The Flooded Earth

by Mardi McConnochie

  “I’ll disinfect the wounds and keep applying pressure, then get a dressing on it. Hopefully that’ll do the trick,” Essie said.

  “Okay,” Annalie said, already moving toward the stairs so she could go and talk to Pod on deck. Then a sudden silence fell.

  “What was that?” asked Essie.

  “The engine just stopped,” Annalie said. “We’ve run the battery down.”

  “Does that mean the pump’s out of power too?” Essie asked.

  “It has its own,” Annalie said, “but I don’t know how long it will last.”

  She hurried up on deck. Pod turned to her anxiously.

  “We need sails,” he said.

  Annalie set the sails and the Sunfish began to move again, more slowly than before.

  She picked up the binoculars and looked back the way they’d come. The two inflatables were still in sight, dead in the water, and further off she could see the shape of the destroyer on the horizon. They would certainly be sending more boats to recover their comrades; whether they would send more boats after the Sunfish was another question.

  “Do you think they’ll keep coming after us?” Annalie asked.

  “I would if I was them,” Pod said.

  “Yeah,” Annalie sighed. “Me too.”

  “We got to keep going,” Pod said. “Get some distance between us and them.”

  “I agree,” Annalie said, “only we’ve got a hole in the boat.”

  “Oh,” said Pod. “Yeah.”

  He began to look sick as he remembered the hole and the water gushing in.

  “I’ve been down for another look,” Annalie said. “There’s a bit of water coming in, but the pump’s still managing to keep up. We could stop now and try to patch the hole. Or we could just keep going until we find a safe place to stop on the other side of the reef, and hope the pump doesn’t break down in the meantime.”

  If Will had been at the helm he would have had very certain views about what they should do next; they could have discussed it, argued, and then thrashed out a solution. But this was Pod, and the look he was giving her made it clear that he expected her to know the answer.

  “What do you think we should do?” Pod asked.

  Annalie hesitated for only a moment longer. “I think we should keep going.”

  They sailed on through the narrow channel in the reef. The water below them was so shallow they could see the sandy bottom. The reef stretched out around them, bleached, white, broken, a desert beneath the water. But as they came toward the end of the channel, and the far side of the reef, Annalie began to see signs of life: a few sprays of color, shoals of fish. She wasn’t sure why conditions on this side might be different, but here there were glimmers of the old beauty. Perhaps life was returning after all? She hoped so.

  Essie came hurrying up from below. “The pump’s stopped working!” she cried.

  “The battery must have run out,” Annalie said. “We’ll have to pump it manually.” She ran down and found the water was rushing in through the hole. The water level had risen alarmingly. She fitted the manual arm to the pump and began pumping. “This is what you have to do,” she told Essie. “Pump as hard as you can.”

  Essie, wide-eyed, took her place and began to pump.

  Annalie had hoped they might be able to run to an island to take stock and deal with the damage, but that would not be possible now. They had taken on too much water to risk continuing and pumping it out manually would be slow. They were going to have to deal with the hole right now, or there was a good chance the boat might actually sink.

  Before she went back on deck, Annalie went forward to check on Will. She found him sitting on the bench seat, his injured leg propped up, wrapped in a thick wad of bandages. He was very pale and he was obviously in pain. The water slopping around their calves was tinted with blood.

  “How do you feel?” she asked.

  “Bit terrible actually,” he said.

  “Does it hurt?”

  “Well, what do you reckon?” Will said.

  “Have you had any painkillers?”

  “Yeah, but they’re piss-weak.”

  “Do you think the bleeding’s stopped?” Annalie asked.

  “Mostly,” Will said.

  “He needs to rest,” Essie called from the cabin. “I tried to make him go and lie down but he wouldn’t.”

  “Cabin’s full of water,” Will reminded her.

  “There are two cabins,” Essie reminded him back.

  “We’ve taken on a lot of water,” Will said.

  “I know,” Annalie said. “But I’m going to deal with it. Don’t worry.”

  “We should be bailing the boat out. I’ll get a bucket—” He was already levering himself off the bench. Annalie pushed him back into place, noticing a fresh bloom of blood welling onto his dressing.

  “I’ve got this,” she said. “Stay put. We need you to get better.”

  She hurried back up on deck. “Okay,” she told Pod. “Let’s have a look at this hole.”

  They anchored and furled the sails, then rigged up a little platform on ropes, and Pod lowered Annalie over the side to see the damage.

  The rock had gouged a rip into the hull as long as her forearm, and the area around it had been pushed in by the impact. It was a substantial hole. She put her fingers into it and felt the water rushing past them. She thought she’d better check that this was the only hole. She took a deep breath and dived under the water, the salt making her eyes sting. There were a few scrapes in the paintwork lower down, but no more holes.

  She surfaced. “Pull me up!”

  Pod hauled her back on deck. “How’s it look?”

  “Not great. There’s a tear in the hull. It’s about this long.” She measured with her hands.

  “Can you fix it?”

  Nothing like this had ever happened to her before. What did you do when you were holed, alone, in the middle of the ocean?

  A story came back to her. She wasn’t sure if she’d heard it as a sailor’s yarn, or read it in a book, but she remembered a story about a holed boat, miles from anywhere, with little hope of rescue. “I heard a story once about someone who wrapped their hull in a sail. It kept enough of the water out for them to get to the next port.”

  “How, wrapped in a sail?”

  “I mean they got a sail and swam under the boat with it,” Annalie said. Even as she said it, her stomach churned at the thought of it: the great hull, the huge, wet flapping sail, the risks of getting tangled as you tried to swim under the boat. The price of failure.

  Pod turned to look at the sails. “Would that work?”

  “They wouldn’t be telling the story if it didn’t,” Annalie said. “But I wonder if there’s something else that might work better than a sail...”

  Ideas were coming to her piecemeal, half-remembered bits of conversation, things she’d read. “I think we’ve got some waterproof sheeting somewhere,” she said. “Useful for all sorts of emergencies.”

  She went to the locker, opened it, and discovered that there was indeed a large piece of plastic sheeting folded there.

  “Now we just need to attach some lines to it and get it in place,” she said. Pod and Annalie hurried to attach lines to the corners of the plastic sheet. Pod’s fingers were shaking; he was having trouble fitting the lines through the cringles and tying them. “It’s going to be okay,” Annalie said, noticing this. “As soon as we get this in place, and get it pulled tight over the hole, I can start making some repairs and we’ll be absolutely fine. The boat’s not going to sink.”

  Pod nodded, still attaching his ropes.

  “Ready?” Annalie asked.

  “Ready,” Pod said.

  They went forward with the tarp and dropped it into the water, then hauled on the lines to try and drag it into place. It stuck
and wouldn’t spread out.

  “Haul her up,” Annalie said, “let’s try that again.”

  They dragged it back up, threw it out once more, and tried to haul it into place. Again, it tangled and stuck. They tried poking it with boat hooks and oars but could not get it into place.

  “This is not working,” Annalie said.

  “It’ll work,” Pod said. “Try again.”

  “Annalie!” Essie’s voice floated up from below. “There’s a lot of water coming in now and my arms are getting really tired!”

  “This is hopeless,” Annalie said. “I’m going in.”

  Pod looked helplessly at her, his face twisted with fear and something more. “I should go,” he said.

  “But you can’t swim,” Annalie said. “Anyway, it’s my boat, my idea. I should go.”

  “You’re brave,” Pod said.

  “Or stupid,” Annalie said, with a nervous laugh. She got ready to jump over the side.

  “Hate wet!” Graham squawked from the rigging. “Allie drown!”

  “I hope not,” Annalie said, and she jumped, before she could change her mind.

  It’s not that far, she told herself, treading water beside the boat. It’s really not that far. But she could feel the pull of the current and the waves rolling beneath, and the thought of having to swim right under the hull seemed terrifying, now that she actually had to do it.

  “Coming down!” Pod yelled, and released one end of the plastic sheet. She grabbed it, then tucked it into her waistband so she could use both hands to swim.

  All right, she thought. This is it.

  She took a deep breath, then another, and dived.

  Down into the shadows. Down under the boat. Down past the tear that was threatening to sink them all. It was deep, deeper than she anticipated. Panic threatened to overwhelm her and she thought, I’m not going to be able to make it all the way. But she was committed now, too deep to go back. She swam hard, kicking and stroking, dragging the tarp down into place. Her lungs were already straining. She moved under the centerline of the boat, the lines in her hand, and started coming up the other side. The lines caught—stuck somewhere—she felt herself held, trapped. She didn’t want to let the lines loose and have to start all over again. She tugged on them, her lungs straining, panic rising. All at once the lines slipped free, and she swam and swam, up to where the light sparkled, so far away still, up and up, her lungs so tight she was about to burst—

  She surfaced, sucking air in with a huge shuddering sound.

  Pod was staring down at her, his face fearful. “You okay?” he yelled.

  “Fine!” Annalie shouted back.

  She held the lines up to him, and he grabbed them with a boathook and secured them, hauling on each one until the plastic was pulled tight. When all the lines were in place, Annalie swam back around to the holed side and ducked under once again to see what she could see. The tarp was wrapped tight around the hull. The hole was covered.

  Pod helped her back on board and for a moment Annalie just sat there, gasping, the adrenalin rattling through her system.

  “We should go and see if the water’s still coming in,” she said once she had her breath back.

  Pod gave her his hand and hauled her to her feet.

  Essie turned to them as they came into the waterlogged cabin. “You did it!” she said. “The water’s stopped!”

  Annalie and Pod came and crouched down next to Essie so that they could examine the hole. The plastic was stretched tight across the gap in the hull and it did indeed look like the water had stopped coming in.

  “It’s not a permanent solution,” Annalie said, “especially once we get underway again. But at least now we can try and use the repair kit, and that should hopefully be enough to get us to Uncle Art’s place.”

  Pod turned to her. “You saved us,” he said, his voice formal.

  “I haven’t saved us yet,” Annalie said, touched, but also slightly embarrassed.

  “I couldn’t have done what you did,” Essie said. “Neither of us could. That was amazing.”

  Annalie felt unexpected tears prickle in her eyes. But all she said was, “We’d better try and get this boat dry.”

  Fever

  With the hole repaired, at least temporarily, they sailed on, putting plenty of distance between themselves, the reef, the channel, and any more boats the destroyer might have sent after them. Spinner’s self-steering mechanism kept them on course, freeing Pod, Essie and Annalie to clear up the mess. They had plenty to do: there was more than a foot of water in the bottom of the boat, and everything was sodden. It took them the rest of the day to get the boat pumped and baled out. Graham sat up high, well clear of the water, squawking, “Hate wet!”

  “You want to swim?” Pod said, playfully threatening the bird with a bucket full of water.

  Annalie used the repair kit they had on board to patch the inside of the hull, and hoped that would fix the problem. Then they dragged all the wet things up and spread them out on the deck, hoping they’d dry out.

  “Where to next?” Pod asked, when the work was done.

  “I still have to work that out,” Annalie said.

  In their flight from the destroyer, they had abandoned their old route. When they planned the journey originally they had intended to take the route everyone took, and which the destroyer would still have to take: up the normal shipping lanes, around the top end of the reef, then south-east again to the Lang Langs. By taking the tiny channel through the middle of the reef they had managed to lop at least a week’s sailing from the journey; now, instead of sailing up the reef, crossing it where everyone else crossed, and then sailing back down in a south-easterly direction, they would have to travel more or less due east to reach the Lang Langs. Their goal was now much closer than it had been at the start of the day, and that had to be good news.

  When night fell they were all exhausted. Will slept where he’d spent the day, on the bench seat in the saloon. The girls retired to their cabin, while Pod slept up on deck. He claimed not to mind—he wasn’t used to beds anyway. Annalie set the autopilot before she went to bed, intending to get just a few hours sleep before she went back up on deck. But in fact she slept deeply until dawn.

  When she emerged from her cabin the next morning she found Will already awake.

  “How are you doing?” she asked.

  “My leg hurts,” he said. There was blood soaking through his dressing.

  “We should change that,” she said. She got the first-aid kit and found that Essie had already used up a lot of the dressings. She unwrapped the bandage carefully and eased the sodden dressings off the wounds. They didn’t look too good, although she wasn’t sure what a good gunshot wound was supposed to look like. His skin felt hot.

  “Do you have a fever?” she asked. “You feel hot.”

  “I’m not hot,” he said fretfully. “I’m cold.”

  “Let me put new dressings on,” Annalie said, “and I’ll get you something to warm you up.”

  She cleaned the blood away, put a little more disinfectant on the wounds, and wrapped them up again carefully. Then she went to find something warm to wrap him in.

  The blankets were still wet, and Will had not brought any warm clothes of his own. Annalie couldn’t think what she’d be able to find to wrap him in—perhaps a forgotten beach towel?—but then she opened a locker in the boy’s cabin and saw something hanging there. It was a wool sweater, Spinner’s sweater, knitted with huge chunky stitches, warm and dry. Annalie took it out and snuggled it against her, thinking about Spinner. He used to put this on for cold days in the unheated workshop, or nights on the boat when the wind was howling and you could feel the cold of the ocean pressing in on you from every side. It smelled of salt and sweat and Spinner, and Annalie felt a wave of sadness and longing sweep over her. How she missed him. How she hoped th
ey’d guessed right when they chose this destination. She had no next step, no Plan B. If they were wrong, they would be truly lost.

  She went back into the saloon and helped Will put the sweater on. He put it on without a struggle, perhaps not even noticing what it was as he huddled into it.

  “Are you hungry?” she asked.

  “No,” said Will.

  Soon the others appeared and began to make breakfast. Pod looked at Will, frowning, then said to Annalie, “He don’t look good.”

  It was true; Will didn’t look well at all. “I think he needs a doctor,” Annalie said.

  “Where do we find one out here?”

  Annalie could only shrug.

  It was Essie who made the next unwelcome discovery. “Something’s wrong with the tap,” she said, turning the tap that supplied water from the main water tank.

  Annalie turned to look, not yet alarmed. “We should have plenty of water,” she said. She went to check the levels in the tank, Pod and Essie following.

  The tank should have been full. But it wasn’t. When they pulled it out for closer examination, they discovered two bullet holes in it. One of the other smaller tanks had a hole in it too, about halfway down. The last was intact.

  “We’ve lost most of our water,” Annalie said in dismay.

  “That must have happened when the marines were shooting at us,” Essie said.

  Pod looked a little guilty. It was him the marines had been shooting at.

  “This is still enough though, isn’t it?” Essie said.

  “No,” Pod said. “Not enough.”

  “Not if something goes wrong, or we get becalmed, or lost,” Annalie said. “We’re going to have to get more water before we move on.”

  Once again she checked the charts, and saw that there was another pair of islands not too far out of their way—it would add perhaps another day or two’s sailing to their journey. But with their water supplies so depleted, they had little choice.

  “D’you know anything about this place?” Pod asked.

  “Nope,” Annalie said.

  “Let’s just hope they have water,” Essie said.