by Perrin Briar
One corner of Joel’s lips curled up. “With one hell of a lot of practice.”
6.
Stan flicked the line above his head, wound it around in a big circle, and then threw it forward with all the skill of an expert angler. The line whirred as it flew away and landed on the sea’s calm surface six meters out. Stan sat the rod in its mount and lounged in a deck chair beside Joel.
Joel lay back with his hands behind his head, feeling the relaxing rock of the sea beneath him and the ruffling of the tarpaulin above. “What I wouldn’t give for an ice-cold beer right now.”
“You and me both,” Stan said, smacking his lips.
They watched the horizon, flat and unchanging in the distance.
“Where do you suppose he’s from?” Joel said.
“Could be from anywhere, I suppose. His accent doesn’t give much away.”
“He’s not Australian, that’s for sure. Or from any of the other colonies. He’s not Scottish, Irish or Welsh. I don’t even think he’s from northern England, but you’ll have a better ear for that than me.”
The flywheel clicked. They paused, watching it. It didn’t move again. They returned to staring out at the ocean.
“Do you think we can trust him?” Joel said.
“No reason not to. He’s a survivor. If we start turning on each other we’ll be no better than the Lurchers. But God knows he couldn’t have picked a worse time to bump into us.” Stan peered over at the empty containers on the deck. “No water, nearly no food.”
“Can’t even catch a lousy fish bigger than a carrot these days.”
Stan smiled. “We’ve got fresh bait now, though.”
Joel rolled his eyes. “Oh, that’ll make all the difference, that will. We’d be better off eating the bait.”
The fishing line clicked again. Their eyes rolled to it. It clicked once more before stopping.
Joel checked over his shoulder and spoke in a low voice. “If something doesn’t change soon we’ll be for it.”
“Something will come up. It always does.”
“One day it won’t.”
The line clicked once more, something on the end tugging gently. Joel leaned forward in his deckchair. The line gave another little pull. The bobber ducked beneath the surface and then popped up again a second later. The fishing rod’s tip dipped down and bounced against its mount. The line unfurled, drawing farther out to sea.
“See?” Stan beamed. “Something always comes up. Must be the new bait.”
Joel picked up the rod and held it steady in his hands. He felt something tug on the other end. He could sense its powerful body through the line, making strong broad movements with its tail. Joel’s mouth salivated at the potential size of it. The rod pulled to one side, so fast Joel was barely able to keep hold. He tightened his grip and cursed himself for daydreaming. Joel pulled the rod back and reeled in the flywheel. The fish darted starboard, almost knocking Joel over the side.
“Easy there, fella,” he said, righting himself, leaning back and reeling in the flywheel.
“What do you reckon it is?” Stan said, dancing around like he had ants in his pants. “Tuna? Mackerel? What I wouldn’t give for a bit of cod.”
The rod bent over at a seemingly impossible angle as the fish fought to escape. The muscles in Joel’s arms tightened hard as stone, veins protruding. “We might have hooked us a whale! Blimey. He’s a tough old brute, I’ll give him that!”
Joel battled the fish for over twenty minutes. It never gave an inch it couldn’t fight him for. The muscles in Joel’s arms burned as he wound in the flywheel, his hair damp with sweat, his arms shaking with the effort.
“Let me take over,” Stan said. “You’re tired.”
Joel felt the weight in his hands and eyed Stan’s weedy frame. “You’re all right.”
“Go on. Let me take over.”
The fish had lost a good deal of its aggression, strafing side to side two meters out. There was the slightest glint of its silver scales beneath the surface. Most of its fight was gone, Joel surmised.
“All right,” Joel said. “Brace yourself.”
Stan assumed a wide stance and accepted the rod.
“Keep a tight grip on her.” Joel wiped the sweat from his brow. “Reel it in before it recovers.”
“I don’t know what you were talking about,” Stan said. “She doesn’t seem all that strong to me.” Stan reeled the fish in. Its silver scales glittered at the water’s surface, water running through the funnels between the armor-like plate. “It’s a tuna fish! What in God’s name is it doing out here in the English Channel?”
The tuna’s gills flapped open and closed. Its black eyes staring everywhere at once. Its blue fins made lazy movements. And then it went crazy. Its thick body thrashed against Haven’s stern, thumping a fractured beat, splashing them with spray. The line tightened, the rod bending at a near ninety degree angle. Stan was tossed to one side. He hit the deck hard and lost his grip. The flywheel unspooled, thirty clicks a second. The tuna fish ducked beneath the surface. The rod shot across the deck.
Joel stamped his foot, trapping the rod beneath it. The tuna stopped sharp like it had run into a brick wall. Joel picked up the rod and began reeling it in again, his muscles aching. Joel roared as he pulled with all his remaining strength and pumped the flywheel. The tuna drew closer, back to the waterline, though it was hardly visible through the thrashing fins and churned water. Joel tugged at the line, but the tuna fish would not come free of the water. A stalemate. The fish was losing strength, but so was Joel.
“Don’t let it go!” Stan shouted, blood trickling down the right side of his face. “Don’t let it go!”
Joel trapped the rod under his feet again. He unsheathed the knife at his waist and leaned over the side, preparing to sink it into the tuna’s flesh. The fish gave one last thrash, his tail whipping up. The rod pulled up, knocking Joel off-balance. His eyes widened in shock as he fell overboard. He felt the cold scales of the fish whip past his leg. He thrust out with his knife, but the fish slapped him across the face and shot away. It was gone before Joel could turn.
Joel raised his head above the surface like an angry hippo and blew out a mouthful of salty water. Something hit his head and flew off after the fish. He made a mad grab for it, but he was too late. The fishing rod skimmed across the surface, disappearing into the distance.
There was the thud of footsteps on the deck. Jordan offered his hand to help Joel back on board, but he refused it and climbed up by himself.
Anne helped Stan up. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” Stan said, shaken.
“I’ll take a look at that cut.”
“It’s nothing.”
Anne checked it. “Looks worse than it is. I’ll get my kit.”
“What happened?” Mary said. “We heard thumping and thought” -She looked at Jessie and Stacey and changed what she was going to say- “something was wrong.”
“I could practically taste it,” Joel said, leaning on the stern, looking out to sea in the direction their meal had gone. “I could smell the bastard! Shit!” He lashed out at an empty container, knocking it overboard. The girls started.
“We’ll catch another one,” Mary said. “We always do.”
“Do you know how long it’s been since we last caught something?” Joel said, fire in his eyes. “Do you? Or the time before that? Or the time before that? They’re not biting. For whatever reason, they’re not bloody biting.”
Stacey whimpered and cowered behind Mary’s patch-worked skirts.
“Joel, you’re scaring them,” Mary said.
“They should be scared. I’m scared. No food. No water. Stuck out here in the middle of the ocean in a rusting tin bucket with those things on the land. What’s not to be scared of?”
Mary put her hand on his shoulder. He shrugged it off.
“I’ll go turn the engine on,” Joel said. “See if we can find a better fishing spot.” He stomped down th
e stairs into the belly of the ship. Anne dodged out of his way as he passed her.
Silence followed him. No one made eye contact.
“He does have a point,” Mary said. “A little aggressively put, perhaps, but without food and water we’ve got no chance.”
“We’ve got food,” Anne said feebly. She washed Stan’s face and applied a plaster.
“But for how long? We can’t keep living like this.”
“But at least we are living. We’re not one of those things on the land. We are alive.”
“Not for much longer if we don’t get more food and water.”
Haven shivered as the engine chugged. It spluttered like a man on his last legs, and then cut out. No one took any notice. It was a common occurrence.
Anne looked into Stan and Mary’s eyes. “Maybe we should go onto the land.”
“We can’t go back on the land,” Stan said. “You remember what it was like.”
“Maybe it’s better now.”
“It’ll never be better.”
“We could do a quick hit and run. Be in and out before they know we were there.”
“They wouldn’t know anyway.” Stan shook his head. “It’s not worth the risk.”
Anne gritted her teeth. “Isn’t what we’re doing a risk? We can’t live on the land because it’s too dangerous, and we can’t live at sea because there’s no food or water. What would you have us do?”
“It gets worse,” a voice behind them said.
Joel was black up to the elbows with smudges of oil on his face. He had a lump of metal in his hands. “The alternator’s dead.”
7.
The engine was a twisted mound of metal, plastic and rubber. Cloth rags, saturated with oil, dirt and fuel, had been wrapped and tightened around various joints in a patchwork attempt to hold it together. Baked bean tins and what looked suspiciously like a Smarties tube made up the components.
Stan, Anne and Jordan squeezed into the small space just inside the door while Joel mounted the engine with well-practiced grace and descended on the other side. “I’ve managed to piece her back together again for now,” he said, “but she won’t last long.”
“What’ll we do?” Anne said.
Joel stood up, wiping his hands on an old piece of dirty cloth. He tossed it aside. “We have to find a replacement part.”
“Where?” Stan said. “We’ve salvaged every boat we’ve come across.”
“We’ll have to find the parts elsewhere.”
“Where?” Stan asked.
Joel looked at Stan. A conversation passed between them that Jordan could not understand.
“No,” Stan said, shaking his head. “No way.”
“What other choice do we have? What happens when the alternator packs up altogether? I’ll never be able to patch it up forever. One day it’ll break. What’ll we do then? You said yourself we’ve had no luck with salvaging.”
“I won’t go to Terry,” Stan said, shaking his head. “I won’t.”
“Terry?” Jordan said. “Who’s Terry?”
“A megalomaniac,” Stan said. “A pirate. An extortionist. A gangster. We’re not going to him. Not until we’ve exhausted every other option.”
Joel scratched his chin with his thumb. “We’re getting that way now, Stan.”
“No. We still have options.”
“What options? There are fewer boats to salvage every day. We’re running low on food. If Mary’s soup doesn’t get any weaker, it never will.” He fixed Stan with a hard stare. “We’ve got no other choice.”
Stan shook his head.
Joel turned to Anne. “Anne, help me out here.”
Anne took a moment before answering. “I’m with Stan on this one.”
“Anne!”
“We’ve got a little food left,” she said. “When we’re out, or almost out… then we can consider Terry.”
“Until then we just wait?”
“We fish. We hope for rain.”
“Hope! That’s all we ever do. At some point we’ve got to make a stand. We have got to be proactive.” Without the support of the others, Joel turned to Jordan. “What do you think?”
“He hasn’t been here long enough to know what we’re up against,” Anne said.
“He’s been here long enough to know we’re in trouble. And it’s his life on the line too. Jordan?”
Jordan let out a sigh. “If this Terry is as bad as you say he is we’d better stay away from him. At least until we have no other choice.”
Joel shook his head as if he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “And if the engine gives up the ghost on our way to see Terry?”
No one had an answer for him.
“Great,” Joel said flatly.
“We keep salvaging,” Stan said. “Sooner or later something will come up.”
8.
Stan pulled in the net. His heart sank. He felt the lack of weight and knew they hadn’t caught anything of value. He shook the net. A crushed Coke can, plastic supermarket bags and frayed shoelace tumbled onto the deck. Stan turned to the others who sat on the floor in the shade of the tarpaulin. Stan shook his head and tossed the net back over the side.
Mary upended the flask, letting the last few drops of water fall into Stacey’s mouth. She ran her finger around the lip of the bottle and ran it over Jessie’s chapped lips.
Jessie took Stacey by the hand. “Come on, let’s go play.”
“That’s the last of the water,” Mary said after the girls had left.
Joel looked at the others, his eyes meeting theirs one by one. Each gave a curt nod. Stan hesitated only a moment before he too nodded. Joel got up and headed down the stairs.
There was a moment of silence before Stan said, “At least we tried. We can’t do more than that.”
Jessie came running from the prow. “There’s a boat,” she said.
They were all too forlorn or dozy to have heard her.
“There’s a boat,” she repeated.
Anne blinked, waking up to what Jessie was saying. “A what?”
“A boat.”
“Where?”
Jessie pointed. Sunlight bounced off a stainless steel railing and cast spots in their vision.
“Go tell Joel not to start the engine,” Stan said to Anne. He smiled. “Hope has arrived.”
9.
It might have been adrift on the sea forever. It was dirty brown from rust, covering it like an inelegant tattoo hull to stern. The tatters of a forgotten flag flapped from the bridge’s peak. Cars sat bumper to bumper on the main deck, each covered with a thick layer of bird excrement. Its name, half blacked-out due to some kind of fire incident, was Light. Haven completed a turn about Light. The water was still, no sign the engines were on. The boat was adrift, guided only by the ocean’s current.
Joel shook his head. “Why a ferry? I hate ferries.”
Anne peered at the ferry through binoculars. “Can’t see anyone on board, can you?”
“No,” Joel said. “Her ass looks a little heavy though.”
The stern appeared to be several feet lower than the hull, the waterline hanging loose like a builder’s cleavage. “Taking on water, you reckon?”
“Might be.”
“Too risky to go on board?” Anne asked.
“Riskier not to. We need that engine part, never mind the food.”
Anne shook her head. “Pity Kwit-Fit never opened a branch in the English Channel.”
10.
“Why does Joel hate ferries so much?” Jordan asked Stan as he helped strap on thick foam-like pads that clamped around his forearms and calves.
“We all hate ferries,” Stan said.
“Why?”
“Let me do what all the best academics of the world do, and answer a question with a question: What’s a ferry’s main cargo?”
Jordan thrust his feet into the loose-fitting steel toe-cap boots. “People.”
“Right. And wherever there are people there are…”
“Lurchers.”
“Added to that fact, they’re massive places with dark corners and too many hiding places. That’s why we hate ferries.”
Jordan pulled on the thick gloves and fingered crescent-shaped indentations along the fleshy part of the hand. “Why do we need all this protection? I thought they were slow and lumbering?”
“They are. But nothing seems slow or lumbering when it comes at you from nowhere. Walk around. See how it feels.”
Jordan paced up and down the narrow space in the main living area. The armor creaked, but it hardly restricted his movement. “It pinches a little in the crotch.”
“Nothing’s perfect.” Stan turned to a pile of wood that Jordan had previously taken for firewood. “Pick your weapon of choice.”
Jordan ran his fingers over them. There were chair legs, baseball bats, even a rolling pin. “You don’t have anything a bit more… sophisticated?”
“Guns jam and require ammunition. Swords can snap or become dull.” Stan picked up a chair leg from the pile and held it to Jordan’s head. “A solid blow to the back of the head and… lights out.” He spun the leg around in the air in an impressive display of dexterity. “This is cutting-edge technology in the fight against the undead.” He shrugged. “Pots and pans work equally well.”
Jordan gave the lump of wood a few practice swings. It whumped through the air. He fingered the detailed engravings of vine leaves that snaked over its surface.
“Are you sure you’re ready for this?” Stan asked. “No one would blame you for not going through with it.”
“I’m fine. I’ll have to take the plunge some time, come face to face with these Lurchers.” His mouth was still awkward around the new word. Jordan grinned. “Maybe I can help ferry a few of them to the great beyond. Huh? Huh?”
Stan groaned.
11.
Joel stood on deck in his body armor looking at the ferry through the binoculars. The ferry’s white hull caught the sunlight and reflected it back in a blinding display like it were the boat of God. Despite its damaged exterior it still managed to look regal. Perched atop the ferry’s main body was a small box, a tiny head on the trunk of this massive beast. Its walls were made of reinforced glass. He could make out the shadows of the computer terminals inside. “What am I looking for again?”