The Boat

by Christine Dougherty

  And now the kid, Mohammed, was dead. People were going to lose their confidence in his leadership abilities if he didn’t do something. But how can you fix a situation like this? Can’t bring the shitty kid back, now can you? No.

  He’d just have to think of something else.

  Chapter Five

  “I should have stopped him,” Steve said. His voice was equal parts anger and anguish. He was standing behind Maggie as she leaned over the survivor from the life raft, stitching the gash on his forehead. Brian and Denny sat nearby, ready to spring forward if the guy woke up struggling. Randy and Bonnie had taken Babygirl into the salon.

  She looked around and then bent back to her work. “You tried.”

  Steve shook his head, watching the Jeep that careened along the shoreline. Two people were in the front seat. Only one in the back. They were too far away to see their expressions but Steve read fear and despair into them, anyway.

  “I could have tried harder.”

  “It isn’t your responsibility…Mohammed wasn’t your responsibility. His aunt let him go. Not you.”

  Steve’s hands balled into fists at his sides. Maggie, sensing his tension, glanced toward shore. Then she looked back down. “They’ll make it. Don’t worry.”

  She felt his movement and assumed it to be a nod. She and Steve had become close. She liked him and sensed his willingness to have things between them progress beyond friendship. But she missed her husband.

  “Big Daddy, you have eyes on them? Over.” Steve’s shadow slipped over Maggie as he stepped past her to the bow.

  “We’re all set. Ready to roll. No worries, man. Over.” Carl’s voice over the walkie was calm but somehow still burly as though his beard were a testosterone amplifier. Steve’s eyes went from the racing Jeep to Big Daddy, which sat idle, fifty feet from the end of a long pier. The Jeep rounded a turn and shot down the pier, headed right for the water.

  A shambling crowd of corpses slogged their way onto the pier behind the Jeep. Many were forced to the sides and they tumbled down the steep shoreline and rolled into the water. Big, angry Atlantic waves rolled them like bundled sticks, bashing them into the pylons under the pier. Some of them broke apart like poorly constructed dolls. Others dropped off the sides and plopped into the water further down.

  The Jeep reached the end of the pier and turned in a tight circle, facing the onrushing hoard. Two people in the Jeep jumped out and ran in the direction they’d just come…straight toward the advancing line of corpses.

  They kneeled in unison and threw ropes over their shoulders. The pier developed a split as the section with the Jeep began to move with the waves. Big plastic barrels revealed themselves under the raft as it rocked. The third person raised his hand in an all clear to Big Daddy and her monstrous diesel roared to life. Big Daddy chugged forward. She was powerful, not fast, but still fast enough to put a gap of five feet between the Jeep’s raft and the crowd of dead.

  The first several rows of corpses never broke their painful, shambling run and they dropped straight off the end of the pier, still reaching for the people on the departing raft. The crowds behind continued to push forward and more of them plopped into the ocean. They looked like the arcade game where you drop a coin down a chute and hope for a shiny cascade of quarters to reach a tipping point inside the machine, making you arcade rich.

  On the deck of the ThreeBees, Steve lowered the binoculars. Part of him–the scared, despairing, flagging part–wanted too much to laugh at the tumble of reanimated corpses. To laugh at their flailing, their insectile stupidity. He wanted to see them as the enemy and revel as each one became a sinker, chum, fishfood.

  But you may as well curse the rain, he thought. May as well give a tornado the finger; tell a tsunami to go fuck itself.

  It didn’t help. And it didn’t stop them.

  On Big Daddy, a winch whined, dragging the Jeep raft close. The railing was clustered with men. Normally they would be cheering and the people on the raft would be celebrating, hands clasped above their heads. The unpacking of each new treasure–food, water, clothing–would have been greeted with fresh cheers.

  But there was no sense of celebration this time.

  No one counted this run as a victory.

  Not after losing Mohammed.

  Steve turned back to Maggie. She was laying a bandage over the guy’s forehead and taping it down. She worked quickly and economically, wasting nothing.

  Steve had been part of the boats for ten days before Maggie showed up. She had come through the Pine Barrens. She was bedraggled and too thin but she led the little girl, having found her in a trailer park near the shore. When she was finally on the boat, she’d been invaluable because of her nursing skills.

  It was Adam who had told her to stay on ThreeBees instead of joining the community on Flyboy. She preferred it, anyway. Although ThreeBees was substantially smaller, it seemed to her less claustrophobic.

  “Okay,” she said and sat back. She stripped off the latex gloves. “Denny, would you and Brian grab a blanket? I want to get him out of the sun.”

  As they trotted away, she looked at Steve, bringing a hand up to shade her eyes. “Do you think we should restrict him in some way? Restrict his access to the boat?”

  “Why do you say that?” Steve was surprised that she seemed to have the same mixed feelings about the survivor, especially since his own misgivings were so vague.

  She shrugged, glancing at the man. His eyelids fluttered slightly. He could be coming out of his faint. Or he could be faking unconsciousness. Maggie looked back at Steve, shaking her head.

  She stood and her voice dropped to a whisper. “I don’t know why I say that. There’s just something…” She put her hands on her hips, staring with consternation at the man she’d just stitched up.

  “Off,” Steve said, supplying the word she needed. She turned to him and smiled briefly. She nodded.

  “Off, yeah. Something just isn’t quite right,” she said.

  Now it was Steve’s turn to shrug. “Yes, I felt it, too. But I don’t know how much of that is just us…I mean, nothing feels exactly right, does it?”

  She nodded her head in acknowledgement and sighed. The boys were back with the blanket and they rolled him onto it.

  “No restrictions, then?” Maggie said.

  “Well, I wouldn’t say that. We don’t know him. The circumstances of him being here are odd. Better to be safe than sorry especially with…” he trailed off and nodded toward the salon doors where Babygirl stood holding Jade’s hand. Baby’s angelic lightness was in sharp contrast to Jade’s jet-black hair and black eyes. Both were beautiful. And vulnerable.

  Maggie hated that being female, being young, made them vulnerable.

  “Can you take him to Big Daddy?”

  “Yeah, we’ll do that. It would be for the best. Let me get over there and get a bigger jet…yours are all one seaters, right?”

  “We’ll come with you,” Denny said, standing. “Me and Brian. We’ll help you keep an eye on him.”

  Steve laughed, not unkindly. “That’s okay, Denny, we need you here, on ThreeBees. If you and Brian left, who would protect her?”

  Another dig of annoyance jabbed Maggie, made worse because she knew it was true. She also knew she’d be much more fearful if she didn’t have Denny and Brian on the boat. She liked that they were in the salon. Anyone coming aboard would have to go through them, and they were young, strong and fit.

  Singer, Jade’s brother, was young, too, but he didn’t come across as strong and fit. He was almost as thin as his sister with the same lithe, graceful body type. The two of them could pass for twins.

  Maggie’s smile was tight, rueful. “Come on, Den, you don’t really want to leave us do you? For Big Daddy? I hear it smells like dirty socks over there. Besides, who would I train? If you guys left?”

  Maggie had been giving the two of them what she called EMT training. Both Denny and Brian enjoyed it and not just because it passed the time.
Because it made them valuable. Denny was smart and he was starting to see that ‘valuable’ would be an outstanding commodity in their new world. Just look at that guy Adam. He was a total tool, but he ran the show because he’d been able to figure out some of the things on that big boat, Flyboy. Now he douched it up and everyone just said yes sir to him all the time.

  Not that Denny wanted to be a tool or a douche. He just didn’t want to be one of the shuffling multitudes like most of the people on Flyboy. When he found his parents someday, they’d be really proud of him. Especially his dad. Denny never admitted to himself that he might not find his parents. But his bad dreams were ones where he found them floating (inexplicably together) next to the boat. In the dream he bent over to try and pull them into the boat but then they reached up, their mouths opening and their eyes deadly empty, and they pulled him over into the water. He’d wake shivering from that one.

  Steve jet skied off and Denny and Brian carried the guy into the salon to wait for Steve to come back with the two man jet. At their entrance, Jade faded back down the stairs to her stateroom, taking Babygirl with her.

  Maggie stayed on deck, tidying and wiping blood from the teak deck boards. The guy had bled a lot. Head wound, she thought, they bleed like crazy. It had been a clean cut–surgical, almost–and straight across his forehead. He was lucky half his face hadn’t folded over on itself.

  “Maggie, this is Steve, you there? Over.”

  Maggie sat on the bench that curved around the inside of the hull and picked up the walkie-talkie. “I’m here, Steve, what’s up? Over.”

  “Listen, Maggie, we’re having some problems over here, will you guys be okay for a bit? With your passenger? Over.”

  “We’re fine; take care of business. Over.”

  “Over and out.”

  She sighed and looked across to Big Daddy. Big Daddy, what a name, she thought. But fitting, I guess, for its purpose. Tugging and nudging, putting boats where they were supposed to be. Keeping them from harm. Providing.

  She smiled.

  A gunshot echoed across the water. Maggie recoiled in shock, almost as if she had been hit.

  Someone had fired a gun on Big Daddy.

  ~ ~ ~

  “Big Daddy…Steve, what happened? We heard a gunshot. Over.” Maggie’s voice from the walkie-talkie on his belt, trying for calm, but Steve heard the panic that wanted to break through. He felt Maggie’s panic himself, but was trying to quell it.

  He stood with his hands up, looking at Sujon, Mohammed’s aunt. Tears coursed down her cheeks and her teeth were bared in rage. She held a gun in thin, trembling arms. Her entire body shook. The gun was pointed at Steve. Light smoke curled from the barrel.

  Carl rolled on the deck between them, cursing and holding his leg.

  “Where is Mohammed?” she said. Her voice was shaking, choked.

  “Sujon, you have to put that gun down. You don’t want to hurt anyone else.” Steve said but he didn’t move, not yet.

  “Where is he? Where is his body?”

  “He was…he was…left behind; Sujon, they had to leave him behind.” Steve hears the despair in his own voice, the guilt. They should not have had to leave Mohammed behind because Steve should have done more to stop his going.

  “Who?” she asked and her gun traced the line of men who stood behind Steve on the deck. “Who left him? Who left a little boy to be torn apart by the dead?”

  A man’s head fell as a sob escaped him. Sujon’s gun swiveled to him as levelly as if she were a twenty year sniper veteran. “It was you? You left him? You left a child?”

  Steve heard the loathing in her voice. He stepped neatly between her and the man she’d targeted.

  “It’s not his fault, Sujon, don’t aim that gun at him. You know it isn’t his fault.”

  “It’s your fault,” she said, her voice a shaking ruin in danger of imminent collapse. “Your fault.” Tears coursed steadily from her red-rimmed eyes. Steve had a distant twinge of surprise that she could even see. Everything must be a blurred swirl to her.

  Her hands shook and her finger gripped and relaxed reflexively on the trigger. If he didn’t do something quick, get through to her, she was going to shoot again. This time, it might not be a grazing leg wound.

  “Sujon, it isn’t my fault, it isn’t anyone’s fault. It just happened. It’s terrible. No one wanted it to happen but it did; it did happen. We’re all upset about it, Sujon, but no one is responsible. No one is at fault.”

  Sujon blinked rapidly. Steve noted how slack her clothes lay against her skin, how dry and malnourished she looked. We all look like that now, he thought. We are all like the sinkers except just not dead. Not yet.

  Abruptly, Sujon’s tears stopped. “Yes. It is someone’s fault. Someone was responsible for Mohammed.” Her eyes were alight with some terrible inner fire. She stepped back three quick paces until her back was to the rail. “I was responsible for Mohammed,” she said and turned the gun to her own face. She pulled the trigger.

  The top half of her head disintegrated, blowing blood and gobbets of brain and bone into the air. Steve and everyone nearest her were peppered in gore.

  Steve had stepped forward when he’d realized her intent. But his hand closed on nothing as her body toppled over the rail and caught in the lines criss-crossing the side of Big Daddy. She dangled, half headless and twitching, one bare foot kicking.

  Steve stared at Sujon’s sandals on the deck. They were light green with sparkling faux gems on the straps. Very pretty. She’d been blown right out of them. He cocked his head at a strange patter, like rain, and realized it was her blood, raining into the ocean below.

  He felt his gorge rise and he stepped forward, drawing a knife from his pocket and flinging it open. He cut Sujon’s bonds in two furious swipes, nearly cutting off his own thumb in the process. Her body tumbled into the ocean below.

  He turned away and stared at his men. Each set of eyes that met his were round with shock. All faces had drained of color. A few men had bent over themselves, crying or trying not to vomit, Steve couldn’t tell which.

  In his despair, his eyes went to the deck of ThreeBees, which was facing the side where Sujon had shot herself. Maggie stood at the rail, utterly still. Steve raised a shaking hand to her and she raised hers back.

  What a fucking mess, he thought. Is this our world, now? Is this our only option?

  He wiped a tickling drip from his cheek and stared at the smear of gelatinous gray matter shivering delicately on his fingers.

  Yes, most likely.

  ~ ~ ~

  “That was Sujon, wasn’t it? Was that Sujon? Mohammed’s aunt? She just shot herself. Didn’t she? Didn’t she shoot herself?” Denny’s eyes were feverish. Maggie put a hand on his arm, trying to calm him. She nodded.

  “Yes, I’m pretty sure she did.”

  “Well, but why? Why would she? Why did she…I mean, it doesn’t make sense. For her to…to kill herself.” He dropped his head, thinking, considering.

  “I think it was just too much for her,” Maggie said, patting Denny’s back. Brian turned away, embarrassed but also near tears. It’s strange, Maggie reflected to herself, these people who had seen so much horror in that first wave of panic are still not immune. None of us are immune. We’ve had two months of relative calm and we’re ready to pat it on its ass, call it good, and assume it’s here to stay.

  How complacent.

  How stupid.

  “She just couldn’t take it, Denny. She was…” Maggie trailed off, realizing she couldn’t put herself in Sujon’s shoes. She didn’t know what it was like. She’d had no children of her own, no nieces or nephews, no one she was solely responsible for. Babygirl flitted into her mind but Maggie pushed her aside. Maggie was not responsible for Babygirl, they were all responsible for Babygirl.

  Not just me, Maggie thought, and the thought was touched by a tinge of resentment. Then she pushed that aside, too.

  “I think we should probably plan on having o
ur visitor stay the night,” she said and turned away from the railing, away from her view of Big Daddy. “I think they’re going to be distracted over there for a while.”

  Denny stayed at the rail, his head down. Maggie thought about going back to talk to him, comfort him some more. But this was life now, she decided, and he’d have to just face up to it. He was old enough. He was an adult.

  There had been a furious burst of chatter over the walkie-talkies as the people on Flyboy wanted to know what happened. Maggie had ascertained that the shot fired had mostly just grazed Carl’s leg so she wouldn’t be needed. There were questions of retrieving Sujon’s body, but most people took a ‘what for?’ attitude on that. They’d only end up burying her at sea anyway, right? Let her rest, poor thing. At least she wouldn’t reanimate, not with half her head gone.

  Severe damage to the brain, it turned out, was the key to dropping the walking dead.

  Adam had addressed and readdressed Steve several times over the walkie-talkie, the tone and pitch of his voice escalating through the octaves until he’d seemed to realize that Steve wasn’t answering the phone, so to speak. There had been no more from Adam, but Maggie found the silence ominous.

  Adam had, in Denny’s words, ‘a kink in his dick’ for Steve.

  Thinking of the term now, Maggie smiled, but it was brief. She surveyed the deck in the fading light. Cleaned up. She looked back to Big Daddy, almost expecting (hoping?) to see Steve at the railing, but he isn’t there. No one is.

  Everything seemed to quiet as the darkness fell.

  Chapter Six

  Maggie eased herself into the double bed next to Babygirl. Baby’s lips had gone slack around her thumb and she was covered in a light sweat. Maggie brushed a hand over the girl’s forehead and marveled that her skin could be so cool despite the uncomfortable heat in the stuffy cabin.