Adam Baker - Outpost

I try to face death with stoic detachment but, let’s face it, my state of Buddhistic serenity is the result of heavy doses of morphine rather than any hard-won wisdom. I shoot up every couple of hours. I have a shoe box full of used hypos hidden beneath my bunk. There aren’t many syringes left. Enough to last the next few days. If, in months to come, the Rampart crew need to inject medication they will have to rinse and sterilise a used hypodermic. But that’s their problem.

The sensation of snuggling warmth, the Wash I used to call it, feels like coming home. It took me years to quit. Resolution and relapse. I underwent a full year of detox to win back my licence to practise. I lost my house, my child, my job. I had to work at a supermarket. Swiping groceries sixty hours a week just to make the rent on a one-bedroom flat. It was a mercy I wasn’t struck off altogether. But I suppose it doesn’t matter now. Might as well enjoy the buzz.

During my time at Kings College I used to watch lung cancer patients in nightgowns and pyjamas wheel their drip-stands out of the hospital back entrance. They would congregate on a loading bay and savour a cigarette. Why quit? The worst had already happened. The damage was already done.

Last night I felt compelled to go outside, stand at a railing and face the island. Forty below, but I barely felt the cold. I stood there a long while and listened to the whispering voices in my head. Insinuating murmurs in my back-brain, faint like a weak radio signal, too faint to make out words. I have often suspected those infected with this disease share some kind of hive mind. These past few days I have often stood at the railing and watched infected Hyperion passengers mass at the shoreline. From what little I’ve seen they flock like birds. They move as a crowd. Each individual is slow and stupid, but when massed together they become a formidable tide.

A crate of booze has been left in the canteen. Vodka, tequila, cognac. Dregs left over from the riotous toga party, along with dried sausage rolls and crackers greased with cream cheese. Ghost gave a speech at the party. He thanked Jane for bringing Hyperion to the island. A transparent attempt to win back the approval of the crew. Jane seized a cruise liner, the most absurdly perfect transport we could hope to find, and managed to wreck it. I’m surprised they didn’t build a gangplank and push her into the sea. Yet the crewmen seem strangely passive. The memory of their old lives has faded to such an extent they can’t remember anything but the refinery. Nothing else seems real. They haunt the corridors like the sailors of the Flying Dutchman. They have each retreated into their own personal psychosis.

Mal often sits in front of the TV, watching static and tattooing the back of his hands. Jailhouse method. Biro ink pricked beneath the skin with a bent safety pin. He already had tattoos, but following an acid-burn from spilled caustic soda his knuckles spelt LOVE and HAT. He re-inked the letters and added spider-web decoration.

Gus has moved into the old gym. Camped among freezing treadmills and steppers. He has painted a bleak moonscape on the wall. He calls the place Tranquillity. He affects a posh accent and has begun to call himself the Duke of Amberley. It began as a joke, but he genuinely gets angry if he isn’t addressed as Your Lordship. The crew seem happy to comply. There is a tacit understanding that they all need a holiday from sanity. I wish I could stick around and see how it plays out.

I suppose I shall endure this illness as long as I can, then jump in the sea. But what if I don’t die? What if lack of oxygen and skull-crushing pressure don’t kill me? I might find myself stumbling round the ocean floor in absolute darkness. My lungs would be full of water. I couldn’t even scream.

I visited Nail in his room this evening. We made a trade. His arm looks better. I asked him about Nikki. No one has seen her for a while. He said I should go fuck myself.

Thursday 29 October

Jane knocked on my door this morning. I was still in bed. I hid my infected arm beneath the blanket then invited her inside.

She persists in her attempts to redeem me. I’m not quite sure what form this redemption is supposed to take. Maybe I should fall weeping and hug her knees. I like her. She’s a sweet girl. Yet she is still young and naive enough to believe people help one another. She has yet to look out of the window and realise the extent to which this great white nothing reflects our personal reality. We are all serving a life sentence. Trapped in the confines of our skull.

Jane and Ghost have concocted a plan. An ice shelf has spread from the island coast. It stretches towards the refinery. The sight of infected passengers jostling at the water’s edge has banished all compassion and has convinced Jane to embark on an eradication programme. Ideally she and Ghost would like to move through Hyperion room by room systematically executing passengers, but they don’t have enough ammunition. Instead they want to visit the old Russian bunker on the island. Ghost says there is equipment stored on the lower levels that may help exterminate a swathe of the infected. He refuses to be drawn further.

No one from the rig, as far as I know, has ever fully explored the bunker. It is a vast, multi-level catacomb intended to be a repository for nuclear waste. A relic of the militarised Arctic, the long cold war stand-off. Decades of spy plane over-flights, prowling submarines and incursion alerts.

Ghost undertook a brief expedition last year. He sprayed arrows on the walls so he could retrace his route to the entrance. He says he saw tiers of rooms that might have been intended for offices and dormitories. He says there is abandoned mining equipment parked in some of the deeper caverns. Rock drills as big as a house. Conveyors to carry rubble to the surface.

We leave the rig in two hours. We will ride the zodiac a kilometre north to avoid Hyperion passengers standing at the shore. We will travel across land to the bunker, lock the steel doors behind us and seal ourselves inside.

I once visited the Valley of the Kings. Part of my self-imposed detox programme. A cheap package holiday. Camels and sun cream. Escape my cravings, my fucked-up life. I signed up for a coach party. A day trip to explore the tombs of the Pharaohs.

There were no stairs. Each stone sarcophagus was slid underground down a steep ramp. Ghost tells me this bunker follows a similar design. Wide tunnels angled downward through Palaeocene sediment, rail tracks bolted to the concrete floor. Ghost speculates that the necropolis was built to hide more than submarine reactors. The place seems too elaborate, too deliberately labyrinthine, to be a simple storage space. Perhaps the Russians intended to store nuclear weapons down here. A way of subverting disarmament treaties. What better place to hide the distinctive radiation signature of nuclear warheads than next to a pile of fuel rods? Not that it matters any more. The Russians are dead. The Americans are dead. There’s nobody left to care.

We are camping for the night on sub-level four. We have laid our sleeping bags on the concrete floor in the corner of a cavern. We are each quilted in survival gear. Dinner was chicken royale eaten from self-heating cans. I told them I wasn’t hungry. They are both asleep now, so I have taken off my gloves to write this journal.

I am writing this by lamplight. Jane is lying on her back, mouth half open. Long plumes of steam-breath. The zip of her coat collar is partially undone. I can see the pulse in her neck. If I stare long and hard I feel a strange pull, a vampiric craving to bite and tear. A lust to penetrate and invade. I find myself leaning towards her, as if physically drawn. A sobering sensation. Until now I have thought of my illness as a personal tragedy. But I am starting to realise the extent to which I threaten the Rampart crew. If I return to the refinery and succumb to this disease, I might kill them all.