved Cody away. ‘Put them in the cages. They’re on work detail for the morning.’

The guards grabbed them and shoved them towards the nearest of the cages. Bethany struggled to keep up with Cody as he walked, shrugging off the big hands of the militia guiding them. Behind, he heard Charlotte sobbing as she was dragged off Bradley’s body.

The guard in front of Cody reached up and unlocked a heavy padlock that sealed the handle of a cage shut. The ragged prisoners incarcerated within barely looked up as the cage door was rolled open to the sound of metal on metal. Cody was pushed inside along with Bethany and Jake and the door slammed shut behind them. Sauri was shoved into a cage to their right.

Cody turned and saw Hank and Charlotte propelled into a cage further down the line, the heavy door slamming shut and echoing around the amphitheatre as the guards stalked away. Charlotte collapsed onto her knees on the metal floor of the cage, bowing her head and shielding her face with her hands. Hank looked down at her in silence and then turned away to survey their surroundings.

The prisoners in the cages made no effort to communicate with the new arrivals, instead avoiding eye contact as they recoiled away from them and huddled against the bars of the cage.

‘This is what I was afraid of,’ Hank Mears uttered across to them. ‘Now we’re stuck here.’

‘Sawyer’s a psychopath,’ Jake said to Cody. ‘I don’t think he’s kidding when he says they’ll eat us.’

‘Jesus,’ Cody uttered, rubbing his temples with his finger and thumb as he whispered out to Hank. ‘Any chance that Taylor and the crew will attempt a rescue?’

Hank shook his head. ‘They’ll run at the first chance they get if Saunders can’t hold them. Nothing here for them and with me cooped up there’s not much to stop them from taking the ship wherever they want to go.’

Cody nodded, unwilling to think about how quickly their plan to leave Boston had been scuppered by Sawyer’s militia. He caught the gaze of other prisoners trapped in the cages, watching him with defeated eyes. Many slept, presumably exhausted from their labours out on Boston Common. Each prisoner had a bowl alongside them, picked clean of whatever had been within. From the smell, Cody guessed some kind of potatoes and maybe small amounts of chicken. Sawyer’s men might have managed to capture a few domesticated fowl before they became extinct in the wake of mankind’s fall.

‘We shouldn’t have come here,’ Sauri said softly. ‘We’ve gained nothing and lost much.’

‘Sawyer thinks that Eden exists too,’ Cody replied. ‘We’ve got to figure out a way of getting him onside long enough to get out of here.’

Hank Mears called across. ‘That radio message you intercepted would be a damned good start.’

Cody nodded and saw Charlotte look up at him, her cheeks smeared with tears as she launched herself across the cage to bang against the bars.

‘You bastard!’ she screamed. ‘You killed Brad! You killed him!’

‘Sawyer killed Brad,’ Jake snapped at her. ‘Not us. Not any of us.’

‘The message,’ Hank snapped at Cody. ‘What did it say?’

‘There was a code.’

‘What kind of code?’ Jake asked. His expression was crestfallen, as though the one person he could trust had let him down. Which, Cody realised, he kind of had.

‘Morse,’ Cody said, still unable to bring himself to reveal everything, ‘maybe a cypher code or something.’

A cypher code was a simple means of concealing a message by using alternative figures to represent established alphabetical letters. Done two or three times, even the most complex computers could struggle with the cypher, especially if the cypher-key was based on something truly random. Cody had once based a cypher code for his credit card PIN on the number of birds that flew within fifty yards of his house in a ten minute period.

‘You didn’t hear anybody speaking?’ Sauri asked.

Cody exhaled. ‘Briefly,’ he admitted, ‘a man.’

Charlotte’s rage faltered as she digested what he had said. ‘An old man?’

‘I don’t know,’ Cody said. ‘It was a weak transmission.’

Charlotte’s expression collapsed into something between regret and disgust.

‘My father might have sent me a message and you knew about it!’ she raged. ‘You knew about it and you never said a word. We could have sailed past Boston! This never needed to happen!’

‘I didn’t know that your father might have the means to be looking for you any more than you did,’ Cody shot back at her. ‘It meant nothing at the time, except that maybe somewhere there were people who had survived.’

‘Why hide it at all?’ Jake asked.

‘We couldn’t trust Hank’s crew with the knowledge,’ Cody replied. ‘We’d have never got this far. And you wanted to find your father just as much as I wanted to find my family.’

‘If I’d known about the damned message I wouldn’t have come here!’ Charlotte snapped. ‘None of us would have come here!’

‘Bethany would,’ Cody said in reply. ‘Her brother’s here.’

Bethany’s head dropped at the mention of her younger brother.

‘Whatever the purpose of the message,’ Hank said, ‘the person who sent it must have had electrical power to do so.’

‘That’s right,’ Cody agreed as he glanced at the other prisoners, ‘and we need to keep this to ourselves. It could be our only leverage.’

‘Not entirely,’ Sauri said. ‘Charlotte’s father might have sent the message, and she’s here. If Sawyer knows about it then she’s safe.’

‘Not necessarily,’ Cody replied. ‘And it means nothing if we’re all dead. We need to find a way to use the information to get us all the hell out of here. We need to stick together.’

‘This your idea of sticking together?’ Sauri uttered. ‘You got Bradley killed.’

‘No he didn’t,’ Jake snapped. ‘Sawyer killed Bradley because he was the most likely threat, a trained soldier. It removed the potential for rebellion, or so Sawyer probably believes. The rest of us he thinks are just scientists.’

‘Regardless,’ Hank replied. ‘I’ll do the damned talking from now on, unless anybody’s got any complaints?’

Nobody spoke.

‘Jesus,’ Cody uttered in exasperation. ‘We need to work together. What’s to stop you from negotiating your own release?’

‘Nothing,’ Hank replied. ‘Except that Sawyer will believe what I say because he’ll assume I’m loyal to all of you. You’re his leverage over me, and we’ll let him keep thinking that.’

Cody shook his head and looked away from the captain. He cast his gaze out of the side of the cage to the one alongside it. Faces looked back at him, scoured of emotion, eyes glazed with the haze of the defeated.

The shambling, bedraggled mass of prisoners shifted slightly as something moved amongst them. Cody’s gaze drifted down between them as a small hand shoved bodies aside and a pair of big brown eyes peered cautiously between pairs of dirty jeans and grubby sleeves.

Cody experienced a transient blurring of his vision as he saw the small face look out at him. Soft skin was marred by dirt, the eyes haunted by confusion and fear, but the blonde hair curling down to the shoulders sent a pulse of disbelief racing like a freight train through Cody’s heart. He felt the earth shift beneath his feet, felt his balance fail him as the child pushed through the crowd and a tiny smile flickered in recognition.

His breath fell from his lips as though torn from within him as the little girl reached out and touched the bars of the cage, her gaze fixed upon his from just a few feet away. Cody fell into the bars of his cage as tears spilled from his eyes and he slid down onto his knees.

‘Maria.’

Suddenly every moment of his suffering was lost into a maelstrom of joy that felt like grief as Cody saw his little girl standing before him, too far to reach and yet now so close. Her voice was tiny as she spoke.

‘Dadda?’

Cody pressed his face against the bars of the cell as though he could push through them by sheer force of will as he cried openly, not caring who witnessed it. He reached out, stretched his hand as far as he could toward Maria, but she was too far away.

Hands grabbed his shoulders and yanked Cody away from the bars. Cody shouted out, but a hand clamped over his mouth as Jake whispered into his ear.

‘Don’t let them see you! They’ll use her against us!’

Maria’s face collapsed into confusion and grief. Jake released him immediately as Cody gathered his wildly flying emotions and saw the faces of the other prisoners in the cage with Maria looking at them both.

‘It’s okay,’ Cody whispered across to Maria, forcing a smile through his tears. ‘It’s okay, everything’s okay.’

‘Daddy?’ she asked. ‘Where’s mom?’

Cody felt his throat constrict and his hands were shaking as he replied. ‘I don’t know.’

Maria watched him with interest as Sauri moved protectively alongside her. Cody stared at them both for a long moment and then turned to whisper to Hank in his cage.

‘You sure you can get Sawyer on-side, with us?’

Hank nodded. ‘Only way we’re getting out of here is with his blessing. We need to convince him that we’re too valuable to let go. We get back to the Phoenix, sail, and then toss Sawyer overboard.’