The Price of Freedom

by Chris Kennedy

  I kept my rifle out and within sight of anyone we passed so they didn’t get any ideas.

  A couple of the smaller boats came closer than I wanted, necessitating a shot across their bows, as it were, but then they drove off—probably in search of easier prey. I couldn’t be sure of their intentions, and it didn’t matter. As long as they stayed well away from us, they were fine.

  “Does this thing go any faster?” I asked as we reached a relatively straight section of the channel.

  “Sure does,” Jimmy replied. “It’s just a matter of range versus fuel consumption. We can go about 3,000 miles at this speed, or I can speed up, and we’ll have to refuel sooner. I can go really fast, but then we’ll have to find gas really soon. I didn’t figure you’d want to stop.” He raised an eyebrow. “Was I wrong?”

  “No, that’s fine,” I said. I nodded at the sun, which was getting close to the western horizon. “I had hoped to make open water before sunset.”

  Jimmy chuckled. “Not going to happen. We can make the Columbia River, but I’m not sure you’ll want to. There will probably be a lot more traffic on it and maybe some radiation from upriver in Portland.”

  “So, what do you recommend?”

  He nodded toward the island we were passing. “All things being equal, I’d suggest finding a little inlet and anchoring there.”

  “Makes sense,” I replied. “I did that when I came up here yesterday.” Was it only yesterday? It seemed like ages ago.

  “There,” Jimmy said a few minutes later, pointing. “Let’s go for that one.”

  “Okay,” I replied. “If you think it’s big enough.”

  “I’ll go slow.”

  Jimmy powered down to a crawl, and we inched into a side channel. We had just made it around a small bend when the boat jerked to a stop.

  Jimmy shrugged. “Guess we’re drawing a little more water than I thought,” he said.

  “Should I go see if we sprang a leak?”

  “Nah,” Jimmy said, shaking his head. “That was sand; we’re probably okay.”

  I raised an eyebrow, and he shrugged. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll check in a minute after I get us set.” He put the propeller into reverse and backed us off gently, then dropped the anchor. “We should be good here.”

  “How do you know?”

  A flush crept up Jimmy’s face. “Uh…sometimes Mr. Courvoisier would have…parties here. This is how he would do it.”

  “Anyone ever bother you here?”

  “Never.”

  I nodded. “Then this is as good a place as any. Well done.”

  We made a quick dinner, then I looked Jimmy in the eye. “How long do you think you can stay awake?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “One of us is going to stand guard at all times. I doubt you can do it at two or three in the morning; it’s not something you’re trained for. I can, though, so I’m giving you first watch. If it gets to be midnight, or you can’t stay awake anymore, wake me up.”

  “Do we really need to do this?”

  “Yes,” I replied. “Our lives—your life—may depend on it.”

  That got his attention. “Wha—what do I do?”

  I handed him a pistol. “Know how to use this?”

  “No.”

  I took it back. “Never mind. I don’t want you shooting me accidentally. We’ll work on that.” I shrugged. “Since that won’t work, I want you to sit here and watch and listen. Keep the lights off and don’t move around. It’s going to be hard not to fall asleep. Don’t fall asleep! If you hear anything, come wake me up. If it gets to be midnight, come wake me up.” I took a moment to let that sink in, then asked, “Can you do that?”

  “I think so…”

  “If you want to stay alive in this new world, you better do more than just ‘think so,’” I replied. “You damn well better know so.”

  Now he looked scared, which was my point; it was how I wanted him to feel. He finally nodded. “I can do that.”

  “Good,” I said. “Get me up at midnight, or sooner if you need me.”

  I went down to my stateroom and turned off my brain. It was a trick I had learned so I wouldn’t waste time lying awake when I could be sleeping. It had been a long couple of days, and I knew I needed time to recharge—time I wouldn’t get if I had to spend half the night on watch—so I needed to maximize the time I had. Admittedly, in retrospect, I fucked up; I shouldn’t have trusted Jimmy so completely.

  When he shook me awake, I knew instantly it was after he should have gotten me up. I withdrew the pistol from the side of Jimmy’s head, instantly awake. “What?” I whispered.

  “Never—” Jimmy’s eyes were huge, and he was shivering. Apparently, he’d never had anyone point a gun at him before. I suspected that would change going forward. “Never seen someone move so fast,” he was finally able to say.

  “Is there a problem?” I asked.

  Jimmy stared at me for a second with his mouth open, then shook his head, trying to get ahold of himself. “There’s—there’s…” he paused. “I heard voices outside.”

  “Which side of the boat?”

  “Port side.”

  I nodded. The left; got it. “Stay here,” I said. “Unless you want to get shot.”

  He shook his head vigorously, and I scooped up my rifle as I went to the door. The moon was about half full, which was plenty of light for my modified eyes to see by. I was looking at the sky and didn’t see a screw head sticking up, and I kicked it really hard as I walked. With 200 kilos of mass behind it, the screw did a good bit of damage to my foot. It took everything I had not to cry out in pain.

  It’s harder to sneak quietly when you’re limping, but I managed, and I eased my way out onto the bridge level. I saw them right away—they were sliding into the water from the nearby bank. I don’t know why they had put on rubber suits, masks, and flippers—maybe because of the radiation?—but the three men were kitted out. I set the pistol down gently and brought up my rifle.

  The flippers made it hard for them to run. I shot the man on the right, and the middle one tried to spin away when the rifle boomed, looking to escape, but the flippers hampered him. Another boom! sounded in the still night, and he dropped. Instead of trying to flee, the third man dove forward into the water and submerged before I could shoot him.

  Unfortunately for him, there was still enough light for me to see him—the water wasn’t that deep, and he was moving—and I fired at him a couple of times. The first shot missed, but the second made him ball up, and a dark stain appeared in the water, trailing off him. I leaned the rifle against the railing and reached over to get my pistol for when he surfaced, but it was gone.

  “Don’t move,” a man’s voice said. “Turn around.”

  I put my hands in the air, but stayed facing the water. “How am I supposed to turn around if I don’t move?”

  “Oh, a smartass, huh? How about I shoot you now?”

  “That’s not required,” I said, turning around, “although I have been told I’m a smartass.”

  The man stared at me, obviously not finding me amusing, while he pointed my gun at me and dripped on my deck. “I want all of your food and weapons,” he said. “You can either help me gather them up, or I can shoot you. Which is it going to be?”

  “I’ll help,” I said, walking toward him as I dumped my adrenal glands.

  “Don’t come any closer!” he ordered.

  I kicked my body into high gear. I only had to cover two steps, then I slapped the hand holding the pistol away from me. He fired, winging me in the arm, then I chopped down with my opposite hand, breaking his wrist. The pistol fell to the deck.

  He gaped up at me, his brain obviously having problems processing how fast I could move. Before he could recover, I bent down, grabbed the pistol, and shot him once through the head. As his body fell backward, I switched the pistol to my other hand and gave him a shove. His body went over the railing and splashed into the channel.

  I l
ooked quickly at my arm—it was bleeding, but not badly—then went to check the other man I had shot. He was climbing out of the water, limping. I put another bullet into his back, and he fell forward into the mud along the bank.

  I took a second and focused, allowing all of my senses to operate at their peaks. I should have done this at the start, I realized, rather than simply going with what Jimmy had told me. That was my second mistake of the evening, and one that had almost cost me greatly. I guess I’d become too used to operating with professionals; it had been so long since I’d been partnered with a newbie that I forgot just how little they knew. I would have to give Jimmy some training…for my sake.

  You need partners you can rely on in this Fallen World.

  * * * * *

  Chapter Sixteen

  It was almost dawn by the time I’d gotten Jimmy, checked the rest of the boat, and tended to my wound. Thankfully, it hadn’t hit the bone, so I put some antibiotic on it and covered it up. As fast as my body healed, it would be back to normal in a day or two.

  As I could see pretty well, we pulled in the anchor and continued on the Multnomah Channel. It was only about a mile further to where it reached the Columbia River at St. Helens. The previous day hadn’t been good to the city, as evidenced by a number of columns of smoke where buildings still burned. I hoped the folks in Rose Manor had held out. Civilization would need people like them to help rebuild.

  There was a lot more traffic on the Columbia River, all of it going in the same direction we were. I doubted any of them really had more of a purpose than “get away from Portland and the destruction,” but it made it a lot harder on us. Some of the people were scared and running, but others were watching them with predatory glances, and a number of people visually sized us up as we passed them or were passed by them.

  I gave most of them nothing more than a slight nod, never taking my eyes off them. Whether it was my stare or the rifle I held in my hands that kept them from trying to board us, I don’t know—I was just happy it worked.

  It took most of the day to navigate the 50 miles of river to where it broadened as it reached the coast. I traded rifle fire with people on shore once and a couple of times with other boats as we motored along, but most people were content to let us pass unobstructed. The three people who didn’t wouldn’t bother anyone who followed us. Or anyone else, ever.

  I spent some of this time training Jimmy, showing him how to operate both the pistol and the rifle. Although he was afraid to touch the pistol at first, he was a quick study, and I let him fire a couple of rounds into our wake to get the feel of it. I couldn’t make him an expert, but if I could make him more dangerous to the bad guys—i.e., anyone who wasn’t me—that was a step in the right direction.

  By the time we reached the Astoria–Megler Bridge near the mouth of the Columbia River, the traffic had begun to bunch up. Even though the river was several miles across, this appeared to be the point where reality hit everyone who was on the water, and they stopped to consider what they wanted to do. Either that, or they were afraid of going into the Pacific Ocean—I didn’t know which—and we ended up having to go almost as slow through the groups of ships as we had when the river was narrower. A large number of boats were clustered near the Astoria end of the bridge, although their owners appeared afraid to put ashore there. With most of the buildings lining the river on fire, I wouldn’t have pulled in, either.

  The problem, though, was that end of the bridge was the only place along its entire span that was high enough for us to cross under. So, we worked our way through the boats and under the bridge and finally made it to the open ocean. Although the map proclaimed the northern edge of land to be “Cape Disappointment,” I couldn’t have been happier.

  It’s the little things that make you smile in this Fallen World.

  * * * * *

  Chapter Seventeen

  We made it all the way to Cabo San Lucas before we decided to put in for more fuel. We’d covered about half the distance to Panama, but we were down to less than half our gas. The journey had been long and stressful, and seeing what humans could do to each other hadn’t made it any better. Where the big cities had once stood, there were now nuclear craters. Worse, it looked like the cities that had survived the nuclear hammer had torn themselves up. Buildings were burned, and for the first few days, smoke covered the eastern horizon.

  After being chased by what I took to be pirates a couple of times, we stayed a good distance offshore, and no one came out to bother us. The fishing was better there, too, although after a week of nothing but fish, I was looking forward to something—anything—else.

  I’d been ready to put in for a while, but hadn’t seen anything like what we needed since the hell that was formerly called San Diego. The majority of Baja California—aside from Ensenada, which was still on fire—was an empty, blasted wasteland. While that meant there was no one to come out and harass us, it also meant there was no place to replenish our stores, and things were getting pretty tight.

  As we pulled within sight of Cabo San Lucas, which was at the southern end of the Baja Peninsula, I could see the port looked…weird, and I had Jimmy hold us about a half-mile outside the mouth of the harbor.

  The entire scene was surreal, from the CruiseWorld ship that had been driven onto the beach to the people I could see moving around the boats tied up to the piers inside the boat basin. Although I’d never been to this part of Mexico, I had been to other parts of the country, and the actions of the people I could see were strange; in fact, they didn’t look or act like any people I’d ever seen before. Their legs seemed shorter, and their trunks were elongated. Half the time—maybe more than half—they got down on all fours to move around. When they did, they didn’t seem hunched over—their front legs were as long as their back ones.

  I swept my binoculars through the rest of the city. It seemed like a normal-enough view. People were walking around, doing whatever people did in small, Mexican towns. It looked like there was a market where several people were moving around, picking up items. The only things that struck me as odd about the town were the lack of devastation, compared to what we’d seen along the way, and the city’s water tower, upon which someone had scrawled “KK” in big black letters.

  “KK,” I muttered to myself. “I wonder what that stands for.”

  “King Korp,” a man’s voice said behind me, and I drew my pistol as I spun. On the back deck of the boat stood…something. Although humanoid in shape, the man’s facial features were smeared, as if he were made of wax and had stood too close to a flame. He held a hand over his eyes as he looked up to shade them from the sun, and I could see he had some sort of webbed swimming glove on.

  Jimmy inhaled sharply next to me, and I could feel him tense. Without looking, I reached back and put a hand on his arm, holding him in place so he didn’t do anything stupid. “Never heard of it,” I said, trying to get my heart rate under control. “It’s certainly not one of the major corporations, and I don’t think it’s one of the smaller ones, either.”

  “It was very small,” the man said.

  Something on his neck moved. Did he have gills?

  “In fact,” the man said, “it was very much a niche market. King Korp did animal burials.”

  I shrugged. “I was always gone on a mission, so I never had a pet. Must have missed it.”

  What passed for the man’s lips turned up slightly. “Of course, before they did, the scientists, here, withdrew…samples.”

  I didn’t like the direction this conversation was going, and I raised my pistol, which I had lowered when the man hadn’t turned out to be dangerous. “What did they do with these samples?”

  “They were scientists,” the man replied. “They did what scientists do—they experimented. They were also holdovers from an earlier generation that never gave us what we were promised.”

  “And what was that?”

  “Life. Not just life, but life the way we wanted it. For example, aquatic an
imals can swim better than we can because they have webbed claws. Now, so do we.”

  He held out his hand, and I could see that what I had thought was a glove to aid in swimming was actually his hand, and he had webbing between his fingers. I couldn’t tell whether it was real from up on the bridge, but it looked real enough to me, and I wasn’t going to get any closer to the man than I had to.

  “You used to know us as Geno Freaks, and you Yankees called us other names, mostly unpleasant ones…but now we have taken our rightful place at the top of the food chain. We are faster than you and better than you in every way possible. The time of homo sapiens is over; the time of homo evolvedicus is at hand!”

  “Homo evolvedicus?” I asked. “Do you know how stupid that sounds? Seriously? That’s what you want to call yourselves?” I chuckled. “You thought you got laughed at before. Wait ‘til people hear about this—you’ll really get an earful then.”

  He stood there, looking at me, nonplussed.

  “I mean, seriously,” I said, “what kind of moron comes up with that?”

  “I did.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “I said I was the one who invented that term.”

  “Oh.” I could feel the flush crawl up my neck. I was one of the most accomplished Specialists I knew. I had trained in a number of areas and had a huge number of skills. Tact, apparently, wasn’t one of them. “I mean, it could be cool, but maybe if—”