Dangerous Shores: Book Two; Hell or High Water

by Christine Conaway

  “Hey, what’s up?”

  “It looks like we’ve got company. Have a look.” Frank handed her the binoculars. “Alan thought he saw something this morning, but never saw anything again.”

  She put the glasses to her eyes and searched in the direction Alan pointed. On the second pass she saw what they were talking about. So miniscule in size it was hard to say exactly what they were looking at. “Do you think that’s something we have to worry about?”

  She relaxed her arms and handed the glasses back to Frank. “I’m not even sure what I was looking at but if I had to guess, maybe a large rowboat someone has rigged sails on? It doesn’t look like a sailboat.”

  “If we have no wind then neither do they, but we’ll keep an eye on them. If it looks like they are closing in, we’ll start the motor for a while and put some distance between us.”

  “Tell Ellen what you told me.” Alan said.

  “Tell Ellen what?” She looked at Frank and he was looking everywhere but at her. “It can’t be that bad so just tell me?”

  “Sit down and I will. You’re probably not going to like this but, I think we need to teach Olivia gun safety and also how to shoot one.” Ellen started to talk but he held his hand up to stop her, “I knew you would not like it but let me say why I think we should.”

  Ellen sat with arms crossed, waiting patiently for Frank to let her speak. She had a hard time waiting but she knew he would be very surprised by what she had to say.

  “Look, what happens if something happens to us? Of course we will keep Olivia’s safety first and foremost, however, shit happens when you least expect it. I would feel better knowing she can at the very least use a handgun. She may be only six, but she’s smart. She is so far ahead of most six-year-olds.” He sank down onto the other cockpit seat as if he had drained the last of his reserves with his speech.

  Ellen stared at him to the point she thought she was making him uneasy. In reality, she did want him to feel uncomfortable. He was being defensive before he knew how she would react to his words as if he had already made up his mind that she would say no. She watched him squirm for a few minutes longer and finally answered, “Okay.”

  “If you think about it for just a minute you will see I am right. She has to be…”

  Alan’s laughter interrupted Frank. It was long and loud. He was clinging to the wheel for support. Tears streamed from both eyes as he roared. “Oh my God, you are so funny!”

  “What?” He looked between Alan and Ellen who had joined in with the laughter. He didn’t remember anything she said that was that funny. In fact, she really hadn’t said anything except okay. Why would they be practically rolling with laughter? Slowly he realized what it was. From deep down inside his laughter erupted, joining with theirs.

  “I wasn’t ready for that,” Frank finally managed to spit out, and burst into laughter again.

  “Are you guys okay up here?” Hannah was on the ladder looking out into the cockpit. Olivia had squeezed in beside her trying to see what was going on. Maybe she had never heard adults reacting like this before. She hugged in closer to Hannah as if seeking her protection. Not knowing what was going on, Hannah began to laugh too because they looked funny sitting there; all three with tears running down.

  Several minutes went by before they were all able to control themselves at the same time. They carefully avoided looking at each other in fear of igniting the laughter again.

  Finally, Hannah asked, “So are you guys done? And, would you like to let us in on the joke, because we could use a good laugh too.” She looked down at Olivia, “Couldn’t we Olivia?”

  “You and Olivia better come up and sit down. What was so funny concerns Olivia and now we need to talk.”

  Hannah was obviously puzzled; her eyebrows rose in question, “Olivia too?”

  “Yup, this concerns her too.” Ellen patted the spot next to her, “Come sit here Olivia.”

  She waited until Hannah sat beside Frank, “Olivia, we think you are a big girl and big girls need to be treated like big girls, don’t you think?”

  Olivia looked at Hannah as if she needed Hannah’s permission to speak. Hannah simply nodded yes, and smiled at the little girl. The bond Olivia had formed with Hannah left no room for doubt that she was the person Olivia looked to for guidance.

  Frank leaned toward her resting his arms on his knees. “Olivia, do you know what guns are?”

  “Chin down, her eyes rose to meet Franks, “Yes. My Papa had a gun. Lots of people had guns when we left home.” She paused as if she needed to think what to say. It was the first time she had mentioned the events leading up to them leaving in the boat. “Some people tried to shoot us in the boat, but Papa shot them first. Lots of people were shooting at us and my Momma was so scared.”

  “I would have been scared too, if someone was shooting at me too.” Ellen assured her. “Olivia, did your Papa ever show you his gun?”

  “Yes,” she said while nodding yes so there could be no doubt. “He said Momma and me had to shoot it. Momma dropped it when she did, but I didn’t. Papa said I did good. I didn’t drop it.”

  “Olivia, you know that lots of bad things are happening right now. Some bad people might want to hurt us? “

  “Frank…” Hannah began. Frank raising his hand up palm out stopped her.

  “Hannah just wait please.” He turned his attention back to Olivia, “Olivia, we want to teach you to protect yourself. Do you know what that means?”

  “So the bad man doesn’t try and take me away again?”

  “That’s what I was going to tell you. Her Papa was teaching her so she would be safe. Her hands were too small to pull the trigger on his gun. Form what she explained to me, his gun looked like John Wayne’s.”

  “Well I guess the Duke is well known. No wonder her hands are too small, that thing of his was the size of a cannon. Ellen, you have that little Smith and Wesson Shield in that bag of guns of yours. I think it will be perfect for her.”

  Chapter Ten

  It hadn’t taken long for Olivia to become accustomed to the little Smith and Wesson. Her hands were still a little small; she had to use both of them to support it, but she could get her finger on the trigger. If someone was directly in front of her when she pulled it, they were going to have a hole in them. She didn’t seem bothered by the notion of shooting another person, but on the other hand she hadn’t had to resort to shooting anyone either. Hopefully she never would.

  The Smith and Wesson Shield was one of the newer modern striker fired handguns, with a relatively short and lighter trigger pull. This one was in the nine millimeter model. Frank liked it because there was no need to hunt for the safety to use it. There wasn’t one. It was a lighter than the Glock that he preferred, but could actually hold more ammunition simply because the shells were smaller.

  Ellen tried it and wished she had gotten one for herself. The one thing she didn’t care for with her 357 was the recoil. With 9 mm. there was significantly less recoil and what there was, didn’t send the barrel flying up in the air, making for a more precise shot when firing more than one round at a time.

  Frank grabbed the fish net and retrieved the floating laundry soap bottle from the water. He didn’t tell the girls that only one of them had hit it and the one hole was almost a miss too.

  The sun was sitting on the horizon when Hannah brought their dinner to the cockpit. With the shorter rations they were eating quite a bit of soups. They were tasty, nutritious and their stores went farther. She had rolled up strawberry jam in thin pancakes and sprinkled powdered sugar over them.

  Had there been anyone around to hear them, they would have sounded like a family out enjoying an evening cruise. The problems behind them and the ones in front, momentarily forgotten.

  “Okay come on kiddo, you can help tidy the galley then off to bed with you.” Olivia had been so quiet the adults had almost forgotten she was there.

  Oliva slid off the seat and went around the cockpit giving each
of them a kiss on the cheek and a hug. “Good night,” she said going down the ladder.

  “Good night Olivia,” they chorused.

  “Olivia handled shooting far better than we could have hoped for. I pray she never has to use that gun to defend herself,” Frank said as he stretched and yawned.

  “I pray she will know the difference between a threat and someone who is actually trying to help her. I think with some people it could be hard to tell the difference.” Ellen had already decided in her mind to offer to take the first watch. After seeing how tired Frank looked and sounded, she would make the offer. Teaching Olivia to shoot had given her a lot to think about and she wanted to write some of her thoughts in her journal. She agreed that once again Frank had been right. Teaching Olivia to shoot could not only save her own life one day, but maybe one of theirs as well. She couldn’t understand why Frank would have thought she’d disagree with him; she’d begun shooting when she was the same age as Olivia only she had been equipped with an air rifle.

  Alan had followed Hannah and Olivia below and it was only herself and Frank left in the cockpit. He had the binoculars to his eyes again, but she didn’t think he would be able to see anything in the dark. Once the sun had set, clouds had begun to hide the stars.

  “See anything out there,” she asked.

  He must have heard the laughter in her voice, because he gave a soft snicker before he answered. “Looks pretty stupid I know, but light of any kind shows up in the dark. I was trying to see if our friends were still trailing us.”

  “Oops,” she said, “Let me take my foot out of my mouth. I hadn’t thought of them all evening. Did you see anything?”

  “Nope. If they’re still out there, they don’t have any kind of lights, which says to me that maybe they don’t have any propulsion besides the sails. That’s good news for us.”

  He yawned again and blew out a huge sigh. “Why does it seem like this day is never going to end?”

  “Well, how about this? I’ll trade you shifts because I’m not the least bit tired right now.”

  He thought about it a few seconds, “You sure you don’t mind?”

  “Not at all. Maybe I can get my journal caught up. Go ahead and lay down, I’ll wake you if I get sleepy.”

  From under the cushion she was sitting on, Ellen grabbed her journal and traded places with him. Within minutes he was stretched out on the lazarette asleep.

  Before Ellen had a chance to write a word, the solar light they used for light in the cockpit flickered once, twice and went dark. “Well why not!” She exclaimed and pulled the light from the holder. She went to bang it on the heel of her hand and froze in position. Her eyes darted to the companionway door. They had left it open to circulate the air and she relaxed when she saw the glow from the red safety light they left on at night.

  Banging the light on her hand had briefly taken her back to the first night when her flashlight had not worked. That night had changed her life forever as well as the lives of the rest of America too. At least she thought all of America had suffered from the loss. The Major on Garden Key, had indicated it was all over, but what did all over include? The whole world? She knew it did include Florida so she assumed the Keys were included there and she knew it included Cuba with even more disastrous results. The thought that the whole U.S. could be in the same shape as Cuba or worse with the amount of people living there was overwhelming for her. Her legs gave out and she sank to the captain’s chair.

  The chance that the plague or some other sickness was annihilating the population on land was a real possibility. Without power, the people on life-support or pace-makers would die immediately, the people dependent on prescription drugs would follow when they ran out of meds, and the junkies and alcoholics…the scenarios were endless. People would be faced with starvation when the stores ran out of food, because for either lack of opportunity or lack of knowledge, most people were incapable of fending for themselves.

  With a shake of her head she tried to dismiss her thoughts. Tears of grief ran down her face that she was unable to stop. She had never been a crier, but her mind was on overload and the weight on her shoulders had grown to be overwhelming. At the back of her mind she wondered how she could have thought they would make it all the way to Washington State?

  The tears had dried on her face and she realized she hadn’t been paying attention to the direction she was headed. For all she knew they could have turned completely around. A glance at the compass told her she was okay. A minor adjustment of the wheel had them back on the course Frank had plotted for them.

  Completely drained emotionally, she sat and watched the sails flutter in the breeze. With minor adjustments, they filled and stayed that way. They weren’t getting optimum performance from them, but at least they were moving in the right direction.

  With nothing to do but watch the water pass by, she couldn’t prevent her thoughts from straying backwards.

  She mentally cursed the Major on Garden Key for taking her spare sails. Then she remembered it was the stranded power boat who had destroyed the new main. As much as she would have liked to wish them all ill will, she found she couldn’t. She also couldn’t say if she would have tried to help them or not. She had thought about helping, until they had caught the main sail on fire with the flare gun.

  Ellen had thought she hadn’t many friends on shore, being the solitary person that she was, but her mind wandered back to the marina. She wondered where Sparrow had ended up. They had been leaving the marina when Ellen had sailed up to the fuel dock. Then there was Jim and Margaret, Tim and Leslie, Mike and Betty…so many people that she didn’t know about. Had they all found refuge somewhere? As sad as it was, she would never know. “Fair winds my friends,” she whispered.

  More times than two, Ellen had wondered if she could have done more to either help or warn the other sailors at the dock. She couldn’t know if they were aware of what was going on, but with the departure of Sparrow she figured that they must have known something. Anyone could have passed silently by while she slept or dealt with the idiot from power boat. She had the feeling that she was going to be haunted the rest of her life wondering where they were and if they were alive.

  Something splashed in the water from somewhere behind them and she would have thought a fish had jumped until she heard it repeated time and time again. She closed her eyes, right ear turned in the direction she heard the splashes from. She strained to identify what exactly she was hearing. The splashes had a cadence that didn’t change in tempo. However, it didn’t sound like anything mechanical could be making the sound either.

  “Oh lord, please don’t make it another boat,” she whispered under her breath. “We have no more room.”

  “Frank, wake up.”

  He groaned and rolled over. “It’s my turn?”

  “Shh…I think we have company.”

  Chapter Eleven

  “Oh crap, please tell me not again,” he whispered as he rolled off the lazarette into the well. “Where are they?” He sat by Ellen’s feet listening.

  “I can’t see anything but listen. What is that?”

  They sat in silence, ears straining to identify the sound. Finally, Frank admitted, “I have no idea, but it sounds like it’s getting closer.”

  “What should we do?” Like Frank, she didn’t recognize the sound either.

  “It’s someone rowing a boat,” Alan whispered. He was awake and had heard Ellen when she woke Frank and wondered what was up. “Actually it sounds like several rowers. I do mean rowers and not someone paddling a boat.”

  “Are you sure?” Frank had seen Alan when he put his head in the companionway opening.

  “Positive. I rowed on a dragon boat in school. Hours of listening to that and you don’t forget the sound.”

  “You think someone is out in the middle of nowhere rowing a boat?” Ellen’s voice held disbelief. “Who’s that crazy?”

  “We’re not so far out in the middle of nowhere anymore. It’s
not probable, but it is possible, and I think Alan is right. We haven’t had any severe weather for days, so maybe it’s someone trying to get somewhere other than where they were.”

  “You mean like Olivia’s folks?”

  “Exactly, but I think Cuba is too far behind us. Maybe Jamaica or Haiti would be my guess. If the sounds were coming from a different direction I would say Columbia, but these are coming from behind us.”

  “It could be the boat we saw yesterday,” Alan ventured, “We don’t know how many were in that boat, but assuming they have oars they could be rowing in addition to using the wind power. With the wind we’ve had it wouldn’t be a bad idea.”

  “Could they have closed that much ground though?” Ellen was still finding it hard to believe that anyone could or would be rowing across the Caribbean Sea.

  “Frank, where did your sighting last night place us?”

  “I didn’t do one yesterday at all. I needed either the last stars in the morning or the first stars in the evening to get a reliable fix. We’ve had cloud cover the last two days. I didn’t do a noon sighting for the same reason. I would have to think with the wind and current we’ve had we couldn’t have been making more than three knots an hour maximum. We have to still be over a hundred miles from Columbia and maybe as much as two.”

  Alan had come up to the cockpit and sat. He didn’t think it would matter if he kept a low profile or not. If the other boat had seen them already, maybe a show of strength in numbers would dissuade them from approaching. “So do we have a plan? Are we going to confront them?”

  “I was just getting to that. Not if we don’t have to. They obviously had to have seen us, it’s not like we can keep a low profile. But, I think we should start the engine and depart.”