Noah took me aside, or as aside as one could go on a ship, when the group broke apart. Shane insisted on coming along, following me like a little blond shadow.
“Thanks for doing that,” Noah said, shaking my hand. He was a strange kid, but loveable, and I pumped his hand back with a wry smile.
“I don’t really know what I’m doing,” I admitted with a shrug. “But someone had to speak up.”
“It’s a good plan.” He nodded and took back his hand, sticking it into his pocket. “Arturo really did teach me some things … basic stuff, you know, but … I think we might really be able to do this.”
I glanced at Cassandra, who hadn’t moved much since the speech’s end. She never moved much, period. “Do you think she’s all right? I don’t really know what to make of her.”
“She keeps to herself,” Noah agreed, scratching at the back of his neck as we both looked at her. “I dunno … Every time I try to talk to her she just sorta stares at me and then clams up. I don’t want to say she’s crazy, but…”
“But you think she’s crazy.”
“No … no.” He sighed, deflating. “I dunno. I mean … would you wear bloody clothes for days on end?”
The boy had a point. “No,” I replied, “but I think we need to at least get her up on her feet. I’ve hardly seen her eat since we’ve been on this thing and we’re going to need everyone’s cooperation to make this plan work.”
Noah nodded again and bit down on his lip. “I’ll see if I can get her talking.” He paused, smirking as he asked, “Did you get a chance to read the stuff I gave you?”
“Couldn’t put it down if I wanted to.”
He blushed, lighting up like a tree on Christmas morning as he sidled away in Cassandra’s direction. I hoped his disarming bashfulness might encourage the redheaded girl to open up a little.
Reading The Maltese Falcon got me thinking; not about fedoras and cigarette smoke and red, red lips (although it did definitely have all of those things) but about birds, falcons. Andrea unearthed a raggedy pencil and some legal paper in the cockpit and I spent the afternoon sketching, Shane at my side. He was talkative for once, telling me when something looked too silly or not silly enough. Like therapy or a stiff drink, it clears the mind. I drew falcons and sparrows, Pink Bear for Shane, seagulls and whatever appeared on shore. He asked for a few dinosaurs and I gave him Velociraptor vs. Decepticon. I know animals—and thanks to Shane, I also know robots. I’ve drawn creatures all my life, filled books and sketchbooks with their quasi-human hijinks.
Strangely enough, I never had pets growing up. My mother’s tolerance for grime began and ended with Dad’s grubby trailer. Dogs brought smells into the house and Kat was allergic to, ironically enough, cats. We tried fish. Kat and I weren’t great about remembering to feed them and Mom got fed up with always being the one to clean the tank and scoop out the belly-uppers. On trips, Dad put up with me taking precious time out of hiking and fishing to bird-watch and sit extremely still in the hopes that a deer or two would glide by. In the city, pigeons and the occasional wayward mouse in the apartment were the only flesh and blood creatures I got to see up close. The zoo and sometimes a friend with a hamster or parakeet were my sole exposure to the animal world. It was a rare treat and I loved every second of it. I would pick an animal and sit on the bench in front of its habitat for hours, sketching the tigers or apes, wondering what would happen if I went inside the enclosure. On a school field trip I was left behind because I had hidden myself in the thick shadows of the nocturnal creatures building. They did a head count when they got back to the school and I came up missing. The teachers found me rooted to the floor in front of the Slow Loris exhibit.
My parents didn’t have the heart to ground me, and instead took me back to the zoo. Dad gave me a tiny pen light so I could see my sketchpad in the darkened nocturnal house.
For me, it’s hard not to think in animal terms—when you’re living in a kind of apocalypse, you see people behave like wild beasts every day. And it helped me connect with Shane. It was the one game I could consistently get him to play—picking out what animals people looked like. He was good at it and sometimes—like on that day—it even brought him out of his shell. It made me consider that there might be a budding young artist living with me, but whenever I handed him the pencils he just drew spirals, dark ones, circling drains that wore the pencil leads down to soft nubs.
I didn’t want to know what a child psychologist would say about that.
So I drew a sleek little fox for Andrea—that was as no-brainer—and a greyhound for Moritz. Cassandra and Noah were tougher to pinpoint, but eventually I drew a woodpecker for Cassandra and a penguin with a Maple leaf scarf for Noah. Shane, of course, got Pink Bear, but I also gave him a few companions, some cheerful squirrels and rabbits to frolic gingerly at the feet of Velociraptor and his mortal enemies, the Decepticons.
“Is that supposed to be me or something?” Andrea asked. She had snuck up to peer over my shoulder. The fox was carrying a floppy muffin hat in its jaws.
“Yes,” I said.
“Oh, what’s that?”
Andrea and I looked up together. Cassandra was standing in front of us, her hands tucked demurely in front of her waist. It was a weird image to reconcile, her bloody blue scrubs and her sweet, pleasant smile. Cuter things dragged themselves around Silent Hill. I turned the legal pad around for her to see. Her face opened up into a beaming smile. Mother, I thought immediately. She had had kids at some point. Hmm. Perhaps my affinity for child-rearing was growing if I could notice that so easily.
“Those are adorable!”
Moms always respond to drawings like this. They instantly recognize the style, the intent. It’s like reading The Mitten and Never Smile at a Monkey is encoded into their DNA. Cassandra flopped down next to me. She seemed young to be a mom, but maybe clean living had preserved her looks. Her eyes were as big as saucers as she gazed lovingly at the animals bounding across the page. She pointed at each character in turn and named who it matched on the boat.
She was, to put it mildly, a bit on the ripe side. I switched to breathing through my mouth.
“But where’s yours?” Cassandra asked, crestfallen.
“I don’t know,” I said, using the gentle, cautious voice I used with Shane. Maybe we’d find out more than just her name if we kept her going like this. “What do you think fits?”
Cassandra glanced up from the drawings, studying me closely, beady eyes all scrunched up with concentration. I blanched, sneaking furtive glances to Andrea for moral support. She was laughing silently.
“Maybe a crow,” she said. “Or a panther … a baby one!”
“Or a weasel,” Andrea kindly supplied.
We compromised on a mink. Noah joined us, pleased with his penguin. Under his direction I sketched a few characters from The Maltese Falcon, humans this time. I tore off the drawing of the main character, Sam Spade, and gave it to Noah. Shane stared up at me and pointed to the sketch of Pink Bear. It was the most emotional communicating he’d done in days. I handed it to him and watched the tiniest of smiles tug at his lips.
Noticeably absent from our little powwow was Moritz.
He had withdrawn to the port side of the ship, silently watching the scenery go by. I brought him a piece of bread with some dried fish and an apple while Andrea looked after Shane. Moritz didn’t seem to want to meet my eyes and concentrated all of his attention on the food in his hands. His scarf rippled in the faint breeze coming from the south.
“You almost died,” he said at last.
“It happens,” I said, not wanting to dwell. “You saved my life.”
“That thing grabbed you. I thought … I don’t know. I couldn’t be responsible for that.”
“Well, you’re not,” I replied. “You saved a life. Think about that instead.”
My smile was shaky. I didn’t like hearing just how close I’d been to death. In books people always say “I’m no hero” but the differenc
e is I mean that when I say it. Or think it. My heel still ached where the creature had pinched. I had the luxury of not knowing how that had looked and I could only imagine what Moritz had seen. I’m not even remotely a strong swimmer, so it must have been a photo finish from his perspective, with me just barely outrunning death.
“I keep seeing it in my head. I couldn’t sleep or sit still. Andrea had to give me something or I would have been up all night,” he said. Then he mumbled something under his breath in German, a curse word maybe. “Sometimes I think it would be better if I did not care for any of you. If we were to all remain strangers it would be so much easier.”
“Easier? You mean when we die?” Which was inevitable in his mind apparently.
“I’m aware of how callous that sounds,” he said, glancing away. “However, that is how I feel.”
“Then don’t worry,” I said coldly. “I’ll vanish.”
He laughed. “I said it would be easier, not better.”
I couldn’t help but see this all playing out somewhere else, in a smoke-filled train car or a seedy bar. Once you descend into the hard-boiled mind-set it’s hard to climb your way back out. Everything is noir, or feels like it should be. With just a tiny squint I could place a cigarette between Moritz’s lips and a jaunty fedora on his head. He’d aim an ice-cold bullet of a look at me and I’d melt it with a smoldering gaze and a twitch of perfect red lips. He’d say something witty and ironic like, “Come here often?” and we’d both laugh and call for paint thinner on the rocks.
I had drifted. He was staring.
“Sorry,” I said. “Just thinking.”
“About?”
“About those ugly-looking clouds.”
Speaking of noir …
He looked above my head at the mass of clouds so gray they were almost black. They were moving in fast, dragging a curtain of slate-gray rain with them. At that moment I felt Arturo’s loss like a smack to the face. There was a storm coming, chasing our tail with the kind of speed that made you want to curl up in bed under the covers. It would be a whopper—lightning, thunder, the works. That wouldn’t be so bad in a cabin or even a tent, but out in the open water?
“Andrea!” I called. She and Noah had already begun scrambling around in the cockpit. The wind snapped, sail straining at the rigging. Shane shuffled around in the midst of all this chaos until I swooped in and snatched up his hand, deciding that if I went overboard then he was coming with me.
“Great,” I muttered, backing away from the railing with Shane. “Maybe we’ll get extra lucky and it’ll rain zombies too.”
You know that feeling before a spelling bee or an important presentation? The one where you can’t decide whether to diarrhea or vomit or both? We joined the others, huddling under the little cover made by the cockpit. My stomach began to ache in anticipation. My first taste of seasickness would probably be nothing compared to this. Not only that, but there was our safety to consider, and the fact that none of us knew what to do in the event of a bad storm. We couldn’t exactly check someone’s iPhone for a quick forecast or Google search: “Oh, God, what the fuck do we do now?”
The rain pounded the deck without warning, rushing across the surface of the water like a cymbal roll. The clouds split open, unleashing a few blinding flashes of lightning to the south. I looked at the mast, trying to recall basic science and decide whether or not we were all shortly to become jalapeño poppers.
Noah was trying to shout over the downpour and deafening roars of thunder. Together, crammed into the cockpit, trying to hide from the lashing rain, I realized that no matter how much we wanted to go on and no matter how much we planned, Mother Nature would always have the final say. She was every bit as dangerous and threatening as the undead. Shane curled up, making himself as small as possible, a tiny humming noise coming from him as he whimpered in fear.
“It’ll pass,” I assured him, hoping like hell it was true. “Just a little longer.”
It was one of those indelible moments where you remember just how miniscule you are in comparison to the weather, how with one bad bout of PMS Ole Mama Nature can send the furies to terrorize you on the sea. Humans belong on land, I thought to myself, trying to become one with Shane and the rubber sheeting over the food supply. Someone was standing on my foot, it didn’t matter. The cockpit was one mass of human limbs and sloshing rain. No one had volunteered to take the lead and try to sort out the mast or the rigging. We could only masquerade as sailors for so long. Even if Arturo had still been alive, I wasn’t sure he could save us from this.
I managed to aim my first wave of nausea out of the cockpit, stumbling to the edge to heave it over onto the deck. Shane cringed and recoiled from me. I watched the vomit cascade in an orange blob straight down toward the edge and into the water. The boat had reared up, tilted at a heart-pounding sixty-degree angle. I scampered back into the safety of the cockpit, clutching my stomach, letting Moritz have a turn.
Suddenly, day was night, darker than I could remember it being. The sky was no longer blue or even gray, but flat black that lit up with the oncoming spikes of lightning. Behind a glass pane it would have been beautiful, awe-inspiring, but jammed into a five-by-five cockpit with a tender tummy and five frightened compatriots made it unbearable. I shook and glued my eyes to my shoes, determined not to piss myself and to hold up with a modicum of dignity for Shane’s sake.
“Soon now,” I told him in a pale-faced whisper. “Soon it’ll stop.”
The boat lurched, listing heavily to the left, portside, to the water. I couldn’t muster the tiniest instinct. The sail wagged and then made a noise like a shotgun blast. I wanted to grab something, pull a rope or fix something, anything. I realized then that I should’ve found a life vest to grasp, but my legs were paralyzed and I didn’t know where to look. Then the wind caught us and sent us reeling back the other way. Andrea screamed. I grabbed Shane, wrapping him in a bone-crushing embrace. He hugged me back as we held on for dear life, my tears mingling with the storm.
* * *
Whether we liked it or not, a destination had been chosen for us.
In a way, it was just like we planned. Find land. We found it, all right, forcefully.
I’d like to think we were fortunate. The storm had thrown us into a cove of sorts, with a curtain of green trees covering us overhead. Everything smelled piney and crisp. When the rain finally died down we poked our heads out to find that we weren’t doomed to drown or wash up on shore. But the boat had taken a beating, the hull badly scraped and torn from being smashed against the rocky coast of the island. There was no beach, just a sheer rock face with fringes of mossy grass hanging over the edge at about our head height.
Shane trembled in my grasp, peering up with unblinking eyes as we both found ourselves in more or less one piece.
“See?” I said weakly. “All over.”
He climbed out of the cockpit with me, shifting his grip to my left hand. Thank God he was all right—shaken, sure, wet and rumpled, but definitely not fish food. When I limped to the starboard side of the ship I could reach out and run my hand along the gleaming pale pink stones. The storm had appeared, tossed us around, and then left, leaving behind a creepy absence, birds singing happily as if nothing at all had happened.
“I can’t believe it,” Andrea said, appearing at my side. She, too, reached out to touch the rocks, as if checking that they were real and not in a dream. “We’re alive.”
Miraculously, nobody was seriously injured. Noah had jammed his wrist pretty bad trying to steady the wheel in the cockpit, but other than that there was nothing to report but bruises and minor abrasions. We gathered at the railing, taking stock of our cuts and bumps and sneaking glances at the island itself. So close to the shore it was impossible to tell how big it truly was.
“Do you think we should explore a little?” Noah asked. He bounced on his heels. It was obvious he was eager to be on land again.
“I don’t know,” Andrea said, “maybe we should wai
t and spend the night here, see what happens.”
“You mean see what comes crawling out after us?” I countered.
“We can’t stay,” Moritz said, rubbing his jaw. He had the beginnings of a beard. “We might drift back out with the tide.”
“The boat won’t go anywhere if we tie it to the trees,” I said. “We can’t stay here. That was never the plan, right? We should get onto land while we have the chance.”
Andrea shot me a look. “And when the tide goes out it’ll beach.”
“Look, it was your idea to land anyway,” I replied. “And now we’ve done it.”
Not very gracefully, I didn’t add. Trying to navigate the boat back out would be touchy, especially with the hull wedged up onto a sandbar. You didn’t need to be Vasco da Gama to see the problems inherent in trying to push a boat off of the sand and manage to scamper onto it in time. The sail was tangled, the outboard motor sticking up out of the water … Leaving didn’t seem like much of an option.
“Fine,” Andrea said, throwing up her arms. Her hat had fallen off in the storm. She began searching the deck for it. “But we need to find a beach. I’m not camping in the middle of a forest.”
We got down to the business of transferring what was salvageable off the boat. Personally, I was glad to feel firm earth under my feet again. Shane seemed to like it too. Even before The Outbreak he hadn’t been a complainer, but living on short food stuffs, you’d think the kid would eventually gripe about eating rice for almost every meal. But he never uttered a peep of discontent. You had to look close, like now, to see that the barest hint of a smile was the only indicator that he liked this situation better.
Walking on stones and dirt felt natural, comforting. And the smells were different, as lush as a savage, prehistoric forest. The air was clean and filled with the wintry scent of wet trees. Feeling optimistic, I tracked down my garbage bag, which had snagged on a nail and managed to stay onboard. The things inside were more or less ruined. The sketches hadn’t fared well, washed out by the water, and the food was soaked. We had Arturo’s port, some old sodas from the hold under the cockpit and some random bits of food that had managed to stay dry. Shane puttered along behind me, collecting a shell, a broken pencil, Andrea’s hat …
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