Humanaty's Blight

by LeRoy Clary

  “Lots. Dried. Dehydrated. Even cases of MREs.”

  “Water?”

  “Dozens of cases bottled. The meter above the sink says we have two fifty-gallon tanks, both full.”

  Someone else had been doing a thorough inspection while I learned to sail.

  She continued, “There is a shower, but even a quick one will use up the water reserves in no time. I think we should wash with saltwater. Yuck.”

  The GPS showed our progress and despite Sue flipping screens, I let her keep at it. She might find out another critical bit of information or a screen that would help us. We were using power with the electric furler, water pump, GPS, and probably a dozen unknowns. Power had to be my next task. How much did we have, how much were we using, and how fast did we charge our systems when the sun was out? Could we use more power, or did we need to reduce consumption? How could we help ourselves?

  If we used little, would the solar cells recharge enough to replace it? Maybe I could get more batteries off another boat and store extra power. And more freshwater storage? Large water cans? And if we found another sailboat or any boat, for that matter, could we raid it for more food and other supplies?

  Sue exclaimed, “Got it!”

  “What?”

  “GPS Destination. San Juan Island okay with you? Then we can decide later where to go?”

  “Sounds good.”

  She typed on the keyboard screen and a course was plotted by the unit. She pointed to the screen and a squiggly line. “Just follow that.”

  She leaped to her feet, went into the cabin and returned with two fishing poles and a box of tackle. She talked as she worked, saying nothing of importance, but her chatter told everything of being happy and satisfied. Her smiles were unconscious, simply outward expressions of being relieved of worry that someone was going to shoot us from behind the next tree, track us home, or sneak up on us. For the first time in over two weeks she breathed free—and so did I.

  Despite all we had to learn, for the moment, we had full bellies, relative safety, and were doing what we wanted, not what we were forced to do. It seemed we might have a future. We might expect to live at least another month, which was a huge improvement over our prospects two days ago.

  Meanwhile, as I tried to share her exuberance, I realized that we would seldom be out of sight of the mainland during the entire time to sail there—and that knowledge both relieved me and worried me. Relieved, because I was not a sailor. Worried, because of pirates. I’d decided of all people who were a danger to us, pirates were the new one we had to be careful of. They could see us during the daytime, then come after us at night.

  All motorized boats were faster than ours, and I suspected all other sailboats with experienced sailors at the helms were too. I saw no way to hide from them or outrun them. We presented ourselves as a huge and helpless target to anyone on the shore with access to a boat. I remembered the small open boat with the three drunk men earlier today. They had not intended to be our friends. They were the new pirates.

  On the positive side, there had only been a few other boats spotted so far. I considered putting down the sail to hide and relented. I still had five bullets in the rifle, Sue had at least fifteen shells for the shotgun, and between us, our nine-millimeters had over a hundred. The rest had remained with the motorcycle. True, the pistols were no good for anything over forty yards, and probably less with the motion of the boat to consider, but a hundred shots fired at them would deter most people.

  The truth was, every time we seemed to solve one problem, three more emerged. Out on the water, I felt like a single speck of gold on a black sheet of paper. People couldn’t help but notice us.

  Sue sat quietly beside me, her fishing lines trailing in the water behind. I had no idea of how she’d rigged them, nor of how she should have. The boat took constant care to work the wheel against the wind to keep us sailing in a fairly straight line. I unfurled more jib as if I knew what to do. The boat picked leaned over to one side, as we sped along. A pan left on the stove clattered across the floor as it fell.

  I actually had a vague plan for later. I wanted a small island to anchor beside for the night, to help hide us. If we found another boat, and nobody was around, I wanted to turn pirate and raid it for food, water, ammunition, clothing, diesel, and anything else we might use. That almost made me laugh. We’d become pirates when we’d stolen Truant.

  I didn’t consider myself a bad person. Maybe less than a good one, but not a bad one.

  I have been telling myself that over and over.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Sue hooked a salmon in the late afternoon, near Fort Casey, an old military installation built around nineteen-hundred that had served through two world wars. Huge guns were positioned to fire across a narrow channel to sink ships on their way to Seattle from the Pacific Ocean. Any enemy ships would have had to pass it. Just in case, there were two more forts located across the channel. Ships sailing past would be pounded by huge guns from both sides.

  The salmon bent the pole in half, taking the tip nearly down to touch the water, the barrel of the reel screamed in protest as line fed out. At the time, we were both napping in the rare sunshine, me trying to remain awake enough to keep the Truant on course after a nearly sleepless night. We leaped to our feet and Sue started reeling in her fishing line.

  “What can I do?” I asked.

  “I got this,” she cried, as more line stripped out.

  I hit the button to furl the jib half-way. That slowed the boat to a crawl, so she was not contending with the speed of the boat while dragging the fish. She fought the salmon for ten minutes until it tired enough to allow itself to come nearer the boat. Once she had it at the side of the boat, she hesitated. The thing was close to two-feet long. “We need a net.”

  She had the still struggling fish on the line right next to us. Lifting it free of the water would probably break the line or the fish would flip off. I kept the wind in the sail and waited, not knowing what to do. My job was to keep the boat going steadily forward.

  “I said, we need a net!”

  “You want me to go get one?” I had no idea what she wanted or where to get it.

  “A dip net, silly. With a long handle. In the storeroom, the one on the right side.”

  I let the wheel go, felt the change in the motion of the boat instantly, but rushed below. Inside the door to what had been a bedroom were racks and shelves like in a library, repair parts, spares, oil cans, supplies, clothing, and hundreds of other things. In one corner stood a pole with a net a yard wide.

  Back beside Sue, she guided the fish that had ideas of its own about entering my net. Finally, her efforts and my frustrated scoops met with success. We brought a fish aboard that weighed an easy ten pounds.

  “Salmon for dinner,” she shouted as she tried to dance, despite standing beside me in the confined area of the cockpit.

  For her, it was the culmination of selecting the lure, setting the pole, letting out the right amount of line, and reeling in the fish. For me, it took on a more esoteric victory. For the first time since the flu struck, we were not consumers of the leavings of those who came before us. We had provided for ourselves, much as the original settlers of the area had done for thousands of years.

  Before she carried her catch inside, Sue used her knife to cut the head off the fish, which meant sawing through the backbone, then cutting the belly open and scooping out the insides with her bare hand. She threw it over the side. In no time, she had twenty seagulls feasting and calling for more. She tossed stringy pieces high into the air and the birds caught them.

  After adjusting the wheel to turn the boat and catch the wind in the jib as I let it back out. The boat reacted as if I’d hit the throttle on the engine. The exhilarating feeling was one of total success. With nothing but the breeze that made a few small whitecaps on the water propelled us faster than the engine. I was a sailor. Sort of.

  I skipped the complicated or confusing pages and went to
the meat of the lessons. I didn’t need the details, just the main information. As I studied how the wind caught a jib sail and could carry a boat almost directly into the wind, odd music sounded. I stood up and found no other boats nearby.

  The door to the cabin opened and Sue stuck her head out as the strange sounds became louder with the opening of the door. “Can you help me?”

  The music was music unlike any I’d ever heard. It was also filled with wavering static. I let the wheel go, felt the boat swerve and stop again, and followed her inside. The music was louder, with flutes, odd twangs, and other alien sounds among the hisses and scratches. It sounded Japanese or Chinese. Asian, of one kind or another.

  She went to the desk and gauges and pointed to a radio mounted to the wall. “The only music I can get is that crap. It’s on all the channels that work. Either that or gibberish talk.”

  Stunned, I stood aside as she spun a large dial and moved from one static-filled station to another. She was on the AM band, but only got static or Asian talking and music. That was odd because American stations were much closer. The radio dial said, “short wave” and I’d heard of that phrase but didn’t know exactly what it meant except it was used in emergencies. What I did know, was the AM radio frequencies on the dial were what should be American stations if there were others broadcasting.

  The idea that the radio picked up stations halfway around the world suggested that there were no working stations in America. However, if that was true, there shouldn’t be stations in Asia, either. Not if they also faced the same flu that had killed so many of us.

  A chill worked its way up my back. That last thought was cold. If radio stations in Asia still broadcast, did that mean they were immune to the flu? Or, was I misreading everything?

  “Can’t you find a real station for us to listen to? Even if it has only country music?” Sue whined.

  While music hadn’t ever been important to me, the music we heard suddenly felt very significant. I didn’t want to alarm Sue or jump to incorrect conclusions. “Later. Finish with the salmon and then play with the radio. Move the dial slowly and see if you can find any American stations. Maybe on another band.”

  I went out onto the deck, took hold of the wheel, my hands shaking. The men who hunted us at the mining tunnels had scared me, the motorcycle gang in Darrington had done the same. Even the men who attacked the old man’s house at Priest Point had scared me. They were familiar foes in one way or another. None of the past instances gave me the kind of fear that listening to the strange music on the radio did.

  The Internet had said the flu was universal. I’d believed that.

  Now I didn’t.

  What about French, German, or Italian? Were others broadcasting?

  With trembling hands, I turned the wheel and let the jib find the wind again. It filled and pulled us ahead. But my mind was not on the sail or on the boat. It was across an ocean where strange-sounding music was being transmitted.

  How was it being transmitted if many people of their people had died of the flu, and their power grid failed as ours had? If they had died by the hundreds of millions, who were the radio broadcasts being aimed at? It didn’t make sense. Automation? Could the broadcasts be recorded, the power from batteries that hadn’t yet run down?

  A sailboat with a white sail emerged from the clutter of the coastline of Whidbey Island and It sailed parallel to us. That in itself was not too surprising. We were not the only ones to realize the importance of a sailboat as a floating home for the future or the relative safety of the San Juan Islands. What was upsetting was that it didn’t pull away or outpace us.

  Any sailor in any boat should have easily outrun us and our jib. The fact that it hadn’t concerned me as I soul-searched to find a possible reason. It sailed no faster or slower as if it was waiting for dark, so it could sneak up and attack us.

  “Sue, have you seen a spyglass or telescope down there?”

  “Binoculars. Will they do?” She emerged with them in hand. They were larger than any I’d ever seen. When I put them to my eyes and focused, the white sailboat leaped into view. There were only three people on deck. They were not acting strange and I saw no weapons.

  All of that meant nothing.

  Sue went below again, off on another pursuit of her own. It seemed we’d divided the ship to above decks and below. Her domain was keeping her busy.

  We had several miles of nothing but open water to our left. I expanded the view on the GPS and found we were heading for the edge of the Salish Sea, a name I hadn’t known existed. What it did, was go all the way from our location out to the Pacific Ocean, which I estimated was sixty miles away.

  My plan had been to continue sailing north to Orcas, Lopez, and San Juan Islands, where I hoped to find a safe place to anchor. There were many inlets and smaller islands. The sailboat on my right still worried me. I hit the button to roll in the jib slightly, reducing the amount of sail and slowing us a little as a test to see if the other boat slowed. Then I slowed us again, a half-hour later. We were barely making progress.

  The other boat remained in the same relative location, right off our side, the same distance away. I’d slowed again, taking in nearly half our remaining sail so we only had forward progress enough to steer. I then let the jib full out. All of it. The brisk breeze scooted us ahead like a dry leaf on a road in the fall.

  Either they were following us, or they were not. What had happened so far might be a coincidence or have another explanation. The abrupt change in our speed would tell me for sure. It made no difference in some ways because I couldn’t outrun them. My knowledge of sailing was only enough to go a few miles an hour and be satisfied. We might have to defend ourselves with our guns.

  The other boat obviously knew where we were. We might even show up on their radar, so besides outrunning us, they would know right where we were—even after dark. We wouldn’t know where it was. The one thing that became evident was that it was lurking and watching as it increased its speed to match ours again. Waiting for something.

  Waiting for darkness? That seemed the most likely answer. But how did they know we didn’t have radar and might evade them in the dark? Maybe Truant did have radar. We had GPS, so maybe we also had radar and I hadn’t found it. But the point was that they didn’t know. Those people on the other boat couldn’t know.

  They were too far away to see how many people we had on our boat, and we couldn’t tell how many were on it. Maybe we had a platoon of sharpshooters to repel boarders. Or two or three expert snipers. The fact was, they knew about as much of us and our capabilities as we knew about them.

  A flash from an old army movie came to mind. The hero said something like, “You never pick a fight you’re going to lose, and it’s stupid to enter a fight when things are even. Even means you’re going to lose half your battles.”

  He was right. You choose to fight only when you believe the odds are in your favor. For some reason, that sailboat had the belief that if they came for us, they would win. I chose to believe they were right.

  All we had to do was avoid them. Not trust them. It didn’t make sense. Maybe they were looking to join up with us and be friends. If so, they were not convincing me to be friendly.

  I called, “Hey, when you have a minute, come up here.”

  Sue emerged with a smile.

  I said, “Sit down and listen.” In a few words, I described what was happening and what I suspected, then waited for her assessment, which was generally far better than mine.

  She turned to stare at the other boat as if that would help her decide on a response. Then she studied the GPS. Finally, she said, “Besides what you’ve already found out, we have only a few choices. Go past the end of the land on our left and turn that way and run for the Pacific. Head for the ocean or continue sailing north are the obvious choices. We could turn around, but that seems silly. The last option is to turn and sail right at them and when we get there, ask them what the hell is going on.”

 
“At them?” I blurted. “We’re trying to get away from them.”

  “I know that is what your gut says. But think about this. If we turn to the ocean, they’re better sailors and probably their boat is faster, so they’ll catch up with us if that is their intent. Same thing if we sail north or south. But if we turn right at them, what happens?”

  “They attack and kill us sooner?”

  She shrugged. “Sometimes you can’t control it all, but what happens if you confront a bully?”

  “He punches you in the nose or worse.”

  She smirked. “Sometimes. At others, the bully wonders if you know karate, or if you wrestle on the school team. He looks at your hands to see if you have a knife. If you don’t back down, he will. Not always, but sometimes. If he charges, you try to defend yourself, but he was going to beat the crap out of you anyhow, so now it is more on your terms.”

  “Have you ever done that?” I asked, not really buying into what she was saying.

  “Yes. There was this girl. Bigger than me but she thought I was after her ugly boyfriend. I heard she was telling everyone she was going to jump me on the way home. I knew she could beat me, and we heard she had a knife.”

  “What’d you do?”

  “I saw her in the hallway between classes. She was walking behind two coaches and another teacher. First, I slipped up behind her and put a knife into the pocket of her backpack. Then I jumped on her back and got her in a chokehold while I screamed and yelled that she had a knife. The teachers broke us up and took us both to the principal’s office.”

  “What happened?”

  “She got suspended when they found the knife. She said it wasn’t hers, but who’d believe that? She got warned that any fights with me in the future would get her put in juvie for the rest of the school year.”

  Sue had made good points in our situation. After a wry look at her, I turned the Truant directly at the other boat. Actually, with my new seamanship skills, I aimed at a point well ahead of the white boat, a place where our paths would come together. “Get your shotgun and my rifle. Bring me my pistol, too.”