Jenn didn’t think for a moment the Corsairs were out there lurking in the storm. From everything she had heard about the pirates, she knew they weren’t so desperate that they would risk one of their ships in a storm like this. But if thinking they were out there kept Mike going at full speed, Jenn wasn’t going to disabuse him of the idea.
Stu didn’t have three days. All night long she worried over him, changing his bandages and begging him to drink water when he was lucid. He seemed to be fading when, suddenly, they slid out of the storm almost as though they had sailed into another ocean.
“He’s not going to last a day,” Jenn told Mike when she left him once more.
“We’ll go to Seattle,” he said. “Though it would help if I knew where we were.” He gazed around at the ocean. It was three hours before sunrise and without landmarks or stars he had no idea where on the vast Pacific they were. Ten minutes later, they heard the distant crash of waves. Mike looked at his compass in confusion. “That’s coming from the north. How is that poss…” He dug out the map Stu had handed him the day before. “I know where we are. Well, I think so. The only thing north of us is Canada. That’s probably Vancouver.”
He turned east, heading down the canyon-like strait that cut toward Puget Sound and Seattle. It was still windy and the gusts were almost as dangerous as they had been. What was more dangerous, was zipping along an unfamiliar waterway without a single nautical map. Mike was forced to pilot strictly by sound.
When they crept too far north, they heard the familiar thunder of waves breaking, and when they went too far south where the waves didn’t amount to much more than a splash, there was only a sighing sound as water passed over sand and shells.
Once they came so close to the shore that they ran across something that made the Calypso shudder and they heard what sounded like a dry stick snapping. Still, Mike didn’t shorten sail. Stu was fading.
They were both nervously scanning the horizons as they followed the waterway south, thinking they would be lucky to catch sight of an early morning cooking fire. The one thing they didn’t expect, however was to see a sudden, magnificent blaze of lights. An entire ten-mile long island was lit up, ringed with hundreds of searchlights all pointing outward. The interior of the island also sported lights, though these were smaller.
Jenn stared open-mouthed. On a certain level, she understood that these were lights that worked through electricity, just like in the old days. This should have been a good thing. It meant the people here were living like real people, and for some reason the idea completely unnerved her.
Would they be like the people in the before that she saw in her magazines? Would they be perfect and pretty? And what would they think of her? She looked down at herself: blood-stained jeans that were tied at the waist with a length of rope. Over this she wore layers of mismatching boys shirts that had been wet for days and smelled like unwashed dog. Her deep brown hair, that was normally clean and always brushed, looked like a ragged mop sitting on her dirty brow.
The perfect people on their perfect island would look at her with disgust and she wouldn’t blame them. She didn’t even have a hairbrush and there was no time to stop for clean clothes or to bathe. An intense sense of shame stole over her and she slunk down, not even realizing she was squatting in a foot of water. She was already so wet and cold that a little more water went unnoticed.
As Mike piloted the Calypso down the length of the island, he seemed dazed. “Those are porch lights. Can you believe it?”
She couldn’t remember a time when everyone had porch lights; in fact the very concept wasn’t just foreign to her, it was foolish. Lights at night attracted the dead. Everyone knew that. If she lived on the island she would never use porch lights.
Not that the people there had much to fear. They had built a wall a few feet back from the water’s edge. Unlike the island of cannibals, where the wall had been thrown together piecemeal, this wall had been built by a master builder. It was thirty feet tall and five feet wide. There was a walkway set three feet from the top from which people could shoot, and every fifty yards were towers made of reinforced concrete placed to allow for converging fields of fire.
The island was impregnable. No horde that Jenn had ever heard of could take it, and no human force, not even if all the Corsairs were gathered together could hope to defeat the wall.
When the search lights pinpointed them, she felt exposed and tiny. “I should check on Stu,” she said, and fled into the cabin. She found him unconscious and no matter what she did, she couldn’t wake up him up. His heart rate was thready and weak.
They needed more speed, but the wind was sketchy and it seemed to take forever to find a break in the wall. By the time they did, the sun was over the horizon and they could see dozens of people watching them from the walls. Most looked like ordinary people, however there were soldiers with scoped rifles among them and, every once in a while, one would put his weapon to his shoulder and use the scope to inspect them. This was very unnerving, and Jenn did her best not to cringe when it happened.
At about eight in the morning they finally made it to a tiny harbor. Across the mouth of it were a series of towers rising out of the water and between the towers was a stout chain, the links of which must have weighed twenty pounds apiece. There was also a double wall of fencing that hung above and below the waterline. A gate was opened between two of the towers and Mike steered them through and toward a dock where a few small sailboats were moored. None of them were even as large as the Puffer.
On the dock was a squad of soldiers, waiting with weapons at the ready.
Since a fight would have been suicide, Jenn had already unloaded their weapons and set them aside. “We need a doctor!” she yelled to the soldiers when they were fifty yards out. “We have a man who’s been shot!”
Two men darted away but they didn’t go far and they didn’t get a doctor. They came hurrying back with a stretcher just as Mike slid the Calypso along the dock. He tossed lines to the soldiers and the boat was made fast.
Just as Jenn figured, the people on the island were very much like the people from before. Everyone wore clean clothes and unscuffed shoes. The men wore their hair short and almost all were newly-shaven. Those who had beards kept them neat and trim. The women wore makeup, had styled hair and long, sharp fingernails. For the most part, they wore dresses and when they did wear jeans or slacks they looked practically brand new.
Jenn felt utterly shabby compared to them. She was helped off the boat by a stern-faced soldier who then frisked her. He pulled her aside as Mike received the same treatment.
Two of the bigger soldiers, and all of them seemed very big and strong to Jenn, went on board with the stretcher and hauled Stu out. “Was it the Corsairs?” the soldier next to Jenn asked. At the sight of Stu, the stern look had receded. He was a young man of twenty-two or so, handsome with ruddy cheeks and a cleft chin. He was so handsome and clean that Jenn had trouble looking him in the eye.
“No,” she answered after a touch of hesitation. “It was cannibals up the Columbia River. Can I ask a question? Is it true you have a doctor here?”
His jaw clenched briefly. “We have something.” It was such a cryptic reply that Jenn had no idea what he meant. Did he mean they had a witchdoctor who would cast bones and offer sacrifices? Or was it a saw-bones like the one the Santas had; he only did amputations and more often than not, his patients died from gangrene.
There was no time for a followup question. Stu was being rushed away. Mike, Jenn and their guards followed along, heading inland. Even though it was October, the island was robustly green and everywhere Jenn looked there were gardens and makeshift farms. There were people tending those gardens, and there were others walking here and there. In the fifteen minutes it took them to walk to what had once been an urgent care facility, Jenn saw many, many hundreds of people. Not since the early years on Alcatraz had Jenn seen so many people.
It was bewildering, especially how they were actin
g. It was as if they didn’t have a care in the world. No one carried weapons of any sort, no one cared about noise protocols and no one worried about how much smoke was belching from their chimneys. They seemed unaware of just how dangerous the world was.
They were pleasant, too and many waved to Jenn. When they entered the urgent care facility, there were two men in blue scrubs waiting for them, one of whom took a look at Stu and said, “Oh, the poor dear,” in a voice that was more like a woman’s than a man’s.
The stretcher bearers took Stu to a back bay and set him down on one of a dozen empty beds. While one of the men stuck a needle in his arm and hooked it to a bag of murky-looking yellow fluid, the other addressed the gunshot wound, saying, “This is bad. It might have just nicked the femoral artery. Barry, you better run that full bore.”
Biting his lip, Mike tried to get closer. “Is he going to make it?”
The soft-spoken one named Barry answered with a shrug. “It depends.”
That was hardly a satisfactory answer to Jenn, who asked, “On what?”
The two men shared a look; Barry swallowed loudly before answering, “It depends on what sort of mood the doctor is in. If she’s in a good mood, I think he might make it, so make sure you smile and act polite when she comes in.”
“We will,” Jenn replied. “We’re very grateful for anything you guys can do for us. And we do have…” She broke off as a side door banged open and a teenage girl walked into the clinic. She wasn’t much taller than Jenn, though she looked it because of her hair. Her brown hair wasn’t messy or mussed, it was in a wild state, as if she had never used a brush in her life.
Her Converse high-tops, her tight jeans, her t-shirt and leather jacket were all deep black. Where Jenn was pale, the girl was purest white, as if she had been carved out of a single piece of alabaster. Set in this white face were huge blue eyes that stared at Jenn with unsettling intensity. If it weren’t for that intensity, Jenn would have considered her eyes beautiful. Instead, she was frightened of them and dropped her chin after only a second.
Without looking at Stu, the girl stepped lightly around the room, taking in each of them, the two men in the blue scrubs and the guards included. No one except Mike could hold her gaze any longer than Jenn had. Mike stared straight back at her as seconds passed. As far as Jenn knew, these could have been Stu’s last seconds.
“Excuse me?” Jenn asked in a whisper. “Are you the ‘girl’ doctor?” The blue eyes shot back to Jenn and she did her best not to look away even though she began shaking. She had no idea why she was shaking and she had no idea why she was afraid of this girl who was maybe eighteen. “W-We don’t have much, but we’ll give you everything we have if you can save him.”
“And if I can’t save him I get nothing?” the girl asked. “Not even a base hourly wage? Even a menial laborer should be able to look forward to compensation of some sort, otherwise I’d be acting the part of a thrall, don’t you think?”
Jenn began to blink in confusion. She didn’t understand the words: base, wages, compensation or thrall. The only thing she understood was that she was likely ruining any chance for Stu. “You can have everything we have, right now. It’s yours, just please help.”
For a moment, the girl looked as confused as Jenn felt, then a smile spread across her face. “Oh, don’t listen to her,” she said. “That’s just Eve being mean again. We don’t need your belongings, I’m sure. Unless, of course you brought a multi-point NIR system with you? I could really use one.”
Jenn couldn’t seem to stop blinking. None of what this girl was saying made any sense. “I-I don’t think we did.”
“Don’t worry about it,” the girl said, turning from Jenn and finally looking at Stu. “It was a joke.” After glancing at the hole in Stu’s leg and saying, Hmmm, she produced a stethoscope and listened briefly to his heart and lungs. “Barry, get a second line in him, normal saline. Ricardo, why don’t I have sterile gloves? Didn’t I teach you to always have gloves ready?”
Before Ricardo could say anything, the girl said, “Maybe he didn’t have time. You’re being too hard on him, Jillybean.”
The girl who might have been named either Jillybean or Eve looked back at the stretcher bearers and answered herself, “Yes. Their respirations are still at an elevated rate. I shouldn’t have missed that. I blame the girl and her handsome friends. So, which one do you like?”
There was a long pause before the man who was acting as a guard nudged Jenn and said in a low tone, “Jillybean asked you a question.”
“Which one do I like? Do you mean which one of my friends do I like?” She cast a quick glance up at Mike but before she could answer Ricardo slid back into the room with a tray on which were latex gloves and a variety of surgical tools, none of which Jenn had ever seen before.
Eve or Jillybean, or whatever the girl’s name was, seemed to forget all about Jenn. She stripped off her coat and pulled on the gloves. “Let’s go, Ricardo. Let’s have the retractors.” The girl bent over Stu’s leg, thankfully blocking the surgical process from view. Jenn didn’t think she could handle seeing much more blood. A pool of it had collected beneath the gurney.
“Here we go,” the girl said, after ten minutes. “You see that, Sadie. It got the femoral just like we thought. This guy’s lucky he’s cute.”
Jenn had no idea what being cute had to do with whatever a “femoral” was. And there was no way for her to know who Sadie was.
“You never did answer my question,” the girl said, without looking back. “Though I suppose you didn’t need to. You’re from San Francisco. That much is obvious and so is the fact that you’re engaged to that handsome statue next to you. That guilty look you two shared told me that. What’s not as obvious is why you’re here.” Now, she turned to look back at Jenn who wilted under the intensity of the gaze.
To Jenn’s relief, the girl only stared for a few seconds before turning back to Stu.
The relief was short-lived as the girl went on. “You aren’t related. None of you are. Which makes banishment an unlikely reason for you to be this far north. You care for this man, though, that was easy enough to read. You think of him as a brother and…oh wait, I get it now. Of course. I must be slipping in my old age. You’re here because of the signs.”
She threw back her head and laughed wildly, making everyone uncomfortable. “Oh, those foolish signs. This world has become an anthropologist’s wet dream. So much madness disguised as rational thought. Religious zealots on one hand, telepaths on the other. Warlords and pirates and race wars and everything in between. So much madness! And they call me crazy! And they’re right too. I don’t hide my insanity. You see it, don’t you?” She paused long enough for Jenn to swallow loudly. “Why do you always hesitate when I ask you questions? What’s your name?”
Jenn always hesitated because she never knew who the girl was talking to and what she was talking about. “Jenn Lockhart.”
“Okay, Jenn, so what do you think? Am I crazy or has the world come apart so terribly that you can’t tell one way or the other?”
The girl had stopped working and Jenn was sure her answer would be the deciding factor whether she would start again or not. The girl was crazy, but Jenn didn’t think it was something she could say; nor would a lie do. The girl would see right through it.
Jenn ended up not saying anything which caused the girl to grow angry. It was as though the temperature in the room dropped twenty degrees. “Why aren’t you answering? Is it because you really do think I’m crazy? Is it? IS IT!” She turned now, and in her red-stained hands was a bloody scalpel. Frightened almost out of her wits, Jenn sketched a sign of the cross which only made the girl angrier. “God won’t help you unless you tell me right now. Tell me or else! And Jillybean won’t be able to stop me. Tell me…”
“Eve,” a soft voice said. A small, thin man had entered the room from behind them. He had pretty, baby-blue eyes, while the rest of his face was a ruin of craggy scars. Along with two fingers on
his left hand, he was missing an eyebrow and half of one ear. The scars looked like they had been made by one of the dead, but that wasn’t possible. The man would have become one of them if he had been bitten.
“Leave her alone, Eve,” the man said, his voice still soft. With his penny-loafers, khaki pants and a blue sweater vest, he looked like someone’s dad, except for his face, that is.
The girl ground her teeth, gripping the scalpel until her fist shook. The man ignored this. He limped to Stu’s bedside and glanced at the mess. “Tell me, Jillybean, what are the twelve cranial nerves?”
“There are thirteen, Neil,” the girl replied in a snarl.
“Okay there are thirteen,” Neil said. “What is the seventh?”
The girl’s mouth opened, hung there for a moment before she blinked and answered, “That’s the easiest of all. It’s the facial nerve. Next time go with the ninth. It’s the glossopharyngeal. Even if Eve looked it up she would never remember it.”
“If she can’t remember that, how am I supposed to?” Neil asked giving her a warped smile. “Now, why don’t you do what you can for this man while I look after our guests.” He turned to Jenn and Mike. “We should leave. Unplanned surgery can be stressful and she doesn’t handle stress very well. Though this wasn’t bad.”
Chapter 25
Jenn Lockhart
That wasn’t bad? As the three of them walked out of the clinic and into bright sunshine, the words bounced around Jenn’s head without finding purchase. She had never heard anything so ridiculous in her life. The girl was out and out crazy.
“I don’t know if anyone’s welcomed you officially to Bainbridge. If not, welcome,” the scarred man said, putting out his hand. “My name is Neil Martin. I’m an advisor to the governor…”
Generation Z (Book 1): Generation Z Page 21