Spackman’s voice trailed off, but Josh had picked up the underlying despair in the crewman’s voice.
“And the only guy on the boat with all the knowledge we need is Petersen, and he’s as mad as a bag of elbows,” Josh offered.
Spackman nodded. “And at any moment, any one of us might be, too.”
Josh sighed. This was going from a wholly bad situation to an impossible one.
“Dad?”
Tally appeared beside Spackman, her face grave. If Josh’s heart could have climbed out of his skin and jumped over the side of the ship, it would have.
“Is there any good news?” he asked.
Tally shook her head. “Not really. We have food, but…”
“There’s always a but...”
“It looks like, before Rollins died, he sabotaged the water tanks. They’ve been vented into the sea. We have next to no fresh water on the Sea-Hawk.”
Great.
“Who knows what was going through Rollins’ head?” Josh looked down into the square, black plastic-lined water tank, having levered up the lid. “Perhaps he thought making us die of thirst was easier than chopping us up with his ax. I don’t know. And there’s no point in speculating. We have to deal with the situation as it is. If we’re going to get through this.”
There were maybe six inches of water below the vent plug. Scant little of the precious liquid. The irony of being a ship on one of the largest bodies of water on the planet, and yet none of that water being in a drinkable condition, was not lost on him.
“Quickest way to get drinkable fresh water from seawater is to distil it. But for that we’ll need a fire, and on a boat made out of wood…” Josh rested his head against the cool plastic. Now was not a time to show desperation. Tally, Spackman, and the probationers needed to know there was someone taking this stuff in their stride. Otherwise, chaos may reign once more.
The galley was well equipped, but the cooking range was powered by electricity—there were no gas-fired burners. On a ship made of wood, you wanted to cut down on the combustible material, Josh reasoned, and so gas would increase the risk of a fire even though it would have made the task of feeding the crew a little easier. There was a useless microwave, as well, but there were lots of pots and pans.
A small stock of bottled water sat on a couple of cardboard pallets in the galley, and there were perhaps fifty cans of soda in the pantry with some other dry and tinned goods. So, the good news was—and Josh realized you had to take what little good news you could when it came in a situation like this—was that they weren’t in immediate danger. Well-rationed, they had maybe a week’s worth of drinkable liquids to be split between the ten probationers, Tally, Spackman, and Petersen.
With that in mind, Josh charged Puck and Goober to find whatever sealable water containers they could in the cabins and then get as much of the water out of the tank as they could. The water pump on the plumbing system was electrically powered, as well, so if they wanted what little water there was in the tank, then they were going to have to take it out manually.
There was enough food in cans for them to eat meats, hotdogs, beans, and the like, and to last fourteen people on the Sea-Hawk for at least as long as the water would hold out.
“I reckon I can build a still,” Tally announced over Josh’s shoulder as he looked out over the waves. The water was gunmetal gray, but the wind had dropped a little. It wasn’t as stinging, and only occasionally would spray be picked up from the white-crested waves to hit those on deck.
“I’m sorry? Repeat that.” Josh turned to Tally, and found her hugging herself in an oversized navy blue, cable-knit seaman’s jumper that she’d found among the crew’s things.
“I can make a still. To purify water. You and Spackman can get on with finding a way to turn the boat around and sail us into the wind, or whatever you need to do with sheets and Jolly Rogers or whatever they’re called.”
“Since when are you, survival-girl?”
“Dad, it’s a wonder you can remember my name, you know so little about me.”
That stung.
“You have to have a lot of back-up knowledge if you’re going trekking,” she pointed out.
“You haven’t been trekking.”
“No, but I planned to. When you and Mom stopped clucking around me. I had some books on wilderness survival. I shared them with Storm, too.”
“Storm? Tally, Tic-tac’s idea of being in the wilderness is not being able to get a cellphone signal.” Josh couldn’t help the note of incredulity creeping into his voice. Before the cancer, Storm had been an athlete, had concentrated on his running and his training, and occasionally seemed to be focused on girls, and his work as an admin assistant at Morehead Mercy, but… survival? No, come on…
Tally’s eyes narrowed and her jaw set. “Maybe if you weren’t so concentrated on your job and your own issues, you might have noticed, Dad, and maybe Mom might not feel about things the way she does.”
Josh felt the words of recrimination and hurt bubbling in his throat, but he clamped them back down inside. This was the first time since he’d been talking to Storm on the satellite phone that the real-world concerns of his relationship with his family had shifted into view over the horizon, and he couldn’t let them get in the way now. There were ten probationers and Tally to keep alive; until they found a way to get back to a port, there wasn’t time to argue this out.
He took a deep breath and nodded. “That’s stuff for another time, Tally. We’ve gotta stick together on this now, okay? We’ll deal with whatever we need to when I know we’re all going to make it. I promise.”
Tally shrugged. “I notice you didn’t apologize, but yeah. Okay. So. I can make a still. You want me to do that?”
Josh nodded with clamped lips and bunched fists.
How is it that you can take any hit but this, Josh? Anything that life throws at you except one thing… the disappointment of your children?
He stalked off to find Spackman.
Josh found the crewman in the cabin, trying to get some sense out of Petersen.
The Swede’s gag had been removed, and he was now tied sitting up. Ankles bound and arms behind him. The blood had been cleaned from his face, possibly by Spackman, and the remains of a can of cold beans sat next to him with a spoon sticking out of it. Spackman had been feeding the first mate, and had given him some water, too.
Petersen’s eyes were wide and rolling. Hair awry, mouth working and stretching over words, which Josh couldn’t understand, in a language that might have been Swedish or could have been gibberish.
“I thought if I gave him some food, showed we weren’t going to hurt him, he might help us with the rigging and navigation.”
Spackman wiped at some stains on the front of his shirt.
“He just spat at me.”
Petersen fixed Josh with a static, unblinking stare that Josh felt drilled right through him on a spike of madness. Another stream of unintelligible and guttural words gushed from out of Petersen’s cracked lips. The first mate seemed not to have to pause for breath.
Josh bunched his fists inside his jeans pockets and hunched his shoulders in frustration. Suddenly, he was shocked by the desire to reach down, take Petersen by the collar, and punch the first mate’s face to a bloody pulp until he died, and he imagined kicking him over the side of the Sea-Hawk into the drink, to sink below the dark waves, to rot in the water as fish bait and shark food…
Stop!
God, man. Stop.
The roil of anger that had washed up from nowhere was a gut-punch. It showed Josh again that there had been a change in him, too. Too a much lesser extent than Petersen and Ten-Foot, sure, but certainly there had been one. Josh prided himself on the fact that he was not a man quick to anger, and he considered himself to be thoughtful and level headed. He hadn’t felt like punching someone’s lights out since high school, and that had been over Maxine and his ex-best friend Gabe, who’d treated her so badly. But he was channeling tha
t murderous rage now, and then some.
It scared him, and chilled him to the core.
What had happened to them all? What had caused it, and what if anything could be done to prevent it getting worse?
He supposed there was a small amount of hope to be found in the fact that Ten-Foot had bounced back from one extreme to the other. He was now more docile, ready to help and falling over himself to be useful—but who knew what tomorrow would bring?
Josh certainly didn’t.
There was no consistency in all of this. No predictability. That’s what made everything so unsettling. That’s why Josh had found himself trying to gain control over some of the unknowable. Make inventories of the food; find a way to sustain fresh water. Find some practicable solutions for navigating the ship back to shore.
“We’re not going to get anything out of him yet,” Josh said.
And so Spackman put the sock back in Petersen’s mouth. They left the cabin to the strains of Petersen’s growling, incomprehensible mumbles.
Next, they went to Rollins’ cabin. The hank of rope from which the captain had hung himself was still tied around the ceiling beam from when Josh had cut the body down. It was a grim reminder of what had gone on in the room. The rope end moved with the shifting of the Sea-Hawk on the waves, and Josh couldn’t help himself imagining the creaking of Rollins’ bodyweight on it. He figured, when he had the time, he would cut the rest of the rope down. He didn’t need a permanent reminder of Rollins’ fate. The memory of sheeting up the bodies of the people who had died at his hands was bad enough, and more than raw enough in his mind.
Spackman and Josh started going through the captain’s books and papers. There were a number of Mack Bolan: Executioner men’s adventure novels, a collection of C.S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower naval romances, a collection of perhaps twenty vintage Playboy magazines, charts, logs, and leaflets about how the Sea-Hawk had been made and what she was capable of. Josh had himself one of these leaflets back in his luggage. It had been handed to him on the first day of the trip by Kip, the first crewman to have died in falling from the rigging. The one who had taken a shine to Tally.
Josh hadn’t read the leaflet, and in that moment felt unutterably sad that he hadn’t.
He shook his head and came up from examining Rollins’ bookcase. “No ‘Tall Ship Navigation for Dummies’ here,” he said, making an approximate stab at humor that was he knew was uncalled for under the still swinging stump of rope.
“Nope,” Spackman replied, closing the door of the closet.
“But you must have, I dunno, learned what you had to do with the sails in conditions like this? No?”
Spackman looked apologetic and rubbed at the dressing on his ear. “I’ve been on this ship three weeks. The last time we had to go into a headwind, Rollins pulled in the sails and used the engine to get us back to port. I don’t know how many times I can say I’m not an expert, but trust me, man, I’m running out of ways to express it.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Not as sorry as I am.”
“What I wouldn’t give for five minutes on the internet right now.”
“Amen, Josh. Amen. Although, I don’t think Amazon’s going to deliver out here.”
They laughed.
They had to. The only other option was crying.
When they came back up on deck, Tally had probationers bring the freezer Josh had fired the flare into up and lay it on the deck, on its back with the door wide open. All the flare-ruined food had been put to one side, but not discarded completely. “We might be able to use it for bait if we need to start fishing,” Tally said as she worked.
With Dotty-B and Marshal, she was working to lever out as much of the plastic innards of the freezer as she could so that it left the metal bare. “We can set a fire in here,” Tally said. “The freezer will keep it contained.”
From the galley, she’d taken two pots with tight-fitting lids that had small steam holes in them to stop them from boiling over if left unwatched. From a storeroom for equipment used in shallow water anchorages, she’d acquired some snorkel tubes which were being gaffer-taped to the lids of the pots and then covered in Vaseline to make the best airtight seal she could.
The snorkel tubes had then been wrapped in tinfoil to stop them being burned by the heat of the fire, and then taken out over the side of the freezer to cool and condense into empty demijohns they’d found under sacking in the back of the galley.
“All we need now is some fuel.”
Josh was beyond impressed at the lash-up Tally had achieved in a so short a time with the help of the probationers. Ten-Foot and Goober were swinging fire axes twenty feet away, breaking up crates and boxes, and Lemming was piling newspapers and books from the crew cabin, along with tablecloths and spare bedding. They’d opened up deck stores and found spare sails, which were being cut into strips with knives. A can full of diesel had been brought up from the engine room, and Josh pointed at it.
“Diesel is hella difficult to light cold,” Josh said, trying not to pour too much cold water on her invention.
“Thought of that.” Tally smiled and reached down behind her side of the freezer to pull up a small plastic bottle with a hand pump above the nozzle. “One of the crew liked growing bonsai. She used this to spray the leaves. We clean it out, fill it with diesel, pump it up, and that atomizes the fuel. Spray it on the wood and naked flame, and we’re cooking with gas. Well, obviously not gas, but you get the idea.”
When did my little girl do all this growing up? Where was I looking when all that was going on? Josh felt elated and sad all rolled up into one. Maybe she had a point about where his focus had and hadn’t been for the last couple of years.
Josh hugged her tight, and Tally squealed with surprise.
10
McCready’s face was flushed with anger as he protested, “I think it’s a bad idea!”
Maxine hugged the robe around her and looked about the kitchen for her clothes. They’d been hung from the cupboard doors when she and Storm had gone to the spare room the night before, but now they were conspicuous in their absence.
Maxine had just finished telling McCready that she agreed with Storm’s assessment of how dangerous it was going to be to stay in Boston, and how they needed to get out of the city and either find a way to travel back to Morehead City or, better still, make their way to her parents’ cattle ranch in West Virginia. Both journeys were daunting and full of risk, but her parents were closer and staying here while the water became contaminated, the food ran out, and the rats multiplied in the sewers was just as dangerous, if not more so. It had only been when she’d noticed that her clothes were no longer hanging up that her voice had trailed off and McCready’s anger had bubbled to the surface.
“No. We need to stay here. We’re safe her. I have food. We can go to stores. Get more. Get bottled water.”
“Umm, just a minute…” Maxine pointed at the cupboards where her clothes had been hung up. “What’s happened…”
But McCready, still in his dirty uniform and with two days of stubble on his chin, was on another track entirely, spittle flecking the corners of his mouth as he spoke. “Didn’t I look after you? Didn’t I save you… twice?”
“Yes… but…”
“I can keep you safe. That’s what policemen do. Protect and serve. That’s what I’m going to do and we’re going to stay here and it’s going to be alright!”
Maxine was surprised in the change in McCready since he’d woken that morning. He was wound up tighter than a watch spring as his fingers drummed on the stained cloth of the table. He’d made some attempt to clean the dirty pots and pans in the sink, but it looked like he’d given up halfway through. There was an open garbage sack into which he’d thrown empty packets, cans and cartons that had been left out on the side, but it was only half full, and there was still plenty of stuff that could be chucked into it.
It occurred to Maxine that she might look in the bottom of the sack for t
heir clothes, but McCready was so wired; plus, the gun was still on his hip, and his manner had become so freaky that she didn’t think it would be a good idea to do so right now.
“You’re to stay here. Both of you. That’s an order.”
“Hey, come on. You don’t have that authority...”
“Yes, I do! I have all the authority I need!” McCready was shouting hard now, and his finger pointed at his gun.
This situation had gone south pretty quickly. Yesterday, McCready had been a little odd at times, but now he was verging on the frightening. Maxine got the feeling this wasn’t just because he’d gotten up on the wrong side of his pig-sty that morning, either.
The door opened just then and Storm came in, eyes red and bleary. “Mom… is there a problem?”
McCready stood up and pointed at Storm. “There’s no problem! There’s no damn problem!” Then he stormed out of the kitchen towards his bedroom and slammed the door behind him.
Storm looked at the kitchen cupboards. “Where are our clothes?”
“That’s what I was wondering,” Maxine said, diving down the garbage sack. Of course, that would have been too easy a solution. It was just McCready’s garbage all the way down. She began opening cupboards. From the bedroom, it sounded like McCready was kicking at the walls or breaking wood. Maxine looked at Storm. “How do you feel?”
“Well enough to get the hell out of here. What’s eating him?”
“All I did was tell him I agreed with you about getting out of the city and he went to pieces. I don’t think this is all him. Look at the people we saw on the way to the institute, how Gabby killed Sudhindra… I think people are being changed somehow. I don’t understand it… a power outage might cause mass panic, but it’s not going to cause mass murder. We need to find our clothes and … god… no!”
“What…?” Storm demanded.
Supernova EMP- The Complete Series Page 10