The Last Murder at the end of the World

TWENTY-EIGHT

It’s mid morning and Niema’s body is still lying on the cable-car station steps. It’s been several hours since she was found, and the sun is pouring into the deserted village, the heat rising between the walls. Thea’s prowling back and forth, aiming kicks at the emaciated vultures that are swooping down on their huge wings. There are four of them now, gathered at a safe distance, watching through hungry, patient eyes.

After being trapped on this island for ninety years, Thea has a lot of sympathy for scavengers, and she’s tempted to leave them to their feast. There would be something fittingly mythological about a prideful mortal being torn apart by ravenous birds.

‘Where’s Hossein?’ she asks impatiently.

The cart they use to move bodies is missing, so Hossein has been carrying the corpses to the furnace one by one.

‘He’s dehydrated and at risk of orthostatic hypotension,’ I explain. ‘I’ve told him to take a fifteen-minute break.’

Thea’s irritation is stalled by the sight of Hephaestus rounding the barracks. His face is badly bruised and there are scratches up and down his arms, which are stiff by his sides, sweat dripping off his fingers. His head is lowered against the glare, forcing him to squint at the bright world from under that tombstone forehead.

‘Where’s my mother?’ he demands.

His searching gaze finds the bloodstained sheet and the lump beneath. Thea moves to console him, but he strides straight past her, tugging the sheet back, revealing the bloody wound in her sternum and the shattered skull, a few strands of grey hair clinging to what’s left of her scalp.

Moving with terrifying speed, he grabs one of the vultures by the neck, and slams it into the ground with a horrifying crunch. The poor creature beats its wings and squawks, desperately trying to scratch him with its claws, but he lifts it into the air, hammering it into the dirt again. Then again, and again.

Sobbing, he tosses the twitching bird aside, then sinks to his knees.

I should try to comfort him, but there’s no optimal way of handling extreme emotion in humans, which I’ve come to regard as the greatest of evolution’s failures.

Thea squeezes Hephaestus’s enormous shoulder. It’s a simple gesture, but it lays bare their entire history together; everything they’ve endured and overcome since the world ended.

This tenderness would surprise the villagers who’ve rarely seen Thea laugh, or smile, or offer a kind word to anybody.

In truth, it still surprises Thea.

The first time she met Hephaestus he was the typical billionaire’s son, spoiled and spiteful, flailing through the world, mistaking notoriety for success. His mother was the most famous woman on the planet. The most successful. The most driven. The most debated. The most adored, and the most despised. Hephaestus was the most ‘her son’.

He was a gifted biologist, but her shadow draped the entire world. Unable to escape it, he decided to crash sports cars and sleep with models instead; anything to temporarily turn the tide of conversation his way. For a very long time, Thea thought him pitiful, but then the fog came.

Hephaestus dragged himself across a crumbling world for seven months to escape it, watching humanity tear itself apart. Somehow, he managed to find Thea’s sister, Ellie, along the way, protecting her as though she were family.

Ellie arrived scarred and bleeding, a little jumpy, but no worse for wear. Hephaestus, on the other hand, was almost an entirely different man. He never spoke in detail about what he experienced, but – in the first years especially – he barely spoke and never laughed; preferring the dark to the day. Even the surfeit of malignancy and entitlement that had once defined him was gone, replaced by the humbleness of the hunted.

For that first decade, the only people he really trusted were Ellie and Niema. He kept a wary eye on the other scientists, refusing to live in Blackheath with them. He was so paranoid, he wouldn’t even tell them where he slept. He came and went at unpredictable hours spending most of his time in hushed conference with his mother.

Gradually, he became more comfortable with other people, but never large groups and never with laughter. He didn’t trust laughter any more. He knew how malevolent it could be.

Through Ellie he slowly warmed up to Thea, the three of them growing closer as their fellow scientists started to die. Buried under his scarred exterior, she found a deep well of empathy. A steadfast friend.

After Ellie gave up, they only had each other.

It was Hephaestus who dragged Thea out of bed when the fog seeped through the island’s bedrock, worming its way inside Blackheath. They ran through the alarms together, sealing the blast doors after themselves, trapping it underground. If he hadn’t been there, she’d have been torn apart in her sleep.

Hephaestus finishes crying, then wipes his cheeks with the back of his hand. His eyes are snares, his fists clenched.

‘What happened?’ he growls, assuming his full height.

‘She was in the warehouse last night and a beam collapsed, crushing her skull,’ says Thea.

Hephaestus glares at the smouldering warehouse. Thea’s surprised it isn’t trying to scramble up the volcano away from him.

‘My mother went in there?’ he asks sceptically. ‘Why?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe she was looking for something. Does it matter?’

‘It might,’ he says darkly. ‘When she first put the call out for refugees, she created a deadman’s switch that was designed to automatically turn off the barrier if her heart stopped. She’d seen the lawlessness and the rapes on the mainland, and she was worried that same violence would find its way here. The deadman’s switch was her deterrent. She wanted every new arrival to know that if she was killed, the fog would swallow the island whole.’

Thea stares at him, her pulse quickening with fear. ‘We’ve been on this island for nearly a century. You can’t be telling me that she never got round to turning it off?’

‘I’ve got equipment monitoring the fog,’ he says bleakly. ‘For ninety years, it hasn’t made a peep, but when I woke up this morning, every light was flashing red. The barrier’s down, Thea. The fog’s closing in. At this rate, it will swallow the island in thirty-eight hours.’