by Bobby Adair
“That was a good choice.” There was a silence that lasted a bit while I thought of what else I could ask. They weren’t trying to help at all with the conversation. “Are you girls keeping a watch all the time, even at night?”
Suddenly suspicious. “Why do you want to know?
“It’s just that it took a little while for you to figure out that I was out here.”
“We knew.”
“Fine. Can I ask a favor?”
In a tone that carried a harsh laugh, Amy said, “You can ask.”
“It’s really late. I’m really, really tired.” I pointed up the river. “Can I anchor my boat over there tonight and get some sleep?”
“As long as you don’t try to come on our boat.”
“Just, if you don’t mind. Kinda keep an eye on me. Maybe warn me if you see danger.”
“Like what?”
I looked around. “I don’t know. Any of the usual stuff, I guess.”
The girls huddled again. “You were nice to us before. You gave us food and a gun. Yes. We owe you a favor. We’ll keep on eye on you if want to sleep over there on your own boat.”
That was a relief anyway. “How are you guys set for food? Did that stuff we dropped off last? Are you out?”
One of the younger girls shouted, “We’re almost out. Do you have any to spare?”
I said, “I’ve been through some shit. I’m running on empty at the moment, but I’ll need to raid a pantry tomorrow, if I can do it without getting killed. I can probably drop some surplus off, if you like.”
“You don’t have to.” It was Amy speaking again.
“I know. Hey, can I give you some advice?”
“About what? You’re naked and you look pretty beat up. I think we’re doing better than you are. Maybe we should give you some.” I could hear the smile in Amy’s voice on that one. She wasn’t being mean.
“I need to tell you a bit of a story first.”
Brittany asked, “Is it about why you’re naked?”
“Yeah, but it’s a long story.”
“We’ve got lots of time and no television to entertain us.”
I smiled. Maybe that was the worst aspect of the post-apocalyptic world for the modern human. No entertainment. How difficult would life get with no iPhone, no television, and no internet to fill in the boring parts? I told them about my experience at Sarah Mansfield’s house, taking extra time on the part about how quickly the naked horde had overrun what had seemed like pretty strong defenses. “I think you should take your ski boats and tie them up alongside, one midway on the starboard side and one midway on the port side. Leave one in the back, I guess.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know if those naked ones can get at you in the boat, but if they get some boats or start swimming at you from one bank or the other, if you have an escape boat hidden from their view, then you’ll have a better chance of getting away.”
“But they’re afraid of the water.”
“Don’t underestimate them if you see them on the shore looking at you,” I pleaded. “They are a very dangerous group.”
Chapter 28
I woke on a pallet of flat seat cushions next to the tool chest that Murphy had left on the pontoon boat a week or more before. It was late on a brilliantly sunny morning and my head was throbbing. My joints were stiff and my stomach was rumbling. When I sat up, I had to throw out a hand to steady myself on one of the benches that ran down the length of both the port and starboard sides of the boat.
I was sorely missing regularly scheduled meals. At least the warm morning air felt good against my skin.
Looking downriver, I saw that one of the girls was fishing near the bow of their big boat and I wondered how boring their daily routine must be, cooped up all day on that boat. Oh well, not my problem at the moment.
I checked both shores for anything that could be a danger and, seeing nothing, went to the stern and jumped into the river to clean myself up. The water was cold, of course. It was always cold, no matter what time of year. The water in the river flowed out of the bottom of the big dam upstream, so it came off of the bottom of the lake, where all the coldest water settled. After a few minutes, my skin got used to it, and I lay back, floating on the surface, truly relaxing for the first time in a week.
It felt good. And goodness had become such a rare commodity.
As I lay there, gently bobbing on the few waves and watching the puffy, white summer clouds, I noticed smoke. Raising my head and starting to tread water, I spun in the direction of the smoke. The fires on Mt. Bonnell that I’d started the night before with my fizzled bomb had grown. Hopefully some of the naked infected were still there, screaming and burning as their skin crisped black and flaked off.
It was a dirty, murderous thought, but the imagining of it didn’t feel bad.
I climbed back aboard my pontoon boat, sat my naked body out of sight of the young girls on the riverboat and thought about the day ahead. Food, clothes, weapons, friends. And fucking Freitag.
Food needed to come first. I was going to fall into uselessness if I didn’t get a lot more calories in me pretty soon. Clothes were a nice luxury. If I was going to be in a house collecting food, there’d surely be a closet with something to wear.
Some kind of weapon would be a necessity. Again, if I was in a house, a kitchen knife was kind of the least I’d expect to find there. And being in Texas, the sky was the limit in terms of potential firearm availability.
Then it came down to Freitag versus friends. If I knew where my friends were, I could get past my desire to get some vengeance on her. Really, all I wanted was to reunite with my friends and know that they were all okay. Everything else on my list was just a necessary step in the direction of seeing Murphy, Steph, and Mandi, distasteful Dalhover and simple Russell.
Freitag knew what had happened to them. That meant that the most expeditious path to my friends was through her because wherever she was—and I hoped she was still on the river—the ski boat would show me exactly where she’d gone ashore. I was betting that she’d be close by.
The river between the dams couldn’t be more than fifteen miles long, and I was somewhere near the midpoint of that stretch. So seven miles of river going upstream was what I had to check for the ski boat. Depending on how much of the morning I burned off finding food and weapons, I could find Freitag, and with any luck, my friends, before sundown.
I got up off the deck and checked my boat’s fuel gauge. There was about three quarters of a tank. That seemed like a lot, though I had no idea how much fuel the tank held or how far the pontoon boat could go on three quarters of a tank. It had to be enough to scoot up and down my fifteen-mile section of the river many times, at least.
As I stood there by the boat’s wheel, I noticed four, no, five bloated bodies drifting down river toward me. One wore a brilliantly colored turquoise skirt that spread out around her body in an enormous flowery semi-circle with graying white stamens. Two were children, and their skin wasn’t infected white. They were Hispanic and they floated face down in the water, with black halos of hair spread around them.
Another woman, a big girl, was of no consequence to me because I noticed at that moment that one of the flotilla was man with a broad, hairy back, and he was wearing a pair of khaki cargo shorts, which, if I cinched up the belt, would fit me well enough.
Thinking back to my fight with the alpha in the boathouse who’d made the bad choice of victoriously dangling his manhood where I could grab it, a pair of risk-free shorts suddenly moved to the top of the necessity list.
A quick glance around the pontoon boat’s deck was enough to inventory my resources. The big red toolbox, of course, and several dozen seat cushions that I’m sure doubled as floatation devices. Two life preservers and a rescue hook, the kind found by nearly every swimming pool in the country. It was a twelve-foot-long aluminum tube with a rounded, body-sized hook at the end, perfect for fishing infected corpses out of the river. But what really
caught my eye were a couple of things I hadn’t noticed and hadn’t thought to look for previously. Just below the cushions on several of the bench seats were latches, giving away the presence of storage bins beneath. At least one of those storage bins had to be a cooler. And a cooler might contain something edible, or at least a warm drinkable.
My stomach concurred with a growl.
First things first. I grabbed the aluminum hook pole and went to the port side of the boat and waited for the corpse with the shorts to float near enough by. I didn’t have to wait more than a minute.
I reached out into the river with the hook and looped it around the big man’s torso on the first try. When I tugged it to bring him closer, the hook compressed his bloated gut and his head—face down in the river—bobbed up on an eruption of bubbles, stinking gases of rotting flesh that floated my way on the wind and nearly made me vomit.
The shorts were risk-free, but there was still a price to be paid.
Hand over hand, I pulled the body toward the boat until I had it pressed up against the hull. In a quick move, I unhooked the man and dropped my pole to the deck as I got down to my knees and grasped, with no small measure of disgust, one of his ankles. I didn’t need my prize drifting off.
A slippery film covered the man’s skin, and if not for the thick hair on his leg, I might have lost my grip on his ankle.
I pulled his foot up onto the flat deck of the boat as I reached for his other. I didn’t have any desire to have the spewing end of the man in my boat. Pulling and tugging, I had to get the legs up onto the deck if I was going to have any hope of reaching the shorts. As I was working, the man’s belly pressed against the hull and several more puffs of gaseous rot belched out.
Remaining naked was starting to have some real appeal.
But I was close.
One more tug put the man’s thighs flat on the deck the belt within reach. In a most unflattering way, I straddled the man’s thighs—feeling the slime from his skin on my legs—to hold him down. I bent forward to reach down around his belly so that I could loosen the belt, then unbutton and unzip the shorts. I thought I heard giggles across the water, but I ignored them.
More gas seeped out of the man’s mouth and nose and bubbled up past his ears, giving me a full dose of the stink.
The shorts came loose and I pulled them off hurriedly, somehow getting the underwear as well. For some reason, that really grossed me out. I jumped up off of the man, and as he slid back into the water, his dirty underwear fell out of the shorts and onto my feet.
I yelped and shook my foot to get them off as I hopped around the deck in utter disgust, making a complete fool of myself.
When they finally flew free and landed in the water just past the edge of the deck, I again had attention for something besides the violation I felt at having the wet underwear plastered to my skin. That’s when I heard the laughter of the three girls coming from the other boat.
The white skin on my face flushed red, but I held my hard-won shorts over my head in triumph.
I spent a good while back in the river after that, scrubbing my skin and the shorts, and wishing for soap. A little bleach would have been desirable as well.
Finally, the shorts were hanging over a rail to dry in the morning sunshine, and I was drying in the sun as well when I recalled the storage bins underneath the boat’s seats.
Cooler time!
Sliding a wide bench cushion over, I flipped a latch and opened the storage bin hidden underneath. Fins, snorkels, masks, inflatable water toys, ski ropes—nothing of immediate interest to me. I stepped across the width of the deck, pushed the cushions out of the way on another bench, flipped the latch, and lifted the lid.
“Oh, my God!” It smelled so bad that I fell back on the deck trying to get away from it. It was just as bad as the smell that belched out of the hairy man’s mouth. That was the cooler. It had been packed with meats, cheeses, ice, and other perishable items in apparent preparation for an afternoon picnic on the water that never happened. Now, the cooler was a sealed container in which all of those items had been rotting in the heat.
Standing up and leaning over the rail, I spit into the water to get the remnants of the spoiled taste out of my mouth. As I was doing that, it occurred to me that in that cooler, in the putrid, warm liquid, there had to be bottles of beer or soda. What kind of picnic could it have been without those? And where else would such items go but inside the cooler? That, of course, led to the next question. What about the dry goods, napkins, paper plates, cups, and chips? Those things wouldn’t be in the cooler. I looked around at the seats and sure enough, there were two more storage bins. It turned out that one of those contained some tools, more rope, and an extra anchor. The second, however, held just what I was looking for: a dull paring knife, three big bags of chips, unopened jars of pickles, mustard, mayonnaise and ketchup, and cookies—manna from Heaven, if there ever was such a thing.
Resisting the urge to tear into the packages like an animal, I started with a bag of corn chips, and with deliberate slowness, sat in the sun on one of the cushioned benches and ate them, one by one. I had no desire to barf everything back up after rushing too quickly to shove it all down my throat.
After eating the equivalent of a few handfuls of the chips, I felt, for the moment, full, and I let myself bake for a while in the heat. And for the second time that morning, I let my thoughts of adversity slip away, and I felt good.
Deciding that a soda, a beer, or any liquid that wasn’t river water would make a tasty second course, I walked over to the cooler that held the rotting meats, held my breath, and kicked it open with my foot. The lid leaned up against the side rail and I stepped toward the bow of the boat, upwind from the cooler. Jumping up on one of the benches across the deck, I was able to see down inside from a breathable distance. The cooler was a disgusting cauldron of rot, but in the liquid, among congealed blobs of gray goo, floated dozens of canned sodas and bottled beers. Warm or not, one of those beers would taste so good. Holding my breath, I bounded across the deck, fished out a can and a few bottles and made my getaway.
Back near the bow, I leaned over edge of the boat once again and spent a good, long while washing the can, the bottles, and my hands until I could no longer smell the cooler’s stench on my skin. After that, I went back to my place in the sun and took my time drinking one of the beers and eating some cookies.
Calories in my blood unloaded in my brain and bounced around my synapses as the taste of alcohol brought with it the most vivid memories of my last normal night. My buddies and I were at a yuppie sports bar in the suburbs with dozens of enormous flat screen televisions and waitresses that wore tight blouses and skirts too short to take out in public. They always smiled sweetly with clean, white teeth though often their eyes were just as dead as the Whites I’d seen, betraying the lie of how they loathed serving the likes of me. Because one thing they knew, just as I did, was that I was no better than they were. I didn’t have a high-paying high tech job with a big future. We were all commuters, traveling, serially to the same unsatisfying future, the same dead end.
I was so hammered when I went home that night. I was so hammered after I drank that tequila the next morning and saw what the Ogre had done to the Harpy in the middle of their living room.
Oh, why weren’t those memories gone yet?
I tossed the beer bottle, still half full, into the river.
Chapter 29
Wearing only my warm, dry cargo shorts, I piloted the pontoon boat slowly up the center of the river, keeping a watchful eye on the banks and paying special attention to docks and boathouses. Occasional Whites were lurking in the shade to escape the midday heat, or were on their haunches on the banks, sipping from the river.
Much of the northern bank was undeveloped, an unbroken forest of oaks and cedars. The southern bank had regularly spaced houses, mostly of the opulent variety, and they slowly passed, turning mundane in their ubiquity as the sun crested in the sky. When I finally
spotted Sarah Mansfield’s familiar ski boat, it was docked in front of a Mediterranean villa-style house with stucco walls, a terracotta roof, and dying landscaping. Taking care to keep myself concealed between the pontoon boat’s bench seats, I motored on past without seeing a single living soul.
When I was a quarter of a mile upriver, I killed the engine. Drifting back down and staying out of direct sight of the house would be safest. Unfortunately, guiding the clumsy pontoon boat with a single canoe paddle was a nearly futile endeavor for which I had no patience. When I came within thirty or forty yards of the dock, I dropped anchor and waited for it to catch on something as it dragged on the river bottom. The line straightened out, pulled taut, and the boat jerked to a stop, causing me to fall down as my momentum carried me forward on the suddenly motionless deck.
Secure enough for me.
I’d expected to have trouble pulling the anchor back up when I returned to the boat later on, but I’d deal with that problem when I got there. I patted my pocket to make sure the paring knife, my only weapon, was there. It was. Canoe time. Pulling the canoe’s bow line, I took the loop off of the cleat on the deck, tugged it up beside my pontoon boat, and very carefully put a foot in.
Well, carefully didn’t work out so well. With nothing to secure it to the boat, the canoe slipped away from the pontoon boat and my legs split wide apart as I lost my balance and fell into the river. The stupidity of it pissed me off, and I immediately feared losing the canoe. The canoe had real value in a world of hydrophobic cannibals.
When I got my head back above water and got my bearings, the canoe was skating across the water and getting caught in the current. I swam hard after it, figuring I could catch it in four or five strokes. I was wrong. It took closer to ten or twelve, and I was gasping for breath when I finally reached out of the water to grab it. My fingertips, instead of catching the edge of the canoe, barely caressed the top edge of the hull and slipped down the curved side, pushing it further away from me.