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.
Jane looks almost gaunt. She was horribly obese and lethargic when we first met. A heart attack waiting to happen. She couldn’t walk without hurting her knees. She sequestered herself in a distant accommodation block so we wouldn’t be kept awake by her piggy snore. Now she seems fiercely alive. She’ll be dead soon. They’ll all be dead. But I suppose some people thrive in a crisis. They find their purpose. They say a happy childhood is a lousy preparation for life. Kids who spend their playground days fat, ginger or gay know the truth. The world has always been full of vicious predators. For plenty of people this carnage and savagery is business as usual.
Ghost led us to a stack of explosives hidden in a deep vault. C4 and thermite grenades. Apparently Jane and Punch discovered the munitions at a seismic research station some weeks ago. Rawlins ordered the explosives be stored in the bunker.
The packets of C4 look like bricks of clay wrapped in cellophane. They smell like petrol. Cable. Detonators. Battery- operated initiators. Ghost insists we each sleep cuddling a patty of frozen explosive in the hope our body heat will make it pliable. Tomorrow we blow some Hyperion passengers to hell.
Friday 30 October
We woke early, packed and stood at the bunker mouth. Arctic winter. Early morning, but it will be bright moonlight all day.
Ghost took one of the Skidoos and drove to the shore. Jane rode pillion. She balanced a holdall in her lap. I took binoculars to high ground.
He rode out on to the ice sheet that has extended from the island shoreline. He made a slow pass of passengers who stood mesmerised by the lights of the refinery. Jane unzipped the bag and unravelled detonator cord behind them. Fistfuls of explosives strung at fourmetre intervals like a string of Christmas lights. Ghost brought the bike to a halt and they both crouched behind it for cover.
Ghost twisted wires to a hand-held initiator. He mouthed a three-count then clicked the trigger. The chain of high explosive blew, and threw a curtain of ice-dust into the air. No flame, no fireball. Just a fierce concussion. The sound of the explosion reached me a couple of seconds later. A sharp clap like thunder.
Four or five passengers were blown to pieces. Body parts littered the snow.
A web of jagged fissures split the ice. Slabs tipped and tilted. Figures toppled into dark water. No attempt to swim or struggle. They immediately sank. A couple of infected passengers stood at the centre of a detached ice floe and looked around, stupefied, as the current began to carry them south.
I could hear Ghost and Jane whoop and cheer. I’m not sure how many passengers they killed. Maybe twenty or thirty. Futile? People need to act, to feel in control of their fate. Jane and Ghost are intelligent people. I’m sure they are aware how little they achieved. Yet they fight, and I admire them for it.
I was supposed to meet Ghost and Jane at the zodiac, but instead I have returned to the bunker and locked myself inside.
Sian tried to contact me on the radio. She called over and over before I descended too deep for the signal to penetrate. ‘Rampart to Rye, do you copy, over?’’ I suppose I should have told them not to look for me. I should have told them I was gone for good.
I’m reluctant to put down my pen. This is the end of my life. I don’t want to sign off.
Sooner or later, Jane will search my room. She will find the remaining medical supplies laid out on my bed, with explanatory Post-it notes taped to each of them. I’ve left a simple medical encyclopaedia on my chair. The A-Z of Family Health. Dress a wound, deliver a baby or pull a tooth, then they will have to thumb through the index.
I’ve survived these past few years by ruthlessly suppressing all sentiment, declaring unending war on self- pity. Yet I can’t help wishing I was leaving someone behind, someone who will miss me, someone who will remember my name. I haven’t seen my son for years, and that is probably for the best. Easier all round if I stay out of his life. Easier if he thinks I’m dead in a ditch. Let him hate me. Hate is good. Hate is rocket fuel. It’s a
