“Finally,” David replied. “What?”
“Look up at the top of the mast. See that wind needle? I’ve been checking it since it got light enough, and my compass says that it’s mostly blowing a direct northerly. That’s why I took off the mask. We’re probably not being irradiated.”
“That’s a good sign. Though if we get spotted, someone would probably shoot out our hull and sink us just on the chance we had a chocolate bar onboard.”
“Well, to be fair, we have two,” Kelly replied. “We’ve almost eaten all the food and we only have one bottle of water.”
“Oh, about that. My turn for good news. There’s still water in the tank onboard. It’s smells as stale as hell, but we’ve got some chlorine tablets. Oh, did you take your iodine tablet this morning?”
“Not yet. They’re inside.”
David lowered himself back inside the cabin and reached for the iodine tablets, popping one for himself and one for Kelly.
“Here you are, ma’am. One continental breakfast.”
Kelly laughed, shaking her head.
“Yeah, ‘bout that. I’d like speak to the manager.”
The boat swirled in the early morning light, entirely out of control, but still moving. The river moved slowly, but it was much wider now.
“I reckon we should try sailing,” David continued. “There’s no houses here and the wind is light so it should be safe. I’ll show you how it works.”
David pulled on a rope, the black, sticky mainsail peeling off itself as it took its first leap skywards. He pulled again, the sail reaching another foot in height.
“Pull the tiller toward you, and when the sail starts to fill up with air, keep the boat aimed in that direction.”
Some rope pulling later, the black sail was fully hoisted and secured and the boat began to move under its own power. Both of them had become used to traveling purely at the whim of the river current, so to be moving via actual propulsion was genuinely exhilarating.
“This is fucking brilliant!” beamed Kelly.
“It is, but you’re going to have to have to turn soon, babe.”
David stared as the opposite shore approached.
“Like, now would be good. Kelly... Kelly, turn the boat...”
Kelly pushed the tiller away from herself and the sailboat gradually began to change its slow course. The changing direction of the wind gently pushed the lapping sail in the other direction with the boom swinging around and thumping into Kelly’s head.
“Ow!” she said.
“Yeah. You’d better get used to that.”
Kelly soon got the hang of sailing, tacking to port and then to starboard, zig-zagging slowly down the James River, while David sat with his rifle on the bow of the small sailboat. Other than an occasional cliffside house above them, there was no sign of human activity, but sailing during the day was still incredibly risky.
“What are we gonna do when we get to Hampton and Norfolk?” Kelly asked. “There's gonna be crazy and desperate people there.”
“I honestly don’t know,” David replied.
Kelly studied the slowly approaching curve in the river, mentally charting how close she could get to the bank before having to tack to port once again.
“You know, we’re gonna have to sail right between them, a city on either side. Straight through the gauntlet.”
“I know,” David replied.
Raindrops started falling on the water around them, tapping against the surface of the dark, sticky cockpit. David got to his feet, exhaling in pain, and opened the hatch on the bow. Kelly watched as he reached down into the tiny front cabin and pulled out a bucket, placing it on the bow, between his legs to catch a few precious drops of water.
“What if we just sail as fast as we can, right past the city and straight out to sea?” Kelly asked.
“I want to, but someone would definitely see us. Anyone who sees a person on a sailboat, even a piece of shit like this, would probably assume we’re stocked up with food and water.”
“Well, we’re certainly not,” said Kelly.
“Yeah, but no one else knows that.”
David gazed across to a grassy, bushy area on their starboard bow. It looked like a wildlife reserve. This immediately made him think of food. God, he was hungry. If they made it to sea they could catch a fish. They just had to wait another day, he thought.
“I’ve been thinking,” he continued.
Kelly wanted to make a “Really, did it hurt?” joke, but this wasn’t the time.
“What were you thinking?” she asked.
“What if we stopped the boat over there for the night and then, first thing in the morning, we make a break for it, sailing right through the city.”
Kelly was just eager to get the hell out of there.
“I was also thinking,” she continued. “There’s not really any wind in the mornings, so what if we just kept going today and took our chances and tried to reach the sea tonight?”
David had wondered the same thing, but it was such a risky proposition.
“I thought about it too, but honestly, I really don’t want to get shot again.”
Kelly pondered if that was the second or third time he’d mentioned that he’d been shot.
“What if we just take the sail down, let it flop around in the water, hide inside and just drift out to sea?”
“I’ve thought of that too. Problem is, we're so close to the sea that this river’s now tidal. I don’t know when the high tide is, so we could be sitting ducks, floating around in the harbor, going nowhere.”
The two sailed in silence for a couple of minutes, moving slowly at around one or two knots. David was the first to break the silence, the raindrops tapping on the water surface around them.
“I have an idea.”
“I’m listening,” Kelly replied.
“I could try and rig up that outboard to the car battery I got from the truck yesterday. I've got the truck’s starter motor inside, and there’s a chance I could mate the two together to turn the propeller.”
“Do it!”
“Well, don’t get too excited. That battery probably doesn’t have much power in it, after sitting there for three months, but if I could somehow make it work, it could get us about a mile. Maybe. Plus, when we get sailing and the propeller is running in reverse, the whole thing could be used to generate power to recharge the battery.”
“Babe. Try it anyway. We have nothing to lose.”
David nodded, lifting himself up onto his good leg and picking up the bucket, holding a thin sliver of water in the bottom.
“Here. Rainwater,” he said, handing it to Kelly.
It had taken an hour of effort, but David had moderate success in removing the small outboard engine and replacing it with the truck’s electric starter motor. With a hacksaw and basic tools he’d sourced from the workshop, he’d scraped slots into the starter motor’s shaft and the propeller shaft of the outboard motor. Using rope and a lot of duct tape, he managed to convince the two shafts to lock together, at least temporarily. He connected the positive and negative leads of the motor to the battery. Inside the cabin, the propeller spun.
“Kel! It actually works,” came the cry from inside the cabin, followed by David's head poking out, a look of mild triumph on his face.
“I mean, there’s no guarantee the shafts will stay connected, and God only knows how much power is left in that battery, but it might help us in a crisis.”
Running a cable from the truck’s battery in the foot-well of the cockpit, he placed the outboard contraption on the motor mount attached to the stern, ready to lower it into the water if necessary.
“Let’s just hope we’ve got the tide on our side,” David added.
Chapter thirteen
The ocean or bust
Nighttime approached, as did the dock area of Hampton, both getting closer by the minute. They needed some kind of plan.
“We need some kind of plan,” said Kelly.
“I know,” he responded, looking up at the black mainsail, growing dim in the evening light.
“We have a choice,” David continued. “We can try to gun it, sailing right through the middle of the city, or we can drop the sail and try to drift, making any crazies think that it’s an abandoned, worthless boat.”
Kelly sat in silence for a few seconds.
“I reckon we should go for it, guns at the ready,” she suggested. “I’ve had enough. I just want to finally get away from people.”
“Oh,” David replied, that not being the plan he had in mind. “I was thinking that we should try to drift through, hopefully ignored.”
They looked at each other.
“Rock, paper, scissors?” asked Kelly.
“Seriously? Our lives are going to be decided by a game of rock, paper, scissors?”
“Well, there’s a higher risk of being seen if we try to sail, sure. But look at the tide. It’s not moving. If we drop the sail we’ll just sit here like targets,” said Kelly.
“Yes, but if we keep that giant sail up, anyone waiting up ahead with a gun will just blow us out of the water. It’s suicide.”
The docks were now becoming visible on the port bow in the evening light.
“Alright,” David said, sighing. “Rock, paper, fucking scissors.”
Kelly, sitting at the tiller, prepared her fist, raising it towards David, sitting with the rifle on the bow. He shook his head in frustration, raising his arm and closing his fist into a ball.
“Ready?” Kelly asked.
“No. But let’s do it anyway. On three.”
The rain pattered on the river surface as they rhythmically shook their fists up and down, counting, “One… Two… Three!”
The result, both of them having paper, caused a collective groan.
“Alright. Try again. Ready?” David asked. Kelly nodded.
“One… Two… Three.”
It was a tie, with both of them choosing rock.
“For God’s sake, exclaimed Kelly, wanting to laugh but not having the energy. “Alright, let’s try again. Ready?”
David closed his eyes for a moment and exhaled, nodding his head.
“Ready.”
Kelly took a breath, her fist raised to her chest.
“OK,” she said. “One… Two… Three.”
They looked at each other’s hands, their potential fate chosen by a children’s game.
“Well, congratulations,” Kelly said.
David didn’t reply, pulling himself to his feet with a gasp of pain. He hobbled to the rope holding up the mainsail and pulled it free from the cleat, the mainsail above them slackening, David pulling it down and draping it over the side of the boat, into the water.
“Let’s get inside,” he said.
The tide was high as the boat bobbed about in the evening rain, their vessel not moving. Like sitting ducks, they cowered in the dark interior, hiding from any eyes on the shore, their painted-over windows making it difficult for them to see each other’s faces in the darkness. The looted waterfront buildings of Hampton city were now sitting just a hundred yards to their port side. David’s outboard motor contraption sat partially submerged in the water, in case it was needed.
“I reckon the tide should begin going soon. I hope,” said David. “Until then, we just wait.”
God, thought Kelly. They were so damn close.
She looked at David’s silhouette, the last of the late evening light appearing in the window above his head, illuminating through a part they’d missed while painting.
“You're gonna need a bigger boat,” she said.
“What?” he asked.
“You're gonna need a bigger boat. From the movie Jaws.”
“1975?”
“You got it,” she said. “Your turn.”
David paused, thinking through his mental archive of famous movie lines.
“Mama always said life was like a box of chocolates.”
“No,” Kelly said. “Give me a hard one.”
“Alright,” David replied, staring at the ceiling. “OK, how about ‘Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer’.”
“Godfather!”
“Yep, which one, though? And what year?”
David could make out Kelly’s tongue poking out the corner of her mouth, a sign that she was deep in thought.
“It’s got to be the second one; Godfather II.”
“Good work, Sherlock. And the year?”
Kelly pondered in silence for a moment. A faint sound of a splash appeared outside in the twilight, interrupting their distraction.
“A fish?” Kelly whispered, hopeful.
Another distant splash sounded, followed by a faint clunk. David spun around and looked through a patch in the black, painted window.
“Something’s out there,” David said.
Kelly reached for her gun and tried to peer through the painting flaws in her own window. She thought she saw a person for a split second, maybe two. The darkness was playing tricks on her eyes.
“I think there’s a guy in a dinghy, heading towards us!” she whispered, breathing quickly.
“Get the rifle,” David ordered.
David stood up, approaching the cockpit door, but staying back against the wall in the darkness. As their sailboat drifted around, he saw it.
“There’s a boat. A little rowboat. It’s coming toward us. There’s two people in it.”
“What do we do?” Kelly asked, rifle in hand.
David’s eyes darted around the cabin. If those guys had survived this far, they were certainly armed and no doubt happy to kill David and Kelly in order to get their hands on the boat.
“They probably think it’s abandoned, so we have the element of surprise. I say we just shoot them now.”
Kelly pictured the look on the face of the guy she’d killed some months before. She didn’t talk about it, but the image of his frightened, confused face still haunted her.
“Should we give them a warning? What if they’re unarmed?” she asked.
“Kelly, I promise you, they will kill us if they see us. They must be armed.”
The rowboat approached, about forty yards away now. They were so close to freedom, she thought.
“Fuck them,” Kelly whispered angrily.
If she was going to die, she’d die fighting for her freedom.
“You connect the motor to the battery and I’ll shoot the bastards.”
Sitting on the cushion inside the dark cabin, Kelly raised the Springfield M1A semi-automatic rifle slightly, ready to stand up and empty the magazine’s contents at the two closing in on them, while David placed Kelly’s Glock 19 and his own Desert Eagle on the floor at his feet. He picked up the positive wire and held it above the battery terminal. It wasn’t going to move them fast, maybe one mile per hour, but it was movement.
“Ready?” David asked.
Kelly looked over at her husband, the following second of silence feeling like a full minute.
“I love you,” she said.
“I love you,” he replied.
With a nod, David wrapped the wire to the positive terminal of the battery, causing a spark. A whirring noise began from outside the boat. At the same time, Kelly leaped to her feet, placing the butt of the rifle against her shoulder. It took a second to spin around and locate the rowboat, some twenty yards to their side, positioned between them and the worryingly close city shoreline. She froze, as did the two occupants of the boat, oars in hand, a man and a woman, about their age. She didn't expect to see a woman.
“Shoot!” David yelled.
Yet, she froze, standing there, blocking the hatchway. David grabbed the pistols and crawled to the front hatch, throwing it open and rising up, arms outstretched, a gun in each hand. He turned and aimed them at the rowboat, to see both occupants; one with her hands raised, another with oars raised, frozen still. Maybe they were unarmed after all, he thought. There were no laws
but they were still human beings. The boat’s electric motor propelled them forward slowly.
“Please don’t shoot us,” pleaded the woman in the rowboat.
“Why not?” Kelly demanded.
“We thought the boat was abandoned,” the woman continued. “We just wanted to escape the city. It’s just nothing but death there.”
The sailboat’s humming electric motor began to put a few yards of distance between them, though they were all still too close for comfort.
“Stay there,” Kelly added. “And we won’t shoot you.”
“But if you move a muscle, you’re dead,” David added, hoping that he could leave this scene without them both being cold-blooded murderers.
“Please take us with you,” the woman begged.
Neither David nor Kelly responded, but each of them considered it. After all, they’d abandoned Steve, Maureen and the kids in the name of self preservation. They were already proven as selfish monsters. Kelly wondered if, perhaps by saving these two souls, they could redeem themselves in the eyes of God, or whatever. Kelly flicked a quick glance over at David, his head and arms sticking out the bow access hatch, the dark ocean ahead of him. She suspected David was thinking the same. He was.
It wasn’t clear at first where the bullet came from, but the man in the boat flew backwards onto the woman, who screamed. It looked as though Kelly had chosen to end the misery of these two tragic souls. Another shot rang out, a bullet hitting the rowboat, right on the waterline, evident by the thud and splash of water. David looked at Kelly, only to see her spinning around, searching for the source of the bullets. It wasn’t her, after all.
Another shot rang out, with the unmistakable thud of a bullet hitting flesh. The problems of the future were solved for the couple in the rowboat, both now dead and slumped over, their little boat taking on water, but Kelly and David's problems had just begun.
“There! There's a muzzle flash!”
Kelly opened fire, her gun aimed at the source of the gunshot on the promenade. David turned back around, facing the shore. The vague silhouette of the man, made darker by the lack of light, ducked behind a smashed-up car.
“Get the sail up!” Kelly yelled.
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