by LeRoy Clary
“Then what?” she asked. “You still have not told me about your future plans.”
Then what, indeed? I’d barely gotten used to her latest bursting of my technical bubble and now she wanted me to read the future? “Exactly what are you asking?”
“After we find the right books, what then? Back to our tunnel?”
“Yes.”
She snorted. “No, silly, we can’t live here for the summer and certainly not next winter. Not enough food and we’ll be killed by others. Think about it. Can we really survive here through spring and summer—and then fall and next winter? All that time and nobody sees us? And we find enough food for a year? No. We need a plan, a better one.”
Like living in my basement for a couple of years, I said in my lazy way, “I guess I was just thinking of going along and seeing what happens. Take it day-to-day.”
Sue shook her head. “The mine tunnel is okay, for now. Better than what most people have, but it’s a waystation. A temporary stopover.”
“Why?” I asked, suspecting she had figured out something else a semi-hermit like me had missed. Actually, I had seen the problems she already pointed out. I just didn’t want to face them.
While living safely in my parent’s basement in the last few years, I’d had food and necessities delivered, as well as anything else I needed. The fact was that I’d stayed inside that house, mostly in the basement with my computers, for over two years. I rarely interacted with people during that time, even online. I saw the world differently than the girl/woman with the round, brown face sitting beside me. Hoping to change the subject, I asked, “Can you speak Spanish?”
The question escaped my lips before I could stop it. She rolled her eyes in disdain. “I was born here. So were my parents, and theirs, too. Can you speak Irish?”
“A little,” I admitted while suppressing a grin. “But English has been the official language of Ireland for a couple of hundred years, so I can get by.” We both laughed. That breached the wall that had slowly built up between us.
She said, “We need to get out of these mountains and the snow. Next winter there will be no food to steal from local houses and I can’t depend on you to provide it by fishing and hunting. You’re worse than me about knowing nothing of farming and stuff like that. Besides, someone is sure to find our farm and kill us for the crops if we try that. We need something more permanent.”
Her thinking was proceeding right where mine had been for a week. I was willing to chance that she and I were immune to the deadly flu, or that it had run its course. I hadn’t encountered any recent deaths by flu but hadn’t seen many dead lately.
The very real problems came in two varieties, which she’d just identified. She had realized the problems of surviving the first month or two were one issue, and the problems of long-term survival were different. They were not the same. The immediate ones were easier in many ways because they were defined by a daily goal, and we’d accomplished most of them. “I can see your point. So?”
“It rains all the time here, so we need a drier place to live. Where we can hide out but move around. We need food and supplies for when they get scarce because others will have cleaned out all the good places. By the end of the summer, food is going to be difficult to find and people will kill over it.”
“You’re not thinking of an RV, I hope.” It was like she had taken all our critical needs and wished for a tornado to whisk us away to a magical land. It was my turn to be down to earth and set her straight. What she wanted and what was possible were two separate things. I was deciding how to phrase more of my response when she turned to face me.
“Not an RV. We need a boat.”
“A what?” I mentally pictured a little, leaky rowboat with her sitting in the bow while I fought the oars, and enemies took potshots at us from the banks.
“A sailboat, Bill. It’s the perfect solution!”
“Sailboat?” The single word was forced from me as if she’d punched me in my stomach. “What the hell are you talking about? We’re in the mountains. Besides, do you know how to sail?”
She smiled delightfully as she shook her head.
I shut up.
“Let me talk,” she said. “We can refine the idea later but listen. The wind pushes a sailboat. No fuel. No noise. The cabin is dry. There are hundreds and hundreds of islands in north Puget Sound; we studied about them in school. There are salmon, clams, crabs, mussels, and different fish we can catch and eat. We could take seeds and plant little gardens on different islands and revisit them when the food has grown. Many islands are too small for people to live on, but we’d have a boat.”
“Have you ever even been on a sailboat?”
“No. But there must be books that say how to do it. Just like the ones that tell us how to survive here.”
I tried to maintain my scowl, but it seemed I knew a few things she didn’t, and the first was that I knew larger sailboats also have motors. If the engine would start, and there seemed to be no reason to think it wouldn’t after being idle only two weeks, it would be easier than driving a car. Just steer it where you want to go, and you don’t even have to stay on your side of the road.
Not only did I like the idea, but my mind also expanded upon it. We could have several rifles with scopes and any boat coming too close would get a few warning shots before we sank them. Her idea solved a thousand problems. Gangs of roaming looters acting like animals on land wouldn’t find us. That was number one. Like the three men this morning. We didn’t know what the three had done, if anything, to cause the motorcycle gang to kill them. We didn’t know and didn’t want to find out.
My new goals in life were to avoid everyone else and gather enough food to last until things settled down. Eventually, the bad people would all kill each other off, and good ones would be left. Or maybe all the good ones would die and there would be only bad ones remaining. If we were on a boat where we could sail away from trouble, we might live another year or two and feed ourselves with fish.
The idea had taken hold instantly and a vague memory rushed in. Columbus’s smallest ship, the Nina, was less than fifty feet long and it had crossed the entire Atlantic Ocean. Many new recreational sailboats are over well thirty feet, probably most of them. At thirty feet, they are more than able to cross oceans, not that I wanted to attempt that. But that size could, even with me at the helm—yes, I was already thinking in seaman-talk—we could sail out of Puget Sound and into the Pacific where we’d be out of sight of land and the eyes of others. Nobody remaining on land could see us or come kill us.
If a primitive fifty-foot wooden ship built before 1500 could sail across the Atlantic, a modern fiberglass hull with 500 years of improvements could surpass its performance. Somewhere, I’d heard or read that modern sailboats, if properly secured for hard weather, were like corks. They couldn’t sink. The lead in the bottom fin, or whatever it was called, made them self-righting. They might lose their masts but seldom sank.
I couldn’t think of a safer place to be.
So, that left us with a few minor details to resolve. We needed food and weapons to travel and locate a suitable sailboat to steal. To do that, we had to move through what we’d call hostile territory on land for at least fifty miles, avoiding hordes of well-armed scavengers, and finally locate a boat. Then we had to take it from that place to the northernmost part of Puget Sound, almost to the Canadian border—and maybe beyond.
I explained all that to Sue. The problems sounded impossible to achieve as I laid each one out, the objective and the reasons to attempt it, along with the hurdles.
“How long does it take to walk fifty miles?” she asked.
“At least fifty miles, maybe twice that if we avoid population centers.”
“How long?” she asked again as if the answer went unheard.
“Before the pandemic flu, a good hiker on the side of a road could do it in a day. Two at most.”
“But not now, and you are not a good hiker. So, don’t tell me ho
w it used to be, tell me for today.”
I considered and talked as I thought. “Excluding gathering food and weapons as we go, and unexpected encounters that will delay us, we could probably stay in forested areas as we moved and maybe go five miles a day if we don’t run into others who are hiding out in those forest like we are doing. Ten to twenty days. Minimum.”
“But we’ll encounter others who are unfriendly?”
“They probably have their own tripwires and alarms, as well as lookouts. Maybe dogs, so add a few more days and a lot of danger.”
“We might slip past. I think I have some Indian blood in me.”
“I don’t. And we might end up dinner for a hungry group of flesh-eaters or packs of starving dogs gone wild.”
“We’ll shoot them.”
“Which will bring all the rest of the starving creatures on two feet running to get their share of the dead. The noise will bring the worst of humans our way as it did for those three today.”
She scowled. “So, my boat is a bad idea.”
“No! It’s a wonderful idea. The sailboat, I mean. We just have to figure out how to make it work.”
“Really?” Her brilliant smile could have provided the light for the tunnel we sat in.
We talked the afternoon and evening away as if we were actually going to do it. I knew where there were sailboats. They were in a city called Everett, at the yacht basin. I’d been there a few times with my parents and once we’d eaten in a restaurant overlooking the boats. There were hundreds and hundreds moored at floating docks.
So, that became our destination for the sake of discussion. Getting safely through a city of a hundred thousand residents, or more realistically, the survivors of that hundred-thousand, became our largest problem. Reaching that city to begin the dangerous trek through it was the second problem. The fact neither of us knew anything about sailing—if we actually reached a boat—was not even discussed.
With both of us throwing out ideas, most of which had no possibility of succeeding, we eventually decided there were the two critical areas to resolve before anything else. Lesser problems could be worked out only after those two. Travel from the mountains near Darrington to Everett, and then travel through a city full of dangerous, hungry scavengers, packs of rats, wild dogs, illness from the flu, and a dozen other diseases since sanitation had ceased. Even worse than all those were the unknowns.
It is impossible to evade what you don’t know. The unknowns in the city far outweighed the knowns. However, that didn’t mean we give up.
We didn’t need to stockpile food before reaching the boat. If nothing else, we could go hungry for a while, and maybe even catch a fish or crab. But more likely, there was at least a limited amount of food already stored on each sailboat. Carrying extra weight while traveling would only slow us down, and if there was one certainty, it was that I didn’t want to remain in Everett any longer than required.
So, we tried deciding how we could cross more than fifty miles of rural terrain and suburbia while remaining alive. The second step would be to enter a city full of unknown dangers and eventually reach the waterfront. I fell asleep with those things on my mind, believing them impossible to resolve, but perhaps we would either find a way or adjust our plans.
At least we now had a goal, thanks to Sue. We just had to figure out how to implement it instead of looking forward to months of sneaking around the tunnel and nearby mountains hoping we were never spotted and that we could locate enough food to stay alive.
I woke with images of manned balloons floating in my head, like those that I saw floating over Arlington one time when there was a balloon festival. They were colorful, some created to look like cartoon characters, and all carried a basket below with smiling, happy people. In the dream, the two of us flew right over the problems on the ground.
Right, like that would happen. Where would we get a manned balloon and how did we make it go where we wanted when who knows what direction the wind would blow? Maybe we just needed to steal a plane and learn to fly at the same time, and then go over the top of the dangers. Like I could fly a plane. I could hardly drive a car. Sue couldn’t do that much. I forced my mind to be realistic.
We needed a map. That was obvious, but that small detail had escaped our attention the evening before. I knew in general terms where Everett was. I had never driven there by myself, and there wasn’t GPS on my phone to guide me. On the positive side, north of Everett was spread a lot of rural areas. It might be possible to travel on foot in the forests and avoid fighting our way through. We could move silently. Maybe.
I considered recruiting more people to help stand watches at night and protect us during the day, and quickly rejected the idea. While they might join us initially, and perhaps even help, they would want to sail north with us and there was nobody I trusted to be awake while I slept except for Sue. Besides, more people meant more compromised decisions and more mouths to feed.
I went back to sleep, only to wake again with the determination to search a nearby house or two for a map. A few days after I’d left my car on the road, it had been burned to a rusted, blackened hulk. All that remained was an outline of the chassis. However, even deserted cars might have a map or two in the glovebox. I congratulated myself for thinking of that one and went back to sleep. It was step one to solving problem number one. There were plenty of deserted cars. And plenty of additional problems to solve.
Sue woke me a short while later with a blood-chilling scream. I left the sleeping bag we shared like a piece of popcorn popping in a hot pan, my twenty-two in my hand, ready to shoot anything that moved. There was nothing in the tunnel. No intruders, no wolves, nothing.
“What was it?” I hissed, my eyes wide, my ears perked.
“Just a bad dream. Sorry.”
She had two more nightmares before dawn. I asked her what was the problem since she hadn’t been having them, and she answered angrily, “Really? What a stupid friggin question. A wolf came in here last night and tried to eat us. Then, three men came along with guns and wanted to shoot us, and then they were shot dead by bikers. All in one day and you’re asking me, what is the problem?”
I said nothing out loud but silently determined to find a way to obtain a sailboat as soon as possible. Not because of her nightmares; I had them too. It was because she was right again. We were rabbits afraid to venture out for fear of a hawk swooping down on us.
CHAPTER FIVE
We both sat in embarrassed silence as we ate a can of peas for breakfast. Sue seemed sheepish at speaking so harshly about her nightmares during the night. I was crabby from lack of sleep. We were facing the tedium of another day where we couldn’t leave the mine without leaving tracks in the snow anyone could follow. The warmer days had melted more of the snow. Bare patches appeared where the sunshine struck the ground between the trees. We might or might not have seen the last snow of the season.
We felt safe enough in the tunnel but living below ground and being restricted from leaving because of telltale tracks in the snow was already getting old. We were not the sort of people to bury ourselves in a dark and damp hole for the rest of our lives, even if we could locate the required food to survive.
Well, that was not entirely true. In fact, it was a total lie about me. I was exactly the sort to live in a dark basement or cave and ignore the rest of the world. I’d already done it for two years—however, my perceptions of the world had changed since the flu struck and even more dramatically once I’d met Sue. Or maybe it was the influence of Sue. If nothing else, I had a live person to talk to.
Staying another week in the tunnel would be hard to take, now that we had a goal. A month seemed impossible. A year unthinkable. Logic said that the number of people we’d encounter would increase—including those who would want to do us harm when we left the tunnels and moved closer to population centers. We had to prepare ourselves to kill or be killed, an idea that turned my stomach sour and threatened to bring the canned peas back up.
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nbsp; There were also the rats, feral dogs, and insects that fed on the dead, along with a certainty of other diseases that could kill us as easily as a bullet. Sicknesses other than the flu that had killed so many were a dire warning on the Internet. Towards the end, before the Internet died, more were referring to it as the “blight” instead of the flu.
All bloggers and chat rooms were certain there would be a resurfacing of diseases from long ago, especially ones transmitted in the air and foul water. I suspected that more than just the new flu was killing people by now. Especially in populated areas. My mind spun in circles. No matter how much I tried to improve with my ideas, the single item of truth that stood out was that we could not remain where we were.
The following thought was that a sailboat was the perfect solution and our lack of experience with them be damned. If we were only trying to live for another month, we could remain in the tunnel. If we intended to live another year, or ten more, the boat was our best chance.
The third thought was the possibility that we couldn’t get from our present location to a sailboat.
“You’re awfully quiet,” Sue muttered as if she thought I was upset with her.
“Just thinking.”
She tossed the empty tin can into the growing pile behind me. I’d have to get rid of them daily when the weather warmed or live with insects crawling and breeding in the stink. For now, they could remain. Mentally, I shook myself to focus my thinking on the newest reality. It was a small incident. We wouldn’t be here when the weather warmed so the cans didn’t matter. How we would accomplish that, I didn’t know, but I firmly believed it. I raised my eyes and found Sue’s locked onto me.
She said in barely a whimper, “I stayed awake thinking about the sailboat last night.”
“Me too.”
“Don’t you know anything about them?”