Days of the Python (Python Trilogy Book 1)

by David Jurk

  It was there, in the infirmary, that I took the first of my pirate bounty, using my phone to translate the Italian, and identify those things that I thought might be useful. Compared to the first aid kit that I had taken on board in San Diego, the supplies and drugs I found in the Mare Oriens’ pharmacy would put me on a footing with a small hospital. I loaded the backpack with surgical kits, several strengths of antibiotics, sea sickness tablets and pain medication that covered the spectrum from strong aspirin up to opiates so potent that careless use would be deadly. Then, thinking it over, I added a pair of quick-set splints and a dental kit, trying not to imagine the circumstances that would lead me to become my own dentist. I put the backpack on, feeling the weight of the supplies with satisfaction, and again headed for the stairs.

  The next floor up was given over entirely to the ship’s galley and a large, bright dining area, illuminated by the full width of the forward wall of glass. The tables and chairs were in long-abandoned disarray, but I struck treasure in the galley behind the cafeteria-style serving counter. There was a large walk-in freezer and similar refrigerator; both dark and warm and full of rotted meat and fruit, spoiled milk, moldy cheese and a host of unrecognizable lumps. The smell must’ve been revolting and again I was supremely grateful for the respirator.

  The true bonanza was on the shelves along the wall, which held literally tons of canned goods, and again using the phone translator to guide me, I selected the ones I liked, taking as many as I thought I could manage. I had to be very conscious of the weight I’d be adding to Windswept, and the stowage space it would all take. And my backpack was already full, so I needed some way to carry the cans. Looking around, I eventually pulled a tablecloth from one of the tables in the dining room and tied it into a crude bag. Slinging it over my shoulder, I walked back to the stairway and left it and the backpack on the landing; I’d get them on my way back. There was one more floor to explore, and I headed up the last section of stairs.

  Reaching it, I found a single steel door in front of me, and the first sign of violence on the ship; the door appeared to have been forced. It sat jammed half-opened, the handle and latch area nothing more than a jagged hole of melted metal. On the deck beside it lay what must’ve once been an acetylene torch – now bent and twisted into shards; whether from an explosion or some other force I couldn’t say. Squeezing inside, I saw pimpled indentations of bullets on the walls all around the door, and over the inside panel of the door itself. Dozens of them, perhaps hundreds.

  The room inside spread the entire width - though not the full depth - of the bridge. Four doors were spaced along the aft wall, obviously leading to the rear section of this level. Centered in the middle of the room, set back two meters from the forward glass wall, a raised dais held a profusion of large, paper-thin monitors floating serenely in the air, still gripped by the magnetic field holding them in place. A half-dozen chairs were placed haphazardly before them. At the far end of the room, the breeze entered through the square meter of broken glass I’d seen from the deck, riffling papers and the drawn-back curtains.

  Still firmly seated in one of the swiveling chairs was a body dressed in shorts and a uniformed shirt, face down onto the desk before him. I walked slowly over and saw that the back of his head was bludgeoned away; the edges of the wound sharply splintered with slick white bone that surrounded the pale brain within, torn and ripped into a bloody pudding. Neatly trimmed steel grey hair ringed the sides of the skull and one side fell in a flap over an ear. My stomach lurched, and I turned quickly away.

  I looked around the room, considering, then walked the perimeter, everything bright as day inside thanks to the expanse of windows. But there was little to see – some dead plants, several stuffed chairs and a small table. There were shelves with numerous books, and a vast collection of small trinkets; perhaps mementos from distant ports. Walking along the forward glass, I looked out at the deck, at the blue sea beyond. Windswept was not in sight and though I told myself she must be aft of the ship, out of view behind me, the urge to be gone, to be on deck and see her safely waiting, was nearly overwhelming.

  But something held me, some sense that the story of the Mare Oriens was here, in this room.

  I walked to the first of the four doors leading aft. In block letters, painted, was the word Elettronica. I didn’t need the translator; this must hold the electronic brains of the ship. The door was locked. The next, holding the universal icons for man and woman, was nothing more than a head – all very neat, very tidy. It was large, containing not only toilet stalls and a row of urinals, but two shower stalls as well. As heads go, it was luxurious. I supposed this must be for very senior crew when they were on duty.

  When I walked up to the third and read the label, it took a moment for the Italian to register, took a moment further to believe it. The door read Armamento. Locked of course, and just as heavily built of steel as the others. Until this moment I’d considered my exploration nearly done; I’d found excellent medical supplies and some helpful canned food. But this – these were weapons; I wanted to get into this room.

  I went to the last door, set some distance from the others. Again, I needed no translator. Quarti del Capitano. Locked.

  Frustration – tempered by the nagging urgency to be back on Windswept – drove me to a quick second search of the control room. There must be keys here. I looked through the book shelves, rummaged through the trinkets, searched under the papers and keyboards still on the dais, but for all of that I found nothing. Standing, breathing hard, painfully aware that I had now been on board far longer than I’d intended, my eyes fell on the one thing I hadn’t searched; the Captain.

  And ultimately, it wasn’t that bad, patting down his body. I stood to one side to avoid staring down into his shattered skull and tried all his pockets. I found some change, but nothing else. But perhaps there was something under him? Gently taking one shoulder, fighting the stiffness of the body, I rocked his upper torso enough to move his arms and face up out of the dried blood on the desk where they’d fallen. There was nothing underneath, but as I let his shoulder back down, I caught sight of something protruding from one hand, sticking out between thumb and forefinger. Thankful for the gloves I wore, I pulled the stiff fingers open and pulled from them a tightly folded wedge of paper, dried blood along its edges having nearly sealed it shut. I took it over to the window and carefully unfolded it. It was covered in handwritten Italian, in very small, neat script.

  I tried to spread it out on the window sill, but it had been too tightly folded. I needed weights to hold it down. Coins, I thought, and went back to the Captain and pulled what I’d found there from his pocket; four of them, one for each corner. I scanned the page with my phone, turned it over, scanned the back. The AI in my phone figured out what I wanted without being asked, and an English translation appeared in the air above it, glowing brightly in the sunny room.

  Beloved wife,

  I have little time, my dearest Giulia, and what is left to me will be spent writing these words that you will never read. The sorrow in my soul at never seeing you again in this world is tempered only by the certain knowledge that we will be together in the next. That you may have travelled there already, alone and frightened, torments me. I imagine you there in our apartment high in the red hills of our beloved Coletto Fava, alone and ill; an image that fills me with anguish.

  We are stopped in the central Pacific, far from any land. I have brought us here to keep the plague on this ship. I will not sail to port while the virus lives. And it will live until we are all dead.

  Many of the men are terrified and want to go home, and I have barricaded myself here alone to stop them. We are merchant seamen, like soldiers, and we do not run from our responsibility like children because we face death.

  They have brought up the torch from the engine room and once they get through, I must try to hit the oxygen tank with a bullet so that they cannot use it to burn their way into the computer room. I have fired bullets into t
he server, and if I can destroy the torch, I think there is no way for them to get into the electronics room, to try to replace it. And without the system coming back online, the ship will never move again, nor have power, which prevents the lifeboat from being lowered as well. I have long despised the complete control of this ship by a computer; at the end now, I am grateful for it.

  It may all be little enough – if the reports are to be believed, the plague is unstoppable. Still, this is the life I have chosen, and I play my part to the end.

  There are sparks through the door and I must stop now and spray the wall with bullets to put some fear in them, to slow them a little. Still, they will soon be in and I will not shoot them, whatever they do to me they are my men and they act with terror, not ill will.

  Know that all that I am is within you, all that you are is within me. Soon, my beloved Giulia, soon.

  Matteo

  “Translation off,” I whispered, and the display faded.

  I stood staring out the window for long moments, imagining the hours and minutes leading up to the door being breached. The men finally get through, the Captain with his rifle angles himself for a shot and manages to blow up the Oxygen tank, wrecking the torch. The men rush him as he sits back down, and someone comes up behind him with a bludgeon and that is the end of him, the end of this loving husband and good Captain.

  I folded the letter back up and walked over to him and put it back in his stiff fingers. I let the weight of my hand rest on his arm for the briefest of moments. He had been a brave man, doing what he felt was his duty.

  But two things remained a puzzle – first, where was this rifle he had used to spray the wall with bullets? Having searched the room twice, I knew it wasn’t in here, and I supposed one of the men had taken it once they’d killed him. There remained the last question – there had to be keys. Where were they?

  My eyes fell on the broken section of the window. Had he thrown them out onto the deck to keep them from the men? But surely the men saw this broken window just as I did – wouldn’t they have assumed the same thing and simply searched the deck? But perhaps, with all the structures covering this huge deck, he had hopes of the keys being lost for good.

  And as much as I wanted to get into that armory, the time on board had taken its toll on me. I needed to be out of here, away from this ship of the dead, back out into the sunshine and clean sea, back to Windswept.

  Then I heard her voice, soft, clear. His shoe, she whispered.

  I slowly dropped to one knee and untied the shoe on his right foot and struggled to get it off. Nothing. I walked around him and repeated the process on his left. Nothing again, I thought at first, then felt a bulge in the heel of his sock, in the hollow of his achilles tendon. There were three small bronze keys, tied together with a string inside the sock and I pulled them free. Standing, I looked down at him. A clever man. He’d broken the window to throw them off – have them spend hours searching the deck with all those racks instead of this room, instead of him.

  I rose and went to the Armamento door. The second key I tried slid in easily, turned with a click, and the door swung open. There was just enough light flooding in from the outer windows to see what the room held.

  It was – assuming you liked weapons – a veritable gold mine. Assault rifles, two very serious sniper rifles, a shoulder-fired rocket launcher of some sort, pistols, thousands of rounds of ammunition, and Styrofoam-padded boxes of what looked like explosive charges. Two tripod-mounted scopes, and from the looks of the bulky mechanisms around the lenses, I assumed they were equipped with rangefinders. In a box on the floor, night vision gear.

  It was hard not to get carried away; I had to temper my instinct to just grab everything in sight with the knowledge that every gun, every box of ammunition had to be balanced against an equal amount of food that I could take on board. Still, in the world I was beginning to believe I lived in, these weapons were tools of survival, so for the next half-hour I went through everything, culling it all first into a ‘would like to have’ pile, and ultimately thinning that into what I took. In the end, I went with an American-made M-16 and a German G-36, both chambered for NATO cartridges, of which I piled up twenty boxes of fifty rounds each. I wanted more, but the stuff was heavy. I took one of the sniper rifles, a Sako TRG-22, though the other was the more powerful TRG-42, because the 22 fired .308 ammunition, the same as the trusty old Winchester I already had on board. I added two of the pistols – nine-millimeter Berettas, with five hundred rounds of ammunition for them, and the night-vision gear.

  And finally, after considerable hesitation, I took one of the boxes of explosives. While the idea of taking explosives on board made me very, very nervous, a single thought kept bringing me back to them; if I ever need something badly, something that lay behind a steel door like the ones in this room, having explosives might save my life.

  And how to carry all this? There was literally nothing in the room that was useful. I thought of the Captain’s quarters and went to the door, got the right key on the first try and entered. It was a large room, lushly appointed, and though I immediately saw a heavy quilt on the double bed that would work perfectly, something about the peacefulness of the room, the profusion of art, the hundreds of actual, physical books brought me to a halt. There were ancient mariner’s maps of Italy on the wall, a model wooden windjammer under construction on a small table, and a chessboard, the game still obviously in progress – whether against another human or a computer I had no idea. And on the bedside table, a small crystal pyramid. I reached out to it, knowing, and wrapped my fingers around it. In a heartbeat, the warmth from my hand powered the 3D generator and above it, before my face, appeared a smiling woman. She was in her fifties, I’d think, very beautiful with a smile so warm and brilliant it broke my heart. Giulia, I thought, and staring into her eyes, unwrapped my fingers and watched her fade away.

  I pulled the quilt gently from the bed, took it out of the room and softly closed the door. Then I stopped, and opened it, leaving the door ajar. It took me ten minutes of very hard work to drag the Captain to the room and lay him on the bed next to the little table with the crystal pyramid. In return, I stole his belt.

  Quickly now, quickly. My hands fumbling with anxiety, I wrapped everything but the explosives inside the quilt and tied it with the belt. I was ready.

  Still, it took three trips down to the deck – two for the weapons and one for the food and my backpack that I’d stashed on the stairwell in the atrium.

  And at last I was finished; the respirator came off, and I stood at the rail, everything piled onto the deck at my feet. After the gloom of the interior, the sun was unbearably bright, the breeze coming to me off the water cool and fresh. I peeled the gloves and suit off carefully, turning them inside out as I stripped them from me, and wadded it all up, stuffing it under a rack.

  Standing there in my shorts and t-shirt in the open air was like being reborn. I slowly scanned the deck, sweeping my eyes over the dark glass walls of the bridge, hiding the death behind them. I thought of the captain. The Mare Oriens would drift with the ocean currents for months, even years, until at some point it fetched up aground on some rocky promontory somewhere, then slowly rusted. It seemed a poor end; the best I could do was to make good use of what I’d taken from her.

  Turning back to the gunwale, I realized I needed some way to lower everything to the water. And it occurred to me to look for the lifeboat – it was probably a large one, big enough to carry twenty crewmen, and surely there’d be lines of some sort. I walked across the deck to the starboard side, seeing it immediately, covered in canvas. I stared at the canvas and then went back to the port side and rummaged through my pack until I found my knife.

  I cut out a large piece of the canvas and found several coils of line stowed inside the boat. Taking it all back to where my bundles laid on the deck, I made a sling with the canvas large enough to hold everything. It was bulky and awkward, but I dragged it over the side, using the railing a
s a pulley, and with a wrap of line around it as a brake, slowly lowered it to within a meter or two of the water, and tied it off.

  Then, I scanned the sea for Windswept. I learned then that when one is standing on a ghost ship in the middle of the Pacific with an AI program controlling your only means of survival, telling yourself that she must be rounding the stern is only marginally successful at quelling the panic that wells up in your heart.

  I ran back across the deck to the other side of the ship, to the lifeboat, and leaned over the rail. Still, no Windswept, and now fear gripped me in a white-hot embrace, fully and completely, and I sprinted back to the starboard side, leapt over the railing onto the stairwell and raced down it as fast as I dared.

  When I reached the bottom platform, I pulled my phone out, cradled it carefully – very conscious of what dropping it meant – and pulled up the RayMarine app. Please, I said, please, please, please - and pushed the call icon, then pushed it twice more, as if I could somehow communicate to Ray how desperately I needed him.

  I sat down on the floor of the platform and swung my legs into the opening where the ladder was attached. It seemed miles above the water. I put my feet on the farthest rung I could reach, grabbed the top rung tight, and swung myself over and began slowly climbing down, one rung at a time. It was far worse than climbing up, and my arms and legs began shaking – though whether with effort or fear or both I couldn’t say.

  When I reached the bottom rung, the satchel I’d lowered overboard scraped lazily against the hull a meter from my head, and I could not stop myself from wondering if it had cost me my life. But a moment later, a moment of eternity, I saw Windswept rounding the bow, heading straight at me, faint streams of wake trailing from her. I had seen many beautiful things in my forty years; sunsets of incomparable glory, mountain peaks in the Tetons hanging ghost-like in early morning mist, a newborn emerging from its mother, the bittersweet magnificence of an autumn forest – but this, this was salvation. I don’t know – imagine your father, arriving at school to pick you up just as the group of older boys has you surrounded. Imagine your mother, come to you in the darkness of a nightmare, comforting you, pulling you back from the abyss. Imagine whatever rescuer you will from whatever terror – all of that and more; that was Windswept sweetly making way, straight for me. It was life itself coming for me.