The other things that the captain had scavenged for us—mostly food, water, vitamins, medical supplies—were all in sealed plastic: the only reason he had picked them up. In addition to a pair of toolboxes, that was pretty much it.
When I was done, everyone sat for a while. Then Rod looked up. “Okay, but what are we gonna do next?”
I sighed, couldn’t believe I was going to say what I was about to say. “We start getting ready to leave.”
“Whoa, whoa!” shouted Silent Steve—who’d really found his voice in the past twenty-four hours. “That’s not for a few months, though, right?”
I shook my head. “Captain says there’s a change of plans. We leave within the week. Have to.”
“What? Why?”
“Because of the plague.”
“But we’ve got the captain and Johnnie quarantined. And if they’re okay—”
“We won’t know until it’s too late, Steve. What do you want to do, tape them to their chairs for the next month—assuming that’s long enough? Except how do we restrain them without also getting too close to them? According to the reports, when the infected turn, they turn fast. Really fast. And—worst news—the two people who’ve been exposed and are currently quarantined are also the two largest, strongest people in the group.”
Steve eyed the guns leaning in the corner next to the door.
“Really?” I asked. “You think you could shoot either of them? And do you think they’d make it easy?” I thought I might throw up. “Captain thought this through. Winter is just about done down here. In a week, if the weather is good, we start out. If not, we wait for it to turn, watching the ocean from Leith Harbor.”
“And what?” Giselle gasped. “Just leave the captain and Johnnie here?”
I sighed and looked straight at her. “That’s what the captain says. And if you have a better solution, one that allows us to keep them with us, but safely in quarantine, I am all ears.” I kept myself from adding, I don’t like this any better than you do. Probably a lot less.
Giselle’s chin came out: she wasn’t going down without a fight. “There’s the other ship. We could put them on that.”
I shook my head. “It’s a good thought, but it won’t work. Running that ship requires a lot of hard work and a lot more than two crew. Unfortunately, the captain can barely hold a teacup. And Johnnie—well, he’d need a lot of hands-on guidance.” In order to make that sound better, I added. “Any of us would.” Which was true enough. “Look: the captain is right. We can only take one ship: Voyager. So we refuel her from the raider’s tanks, and take as much more as we can hold in the containers we have. But all of that is for emergencies: for close maneuvers, outrunning bad weather, whatever. We aren’t experienced sailors like the captain, but he taught us a lot more than the basics. As he pointed out, we ran the ship on our own from the time we got around Tierra del Fuego.”
Chloe frowned. “Ugh. I’m not looking forward to going back through there.”
I smiled at her and her frown went away. Hell, she even smiled back. “You won’t have to. Because we aren’t going that way.”
Rod nodded. “If we head toward Africa, we can jump from one current after the other over toward Brazil. Then we can coast-follow all the way up to the Caribbean.”
“To do what?” Steve asked. “None of us have spent any real time on the East Coast. The West Coast is all we know.”
Willow shook her head. “Actually, Steve, we don’t know the West Coast. Not anymore. Every place is an unknown, now. But if we tried sailing back to California, we’d have headwinds for a thousand miles to the west and then a hard tack up along South America’s Pacific coast. But if we go north, we can follow the Benguela Current up to the South Equatorial Current and catch a ride all the way to the Spanish Main and the Caribbean.”
Steve smirked. “Yeah, just in time for hurricane season.”
Chloe shrugged. “Hey, if you know a perfectly safe place these days, tell me and I’ll go. But if not—damn, there are a lot of ports up that way. A lot of places to look for survivors.”
I nodded. “And the captain pointed out that there are a lot of sub pens that face on the Atlantic. If anyone in the world got away from this virus, it would be sub crews. So we want to get up there and get our radio in range: not just to pick up their transmissions, but to trade information, join them.”
Giselle sighed. “We’re not the only people who will go to the Caribbean. Which, if I recall my history, was a hot spot for pirates until the last century.”
I smiled. “Well, we certainly don’t have a shortage of guns or ammunition this time. We even have enough to get in some practice.”
“On the open ocean?”
“Could. Or if we scout out some of the islands that have remained uninhabited. We might make landfall there.”
Steve screwed up his face. “What uninhabited islands?”
“There are some everyplace you go. Usually small ones that don’t have any springs or rivers of their own and are so small that any decent hurricane will put them underwater for a while.”
“So we’re going to stop there just to practice shooting?”
I shook my head. “Fish gather in their shallows. There are fruit trees. We get a chance to feel our feet on the ground. And yes, we also get to practice our marksmanship.”
Rod nodded. “Captain really did have it all figured out.”
I smiled, didn’t let on that the last couple of ideas were my own. Then I noticed Willow smiling a Mona Lisa smile at me. Well, yeah, okay: she knew they were my ideas. After all, she’s friggin’ Willow.
It was she who got up first. “I’m going to go tell Johnnie.”
No one volunteered to come with her, to talk through the door to tell the biggest, most good-natured of us all that we were going to maroon him here with a dying SAS lieutenant who just might go whacko and kill him before the first week was out.
I felt like a shit.
August 29
Just when you think you’ve got things under control, you realize that control is an illusion. Because the world takes all your fine ideas and solutions and flushes them down the crapper.
Here’s how it happened.
I was one of the first people up. We’d ended the prior day making some initial preparations for the journey, figuring out how many and what kind of rations to leave behind for the captain and Johnnie, which weapons, how much ammo. Made us feel lower than dogs the whole time we were doing it. And we stayed up pretty late. Except Willow. She participated through dinner then went to her bunk. She looked depressed or maybe very thoughtful or—hell, I don’t know. Because: Willow.
So next morning, as soon as I pulled on my clothes, I went to check on the captain. No response to a light knock and no snoring. Either he was still sleeping or he had died, which was always on our minds, now. But I calmed myself down and walked back to the manager’s house, figuring it was time for us to bite the bullet and eat some more of those godawful penguin eggs. They were protein and they wouldn’t stay good forever, so what the hell.
When I walked in, Chloe and Rod were already up. He was heating water. She had already grabbed one of the penguin eggs from our makeshift “fridge” outside.
I sidled over to Chloe. “Hey.”
She smiled sideways at me. “Hey.” She leaned close enough that our bodies were touching all the way down the side. It felt great. Then it felt more than great. Her smile widened. “So,” she asks, all innocent as she changed the unspoken subject, “where’s Willow?”
“What do you mean?”
Chloe’s smile dimmed. “She’s not with you, checking on the captain?”
Giselle’s head popped out from under her blankets.
“No, I went there alone—”
“Damn it!” shouted Giselle, who leaped out of bed and ran down the hall to the room at the end of the hall, the one with a separate outside entrance. Johnnie’s room.
She hammered on the door. “Johnnie, Johnnie? I
s Willow—?”
“I’m in here,” Willow said through a loud yawn. “And we’d like to sleep a little more.”
Johnnie actually giggled when she said the word “sleep.”
Giselle nodded, walked away from the door and started to cry. Rod held her, and I’m not sure his eyes were dry either.
Chloe had grown very pale. “No,” she whispered. “This can’t be happening.”
“Oh, it’s happened all right,” muttered Steve. “Shit.”
* * *
In retrospect, I should have seen it coming. We all felt that way, particularly Giselle, who was the only one of us who had noticed that Willow always seemed to find extra time to spend alone with Johnnie. On the surface of it, you’d think there couldn’t be a more mismatched couple, but in a crazy sort of way, it made sense. Although Willow was arguably the most grown-up of us, Johnnie was the most uncomplicated and comfortable with himself. Which we had sometimes mistaken for stupidity, I guess. Granted, he wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, but what we were really seeing was that Johnnie wasn’t a worrier. He took things as they came and always with a cheery attitude. That’s just who he was, and when someone was cruel to someone else, you always got the sense he didn’t quite understand it—as if we were behaving like people from another planet.
So Willow had made her choice. And there was obviously no going back. She didn’t do it to try to get us to lift the quarantine; she did it to stay with Johnnie. Kind of the weirdest and scariest Adam and Eve reboot you could ever imagine. She knew the dangers. She knew that a balanced diet was going to be a big challenge for them. She knew all of it. But as she calmly, patiently explained through the door, she knew that we’d leave them a good supply, she knew which seaweed she could use to supplement their other nutrient needs, and she knew the wildlife of South Georgia well enough to help them get by. And with Johnnie, she certainly had a strong pair of arms to help her. And with all the diesel left in the ship, they’d have heat and electricity for a long time, as long as they only used it when they needed to.
“Besides,” she said in that eighteen-going-on-fifty-eight voice of hers, “if we don’t catch the virus, it means we’ve learned some important things about the vectors of contagion. And then if we wait for, say, a month or so, we can try going back aboard the ship, scout out more of the supplies. Also, it’s certainly got a better and more powerful radio than we have here. So, you see, if all of you find the world dead out there, you can always come back here. Because we’ll either be safely dead and frozen solid, or we’ll be alive and with plenty of room for all of you.”
I wanted to find a flaw in her reasoning, but I couldn’t. I also couldn’t help envying her for how much of an adult she already was. I suspect she was born that way.
So after pushing back the sense of loss, of how much our group had shrunk, we went back to the radio shed with the captain’s breakfast. Once again, he didn’t reply. We knocked hard. Still nothing. We pushed open the door with a flensing knife. He was in his bed, staring at the ceiling.
And beyond it into eternity, I guess.
September 6
It is still hard for me to write. I have to say the words first and then spell them one by one. But I like doing it. Because now I will not be “dum Chloe” any more.
Alvaro could’nt write today. He was so tired. He steered the ship out of the bay and far out into the ocian. He never took a brake.
It was hard waving good by to Willo and Jonny. I will miss them. But they are happy and I am glad for them.
And the five of us who are leaving have a new addvenchur. We are sailing to the Caribeen. The wether is good, we have enough suplies, and we are healthy. And I remember what the captain told me when Alvaro was first teaching me to write. That I shoud keep one eye on the wether, one eye on the radio, and both eyes on tomorro.
I just never gessed I woud see tomorro whenever I looked at Alvaro and my frends. But now, that’s what I see.
Because they are all my tomorros. And I am theirs.
Part Two
At the End of the Line
October 13
When we got hit by a storm on October 11, about nine hundred miles south of the Ivory Coast, somebody must not have secured the pilot house’s aft deck door. I suppose that “somebody” could have been me, but remembering routines (or anything else) isn’t usually one of my problems. On the other hand, after a month at sea on the same boat, the stuff you do lots of times every day begins to blur together.
None of this would even be worth mentioning if, toward the end of the storm, we hadn’t been hit by a following gust that whipped through and around the pilot house and scooped out a bunch of papers. We lost some charts, but fortunately, we have backups of all the working maps. But we have no way to replace the last twenty-seven days of my—well, our—journal.
Not that it was riveting reading or anything. But it’s kind of like having a hole gouged out of our story. I mean we still have the log book, although not everybody keeps the records of our course and speed as carefully as they might. And now that I’ve written that where everyone else can see it, I will stop grumbling about it. Well, I’ll try to stop grumbling about it.
Besides, it’s my fault for not making myself an even bigger pain in the ass by insisting that we never leave the journal topside. Meaning that losing it is on me as much or more than it is on anyone else. So it’s up to me to make good on that loss as best I can.
Here’s what I remember of the last five weeks:
Only two days out from South Georgia Island, our radio went dead, and none of us knew why. Captain was the expert and all he had showed us was how to operate it. Hell, he barely had enough time to make us semi-competent sailors. So I took a dive into the user’s manual. I didn’t get very far.
Unfortunately, that was farther than anyone else got. As a result, our daily coded contact with Willow and Johnnie—timed and date-patterned squelch-breaks that we used to tell each other that we were okay—ended almost as soon as it began.
A difficult discussion followed: do we go back and see if we can repair the radio from spares at Husvik? Giselle wanted to tack back to South Georgia. Rod was unable to make up his mind. And so, for once, was Chloe. Whereas hers had always been the most ruthlessly practical voice, I think that after fighting the pirates at Husvik she had turned some kind of psychological corner. It’s as though she had adopted us—all of us—as surrogates for the family she’d never really had. And let me tell you, as I’ve learned many times since, Chloe doesn’t do anything half-assed. If she says she’s all in, she means she’s ALL in. And this choice damn near tore her apart. The practical side of her sided with me: we’d have to fight our way back against both wind and current and that meant more time before we reached our first destination—St. Helena—to replenish our slim supplies of food. Besides, the odds were poor that we’d find any spare parts for the radio at Husvik. Assuming we could figure out which ones we needed to fix it.
On the other hand, Chloe nodded every time Jeeza (Chloe’s new, improved name for Giselle) insisted that we at least let Willow and Johnnie know that we hadn’t gone off the air because we’d died at sea. Jeeza got wet-eyed every time she reminded us that the two of them were all alone at the far end of the world. They needed to know that we were still out there, too. Which I sympathized with and felt like a bastard arguing against.
But in the end, it was Silent Steve who smacked the ass of the elephant in the room. “We can’t take the chance,” he said, not looking up from where he was sitting cross-legged on the crew deck that night. “They’ve been all over Husvik now. Including the radio house. And we don’t know how contagious the virus is or how long it stays that way. So we couldn’t even help them look for parts to fix the radio. All we could do is holler at them from the middle of the inlet, then turn around and sail back out. With less food and even less time to find more.” He looked at Jeeza. “I’m sorry.” He rose and went to the head.
No one said anythi
ng after that. No one had to. He was right. The risks just didn’t justify whatever good we might do by letting them know we were still alive. One by one, everyone left our new crew commons: the Captain’s cluttered stateroom. We could have cleaned it up, but it had already become a shrine. Leaving it as he’d had it made it a little bit like having the Captain there, listening in on our discussions.
It was lonely without him. And to be dead honest, it was terrifying. Don’t get me wrong; he’d trained us well. But damn it, four months and one whole world ago, our biggest worry had been meeting our new roommates at the freshman dorms we never got to.
So we didn’t go back to Husvik and spent two weeks feeling pretty lousy about it. That was also when we steered away from the uppermost margins of the Antarctic circumpolar current (the same one that helped push us from Tierra del Fuego to South Georgia) and nosed northward into the Benguela current. We paralleled the western coast of southern Africa for ten days, then sheared off, heading northwest for St. Helena.
After making that turn, the winds were brisk but changeable, so we spent an extra day or two tacking to hold course. Thank god GPS is still working, because with all that back and forth, there were about a dozen times I wasn’t entirely sure if we were on the right heading. Twice we weren’t. Not huge errors, but this is the South Atlantic. No landmarks because, well, no land. If your numbers aren’t “spot on” (as the Captain put it), then you are shit out of luck.
But GPS gave us those one- or two-degree corrections when we needed them and thirty-one days after leaving South Georgia, we saw a rocky hump profiled low on the horizon, the setting sun dropping behind it. So we all celebrated a bit, then a bit more, and for the first time in weeks, I was able to relax and get a good night’s sleep.
At the End of the World Page 12