At the End of the World

by Charles E Gannon

  But as we made our final approach the next day, we found ourselves facing new uncertainties, because we knew damn little about St. Helena.

  For instance, it was entirely possible that whatever was left of its small population might be staggering around like extras from a zombie flick. If that was the case, what would we do? Kill them all? Yeah, we had brought most of the guns and ammo, but would that be enough? And would anything useful be left, or would the early survivors have gone through all the supplies before finally turning and tearing each other to pieces? As we sailed for that looming sea-surrounded mesa, we couldn’t ignore the possibility that, after coming all this way, we might find St. Helena to be not only our first, but our last, port of call.

  But soon after we swung around the northeast shoulder of the island, we saw white-hulled boats out in the water. They were spread in a thin fan around the small bay that fronted the port capital of Jamestown. Several were under sail. Four miles farther out, a big ship was riding at anchor. A quick look through binoculars showed it to be the Royal Mail ship that cycled between the island and Cape Town.

  But before we got within two miles of the port, two of the sailboats heeled over and started waving us off. So we stopped near what our map told us was Sugar Loaf Point and started with the signal flags.

  I don’t think I’ve ever been as grateful for my memory as I was when I saw their first flag: catty-corner yellow and black squares. That was Lima. Meaning: stop immediately. Pretty much the greeting you’d expect in a world blanketed by a plague.

  I told Jeeza to come around slowly and angle away from the coast as I rummaged for a half-blue, half-red flag: Echo, or “altering course to starboard.” I held it aloft, followed it with another that was half a vertical yellow bar, half a vertical blue bar: Kilo, or “I wish to communicate.”

  Don’t know what they were expecting, but it sure wasn’t that. They reset their yards, slowing their approach. But no flags.

  “What are they doing?” I shouted at Steve, who was up near the bow with a pair of binoculars.

  “Talking with each other.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Just talking. A lot.”

  Made sense. From the look of it, they might never have had any visitors at all. So while they figured how to respond to our request, I flipped through the rest of the flags in the box and had the nagging sensation that the Captain was right behind me, his lips seamed by the grimace he called a smile. (And when the hell did I start capitalizing “Captain” like that?)

  He had known I wasn’t into learning the flags and spent only one morning going over them. But he drilled me on each flag several times, enough to fix it forever in my head, whether I liked it or not. And now that skill was saving my ass. So I guess his ghost had reason to gloat.

  Eventually, the folks on one of the boats started responding, but it was semaphore this time. And that took a lot longer. After about fifteen minutes and about twice as many mistakes, I got the basic message across: we’d never been exposed to the virus, we’d been at sea for four weeks, and we meant to trade and sail on. Another minute or two and then more semaphore from them: we were to backtrack to St. Helena’s east coast and head to a small ramp of rock sticking out of the water just off its southernmost point: George Island. They’d meet us ashore. “At distance,” they added.

  We turned around and headed back south. It was a short coastal sail, about eight nautical miles. But having become accustomed to being on the open water, we weren’t eager to get too close to the brown and tan cliffs of St. Helena. But the depth charts and sonar reassured us that, as with most sea mounts, this one fell away into the depths really quickly.

  Navigating near the rendezvous point was a different story. There was no telling where submerged crags were waiting to rip out the bottom of Voyager. So we decided to stand off, reef sails, and use our trawling motor to push over to George Island.

  I had to stop after I wrote the words “George Island.” Otherwise, I might have laughed and awakened Chloe. Everything about that little scrap of rock was a joke. Beside the Brits’ apparent reflex to work the word “George” into most of their islands’ names, it hardly deserved the label “island.” It was just a bigger-than-average rock-spur shaped like a launch ramp, barely two hundred yards long and seventy wide. Except for birds, there was nothing living on it. Probably because it was damn hard to get a boat close enough to land safely. One moment you were in a rising swell and had a full fathom of water under you; the next, you were bottoming out only a hand’s width from submerged volcanic teeth.

  The two boats from Jamestown arrived half an hour after Rod, Jeeza, and I climbed out of Voyager’s dinghy. And because they knew right where to approach and how to time the risers, they got ashore in less than two minutes. But the moment we started approaching, they made shooing gestures and used a megaphone to get us to stop. Unfortunately, we’d lost our megaphone back when we were making the southern passage, so “communicating” on George Island meant shouting through cupped hands until we got hoarse.

  At first, the Saints—that’s what the locals call themselves—didn’t believe that we had no desire to stay on St. Helena or that we had completely avoided contact with the virus. They kept returning to questions about where we’d been since the plague hit, and where we’d just come from, and how long it been since we left there. In their place, I’m not sure I’d have done any different. Eventually, though, they accepted that we really didn’t want to live on St. Helena, but, instead, meant to sail all the way to the Caribbean.

  So, why had we come to St. Helena? And we repeated, “to trade.” I wanted to add “like we told you earlier.” But I didn’t. We needed supplies a lot more than I needed to get in my weekly ration of snark.

  That sent them into another long confab, which ended with them apologizing for taking so long (so veddy, veddy English). Not counting the Royal Mail ship, we were the first boat to reach them. Which isn’t particularly surprising. St. Helena is only useful as a waypoint across the emptiness of the South Atlantic. They had decided to turn away all refugees but had never considered traders.

  Which actually sped things up. Since they didn’t have any scripted bargaining strategy, they just asked, “What do you have, and what do you want?”

  Now it was our turn to realize how little we’d prepared for this. No matter how fair your trading partner is, you never let them know that you need something in order to survive. Because no matter how ethical they are, you just told them how to squeeze you dry. So we replied that we wanted to pick up some additional food. We didn’t let on how desperate we were for it, particularly carbohydrates and anything green.

  Carbs had been a problem from day one, even though we left South Georgia with more than our fair share. Willow was confident that if she and Johnnie didn’t get infected, the food the Captain had seen on the pirates’ trawler—mostly dry and canned goods from King Edward Point—would last a long time. Willow even had a solid plan for getting to those supplies in a few weeks: douse the compartments with water and wait for it to freeze. That would entomb anything harboring the virus in ice that could then be broken up and tossed overboard. It was a typical Willow plan: practical, smart, elegant. But even with those supplies, and her having identified the edible seaweeds on South Georgia, getting the right foods (and enough of them) was still gonna be dicey. At best.

  We were in pretty much the same situation. We’d rationed our carbs but, after more than a month at sea, had already gone through ninety percent of them. Vitamins weren’t as big a worry; we had enough tablets to hold us through to the new year.

  But humans need nutrients and minerals that you don’t find in over-the-counter supplements. Which is why, if we had lost only the carbs from our diet, we might have been okay. Yeah, we’d have found out what full-blown ketosis is like (I’d never heard of it until Willow explained it), but we could’ve managed that. What we couldn’t manage was a diet that was just protein and fat. That kind of malnutrition wou
ld prove fatal. Most likely because of being woozy and making stupid sailing mistakes long before our bodies physically shut down.

  The Saints were even more unwilling than we were to admit what they needed most. But one old guy finally got impatient, grabbed their megaphone, and howled: “Prophylactics!”

  He shouted it three times. And then, maybe because we didn’t reply right away, he made it even more clear:

  “RUBBERS!”

  Rod was the first to snicker. “So I guess asking us for rubbers was…was really hard.”

  I managed not to roll my eyes.

  Jeeza giggled, added, “Yeah, they sure were…beating around the bush.”

  Rod chortled.

  And then—yeah, I’ll admit it—so did I.

  Look: you had to be there. First, imagine five teenagers alone in the post-apocalyptic world and punch-drunk with early-stage ketosis. Now add a bunch of veddy proper Englishfolk called “Saints” who start bellowing through a bullhorn that their most desperate need is a crate of Trojans.

  Right out of Monty Python.

  But once we shook off the brief reversion to really bad tween-aged sex jokes (wait: is there any other kind?), the locals’ need for condoms actually started to make sense. It was all about surviving their own greatest danger: a baby boom and major population spike.

  Clearly, the Saints had come through the plague by learning to subsist on what they could grow and catch and by avoiding both community meltdowns and unwanted visitors. The mail ship moored way off shore had been their only outside contact and, with just one lifeboat missing and a lot of the portholes and doors open to the wind and the rain, we could fill in its story. The virus had broken out during its cruise up from Cape Town and the Saints hadn’t let anyone off. So RMS St. Helena ended her days as a permanently quarantined plague ship. Otherwise, the Saints would have stripped her.

  But the same isolation that had kept them safe also made it impossible to meet needs they couldn’t supply locally: in this case, birth control. After they hushed the old guy howling about rubbers, the other Saints explained that they would not survive a population increase until they found ways to make the arable parts of the island more productive and determined how and when to safely venture out into the world again.

  We explained that we had no solutions to those long-term issues, but that we did happen to have a lot of condoms. For which we were, once again, in the Captain’s debt. Other than guns, ammo, and food, the only thing he dragged off the pirate trawler was a small crate of condoms.

  We never learned why. Maybe it was foresight, ensuring that a bunch of scared teenagers didn’t add babies to the other challenges of their post-apocalyptic existence. Or maybe the Captain was just obeying decades of military reflex: always grab the major consumables. Food, water, booze, smokes, ammo, and rubbers. Not always in that order.

  Why did Argentinian pirates have a crate full of condoms? No way to know. However, since they had chosen a profession without health benefits and where a pension would be pointless because you’d never live to collect it, I don’t think they were concerned with safe sex. My guess is that they just grabbed every box they could carry out of some farmacia, figuring that one day they’d have a use for most of it.

  It took twenty minutes to arrive at a deal with the Saints: a couple hundred condoms for about a hundred kilos of fresh produce, exchange set for the following morning.

  The next day, I almost drooled (for real) when they showed up with crates—crates—of pumpkins, bananas, yams, tomatoes, and—my personal favorites—onions and hot peppers. No garlic, but hey, at last I had a chance to make something other than bland gringo food.

  They topped us up on fresh water, too: as much as we could carry in every empty container aboard Voyager. It’s not just that it would give our condenser a break; it was the taste. You might not believe it, but something as simple as the taste of fresh water can be a huge morale boost when you’ve been living on what comes out of a purifier.

  We asked about radio parts but got nowhere with that. The few of them who had our particular model refused to trade even the smallest components. Which made sense: none of that stuff will be manufactured again in our lifetimes.

  After several hours of moving all the food and water through the choppy waters to Voyager, we waved farewell and set sail. We had more than half a day of light left and wanted to get a good start. The Saints seemed both sad and relieved when we weighed anchor and started west for Ascension Island. Where, it turns out, most of the civilian population hails from St. Helena.

  By the time that high rocky loaf of an island finally dropped below the horizon astern, our excitement over the new food and fresh water had faded. Quiet followed. Not until we were sticking our forks into our first fresh meal in weeks did we discover we’d all been reflecting on how far we’d come in the past month. For us, the new food symbolized our success as sailors and survivors, so we felt pretty pleased with ourselves. Chuffed, as the Captain would have said.

  And he would have been laughing as he said it because soon after celebrating how mature and capable we were, the ocean reminded us that we were just as small and vulnerable as ever.

  Two days out, the wind began to rise and clouds started gathering to the southwest: right between us and St. Helena. So no going back. Two days after that, the storm hit. And toward the end of it, the wind came in and took away the complete story of our journey since leaving Willow and Johnnie at Husvik.

  Fortunately, the Captain proved right again. He had told us that major storm systems don’t often form in the South Atlantic. The region’s strong vertical wind shear pretty much tears them apart. I guess that’s what happened with this one. It slowly got worse over thirty-six hours and then just died away.

  Still, even though we didn’t lose any sails or spars, we’d never seen waves that big. But thanks to the Captain’s training, we knew when and how to put our bowsprit into those curling walls of water and ride them. Now we’re about two days out from Ascension Island, which, the Saints warned us, has been radio silent for months.

  They also warned us that Ascension is a very different kind of island. Far more barren than St. Helena, but far more trafficked, also. The Brits share (well, probably shared) a base with us there. A communications hub and tracking for space missions, according to the mostly crap references we have on board. So, it’s likely that the base will have at least some working radios.

  Assuming that the plague didn’t drive everyone there into a frenzy of total destruction.

  I guess we’ll find out which it is soon enough.

  October 15

  First thing you think when you see Ascension Island is, “This place is going to suck.” Then you land and…and—

  Look: do you remember how your parents and teachers told you that “appearances can be deceiving?” Well, sometimes they’re not.

  Ascension Island is almost all volcanic rock and cinder stumps, more moonscape than landscape. We could see green up on the one major mountain/cone at the other end of the island, but aside from that, it was a picture from the apocalypse we’d all grown up expecting: the nuclear kind.

  The port was small, with a stone pier and one crane. A boat came out, waved us to sail parallel to the coast. Once we’d complied, they closed to hailing distance, asked where we’d come from, asked how long it had been since we had been either on land or another ship. We gave them the facts, then passed on news and messages from St. Helena.

  They hadn’t been very suspicious to begin with, but the moment the names and news of the Saints flowed, they waved us in so that we could spill everything we’d heard or seen there.

  On the one hand, it was great to set foot on real land again and to be surrounded by people who didn’t presume we were plague carriers. But on the other hand, news of our arrival spread so quickly that within five minutes, we could barely get off the boat because the crowd lining the pier was three deep. It was chaos until Jeeza put on her war face, pushed her way on to the
dock, climbed atop an old crate, and started reeling off the names of the Saints we’d met, and from whom we were carrying messages.

  Me, I was holding back a little, because there were some folks in the crowd with guns. Not sure what you call that kind; it’s one of the types with the magazine behind the pistol grip, the one you see carried by Brit soldiers. I could see more folks carrying them as they wandered around the streets. Well, not wandering, exactly; more like a casual walking patrol.

  And then there were the dogs. Dozens of them, doing their doggy things: sniffing everyone, barking, tails wagging, tongues hanging out, and generally being excited by having so many people in one place at one time. They seemed to know every person on the pier but didn’t seem to belong to anyone in particular. I couldn’t figure it out.

  But Chloe did. From back in the pilot house, where she held one of the fully automatic AKs below the level of the helm console, she muttered, “Ten to one there are infected on this island somewhere.”

  “Huh? ’Cause of all the guns?”

  “Naw. The dogs. Lookit ’em. Almost three quarters are only a few months old. And every bitch in the bunch is fat with more.” When I didn’t show instant understanding, she raised an eyebrow.

  “Look,” I explained, “I never had a dog. Not a lot of my friends did either. In my neighborhood, it was mostly old ladies who had dogs. The kind that fit in their purses. Or cleavage.”

  Chloe made a face. “I think I just threw up in my mouth. Listen, the dogs here are protection. For everyone. They’re not pets; they’re part of the town.”

  I looked back out and saw the whole scene differently. “And that’s why all the guns are out. Not special for us; just part of the everyday scenery.”

  “Yup,” she agreed. “These people have some real nasty neighbors.”

  “Infected, probably.”