Outpost (10 page)

'Happy
pills,' said Rye. 'Seroxat. Triptafen. You've got to expect depression in a
place like this. No daylight. Nowhere to go. There will be plenty of demand,
now night is closing in.'

'How
is Simon?'

Rye
gestured to a side room.

'Stable.
Sleeping. Infection: that's my chief concern. This is a first aid station.
Serious injuries are supposed to get a priority airlift. We don't have enough
antibiotics for long-term treatment.'

'Right.'

'I
probably shouldn't mention it, but what the hell. You might need to know.
Nikki? That girl we pulled off the ice? She was pretty distraught about the man
they left behind. She blames herself.
It should have been me, blah, blah.
I dosed her with Anafranil but
it takes a few days to kick in. She'll need a shoulder, someone to coax her
through the next few days.'

'Okay.'

'The
crewmen are smoking weed and hoping for a ship, but once the sun has set for
good the mood will quickly head downhill. There are black days ahead. Thank
God we don't have guns on board.'

Sian
found Simon watching DVDs in his hospital room.
Goodfellas.
He was pale. His hands and feet
were bandaged. Sian held a cup so he could sip from a straw.

'Can
you help me up a little?'

Sian
pressed the Elevate button to raise Simon's head.

'Where's
Nikki?' he asked.

'Eating
in the canteen. Eating and eating. Can I bring you any food?'

'No
thanks.'

BBC
News was still showing slow-motion footage of a fluttering Union flag and a
list of refuge centres.

'It's
been that way for days,' said Sian. 'The refuge list doesn't update. I suppose
the studio has been evacuated. We'll be watching that image until the satellite
fails.'

'Are
there no other channels?'

'North
America is totally off air. All the Russian and Euro channels are long gone.'

'Jesus.'

'See
that BBC logo in the corner? I like to look at it. It's comforting. A last
little piece of home.'

'I
killed my best friend to get here,' said Simon. 'And I'm just as stuck as
before.'

'We've
got heat, we've got light, we've got food for months. Look around you. This rig
is one giant construction set. It's packed full of survival equipment. I promise
you, one way or another, we will get you home. We'll get everyone home.'

Rye
changed Simon's dressings. She unwrapped his right hand. The smell of necrotic
flesh made Sian want to retch.

Sian
sat on the edge of the bed. She wanted to distract Simon from the sight of his
rotted hand.

'So
what's the first thing you will do when you get home?'

'Fuck
knows. Doesn't sound like there is much waiting for us. And what can I do? I'll
probably never use a knife and fork again. I'll have to lap food from a bowl
like a dog.'

'You're
exhausted, hungry and dehydrated. You get two days' self-pity, all right?
That's your allocation. Wallow. Whine all you want. But after those forty-eight
hours are up, you are officially a malingering twat.'

'I
need a shit.'

'Is
that why you haven't been eating? Worried about using the toilet?'

Sian
lowered the bed and helped Simon stand. He shuffled to the bathroom. Sian
helped tug down his pyjama bottoms.

'Call
me when you are done.'

Sian
helped Simon wipe, then walked him back to bed. She found Rye checking the drug
cupboard.

'What
are you giving him for pain?'

'Codeine.
He'll get a couple of cycles. After that, he has to tough it out.' Rye gestured
to the pill packets and bottles. 'We don't have much of anything. Once his
share is used up, he's on his own.'

Jane
knocked on Nikki's door.

'Who
is it?' Nikki sounded groggy. She was probably dozing on her bunk.

'It's
Reverend Blanc. Do you have a moment? I need your help.'

Jane
led Nikki to the observation bubble.

'How
have you been?' asked Jane, as they climbed the spiral stairs.

'Standing
by every heating vent I can find. Just can't seem to get warm.'

Jane
showed her the radio console.

'We've
been trying to hail any passing ship by short-wave. We man the radio round the
clock. We were hoping you could pull a few shifts.'

'What
should I do?'

'Sit
here. Press to transmit, yeah? Kasker Rampart. That's the name of the platform.
So you say something like: "Mayday, mayday. This is refinery platform
Kasker Rampart requesting urgent assistance, over." Then you release the
switch and listen for a reply.'

'Okay.'

'Do
you like Monopoly? We've been holding a tournament.'

Sian
walked Simon to the shower. She set the water running, took Simon's dressing
gown and helped him into the cubicle. She sat on the bed and waited for him to
finish. 'How's Nikki?' he called.

'Seems
okay. They've got her helping out in the radio room.' 'Keep an eye on her. Make
sure she's all right. She seems tough, but she's not. We left Alan to die. She
may act casual, but on some level it will be eating her up.'

'Jane
is looking after her. Jane's good with people. She has an instinct.'

'I'm
done.'

Sian
wrapped Simon in a bath towel and led him from the shower.

Jane
took the elevator down to the docking platform. She found Punch in the
boathouse. The boathouse was a steel cabin with a wide hole in the floor. The
zodiac was suspended above the water by chains. The walls were racked with
survival equipment.

'What's
this?' asked Jane, inspecting a big plastic pod.

'A
weather balloon. Don't mess with it.'

'Maybe
we should build a boat. A raft or something. Give everyone a job. For morale,
if nothing else.'

Punch
had found a golf club. He putted scrunched paper into a mug.

'Do
you think Tiger Woods is dead?' he asked.

'He's
probably sipping martinis on a private island somewhere. Times like this, the
rich buy their way out of trouble.'

'But
imagine if we were the only people left. The last men on earth. I'd be the best
golfer in the world right now. You'd be the only priest. And Ghost would be the
only Sikh. Imagine that. A four-hundred-year religion terminating in a
dope-head grease monkey.'

'I
thought you liked the bloke.'

'I
do. But think about it. All the people that made you feel worthless and small
down the years. The bullies and bosses. All gone. It's exhilarating, if you
think about it. Freedom from other people's expectations. We can finally start
living for ourselves.'

'We
can't be the only survivors. There must be others like us. We just need to find
each other.'

Jane
found a yellow Peli case on a shelf: a crush-proof, watertight plastic
container about the size of a shoe box. She turned the box over in her hands.

'Do
you mind if I take this?' she asked.

The
crew ate dinner in the canteen. Mashed potato, a sausage, a spoonful of gravy.

'Eat
it slowly,' advised Punch. 'Make it last.'

Rawlins
lifted his plate and licked it clean of gravy. The crew copied his lead.

Jane
stood on a chair and called for attention. They looked up, wondering if she
were about to say grace all over again.

'Okay,
folks. Here's the deal. We've got a bunch of helium weather balloons
downstairs. A week from today I am going to launch one of the balloons with
this box attached. The prevailing wind should carry it south to Europe. If any
of you want to write a letter to someone back home, then drop it in the box.
Million-to-one shot? Maybe. Even if the box lands in the sea, one day it will
wash up and one day someone will find it. You may think it's a stupid idea, but
do it anyway. Put it down on paper. Put a message in the bottle. The things you
wished you'd said but didn't get a chance. I'm going to leave this box in the
corner. It's a good opportunity to unburden yourselves. Make use of it.'

Sian
sat in the corner of the canteen, pen poised over a sheet of paper.

She
had a stepfather. Leo. A carpet fitter. He was a nice enough guy. He cared for
Sian's mother during that last year of ovarian cancer. Sian spent each
Christmas Day at his little terraced house, ate a turkey dinner in front of the
TV, but they never progressed beyond superficial pleasantries. It had been
three years. Sian often wondered if he had a new girlfriend. A divorcee with
kids of her own. Maybe he wanted to drop Sian from his life, but didn't know
how.

Leo
was a fit, capable man. He kept a bayonet beneath the bed in case of burglars.
He would be all right.

Sian
screwed up the paper. Better this way, she thought. No one to worry about but
me.

The
coffee urn. She filled a Styrofoam cup. Punch no longer supplied milk powder or
sugar. Everyone took it black and bitter.

Jane
sat in her room with a pad on her lap. She wrote love-you letters to her mother
and sister. Then she wrote on behalf of the crew.

My name is Reverend Jane Blanc. I am chaplain of Con
Amalgam refinery platform Kasker
Rampart.
We are marooned in the Arctic Circle west of Franz Josef Land. We have supplies
to last four months. Winter is coming. By the time you read this we may be
dead. We have little hope of rescue and we are so far from inhabited land any
attempt to sail to safety in an improvised craft would almost certainly fail. I
often promise the men we will all get home, but I have no idea how this can be
achieved or what horrors might await us beyond the horizon. So I appeal to
anyone who may read this note: please do what you can to ensure that one day
these letters reach the people for whom they are intended, so that they can
know what became of us.

God bless,

Jane Blanc

Jane
sealed the notes in an envelope and took it to the canteen. She slotted the
envelope into the Peli case.

Sudden
PA announcement: 'Mr Rawlins, Reverend Blanc, please report to Medical right
away.'

Sian.
By the sound of her voice, something was very wrong.

Simon
was curled foetal at the bottom of the shower cubicle. He was dead. He held a
scalpel in the swollen, blackened fingers of his left hand. He had slashed his
wrist. He lay naked in a puddle of pink blood-water and unravelled bandages.

'Jesus
fucking Christ.'

Rawlins
shut off the water. Jane helped drag the dead man from the shower.

They
carried Simon to the operating table. They watched Sian wash him down. They lifted
him into a rubber body bag and zipped it closed.

There
was no mortuary on the refinery, so they laid Simon on the floor of the
boathouse overnight.

'He
was talking to me,' said Sian. 'Reaching out. Screaming for help and I was too
stupid to hear.'

'A
person's life is their own,' said Jane. 'It's not your job to save them.'

Nikki
sat in the observation bubble reading a magazine.

'We'll
be holding the funeral at three,' said Jane.

Nikki
flipped pages like she hadn't heard.

The
crew processed down steel stairs that spiralled round one of the rig's
gargantuan legs. An ice shelf had solidified around each leg. They walked
across the ice and congregated at the water's edge.

Jane
turned the pages of her service book with gloved fingers.

'O
God, whose Son Jesus Christ was laid in a tomb: bless, we pray, this grave as
the place where the body of Simon your servant may rest in peace, through your
Son, who is the resurrection and the life; who died and is alive and reigns
with you now and for ever.'

Simon
was swaddled in sheets. He lay on a stretcher. Ghost lifted the stretcher and
the body slid into the water.

'As
they came from their mother's womb, so they shall go again, naked as they came.
We brought nothing into the world, and we take nothing out. The Lord gave, and
the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.'

The
shrouded body floated just beneath the surface. Ghost pushed the corpse away
from the ice with a golf club. It drifted away, drawn by the current, a white
phantom shape beneath the water.