Dead Reckoning

by Tom Wright

“Constantly killing people in their own countries was what pissed them off so much.” Sonny cut in. “How would you feel if some Middle Eastern country kept interfering in our business?”

  “The 9/11 terrorists didn’t come from our country, they came from theirs! If we were sending out terrorists to attack other countries, I’d expect that to come back to us.”

  “They think we are terrorists,” Sonny returned.

  “Ridiculous!” Jeff yelled.

  “Are you seriously saying that if soldiers from some Middle Eastern country were patrolling our streets and killing our citizens, for whatever reason, you wouldn’t fight back? Jeff, that’s bullshit, and you know it!”

  I always enjoy a good debate, but since this was counterproductive to our goals, I wasn’t really enjoying this one. However, I thought Sonny had made an excellent point there—one I hadn’t thought of before. He was right: there were no circumstances under which I would not want to fight back against some other country patrolling our soil. I waited anxiously for Jeff’s reply.

  But Jeff diverted: “That’s just the tip of the iceberg of what I don’t understand about you.”

  “Really?” Sonny said, chuckling.

  “Well, let me just tick through the list. Number one….”

  “Don’t bother!” Sonny yelled.

  “Number one…” Jeff continued unfazed. “Gun control. We wouldn’t even be able to defend ourselves right now if you liberals had your way.”

  “Stop right there!” Sonny barked. “Maybe if we were able to control all these guns the world wouldn’t be so damned dangerous right now!”

  “Yeah right! All that would have happened is that law abiding citizens wouldn’t have guns. Criminals don’t obey laws, even gun laws. Remember?”

  “Just stop,” Sonny said.

  “Number two: the environment!” Jeff persisted.

  “I said stop,” Sonny said in a quiet, angry, monotone.

  “The environment is king! We might as well just kill ourselves, for the good of the earth!” Jeff was becoming angrily dismissive and starting to sound irrational. “Even if it meant limitations on where people could live, play, or even where we could get our energy from—which, by the way, is a big reason we got into all this shit in the first place.”

  Sonny stood up and confronted Jeff. “I said shut up.”

  Jeff yelled right in Sonny’s face: “If we could have just used our own fucking energy, energy right under our own soil, instead of pissing away trillions of dollars in the turd world, we would have never had to set foot in that cesspool, they wouldn’t have been so pissed off at us, they wouldn’t have had the resources to terrorize us, and we’d probably be sitting fat, dumb, and happy right back on Kwaj right now—our families safe!”

  There it was; the real reason for this argument. Sonny stopped and softened, realizing it too.

  “Both of you stop,” I said, stepping between them. “How do any of these old political arguments matter anymore? No woman is out looking for an abortion now. Only an idiot could argue for gun control now. These are the kinds of theoretical things people sit around and discuss when everything is fine. The rules have changed.”

  “The bottom line is that I just look at the world differently than liberals,” Jeff said calmly. “Liberals think that people are basically ok, and that all we need is just a little bit more government oversight here and there to keep them in line, whereas I think that people are basically no damned good.”

  “Really?” Sonny asked. “People are no damned good? What makes you say such a thing?”

  “Experience. Put twenty-five toddlers in a room and see if most of them are disposed to being good or being bad. That will show you the true nature of humankind, like Lord of the Flies. Look at what happened in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. That is what a good proportion of people are really like when all restraint is thrown off. Look around now!”

  “And so you think that is an argument in favor of less government regulation of people?” Sonny said in a laughing tone. “It sounds to me like we need more government regulation!”

  “Stop it!” I demanded. “We all have our opinions about these things, but what difference does it make now?” I had my opinions about these things, but, as a scientist, I based mine on evidence, reason, and intuition. I came in with no preconceived notions about how things were or how they should be. I tended to agree with Jeff on gun control and abortion and with Sonny on government regulation and terrorism, but it was irrelevant. I knew what the argument was really about and didn’t want it to get out of control because of things that didn’t matter.

  “We’re all scared,” I said. “We all feel like crap. We have to work together, or we’re screwed. Arguing about these abstract, irrelevant concepts doesn’t help.”

  Jeff and Sonny continued to glare at each other.

  “Seriously!” I yelled. “Does this shit matter?”

  They didn’t reply.

  I turned to Jeff. “Do you really think there is any woman looking for an abortion right now? You can’t honestly say you wouldn’t fight back against an army occupying our country!”

  Then I turned to Sonny. “You don’t really believe in gun control now. We’d be slaves on the Horatio right now if we didn’t have guns.”

  Jeff and Sonny went angrily but silently back to what they had been doing before the argument. Neither said another word for over an hour, probably replaying the argument over and over in their minds to see where they could have won.

  . . .

  I sat in silence for two more hours thinking about liberals and conservatives, my family, the world. I sat until long after Sonny and Jeff retired to their bunks.

  Through the moonless, pitch-black sky, I heard a dull thud followed by another a few seconds later. The flying fish are back. I began to smell something strange, offensive, like rotten oranges, but I dismissed it as a random vapor in a sea teaming, inevitably, with dead stuff. Then I heard several thuds in a row—too loud to be flying fish, maybe sharks.

  The sound stopped, and my thoughts returned. A few minutes later another dull thud, and another, and two more. Ok, fine. I will catch some of you guys for dinner then. I fished around in the cabinet under the wheel for the flashlight. Once in hand, I grabbed the net behind the seat. Flying fish were so mesmerized by the flashlight that all I needed to do was hold it over the net, and they would swim or jump right in. I had done it before, and they were easy pickings. We had grown tired of eating them, but it was better than eating our portable rations.

  Even though it wasn’t particularly rough, I put on my harness and clipped myself onto the safety line. We made this our rule when venturing away from the helm, especially when no one else was topside. Jeff and Sonny were both sleeping, and if I had gone over the side, they likely wouldn’t have heard my screams and probably wouldn’t even know I was gone for hours. I was also careful to walk on the high, upwind side, so that if I did slip, gravity would force me toward the boat and not toward the water.

  I scanned the water with the flashlight as I walked along the rail. I saw no fish, but the water was strangely murky, and the smell choked me. It smelled like low tide but, of course, that made no sense out there in the middle of the ocean. Then I saw something round and dark, bobbing in the water a few yards away. I lowered the net, but the object swept around the stern and out of sight before I could get the net on it. Buoys adrift, I guessed. As the boat advanced, it came closer and I spotted another one, further away and lighter in color. I focused on the one that was in position to be netted, and I noticed a frothing of the water around it. “Fish, screwing with a buoy?” I wondered out loud.

  One came close, and as I leaned over to net it, the flashlight slipped out of my hand and rolled around on the deck. I felt the net heave as the object entered and began to fight the force of the current. I lifted the net, and it was heavy. As I gained my balance, I retrieved the flashlight and trained it on the net to see what sort of thing I had snagged. I expected t
o see a buoy, and so my mind failed to register what I saw immediately. My emotion changed from curious to shocked to horrified as my brain processed the image. The mass rolled over, and the empty eye sockets, human eye sockets, stared back at me like a ghost, the rest of the skin on its face either missing or riddled with small, toothy pockmarks.

  I jumped back, shocked and terrified. I stumbled and fell against the cabin window. My safety line tightened, and I dropped the net. I quickly flipped the net over and emptied the human remains back into the sea. I swished the net around to rinse off the residue, but another mound tried to wiggle in and soiled the net with more slime.

  I gathered myself and began scanning more of the ocean. There were a lot of them. My mind scrambled to make sense of what I saw. I went back to the helm and hit the floodlight switch. It illuminated a scene of horror: hundreds of round, fleshy mounds, some attached to the remnants of bodies, some not. Some being fed on and others ignored. A few of them seemed to catch the gentle swells and ride them, like little ghastly surfers, roiling over in the whitewash of the breaking wave. The soup of humanity stretched off toward the east—toward Hawaii—or perhaps more aptly stated: from Hawaii. Dozens—maybe hundreds or thousands—of heads and bodies dumped in the ocean, corralled in a current, and driven here like so many willing cattle—little varmints of the sea nipping at them the whole way.

  I leaned over the rail and vomited.

  Unable to stand another second of the scene, I went below hoping for it to pass quickly. Thud, thud, thud they marched on. Things that go bump in the night, only real this time. With each bump a shock of adrenaline surged through me, and the hairs on the back of my neck stood erect. I sat trembling wishing for the sound to stop.

  I did not wake the others, but the bumping did, eventually. I warned them not to go up to look, but they did anyway. They returned white as sheets.

  An hour and thousands of bumps later, the horror stopped and the smell dissipated. No one had said a word during the carnage.

  I broke the silence: “What do you think happened.”

  “I saw a life ring. Some cruise line,” Sonny said.

  “Sunk?” I wondered aloud.

  “Or they were all murdered and thrown over,” Jeff said, looking at Sonny. “Poor cruise passengers, all unarmed and defenseless. I wonder how it might have turned out if even one of them had been armed.”

  Sonny stormed up the stairs and retook the helm.

  “Was that really necessary?” I asked Jeff.

  “Maybe not, but it’s true.”

  . . .

  At some point during the night, I awakened to the sound of thunder and pelting rain on the deck. I noticed a drastic increase in the heave of the boat. I heard the mast come around and snap into position on the opposite side of the deck as Sonny tacked. I had noticed a falling pressure and an increase in the southeasterly winds on my previous shift and passed along my suspicion of an approaching cold front to Sonny. I rolled over, satisfied that my forecast had verified and that he had handled the change properly.

  I had third shift at the helm again the following day. Third shift started in the late afternoon and continued until after midnight. I awakened in the early afternoon, grabbed some water and a couple of pieces of bread—I hadn’t eaten, or been able to, since before the previous night’s gruesome discovery—and headed topside. As I emerged, I noticed that the temperature and humidity were way down. It was not cold, but definitely cooler.

  “Look at that,” Jeff said, beckoning to the sky.

  The sky was the strangest, most beautiful color of orange I had ever seen. Red skies at night, sailor’s delight was my first thought, even though that adage failed in the tropics since, unlike the mid-latitudes, the weather moved from east to west. The orange sky was not a weather phenomenon because, save for the high overcast and a few fair-weather cumulus on the horizon, nothing was going on—certainly not an advancing or departing storm that would normally be associated with such a sunset. Whatever the cause, it bathed us in an eerie orange glow, as if we were looking at everything through that transparent orange film we played with as children.

  “What is it?” I questioned.

  “I don’t know. I hoped you would,” Jeff said.

  “I think I do,” Sonny said, walking back from the bow with one hand outstretched and the other cupped around it as if cradling something precious and fragile.

  We looked into his hand and saw what looked like a tiny cast off from a cigarette. Jeff and I deliberated on the clue and its meaning. Sonny said nothing.

  “Is that…ash?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Sonny said. He smudged the particle against his palm with his index finger, creating a small black streak that followed the lifeline in his palm.

  Jeff and I sat back and looked up toward the sky. Jeff snapped upright, put his hand to his face and leaned over, attempting to clear something from his eye. A piece of ash landed on my leg. It was not hot. In fact, it felt like nothing. I flicked it off as all sorts of dreadful thoughts flashed through my mind.

  . . .

  Ash fell for two days and darkened the sky, air, and ocean. If not for the wind, it likely would have amounted to many inches on the deck. On the third day, the ash storm stopped. Visibility improved to the horizon, but the ocean was slate gray and choked with sludge. There were no low clouds, in fact, no discernible clouds at any level. Nevertheless, the sky was gray—the highest, most uniform gray overcast I had ever seen. The sun shone through as a mere silhouette. It was a bit colder, and I was terrified. We all were.

  . . .

  We stayed below decks just in case the ash was radioactive. Jeff passed out some potassium iodide (or KI) tablets he had. We didn’t ask where he got them. They were supposed to keep radioactive crap from accumulating in our thyroid glands, as Jeff explained. We were too numb to care. We just hoped the ash wasn’t radioactive since it was all around us, and while we had closed every hatch and vent on the boat, the hull provided no protection from the radiation itself.

  “I can’t believe this!” exclaimed Sonny, holding up a cell phone as he emerged from his berth.

  “There was just a nuclear war, and you are worried about your cell phone coverage?” I asked sarcastically.

  “Not the coverage, the battery.”

  “What about it?” Jeff asked.

  “It’s dead.”

  “So?” Jeff and I said in unison.

  “So, it’s brand new, and I just charged it before the lightning strike. I haven’t turned it on since. “

  “Whatever,” I said.

  12

  DAY 18 AT SEA, APPROXIMATELY 560 MILES NORTH-NORTHWEST OF HONOLULU, HAWAII (DEAD-RECKONED POSITION: 23.8°N, 166.2°W)

  “The existence of the sea means the existence of pirates.” –Mayan Proverb

  We had taken more of an easterly course over the last several days to try to stay out of the ash. We made an educated guess as to the best course based on weather and, well, guessing. We knew this course would bring us closer to Hawaii than we liked, but when the ash became more intermittent and then stopped, we decided it had been worth it. We continued to pop KI tablets just in case.

  The weather became jacket cool—an encouraging sign that we could be getting into the Kona Low. Unfortunately, there wasn’t even a silhouette of the sun in the sky any longer. It was just gone—obscured behind a veil of debris from, we hoped, an isolated nuclear exchange, rather than an all-out nuclear war. Of course, we did not know. It could have been a volcano or other natural disaster blotting out the sun, but given the world situation last we heard, we feared the worst. I felt odd hoping that the Yellowstone Super Volcano had gone off, but it was better than the alternative. Whatever the cause, the day incorporated a lot more twilight than usual, and the nights were pitch-black.

  I hadn’t seen shithead in several days. I wondered if he got off and hitched a ride on one of the heads. That was certainly more his style than hanging out with us. Then I saw him, dried and still, nex
t to the head. I picked him up and studied his eyes and wings and little violin bows.

  “Seventeen days at sea,” I said. “Pretty impressive.”

  I went topside and buried him at sea. I hoped he was not simply preceding us in a soon to be realized fate. Maybe he had been a she and had laid some eggs somewhere. The thought sparked a brief twinge of hope, until I realized that it was probably too cold for any flies to live.

  . . .

  I awoke from an evening nap to the sound of Sonny yelling topside. I rolled over to go back to sleep, but a pot clanking ever so quietly in the sink ended my chance for more sleep for the time being. Sonny’s voice came down from above once more—something about a boat. I climbed up the stairs and out onto the deck. Sonny pointed to starboard and said: “Out there.”

  I could barely make out a boat on the horizon. The land immediately behind the boat surprised me more.

  “There’s land,” I said.

  Jeff emerged from the helm with a small sailing telescope. He extended the scope and peered through the eyepiece. “I think it’s FFS.”

  I went to the helm and studied our nautical charts. French Frigate Shoals (FFS) was one of the tiny land masses of the Leeward Hawaiian Islands. Most people were aware of the main Hawaiian Islands between the Big Island and Kauai, but few knew that the Hawaiian archipelago extended northwestward for almost two thousand miles.

  We were several miles away but decided to lower the sails to avoid being seen. Darkness would overtake us in the next hour, and we could put the sails back up. As we puttered along, we took turns watching the activity near the atoll. We were able to see the U.S. Fish and Wildlife station signs on the island, which confirmed that it was indeed FFS. While we wanted to avoid land and other people, we were glad to be able to get a firm fix on our position. We observed no activity on the island itself which wasn’t really surprising—the federal workers had probably bugged out long ago.