Relapse (Breakers Book 7)

by Edward W. Robertson

"Come on!" Her voice carried on the winds. "I see the sub!"

  Ness hollered for Sam, then took off at a run. The others strung out behind him. Lionel and Emma kept up okay, but Dr. Gohel lagged behind. Ness swung around the far point of the arm of water and headed for Tristan, heedless of the distance he was putting on the rest of them.

  Ness skidded to a stop in a cloud of dust. "Where is it?"

  Tristan pointed northeast along the shoreline. Ness expected to see it parked a few hundred yards away—somewhere safer in the currents, say—but the dark body of the sub was nearly to the northern horizon. And getting further away by the second.

  "Ready to run?" Tristan said.

  "What?" Ness laughed. "We can't catch up with it by running! Even on the surface, that thing can cruise at twenty miles per hour!"

  "What other choice do we have?"

  Lionel drew up beside them, breathing hard. "It's sticking near the coast, yeah? It'll swing around that point there. But I know a shortcut."

  "Lead on." Tristan turned away. Ness grabbed her shoulder.

  "Not everyone can keep up," he said. "We need a plan."

  She scowled at him. "There's no time."

  Lionel turned to the others. "We're going to take a run after the boat. If we get separated, the road over there and the highway converge at Yarrawarrah. Five, ten miles from here. That's where we meet. Yeah?"

  They nodded. Tristan broke into a run, glancing back for Lionel, who got a surprised look and lurched after her. Ness hurtled after them. Lionel moved to the fore, running along a northbound dirt path, swatting at stray branches. The route took them away from the angling coast and connected to a decaying road. This too ran north. Thick walls of trees blocked out sight of the water.

  Within a mile, Ness was sweating and gasping. Lionel began to flag.

  "Can't slow down now," Tristan said. She had a sheen of sweat going but her breathing was enviably even. "Tell me the way."

  "Follow this road until it starts to veer left," Lionel said. "There'll be a turn onto another road. Bungee, Bundona, something like that. It'll take you right to the bay."

  Tristan kicked up her heels, immediately outpacing them. Lionel laughed, grinning lopsidedly. "God, that girl can run."

  "Good thing," Ness said. "I'm about ready for the dog food factory."

  He slowed to a light jog. Tristan's tan legs flashed in and out of the dappled sun, carrying her away. Lionel dropped back, too, swiping his forearm across his ruddy, sweaty face. The trees began to thin, giving way to equal portions of brush and grass. After a half mile, Ness was rested enough to put on speed. Lionel picked it up, too. A road forked to the right, but Lionel jogged past it. As their road veered left, he took them down a second fork, straightening their path north.

  This was downhill, which Ness thanked God for. His shoes smacked the pavement, which showed cracks but was holding up okay. The trees kept on thinning. Now and then he glimpsed the ocean, but he couldn't see the sub. Nor, for that matter, Tristan.

  He made it another mile before a stitch throbbed in his side until it felt like he couldn't breathe. He dropped to a walk, hands clasped behind his head.

  Sam caught up to them, her brown skin damp with perspiration. "Emma's sticking with the doctor. Anything up here?"

  "Nothin'," Ness said. "But Tristan isn't done yet."

  When the stitch subsided, he started jogging again. He figured they must have covered five miles, but the bay looked to be another three ahead. How much time had gone by? Thirty, forty minutes? Enough for the sub to have steamed out of sight for good.

  Feet clapped the road ahead. Coming closer. Around a hitch in the road, Tristan jogged into view. As she closed on them, she swung about and fell in beside them, still jogging. Sweat dampened her collar, dripping down the back of her neck. Her tan face was red, the veins standing out from her forehead.

  "I got to the bay," she said. "Ran up this hill. And saw the sub turn into Sydney."

  "No way," Ness said. "Way to go, Wonder Woman."

  "We're not done yet. For all we know, they're just making port to grab a few supplies. We have to get into the city ASAP. Lionel, can you get us around?"

  "Not half so well as Dr. Gohel," Lionel said. "He lived there before the plague."

  Tristan glanced over her shoulder. "Where are they? We don't have time to dawdle."

  Lionel nodded and hooked back up the road. Blessedly, Tristan slowed to a walk.

  "When I wasn't busy making myself not barf, I was doing some thinking," Ness said. "The sub's moving, right?"

  "If not, I'd like the last hour of my life back."

  "Well, even with the 'Alien Submarines for Dumbasses' software we rigged up, you can't just stroll into the control room and take that thing for a spin. You need an experienced user. That means Sebastian and Sprite are still alive."

  "One of them, anyway," Tristan said.

  "Nope. Both of them."

  "You can't know that."

  "Sure I can." Sweat leaked into Ness' eyes, stinging them. He dabbed it away with his shirt. "Whoever hijacked the sub, when they saw Sebastian, they weren't about to bust out a pen and paper and converse with him. They would have shot him. To do that, they'd have to sneak up on him. Meanwhile, he's on home turf, he can shut down the lights, and he can sense movement. You really think they're going to catch him unaware?"

  "Probably not," Tristan said. "Other than being a nice thought, is there a point?"

  "It's all the more reason to hustle our asses to the sub. And once we get there, we'll have help from inside."

  Lionel and the other three caught up shortly. Tristan explained what she'd seen to the doctor, who listened to her description of the geography and nodded.

  "Botany Bay," he said. "The good news is that it's quiet. Most of the city's to the north. The bad news is, the people who have dominion over Botany Bay are the main reason why I've taken to the forest."

  "Are these the pirates?" Ness said.

  "I don't have the information to answer that. I can say that no one would be foolish enough to take a damaged ship into the bay without the permission of the bay's owners. Those being a group known as the Magpies."

  "What?" Emma said. "As in Collingwood?"

  "That is a reasonable guess."

  "Is this gibberish to anyone else?" Ness said.

  "Football club," Gohel said. "In other words, completely irrelevant."

  Miles away, the skyscrapers of Sydney punched into the sky. According to the doctor, Botany Bay was only six or seven miles from them, as the magpie flies, but getting to it on foot would require a miles-long detour around the other bay directly in front of them, a many-armed waterway of turquoise water and shallow, sandy bottoms. Most places, the ocean was at least a thousand feet across between the north shore, and as wide as half a mile, but Gohel claimed that one of the sandbars stretched to within a hundred meters of the other side.

  They agreed to make a quick search for a boat or raft, though Sam warned them that swimming, no matter how tempting, would be a bad idea unless they had a way to float their guns across. The trees led all the way down to the shore. Suburban neighborhoods broke up the lands.

  After the run, Ness' head felt incapable of anything more pressing than single-digit addition, but he homed right in on a rowboat. When they floated it, it took on a bit of water, but nothing too severe for their modest intentions. A half-mile tentacle of sand extended toward the far shore. Tristan paddled the boat alongside the sand while the others walked up the spit. Feeling exposed, Ness darted his eyes to all sides.

  At the end of the spit, Tristan brought the rowboat in to the sand. As Gohel had promised, the other side was separated by a channel no more than five hundred feet across. Houses clustered the shores. There wasn't room for all six of them, so Tristan made the first crossing with Ness and Emma, with the other three covering from the spit. Tristan put in at a dock surrounded by trees. Ness and Emma watched the surroundings while Tristan rowed back and brought over the o
thers.

  "The bay starts about two miles to the north," Gohel said softly. "I would consider everything forward Magpie territory. Best be careful."

  For all the action, it wasn't any later than two o'clock. The days were getting longer; the sun wouldn't be all the way down until at least seven.

  Tristan gauged the sky, clearly having similar thoughts. "This place is huge. I say we make use of the daylight while we've got it. If we spot the sub, we can hunker down until nightfall, then take a run at it."

  "That sounds ideal," Ness said. "If conditions aren't, I'm going in anyway."

  "Won't do your friends any good for you to throw your life away."

  "My friends?"

  "Who are also mine." She shook her head. "We're wasting time."

  "I'm in total agreement with that."

  He headed up the sidewalk where the trees provided plenty of shade. The neighborhood was single-family homes that looked like they would once have cost sums he only could have laughed at. Now there was nobody to buy them and no money to pay with. The most valuable location wasn't in the middle of a city anymore, either—exposed to its few surviving residents, with little farmable land, any sources of fresh water contaminated by your neighbors' shit. The very idea disgusted him.

  Then again, could be he'd simply been away from people too long.

  They moved north in a loose, single column, stopping at the dinky little residential intersections. Ness kept his nose open for the smells of habitation but could only smell the sea. The peninsula narrowed, spitting them into glassy shopping centers and ritzy apartment blocks built with all kinds of weird levels and swoops. Whenever he could see the open ocean to his right, he glanced that way, making sure the sub wasn't sneaking off without them.

  They headed up a boulevard interrupted at regular intervals by roundabouts clogged with rusting, bashed-up cars. Every single one had its fuel door popped. Many had been stripped of their tires. Others had their hoods propped open, hoses and wires dangling like desiccated intestines.

  After passing an overgrown golf course, they looked out on shining waters to the north. The doctor confirmed it was part of Botany Bay. After moving to the forested shore for a better look at the lagoony waters, they took a winding road through a preserve of trees, sandy beaches, and industrial crap Ness figured was for water treatment. This enfolded yet another bay, but it was all forested, with no docks or harbors.

  Past another paved field of massive, white, circular holding tanks, they came to an upscale suburb. The houses were arranged along the shore like popsicle sticks, their side walls nearly touching the neighbors, with narrow yards in front and back. The group came to a stop behind an overgrown hedge. A road paralleled the shore. At regular intervals, boulder-built breakwaters extended a hundred yards from the sand. The ocean was so shallow it was green, a mix of light sand and darker seaweed.

  "This is it," Gohel said. "Botany Bay proper." He pointed to a sweep of coast to the right. "Your sub would have come in right over there."

  A couple miles across from them, two massive concrete platforms—runways, Ness thought—thrust into the bay. To the right of the airport, two vast paved lots were stacked with multicolored shipping containers. Sunken cargo vessels angled from the waters. Ness was about to say it reminded him of the time they'd stolen the diesel fuel from the port in the Philippines, but the only ones who would have known what he was talking about were Sprite and Sebastian.

  "There you go," Sam said, binoculars raised to her eyes. "As requested, one alien submarine."

  Ness waited impatiently for her to hand over the binoculars. He focused in on the docks beside the airport. There, the dark body of the sub rested in a deepwater berth. Tiny figures moved around its top deck and the dock, so small he wouldn't have noticed them if not for their movement. He couldn't get a good estimate of their numbers, but what with the warehouses they were going in and out of, he thought there must be twenty, minimum.

  "Wonderful," Tristan said. "We've got our boat. Now, the small matter of retrieving it from the legion of armed men."

  "No problem," Ness said. "All we need is two things: a rowboat, and a can of black paint."

  * * *

  Across the bay, the dead skyscrapers were black rectangles against the starry sky. The surf beat softly on the shore. It had cooled down, but to a tolerable non-temperature that reminded Ness of the nights they'd spent in San Diego and Tijuana. While Sam watched from the front of the rowboat, he and Tristan paddled alongside the concrete pier extending a half mile into the bay. They were in no hurry, keeping the splash of their oars as quiet as possible.

  Ideally, they wouldn't wind up doing much paddling at all. He had spent most of the afternoon watching the bay. Specifically, the clumps of kelp and chunks of plastic floating around in it. As it turned out, the currents made a rough circuit. Once they maneuvered the rowboat into the swirl, it would sweep them right past the port.

  That, meanwhile, had finally quieted down. Two lanterns burned from the dock, but the workers had quit at sundown, leaving a handful of sentries patrolling the grounds. With the rowboat painted matte black, the moon a bare sliver, and the currents guiding them silently to their target, they were about as stealthy as stealth got.

  Even so, they'd sent Lionel, Emma, and the doctor back to the first bay they'd crossed. With instructions to walk away if they hadn't come back with the sub by dawn.

  The boat cleared the end of the pier. They guided it northeast, toward the mouth of the bay. Once they came within a couple hundred yards of the north shore—more sand and trees, mostly, with scattered suburbs—the current grabbed them, tugging them back to the west. The port stuck down like a crooked thumb. With the sub docked on its western edge, they were blocked from sight by warehouses and stacks of containers, allowing them to paddle more aggressively.

  Minute by minute, they drifted closer. Sam held up a hand and pressed herself as flat as she could. Ness quit paddling and followed suit. The right side of the dock was less than three hundred feet away. A dark figure emerged from between two warehouses and gazed out to sea. Ness held perfectly still. After a moment, the sentry headed south along the warehouses, reached the port's edge, and circled back behind the buildings.

  "He's probably on a circuit," Tristan whispered. "We should head straight to the sub. Before he makes another round."

  They made for the port. Its edges were buffered by a weird jumble of identical manufactured concrete pieces. Shaped like children's jacks, the pieces' arms were tangled together, preventing them from sliding into the water. Paddling alongside the sloped piles, their team would be impossible to see unless somebody were standing right above them.

  They skimmed past two warehouses, then hooked around a breakwater fronted by more of the loose concrete. Once they cleared the break, they looked on the docks themselves—and the sub. This rested perpendicular to the end of a long concrete pier. Dark. Silent.

  Ness dipped his oar into the water, pushing them toward the sub's curved flank. Once they were a few feet out, they let themselves drift in the rest of the way. There were no ladders or handholds on the sub's side. Tristan and Sam shifted to the other side of the rowboat. Ness coiled himself and sprung. He thumped against the hull, spread-eagle, inching his way upwards like a starfish. He rolled over the top's lip, then cast down a rope and braced his shoes on the smooth metal.

  Tristan came first, then Sam, her trademark rifle slanted over her back. A lantern burned on the port two hundred feet away, far too distant for its light to reach them. The sub's tower rose twenty feet down the hull. Hunched low, Ness headed toward it.

  "Who's there?" a man called from the darkness, his accent thickly Australian. He laughed scornfully. "Scared out of the boat already, Justin?"

  Ness dropped lower yet, brushing the hull with one hand as he accelerated forward.

  "Boarders!" a second man said. "Open fire!"

  The first shot came from right behind Ness—Sam, pelting the sentries with her rifl
e. Ness sprinted forward. On land, two men ran from the shelter of the warehouses. Muzzles flashed. Shots pealed over the water. A bullet struck the hull like a lethal gong and buzzed away.

  Ness reached the tower and hauled himself up. Tristan was right behind him, steadily firing a pistol at the pair of men. With them distracted, Sam burst toward the tower. Ness reached the top and flicked beams of blue heat at the sentries. One of the men screamed and dropped to the pavement.

  Ness dropped through the hatch onto the rubbery ramp below. The inside of the sub smelled briny, but there was a sharp tang of disinfectant, too. The ramp spiraled so tightly he couldn't see more than a few feet ahead of him. He curled up and flipped around to crawl down the slope headfirst.

  Halfway to the lower level, a pale face swung into view. Ness hesitated just long enough to ensure it wasn't Sprite, then shot the man in the head. A cloud of charred hair filled the tight space. Ness scrambled over the body, leading the way with his laser.

  He reached the base of the ramp and stood. Harsh, pale light poked through the exit. Ness peeked around the corner. An arc light hung from the ceiling, clipped to a strut. A workbench crowded one side of the hall, littered with hammers and pliers and screwdrivers. The sub did have a number of screws in its body, but Ness doubted the thieves would have anything suited to handle the three-pointed alien variety.

  Tristan came up beside him. She'd switched to a laser, holding it forward at arm's length. Sam followed her down.

  "I closed the hatch," Sam said. "But from the look of this place, if we don't get out of here fast, they've got the tools to blow it open."

  "That's just great," Ness said. "What happens if Sprite and Sebastian aren't on board?"

  "Then we find them." Tristan rolled around the corner of the door and got down behind the workbench, bracing her elbows on its top.

  Ness swore under his breath, envying her confidence, her will to move forward. It was like she had no doubts at all. Her fears were like Lego blocks that she could unsnap from each other and put away in a box. His were like the time when he'd been living in the trailer in Idaho with his mom and he'd opened a bag of flour to fry some chicken. On digging out a scoop and plopping it into the metal bowl, he'd discovered the bag was absolutely swarming with teeny-tiny mites.