Blood Roots: Are the roots strong enough to save the pandemic survivors? Read Free

glasses of ginger beer for the children. They toasted Jessica and then, as was always the custom of the community, he raised his glass again: ‘To absent family and friends.’
    Everyone watched as Jessica’s body began to convulse. She couldn’t hold the sorrow inside any longer. Her head lowered and she broke into uncontrollable sobs.
    Fergus stood and moved behind her, wrapping his arms protectively around her shoulders, hugging her tight. ‘I’m sorry, Uncle Mark,’ he said softly. ‘Jessica wants to go back to England too.’
    Mark opened his mouth to once again remind them all of why they had escaped from Haver. Jessica looked up, the tears streaming down her face, her eyes pleading with him.
    ‘Of course we must go back,’ Mark said. The astonishment on Fergus’s face matched Mark’s own astonishment for having uttered the words. ‘Well, I’ve got to go back, haven’t I?’ he joked. ‘Steven needs to make me another coffin.’
    Despite the joke there were tears in his eyes. He had grown very close to Fergus and loved him as a son, but he was also missing Steven.

3
    ‘We’re going to England, we’re going to England!’ The younger children were jumping up and down and chanting at the tops of their voices. Even the babies, sitting in their highchairs, were giggling. Misty opened one eye momentarily and promptly went back to sleep.
    A feeling of relief and excitement enveloped the community. Mark felt the relief as acutely as anyone. His subconscious had decided on the journey the moment
Archangel
had sailed. His growing concern for the long-term viability of the Gulf Harbour community had been preparing him for the decision.
    Upon his arrival in New Zealand thirty years earlier, he had quickly established new roots. He often jested that he was English by an accident of birth, a New Zealander by choice. Now, inexplicably, those New Zealand roots were not enough to hold him. His blood roots in Sevenoaks — a town in the heart of the Kentish countryside — were summoning him home.
    He wondered why he had been so stubborn. Given the crew losses on the voyage to New Zealand after fleeing Haver, the deaths of Christopher, Katie, Sarah and Jane in the tsunami, and his failure to persuade Steven to remain in New Zealand, the only sensible option had been to return to England. He wasn’t religious in the traditional sense, but was convinced that another dimension to life existed — an invisible energy beyond the comprehension of mankind. And now he consoled himself with the fact there had to be a reason he hadn’t sailed with Steven earlier.
    Jessica’s crying had changed from sobs of anguish to tears of relief.
    ‘How soon can we get away?’ Fergus asked.
    ‘First we’ve got to find a suitable yacht,’ Mark reminded him. ‘We’ll be lucky to find one in the Auckland area.’
    The marina at Gulf Harbour had been destroyed by the tsunami; all that remained of over one thousand vessels was a huge pile of smashed debris on the spit between the mainland and Kotanui Island. Every storm or spring tide claimed a little more wreckage and carried it away. In a few months, all evidence of one of the Southern Hemisphere’s largest marinas would have disappeared completely.
    Steven, who had visited other marinas in the Auckland area when searching for his father’s yacht
Raconteur
and his cousins Sarah and Katie after the tsunami, had reported that the waves had destroyed the other Auckland marinas too.
    ‘Surely a vessel will have survived somewhere,’ Fergus challenged.
    ‘Let’s hope so.’
    Jessica had stopped crying. ‘If we can find a yacht, how soon can we leave? How long before we get back to England?’
    ‘Finding a suitable yacht could take some time. We might need to search beyond the Auckland area. Then it depends what state the vessel’s in. It’ll have been lying unattended for six years, and will need both maintenance and provisioning.’
    ‘So how long is all that going to take?’