by Angela White
Kendle moved back, keeping her eyes on the waves, but after starting to doze off as the adrenaline rush faded. It was gone. Her heart fell. Like her world. She had no idea where she was. The gas had run out a long time ago, and she was alone, at the ocean’s mercy.
Her bluish-gray eyes searched the waves as they swelled and dipped around her, finding nothing but debris and endless water. Forcing herself to ignore the waiting tears, she got out her strings and began to tie a square of net to "fish" with.
“Fifty days and nights,” she muttered, cracked lips aching, skin a constant bruise from the lightest touch. In all that time, she hadn’t seen anyone, not a ship in the distance, not even a plane overhead. Surely, they had found the liner by now, counted bodies, and started a search for survivors. Hadn’t they? Shouldn’t she have at least seen a plane by now, one of those big 747s? They wouldn’t be able to see her, of course, but just knowing she wasn’t alone would be a comfort.
Fingers aching as she tied off the ends, Kendle flexed her hand a couple of times before starting on the next side, making small, tight squares that would trap anything bigger than a marker. She let her mind wander as she worked on it, each piece a different color or type of material. She was almost out of things to drink and was hoping for a bottle of water. Kendle croaked a bitter laugh, thinking of the saying about ‘water everywhere and not a drop to drink’.
“Definitely fits.”
Her throat was raw from trying to scream the shark away, and at that thought, her eyes looked around wildly, searching for a Great White with a hammer in its head and revenge in its heart. Instead, murky waves, the unnatural, vivid green sunset, and the dark layer of clouds now ever-present in the sky, were her only companions.
Below was another world, but it was one she was terrified of now, full of foreign creatures that brushed against her wooden home and stole her breath. Where the hell were the planes, the rescue ships? The land?
“It was a Carnival Cruise Liner, for God sakes!” she blurted in frustrated fear, head turning as if to see the Coast Guard pulling alongside. “Front page news! Wealthy stars go missing, massive search ensues!”
Someone should be looking for all those citizens, all those lifeboats, shouldn’t they? And what was with the ocean? While she was grateful - it had certainly kept her alive so far - she could only worry about an explosion that had been big enough to literally litter an ocean with debris.
Just about anything she could think of was floating in the salty waves -bottles, cans, cups, clothes, jugs. It was like a constantly moving store shelf of surprises (some awful, like the hand she’d pulled up, still inside the leather glove), and she was constantly scanning the water, trying to find more each day than she used. She currently had three weeks worth of food, divided evenly into the corners for balance, but her stomach clenched painfully at the thought of being on the ocean long enough to use it all. Where was the land?
Kendle tied the net to the remaining guardrail on the faded orange and white speedboat with thick knots, finishing as a wave broke over the side and soaked her from head to toe in cold saltwater. Her vision faded a bit, eyes blurring, and she was thrown back in time to the storm that had taken her sister just days after they’d snuck off the doomed cruise ship.
“Hold on!”
“Help me!” the terrified girl screamed again, nails drawing blood from Kendle’s wrist as the weight of the rail that had ripped away pulled her down toward the angry sea, where the rest of their group, also still anchored to the heavy metal, were fighting for every breath they took.
“Dawn!” Their wet fingers slipped, and the screaming teenager was yanked off the boat, as Kendle jerked frantically on the rope around her other wrist, unable to get free to follow.
“Dawn!”
Bam!
Kendle screamed as the speedboat was hit hard from underneath, rising out of the water and tossing against the steering wheel. Stars bursting across her vision, her hands found the wide, wooden spokes just as the craft plunged back down. It slapped up sprays of water and she barely kept herself from flying out, arm wrenching painfully.
Bump, splash...Bump!
The boat rocked violently from the hits, and she held on to the wheel, heart thudding at every creak of waterlogged wood.
Thud...splash!
Her shark was back. She saw the fin, watched it roll over. Her eyes widened when she realized her net was wrapped around its streamlined body. It was trapped. If it dove, she would go under too.
"Move!" her mind screamed, and she slid closer to the wildly thrashing animal as her fingers went for the net. ‘No time!’ the panic ordered, water sloshing into the shallow boat as the shark tried to roll itself free. ‘Kill it!’
Kendle looked around. How?
The claw hammer was still buried in the shark’s eye, the long handle being pried out by the ropes of her net, and she grabbed the biggest can she had, its label long gone. Kendle hefted it over her head, trying to wait for the right moment.
The Great White suddenly plunged downward, pulling the boat with it and as water began to pour in, she swung, slamming the heavy can down on top of the hammer.
A sound of agony was ripped from the shark. More a vibration than a noise, the cry was one of a fatal wound and Kendle shoved herself back against the side of the boat to rebalance it, shivering. She had just killed her first shark. That was something she hadn’t done before the War, when she couldn’t wait to face nature's challenges.
After a minute, the shark stopped moving, blood leaking out into the softly lapping waves, and she forced herself toward the corpse, her back and shoulder on fire. She ripped the hammer out of the animal’s head, the tearing sound making her gag, but she didn’t stop, swinging the slimy weapon back into the shark’s meaty area.
She ripped out a big chunk, coughing and wrenching. When her thumbnail tore off, she didn’t notice her blood mixing with that of the shark. Kendle wrapped the meat in a towel, then began untying the carcass, not sure if she had taken it to eat or to look at and know the shark was dead. She felt the tears rise again, and didn’t stop them this time.
The boat and the sisters had barely survived the rollover - being right by the stairs had saved them - but after three days of looters, fights, illnesses spreading, and drunken pounding on the door, Kendle had chosen to get off the crippled ship before they were dragged from their staterooms. Others had been - they’d listened in horror - and on the fourth morning after the tidal wave, she and Dawn had crept out to one of the three remaining lifeboats.
There had been five men there already and the girls had gone with them willingly. It had to be better than the rapes and murders on the boat that had started when the Captain admitted he had no idea how to fix the ship and get them home, didn’t even know for sure where they were, then barricaded himself in the wheelhouse.
One day after the seven of them jumped ship, they found the speedboat, its owner looking much like the bodies they’d left on the doomed cruise liner. When its engine started, they’d all been crying, hugging. It hadn’t lasted long. The boat’s radio, compasses, and lights were out, the fuel gone before daylight, and the speed runner had come to a heartbreakingly slow stop with no land in sight.
“Lost two in the first week,” she croaked, hating the sound of her rough voice, but needing to hear it just the same. “Didn’t even know their names.”
The third to go had either fallen in or jumped, and was hit by something Dawn had sworn was the roof of a house. He hadn’t come back up, and the loss hadn’t registered.
There had been little movement or conversation after that. Talking or moving required awareness, and no one wanted that until there was hope to go with it. They had survived by fishing garbage out of the ocean, slowly adjusting to life on a world that was never still.
Kendle had been alone now for 45 days, marking the boat each morning since the storm that had taken her companions. It wasn’t the longest stretch she’d done - that would be her 88 days spent hi
king from one end of the Colorado to the other – but it was the first time she was totally without backup. She had no phone, no camera crew with access to the outside world. “On my own for real this time.”
Kendle's skin felt very hot as she turned to look at the chunk of shark meat. “‘Cept for you.”
She laughed again and when it turned to sobs, she rocked herself gently for comfort. She would get through this the same way she had all the other trials. One day at a time.
The sun vanished slowly, leaving eerie, beautiful trails of green and orange that threw strange shadows over the deep, dark waves, and Kendle huddled in the middle while she dozed. She was miserable and heartbroken as the fading light left her with only her sense of hearing and smell, both of which checked in and recorded lapping water and salt, nothing more.
Maybe the land was gone. Maybe that was why she was finding so much of the world in the water. A War? Hell, maybe an asteroid had hit and flooded the earth. If so, she hoped the waters receded soon and set her Ark on a mountain before she went mad. Out here, she was defenseless.
Chapter Three
February 23rd, 2013
Illinois
1
“No, please. No more bodies. There’s not room for them anymore!”
Angela’s words brought Marc instantly awake and he rose up on one elbow to look at her tear-stained cheeks in the dim lantern light. Dog’s golden eyes were also watching her cry in her sleep.
“Angie?”
There was no answer. She was having another nightmare. It wasn’t the first time she had woken him this way and though he hadn’t said anything, it bothered Marc that he couldn’t protect her in her dreams, too. Any small part of him that had been wondering if she was exaggerating, so she could play two ends against the middle, was gone. Their first week together had revealed what she hadn’t told him and he was furious.
How could anyone treat her badly? She had been affectionate…passionate, and he loathed her man for changing that. He’d never felt hate so strongly.
“It’s how he was raised. He didn’t know any other way to deal with someone like me,” Angela answered his thoughts.
Marc jumped and gave her an awkward smile, having to pry his eyes from the long dark curls messed sexily over her shoulder. “You would have made a good Marine,” he stated, not wanting to hear her defend someone who had obviously hurt her so much.
Angela sat up, pulling the thick, flag-covered quilt closer, her eyes roaming over pictures of foreign, seductive landscapes and dark, dirty windows, instead of looking at him. “Not me. I don’t kill. I won’t.”
He frowned at her argumentative tone, wondering if it was the dream or something she had picked up from him.
“You okay?” he asked carefully, relaxing a little when she sounded more like herself, but her face was pale in the orange glow of the propane heater.
“I will be. Rough night.”
Marc grunted. Five or six this week. “Wanna talk about it?”
Angela tried to imagine telling him about her life of rape and assault, and total, unforgiving control. She closed her eyes against the shame and betrayal she thought she’d come to terms with long ago.
“No. How about you tell me something from your life I don’t know. Shouldn't be hard.”
He ignored the tone. “Like what? After the War? Before?”
“Tell me something from our past, the answer to one of the questions we used to ask each other.”
His eyes swung to her pale face at the tone, but his mind was again screaming ambush from the almost resentfully spoken words. “Why?”
Marc could almost hear her telling herself to let it go, to preserve the careful peace they’d been sharing, and shook his head. “The truth is all that’s left now. Tell me why.”
She opened her eyes, and he was only a little surprised by the coldness of her gaze. “Because I need to know what was more important than the way we felt. I need to understand why. What was worth more than the love you left behind and forgot about?”
Marc pulled in a wounded breath, reeling from the blow. “I’ve never said it was worth it and I never forgot you!” he protested.
Her words fell like chips of frosted glass. “Clearly it was or you would have at least had the decency to come back and tell me where we stood. You weighed the old life against the new one and if you ever looked back, I never knew. Last thing I heard was - I’ll find you. And don’t give me that ‘it was for the best’ crap, because it wasn’t.”
“I wouldn't. I did a lot of things, helped a lot of people, but I’ve never considered it a fair trade. For the most part, it’s been lonely…cold… I’ve spent the last decade aware that I made a mistake.”
She shrugged, not interested in his apologies, and too angry and hurt to be afraid of arguing with him. Their breakup and her life with Kenny was all she could see when she closed her eyes, and the pain in his baby-blues was finally a balm to the old Angela.
“Tell me something I don’t know about your life,” she repeated tonelessly.
“I don’t... Okay. You remember how we wanted matching tattoos? I’ve got four now. Three can be shown in public.”
That caught her off guard, and he saw a flash of the old Angie, his Angie, in her response, “I’m public. Let’s see ‘em.”
Not expecting that, he reluctantly pushed up his camouflage sleeve to reveal a simple, thin green band around his thick arm, its edges artfully spiked. The other sleeve hid a neat Marine emblem, an eagle on top of the earth. Her eyes lingered on his muscles as she wondered against her will, where the politically incorrect one was. Ass?
“And the third?” Seeing the hesitation, she threw a rare grin. “Come on. You said three were politically correct.”
Marc stared at her. It had been so long! He was immediately sorry her already swinging mood was about to take a hit. He uncovered slowly, hating the fear on her face when his hands went to the buckle of his dusty jeans. He only slid the waistband over his hip a couple of inches as he rolled toward her.
“I know those. Those are Recon wings. Kenny has the same…” she stopped, heart clenching as she read it. Kenny had the traditional "Mother" in the center of his. Marc had "Angie Forever".
Their eyes met, locked, and memories swirled between them, old and powerful.
“You’ll love me forever?” the girl asked softly, terrified to trust.
The boy met her eyes as his hips pushed between her long legs. “Just that long. Not a second more.”
She smiled, leaned into his thrust as he kissed her.
Marc turned away with a heavy heart. That moment had been a very long time ago, but right now it felt like yesterday. He had to fight with himself not to go to her, not to tell her how he felt, or that he had come back for her. It had been too late then, and it was too late now.
The big Timber wolf stretched, yawning widely before following his master, and Angela watched Marc’s big shoulders as he lit the stove. Her name on his tanned hip flashed through her mind, and she slammed her eyes shut as she lay back down. She was sure it had been done when he was fresh into the Corps and still pissed at his mother for putting him there. If their love had meant so much, he would have come back for her, right? He hadn’t, and in the years that had gone by, he'd changed.
The boy she’d loved had been her willing slave on most things, her ally and best friend. This new man was closed off, very adept at keeping to himself, and she missed their closeness, hated the circumstances preventing them from having it back. "It’s for the best," her fear whispered. "What if friendship wasn’t enough?" Angie gave the old dream only a brief glance before shoving it back behind the doors. Kenny would never let her go. The question didn’t matter.
Relieved when her even breathing told him that she’d gone back to sleep, Marc was certain any of the things he might have said would only have caused more tension. They were mostly avoiding the old wounds, concentrating on working out an efficient travel routine. In that way at least, he k
new he had pleased her.
They’d made 127 miles in the week since leaving the wounded brothers behind, compared to her 120 in nine days alone, and took turns at the cooking and cleanup. She had expected to do all the work despite the agreement, and it bothered Marc to see her staring, wondering if she could still trust him, or if he was up to something. She was jumpy, always looking over her shoulder or reaching for the comfort of her gun. She never asked if they were safe, wouldn't have believed him anyway, he guessed, and he had begun doing things to make her feel better, like walking the perimeter often and always using the motion alarms. Marc was determined to show her that he could keep her alive, that she could count on him.
He also kept his distance and kept his mouth shut, sure when she relaxed a little more, she would realize he was still the same man who had taken her virginity with sweetness and care. Feeling himself stir at that hot, shadowy memory, Marc pulled on his coat and stepped out into the very cold Illinois air after motioning the wolf to stay.
They were camped in a large, one-room log cabin deep in the Eagle Creek Recreation area, this particular building chosen for its complete lack of Christmas decorations. The area in which he had chosen to make camp was on the farthest edge of the resort complex, away from the main clubhouse and lavish apartments. He’d even shunned the golfing side, choosing instead to hole up deep in the campground. It was almost serene here, no damage visible thanks to the thick forest around them, and he was glad they had finally cleared the St. Louis quake zone.
The cabin had no yard to speak of, just dense willow and oak trees that hung thickly over the rustic rails. Marc hefted himself into their canopy, wanting to see what (who) was around them, but even with his scope, the leaves were too thick to see the outlines of the wealthier resort area. Only the shadows of blackened foliage told him that Angie’s words of a huge fire were true. Not that he’d doubted her.