Emergency Transmission

by Sean McLachlan

  A few minutes later she noticed the water looked better, although she still saw plastic and the occasional multicolored sheen of toxins floating on top of the waves.

  The sky up ahead didn’t look good, though. A thick line of dark clouds was moving in from the west.

  Clyde pulled off his mask and gobbled down some more pemmican.

  Come to think of it, my stomach does feel better.

  She grabbed some oatcake, lifted up her mask, and ate it as quickly as she could.

  By the time she got her mask down her eyes had already teared up.

  Rachel called over her shoulder, “I’m going to try to get around it.”

  She steered it back towards shore while angling south, where the wall of clouds looked thinner.

  The shore came back in sight just as the first raindrops hit. The wind picked up and the sea got choppy. Yu-jin and everyone else double checked that all their gear was wrapped up well.

  Rachel managed to dodge the worst of the storm, which raged not far to their north, but what hit them was bad enough. The sea lifted them up and dashed them down, and Yu-jin got too scared to feel sick. From what she could see through the large eyepieces in Rachel’s gas mask, the engineer looked calm. Yu-jin stared at those eyes—intent, alert, but confident—until she calmed down a bit.

  Don’t start looking scared, Rachel, or I’m going to freak out.

  The rain came down hard. Water began to pool at the bottom of the boat. Yu-jin was about to ask for a bucket to start bailing when Rachel flipped a switch and there was a low mechanical rumble. After a minute the water level went down. It lowered until they could see the soles of their boots, and lowered no more. The rain lashed down too fast for the boat to get rid of it all.

  Yu-jin had no idea what Rachel did to make the boat get rid of its own water. Some mechanical thing. She was still way behind learning about machines. Hunting, trapping, scavenging, tracking—no problem. When people started talking about machines they might as well have been speaking another language. The boat looked like it could weather the storm, though. They’d stink to high heaven, but they wouldn’t end up in the sea.

  She could see why Reginald didn’t insist on being on this trip. It might have killed him.

  A dark blot on the sea in the direction of shore caught her eye. She squinted, trying to peer through her gas mask and the driving rain. It looked like a sailboat. Yu-jin tapped Rachel’s shoulder and pointed.

  “Better help out,” Rachel said.

  When she turned the boat, Clyde and one of Reginald’s guards came to the front.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Ship over there, we’re going to help them,” Yu-jin said.

  “We don’t have time for that!” Clyde objected.

  “We’re not leaving them out here.”

  A few others came up and argued among themselves.

  “Sit down!” Rachel ordered. “You’re making the boat front-heavy. Don’t want that in these seas.”

  The men sat back down.

  Rachel pulled alongside the sailboat and cut the engine just as the rain lifted. The skies remained heavy and roiling, but for the moment the clouds weren’t pelting them with toxins. Yu-jin didn’t know much about boats, but the fishing vessel looked like a good one. It was a third full of water, though, and the fisherman sat slumped over the rope tied to the sail, apparently unconscious.

  Shouts and waves got no response from him, so Rachel grabbed a pole with a steel hook on the end of it, hooked the edge of the fishing boat, and pulled it until the two hulls clunked together. Reginald’s guards hauled him in.

  He was a lanky black man in his mid-twenties. He wore Old Times camo and had decent boots. Yu-jin was surprised. All the fishermen she’d ever seen wore rags. He didn’t have the typical flaky, reddened skin either.

  Otherwise the guy was a mess. Vomit covered his chin and chest, and his eyes were glazed over, the lids swollen.

  The guards lay him on the bottom of the motorboat. Rachel poured some clean water over the man’s face, wet a towel, and started washing him off as best she could.

  Two guards, one from each faction, climbed on board the fishing boat and started scooping out the water with buckets. They picked up a couple of AK-47s, holding them high so the others could see.

  Clyde motioned for them to put them down.

  “A man’s gear is his business,” Clyde said.

  “I always lived up in the mountains,” Yu-jin said. “Are there any fishermen who own two AKs?”

  “Nope,” Clyde said.

  “Didn’t think so.”

  “Still not our business.”

  “No, I suppose it isn’t. But what if he’s a scout for the Righteous Horde?”

  Clyde shrugged. “No way to tell. He wouldn’t say even if he could speak. And having two assault rifles doesn’t mean anything. There’s plenty of folks out in the wildlands toting that kind of firepower—”

  “I know. I grew up in the wildlands.”

  “—so there’s an even chance he’s legit. I’m not going to start policing the wildlands. Those suckers turn around and come back for seconds and I’ll give them hell, but if they go off somewhere else it’s not my problem anymore.”

  The fisherman or whatever he was stirred. With Yu-jin’s help, he got into a sitting position, his back against the side of the boat. His head lolled to one side. Rachel poured some more water on his face and a guard handed him a canteen. The man managed to take a small drink.

  The storm had calmed. They could see the shore getting hit pretty hard, but above them and out to sea there was only a light overcast.

  “What’s your name?” Yu-jin asked him.

  “David,” he croaked.

  “Where you headed, David?”

  The fisherman paused for the briefest moment. “New City. South isn’t safe anymore. There’s some cult sweeping everybody up.”

  “They attacked New City too. I was up in the mountains but I saw the aftermath. They lost a few hundred people.”

  David slumped. “So I’ve heard. I’m sorry the stories are true.”

  The stranger took another sip of water and sat up, looking more revived.

  Yu-jin remembered something a friend in town had told her.

  “Plenty of work up there right now, but the pay’s bad because everyone got hit so hard by the attack and then the crop got ruined.”

  “Yeah, it’s bad down south too. As for the pay, my needs are simple.”

  “We’ll tow your boat to shore. You can weather out the storm and then finish your trip once it’s cleared,” Yu-jin told him.

  “We got a mission to accomplish,” Clyde objected.

  “And we’ll get to it,” Yu-jin replied, “and we’ll get to it my way. You need me.”

  Yu-jin couldn’t believe her attitude. A month ago she’d have never spoken to an elder like this, but a month ago felt like a lifetime ago. There was too much at stake for her to remain her old self.

  “We can’t bring him along and we don’t have time to tow him to shore,” Clyde said.

  “He might not make it to shore on his own. What if another storm kicks up?” Yu-jin pointed out.

  Clyde lowered his voice and leaned in close to her. “I thought you wanted to fix that damn freighter.”

  “I do,” she said quietly enough that the fisherman wouldn’t hear, “but I’m not going to let him die either. The freighter can wait a day.” She turned and called to Rachel where she sat in the front. “Do we have enough fuel to go back to shore and still get where we’re going?”

  “Yeah. It will be tight but we should be OK.”

  “But there’s still the delay, and we don’t know what other troubles they might have. We should get there as soon as we can.”

  This was from one of Reginald’s guards. Yu-jin glared at him until she realized that her expression remained invisible behind her gas mask.

  “We’re taking him in. The Doctor said I was in command,” Yu-jin said, switc
hing to his title because it carried so much authority with people.

  “I’m just saying—”

  “I’ll go,” David said.

  The fisherman picked himself up and clambered onto his boat.

  “Wait, we can take you,” Yu-jin said.

  “I don’t want to be a cause of dissention among you.”

  “Let me get you some food,” Yu-jin said.

  “I have food.”

  “Here’s a jug of water.”

  “Thank you.”

  Clyde pulled a towel out of his bag.

  “Here, this is clean. Soak it with some of that water and put it around your nose and mouth.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Good luck, and no hard feelings, buddy,” Clyde said.

  “I bear you no ill will.”

  The man readied his sail and it puffed out, catching the strong wind. Within a minute he had made it far from them, heading for the shore while angling north for New City. Rachel turned on the engine and steered back in the direction of the freighter.

  “That was good of you to give him that towel,” Yu-jin said to Clyde.

  “He seemed like a decent guy. The way he acted you could tell he wasn’t from the Righteous Horde.”

  They had only gone another half hour when the sea blackened and the rain poured down stronger than before. Everyone hunkered down, trying to shelter themselves from the wind while holding onto anything they could. Rachel kept a calm demeanor, steering the boat straight into the wind. Her confidence gave Yu-jin confidence, but still she worried. As the rain lashed down, Yu-jin sent up a prayer for that poor man stuck out alone in the storm.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The trip to the coastline felt like a bad dream. David’s stomach churned at every ocean swell and even the dim light of the bleak day seemed to pierce his eyes like daggers. David figured this was what seasickness felt like. He’d always laughed at people who got sick on boats; now he could only sympathize. It had taken a toxic downpour to make him sick. Imagine feeling like this every time you got on the water!

  As his sailboat headed northeast, David kept looking over his shoulder in the direction in which the New City motorboat had disappeared.

  They were heading to the freighter; he felt sure of it. But that wasn’t the whole story. The Asian woman had said to that older guy, “You need me.” And neither he nor the other gunmen looked too happy about it. They hadn’t argued, though.

  Need her for what? She seemed to be both in charge and afraid at the same time.

  Whatever she feared, she would soon have something else to be afraid of. A dark line of clouds frowned over the western horizon and a reeking wind had picked up.

  David gritted his teeth and unfurled the sail to its greatest extent. He wasn’t sure he could survive another downpour. He needed to make it to land before the storm hit.

  He didn’t.

  A wall of acid rain closed in behind him like a poison curtain. David saw it coming and wrapped the towel the older man had given him over his nose and mouth and put a blanket over his head like a hood.

  It didn’t do much good. The rain sheeted down, stinging his eyes to near blindness and making him gag and cough. If his stomach had retained anything from the past day’s meal, he would have vomited. Instead his body was wracked with dry heaves.

  He kept on course, guiding more by sense than sight, his hands sure on the sail rope. Years of sailing with his father and mother kept him on course.

  As he clung with one hand on the line and the other on the tiller, he saw his parents as if in a vision. His father cancerous yet proud, his mother dangerously thin and yet beautiful. What would they think of the things he had done? They had been kind people, gentle people. Or at least as kind and as gentle as a world such as this let people be.

  They would be ashamed of what he had done. His father had always taught him to respect women. What would he have said if he could have seen David dragging a comfort woman into his tent? His mother had always taught him that life was sacred. What would she have said when he gunned down entire families?

  If God existed, they were in heaven. Could they see what he had done on Earth? Had he spent the last two years torturing angels?

  “I want to make amends,” he heard himself choke out. “Just give me a chance to do that before You kill me.”

  The rain filled the bottom of the boat with several centimeters of oily water. David could feel the vessel responding sluggishly because of the extra weight. He wanted to fetch the bucket and start bailing, but didn’t dare let go of the tiller and rope. He might not have the strength to grab them again.

  So he remained locked in place, half blind and miserable, praying for a miracle. All he heard was the rain and the occasional thump as the boat hit a fish floating dead on the surface.

  The miracle took a long time in coming.

  The rain slackened and eventually died down to a patter. Through bleary eyes, David spotted the distant shore. He thought he saw buildings but his sight was too blurred to tell for sure. The boat seemed to move towards shore of its own accord. Was his left hand still on the tiller? Did his right hand still hold the sail rope?

  He didn’t know. There was nothing but nausea and pain and the dim realization that the shore drew closer.

  When the boat ground onto the rocky strand, he lurched forward, knocking his head on the gunwale. He slipped down and fell face first into the water at the bottom of the boat.

  David struggled to rise, coughing and sputtering, but only managed to flail about like a dying fish. He couldn’t even raise his head out of the water. He was drowning inside his own boat.

  Suddenly a strong hand grabbed him and pulled him up. A clean cloth ran over his face, wiping off the grime and some of the stench. David blinked, eyes stinging, and tried to focus.

  The rain had stopped. He saw an older white man with thick glasses and black hair that didn’t have a touch of gray. That seemed odd in a man who looked so old. The man looked at him kindly.

  “Are you Jesus or Judas?” the man asked.

  “Wh-what?”

  The man gave a little laugh.

  “It’s a question I ask everybody. We are at war, my friend. Good versus evil. And most people don’t even know what side they’re on.”

  With surprising strength, the older man hauled him out of the boat.

  “I always go walking on the beach this time of day to pray and reflect,” the man said as he lay David down on the beach. “I find it peaceful here despite the smell. Today I almost didn’t come because of the rains, but something told me I should. It must have been the Lord speaking to me.”

  David tried to sit. The stranger helped him up.

  “Thank you,” David said. “I don’t think I could have gotten out of the boat without you.”

  The man extended a hand, holding David’s back with the other one. “I’m the Reverend Enoch Wallace of the New World United Church.”

  David shook his hand. “A Christian.”

  “I am indeed and proud of it. Do you believe?”

  “I … I’ve strayed.”

  “God will always take you back if you let Him.”

  David nodded. “I know.”

  “Let’s get you back to my house and cleaned up.” The Reverend helped him up. “What did you say your name was?”

  “David Nimitz.”

  “David is a fine name, yes. I had a brother named David, a long time ago,” Reverend Wallace said, his face clouding over for a moment.

  David found his feet and staggered over to the boat. He reached in and got his canteen and, to his relief, found it still half full. He washed out his mouth, took a few swigs, and poured the rest on his face.

  The Reverend chuckled. “Better?”

  “A little.”

  “Just think how you’ll feel after a bath. I have running water piped in from New City.”

  “New City! That’s where I’m trying to go. I didn’t think I’d make it.”


  “The Lord guided you, my friend. Let’s get this boat further up the beach so it doesn’t wash away with the tide.”

  The Reverend hauled it a couple of meters above the tide line. David grabbed his gear. He still felt weak and the Reverend had to carry most of it.

  “I live in the Burbs,” he said. “It’s a settlement for noncitizens beyond the city walls. A vile den of thieves, whoremongers, and enemies of the faith, but there is good there too. The perfect place for a church.”

  David laughed at that. The Reverend studied him, his gaze lingering on the two AK-47s strapped to David’s back.

  “We’re you coming here to trade?”

  “I am,” David replied. He paused to collect his thoughts before going on. “I got jumped by some weird cult down south. Killed a couple and took one of their guns. Good thing I got away from the main group. There must be a couple thousand of them.”

  David figured telling part of the truth would be better than creating a lie out of nothing. He’d never liked lying, although lying was the only way to survive in the Righteous Horde.

  Reverend Wallace nodded, his face grim. “They attacked us a while back. A nasty bunch. Twisting the Scriptures to fit their own evil. We beat them, though. Now we face a bigger enemy.”

  David stumbled and the Reverend had to hold him up. They crossed over some foul-smelling sand dunes. To the north they could see a scattering of tents and cabins.

  “The outskirts of the Burbs,” the Reverend told him. “Not far now.”

  The rest of the Burbs and New City came into view. Even through his misery David felt a bit of trepidation. Conquering this place had been the last hope of the Righteous Horde. The Pure One had been too successful for his own good. Too many people had joined and in his megalomania, the cult leader would not turn them away. The contents of the bunkers and the stores from the farms they looted had barely been enough to keep them all fed.

  But here they had found something approaching the civilization of the Old Times. There was electricity here, and running water. Clean soil all around, at least when they had attacked. After all the recent toxic rains their stores would be less than usual, but even so they could feed David’s people for some time to come. Even better, here the rule of law still reigned and the city traded with a functioning freighter that came from some place even more advanced.