‘It looks like some kind of island,’ I said.
‘Ulrich said that Florida was an archipelago,’ said Bryce, uncertainly. ‘Funny kind of archipelago, though.’
I spotted shapes flitting above the shoreline. Gulls.
‘Wake the others,’ I said. ‘Get them up. Ed, can you start this engine?’
We motored in on the last dregs of fuel. Everyone was on deck now; Josh and Dani standing at the guard rail, and Carmela sitting with Bryce on the cabin roof with his hand on her shoulder. She had seemed nervous when she came through the hatch, unsure of how I would be.
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘For what you did.’
She nodded and smiled. ‘Not so bad smell now.’
Richard looked the worst of them all. With dark-ringed eyes and hollow cheeks, he held his bandaged hand in a perpetual cocoon.
‘I can see people,’ said Bryce, when we were about a mile out. Sure enough, a line of figures were clearly visible, looking out from the shore.
If you could call it a shore; it was more of a disordered stretch of rubble, and those hills behind grew blockier and blockier the closer we got. There were spikes protruding from them, geometric shapes that didn’t belong on a natural landscape, and above everything was the constant flap and swoop of gull wings.
‘Do you think it’s a city?’ I said. ‘Rubble? Christ, what’s that smell?’
A stench had been growing as we neared our target. It was a human smell, but not death. Something more familiar.
We were down to the fumes before we realised.
Ed saw it first. ‘No. It’s not a city. That’s landfill.’
The hills were piles of rubbish. Boxes, bags, washing machines, cookers, lawn mowers and vacuum cleaners. The spikes were bicycles, car parts and strips of timber.
And the figures along the shore.
I could see them quite clearly now; there were nine of them. Men and women, brown-skinned, white-skinned, tall and short, with ragged shirts and torn-off jeans. Each one had to be at least sixty years old.
‘Think they’re friendly?’ said Bryce.
We were near the shore now and one of the figures stepped forward. He was black, with a rough fuzz of beard and a high hairline broken only by grey, thick tufts above his ears. He wore a long trench coat over not much else; a pair of orange Bermuda shorts, mud-caked army surplus boots and fingerless gloves. He smiled at our approach, revealing a set of large teeth and kind eyes. In one hand he held a staff of some kind which, on closer inspection, I could see was a rake. With the other hand he motioned to us to steer starboard, to a jetty made of strung-together palettes and tea chests.
Behind him the rest regarded us with the same expression of cautious, almost amused interest. A bare-bellied white man – he had to be in his seventies – with a long beard, toothless grin, rucksack and wrap-around sunglasses, motioned the same as his friend.
‘Over there,’ he called out. ‘We’ll take you in over there.’
My heart thrilled. His accent was American.
We docked at the makeshift jetty and two of them – an old woman with knotted hair and a pale, skinny man to whom she barked impatient instructions in a southern drawl – tethered the boat as we stepped off one by one.
Their seven comrades waited for us on the shore, which I could now see was a stretch of filth embedded with plastic, cardboard and flattened tin cans. The man in the trench coat stepped forward, squinting with a lopsided grin and oblivious to the flies buzzing around his head. I went to speak, but the relative stillness of the firm land after days aboard the Buccaneer put me off balance and I almost fell. He jumped forward and caught me.
‘Easy there, girl,’ he said. His voice was as light and kind as his eyes. ‘Watch your step now, y’hear?’
When the feeling had passed I straightened up and he let me go.
‘Well now,’ he said, ‘my name is Curtis. Curtis Peach. And who might you be?’
‘Beth,’ I said. ‘Beth Hill. Are we—’
I coughed, my throat dry.
‘Mikey?’ said Curtis, turning round to the bare-bellied man in sunglasses. ‘You got some water back there? Come on, man, give it up now. There y’go.’
Mikey had fished a glass bottle from his rucksack and passed it to his friend. Curtis opened it – pop ‘Whoops! There y’go, girl, take summa that, go on now’ – and I drank five long gulps before passing it to the rest. Mikey found more bottles and passed them round too.
I stood, gasping breaths of relief.
‘Now,’ said Curtis, ‘are we what, Beth?’
‘Are we in America?’
He paused, mouth open, then smiled. ‘Aha. That we are.’
A shuddering sigh escaped my lungs. Ed steadied me, and I looked at him.
Two six three, I thought. You were right, Ed. You were right.
Curtis turned to Ed.
‘And who’s this young man?’
‘I’m Ed,’ he said. ‘Is this Florida?’
Curtis paused again, but this time his smile dropped. He glanced behind him. ‘No, sir. This ain’t Florida. This is Fresh Kills Landfill – what’s left of it anyway.’
‘Fresh Kills?’ I said, with a glance at Ed. I hovered on the question, not fully sure I wanted to know its answer. ‘Where is Fresh Kills?’
Curtis looked at me. ‘Staten Island,’ he said, and smiled. ‘Welcome to New York City.’
Chapter 29
I sat in a three-walled tin shack staring out at mound after mound of human detritus. It was raining, and the corrugated roof hammered above.
‘You can have my place,’ said an old lady with bright eyes and full, skewered hair. She led me from the shore down a wide, weaving gulley between the rubbish mountains. She smiled as she helped me inside. ‘And lucky for you today’s laundry day.’
In one corner was a mattress dressed with impossibly pristine sheets and a fluffed-up pillow, and the walls were decorated with pictures, scraps of paper and coloured glass like rough jewels hanging from threads.
‘Name’s Rhona.’
She patted her wide hips and nodded, satisfied. She wore a blue dress dotted with orange flowers, heavy boots and countless bangles and necklaces. A tattoo – a spider, I thought – peeped out from under the hem of her left arm, stretched with her weathered skin.
I stretched out my leg and rested it on the ground. A bracken of flat cans, bottle tops, smooth glass, plastic, nails and twisted cutlery spread out all around; the terra firma of our sanctuary was just as much waste as the brightly coloured hills that grew from it.
Rhona looked me over, eyes darkening at my stump.
‘You had yourself some bad times, I’m guessing. Am I right?’
I nodded. I didn’t feel like talking.
‘Well, you’re safe here. Is there anything I can get you?’
I shook my head. She smiled with a wince of pity.
‘OK. All right. I’ll get Curtis to bring you some more water. Rest easy.’
The others had been led to similar shacks along the winding road. It was clear our hosts were giving up their shelters for us.
My stump throbbed and my thigh answered with a dull echo. But it wasn’t the pain that troubled me.
We had failed.
Ed had been wrong.
Two six three, the magic number to which I had clung all that way, had taken us a thousand miles from Florida, and God knows how long it would be before we reached it now.
I was in a rut between blame and shame. It wasn’t Ed’s fault, I knew that. He had only said what he had thought at the time. That maelstrom took us far further south than we should be.
But he hadn’t just thought it, had he? He had been certain.
I promise you.
And through all this, Richard had been right.
Ed, you’re not thinking straight.
No. Clearly not. And why had I ever believed otherwise? To give him a chance? Test his mettle? If so, why had I risked our children’s safety on an experimen
t?
Why had I listened to him? Why not Richard?
Rut, rut, rut, went my pulsing stump.
I stared at it, knowing full well that these were not the questions on which I should be dwelling. There was a much bigger one waiting to be addressed.
Why had I listened to either of them? Why hadn’t I worked it out myself?
I had put my trust in other people and it had led to this. So if it was anyone’s fault, it was mine.
Curtis appeared from around the bend. He stopped and squinted at me, shielding his eyes as a shaft of sunlight broke through the rain. As a brief arc of rainbow crossed his face, he gave a wonky grin, walked to the shack and sat down next to me. He took a bottle from his pocket and handed it to me. I drank from it, and this time I tasted the crystal water as it flooded down my throat. I could almost feel my health returning as I gulped it down.
‘What is that?’ I said, gasping.
‘Pretty good, ain’t it?’
I took some more, and offered him back the bottle.
‘Keep it,’ he said. ‘We got plenty.’
‘Thanks.’
I ran my hand through the dust around my right foot. I could feel him watching me, not with suspicion, but interest.
‘You’re from Scotland, right?’
I nodded. ‘That’s right.’
He looked pleased with himself. ‘I’m, ah, something of an expert with accents. Goes with the territory.’
I didn’t ask him what territory that was, but I smiled just the same. He watched me again.
‘The land of whisky and jigs to the Big Apple,’ he said. ‘Hell of a long way to come, if you don’t mind me saying. And something tells me it still ain’t where you want to be.’
I turned to him. He smelled sweetly of dried-in sweat, charcoal and lemons.
‘We were trying to get to Florida, but we were blown off course.’
He raised his head and made an ‘O’ with his mouth.
‘Florida. Must have been one almighty storm!’ His smile withered when I failed to return it.
‘Something like that.’ I ran my hand through the debris. ‘That and a disagreement about where we were –’ I rubbed an ancient ring pull, the ones from before they attached them to the cans, between finger and thumb, then let it fall to the ground ‘– in the sea.’
‘Ah, I get you, I get you. The good old navigational dispute, right?’ he chuckled. ‘Boy, if I had a dollar for every one of those little tête-à-têtes I’ve seen play out on the sidewalk then I’d be a rich man. Tourists and whatnot, you know what I’m saying? Woman saying this way, man saying that. I always used to try to help them, always, I did. A man like me knows New York City like the back of his dried-up hand.’ He laughed again, then sniffed, eyes widening. ‘But most folks don’t want to take directions from an old dude sitting beneath a newspaper now, do they?’
He turned to me, his expression slowly falling.
‘I’m, er, guessing this isn’t your average tourist expedition. Right?’
‘My children are in Florida. They were taken from me.’ I fought against the tug of my lips. ‘They’re very young. If I don’t find them, I don’t … I just don’t …’
Without warning my face relinquished whatever weak grip it had upon its muscles and I collapsed into tears. My face shook and I buried it in my palms.
‘Hey,’ said Curtis, softly, laying a hand on my shoulder. ‘Hey, hey, hey. Now listen to me. One of those friends of yours – don’t know his name, tall, gloomy drink of water with missing fingers – he told me your boat’s in pretty bad shape, but don’t you worry, ’cos we’re going to fix it for you. We got all kinds of things here just fit for mending boats, cars, bicycles, you name it. Look around you.’ His eyes shone. ‘We’re a veritable gold mine. So don’t you shed another tear. We’ll patch up your boat and you can be on your way in no time.’
He slapped my shoulder. I nodded, smiled, heaved a sigh. ‘Thank you.’
‘Don’t mention it. And in the meantime, just relax and get some rest, ’cos I can see you been beat up almost as badly as your boat, young lady. And actually, you know what?’ He glanced at my stump and winked. ‘Maybe we can help a little with that too.’
In an instant the rain ceased and the sun sprang from a cloud, as if the weather was merely a bank of theatrical effects. Curtis looked out at the bright, wet pathway and beamed.
‘Well look at that, sky’s turned.’ He got to his feet. ‘Know what?’ He gave me his hand and helped me up, passing me my makeshift crutch. ‘You might even like it here, Beth. Oh, I know, it smells a little, but you get used to it. You can get used to most anything you want to in this life, in my opinion.’
‘Not everything,’ I said.
He looked a little crestfallen at this, and I felt bad.
‘Curtis, do you know where my husband is?’
He frowned and rubbed his shiny palate.
‘Skinny fella, tufty hair, missing eye?’
‘That’s him.’
‘He’s on the boat. Back thataway.’
‘Mister, I told you, you’re fighting a losing battle.’
The old – I may as well stop saying that; they were all old – woman with the wild, witchlike hair and the pale, skinny man beside her stared up with bemused expressions at the deck of the Buccaneer, upon which Ed was standing, emptying a bucket. He glanced at me and disappeared down the hatch.
‘What’s happening?’ I said.
The woman turned to me and shook her head. ‘Sugar, that boy ain’t right. He been up and down that ladder sixty times already, each time with a fresh bucket of water, and he just done goes and pours it over the side.’ She gave the man beside her, who was still rubbing his chin and looking up at the deck, a sharp-elbowed nudge.
‘Hey now!’ he barked, gripping his arm. ‘That hurt me, Frannie!’
She glared at him. ‘Tell her, Harold. That boy up there; he ain’t right.’
Rubbing his arm, Harold turned to me with a wounded look. ‘Woman ain’t wrong. He been doing just as she said for the past twenty minutes or so. Ain’t no use in it, no use at all. Whatever he’s tossing out just coming right in again.’ He leaned towards me. ‘Does he got some kinda condition? You know?’ he tapped his temple. ‘In the old noggin’?’
The woman rolled her eyes. ‘You’re the one with the condition, Harold. Now help me up there so we can start work. And miss, I’d advise you to get that boy o’yours down.’
Ed reappeared, heaving another bucket of water.
‘Ed,’ I called, but he ignored me, throwing the water over the side. ‘Ed!’
He paused, cradling the empty bucket and turned to face me.
‘I’m sorry, all right? I fucked up. Just one more fuck-up in a long line of fuck-ups. But I’ll fix it. I’m going to fix it.’
He hurried for the ladder.
‘Ed, stop. I don’t blame you.’
He stopped halfway into the cabin, staring down into the dripping darkness.
I hobbled closer to the boat. ‘Nobody could have known which way that thing sent us, and I didn’t even try to work out where we were.’
He looked over, his one eye dark and furious. ‘No. You trusted me. And you shouldn’t have done.’
He jumped down the hatch, splashing and thumping beneath.
‘My, my, my,’ said Frannie, shaking her tousled head, around which a permanent swarm of flies flitted and buzzed. ‘He got the troubles that one, yes indeed.’
‘Mm-hmm,’ said Harold.
‘Edgar,’ I shouted. ‘Edgar, you come back up here now.’
‘Just what he need,’ murmured Harold, ‘another domineering woman.’
This brought another sharp jab from Frannie. ‘Harold!’
‘Ow, Goddammit woman!’ He performed a little scuttle of frustration in the dust, clutching his arm. ‘Stop doing that, will you!’ he turned to me, speaking slowly and theatrically. ‘All I’m saying, is, maybe if you don’t raise your tongue at him like that the
n he’ll listen. ’S all I’m saying, nothing more.’
The splashing and thumping continued below deck. Frannie frowned, mulling it over, and finally gave a purposeful sniff. ‘Sometimes my husband has a point.’
I sighed. ‘Ed, please. Come out. I want to talk to you.’
The noise stopped. A few seconds later Ed pulled himself out of the hatch and stood looking down into the bucket. As a breeze ran through his hair his face creased and he dropped the bucket, spilling water across the deck and collapsing into the puddle.
‘It’s my fault,’ he said, sobbing. ‘It’s all my fault.’
Frannie looked at me, nodding at him with a ‘go on then’ look in her eye. I hobbled to the guard rail and put my hand through, finding his knee.
‘Ed, it’s not your fault. None of this is anyone’s fault. And it’s not wrong to trust people, least of all your husband.’
I reached further and found his fingers. He tightened them around mine.
‘Now come on, because you’re kind of –’ I looked at the empty bucket and the rapidly expanding pool of seawater ‘– you’re kind of being a dick.’
He snorted and wiped a bubble of snot from his nose. ‘Sorry.’
‘Besides, I have a feeling these people know what they’re doing a lot better than you or I.’
Frannie beamed and placed a hand on Harold’s shoulder. ‘You got that right, missy. Me and my man here are what you might call the engineering department of this operation.’ She looked up at Ed. ‘Now are you going to let us do our job, mister, or do I have to call for Leopold to drag you from the deck?’
‘Who’s Leopold?’ said Ed.
Harold narrowed his eyes. ‘A great big Texan with an eye for tight pants, if you know what I mean. You don’t want to mess with him.’
Ed shook his head and got to his feet. ‘No need for that, I’m coming down.’
‘Excellent,’ said Frannie. ‘Gimme a hand up there before you do, there you go.’
Ed helped them both up and took their place on the jetty. Frannie began reeling off orders.
‘We’ll find them, Ed,’ I said. ‘I promise.’
At that moment Harold did another one of his frustrated scuttles on the deck.
The End of the World Survivors Club Page 27