Adam Baker - Outpost

‘Sure,’ said Rye.

He picked up a heavy statuette that had fallen from a wall niche. A dancing nymph.

‘Kill me,’ he said. ‘Do it clean.’

He sat at a cocktail piano. He played ‘I Get a Kick Out of You’. Rye stood behind him.

‘You’re pretty good,’ said Rye.

‘Yeah. Always wished I’d gone professional’

Rye killed him halfway through the third verse.

She searched corridors surrounding the engine room. She opened every door marked with a red flame emblem. Paint. Lubricant. White spirit.

She found the fuel tanks. A long gantry overlooked vats of diesel and lightweight marine oil. She tried to spin stopcocks but couldn’t get them to turn.

She descended steps to the tank hall floor. She hacked at the pipes with a wrench. A joint ruptured, a narrow copper coupling at the foot of a tank. Fuel glugged and splashed on to the deck plates. A slow leak, but if she returned in a couple of hours the floor would be awash with diesel.

‘Codeine.’ The dealer dealt two cards. Queen five.

Rye pushed the cards away. Fold.

‘So what did you do? Write phantom prescriptions?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Sweet. Must be great to be a doctor. Kid in a candy store.’

‘I lost a lot of years. I paid a heavy price.’

‘Yeah. Well. Don’t be too hard on yourself,’ said the dealer. He took a silver cigarette case from his pocket, placed a cigarette carefully between his deformed lips, and lit it with a click of his Dunhill lighter. ‘There’s that line by Larkin. “All they might have done had they been loved.” Every one of us could have ruled the world if we’d got up early and done the right thing. But we limp around dragging our personal damage like a tourist schlepping a heavy suitcase through an airport. Blame your genes, your parents, your school. Just a long chain of cause and effect. Life was mapped out long before you were born.’

‘What is it about cards that makes people all priestly and sagacious?’

‘It’s like communion. Dishing out wafers. Dishing out fate. That’s the beauty of blackjack. Blind chance. A reminder that you’re not in control. You just sit back and watch the numbers dance.’

‘You can pretend that you’re not scared of dying. Personally, I’m terrified.’

‘Anything is better than this.’

‘Where’s the fifth bloke?’ Rye gestured to an empty seat. ‘There were five of you. Now there are four.’

‘Casper. A retired dentist. A pleasant man. A divorce, looking for love. That’s what he told me. Married thirty-five years. Wife took a bunch of cash and ran off with his brother. Didn’t seem too bitter about it, though. We had a lot of time to talk it through, back in the days when he had a mouth.

‘He finally went native. It happened yesterday evening. I saw it in his eyes. The moment the lights went out. He was looking at me. One minute he was Casper, next minute he wasn’t. He became one of them. Mindless. Blank. Lucky bastard. All of us round this table praying for the same thing. That blessed day when it will all be over. I never imagined it would come to this. I never imagined I would hate to be alive.’

She heard a faint scuffing sound. The rasp of a chair nudged aside.

‘That’s him,’ said the dealer. ‘Casper. He’s over there. He’s lying by the wall. He moves, now and again.’

‘What’s he doing?’

‘Migrating. Would you like to watch? Everyone joins the flock sooner or later.’

The dealer stood up. Half his face was rippled metal like melted candle wax. His cheek was smeared over his bow tie and lapel. The rest of him seemed untouched.

‘Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen,’ he said, addressing his fellow players. They were so far gone, so far mutated, they could barely turn their heads. Each face was a mask of blood and spines. Their eyes followed Rye and the dealer as they stood to leave. ‘We’ll be back in a few minutes.’

Casper slowly crawled towards the door. His legs appeared useless and his right arm was fused to his body. He dug fingernails into the plush carpet and hauled himself, little by little, through double doors into a service corridor. He slithered on cold linoleum. He seemed unaware that Rye and the dealer kept pace.

He slowly dragged himself along the corridor, hand slapping on the tiles. He reached a stairwell and began to squirm his way up the stairs.

‘Where’s he heading?’ asked Rye.

‘I’ll show you.’

They left Casper behind them and climbed three flights of stairs. They found themselves standing at the back of a crowd.

Twenty or thirty passengers jostled in front of a locked door. They scratched and pawed at the metal.

‘This is where they are drawn,’ said the dealer. ‘The barricades. We’ll join them, when our time comes.’ He guided her closer to the door. ‘Just stand for a moment. Close your eyes. Can you feel it? Can you feel the pull?’

Rye closed her eyes. She felt it. A skin-prickle like heat. She turned her head, like she was turning her face to the sun.

‘Yes, I can feel it.’

‘Blood music. That’s what I call it.’

She shouldered her way through the crowd and faced the locked door. She stroked the metal.

She could sense the crew of the refinery. She could smell them on the other side of the hatch. Rich and sweet. She began to salivate.

Fresh meat.

Mal lay on the boathouse deck. His body had been stored in the unheated shed for a week. Too cold for decomposition. His shrouded corpse was completely frozen, rigid as a plank.

Jane used to live near the River Severn and had, on a couple of occasions, stood on the bank and blessed bloated cadavers as they were hauled from the water. The Severn Bridge was a popular venue for suicides. Corpses swollen with rot-gas frequently washed up on mudflats downstream. They were pecked by gulls until police frogmen dragged them to shore.

Mal would float south. He would probably wash up on the coast of Norway.

Jane decided to wrap a Ziploc bag beneath his shroud. She bagged his signet ring, his medallion and his passport. She wrote everything she knew about the man. Information from his personnel file. Home address, next of kin. It was a long shot. Even if his body washed up on a European beach there would be no one left alive to find him. But it seemed like the right thing to do. An attempt to preserve his identity as they dispatched him to the afterworld.

At some point during the funeral ceremony Jane would have to give an address. A summary of Mal’s life. She would have to list his virtues, his enthusiasms, the struggles he faced and overcame. But she knew nothing about him at all.

Jane crossed the ice to Hyperion. She took a wide detour to avoid infected passengers that spilled from the rip in Hyperion’s side.

Mal’s room.

The Magellan Suite. Red velvet and gilt fixtures. Lithographs of Napoleonic-era battleships. A senior officer’s dress uniform hung in the wardrobe. Jane experienced a sudden rush of class hatred. She had been an underdog all her life. She instinctively identified with the ship’s drone workers, east European immigrants who grovelled for tips. She wondered if junior members of the Hyperion crew, the cleaners, the waiters, the engine room staff, had been aware of the luxury enjoyed by the ship’s officers. Probably not.

Mal’s clothes lay in a heap by the bed. She prodded his long-johns with her boot.

Jane browsed the cupboards and shelves for any personal artefact that might give her an insight into the man’s life. An open book, a stack of CDs, a family photograph. Something that might reveal who Mal had been.

Nothing. A couple of empty vodka bottles. Socks soaking in the bathroom sink. She wanted to believe everyone had value. Everyone had a rich internal life, everyone was a little universe. Not this guy. He was empty.