Adam Baker - Outpost

They hurried through the ship. The passageways and stairwells listed at a nightmare angle.

‘Okay,’ said Rye. ‘We’ll need to cut through a couple of public spaces. We’ll need to do it quickly and quietly. Way too many of these fuckers to fight off.’

They passed through the ship’s library. Novels and magazines had fallen from the shelves when the ship ran aground. They kicked through mountains of paper.

‘This is where we cut through the main lobby,’ explained Rye. ‘Could be tricky.’

They hurried along a balcony area overlooking the main lobby, the central communal area of the ship. Ghost stopped for a moment and looked over the balustrade.

Hundreds of infected passengers milling and moaning. Chaos and stench. Rich vacationers mutated to monstrous parodies of themselves. They stumbled over upturned tables and chairs. They rode escalators. They rode glass scenic elevators. They crawled up and down the great sweep of the staircase on hands and knees. They slid on scattered leaflets from the information desk. They tripped on glittering fragments of fallen chandelier.

‘My God,’ murmured Ghost.

Rye tugged his sleeve. ‘Keep going.’

‘How did you get here?’ asked Ghost.

‘I paddled a lifeboat from the rig,’ said Rye. ‘We’ll use the zodiac to get back.’

‘Did you find Jane?’

‘I thought she was with you.’

Jane was hurled forward from the roof of the bridge at the moment of impact like a crash-test dummy propelled through a windscreen.

Mid-air. Body clenched for impact. ‘It will be slow hell,’ said a remote corner of her mind removed from the action. ‘You’ll hit the deck, and lie there, and think you are okay even though your back is broken. Then pain will build and build until it blots out the world.’

Her leg tangled in a decorative light-string hung at the prow. She dangled upside down for a moment, swung and spun, arms flailing, then the festoon snapped in a burst of sparks. She hit the deck, crunching bulb-glass beneath her. She got to her feet. Infected passengers would be on her any minute. She snatched up her shotgun and ran.

The Rampart zodiac was suspended from a couple of lifeboat cranes. Jane lowered the zodiac. It hit the ice. She slid down the crane-rope. She unhitched the rope and dragged the boat across the ice to the water’s edge.

She had lost her radio. She huddled in her coat and waited to see if anyone else made it off Hyperion. Fifteen minutes later they approached across the snow. Ghost, Punch, Rye. ‘I thought you must be dead,’ Jane said. ‘So what happened?’

‘There were hundreds of them,’ she mumbled. ‘It was like they were hibernating down there in the dark.’

‘Where’s Ivan?’ asked Ghost.

‘They tore him apart.’

‘Christ.’

‘Let’s get off this island,’ said Jane. ‘I don’t even want to look at that fucking ship.’

They rode the zodiac to Rampart. They looked back.

The liner was beached three kilometres away, lights still blazing. The prow of the ship had lifted from the water. The hull plates were ripped open.

Nobody spoke.

Rye patched up Sian’s face. Wiped blood from her nose and lashed a splint across the split skin.

‘You’ll be mouth-breathing for a while, but you should be okay.’

She gave Sian a couple of aspirin.

‘Anyone else hurt?’ asked Sian. ‘Nail broke his arm.’

‘Damn.’

‘Fracture. No big deal.’

Jane sipped soup in the canteen. She warmed her hands round the mug. The remaining crew watched from the other side of the room. ‘What do they want?’ asked Jane.

‘What do they want me to say?’ ‘I suppose they want to know if the ship still floats,’ said Sian. Her nose was patched with tape. She sounded bunged up, like a heavy cold.

‘How the hell would I know? Tell them to get off their arses and look. Do I have to do every little fucking thing?’

Jane locked herself in the toilet. She had filled her pockets with liquor miniatures during her brief exploration of Hyperion. She sat in the cubicle, balanced her flashlight on the toilet paper dispenser, and downed five shots of Jim Beam. She closed her eyes and waited for the rush.

Jane lay on her bunk. Two more shots of bourbon. She was numb, thoughtless. She hoped it would last. There was a knock at the door.

‘Ghost wants to fetch some stuff from the ship,’ said Punch. ‘There are things we could use.’

‘Forget it. The place is a death trap.’

‘Quick in and out, like a bank raid. Want to tag along?’

‘I’m taking a holiday from the hero business.’

‘Hope you don’t mind if I borrow your gun.’ Punch took the shotgun and shells from the table.

Jane rolled to face the wall.

Ghost and Punch rode the zodiac back to the island. They had lashed a long aluminium ladder across the boat. The ladder spread either side of the boat like steel wings.

Hyperion had run aground on the jagged rocks of the island’s shore.

They carried the ladder to the ship’s prow. They climbed into the ship through a gash in the side of the hull. Steel plates had been ripped away exposing a cross-section of rooms and stairs.

Ghost led Punch to a passageway near the bilge.

‘There,’ he said, pointing at the ceiling. A thick rope of cable lashed to the ductwork. ‘Exactly what we need. Single core, high voltage. Big, juicy length of it. Perfect.’

He prised open a wall box with a screwdriver and threw an isolator switch.

‘Perfect? We find an entire floating city, and all we can salvage is a bit of cable?’

‘This is heat. This is light. This could get us through the winter. Remember: we’re better off today than we were yesterday. Hold on to that thought.’

Punch closed a hatch at one end of the corridor and knotted it shut with a length of fire hose. He stood guard at the other end of the corridor with a pickle jar Molotov in his hand.

‘Quick as you can,’ he said. ‘We don’t want to attract a crowd.’

Ghost dragged a table from an office. He stood on it and got to work. He used a wrench to unbolt a socket joint in the cable. He dragged the table to the other end of the corridor and repeated the procedure.

A fat man in Bermuda shorts and a Hawaiian shirt turned the corner. He wore a sombrero. He had a camera round his neck. His legs were a tumorous mess of flesh-flaps and metal.

‘We have our first customer,’ said Punch. He took a Zippo from his pocket and lit the rag. The Molotov splashed burning kerosene across the corridor floor. The second Molotov smashed against the man’s face and turned him to a pillar of flame. A guttural, inhuman howl. He collapsed and lay burning.

‘See that?’ said Punch. ‘He won’t lie still. He’s dead but the metal keeps on trucking.’

He backed away from the burning man, repelled by the stench. He took another Molotov from his backpack.

‘More on their way,’ he warned. ‘How’s it going, Gee?’

‘We’re done.’

Ghost coiled the cable and slung it over his shoulder. Punch untied the fire hose and released the hatch. He allowed himself a backward glance. Monstrously deformed figures massing through flame and smoke. Punch threw his last Molotov and ran.

The alcohol buzz was starting to wane. Jane resolved to ask Ghost for a big bag of weed. So much easier to extinguish all thought and sleepwalk through the day.

She lay in the dark. The ceiling strip-light flickered to life then burned steadily. She shielded her eyes from the glare. Power had been restored.

She opened the door. There were lights in the corridor, lights in every room. She heard cheering from the canteen.

The crewmen stood beneath heating vents, faces turned upward, basking in a torrent of hot air like they were taking a shower. One of the men got the jukebox working. ‘Sweet Home Alabama’. They would be toasting Ghost with fresh coffee when he returned from his work on C deck. Slapping his back, exchanging high fives. Jane didn’t want to stick around and watch.