The cutthroat w-2

by Jason Frost

  Eric shook his head. "No way. That's a Wellington 63 over there. Nice maxicruiser with NACA air-foil sections and a terrific aft cabin. The high sail area/displacement and sail area/wetted area ratios make it pretty fast. The sail area is nineteen hundred square feet and if it's got any fuel, it's got a two hundred ten horsepower Caterpillar diesel coupled to a variable pitch, three-bladed Hundested prop. But The Centurion is a seventy-three-foot staysail schooner with-"

  "Stop it!" Tracy hollered and threw a canful of water into Eric's face. She threw the can too, but the string attaching it to the thwart snapped it back before it hit him. The sudden physical effort made Tracy wince with pain, but she kept her eyes boring into Eric's. He stared back, his face dripping with water, his expression merely surprise.

  "I'm tired of feeling so goddamned helpless, Eric. Before all this I was an artist, a damn sketch artist for trials, but at least I was respected. I knew my way around the business like a professional." She shifted her hip so she could see him better. "But the kind of things you need to know here, I wasn't prepared for. What plants to eat, how to find drinking water, how to make weapons out of fingernail clippings. Christ, I feel like a baby. And you make it worse."

  "Tracy, I didn't-"

  "Wait," she interrupted, holding up her hand. "I'm not complaining. Not really. Considering the reality of the kind of world we now live in, that we may live in for the rest of our lives, I'm damned lucky to be with you. But you're damn lucky to be with me too, buster. I'm pretty smart, fairly athletic, and a lot sexier than you're likely to find for a long time. It's just that I get a little frustrated sometimes by the way you seem to know so much. How come you always know everything?"

  He looked at her and shrugged. "I don't know."

  And both burst out laughing at the same time. It was a long laugh that caused as much pain as pleasure. Both clutched their wounds as they shook with laughter. It was a communion of mirth, a lightening of spirits that seemed to even float free of the Long Beach Halo. Eric reached into the water at the bottom of the canoe, gripped Tracy's ankle to steady himself as he laughed. Tracy held onto the gunwales, causing the whole boat to rock precariously. Neither seemed to notice. Afterward, tears brimming in their eyes, smiles still stretching their lips, they fell silent.

  Eric stared out over the ocean before him, the long square necks of buildings craning out of the water. Their laughter seemed to still echo across the ocean, perhaps bouncing around inside the buildings, and he thought what a strange sound it was. And how little of it they'd heard since the quakes. How little they'd done.

  "You're looking kind of pale, Eric," Tracy said. "How about you doing the bailing and I'll paddle for a while."

  "Can you sit up?"

  "Sure," she said, but when she tried to curl her legs up, the hip jerked with pain. Her fingers dug into the gunwales until the knuckles glowed white. The jersey cloth fell from her wound and Eric leaned over to inspect.

  Jesus, he cursed to himself, but kept an impassive face. The bullet hole had pounded through the hip like a dull nail, charring the flesh around the entry hole. He tore open her pants around the wound. The skin was puckered and the angry red glow of infection was spreading. The bullet had bored straight through and out the back of the thigh, so at least he wouldn't have to dig the slug out.

  Eric opened the one half-filled backpack he'd managed to grab before jumping off the ship. A pair of thick socks, two rolls of duct tape, a stick of bee's wax he'd used on his bow string. No medical supplies, no compass, no knife, no food. And with Tracy's wound looking so bad, he'd have to do something quick.

  "Reminds me of The Angry Red Planet," Tracy said, staring at the wound. "Remember that movie? The giant spider on Mars."

  Eric nodded. "We'll paddle over to that building there, rest for the night. Tomorrow we head straight for land."

  Tracy looked at him. For Eric to break off his search for Timmy meant that this was serious. "How bad is it? Am I going to lose my leg or what?"

  "I don't know."

  "Don't pull that crap on me now, Eric. Maybe part of the reason I sometimes feel so frustrated and helpless is that you keep things from me. We're in this together, right?"

  "Right," Eric said. "It's too early to tell yet, but I've seen enough bullet wounds to know this one needs immediate attention. We're both too tired to make it to land today. Besides, we'd be idiots to travel during the day anyway. So we hole up in that building until dark and head straight for land, where I have a better chance of treating your leg with herbs and medicinal plants."

  Tracy examined her pulpy hip, made a sour face. "What if we don't land near any of the plants you need?"

  "Then I find something else."

  "What?"

  "You really want to know?"

  "Yes, damn it."

  Eric hesitated. "Maggots."

  "Oh Christ, Eric. I'm serious."

  "So am I. Maggots ingest dead tissue. A common treatment of infected battle wounds during World War I. We just expose the wound to flies and pretty soon we'll have our maggots."

  Tracy swallowed the thickness in her throat. "I've changed my mind about wanting to know everything."

  Eric smiled. "Don't worry. I'll have you on your knees paddling this thing in no time."

  "Some incentive."

  Eric guided the canoe toward the nearest building. Only two and a half stories stuck out of the water, but that would be more than enough. At least a third of the reflective glass plating that encased the building like armor was shattered. Huge gaping holes stared out where floating debris had rammed through. As they neared the building, they could see that the tail of a small Piper plane stuck out of the building. The rest of the plane was lodged in the top floor where it had crashed.

  "Rhino and your former playmate are hauling their butts out of here," Tracy said, pointing at The Centurion, sails full as it sped away. The Home Run still sat quietly in the middle of the ocean, flames engulfing the whole ship, hissing as falling boards touched water. "Did you really sleep with her one night and try to kill her in the morning?"

  "Yes. It was the quickest way to get past her guards."

  "But she knew who you were all the time."

  "Thanks to Fallows. I should've known he'd find a way to turn some profit out of the war." He traced his finger along his scar, the scar that Fallows had given him back in Vietnam.

  "Eric, they're coming toward us."

  "What?"

  "That ship. The one that picked up the passengers. They're sailing right at us."

  Eric watched the sails being hauled up, the last of the survivors being pulled aboard, as the ship turned its bow toward them. He could see four or five armed archers standing at the railing, arrows already nocked into the strings.

  He dug the paddle into the water, churning at the ocean until the canoe was closing in on the building. His wounded chest throbbed as if the ribs were poking through the skin, tearing at the muscles, but he had no other choice.

  "As soon as we land, we search the place for anything we can turn into weapons."

  "Fine, as long as it doesn't involve maggots."

  "Check the plane first. See if there's any fuel left. Maybe we can mix a couple Molotov cocktails."

  "Okay. But maybe they don't want to harm us. After all, they did try to destroy Rhino and that bunch."

  "That doesn't necessarily make them our friends. It could have been a business dispute."

  "Business dispute?"

  "Look at the flag?"

  Tracy shaded her eyes with her hand and peered across the water at the approaching ship. High atop the mast was a fluttering black flag-with a skull and crossbones.

  "They've got to be kidding," she said. "It's too corny to be real. Pirates?"

  Eric backwatered the paddle, easing the canoe up to one of the large holes in the glass. Tracy dragged herself through the hole, cutting her hand on a jagged piece of glass. Eric followed, hopping into the dark dusty room and hauling the canoe in after t
hem.

  They turned to face the room they'd entered. A steel filing cabinet stood against the wall, but otherwise the room was empty. The floor was wet and sticky with clumps of seaweed that the ocean washed in every few seconds as another wave lapped through the hole.

  Eric anchored the canoe, wedging it behind the filing cabinet. Then he slipped an arm around Tracy's waist and helped her toward the room's only door, which was closed. "We'll find the stairs and climb to the next floor. That'll give us the upper ground advantage. We might even be able to block off the stairs after us."

  Tracy reached for the doorknob, turned, and pulled it open.

  The three men stood with weapons ready. There was an ax poised over one man's shoulder, another man thrust his makeshift spear against Tracy's stomach, a third man pressed a.22 automatic against Eric's temple. Behind them stood a tall woman with a red bandana tied around her forehead giving orders.

  "Kill them now?" the brutish man with the ax asked her hopefully.

  Book Two: ON THE SHIPS

  Look now how mortals are blaming the gods, for they say that evils come from us, but in fact they themselves have woes beyond their share because of their own follies.

  - Homer

  10.

  Eric Ravensmith scraped the steel blade against his dry cheek. Though the room was too dark to see anything, he felt the slivers of brown whiskers sprinkled lightly on his chin like tiny leaves. For a moment he thought of himself as a giant sequoia tree, witnessing hundreds of years of human turmoil, but at the end still standing, calm and indifferent in the dark forest. He brushed the whiskers with his hand. He knew without looking that there were dozens of gray ones mixed in with the brown, more than last month. At this rate he'd be all gray by Christmas. He tilted his head back and carefully scraped his neck.

  "God, that's an ugly sound," Tracy said. "Like you're munching on a mouthful of beetles. Yech."

  Eric smiled, nudging the sharp blade gently over his jugular, decapitating two-day-old whiskers like a hooded headsman.

  "Some people, Eric, might think this was a strange time to shave. Not me, you understand, just some people who didn't know you." Her voice echoed in the cold, dark room. "I mean, we've been huddled in this drafty office with the wind whipping off the ocean and nipping at our toes and giving me crow's feet from squinting. We're prisoners again, unarmed again, when you come up with this brilliant way to make a couple knives. So far, so good. But now you sit there shaving, for Christ's sake. Do I think that's weird? Hey, no problem."

  Eric reached his hand over to where he knew she was lying, grazed her shoulder, then traced the length of her arm until he felt her cold hand. He squeezed it and she squeezed back. Something as invisible as electricity and as thick as blood passed between them in that contact. They just held tight for a few minutes, feeling the building sway and groan with the shifting ocean current.

  "How's the hip?"

  "We'll have to cut the triple somersault out of our sexual repertoire, but otherwise okay." She coughed, a racking spasm which sent a flare of pain through her hip. "You don't happen to have a couple hungry maggots handy, do you?"

  "Hold on, Trace," Eric said, wishing he had something more encouraging to tell her. Hell, he wished he had more to say about a lot of things. He'd never been the shy quiet type, rather a fairly animated conversationalist, able to hold his students' rapt attention semester after semester as he chatted about Da Vinci's financial woes or Napoleon's stomach cancer. But lately with each passing day he seemed to say less and less, reverting to some animal silence that didn't require speech. He didn't like it.

  Eric glanced at the door. A stripe of flickering light glowed at the bottom. He heard voices on the other side, but couldn't make out what was said. He didn't have to hear the exact words. He knew that they were the main topic.

  Almost immediately upon being captured, Tracy and Eric had been locked back in the same room that they'd crawled into from their canoe. The canoe had been dragged off into another room and they'd been told to wait. On the other side of the building where that Piper had crashed, they had heard the large ship docking. The shouting and arguing of men and women, sounding none too friendly, had been going on since then.

  The orange Kool-Aid sky had burned itself out for another and the hazy gray of night took over its watch. That's when Eric saw the Long Beach Halo that enclosed them all as a malevolent guard. Tracy described that phenomenon as a giant Tupperware bowl. "Seals in freshness," she joked, "keeps out ugly refrigerator smells. Not to mention the rest of the world." At first there had been weekly government leaflets dumped from Air Force planes flying over the Halo, describing medical and military efforts underway to rescue the survivors of California, asking for patience. And specifically warning residents not to try to escape by sea through the Halo due to fears of contamination. Every Monday they had come drifting out of the orange haze like a heavenly bulletin from God. But after a while they came every other week. Now monthly. There was still talk of rescue, but not as much of it.

  Eric didn't care. If there was a way out, he would find it. But first he had to find Timmy.

  Eric and Tracy sat in the dark room, fighting the chilly wind that swept into the gaping hole in their prison wall. Any thought of escaping through the hole was immediately dismissed. With no boat, it would be impossible to swim to land they couldn't even see in the daylight.

  But Eric wouldn't sit there helplessly, waiting for whoever was outside that door to decide his and Tracy's fates. The room itself was bare except for the metal filing cabinet, its gray paint chewed through by the saltwater, and that proved to be empty. Immediately, Eric had yanked off his Vasque hiking boots.

  Tracy had looked at him as if he'd gone crazy. "I told you, I'm not swimming for it."

  But Eric hadn't answered. He'd dug inside the boots, tearing away until he finally worked free the steel arches that the sporting-goods salesman had once chatted on about. After ripping up a section of soggy carpet from the floor, Eric began the slow task of honing the edge of the steel against the exposed cement until they were both as sharp as surgical blades. He'd handed one to Tracy and they'd both waited for their chance.

  The wait continued. By sunset, Eric had decided to shave, as he had done every day since the quake. He was one of the few men who still did, most having surrendered to whiskers and long hair. At first, Tracy had tried to imitate Eric's actions by shaving her legs, but the nicks and gouges hadn't proved worth it. Eric had finally convinced her that he actually preferred her with her hair.

  What Tracy didn't understand was that Eric shaved not just out of fastidious personal hygiene, as she thought, but out of fear.

  Fear of what he might become.

  He had started to feel it a few months ago. When he was honest with himself, he admitted it had started even before the quakes, back during that first night when Fallows had sent that killer into his home. He had been afraid at first, afraid for his family and for his own life. But that had passed quickly, too quickly, he later realized. In its place had come that adrenaline rush he'd felt in 'Nam when he ran with the Night Shift, the squad of Special Forces assassins that nobody official ever admitted existed. He'd hated the group, and even more their leader, Col. Dirk Fallows. But there were times, too many times, when the power that went with their anonymity pumped through his veins like molten steel. The knowledge that they were sanctioned to do anything had disgusted him, yet at the same time exhilarated him. Many of his friends had given in to the power, like walking into a blinding light. They had become cruel and arrogant, as sadistic as their leader. Some had fought it openly, only to die in battle under mysterious circumstances: bullets in the back, sudden grenade attacks. Eric had fought his battle internally.

  But now the lure was there again. California was an island cut off from civilization, and as such had become a primitive war zone like 'Nam. The survivors fought for existence, not vague patriotic philosophy. And the struggle permitted any acts, no matter how horrible,
all in the name of survival. They were all playing jungle ball.

  Eric had felt the power that came with no morality, no boundaries of behavior. The freedom of pure, cruel selfishness. Living in the Void, he called it. And he felt a constant tug, a temptation to become as free as Fallows. He had felt good sometimes in 'Nam, racing with Fallows through a village occupied by Cong, flinging grenades, feeling a heady intoxication as he saw the bodies tumble six feet into the air, their 7.62-mm Chinese Type-50 submachine guns as twisted as their limbs. He had felt invincible, a wisp of wind able to pass through walls or catch bullets in his teeth. He could do anything he wanted, no matter how disgusting, and no one would question him. It was total freedom. But with that freedom came evil. He fought it still, shaving daily to remind himself of who he had been before the quakes. Back when he'd taught history, instead of making it.

  What was the sign they found at Jonestown when they discovered the piles of dead bodies? That famous quote from philosopher George Santayana: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

  His hands were stiffening from the cold wind, but still he scraped the blade along his jaw, edging his scar. He traced the winding pattern, remembering the feel of the hot smoking blade that Fallows had gouged across his face back in Nam. His nostrils filled with the sour smell of his own sizzling flesh. He could still see Fallows' grinning face through the puffing smoke of his own seared skin. His blood sissing on the tip of the knife like a drop of water in a frying pan.

  "Eric?" Tracy said, dragging him back into the present.

  He wiped the cold sweat his memories had produced from his forehead. "Yeah?"

  "When we get back to the mainland and write our book about our adventures and the movie studios buy it for millions, who do you think should play me?"

  Eric laughed. "How about Goldie Hawn?"

  "Nah, too skinny. I was thinking of someone taller, like, uh, Jacqueline Bisset."

  "How tall is she?"