Rain

by Shaun Harbinger

  Lucy and I barely ate, barely communicated. We lived on board The Big Easy like ghosts. Our existence felt ethereal, illusory. I knew we were in shock. The events since the virus outbreak had finally caught up with us. Our minds needed time to process all we had been through.

  Even though I knew we were in shock, there was nothing I could do about it. I couldn’t tell myself to just ‘snap out of it’. My best friend was dead. Nothing would change that cold fact.

  The weather closed in and I dropped anchor, leaving the boat bobbing on the waves as the tombstone sky cried down unending tears of rain all around us. The water-smeared windows offered us a view of sea and sky and rain and nothing else, adding to the illusion that none of this was real. Maybe I would wake up from this bad dream and Mike and Elena would still be alive. Maybe I would wake up in the tent in the mountains and none of this would have happened. All a dream. A stupid dream brought on by trying to keep up with Mike, Elena and Lucy as we hiked across the Welsh mountains.

  On the third day, I lay on my bed staring at the ceiling. The wind had died down and the boat rocked gently on the water. I didn’t know what time it was but the sky beyond the porthole was black. For the first time since Mike’s death, I felt hungry.

  If Lucy and I didn’t take care of ourselves, this boat would become our floating tomb. I thought of Max Prentice lying on his bed in The Hornet, floating somewhere out at sea just like us. Would that be my fate? Lying on this bed forever while The Big Easy sat dead in the water?

  Mike wouldn’t want this. He wouldn’t want us to give up.

  I had been withdrawn for three days but now I craved human contact. I needed to hear Lucy’s voice, touch her, know she was alive. We were both alive.

  Alive.

  The apocalypse had happened but we were still alive.

  Survivors.

  She must have felt the same need for contact because the bedroom door opened and she stood there wearing only her ‘Sail To Your Destiny’ T-shirt. I remembered the time at Doug Latimer’s barbecue when she had stood in front of the refrigerator and taken a swig of beer, her breasts pushing against her black sweater. She looked that good to me right now as she stood in the doorway.

  “Can I lie down with you?” she asked.

  It felt good just to hear her voice. I nodded and moved back on the bed to give her room to lie with me.

  She lay down in front of me, her back pressed against my chest, the curve of her bottom snug against the front of my boxers.

  I placed my hand on her waist, feeling the warmth of her skin through the T-shirt. I could see the vein in her neck pulsing with life. She smelled of perspiration and tears. Her long hair caressed my face.

  “We’re alive,” I said.

  “Yes, we are.”

  My hand stroked her hip and she pressed herself back against me.

  She was soft and exciting.

  I kissed the pulsing vein on her neck and she turned her head so our lips met. After living through the end of the world, after drifting like ghosts for three days, we each desperately needed something that only the other could provide: human touch.

  My hand explored the soft flesh of her thigh before moving up under the T-shirt to find the curves of her breasts. She moaned into my mouth as my fingers brushed her nipples.

  It was a long night on the gentle waves and all movement, sound and touch merged into a single vivid dream of heat, tightness, sensation, and pleasure.

  * * *

  When I woke up, I could hear music.

  Lucy was gone from the bed. We had fallen asleep together sometime in the night and the physical closeness had been like a life raft keeping us sane after all we had experienced. I listened to the music drifting down from the upper deck. “Total Eclipse of the Heart”. An old song written in a different era but it still lifted my spirits. I sang along badly as I got out of bed. Through the porthole, the sky was blue and the clouds were white and unthreatening.

  A good day for zombies.

  I pushed that thought away and dressed hurriedly. The smell of bacon reached me and made my mouth water. We had found a freezer stocked with meat on the day we first boarded The Big Easy. We had agreed to only use it on special occasions as it was irreplaceable. Lucy had obviously decided that today was a special occasion.

  I went up and found her in the kitchen leaning over the frying pan. She had a pan of beans on the stove and bread in the toaster. The smells assailing my nose were incredible.

  “Something smells good,” I said as I watched the bacon sizzling in the pan.

  She looked over at me and smiled. “We need to keep our strength up if we’re going to find those U.N. ships.”

  We hadn’t talked about the rescue mission for the past three days. It had seemed unimportant… distant. Now we were ready to be rescued. It was the only way we were going to have a future that didn’t involve violence and death.

  After Bonnie Tyler finished singing, Johnny Drake came on the radio . “Hey to all the survivors out there. Here’s a tune from way back when. The Doors and ‘Strange Days’.” The music filled the room.

  After three days of barely existing, the music and the smell of the food and the renewed sense of a goal was almost sensory overload. I sat in the easy chair and let myself become accustomed to this sudden influx of sensation.

  The only depressing part of the morning was when the Survivor Reach Out segment came on the radio while we were eating our breakfast. More lost souls looking for their fellow lost souls. I saw a TV program once where the mother of a murder victim whose body was never found had said that not knowing was worse than knowing her son was dead. For these people on the radio, they would probably never know what had happened to their families and that would probably haunt them for the rest of their lives.

  After three survivors told their stories and appealed for their relatives to get in contact with the nearest Survivors Camp, Johnny Drake’s mellow voice came back on air. “Let’s remember what we’re surviving for, people. It’s all about family.”

  After we had eaten, I went down to the shower and stood beneath the hot spray for fifteen minutes, letting the water roll over every inch of skin. Feeling cleansed, I went to the store room and picked out a new T-shirt. It had no logo, just a drawing of a yacht sailing into the sunset. The nautical folk sure liked their romanticism. I put on jeans and my boots and went up to the bridge while Lucy went below to have her shower.

  The day was warm. In the distance, gulls cried. The sea undulated rhythmically as if it were breathing. The entire world seemed alive. We were alive.

  I started the engine and pulled up the anchor before turning The Big Easy north and giving her a little throttle. We sailed through the calm water easily.

  Maybe later I would get the fishing rods from below and try fishing for our dinner. We had plenty of food all around us. All we had to do was catch it.

  Half an hour later, Lucy appeared on deck wearing jeans and a black sweater. I wondered if it was the sweater she had been wearing at Doug Latimer’s barbecue. She had washed her hair and it trailed damply over her shoulders. She placed the radio on the deck and waved up at me before taking a seat in the sun. I waved back. The sound of a Snow Patrol song drifted out of the radio.

  For the first time in a long while, I felt like things might actually turn out OK. I wondered about the logistics of the rescue mission being mounted by the U.N. There was no way they could take all the survivors out of Britain in a single ship. If that was the case, the virus had hit harder than I thought possible. It was more likely that each Survivors Camp would go to the rendezvous point in turn as different ships arrived to take them to safety. The operation could take months. We had been worrying that we might miss the rescue as if it were a single event. Now that I thought about it, that was a ridiculous notion. There would be plenty of ships, coming and going over a span of weeks. We would be able to get on board one of them even if it meant going to a Survivors Camp for a week to be quarantined. That idea left
a sour taste in my mouth but if it meant being rescued and starting a new life away from all of this, it was worth it.

  * * *

  We spent two weeks drifting off the coast of Scotland.

  I managed to refuel The Big Easy at a deserted marina on the coast. The operation was carried out during heavy rain to protect us from zombies but even so, Lucy stood guard with the Colt while I figured out how to fill the tanks. We didn’t run into any trouble and we avoided the temptation to search the marine store there. We simply refuelled and left.

  I found a hard-covered notebook in one of the cupboards and I spent most evenings writing the story of our survival from the time I felt like I was dying in the Welsh mountains to the present day. It was hard to write about Mike and Elena now that they were dead but the experience helped me deal with some of the grief I had been holding inside.

  We listened to the radio every day hoping that Johnny Drake might mention the rescue mission but he never did. The Reach Out appeals didn’t mention it either. Nobody said, “We’re going to the rescue boats.” They just asked their relatives to contact the army or the nearest Survivors Camp. Despite the sadness we felt every time the Reach Out was broadcast, the music that played in between those broadcasts was a constant companion and made us feel like we were still part of the world.

  No ships arrived in Scotland as far as we could tell. I spent hours on the bridge scanning the sea with the high-powered binoculars. A few times I saw smaller boats like our own in the distance but I didn’t hail them or approach them. The memories of The Hornet meant I wouldn’t be boarding any strange vessels unless it was an emergency.

  I searched the radio frequencies for transmissions from American ships but all I got was dead air.

  Lucy spent the days reading paperbacks from the bookshelves and keeping stock of our food supplies. She also fished off the back of the boat. She wrote in her own journal in the evenings but I had no idea what she put in there.

  We spent the nights entwined together in the bed.

  I started to wonder if the rescue was ever going to happen.

  I even wondered if I wanted it to.

  We were surviving well and we were independent of any military control. I wasn’t sure I wanted to give that up. Out here, we were in control of our lives. If we became part of a U.N. rescue mission, we would become refugees. Our future might be safe but at what cost to our freedom?

  I distrusted authority. I always had. The thought of putting my life in their hands made something deep inside me rebel.

  As far as post-apocalypse life went, ours was pretty good. I was sure there were plenty of people on the mainland fighting to survive a living hell. What would they give to be out here at sea on a comfortable boat, eating fresh fish and not worrying about zombies? Were we really going to give all that up?

  The answer came one afternoon when I was looking through the binoculars and I spotted a luxury yacht in the distance. It wasn’t the first time I had seen a boat through the high-powered lenses but something about this boat was different.

  She was flying the stars and stripes.

  twenty seven

  I called down to Lucy. She was sitting on the aft deck reading in the sun.

  “There’s an American boat over there.” I pointed at the speck in the distance.

  She shielded her eyes from the sun and peered across the water. “I don’t see it.”

  “It’s some way off. Should we go over there?”

  “What for?”

  “If the crew are American, they might know something about the rescue mission.”

  She shrugged. “I guess so.”

  I hadn’t spoken to Lucy about my reluctance at getting rescued but it seemed to me that she was having similar thoughts. “We don’t have to go,” I said.

  “No, we’ll check it out. But we have to be careful, OK?”

  I grabbed the baseball bat I kept on the bridge and shook it in the air. “No fear. Me mighty warrior.”

  She rolled her eyes. “I’ll get the gun.”

  I grinned and gunned the engines, turning The Big Easy around so she pointed directly at the American yacht.

  * * *

  Her name was Solstice and she looked like she was worth a million dollars. Sitting proud and sleek on the ocean, she had an aft deck, a foredeck and an upper deck as well as a deck just above water level for swimming and diving. Her hull was dotted with portholes but her upper windows were made of tinted curved glass, running almost the entire length of the cabin. A table and chairs were set out on the aft deck.

  I couldn’t see any life on board. No movement.

  Maybe they were all inside.

  On a warm day like today? I doubted it.

  A chill gripped my insides. This was like The Hornet all over again except on a larger scale. There could be a dozen people on that cruiser… or a dozen zombies. I suddenly felt that Lucy and I were vulnerable. Just two of us armed with a gun and a baseball bat. If the Solstice was full of zombies, we wouldn’t have a chance. And what were we risking our lives for? News of a rescue that neither of us was sure we wanted to be a part of?

  Lucy joined me on the bridge. “See anything?”

  I handed her the binoculars. “I can’t see anybody on board.”

  “Looks deserted.”

  “Yeah, maybe we should just ignore her.”

  She looked at me closely. “I thought we wanted information about the rescue?”

  “Do we?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Do we really want to be rescued and shipped off to somewhere with everyone else?”

  “I thought that was what we wanted.” She hesitated then said, “Isn’t it?” There was doubt in her voice.

  “I’m not so sure anymore.”

  She put the binoculars down and sighed. “I know what you mean. At least we’re in control of our own lives. But we should check out this boat. Even if we get some information, we don’t have to act on it.”

  I agreed and brought The Big Easy around so we were headed for the diving deck on the stern of the Solstice. The only sound as we approached was Eminem coming from our radio. There was no point turning it off; we were hardly going to sneak up on the Solstice in a forty-two-foot yacht. If anyone was on board, they would be aware of our presence by now.

  Lucy jumped down onto the diving deck and tied us onto it. I cut our engine and climbed over the side of The Big Easy, dropping down onto the deck. The music coming from our boat had switched to an 80s pop tune. I didn’t know where Johnny Drake got his music from but his playlist was definitely eclectic.

  We went up the steps to the aft deck. The circular table and chairs in the centre of the deck were arranged neatly, as was the rest of the craft from what I could see. Double glass doors led into a neat living room lined with leather sofas and chairs. A flat screen TV on the wall showed a black screen. There was nobody in there.

  I relaxed my grip on the baseball bat slightly.

  We knew the decks were deserted so if anyone was on board, they were beyond the living room. I opened the door and took a hesitant sniff of the air inside.

  Rancid. Foul. I gagged and put my head back outside to breathe fresh air.

  There were dead people in there. Maybe undead. If there was ever a good time to turn back, this was it.

  “Do you really want to go in there?” I asked Lucy. “There’s obviously nobody alive on this boat.”

  “We could go a little further. I’ve got the gun. We’re OK.” She stepped over the threshold and into the living area… if it could be called that anymore.

  Breathing shallowly to smell as little of the fetid air as possible, I followed.

  We found them in the kitchen. A family of four. They were all sitting around the table as if they were gathered for a family meal. In fact, that was exactly what they had been doing. In front of each body was a half-eaten meal of mashed potatoes, peas, steak and gravy. Everyone had a glass of grape Kool-Aid poured from a pitcher that sat on
the kitchen counter.

  Mom and Dad looked like they were in their late thirties. Dad, whose body had sagged in his chair and whose mouth hung open, was dressed in a light blue polo shirt and white trousers. His hair was neat and he looked like he may have worked as a CEO for some company or other.

  Mom had definitely been pretty. In fact, she was still pretty even in death. Her hair was long and auburn, spilling over her shoulders. Her makeup was applied perfectly and her face had the striking type of features that were usually found on models. She wore a yellow sundress and apart from the fact that she was slumped to one side and her eyes were closed, you wouldn’t know she was dead.

  The children, a blonde girl who looked about ten and a hazelnut-headed boy of maybe twelve, had fallen forward and their heads rested on the table beside their plates.

  “What do you think happened?” Lucy whispered.

  “I don’t know. Poison maybe? There aren’t any marks on them. I’d say either the dad or the mom or both of them together poisoned their family. Maybe it’s in the Kool-Aid or the food. Or both.”

  Her face looked horrified. “But why?”

  I shrugged. I had no answer to that. The world had taken a sharp curve into madness but these people were removed from all that, just as we were. They were living in luxury. People have different tolerance levels and the situation must have become more than they could bear.

  We explored the rest of the boat and found a laptop computer in the master bedroom. It was still plugged in and had power. I swished my finger across the trackpad and the screen came to life. The computer had been on the internet. The browser window had a number of tabs open, each showing the last page viewed. All were news websites.

  The headline on the page that was open told the story.

  VIRUS OUTBREAK IN THE U.S.

  I clicked on one of the tabs to find a second news site.

  PRESIDENT DECLARES STATE OF EMERGENCY.