Days of the Python (Python Trilogy Book 1)

by David Jurk

A cold spear settled in my spine. There it is, I thought; that’s it then. I am a dead man after all.

  “How long since the last death?” I asked. I tried to keep my voice level, but she heard something in it.

  She watched me for a moment. “I’m not sure what you mean,” she said.

  “You said you were the last one,” I said evenly. “I assumed everyone else had died.”

  “Oh, no,” she replied, smiling in quick apology. “The NZ – the New Zealand government; they took Niue over, took everyone to New Zealand.” She paused. “Except me. I stayed. I’ve been hiding for many weeks.”

  “Hiding,” I repeated numbly.

  She nodded. “I lived in a cave.”

  “A cave?”

  “Along the shore. In a crack in the cliff.”

  I couldn’t seem to process what she was saying. She’d been hiding? For – what did she say – many weeks? Then I thought, alone?

  “Aulani,” I said slowly. “Were you the only one on the island?”

  She shook her head. “No, not at all. The NZ were there, and a few tourists, of course. That’s why I had to hide, yes? All Niueans were supposed to leave. If they had seen me, they’d have put me in jail.”

  “So, you’ve been alone. Completely alone for all that time?”

  She nodded, her face now openly puzzled.

  Life flooded into me like a beam of light illuminating a dark sea. I needed a moment to gather my thoughts.

  “Did you have a radio?” I asked quietly. “Have you been listening to news?”

  Again, she shook her head.

  Oh, lord, I thought. Her eyes never left my face.

  “I don’t know quite how to say this,” I began slowly. Then I just stopped – how do you tell someone the population of the Earth was dying, was in fact mostly gone?

  Something had entered her eyes.

  “What?” she whispered. “What has happened?”

  “Aulani,” I said, “this is going to be hard to hear.” I turned over in my mind what this would sound like. Unbelievable, that’s what.

  “A plague started a couple of months ago – more or less,” I told her. “In China, they think.” Her eyes were wide, waiting – she knew I’d not gotten to the worst of it.

  “It was a type of avian flu; a really, really deadly kind. Extremely contagious and the worst part was that people got sick, could infect other people, but didn’t appear to be sick themselves. So, the people who had it, they were infectious but had no way to know it and just went on infecting others. It just spread; it spread all over. There was no way to stop it”

  She saw it at once.

  “Couldn’t they test?”

  I shook my head. “It just changed too fast for a test to be effective. Same thing for trying to come up with a vaccine.”

  “So, how bad…”

  I hesitated. “Very bad.” I took a breath, let it out slowly. “It’s… it’s all over the world. The entire world.”

  She was silent, thinking.

  “But, how many…?”

  “There are millions and millions of people dead,” I said softly. “It’s everywhere.”

  “Millions?” she breathed.

  “Actually,” I said, “It’s billions. People are dying…people have died. Everywhere. Almost everyone.”

  I watched the disbelief wash across her face, saw questions freeze on her lips.

  “I know,” I said. “It’s… hard to believe. I can hardly believe it myself, but I’ve, I’ve seen it. And I’ve listened to reports - at least, I used to. It’ more than you can take, really, listening to it.”

  I waited but she seemed to have no words.

  “Everything is down. There’s no radio, no satellites, no governments. There was a lot of violence. Riots.” She stared at me.

  “Are there are no medicines for it at all, then?” she asked. “Are you are saying that if you get it, you die? That’s it?”

  “Yes,” I said softly. “You get it, you die.”

  “But, surely,” she whispered, almost desperately. “some people? Away from others?”

  “I don’t know,” I replied. “I’ve wondered myself. Perhaps others like me.” I hesitated. “And like you.”

  I rose to start water for tea, then turned back to her.

  “But even then, if you met someone, how could you know?” I lowered my eyes.

  She stared at me. She was very quick.

  “You thought I had it,” she said. “Didn’t you? When you rescued me.”

  I shrugged without looking at her.

  “You picked me up not knowing if I was sick. And if I had been, you knew you’d be dead yourself. Isn’t that so?”

  I had nothing to say.

  “Owen,” she said, persisting. “Isn’t that so?”

  I looked up at her. “If I’d just left you, what kind of person would that make me?” I smiled, and added, “And it turned out OK, didn’t it?”

  “Yes,” she said. “It turned out OK.”

  But something else had worked its way into her consciousness.

  “New Zealand?” she asked.

  “As bad as anywhere, I suppose.” Then it occurred to me that there must be a reason she’d asked. Did she have family there?

  “But that’s why I’m heading there,” I said quickly. “I’ve been hearing reports over the radio about a sanctuary there, a safe zone. From what I heard, they quarantine people for a month, then if they show no signs of the plague, let them in.”

  She remained silent, and I waited but she said nothing.

  “Is your family there?” I asked finally.

  She nodded, and we sat quietly, each with our own thoughts.

  She leaned forward with a sudden urgency. “Are you still going there?”

  “To New Zealand? Yes.”

  “Will you take me with you?” I didn’t have to think about it.

  “Of course.”

  I waited, but that seemed to have settled it for her, and really, what else was there to say?

  “I’m going on deck,” I said gently. I thought she might need some time alone.

  I stood and started past her, but she reached out and put a hand lightly on my arm and when I looked down at her, I saw tears.

  “Thank you,” she said, “for doing what you did.”

  I nodded, gave her hand a brief squeeze, and climbed out into the sunshine.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  WITH ANOTHER PERSON on board – especially one who proved to be so sensitive to the mood of the sea and so intuitive about weather – my life on board became what I’d always hoped it would be with Rachel; an orchestration of movement, a partnership in which each of us contributed the best of ourselves to the demands of a sailing boat on the open ocean.

  The nature of the watch schedule changed completely, entirely for the better. We worked out a rhythm that suited us well; as we both wanted to be awake during the daylight hours, we established a routine that provided for that. She turned in early, at nine in the evening, and slept for four hours while I was on watch. At one in the morning, she’d relieve me, and I’d go below and sleep until five. Then two final hours of sleep for her, followed by two for me. All told, we both had six hours of sleep each night, secure in the awareness that while we slept the other was on deck, vigilant. And it gave us time for eating meals together; which I could definitely say for myself – and I hoped for her as well – I truly looked forward to.

  But for all of that, there was a degree of awkwardness – she was a woman, after all, and a demure and private one. I suppose in a different world I would have thought her oddly old-fashioned; she was careful, always, to avoid any overt sexuality in the way she moved or presented herself. She was careful to leave me personal space to dress and shower and use the head, and I tried very hard to do the same for her. But ultimately, we were confined in a single, narrow hull - and there were moments for both of us that caused some degree of embarrassment; coming up on deck and finding her taking a bath in the c
ockpit; changing my clothes in the cabin, hearing her steps and turning to see her fleeing back up the steps. When these moments happened, we became practiced at pretending they hadn’t, adept at quiet withdrawal.

  Without a word, I surrendered my starboard-side bunk to her and took the port settee, which sat a bit more forward in the cabin. We were both careful to get out of our clothes in the dark, or turn in separately, which wasn’t too difficult given the watch schedule. Still, at times it was a challenge; I’d slept nude my entire adult life and wasn’t about to change, and as best I could tell without explicitly asking or looking, she did the same. It worked all right; it was just a bit of a balancing act.

  We fell, too, into an easy and natural confidentiality; perhaps it was simply the situation we found ourselves in, but for me, no one since Rachel had been so easy to talk to. We didn’t talk much about our families; she knew I’d been married, and that Rachel had died before the outbreak, and she told me a bit about Niue and that she’d been married. Something had happened, and they went separate ways. Beyond that, I think we both instinctively understood there was painful territory there for each of us, and we didn’t press each other.

  Her experiences on Niue after the exodus though – pouring over those details was intriguing for both of us. She told me about her cave and all the work she’d done and described in detail the trip to retrieve the canoe. It was astonishing, really - and I was amazed that she’d managed it, and even more so that she’d survived on the open sea.

  In retrospect, now knowing about the plague, she replayed the details of that night.

  “That house near Namukulu, with all the lights and the dog, and no one ever came out. Do you think they were sick?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. You said they were cooking out – would they have been doing that if any of them had been openly ill? It just seems unlikely; from what I’ve heard on the news, when you finally show the illness, you’re really sick, really fast.”

  The long, tortuous journey through the surf along the coast troubled her the most.

  “The whole struggle along the reef, all the climbing and crawling through the coral – all the worry about being discovered; I could have walked straight into town anytime I pleased. There was probably no one there alive to stop me.”

  “Maybe,” I replied, “then again, maybe you would have met someone. Just one. Someone with the plague that hadn’t died yet. And that would’ve been all it took.”

  She nodded slowly.

  “I suppose that’s true.”

  Where I was intrigued by every detail of her life alone on Niue, she was equally taken by Windswept, fascinated with the technology I’d built into her and intensely curious about the process of constructing her. I painted a broad brushstroke of my own story; sailing from San Diego to Hawaii, then into the Southern Pacific, and Nikumaroro and the circumvention around the Patch that had led to finding her. We fell quickly into a kind of kinship; I deeply admired her.

  We had good weather for several days; the air warmed unseasonably with steady trades and clean, sparkling skies. Then abruptly, we lost every breath of air, every hint of it. The sky turned hazy and dull, the sea flat and green. I saw no point in hurrying and left the motors off; with the haze, the charging was poor, and I took every opportunity to preserve the batteries. So, we drifted. It turned out to be a wonderful break, almost as if we were on holiday, and for four windless days we threw the watch routine away, staying up late into the night, playing cards in the cockpit, laughing and talking. Her body was healing quickly, and her natural energy and vitality revealed itself. What I’d only sensed in her in the beginning became more and more openly evident; there was a force about her, an energy, a vital generosity of spirit in everything she did.

  With the flat seas and the motionless boat, we took turns swimming and bathing in the placid ocean, one at a time while the other watched for sharks. Where before, I’d been going about the boat naked unless I felt cold, I was now mindful to at least wear a pair of shorts. She did the same - accepting an old pair of mine and a length of cord for a belt - and wound a simple strip of cloth over her breasts. In time, we became more casual about it, swimming naked in front of each other; it just seemed foolish to fall on convention in a world comprised of two people and a cat.

  After days of this hazy stillness, the air turned wretchedly humid, though there were still no substantial clouds, just the interminable haze. I felt there was no reason to be concerned; without threatening overcast or darkened skies - and no breath of wind - it all seemed benign. But Aulani grew increasingly concerned.

  “The energy of the sea and sky is being sucked away,” she told me, “into something big.”

  I was doubtful, despite my respect for her knowledge of the weather. April was late for anything dramatic – not impossible, of course, but unlikely. And I’d never heard of this kind of bland, humid calm precipitating any sort of major storm. Still, I’d learned enough about her uncanny reading of the weather to take her concern seriously.

  And when the wind did come twelve hours later, it surprised me with its strength and direction; it blew hard out of the northwest, dead opposite to the prevailing trades. It was maddingly capricious; an uncertain eddy one minute, rising into a ferocious torrent the next. It made for very difficult sailing, requiring constant sail changes, and for Aulani, it was the final sign.

  She came up to me as I was adjusting the sails yet again and laid her hand on my shoulder. Her face was calm, but her eyes were as dark as jade.

  “I think a cyclone is coming,” she said, “within two or three days. We need to run.”

  I stared at her.

  “That’s impossible,” was all I could think of to say. “It’s April.”

  “It is,” she said softly. “But Owen, we should still run.”

  Before I could say anything more, we were rocked with another blast of wind so strong that the windward ama lifted entirely free of the water. Already putting in a double reef, I now reduced the main as far as I could. Shaken, I began to recognize how stupidly cocksure I was acting and made my way carefully back to the cockpit.

  “I’m sorry,” I told her. “I believe you. But where can we run to? We can’t make New Zealand in three days.”

  “Do you have a chart? A paper chart?”

  “Cabin,” I said. We went below and huddled over the large-scale chart after I’d dug it out. We knelt side-by-side on the seat, huddled like two children over a puzzle.

  She suddenly stabbed a spot with her finger. “That’s it,” she said. “Raoul Island. I think it is within reach of us, isn’t it, Owen? Within three days?”

  I leaned over and looked where she’d pointed, then turned to her, puzzled.

  “I think we could make it,” I said slowly. “But we can’t land there, Aulani. There’s no harbor, no shelter, no nothing. If we anchored off-shore there in a cyclone we’d be smashed to bits. It’d be worse than being caught in the open ocean.”

  “But there is,” she replied. “A year ago, a channel was blasted through the cliff into that small lake on the northern shore. It’s been dredged – we’d get in easily, and it would be very protected.”

  I stared at the chart; there was no channel. “How do you know?” I asked. “There’s nothing like that on the chart.”

  She hesitated. “My husband worked on it. Many Niueans from NZ helped build the channel and dredge the lake.”

  I looked at her. “OK,” I said. “Was it finished?”

  She nodded.

  “The channel was finished, and the lake is twenty meters deep. I don’t remember how deep the channel itself is, but it was built for a large supply ship, so it should be fine for us. The lake is the caldera of an old volcano – once we’re in, there will be steep walls all around us to block the anger of the wind.”

  She seemed calm and very certain. Again, I strongly felt an air of strength about her - a confidence, I suppose – that lent authority to everything she said. And in truth, there
was a tangible magnetism about her, the feeling of being drawn to her was overwhelming, and suddenly, stupidly, I leaned forward impulsively and kissed her briefly on the cheek. Feeling the color rising in my face, shocked at myself, I couldn’t look at her. But her reaction was more surprising yet; she leaned forward and gently kissed my cheek in return. I sat momentarily in a state of complete confusion.

  Then I leaned back, and busied myself with the chart, glancing briefly up at her.

  “OK,” I said. “Raoul, it is.”

  She sat on her knees for a moment as I slid out from behind the table. She asked demurely, “We probably ought to put up a little more sail, yes? For speed?”

  “Okay, we can shake out one reef I suppose, but we’ll have to steer manually. We’ll need to be ready to let go the main in a gust.”

  Her laugh was bright and relaxed, gently teasing.

  “And we can steer woman-ally, too, yes? You’ll want some help.”

  I smiled, grateful for her cheerfulness and very relieved that the exchange of kisses passed without mention.

  “Yes,” I replied, “no sexism when it comes to steering.”

  I followed her out of the cabin, still feeling the softness of her lips on my cheek.

  Wind continued to build throughout that day and the next. High thin clouds gave way to an angry, scudding layer of low squalid cover that kept me from taking any sights. We aimed for Raoul through dead reckoning alone, and though a thirty square-kilometer island was a reasonable target from two hundred kilometers, it wouldn’t be hard to miss it entirely. And if we did – well, if she was right, we’d be caught in the open by a cyclone. I had learned to have great faith in Windswept’s seaworthiness, but a cyclone? Possibly two hundred kilometer per-hour winds and the enormous seas they would bring? No thanks.

  By late afternoon of the third day, I was more than a little frightened; winds were now a steady thirty knots, gusting to forty and seas were running on our aft quarter in long sweeping swells that grew steeper and more violent by the minute. We were down to nothing more than a tiny storm trysail and still we surfed frighteningly at more than fifteen knots as we descended the backs of waves. I felt that I’d reached the very limit of my ability to control the boat. I bitterly regretted not preparing a drogue or wraps of some kind to tow off the stern, slowing us down, but it was too late by then to take the time to do it. We moved across the sea now in a roaring grey world comprised of malicious waves topped with ghostly, wind-whipped foam nearly indistinguishable from the air itself.