The next morning it began to rain. The rain was yellow. On board the ketch, now named Salvation, Dr. Anders looked at a drop of rain under her microscope.
The rain was filled with parasites.
We were immune, but how many survivors in the bay area were not?
The day after the eruption we said our goodbyes to Alcatraz and those staying behind and set sail in the Salvation, the sloop now called Deliverance, and Randall’s boat, Liberty.
As we passed under the Golden Gate Bridge, we looked back, and saw biomasses floating in the water. The stews of living matter were small but growing. And was there a redness creeping up the distant shoreline on the north side of the bridge? I think there was.
* * * * *
We sailed into the unknown, in a world of change.
* * * * *
I’ll be closing this journal shortly. I’ve written everything I could, everything I can remember.
Behind me in this quiet cabin our youngest sailor Sissy and Renfield’s cat Skyhook are fast asleep. Sissy was having nightmares. Renfield thought having Skyhook close by would help, and he was right. They are inseparable. Sometimes Sissy calls me Mister Scary Face, but she also gives me hugs from time to time. It seems she has adopted me, just as she adopted Skyhook.
Perhaps that little girl will take up this tale another day, when there is more to tell.
It is night. I’m going to go up on deck and bring Benjamin a cup of hot tea. We have lots of tea; the Chinese learned how to preserve it by packing it into bricks long ago. I’m going to share a cup of tea and talk with Ben, he’s becoming a fine man and I enjoy his company.
We’ve been at sea over a month. We added two more boats to our small fleet, one carrying a family of five on a journey much like ours, the Eriksons, from San Diego, and one found derelict and offering much needed extra living space.
The Hawaiian Islands were covered in biomass tissue. We sailed on past them. At sea we’ve seen great patches of that hybrid tissue floating on the currents.
Twice now we’ve had to burn away patches of biomass that were growing on the sides of the Salvation like barnacles.
Remember how I mentioned parasites that cause the smiler sickness can survive in any bodily fluid except urine? We learned by accident, when dumping chamber pots over the side, that urine burns the living stew of a biomass as effectively as an open flame.
A disease is trying to take over the world, and our only weapons against it are piss and fire, although Dr. Anders is still at work on a more practical solution. She suspects that, while stews can travel the seas in search of land, prolonged exposure to salt water actually sickens them somehow.
In the meantime we have the open sea ahead of us.
Ben, Renfield, Randall and the Eriksons are teaching every one of us how to be sailors, even the youngest children. Sissy scolds me when I mess up. She may be only eight years old, but she really knows how to dress somebody down. Whoever her parents were, they taught her well.
Up on deck I will be able to see the lights of the Deliverance to port, our new boat, the Steward, to starboard, and the Eriksons in the Golden Wake behind us.
If I’m lucky I’ll be able to see a light from Randall in the Liberty, far ahead. He likes to lead the way.
We are headed due south, searching for a remote and fertile island we can call home.
Perhaps you will read this there one day, a month or a year from now, in relative comfort and safety. I hope so. I dearly hope so.
Goodnight.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jack X. McCallum is a co-founder of Dark Red Press who has lived and worked in and near San Francisco for more than twenty years. After being under the two-story sprawl of Pier 39 in a motorboat during low tide many years ago and hoping no one would use that dark, claustrophobia-inducing location as a setting in a movie or novel before he could, he was relieved to finally find a place for it here.
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4POCALYPSE - Four Tales Of A Dark Future Page 28