by Peter Clines
Danielle’s lips formed a tight grin.
“Nice shot,” said Gibbs.
St. George walked toward the plywood. “So what the heck is that?”
“I wanted to call it a slingshot,” she said, “but Gibbs pointed out it’s a lot closer to a repeating crossbow.”
“A cross-shot?”
“Yeah,” said Danielle, shaking her head, “I’m not calling it that.”
“Sling bow?”
“Sounds like an indie film,” Gibbs said.
St. George reached the target and poked a finger through the hole.
“By my math,” she said, “it hits about four hundred and forty miles per hour. That’s double what an arrow can do from a compound bow but about half the velocity of your average pistol round. And it tumbles a lot, which is okay at close range but sucks as it gets farther out. It’s got a range of about thirty yards before the aim turns to crap.”
“That’s not bad.”
“It’s not great, either.” Danielle tapped her forehead. “The whole reason the bullet in the head works with exes is because the hydrostatic shock from a rifle round turns the brain to jelly. A pistol round bounces around inside the skull two or three times.”
“And turns the brain to jelly,” added Gibbs.
“Don’t some people survive getting shot in the head, though?”
Danielle nodded. “And so do exes, every now and then. Or they keep moving, anyway. But head shots are still the best bet, so that’s what I’m basing this around. And right now, this isn’t fast or powerful enough to take care of that.” She crossed her arms again. “I just need to figure out something that’ll go in a streamlined magazine, be light enough to give us decent range, but still strong enough to punch through a skull.”
St. George shrugged. “What about nails? Like a super nail gun or something.”
“Sounds good on the surface,” Gibbs said, “but how many stories have you heard about someone who survived with a nail in their head?”
St. George nodded. “Ahhh. Anyway, I need to go talk with Freedom, and I should let you get back to wo—”
“Hey,” called a voice. “St. George. How you doing, man?”
He turned. “Hey, Cesar.” The young man had filled out in the arms and chest, but St. George still thought of him as a kid. Probably because of the wispy beard and mustache Cesar kept trying to grow.
He still wore his driving gloves. They hid a series of long scars stretching across the palms of both hands. One time, while “driving” a getaway car, he’d hit a spike strip. The car’s tires had been ripped to shreds, and when Cesar phased out of the vehicle he discovered his hands and feet had been slashed, too. It’d been a lesson not to be too reckless with his powers.
Cesar set a canvas bag on the counter. “We got lunch,” he said. “You want some? There’s plenty. I can share.”
Gibbs pulled at the lip of the bag. “What’d you get for our last meal?”
“Our what? Stir fry.”
“Again?”
Cesar shook his head. “Bro, there’s three people in the whole Mount who make food to go. You want something else, open your own taco stand or something.”
“I’ve got to get going,” said St. George. He pushed himself off the ground and drifted backward through the door. “I’ll stop by when I get back. We’ll…have lunch and hang out for a while or something.”
Danielle tugged her welding gloves back on. “Sure,” she said with a nod. “Lunch.”
“I want to hang out and have lunch,” said Cesar.
Danielle waved the welding torch at him.
St. George spun in the air and sailed up into the sky. He rose above the buildings, turned once to get his bearings, and headed north toward the Corner. The sun was already low in the west. The day was already gone and he’d barely done anything.
Just as he remembered it was still morning, the sun roared toward him out of the west and came to a halt in the sky. It was shaped like a man. The brilliant silhouette crackled as it hung in the air in front of him.
George!
“Hey,” he said. “I wasn’t sure when you were due back.”
The wraith shook his head and pointed behind himself. You’re never going to guess what I found back there.
“In Santa Monica?”
Out in the Pacific. I mean, we’re superheroes in the middle of a zombie apocalypse and this is still really frakkin’ cool.
“IT’S AN ISLAND,” said Barry. “A man-made island. Right around here.” He spun his finger in a circle somewhere in the mid-Pacific.
Captain Freedom peered down at the map spread across the desk. St. George leaned in and almost bumped heads with the mayor. “Sorry,” he said.
“My fault,” said Richard. He was a short man with a beard he tried to keep neat and professional, but it kept getting away from him. He shuffled his feet a bit. Even after all his time running the Mount, even here in his own office, he was still timid around the heroes. Especially Stealth, who stood on the other side of the table, surrounded by her cloak.
Of course, most people were timid around Stealth. She still insisted on wearing her full uniform. Even people who didn’t know what she was capable of found the black, eyeless mask unnerving.
It also didn’t help that it had been her office for many years. Blinds had kept it shrouded in perpetual gloom, but now it was bright and well lit. The marble slab serving as the mayor’s desk had been her war table. Richard’s assistant, Todd, had even found some potted plants and a few generic paintings to give it some life.
The room was very different now…but to St. George, it still felt like her room.
Barry’s wheelchair had been pushed back into the corner to make more space around the table. He balanced on the edge of the desk and shoveled food into his mouth. His bowl held scrambled eggs, half a dozen random vegetables, and a good-sized helping of the “goat cheese” that came out of the Corner. Everyone just called it goat cheese rather than wondering where it might’ve really come from.
St. George looked at his friend. Barry still got double rations, but it wasn’t enough. Zzzap burned up more than he took in each day. Not by much, but the cumulative effect was starting to show. He’d always been thin, but recently his appearance leaned toward gaunt, and his dark skin looked ashy. Barry caught his eye, winked, and scraped up another spoonful of egg and veggies.
“Are you certain?” asked Stealth.
Barry looked at her blank mask. “There’s a man-made island out there? Yeah, of course.”
“Of the location.”
“Oh.” He swallowed another mouthful of food. “Pretty sure, yeah. I mean, there aren’t any landmarks. I’m going off magnetic flux lines in the atmosphere. It’s maybe seventeen or eighteen hundred miles from here, south-southwest. I saw the magnetic signature on the water from a few miles away and doubled back to check it out.”
Richard looked up from the map. “Magnetic signature?”
Barry’s bald head went up and down. “It’s a huge chunk of metal, so it makes ripples in the Earth’s magnetic field. Nothing huge. It stood out because it was in the middle of the ocean on top of the water.”
St. George drummed his fingers on the edge of the map. “What’s it like, this island? Is it a lot of boats or rafts or what?”
Barry set down his bowl, swept up a legal pad and a pen, and began to sketch quick outlines. “Boats,” he said. “It’s kind of like Waterworld. But, y’know, believable. Or maybe the Drexel colony.”
“The Drexel what?” asked St. George.
“Yeah,” Barry said. “When I was six I saw The Empire Strikes Back. That’s what turned me into a real sci-fi nut. My cousin Randy, he gave me this big pile of Star Wars comics he’d kinda grown out of and didn’t want anymore. A bunch of the old Marvel ones. I don’t think he had any idea what they were worth. I mean, I didn’t either, but I was six.”
Stealth flexed her fingers. “Is there a point to this story?”
He nodde
d again, with even more enthusiasm. “In one of the early story arcs Luke ends up on this planet, Drexel, that’s all water. But there are a bunch of old wooden ships that’ve been lashed together to make a big floating island, and the colonists who live there are in this ongoing war with people who ride sea dragons. And Luke has to figure out—”
“Sea dragons?” Richard interrupted.
“Yeah.”
“In Star Wars stories?”
Barry smiled. “I know, cool, right?”
“If the planet was all water,” asked St. George, “where’d the wooden ships come from?”
“Huh.” Barry’s smile faltered. His pen tapped against the notepad. “Y’know, I never thought about that as a kid. It wouldn’t be cost-effective to bring them there from another planet, would it?”
“If we could return to the matter at hand,” said Stealth. “The layout of this island?”
“Right.” Barry scratched at his diagram again with the pen. “There’s a cruise ship here in the center,” he said, tapping at the sketches. “Like the mountain in the middle of Skull Island. Then there’s an oil tanker and a freighter on either side of it, both facing the other way. The freighter has a bunch of shipping containers, but it looked like they’ve all been emptied out.” He circled part of his diagram, looked at them, and shrugged.
“How large are the ships?”
He closed his eyes. “I’d put the cruise ship around…nine hundred feet, maybe? The tanker and the freighter were both longer, but they sat a lot lower in the water.”
Stealth’s mask shifted beneath her hood.
“Thoughts?” asked St. George.
“Possibly a Panamax tanker, if Barry’s size estimate is correct. Although it would be unusual for one to be so far out in the Pacific.”
She said nothing else. Everyone’s attention drifted back to Barry. He finished some new additions to the diagram and sat back up on the desk’s corner. St. George offered an arm for balance, but Barry waved it away and leaned into the sketch again.
“Okay,” he said, pointing with the pen, “if I remember right, here and here are fishing boats. Or maybe some kind of oceanographic research. Greenpeace or something. Definitely some kind of business-work boat. These three are yachts. Really big, expensive-looking things. And then there’s a half dozen or so little boats around the edges. Smaller fishing boats, things like that. I think one of them might’ve been a tugboat.”
St. George glanced at him. “Out in the middle of the ocean?”
Barry shrugged. “It could’ve been a banana boat for all I know. I’m just saying what it looked like. And over here”—he tapped one side of the sketch—“was one of those boats where it’s two narrow hulls with a platform between them.”
“A catamaran,” said Stealth. “How are they all connected?”
“Ropes. Chains in a few places. There’s something between them, keeping the boats from hitting each other too hard. Maybe tires?”
A frown crossed Captain Freedom’s face. “Tires?”
Barry shrugged. “A bunch of round, nonconductive, and slightly magnetic objects, two or three degrees warmer than the water.” He tapped his temple by his eyes. “They looked like tires to me.”
“Where would they get tires in the middle of the ocean?”
“Automobile tires are manufactured worldwide,” Stealth said. “It is not difficult to believe a container ship would have at least one load of custom tires onboard.”
Richard tugged his tie straight. “People?”
Barry plucked a mushroom out of his bowl and swallowed it. “Not sure. A couple hundred? Six, maybe seven hundred, tops. Some of them were down belowdecks, and all the metal and water kind of screws with my vision.”
“Jesus,” said St. George. “Six hundred people just sitting out there.”
“If infected crew or passengers were contained,” Stealth said, “the survivors would be in an extremely safe position. Provided they could balance resources.”
“It looks like the freighter deck was turned into a garden,” said Barry. He used the pen to point at the diagram. “From about here to here.” He drew a dotted rectangle inside the ship’s outline. “Some of the tanker, too.”
“A lot bigger than what we started out with,” St. George said, “and we had five times more people.”
“A garden with soil?” asked Stealth. “It is not a hydroponics farm?”
“Nope,” Barry said. “It looks like they just spread about two feet of dirt across the deck and went at it. I think I saw potatoes and something green. Maybe cucumbers. Or carrots. I didn’t get close enough to be sure.”
St. George looked at Stealth. He knew the shifting surface of her mask well enough to know she was staring at the sketch. “Something wrong with that?”
“As the captain stated, they are in the middle of the ocean,” she said. “Assuming this was a modern container ship in 2009 with standard deck size, where did these people get over fifty-seven thousand cubic feet of soil?”
“Maybe it was in the storage containers, too?” suggested Richard.
“It is unlikely a merchant paid to ship high volumes of soil from Asia to North America,” she said.
“Maybe they stopped at an island?” St. George said.
“The configuration Barry describes would not be mobile.”
“The individual ships would be, though,” said Freedom. “They could’ve sent someone off to get dirt.”
Stealth’s head shifted inside her hood. “Based on these ship descriptions, that would require multiple trips. Such a project would require a great deal of fuel and a sizable workforce.”
“They’ve got people,” said St. George.
“And an oil tanker,” added Richard.
Barry shook his head. “I’m not sure raw crude would work as fuel, even in a diesel engine. I think it’d need some refining.”
“Which would require more work and resources,” said Stealth. “Were you lost?”
“Say what?” Barry asked.
She pushed the diagram aside and drew a line across the map with her finger. “A return flight from Hokkaido should not have taken you anywhere near this area. How did you end up there?”
“Oh,” said Barry. “Well, I was flying back and I realized I’d never seen Easter Island. You know, with the big stone heads.”
“They are called moai,” she said.
“Right. So I headed down that way and looked around, but I couldn’t find it. So I headed back up to come home and that’s when I saw Waterworld.”
Stealth didn’t respond. Her head bowed to the map and diagram again. She crossed her arms.
“Any sign of exes?” asked St. George.
Barry shook his head. “Couldn’t see anything. Like I said, it’s tough seeing all the way into the ships, but the decks didn’t seem to have any defenses set up, and most of the hatches were open.”
“So the island’s clean?”
“As near as I could tell. Also worth mentioning I didn’t see any electricity. No engines, no generators—they’re just drifting out there.”
“How did they react to you?” Stealth asked.
“Actually,” said Barry, “they didn’t. I didn’t see anyone looking right at me. It almost felt like a couple of them were trying not to look at me.”
“Too bright?” asked St. George.
Barry shrugged again. “Beats me.”
“Odd,” said Freedom.
“I know, right?”
They all looked at the map and the diagram.
“So,” said Richard, “the big question. What now?” He looked at St. George.
St. George nodded. “We should head out there,” he said. “Offer assistance or a safe port, I guess. Whatever they might need.”
Freedom cleared his throat. “Should we do this right now? We’re tight on resources as is, and if we need to accelerate the Eden project we’re going to need to focus our efforts there.”
“If we don’t do it soon,” said
Barry, “there’s a chance we might not be able to find them again. Not for a while, anyway. The whole thing’s drifting in the currents out there. A month from now it could be almost anywhere in the Pacific.”
“It’s just like contacting Japan,” said St. George. “We need to let them know they’re not alone. Give them some hope.”
“A noble sentiment,” said Stealth, “but also our only possible offer at this time. We have no access to any form of watercraft. For the moment, our ability to offer aid is limited.”
“I can get to a boat with no problem,” St. George pointed out.
“But for a crew and a truck with supplies,” she said, “it would take the better part of two days. That is time and resources we currently do not have.” She waved a hand at the map. “This should be treated like any of our other attempts to make contact with survivors. First we must ascertain if this group is in need of help and if it is willing to accept it.”
“I can fly back out there and talk to them,” said Barry.
“If you’ll forgive me for saying,” Richard said, “when you’re all light and electricity you can be a bit hard to understand. No offense.”
Barry smirked. “None taken.”
“It’s not that far offshore,” said St. George. “I mean, it’s closer than Hawaii. We could both fly out there. Seeing another physical person could be a good thing.”
“I can go physical,” Barry said.
“You can go naked and vulnerable,” Freedom said.
“Hey, some people like that.”
“Richard’s right,” St. George said. “It’s better if you don’t make contact alone. This could be a real scary moment for some people if they’ve gotten used to their world. I could bring a backpack, maybe offer them a few goodwill tokens, that sort of thing. There’s got to be something useful we’ve got extras of.” He glanced at the huge captain. “I could bring one of Freedom’s beacons so Barry can find them again later.”
“It would take you almost two days to cover such a distance,” said Stealth.
“I could do it.”