by Howard, Bob
Her stomach did a flip when she saw something that matched her security monitor frame perfectly. Since there were thirty frames, she had called this one number twenty-four. A fire extinguisher was on a beam above a catwalk where it turned, and she was standing at exactly the right angle to it. She could hardly believe her luck when she turned at the waist and found the camera just above her head.
It was mounted on an adjustable ball that was tightened inside a socket. It was difficult to turn, but she was eventually able to loosen it and aim it in its new direction. It was a guess, but she tightened it down when she was fairly sure it was aimed at the containers forming her bridge.
Now that she had number twenty-four, she felt like she had a frame of reference for the others, and she found twenty-three less than five minutes later. As a bonus, she found twenty-two. If she was off a little with her aim, she could always come back and realign them, but she only really needed one to be exact.
She celebrated that night with a movie about a man who was stranded on a desert island who finally figured out how to get a boat past the reefs. She wasn’t trying to escape. She only wanted to stay alive long enough for someone to fix things on the mainland. She would know when they had done that when people showed up or if the news came on the TV one day. Until then, she at least felt like she was doing something about it.
******
Maybank stopped shaving three months after the lady in the crew quarters had come outside and seen him. He was talking to himself nonstop by six months when he quit showering.
He was having a daily debate with himself about the woman. She shouldn’t be alive. He had seen the blood, and he knew she had been bitten by the rats. That had been a death sentence before, and if she was alive it could only mean one thing. She was a carrier.
Still, he had her picture, and knowing that the woman in that picture was so close but yet so far from his reach made him willing to accept that anything was possible. He didn’t know that had been a year ago, because he lost touch with reality as easily as he lost track of time.
He was making rounds to check on the systems that operated his shelter, but he had stopped recording the data from the instruments. They would last the rest of his life, and as far as he was concerned that would be long enough.
Maybank had turned the radio off after he received an SOS from someone. He didn’t tell them where he was even though the man had pleaded for help. He wouldn’t stay safe in his shelter if he told everyone where it was. Still, he fantasized about the woman in the crew quarters and would have taken her into his confidence if she would just show herself.
He debated just walking up to the door of the crew quarters and knocking. He could explain everything, she would be happy to know the truth, and she would welcome him into her arms as her hero.
That was how he saw it half of the time. The rest of the times he knocked on the door, she answered with the rifle in her hands, and she shot him as soon as he told her the truth. Both scenarios played out in his mind so many times that he didn’t know which one was more likely.
He dismantled the radio after the next SOS. It made him angry that the people on the radio didn’t understand why he wouldn’t help them, but he also felt compelled to answer. Without the radio he didn’t have to listen to their pleas. They would just have to understand that he wasn’t going to make Janet share with them.
It had been a long time since he had sat for hours on end watching the security cameras. The last of the motion sensors to go was the one facing the container ship. There had been no motion on it for so long that he had assumed it wasn’t working, but when it finally sounded an alarm, it startled him so much that he had overreacted. He broke the camera and the alarm with a fire ax.
Maybank missed Janice’s excursion out on the oil rig until the last camera moved. He was passing through the operation center and saw the view changing as the camera was aimed at the containers laying across the gap between the oil rig and the ship. Then he saw that two others had also been moved.
At first it didn’t occur to him that she had anything to do with the cameras moving. It couldn’t be a coincidence that they were all pointing at the same thing, but they were nowhere near the crew quarters.
He leaned in close to the monitor as if he would be able to see what was causing this phenomenon when a face filled the screen. Maybank fell over backward across a rolling chair that did exactly what it was meant to do. He wasn’t able to get back in front of the screen until the face was gone. Even then he didn’t understand that Janice had moved in front of each camera when she had tightened them into place.
Maybank had always known where each camera was located, and he knew what could be seen by watching them. He could have turned off the feed that went to the crew quarters a long time ago, but he simply chose to avoid those catwalks. He didn’t have a reason for leaving them on except that it felt like it would be mean to turn them off.
Maybank got up in the middle of the night after trying unsuccessfully to sleep. He finally figured out what he had to do. He didn’t feel like he was being mean as he flipped the switch that disconnected the feed to the crew quarters. On the contrary, he felt like he was doing her a favor. The only reason he could think of that she was aiming cameras at that particular spot was because she was planning to do something stupid.
“She’s going to go over to the ship, and I need to stop her. I need to tell her about the shelter so she can stay here and be safe.”
If Maybank had been standing in front of a mirror when he decided to tell her, he might have realized how she would take that information.
******
Janice was satisfied with her first foray into the maze of metal and cables. She had to give herself some credit for finding the cameras and adjusting them. She had made a plan and followed it. Even a year after David’s death, she was thinking of how proud he would be to know she had succeeded.
She grabbed a celebration drink over at the bar and went to the monitor. The three cameras were all almost exactly where she wanted them. From what she could tell, she didn’t leave any blind spots. She could leave the crew quarters and approach the container bridge without worrying that there would be something or someone waiting for her. The only thing left to do was decide when to go, and just like making the decision to go locate the cameras, there was no reason to delay. She originally planned to watch the security cameras for a few days, but that was just an excuse to put it off. It would be nice to have the cameras so she could check the bridge every day before going, but she had seen all she needed to see. The weather was showing signs of making it an unpleasant trip, but the rain wouldn’t kill her unless the container became slippery.
Just for this one night, she doubled her rations in her evening meal, and she indulged in one more cocktail than she had allowed herself for some time. The extra food was for the energy she needed. The extra cocktail was because she had an excuse to drink it. She was excited and nervous at the same time, but kept to her evening routine by watching a movie before going to bed.
Janice didn’t think she would be able to sleep, but she did. When her alarm went off, she didn’t hit the snooze button. She stayed with her morning routine just like the night before, and before she knew it she was at the door with her hand on the knob. The morning coffee had tasted better than ever, and breakfast had been a way of congratulating herself for taking matters into her own hands. She knew she might not even find supplies on her first trip over, but at least she was getting it done.
As Janice opened the door, she had that nagging feeling that she was forgetting something. She thought it was like when she would leave home and remember the keys were in the kitchen. One glance back around the room was all it took for her to remember she forgot to check the cameras, but to do it now would mean sitting everything down and lifting it all again. She decided she could live without it just this once.
Now that she knew exactly where to go, it didn’t take long to reach the bridge. The only t
hing that slowed her down was the heavy bag of kitchen utensils and items in the repair locker that she thought she might need to open a container. She already decided she would only have to carry back the items that had proven themselves to be useless as tools.
The container was a dirty yellow color with plenty of stains running down the sides. It had slid from the top row of containers and turned toward the web of catwalks, wedging itself neatly between two steel beams. The end on the catwalks would remain in place forever as long as the ship stayed where it was.
At the moment, the other end, the end that still rested on top of the stacked containers, was gently moving up and down as waves rolled past the ship. Each time it changed directions there was an eerie sound of metal rubbing against metal, and she saw that one corner of the container had a post connecting it to the container below it. The posts at the other corners had all snapped from the force of the ship hitting the oil rig. The storm had arrived, but it was just an inconvenience. The rain was drumming on the metal container and running off onto the catwalk as the water followed a seam like it was a gutter.
The heavy container had crushed the handrails on one side of the catwalk, and there was just enough room at her end to open its doors. Janice stood before the door and had to laugh at the possibility that the first container would have anything useful inside. She had a better chance of winning the lottery twice.
There was no reason at all to believe there were any infected dead inside the container, so she went to work on the lock. When it broke under the pressure she applied with the handle of a large pipe wrench, she silently hoped they were all that easy, and she was looking forward to the ones that had already popped open. She swung the door open wide and tried not to be disappointed by the contents. Her best guess was that the container was being delivered to a manufacturer of clothing. She didn’t know if the ship was going to or from the US, and she didn’t care as long as it had something on it she needed.
“Well, if I ever take up sewing my own clothes, I won’t have far to go.”
Janice closed the doors and stepped back to get a good look at the top of the container. She didn’t know what she was looking for, but if she was honest with herself, she would admit that she was stalling. Deep down she knew it and shook her head as if it would help to clear it.
She spotted hand and footholds and easily climbed the door. Getting to the top wasn’t a problem, but when she stood up straight, the forty foot container might as well have been as long as a football field because of the way the other end was going up and down. What translated to a small amount of motion on her end appeared to be violent chaos at the other end, and the eight foot wide container looked like the four inch wide balance beam at the Olympics.
Janice didn’t know yet that it would get worse as she got closer to the other end. That was when she would start to feel the strain in her legs as the container rose to push against her muscles as she put weight on them, and then suddenly she would feel like gravity was gone as the container dropped below her.
She started walking with her arms out to her sides for balance, but she finished the trip by crawling on her hands and knees, stopping every time the container changed direction. She tried not to think about what it would be like when she found something that had to be carried back to the crew quarters, but when she finally admitted it would be too hard, she decided it wasn’t a total loss. She would carry back what she could and wait for calm weather to carry the heavy stuff.
Her feet dangled over the edge of the container, and she felt like she would never stop learning about the laws of physics as she watched the container below hers.
“No wonder people get seasick. One moment it looks like I’m going up and down, and the next moment it looks like the other container is doing all the moving.”
Instead of dropping over the edge, she climbed down as if she was descending from Mount Everest. She reached with her foot for the roof of the next container like she had just learned to walk, and she let go of her handholds so fast that she wound up on her butt.
“I don’t know if that’s an Olympic sport, but I don’t think I made the team.”
She was relieved to find there was less movement now that she was on top of the containers, but it wasn’t until she got her bearings that she discovered she was standing at an angle. She was on top of the stack that had leaned toward the oil rig on the day the ship had rammed into it.
“Relax, dimwit. It’s been leaning for a year, and this isn’t the worst weather we’ve had.”
She regretted saying it when she saw the gap between the stack that was leaning and the stack next to it. It was too far to jump. The only way across was by climbing the two containers that had tried to follow the first one. They weren’t going up and down like an elevator, but there was going to be a lot of climbing in her future.
Janice had enough time on her hands to be methodical in her search, so she decided to search each container from the top down. That meant hanging over the front of the containers as she worked her way down, and she would prefer to do that with a safety line. Fortunately, she had one in her handy bag of tricks she had lugged with her.
She didn’t know if there was a special way that container ships were loaded, but if she had to do it, she would take weight into consideration. The heaviest would be on the bottom. That wasn’t much help when it came to guessing what was in each one. If she could logically guess which ones contained food, she would have been a valuable person at any port in the world.
“Stop playing mind games and start searching,” she said out loud.
Even though she had made progress, she was still stalling, and it wasn’t because she was going to be playing on a steel wall all day. It was because she was afraid she wouldn’t find anything. If she went home at the end of the day empty handed, she could tell herself there were still thousands of containers to check, but the question would be whether or not she had to check thousands before she found food.
She took a deep breath, gave herself a mental kick in the rear end, and went to work on the lock of container number two. Her theory about lighter containers being on top was supported by the contents. She doubted she would need wicker furniture in the crew quarters, but she told herself she might feel differently in ten years.
After closing the door, Janice quickly moved to the next container that had tried to follow the first one across to the rig. She moved even faster to close the door after she saw more boring contents. Janice climbed the door of container number three faster than the first one and hurried to the other end. She hooked her safety line to the frame and dropped over in front of the door of the first container that was at the top of the stack.
It wasn’t really hard to get enough leverage to break the lock. It just took time, and when she opened that door, all she could think was that it was going to be a long day.
******
Maybank didn’t see Janice climb the container and cross to the ship. If he had, he doubted he could have stopped himself from going after her. Even though he hadn’t seen rats in a long time, he didn’t doubt that they were still the dominant species on the ship.
It took almost an hour for him to figure out what was different about the container that rested on the catwalk. Even though it had been there for over a year, he never had the slightest bit of curiosity about its contents. The cameras had only been aimed at it for one day, and he hadn’t studied the image closely. When he realized the lock was only hanging in place, he knew that someone had opened the container.
His heart skipped a beat when her head appeared above the other end of the container, and she climbed into full view. The storm had passed, so there was far less motion than before. She had also become more at ease and confident as she climbed up and down the mountain of containers. She made it look easier now as she hurried across the bridge and smoothly descended the door onto the catwalk.
He hadn’t really thought about what he would do if he saw her, but he felt almost frozen in h
is chair as she disappeared from the view of the camera. He switched to another view and saw how quickly she had reached the door of the crew quarters. He was especially impressed that she could move so quickly with a backpack that was bulging at the seams.
******
The day had felt like she was breaking even, or as David used to say when a sporting event ended in a tie, it was like kissing your sister. It wasn’t a total loss because she was searching the containers instead of just thinking about doing it. She was happy with herself for working up the nerve to dangle almost a hundred feet above the deck while she forced open the locks, but she felt like she needed a win, not a tie.
The one container that held food was going to take a long time to unload, but there was no reason to bring all of it to the crew quarters before she found a better shipment. When she dangled in front of the open door she thought she had hit the jackpot.
The cardboard boxes were definitely canned food, but she wondered how many cans of corn she could eat before it started to kill her. She made a mental note that the answer was likely to be when she felt like shooting herself because all she had to eat was canned corn. She brought back a backpack full, and when she added it to her existing supplies it felt like a small win. At least she wouldn’t starve….yet, and she could bring some back on days when she didn’t have anything else to carry. She went to bed feeling like she had gotten some much needed exercise, but she also had a reason to get out of bed in the morning.
The next day started the same, but her muscles ached. She checked the security cameras as she was about to leave, and she was stunned by the snow that filled every little screen. All thirty were the same, and since she had not seen her adjustments the day before, she thought it was possible that she had broken them.