by Peter Clines
It was supposed to be a three-week cruise with two stops in Mexico, but the Queen never actually docked in Mexico. Medical scares kept us out in the harbor. A week later they announced our return to California was going to be delayed. The crew smiled a lot and tried to act like it was no big deal.
Two days after that, the first infected people showed up. A couple who’d spent half the cruise in their stateroom. They’d told everyone it was the flu. It turned out their flu was the ex-virus people had been talking about. All the rumors we’d joked about with strangers over dinner were true. The ex-virus turned people into actual, walking-dead zombies.
The infected couple bit five people before security contained them all.
A couple days later there was a second outbreak. Eight people that time.
The crew stopped smiling. We still didn’t head for shore. At the start of the fifth week, a helicopter with the cruise line logo made the first supply drop. Four big pallets. The helicopter didn’t actually land, it just lowered them with a winch one by one. Mostly food, but there were some medical supplies in there, too. It reminded me of news footage of third world countries getting relief supplies after a natural disaster.
Two weeks after that was the next outbreak. Twenty-two dead. The captain said we had to dump the bodies overboard. There was no room left in the ship’s morgue. I remember a lot of people being shocked at the idea of dumping bodies, and exchanging a look with John that said we were both surprised a cruise ship had a morgue.
The day after the bodies went into the ocean, a bunch of people banded together and took three of the lifeboats. The next day four more were gone. By the end of the week all of them had vanished.
I think it was early July when we got the last drop. A Navy helicopter this time. Only three pallets, but we were feeding a lot less people at that point.
Has it only been three years? It feels like twice that. Sometimes I can barely remember my life before this.
I stop looking at what’s left of the Queen’s logo. Maleko is going to want to hear about this new ship. He doesn’t like to be kept waiting.
I walk up the gangplank, feel it tremble with each step. A crowd of people mill about the top, aboard the Queen, and they draw back a bit when they see me coming toward them. They’re all nervous around me. Many of them are openly scared.
They should be scared. They know I make the tough calls. I do the things that need to be done to keep Lemuria safe.
“New arrivals,” I bark at them. “Watch yourselves.”
They flinch and nod.
It’s exhausting. They just don’t get it. If there was another way that would keep us safe, I’d do it. I don’t like having to be like this.
Sometimes, though, they disgust me. So many of them won’t do anything to protect themselves. They aren’t willing to take action. They think it’s somebody else’s problem. A few of them have even suggested it’s not a problem at all. That in “the big picture” we’re pretty safe and should stop assuming the worst is going to happen.
The worst isn’t going to happen. The worst already happened. My job now is making sure the next worst thing doesn’t happen, whatever it might be.
I walk through the ship. Up stairs. Down halls. Over the past three-plus years, I’ve come to know the Queen better than the old two-bedroom John and I shared just off Fremont Street.
I push open the doors and walk out into the courtyard. I remember being here by the pool as a passenger. Sitting by the pool in the shade and ordering big rum drinks we really couldn’t afford but it was our honeymoon. The deck chairs and umbrellas are gone now, of course, scavenged for firewood and fabric.
Maleko sits in his chair under the gazebo. A bar stood under it once, where they made those big rum drinks, but that got smashed too. I recognize his pose, the casual way he looks off to the side. Walking up here has been a waste of my time. I could’ve been helping to process the new arrivals or their ship.
But he’s the boss. With him, we have order and security. That matters more than any inconvenience I have to deal with.
He looks human right now. He knows I prefer talking to him this way. He’s a good-looking man, if you don’t think about the monster under his skin. Merman. Atlantean. Were-shark. Landshark. A lot of names people used when they thought he couldn’t hear them.
Then everyone learned that Nautilus could hear everything.
“Eliza,” he says.
“Maleko.”
“Any trouble?”
He still doesn’t look at me. I’ve never asked what he did before this, when he wasn’t being a superhero. It feels like he spent a lot of time reading life-coach books about “how to be executive” and that sort of thing.
“Nothing out of the ordinary,” I say. “Most of them are a little stunned. They’re headed to their exams now.”
“No signs of infection?”
“Nothing obvious.”
“No resistance?”
“Nothing out of the ordinary.”
He nods once. “Do you think they are who they say they are?”
Two and a half years ago, a group of pirates attacked us. They had a drifting yacht and they called out to us about starving families and sick children. The guns came out when they docked. They killed six people before we fought back. Three more before Nautilus showed up and they tried to shoot him, too. He’s just flesh and bone, but it’s really dense flesh. The bullets barely slowed him down. He punched one hard enough to crush his rib cage. Threw four of them almost half a mile out to sea, one after another. The others surrendered, but we sent them away anyway. We’d never be able to trust them.
We learned our lesson the hard way. The world was different. The rules were different. Don’t believe what anyone says. Trusting gets people killed. You can’t build real security on trust and beliefs. You build it on what you know.
“None of them have weapons,” I tell him. “No other signs of life from their ship, but we won’t know for sure until we search it.”
“When do you want to go?”
“As soon as possible,” I say. I step under the gazebo into the shade and lean up against one of the posts. “Their boat has solar cells.”
His brows go up. “Are you sure?”
“It’s only half a mile out. They’re pretty clear.” I know how he’ll react to the next words. “Lots of people saw them. Not sure how many realized what they are.”
He raises a hand to rub the bridge of his nose. “Damn.”
I nod. “Yeah.”
He finally turns to look at me. “Did they say anything about them?”
“The solar cells?”
“The new arrivals. Did they mention having power to anyone?”
“Yeah. Sounds like they were just using it for their galley. Refrigeration and distilling water.”
“Nothing else?”
“That’s all they said.”
“But they must have a radio.”
I shrug.
He shifts in the chair and rubs his nose again. He sighs. “People will want to sweep every channel and set up shifts to monitor it,” he says. “We all know it’s pointless, but they’ll do it anyway. Human nature.”
“Probably, yeah.”
Now he drums his fingers on the arm of the chair. It’s an old routine. He goes through it every time. He worries that he’ll seem heartless, so he has planned responses he falls back on, even when it’s just the two of us.
He stops drumming, takes in a breath, and holds it. For a moment I think he’s going to change. Then he lets the breath out between his teeth. “We’re getting close to harvest time with the potatoes, aren’t we? I’m not sure we can afford to have people distracted right now.” He stares at me, waiting for me to say it. He never likes to be the one to suggest things.
I know what happens when people aren’t paying attention. When they aren’t doing their job. That’s how John died. He was bitten because somebody slacked off in those early days of helicopter drops. Someone didn’t
do their job.
And then I—
I made it safe for everyone. That’s what I do now. That’s my job.
“The sun’s already on the way down,” I say. “We’ll tell everyone we’re searching the boat first thing in the morning. Tonight you can slip over there, do a quick search, and disable the radio somehow.”
He thinks about it and nods. “Maybe we’ll get lucky,” he says. “Maybe it will already be broken.”
“Maybe,” I say.
“I know how troubling it is to do this again,” he says. “How wrong it feels. But I believe you’re right. It’s what we need to do.”
John knew what needed to be done. He died saving me. He died so I could live. So I could make sure everyone lives.
So I could make sure he stayed dead.
Maleko and I talk for a few more minutes. The usual stuff. He congratulates me on being so brave, like he always does. I tell him I’m not brave, like I always do. He gives me one of his tight smiles. I wonder if he had braces when he was little.
I head back down to the Pacific Eagle. People will be staring out at the new ship, wondering if it’s got some magic button on it that we can push and it’ll fix the world. They don’t want to admit the world’s broken forever and they just need to deal with it.
I wasn’t lying to Maleko. I’m not brave. I’m just not scared.
John and I saw this Affleck movie once, Devil-man or something like that. One of the superhero movies he always wanted to watch. He liked it, but he said lots of people online liked to shout about how awful it was. It wasn’t a horrible movie, but I don’t remember much about it. A blind superhero just didn’t make a lot of sense to me.
One of the things I do remember was a bit with a priest. Devil-man was in the confessional—not in costume, just as Affleck—and he tells the priest he’s not afraid of dying. And the priest tells him that a man without fear is a man without hope.
It’s a catchy line. And it’s true. I’m not brave. I just haven’t been scared since I gave up hoping things would get better.
HIS OWN COUGHING woke him up. There was saltwater in his mouth, scratching at his tongue. He spit it out, coughed up more, and spit that out, too.
St. George opened his eyes enough to wonder where he was. Somewhere dark. His clothes were damp, and the cold reached through his wet suit. He blinked a few times, salt stung his eyes, and he blinked a few more. He reached up to rub them, and something tugged at his wrists.
“Owwww,” said Barry from behind him. “Watch it. You almost dislocated both my arms.”
“You’re okay?”
“I was going to ask you the same thing. They squeezed a lot of water out of you, and you’ve been out cold since then.”
“How long?”
“About twelve hours, I think. I nodded off for a while, and you were still out when I woke up. The sun went down about an hour, hour and a half ago.”
St. George looked around and tried to blink more water from his vision. He thought they were under the wooden gazebo in the cruise ship’s courtyard. His eyes cleared a little more and he saw the slats were much closer. And made of metal.
The cage had been bolted together out of railings and a few long strips of steel. It sat a few yards from a two-high stack of storage containers. Half a dozen low bonfires lit up all of the metal deck he could see. In the flickering light he saw the outline of plants twenty or thirty feet away, and his nose caught the strong smell of…what had they called it? Night soil.
He moved his arms again. He and Barry were handcuffed back to back, wrist to wrist. Shackles connected his feet.
“Madelyn,” he said.
“Yeah,” said Barry. “Still dead.”
St. George closed his eyes and took a few slow breaths. He felt a faint tingle at the back of his throat. The faint ember of a fire, weak but growing.
“How’d they get you?”
Barry sighed. “The whole thing was a trap, George. All the little kids there at that gathering? Human shields.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I think I realized that a minute into beating the crap out of him.”
“If this is what happens when you beat the crap out of someone, I think you need to get some pointers from your girlfriend.”
“Not in the mood, Barry.”
“Yeah, sorry. Anyway, I couldn’t fire any bursts without hurting a kid or blowing a hole straight through the ship. Then Nautilus came back with you half dead, put one of his funky Deep One hands over your nose and mouth, and said he’d smother you if I didn’t turn human. Soooo…yeah, not a lot of options.”
“Why haven’t you changed back to the energy form?”
“Ummmm…You might not have noticed but we’re all in kind of close proximity here.”
“Yeah?”
“George, when I change everything around me tends to get incinerated by the radiation surge. The air all around the energy form hits six hundred degrees before I get it under control. It only takes a second, but still…”
“So? You know it wouldn’t hurt me. Might’ve woken me up sooner.”
“No, you’re missing the…Can you look over your shoulder without giving me a concussion or something?”
St. George shuffled on his butt and twisted his head around.
A little girl with curly hair and hazel eyes stared back at him. In the dim light, her skin was a few shades darker than Barry’s. “H’lo,” she said.
The hero looked at her for a minute. His eyes flitted down, saw her ragged clothes and the shackle chaining her to his friend, then looked back to her face. “Hi,” he said.
“George,” said Barry, “this is Kaitlyn. She’s three and a half and she’s been hearing all about you while you were asleep.”
She nodded once and continued to stare at him.
There was another child, a little boy, shackled to the other leg. He was curled up alongside Barry’s calf with his eyes closed, his head just below the knee. The boy’s nostrils trembled as he slept.
“That’s Colin. He’s four and he’s never read a comic book in his life. I was getting him caught up on Batman until he passed out. It’s been a long day for them.”
The chains were maybe twelve inches long. Even if they hadn’t been in a cage, the kids couldn’t get far away from Barry. Not far enough to be safe.
“Okay,” St. George said. He stretched his legs, rolled his ankles, and then snapped the shackles with a quick flex of his hips. “Give me a minute and I’ll have us out of here.”
“Stop!”
“What?”
“You need to get caught up before you do anything, okay?”
“I think I’ve got the general idea.”
“No, believe me, you don’t. These people have gone full Murderworld on us, okay.” He said it in a calm, almost amused voice. St. George realized it was for Kaitlyn’s benefit.
He took a breath and felt the fire smolder a little more in his throat. “Okay,” he said. “What’s going on?”
Barry tipped his head toward one of the small bonfires. “If you look around,” he said, “you should be able to spot a couple guards watching us. I saw whatshername, Alice, out there for a while before it got dark, and then one of the guys who was there when I was getting my ‘inspected by’ seal of approval.”
St. George glimpsed some faces in the flickering light. “Yeah,” he said. “I see one of the guys from my inspection. And that guy with the big mustache who kept staring at Madelyn. Mitchell?”
“Mitchel Kirby with one l,” sighed Barry.
“What?”
“Better not to ask. He’s a talker. So, I can’t break out without giving Kaitlyn and Colin an extreme sunburn. If you break out, or they think you’re trying to break out, they start shouting an alarm.”
“And Nautilus comes back? I wasn’t ready for him, but I can—”
“No, George. The alarm goes off and three cages of kids get dumped in the ocean.”
“What?” St. George twisted his head around again. Kait
lyn blinked at him.
“Yeah, I know,” said Barry. “Serious Marina del Lex–level supervillain stuff. Three cages, four kids in each cage all around the island. I can’t catch any of them in the energy form, and…well, you’re not fast enough. Even if we knew right where they were, you might be able to get one of them. Not all three.”
“How do you know all this?”
“They explained it all to me,” Barry said. “Nautilus and his sidekick-girlfriend, Eliza. They took great pains to explain it all to me.”
St. George looked at the shackle cuffs on his ankles and the broken chain hanging down to the deck. “You believe them?”
“I wasn’t sure at first. They used the kids at the meeting as shields, yeah, but this hostages-in-cages thing is a whole new level of messed up. But while I was waiting for you to wake up I’ve been talking with Kaitlyn and Colin. And I think I’m a believer now.”
“H’lo,” she said again. This time she raised her hand and flapped her fingers. The boy wheezed once at the mention of his name, then slipped back to sleep.
“Hi,” said St. George again.
“Kaitlyn’s a little shy at first,” Barry said, “but once she gets to know you she tells lots of great stories. Right?”
The girl nodded, giggled, and then yawned.
“You want to go to sleep?” he asked her. “You’ve been real good keeping me company while George was asleep. He can talk with me now. We’ll keep quiet.”
“ ’Kay,” she said. She rolled over and put her head against Barry’s other calf. “G’night, Barry. G’night, Sajorj.”
“Sleep tight,” said Barry.
She yawned again and her eyes fluttered.
He tipped his head back so it was brushing St. George’s. “So, here’s what I’ve put together from what the kids told me, kind of aging some of it up a bit so it makes sense,” he said. “Nautilus is a full-on hero to these people. Pretty much everyone out here believes the reason they’re all alive is because of him. He helped put the boats together into this island, he finds other boats for them to salvage, fishes with them, takes care of any exes, all that sort of stuff. And he tells lots of stories about back before the ex-virus, when he was a full-time superhero with his best friend, the Mighty Dragon.”