But then the pirates came. Li had gotten a crash course in the history of the “Somali Volunteer Coast Guard” from Abil, a deckmate who spoke some English and translated and explained things for Li. In return, Abil was allowed to wet his mouth with sips from Li’s water skin at regular intervals, a fair trade in Li’s eyes…and ears.
As he gleaned from Abil’s rambling and less than fluent explanations, two generations ago, Somalia’s government had collapsed, and Somalia’s seafaring neighbors were among the first to take advantage. The smaller fishing boats that had confined themselves to the shores of Yemen and Kenya began to encroach on their neighboring country’s fishing territory, and the fishing fleets had begun to arm themselves against the frequent skirmishes that resulted.
Then, word got around. Within a few seasons, Somali waters were being fished barren by Japanese, South Korean, Indian, and Spanish vessels, huge behemoths with processing factories and giant freezers in their holds.
The Somali boats had escalated their armaments, the battles had gotten fiercer, and when the US kicked the ascendant native government in the teeth in 2006, a new generation of young men who’d known nothing but skirmish warfare joined the fracas on the high seas.
Of course, this story came out in drips and drabs of broken English over days and weeks. “I had no idea,” Li said one day. “Now I understand what it means to be a pirate here. My girl—” he stammered a bit.
“Ah, a woman,” Abil nodded and crooked a knowing finger.
“But what a woman! You have no idea. Her name is Meala.”
“Admiral Meala? The one who was killed by raiders at Al-Hudaydah?”
“Killed?” Li felt like he was in an elevator whose cables had been cut.
“Some say killed, some say wounded. Who knows?” Abil noticed Li’s pallor and patted his arm. “Sailors tell lies. Maybe she is alive.”
Li sunk into silence, barely following as Abil finished the story of the Somali Coast Guard.
Spent nuclear and chemical waste containers and garbage began to wash up on the shores, which further enraged the Somali coastal people. Soon, the navy that had formed to protect fishermen had morphed into kidnappers who boarded foreign ships and held the crew and the boat for ransom, which was almost always paid without bloodshed.
This proved highly lucrative, bringing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of scarce money into the impoverished, embargoed region, and so their ranks swelled. Soon, even simple container and tanker ships throughout the entire Gulf of Aden, Red Sea, and the Arabian and Indian Ocean were victims of these crimes.
By the time of the plastic corruption, the insurers of such shippers had begun to take a dim view of all the claims they were paying out for ransom and kidnapping losses. They mandated that crews be armed, and politically twisted the arms of international navies to defend them. The rewards dried up, and the perceived risk of piracy increased considerably after a few pirates were killed.
Yet the latest generation of mature Somali men had seen their land become a battleground for international powers. They’d watched their millenia-old Xeer system shunted aside, a casualty of the warfare among Islamist sharia, totalitarian dictators, and colonial powers such as the US and China, greedy for mineral and agricultural resources.
The machine sickness suddenly rendered the invaders helpless. The Islamists who got funding and armaments from Arab petrostates were suddenly broke. The US and Russian military were cut off and had no more toys or cash for their indigenous proxies (sometimes including the same Islamists, who were nothing if not enterprising, and also unencumbered by loyalty to infidels). The smiley-faced Chinese development advisors no longer oversaw regimented villages of workers who built aqueducts and laid high-speed railroad tracks.
So, naturally, some of the Somalis had returned to the profession of piracy. Their gasoline- and diesel-powered vessels forsaken for traditional dhows, they were a menace. A rare menace, but a menace nonetheless.
So it was with florid curses in Arabic and Somali, along with one lone voice cursing in Mandarin, that the dhow had been met when it fired shots across the bow of the merchant ship Miskaha. Li, unarmed and not caring inordinately about the fortunes of the traders—who’d berated them viciously as they loaded the cargo—quickly collapsed his water setup and rolled himself with it in his bedclothes under the rail.
Gunshots beat and bodies thudded, a couple of screams resounded, and the short battle was over. An inquisitive pirate had discovered him with a probing toe and unrolled him onto deck, amidst much ridicule and a few frivolous kicks.
Turned out, the cargo they’d loaded included sweets and liquors. The pirates had been happily abusing their livers and pancreases in a giddy binge, worthy to rival an American first-grader whose hungover parents allowed him all the cereal he wanted on a Sunday morning. Their gaiety was punctuated by grumpy tiffs and tearful sulks—always worth keeping an eye on, since they involved grown men armed with bladed weapons and a history of post-traumatic stress. Thus, had they cruised precariously south.
The pirates didn’t particularly want to deal with the possibility of a prisoner mutiny, so they’d identified the few on board who actually gave a crap about the cargo, and dispatched them. The rest were treated, more or less, as junior associates. Li pricked up his ears when he started hearing the name of the town Al-Hudaydah on the lips of the pirates and his fellow prisoners, but the ship did not make a turn towards the coast.
“But, that was the destination I joined the crew for,” Li said to Abil. He didn’t mention it was where Meala’s fleet would have anchored to allow the troops they carried to invade Sana’a. He didn’t want any more ribbing or unwanted, empty reassurances from Abil about Meala. Besides, a fleet of religious warriors bent on invasion was probably not high on any of his shipmates’ lists of must-meet luminaries.
“It was where going most of the cargo,” Abil said, “Do you suppose they want to meet the buyers, now they eated and drinked most of their goods?”
Li squinted in the sun at the port railing as they passed the harbor mouth. But he saw no ships that resembled the ones comprising Meala’s fleet.
He saw a ferris wheel on the coast, motionless and abandoned. The plain beyond the coastline was flush and horizontal, a tan flatness. He strained his eyes for mountains beyond, but he could make out nothing in the hazy distance.
The voyage continued. The pirates moderated their intake. They put in for fresh water in Mocha, where a deep well that produced water was the only productive asset.
Li was carrying two heavy water skins when he observed two Djiboutians exchanging glances and whispers. He kept an eye on them, and when the pirate supervising them stepped away to relieve himself, he saw them take off at a run, their long legs and bare feet flashing rapidly. Li set down his water skins and followed them a short distance, hoping to find some sign of Meala, but was outpaced and stopped himself. He spoke no Arabic; his typical Asian features labeled him an object of suspicion here. He casually sauntered back to retrieve his burden and managed to blend back into the workflow at the loading zone before his absence was noted.
By the time all the water was aboard in the hold, the two youths had returned. They’d estimated their odds of survival if they struck out into the harsh Yemeni desert on their own. Now they shuffled up to the gangplank, contrite, and begged to be permitted and come back aboard, even if they had to take a flogging.
The ship sailed through the straits of Bab Al-mandab without mishap. Li began to fear that they were headed for open ocean. Besides the risk of being so far at sea in such a tiny vessel, Li began to fear that he would be carried further from Meala.
He began to accumulate discarded skins that he could mend and inflate, and bits of wood too small for repairs in his private corner of the deck. Anything that would float. He didn’t want to die afloat in the shark-infested waters, but now that he had found his heart’s lodestar and learned that she still wanted him, he was not about to be passively drawn away. Not
until he knew, at least, if she was still alive.
The ship moored south of the island of Perim, and his lack of the Arabic, Somali, and Afar languages frustrated him. He could not get straight answers about their destination; Abil just shook his head and shrugged.
That night was a full moon. Li lay awake until everyone was sleeping, gathered his possessions together, including the flimsy sack of floatables he’d hoarded in hopes of increasing his survival odds, and dangled from the rail by his fingertips so that he could drop into the water with as little of a splash as possible.
XXXIII.
Skull Crumble
D.D. and Alfred walked silently from the beach to the carriage. The soon-setting sun warmed their faces, and the balmy Gulf breeze cooled their backs. Kittykitty fell in behind them, panting softly. Gulls and terns wheeled overhead. Neither of them spoke yet of what they’d experienced. Every few steps one of them would pause and take a breath as though about to speak, then break gaze and walk on as the other turned.
D.D. considered her body. The pain in her ribs was still there, but its sharp, stabbing nature was lessened. Her bruises were almost entirely resolved, faint streaks of greenish yellow beneath the skin their only residue. Where she had been scratched or gouged, her skin bore new, supple pink scars. She felt she was standing straighter, too. She felt somehow more compact and agile than she had in years.
Whatever kind of hallucination that was, it’s affected my healing as well. Almost as if my immune system was accelerated.
Alfred’s face had that starry-eyed expression he always slipped into when he began to talk about the Goddess and his neopagan religion. D.D. usually let him blither, occasionally firing a wry caveat (“if one believed in such things”) into the conversation just to bring him down to earth again.
The thing is, I have this euphoria as if I actually saw the Goddess myself. It was just some kind of a hallucinogen or psychedelic effect, some sort of chemical the ctenophores produce in their secretion that’s absorbed into the skin. Scopalamine or something of the tryptimine class.
Wait…Alfred wasn’t in the water that long. He’s acting as if he saw it too, though. Or is he?
“Alfred, what do you think just happened?” Kittykitty edged in and licked her hand.
Alfred shook his head. He looked at her mistrustfully. “I don’t think I’m ready to discuss it yet.”
“Fair enough.” D.D. gave a slight frustrated sigh.
D.D. held the beasts’ reins while Alfred seesawed the lightweight carriage through a turnaround on the narrow track. After a few minutes of cooperation, they got hitched up.
As they moved jauntily through the process, the jingles of the metal buckles and clips rang like bells, and bright, cheerful smiles lit their faces. He looks less stiff than usual, too.
She was smiling for no reason other than being by the sea, with three lovely animals and a great friend, and feeling better physically than she had in quite a while. She felt eager for whatever happened next.
The two of them flipped the traces and climbed up onto the bench in the front of the carriage. It was D.D.’s turn to drive, so she took up the reins and clicked her tongue in the corner of her mouth.
Soon enough, they were on the Bolivar peninsula proper.
D.D. craned her neck. The whole peninsula had changed its character since she’d was here before, way back at the beginning, before they even knew what had happened to cause the machine sickness—or indeed, or that it was in fact a sickness, passed from machine to machine via their petroleum “body fluids”. They learned soon enough how it metastasized via plastic that melted and flowed in puddles and dripped and clung to hands and feet and metal equipment, to infect other machines at the slightest touch; they were still reckoning what global consequences it later caused.
The peninsula had once been a quiet backwater, dependent on snowbird retirees (for half the year) and Texan tourists eager for particularly isolated weekends by the sea.
Now, the bustle began close to the turnoff that took you down the peninsula. This intersection had once been indistinguishable from the miles of bushy vegetation and brown sea grasses, like that which D.D. once watched a murmuration of birds break from.
Was it only four years ago? It felt almost like it had happened in a different world.
But this formerly deserted stretch of salt marsh was dotted by stilted bamboo structures where people did business with passing travelers. And there were a good many travelers. In their horse-drawn carriage, they had been passed by a courier on a fast horse, several lightweight, chariot-type, single-person transports with huge wheels, and a few lightweight ATVs running on alcohol. They also noticed that there were some strangely flying birds, which turned out to be distant drones. They didn’t buzz quite the same way drones used to; since they were only organic and metallic, they had more of a muffled thrumming sound.
They stopped for the night in one of the bamboo structures. A youth came from the adjacent rafted paddock to unhitch the horses before stabling them for the night, and turned Kittykitty into a kennel situated next to an ancient Great Dane, who barely lifted his head to acknowledge him.
The two friends climbed the steps—a shallow ladder or steep staircase, D.D. couldn’t decide which to call it—and entered a huge, pleasant, airy, rectangular room, hung with fine gauze curtains all around. They allowed the breezes of the nearby ocean to cool the thatched room through the half-open sides, while mostly excluding the local flying fauna. There were curtains hung to make four stalls with straw pallets in them at one end, lightweight bamboo chairs and tables in the middle, and a small kitchen-and-cleaning area in the corner, which smelled of cinnamon, lavender, and roasting poultry.
Soon, they were seated with a glass apiece of an exquisite fruit wine. They watched their host dish out plates of roast chicken and stewed vegetables. He served it with a crispy cornbread on the side. There were three other travelers: Scott and Sheryl, a young couple sharing a stall; and a lone man, Mark. The host and hostess lived in a separate, smaller house connected by a walkway. Conversation over the meal flowed light and friendly.
“So, where are you two heading?” Sheryl asked casually.
“Down Bolivar peninsula,” said Alfred. “And you?”
“We’re headed north to Big Thicket for some hunting,” said Scott.
“Nice,” Mark said. “You hunt too, Sheryl?”
“Always have. I was the only girl with four brothers. I bait my own hooks and I can field-dress a deer.”
“You’re a lucky man, Scott!”
“I know that!” Scott squeezed Sheryl’s waist.
“Who’s in Bolivar? Family?” Sheryl said.
“I have some old friends and family there, and Alfred’s along for the ride. How about you, Mark?”
“I’m looking for work. Used to work construction. The last few years have been all about survival, but I hear Bolivar’s booming.”
The hostess chimed in: “I’d say so! We’re full up every night of the week, and we turn folks away most nights.”
D.D. smiled quietly over her dinner. It’s nice to hear ordinary talk like that. People talking about how business is, looking for jobs, going for weekend getaways…
It seemed to her it had been a million years since things felt normal.
She tried to think: it had started long before the world’s collapse. It was not her bacterium that had brought civilization down. Civilization was heading for a fall long before that; the P. davisii was just the final catalyst.
A healthy civilization would have survived it. In point of fact, what was healthy in civilization had survived—such as the willingness to help one another and a sense of personal responsibility. As they’d just recently learned, there were other civilizations, which had other strengths, that survived.
She wondered what Abiba… if she actually existed…might have brought through the fire with her? Or more precisely, the water, if you think of it elementally.
“You’re awful
quiet,” commented Mark.
“Just thinking about the chemical spill.”
“Yeah, I hear the Gulf of Mexico is full of dihydrogen monoxide,” Alfred deadpanned.
“Damn! I hope it doesn’t kill the seabutter harvest!” Mark frowned.
D.D. shrugged and went to bed.
###
Late the next morning, they hitched up the carriage and continued towards Bolivar. The salt marsh gave way to sandbar and beach-island conditions. The roads became more distinct, but softer and sandier. Hard to make progress on in some spots, though there were many long stretches where it appeared that the local folk had banded together to grade the roadbed. It was funny how every convenience store had become a compact, crowded village, with the storefront as a sort of stage at the center. The solid shelters for the useless gas pumps were generally used as starting points for thatched gathering places.
The people mostly resided in simple shelters they’d constructed within walking distance. The notion of “the commons” had returned, with anything that had belonged to the defunct, hierarchical government provisionally up for grabs. Some of the former 7-11s and Piggly Wigglys served as houses of worship, but a few villages had grown up around actual church buildings, too.
She thought about seeing Gaby and Jeremy again. Since they’d named their daughter Deirdre for her, she’d had hardly had any contact with them. Martha must be getting big. She remembered the night she’d first met her, when she and Jessica and Jeremy had to kill that poor psychotic drifter.
A pang.
Jessica. Damn. No answers there. Will I be able to avoid talking about Jessica when I get home to visit Gaby and Jeremy? I hadn’t thought of that. I’m not ready to unpack all that baggage right now. Home? I haven’t really had a home since before the machine sickness hit. Long before, if you include “family” in the word “home.”
Eupocalypse Box Set Page 69