I sat in the pilot’s chair, making sure we stayed deep enough to avoid rocks but also close enough to shore that we didn’t go off course. Jax stood looking out of the water sheen that covered the bridge windows. Tanya and Sam were somewhere in the living area, keeping dry. I had the radio on but even Johnny Drake must be in a depressed mood today; he played mostly emo and Goth tracks.
A quiet, contemplative atmosphere had descended over the boat. We were all lost in our own thoughts of the mission ahead. I was wondering if it was even possible to get to the radio station alive. The slogan painted on the boat’s hull and printed on my T-shirt, “Sail To Your Destiny” seemed particularly apt today. And the destiny wasn’t good.
Jax had come up to the bridge five minutes ago, said, “Hi,” and then stood silently watching the coastline through the windows. I wasn’t sure if she wanted a conversation or not so I kept my mouth shut. If she spoke to me, I would answer. Otherwise, I was going to stay quiet.
The silence didn’t bother me too much. I was used to uncomfortable silences with girls.
After another minute of staring out at the rain and cliffs, she said softly, “Do you think we’re going to make it, Alex?”
I sighed. Did she want a truthful answer or reassurance that everything was going to be OK? I decided to walk the middle ground and said, “I don’t know.” If I had tried to reassure her, I wouldn’t have sounded convincing at all and if I had been truthful, I would have said, “No, Jax, I don’t think we’re going to make it. I think we’re all going to end up dead…or worse. We don’t have a chance of surviving this crazy mission.”
She turned to face me. There were tears in her eyes. “I don’t want to die.” She wiped her face with the back of her hand.
“Me either,” I replied. “So let’s try and stay alive.” I sounded much calmer than I felt.
She smiled and nodded. “Good idea.”
I was about to reply but she held up her hand, silencing me. “Do you hear that?” she whispered.
I listened. All I could hear was Bauhaus singing “Bella Lugosi’s Dead” on Survivor Radio. “The music?” I asked like an idiot.
“No, not the music,” she said, twisting the volume knob to zero.
Then I heard it. Outside. Beyond the windows. Voices. “What’s that?” I asked, vocalizing my confused thoughts. It sounded like hundreds of people speaking at once out there. I leaned forward and used my sleeve to wipe away condensation from the window. There were shapes on the cliffs and the beaches.
We went down to the deck where Tanya and Sam were already leaning on the railing and gazing towards the shore.
On the tops of the cliffs and on the rocky beaches, at least a hundred soldiers lay curled up beneath the slate grey sky. They all lay in the same fetal position and they all murmured the same three words. But they weren’t saying the words in unison so the sound they made as a group was confused. I listened to the jumbled torrent of words and picked out what each soldier was saying. “Leave…me…alone.”
Tanya turned to me. “What’s happening?”
“They’ve all been bitten,” I said. “And because they’re vaccinated, the virus is battling with the vaccine. They’ll be like that for four days then become hybrids…or die.” I shrugged. “I don’t know for sure.”
Sam stared at the curled up soldiers with fascination in his eyes. “Why do they keep saying that? ‘Leave me alone’? It’s fucked up, man.”
“They’re probably just saying that because it’s the only thought going through their heads. The virus compels them to find an isolated place and they’re vocalizing the command.” The voices floating across the water to our boat were eerie. The soldiers sounded distressed, in pain.
I remembered the soldier I had seen on the beach last night. He had been silent.
“I think they’re only murmuring like that because they’re in close proximity to one another. Look at that one down there alone on the rocks.” I pointed to a soldier who had removed himself from the others and lay alone on the beach. He shivered like the others but his mouth was closed and he made no noise.
It seemed the words, “Leave…me…alone,” were an automatic reaction to the presence of others.
I went back up to the bridge and turned on the radio again. Those eerie voices were creeping me out. On the radio, Johnny Drake had switched to a more upbeat selection of tracks and was currently playing “Summer of ‘69” by Bryan Adams.
I watched the soldiers through the water-streaked windows until we sailed past them and their voices faded away in the distance.
An hour later, the sea calmed and the
Lucky Escape
settled into a gentle rolling gait as she took us along the Cornish coast towards Falmouth. I checked the map and guessed we would be approaching the harbour in the next thirty minutes. I cut the engine and went down to the deck where the others were sitting.
“We’re approaching the harbour,” I said. “What’s the plan?”
Tanya looked at the late afternoon sky. “We should wait until it’s dark before we sail past the harbour into the river. It’s our best chance.”
Everyone agreed so I went back up to the bridge and took the
Lucky Escape
out into deeper water and continued toward Falmouth. We could get a look at the harbour from a safe distance and wait there until dark. The plan didn’t fill me with confidence but I couldn’t come up with anything better and I knew that if I didn’t go through with this, my chances of seeing Lucy again were probably zero.
When a wide inlet appeared, cutting a path inland, I used the binoculars to see more details. A small castle sat on the headland. I wondered if the army were using it as a lookout post but it looked abandoned. The harbour was situated on the other side of the headland, which meant I would have to sail into the wide inlet to assess the situation there. I just hoped we weren’t sailing into a trap we couldn’t escape.
I piloted the
Lucky Escape
around the headland and into the inlet. Despite the huge size of the inlet, having land on both sides of the boat made me feel claustrophobic.
The harbour appeared on the port side. It was much larger than the marina at Swansea and the area was filled with boats of all shapes and sizes moored to the long jetties. I couldn’t see any soldiers. The harbour was eerily quiet. The rain became a weak drizzle then stopped entirely.
The mouth of the river that led inland to Truro lay directly ahead. Maybe I should make a run for it now while there seemed to be nobody around. I had feared a huge military presence but the lack of even a single soldier unnerved me. I thought I could see army vehicles parked in the harbour but it was hard to tell from this distance.
On the water, something sparkled in the afternoon sun like a silver spider’s web stretching across the mouth of the river all the way to the nearest jetty in the harbour.
Using the binoculars, I took a closer look.
What I saw made me groan. An emptiness filled my gut as I realized I was going to have to tell the others the bad news.
As soon as I climbed down the ladder and stood on the deck in front of them, they knew something was wrong by the expression on my face.
“What is it, man?” Sam asked.
“We can’t take the boat past the harbour,” I said.
They were silent, waiting for me to continue.
I said, “The army have barricaded the river.”
twenty-four
We took turns looking through the binoculars and we all came to the same conclusion. Our plan was dead in the water.
The army engineers had built a barricade that stretched all the way from the harbour jetty and spanned the river. It floated in the water, a ten-foot-high steel wall supported by huge plastic barrel-shaped floats. It looked like it had been put together in sections and the movement of the water made it undulate like a living, breathing steel snake.
At the harbour, army Land Rovers and personnel carriers were parked in clusters but none of us saw any soldiers. The area seemed quiet but from this distance we probably wouldn’t be able to hear any sounds that far away. All we could hear was the slapping of waves against the
Lucky Escape
’s hull.
We went into the living area and sat around the table to decide our next move.
“What do we do?” Tanya asked.
“We could go over land,” Sam suggested.
“Too risky,” Jax said. “We have to get past the barrier and take the boat upriver. There’s no other way.”
“We can’t get past it,” he replied. “And there might be even more barriers farther up the river. We’d be stuck, man. Easy targets for the army to blow out of the water.”
“I don’t see any soldiers,” Tanya said. “Maybe they’ve all gone away to turn into hybrids or something.”
“That is possible,” I said. “If the harbour was attacked by hybrids, the soldiers could all have wandered away to find a place to turn.” I thought about that a little more. “If that’s the case, we can get past the barrier by going around it on the jetty and getting into the river on the other side.”
“Dude, we have to get the
Lucky Escape
past the barrier too,” Sam said.
I shook my head. “No, we don’t. We can take the Zodiac. Carry it across the jetty and get into the water on the other side of that wall. If there are other barricades upriver, we can get onto the bank and carry the Zodiac around them too,”
“Portage,” Sam said, nodding. “I like it.”
“It will make us less of a target than if we were in the
Lucky Escape
,” Tanya said. “Let’s do it.”
“There’s just one thing,” I reminded her. “The harbour has to be empty of soldiers. Otherwise we’ll get captured as soon as we set foot on it.”
“Something else,” Jax added. “If hybrids attacked the harbour, where are they now?”
We all knew the answer to that; they were probably still there. Waiting.
“We’ll check it out closely before we leave the Zodiac,” Tanya said. “Everyone grab your weapons.”
We went out onto the sun deck and began to untie the Zodiac while Jax used the binoculars to study the harbour. “Plenty of vehicles,” she said as we carried the boat to the aft deck, “but I can’t see any soldiers.”
That was both good news and bad. Good because it meant we weren’t going to get blown out of the water by the army. Bad because there must be a reason the soldiers weren’t there anymore and that reason could still be lurking at the harbour.
We got the boat into the water and climbed aboard with our weapons. Jax started the engine and the familiar gasoline smell filled the night air. As we set off towards the jetty, I looked back at the
Lucky Escape
. She bobbed on the waves looking abandoned in the fading sunlight. I hoped she would still be there when we got back.
I hoped we would get back.
Tanya had the binoculars and she watched the harbour as we approached. “Looks clear,” she said. “I can’t see much because of all the boats but the place looks deserted.”
Jax guided the Zodiac between two yachts, heading for a set of stone steps that led from the water up to the top of the high jetty. Sam jumped onto the steps and held the boat steady while we clambered out. Between the four of us, we managed to hoist the Zodiac up the steps. The boat wasn’t too heavy for the four of us to handle but it dripped cold water over us as we carried it to the top of the jetty.
At the top, we set it down on the concrete and looked around. The barrier had been fixed to the end of the jetty by thick steel braces that looked like they had been embedded into the stone by some sort of huge drill. There was no way we could detach the barricade. It stretched out across the water to the bank on the other side. It was miles long and must have taken days to construct.
I assumed the army had built it to keep boats in rather than keep them out. The river ran all the way to Truro and along the way there were yacht clubs, small marinas and harbours. This barricade would make sure none of those boats sailed out into the channel. It looked like the military really was trying to control everybody.
As I stood admiring the technical work that had gone into erecting such a huge barricade, a sudden silence descended over the harbour. Even the birds stopped singing, just as they had at Mason’s Farm.
“No way should it be this quiet,” I whispered.
“What’s that?” Jax asked, pointing to the buildings on the shore.
I squinted at the place she had indicated. “I don’t see anything.”
“There,” she said. “Oh my God, we need to get out of here! Now!”
Dozens of hybrid soldiers erupted from the cluster of buildings like ants scuttling out of a nest. They ran towards the jetty, fixing us with their hateful yellow eyes. As the first half dozen reached the jetty, more and more came pouring out from between the buildings. I was reminded of a scene in a Matrix movie where thousands of copies of Agent Smith attack Neo.
The soldiers, although different facially, wore identical uniforms and their running bodies blurred into a mass of camouflage patterned jackets.
“Let’s move!” Tanya shouted, grabbing the Zodiac.
We all lifted the boat and headed for the steps that led down the opposite side of the jetty but it was obvious we weren’t going to make it. “Take it to the end and throw it over,” Tanya shouted, changing direction. We took the Zodiac to the end of the concrete jetty and heaved it into the water twenty feet below. The boat landed with a splash and took on some water but remained afloat.
The nearest soldiers were almost on us. Their boots thundered along the jetty.
We all jumped. In normal circumstances, I would have thought twice before diving twenty feet into the sea but with a horde of hybrids running towards me, I didn’t even give the jump a second thought.
I hit the water and went under, enveloped by cold and darkness. Struggling to the surface, I heard splashes as other bodies landed in the water around me. I had expected to hear three but there were many more.