The End of Men(62)

The new head of the Icelandic Coast Guard, Heida, is a very no-nonsense woman who talks a lot about resources. I don’t think she’s married. I keep trying to find out more about her personal life, try to build a rapport, but she’s quite resistant to it. No matter. My husband is on a boat in the middle of nowhere. Heida needs to help me and Heida is going to help me even if she doesn’t know it yet.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading so I know about virus survival times on surfaces and sterilization. One of the major perks of working in a library is the easy access to books and time to spend researching things online. The virus, according to the Public Health England Task Force, survives for thirty-eight hours on a static surface. Women are hosts, which means every time a woman coughs or sneezes or breathes on her hand, she’ll spread the virus onto the thing she touches. These two things are problems but they are solvable.

Heida needs to understand that they are solvable.

If I could, I would fly out to Iceland myself and give her a piece of my mind, but there’s not going to be any plane travel for the foreseeable, maybe ever, so for now I’m stuck with phone calls.

My plan is simple. Heida needs to get lots of canned food—soup, vegetables, potatoes, sausages, that kind of thing—and either freeze them or cover them in boiling water so every bit of them is drenched. Then she needs to get a massive piece of plastic and sterilize that too, and use that to cover the cans. Then she needs to attach a note to the big plastic pack of food telling whoever reads it to eat the food, not panic and wait to be rescued because everything is going to be okay.

I’ve thought this through. It’s not that hard.

I’ll call Heida again. I’ve told her my plan every day for the past few weeks and I think she’s slowly coming around. You know, she does like me. She wouldn’t pick the phone up otherwise, would she? I don’t think the Icelandic Coast Guard is a barrel of laughs at the moment. I like to think I provide some light relief.

“Hello, Frances,” she says.

“Hi, Heida, how’s it going?”

“Not too bad, as you would say. What can I do for you?”

“I’m nothing if not consistent, Heida. I need you to carry out my plan to deliver food to my husband and the other passengers on the Silver Lady and save hundreds of lives. Please and thank you, Heida.”

“I have gotten approval for this now.”

“I know you always say no, Heida, and— Wait, what?”

“I said, I have gotten approval for this from the government. I have three thousand cans of food currently in a deep freezer storage facility covered in plastic. I have printed the note you suggested and included the message for your husband you wanted.”

I’m sobbing happy, shocked tears. Heida, oh, you beautiful Icelandic princess.

“Hello? Frances?”

“Yep, I’m still here, Heida. I’m here. Thank you so much, I don’t know how to thank you.”

“When all of this is over, come to Iceland with Toby and I will show you around the bit of coastline where we are based. It is very beautiful. We are friends now, I think, Frances. We have spoken every day for five months.”

“Well, actually, you don’t pick up the phone on your day off, so not every day.”

“You always leave me voice mails though, which is the same thing. How many voice mails did you leave me last Sunday?”

“Fourteen,” I say in a small voice before changing the subject. “When are you going to drop off the food?”

“Tomorrow. We know their coordinates. The captain provided them before they lost signal. They’ve been anchored since they ran out of fuel a long time ago. We will use a small military plane to make the drop.”

“Heida, I think you might be the best friend I’ve ever had.”

“If I manage to save your husband’s life, I would hope so.”

“Wait, Heida, why have you been telling me it’s not going to work if you had applied for approval?” That sneaky so-and-so has been telling me to get lost for months.

“I didn’t want to get your hopes up. You’re a very optimistic person. You think the glass is half full. I measure the number of millimeters in the glass before I decide what to do with the water.”

“Oh, Heida, you’ll let me know how it goes?”

“I will let you know how it goes.”





TOBY WILLIAMS


Somewhere off the coast of Iceland

Day 338




Sometime in October 2026

I’m going to die soon. My stomach is eating itself, I can feel it. The pain is unbearable. It’s been over a year, or just under, I can’t keep track of the days anymore. I stopped counting once I got to two hundred.

There’s around thirty of us now, I think. We stopped being able to throw all the bodies overboard a while ago. Took too much energy to break into the rooms. Mark is still here, that’s the only thing that matters. We lie out on the deck because the breeze feels nice and it doesn’t smell as much out here. Maybe we’re hallucinating? I don’t know. Frances, I love you. Maisy, my lovely girl. She was a miracle baby. I was forty-one, Frances was thirty-nine. For a while there everything was just too perfect, wasn’t it? I want to go to sleep and not wake up but the pain in my stomach means I can’t. I can’t sleep, I wait and I hold Mark’s hand. If we’re still together I’m not as scared.