Really? Alone? In that thing? Are you crazy? Sometimes the questions were kindly meant, an expression of genuine concern; even total strangers tried to talk him out of it. But more often than not, the speaker was already writing him off. If the sea didn’t kill him, the barrier would—that blockade of floating explosives said to encircle the continent. Who in his right mind would tempt fate like that? And especially now, when not a single viral had been seen for, what, going on thirty-six months? Wasn’t a whole continent sufficient space for a restless soul to roam around in?
Fair enough, but not every choice came down to logic; a lot came from the gut. What Michael’s gut was telling him was that the barrier didn’t exist, that it had never existed. He was raising his middle finger to history, a hundred years of humanity saying, Not me, no way, you go on ahead without me. That or playing Russian roulette. Which, given his family history, wasn’t necessarily out of the question.
His parents’ suicide wasn’t something he liked to think about, but of course he did. In some room in his brain, a movie of that morning’s events was constantly running. Their gray, empty faces, and the tautness of the ropes around their necks. The slight creaking sound they made. The elongated shapes of their bodies, the absolute, unoccupied looseness of them. The darkness of their toes, bloated with pooled blood. Michael’s initial reaction had been complete incomprehension: he’d stared at the bodies for a good thirty seconds, trying to parse the data, which came to him in a series of free-floating words he couldn’t stick together (Mom, Dad, hanging, rope, barn, dead), before an explosion of white-hot terror in his eleven-year-old brain sent him dashing forward to scoop their legs into his arms to push their bodies upward, all the while screaming Sara’s name so she could come and help him. They’d been dead for many hours; his efforts were pointless. Yet one had to try. A lot of life, Michael had learned, came down to trying to fix things that weren’t fixable.
So, the sea, and his solo wanderings upon it. It had become a home of a kind. His boat was the Nautilus. Michael had taken the name from a book he’d read years ago, when he was just a Little in the Sanctuary: Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, an old yellowed paperback, pages popping loose, and on its cover the image of a curious, armor-plated vehicle that seemed like a cross between a boat and an undersea tank, entwined in the suctioning tentacles of a sea monster with one huge eye. Long after the details of the story had fallen away from his mind, the image had stayed with him, seared into his retinas; when it came time to christen his craft, after two years of planning and execution and plain old guesswork, Nautilus had seemed a natural. It was as if he’d been storing the name in his brain for later use.
Thirty-six feet from stern to bowsprit with a six-foot draft, one main and one headsail, masthead-rigged, with a small cabin (though he almost always slept on the deck). He’d found it in a boatyard near San Luis Pass, tucked away in a warehouse, still standing on blocks. The hull, made of polyester resin, was sound, but the rest was a mess—deck rotted, sails disintegrated, anything metal fatigued beyond use. It was, in other words, perfect for Michael Fisher, first engineer of Light and Power and oiler first class, and within a month he’d quit the refinery and cashed in five years of unspent paychecks to buy the tools he needed and hire a crew to bring them down to San Luis. Really? Alone? In that thing? Yes, Michael told them, unfolding his drawing on the table. Really.
How ironic that after all those years of blowing on the embers of the old world, trying to relight civilization with its leftover machines, in the end it should be the most ancient form of human propulsion that seized him. The wind blew, it back-eddied along the edge of the sail, it created a vacuum that the boat forever tried to fill. With every voyage he took, he went a little longer, a little farther, a little more crazily out there. He’d traced the coasts at the start, getting the feel of things. North and east along the coast to oil-mucked New Orleans and its depressing plume of gooey, river-borne, chemical stink. South to Padre Island, with its long, wild stretches of sand as white as talc. As his confidence grew, his trajectories expanded. From time to time he came across the anachronistic leavings of mankind—clumps of rusted wreckage piled along the shoals, ersatz atolls of bobbing plastic, derelict oil rigs bestriding massive slicks of pumped-out sludge—but soon he left all of these behind, driving his craft deeper into the heart of an oceanic wilderness. The water’s color darkened; it contained incredible depths. He shot the sun with his sextant, plotting his course with a stub of pencil. One day it occurred to him that beneath him lay nearly a mile of water.
The morning of the storm, Michael had been at sea for forty-two days. His plan was to make Freeport by noon, restock, rest for a week or so—he really needed to put on some weight—and set out again. Of course, there would be Lore to contend with, always an uncomfortable business. Would she even speak to him? Just glare at him from a distance? Grab him by the belt and drag him into the barracks for an hour of angry sex that, against his better judgment, he couldn’t make himself refuse? Michael never knew what it would be or which made him feel worse; he was either the asshole who had broken her heart or the hypocrite in her bed. Because the one thing he couldn’t find the words to explain was that she had nothing to do with any of it: not the Nautilus, or his need to be alone, or the fact that, although she was in every way deserving, he could not love her in return.
His thoughts went, as they often did, to the last time he’d seen Alicia—the last time anyone had, as far as he knew. Why had she chosen him? She had come to him in the hospital, on the morning before Sara and the others had left the Homeland to return to Kerrville. Michael wasn’t sure what time it was; he was asleep and awoke to see her sitting by his bed. She had this…look on her face. He sensed that she’d been sitting there for some time, watching him as he slept.
—Lish?
She smiled.
—Hey, Michael.
That was it, for at least another thirty seconds. No How are you feeling? or You look kind of ridiculous in that cast, Circuit, or any of the thousand little barbs that the two of them had fired at each other since they were little kids.
—Can you do something for me? A favor.
—Okay.
But the thought went unfinished. Alicia looked away, then back again.
—We’ve been friends a long time, haven’t we?
—Sure, he said. Absolutely we have.
—You know, you were always so damn smart. Do you remember…now, when was this? I don’t know, we were just a couple of kids. I think Peter might have been there, Sara, too. We all snuck up to the Wall one night, and you gave this speech, an actual speech, I swear to God, about how the lights worked, the turbines and the batteries and all the rest of it. You know, up until then, I thought that they just came on by themselves? Seriously. God, I felt so dumb.
He shrugged, embarrassed.
—I was kind of a showoff, I guess.
—Oh, don’t apologize. I thought it right then: That kid’s really got something. Someday, when we need him, he’s going to save our sorry asses.
Michael hadn’t known what to say. Never had he seen anyone who looked so lost, so weighed down by life.
—What did you want to ask me, Lish?
—Ask you?
—You said you needed a favor.
She frowned, as if the question didn’t quite make sense to her.
—I guess I did, didn’t I?
—Lish, are you okay?
She rose from her chair. Michael was about to say something else, he wasn’t sure what, when she leaned forward, brushed his hair aside, and, amazing him utterly, kissed him on the forehead.
—Take care of yourself, Michael. Will you do that for me? They’re going to need you around this place.
—Why? Are you going somewhere?
—Just promise me.
And there it was: the moment when he’d failed her. Three years later and still he was reliving it over and over, like a hiccup in time. The moment when she told him she was
leaving for good, and the one thing he could have said to keep her there. Somebody loves you, Lish. I love you. Me, Michael. I love you and I’ve never stopped and never ever will. But the words got tangled up somewhere between his mouth and his brain, and the moment slipped away.
—Okay.
—Okay, she said. And then was gone.
But the storm, on the morning of his forty-second day at sea: lost in these thoughts, Michael had let his attention drift—had noted, but failed to fully process, the sea’s growing hostility, the absolute blackness of the sky, the accumulating fury of the wind. Too quickly it arrived with an earsplitting blast of thunder and a massive, rain-saturated gust that slapped the boat like a giant hand, heeling it hard. Whoa, thought Michael, scrambling up the transom. What the holy fuck. The moment had passed to reef the sail; the only thing to do was take the squall head-on. He tightened the mainsheet and steered his boat close to the wind. Water was pouring in—foaming over the bow, dumping from the heavens in sheets. The air was lit with voltage. He locked the main in his teeth, pulled it as tight as it could go, and snapped it down in the block.
All right, he thought. At least you let me take a piss first. Let’s see what you’ve got, you bastard.
Into the storm he went.
—
Six hours later he emerged, his heart soaring with victory. The squall had blown through, carving a pocket of blue air behind it. He had no idea where he was; he had been thrown far off course. The only thing to do was head due west and see where he made landfall.
Two hours later, a long gray line of sand appeared. He approached it on a rising tide. Galveston Island: he could tell from the wreckage of the old seawall. The sun was high, the winds fair. Should he turn south for Freeport—home, dinner, a real bed, and all the rest—or something else? But the events of the morning made this prospect seem depressingly tame, a too-meager conclusion to the day.
He decided to scout the Houston Ship Channel. He could anchor for the night there, then proceed to Freeport in the morning. He examined his chart. A narrow wedge of water separated the north end of the island from the Bolivar Peninsula; on the far side lay Galveston Bay, a roughly circular basin, twenty miles wide, leading at its northeastern edge to a deep estuary, lined with the wreckage of shipyards and chemical plants.
Running before the wind, he made his way into the bay. Unlike the brown-tinged surf of the coastline, the water was clear, almost translucent, with a greenish cast. Michael could even see fish, dark shapes running below the surface. In places the shoreline was clotted with huge masses of debris, but elsewhere it seemed scrubbed clean.
The afternoon had begun to fade as he approached the estuary’s mouth. A large, dark shape stood in the channel. As he neared, the image came into focus: a massive ship, hundreds of feet long. It had come to rest midway between two stanchions of a suspension bridge that traversed the channel. He guided his craft closer. The ship was listing slightly to port, bow-down, the tops of its massive propellers just visible above the waterline. Was it aground? How had it gotten there? Probably the same way he had, pulled by the tides through Bolivar Pass. Across the stern, dripping with rust, was written the vessel’s name and registry:
BERGENSFJORD
OSLO, NORWAY
He drew the Nautilus alongside the closest stanchion. Yes, a ladder. He tied off, dropped his sails, then went below to fetch a pry bar, a lantern, an assortment of tools, and two one-hundred-yard lengths of heavy rope. He put his supplies in a backpack, returned to the deck, took a steadying breath, and began to climb.
Michael didn’t care for heights. Not much else got to him, except for that. At the refinery, circumstances often placed him somewhere far above the ground—swinging from a harness on the towers, chipping off the rust—and over time he’d become more brave about it, insofar as his crew could tell. But exposure went only so far in its curative effects. The ladder, steel rungs set into the concrete of the stanchion, was not, on close inspection, anywhere near as sturdy as it had appeared from below. Some of the rungs seemed barely attached. By the time he reached the top, his heart felt like it was stuffed against the back of his throat. He lay on his back on the suspension bridge’s roadway, just breathing, then peered over the edge. He guessed it was a hundred and fifty feet down to the ship’s deck, maybe more. Jesus.
He tied the rope to the railing and watched it fall. The trick would be using his feet to control his descent. Taking the rope in his hands, he leaned backward over the edge, swallowed hard, and stepped off.
For half a second he believed he had made the biggest mistake of his life. What a stupid idea! He was going to plummet like a rock to the deck. But then his feet found the rope, wrapping it in a death grip. Hand over hand, he made his way down.
Michael guessed the boat had been some kind of freight vessel. He headed for the stern, where an open metal staircase led to the pilothouse. At the top of the stairs he came to a heavy door with a handle that refused to move. He popped the handle loose with the pry bar and inserted the tip of a screwdriver into the mechanism. A bit of jiggling, tumblers clacking, and with a second pop of the pry bar the door swung free.
An eye-watering ammoniac funk filled the air—air that nobody had breathed for a century. Beneath the broad windshield, with its view of the channel, was the ship’s control panel: rows of switches and dials, flat-panel displays, computer keyboards. In one of the three high-backed chairs that faced the panel was a body. Time had turned it into little more than a shrunken brown stain encased by the moldy tatters of its clothing. Military-style epaulets with three stripes decorated the shoulders of its shirt. An officer, Michael thought, perhaps the captain himself. The cause of death was apparent: a hole in his skull, no bigger than the tip of Michael’s pinkie, marked the spot of the bullet’s entry. On the floor, beneath the man’s outstretched right hand, lay a revolver.
Michael found other bodies below decks. Nearly all were in their beds. He didn’t linger, merely added them to the count, forty-two corpses in all. Had they killed themselves? The orderliness of the bodies said so, yet the method was not apparent. Michael had seen this sort of thing before, but never so many, all in one place.
Traveling downward into the ship, he came to a room that was different from the others, with not one or two beds but many—narrow bunks attached two high on the bulkheads, the space bisected by a slim corridor. The crew’s quarters? Many of the cots were empty; he counted only eight bodies, including two that were naked, their limbs wound together in the cramped space of a lower bunk.
This space was more cluttered than the others. Rotted articles of clothing and miscellaneous objects covered much of the floor. Many of the walls beside the bunks were decorated: faded photographs, religious images, postcards. He gently freed one of the photographs and held it up to his lantern. A dark-haired woman, smiling for the camera, cradling an infant in her lap.
Something caught his eye.
A large sheet of paper, thin as tissue, taped to the bulkhead: at the top, in ornate lettering, were the words INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE. Michael loosened the tape and laid the paper across the bunk.
HUMANITY IN PERIL
Crisis Deepens as Death Toll Soars Worldwide
Virus extends its deadly reach to all continents
Ports and borders overrun as millions flee the spread of infection
Major cities in chaos as massive blackouts darken Europe
ROME (AP), May 13—The world stood on the edge of chaos Tuesday night as the disease known as the Easter Virus continued its deadly march across the globe.
Although the disease’s rapid spread makes estimates of the dead difficult, U.N. health officials say the toll numbers in the hundreds of millions.
The virus, an airborne variant of the one that decimated North America two years ago, emerged in the Caucasus region of central Asia just fifty-nine days ago. Health officials have been at pains to identify either a source of the virus or an effective treatment.
“Wh
at we can say at this point is that this pathogen is unusually vigorous and highly lethal,” said Madeline Duplessis, Chairman of the World Health Organization’s Executive Board, speaking from its headquarters in Geneva. “Morbidity rates are running very close to 100 percent.”
Unlike the North American strain, the Easter Virus does not require close physical contact to pass from person to person and can travel great distances attached to dust motes or respiratory droplets, causing many health officials to liken it to the Spanish influenza epidemic of 1918, which killed as many as 50 million people worldwide. Travel bans have done little to slow its spread, as have attempts by officials in many cities to prevent people from congregating in public places.
“I fear we are on the verge of losing control of the situation,” said Italian Health Minister Vincenzo Monti in an extended press briefing, during which coughing could be heard throughout the room. “I cannot stress enough the importance that people stay indoors. Children, adults, the elderly—none has been spared the effects of this cruel epidemic. The only way to survive this disease is not to catch it.”
Absorbed through the lungs, the Easter Virus acts swiftly to overwhelm the body’s defenses, attacking the respiratory system and digestive tracts. Early symptoms include disorientation, fever, headache, coughing, and vomiting with little or no warning. As the pathogen takes hold, victims experience massive internal hemorrhaging, typically leading to death within 36 hours, though some cases have been reported in which healthy adults have succumbed within as little as two hours. In rare instances, victims of the illness have exhibited the transformative effects of the North American strain, including a marked increase in aggressiveness, but whether any of these individuals have survived past the 36-hour threshold is not known.
The City of Mirrors: A Novel (Book Three of The Passage Trilogy) Page 5