Burnt Sea: A Seabound Prequel (Seabound Chronicles Book 0) (5 page)

“Are you praying, Judith?” Manny whispered.

“What?” She had closed her eyes, her hand still holding the wad of
tissues over Manny’s brow.

“I am praying too,” Manny said. His eyes were wide and scared. “Every
minute since we are leaving the shore.”

“No, I just . . . What happened to your head anyway?”

She didn’t want to admit how terrified she felt. She tried to ignore
the way the captain’s jaw worked back and forth as he listened to the radio.

“I fell,” Manny said simply. “It is nothing. We are hitting something,
and I fell against the cart for the bags.”

“You’re a porter?” Judith asked.

Manny nodded. He seemed about to say more, but then the captain
straightened from the computer console. His face was waxen, the life drained
from it at what he had heard.

“Yes,” he said. “It is as I feared.”

Simon

The
plaza was packed now, and arguments began to break out. People were getting
restless. Fear seeped through the crowd like the smell of rotting meat. The
passengers teetered on the edge of hysteria. Simon felt it too.

Where were the officers?
The emergency protocols?
The ship must have standard procedures in place for accidents. Why weren’t they
being used?

Simon fought down panic and climbed back onto the café table. It
wobbled a bit, but he wasn’t too heavy. He had to keep everyone occupied.
Where is the captain?
He called for
everyone’s attention. The crowd took a long time to quiet down, but eventually
silence descended. Wide-eyed faces turned toward him.

“The captain should be arriving any minute,” Simon said. “And everyone
will get some food soon. We need to find out what’s going on out there. I don’t
like the look of that sky. Has anyone been able to get on the Internet or reach
anyone on the phone?”

“I’ve been trying. Can’t get through,” said a man sitting on the plaza
floor with a laptop open on his knees.

“Aren’t we too far away from shore?” someone called from the balcony.

“We’ve been sailing for barely an hour.”

“I can’t even get a busy signal.”

“It’s no use!”

They grumbled and tapped at their phones, but no one had managed to get
any sort of connection. Simon was so used to being able to call or text his
wife at any moment. It was surreal to be completely cut off.

“The ship must have its own computers,” Simon said. “Anyone
know
how to get into those? Someone from the crew?”

The tall sailor who helped them at the gangway had been sitting on the
staircase. He stood.

“The cruise director and most of the reception crew ran for it when
they saw the security guards go,” he said, voice booming across the plaza.
“They thought they’d be safer in the terminal building on the waterfront.
They’re the ones with access to the computers at reception. But if anyone’s
good with that stuff I’m sure they’re not
that
secure.”

“I can help.” A young woman leaned over the second railing. Her hair
was bright pink and spiky. Her face glinted with piercings. “As long as the
computers are running, I can get into them. I’ll try to get a connection.”

“Thank you,” Simon said. “Can you also figure out how many people are
supposed to be on board?”

“You got it.” The young computer expert saluted and disappeared from
view.

“What next?” someone asked.

The crowd looked expectantly at Simon. He opened his mouth, but before
he could answer, a voice spoke from the top of the grand staircase.

“Well, well.”

The captain had arrived.

Murmurs pattered around the balconies like rain on a roof. The captain
had silver hair and a craggy face, and his brass buttons shone. He looked every
inch the hero. Simon breathed a sigh of relief and stepped off the table.

“Don’t let me interrupt,” the captain said. “You seem to have things
well in hand.”

“Thank you, sir. I’m glad you’re here to take over now,” Simon said. He
noticed Judith, the blond jogger, standing behind the captain with a short,
dark-haired man in a crew uniform, barely more than a boy.

“On the contrary,” the captain said. He had a slight accent. “My
sniveling hotelier seems to have run off, along with my pilot and half the
bridge crew. How would you like to manage passenger affairs for the time being?
I need to sail this ship, which is something I don’t ordinarily do, incidentally.”

“I was only getting things started,” Simon said. It had been a long
time since anyone had actually been eager to give Simon more responsibility
over people. He just wanted to find his daughter, find answers about Nina and
Naomi.

The questions started to hammer down again.

“Captain, what happened?”

“Where are we going?”

“Can we turn around?”

“Was it a terrorist attack?”

The captain held up a hand. That was all it took to get people to be
quiet again. He lit a cigarette and blew smoke out of his nose. The tendrils
curled into nothing above the stairs.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I am Captain Ignatius
Martinelli
.
We are currently sailing directly to the Hawaiian Islands. The disaster is
centered in the contiguous United States. We’re gathering information via radio,
but it’s sporadic at the moment. The cell networks are down, as you have
probably noticed. I have reason to believe San Diego is not the only city to
have been destroyed. You will be able to disembark in Hawaii in four days,
where we should learn more.”

A firestorm of questions burst forth as Captain
Martinelli
paused to take another drag on his cigarette.

“Destroyed?”

“Four days?”

“What about our families?”

“Which other cities?”

“Are you sure San Diego is destroyed?”

“Four days!”

“We’re supposed to be going to Mexico!”

“Are we at war?”

Captain
Martinelli
raised a hand. “Not war,”
he said quietly. “Yellowstone.”

The word was a gong.

“You mean the volcano?”

Captain
Martinelli
inclined his head. For a
heartbeat, the plaza was deathly silent.

“Ridiculous!” someone shouted.

More voices joined in, panic escalating again. It was like someone had
let off a hundred fireworks.

“That’s conspiracy theory stuff!”

“Was it really the volcano?”

“Why didn’t we have any warning?”

“If we’re not at war, why can’t we go back to the city?”

“What do you mean, destroyed
?!
”

Captain
Martinelli
raised his hand again. It
took longer for the crowd to calm down this time. Simon’s numbness had begun to
recede, replaced by bone-rattling shakes. The captain wasn’t making him feel better.

“That cloud you saw rolling over the city was volcanic ash,” Captain
Martinelli
said through another puff of smoke. “It contains
glass and sulfur, among other things. It is dangerous to the lungs and very
heavy when wet.”

The captain spoke calmly, but his words set off another flurry of
conversations around the plaza.

“Yellowstone is hundreds of miles from San Diego.”

“He’s lost it.”

“I want to go home!”

Frank, the older man with the mustache, leaned over and spoke to Simon.
“I was in Washington when St. Helens blew. I’ve seen this kind of ash before.
He could be right.”

Simon tried to recall everything he knew about the volcano deep beneath
Yellowstone National Park. It was one of the world’s only
supervolcanoes
.
If it truly had erupted, the results would be catastrophic. Apocalyptic even.

Nina.
Her name beat in his mind
like a drum.

“Another few minutes in port,” the captain continued, “and the ash
would have clogged up our engines worse than a pound of sand in a gas tank.
Over the next few days it will fall atop buildings and vehicles. Add a bit of
rain, and it will get heavier and heavier, until they collapse under its
weight. Everything close to the eruption will be as flat as Kansas soon.”

“But we’re in California!”

“I think he really has lost it.”

“What do we do now?”

“Can we get a new captain?”

“You may do as you like,” the captain said. He didn’t seem to share the
fear and panic that thundered around the plaza. He just sucked on his cigarette
like it was his only source of air. “As I said, we are on course for Hawaii.
Perhaps we’ll reach it. Perhaps we won’t. If that was the Yellowstone
supereruption
, we won’t have long no matter what we do.”

Tremors ran through the crowd.
Conspiracy
.
Fear mongering
.
Lost it. Impossible. Apocalypse.

Could it be true? Simon remembered what the apple pastry man had said
about the earthquakes. The image of the ash cloud rolling over the city was
forever burned into his memory. The explanation fit, but if it was
true—if the captain was right—God help them all.

Nina.
If the Yellowstone volcano
had erupted, was there any chance at all that she and Naomi had survived? Such
an event could wipe out the entire continent.

He had to stop this spiral of thoughts. Simon climbed the steps to
where the captain stood. Frank followed him.

“Sir,” he said. “My name is Simon Harris.”

The captain shook his hand. His palms were dry as dust.

Simon spoke quietly so the other people in the plaza couldn’t hear him.
“I’m not sure we should get everyone worried about Yellowstone until we know
for certain. We’ve all seen the documentaries and . . . well . . . I can’t see
people staying calm for long. Has it been confirmed?”

Captain
Martinelli
looked him in the eye.
Simon shivered. Emptiness. It was like there was nothing at all behind his
irises.

“We’ve just been in touch with another ship via radio,” the captain
said. “Cell towers are down all along the West Coast. The ship was just off San
Francisco. Or where San Francisco used to be. They saw it all.”

Judith stirred nearby, but her severe face stayed still.

“Are you positive it was Yellowstone? Maybe Mount St. Helens . . .”
Simon felt like he was grasping at straws, looking for anything that could pull
him out of this spiral.

“The volcano blew,” the captain said. “They’re saying it was the big
one. No one within a hundred-mile radius is talking. At all.” The captain took
a long drag on his cigarette. “The ash has spread across the West and as far
away as Ohio.”

“When did it happen?”

“This morning. 7:00 a.m. on the nose.”

“Why weren’t there warnings?” Judith interjected. “We could have done
something.”

Her face had gone deathly pale. She must have seen the documentaries
too. The boy in the crew uniform beside her looked equally scared.

“Like what? Evacuate the entire North American continent? Send everyone
running through Mexico? It was too late. I suppose the government knew they
couldn’t do enough. Perhaps we’ll get to Hawaii and find the president holed up
in a bunker.”

“This can’t be real,” Simon said.

The captain shrugged. “We’d better hope Hawaii doesn’t close the
borders.”

Simon looked out at all the people. He felt detached from his body, as
if he were eyeballs and a racing, sputtering heart suspended above the steps.
The plaza contracted before his eyes. This
couldn’t
be real.

The captain’s words infected the crowd like a virus. They were angry,
scared. They didn’t want to believe it, but the captain was the only one with
access to news of the outside world. Simon saw the situation escalating. It
could erupt at any moment. He found his lungs again. Breathed in.

“Hey! Everyone listen to me. We don’t know if what the captain says is
true. It’s just too soon. I was in New York when the Twin Towers fell. Back
then we thought every major city was under attack. We thought the world would
end right alongside Manhattan. It didn’t. Before we start crying apocalypse,
let’s focus on the trip to Hawaii. Let’s all pitch in, folks. It’ll be good for
us.” He turned away from the crowd. “Captain, will you help us get everyone
settled? We need your authority.”

The captain lit another cigarette. Simon wanted to throw his lighter
across the room.

“Do whatever you want,” Captain
Martinelli
said. “I intend to sail us to Maui and watch the world end from a white-sand
beach.”

He turned and walked back up the stairs.

Chapter 5—
Catalina

Judith

The plaza boiled like
a kettle. The captain disappeared
down the corridor they had come from. He had delivered his news and abandoned
his passengers to deal with the consequences.

People gathered in front of the shops, talking in tight groups, some
weeping. Even the children had adopted their parents’ somber attitudes. They
clutched hands and hid behind legs as their mothers and fathers grappled with
what was happening. There were quite a few children, Judith realized, many with
orange life jackets securely fastened around their small bodies. She had always
thought of cruises as the domain of retirees, but this one catered to families.
Bright colors—cartoonlike and cheery—adorned the shops. One corner
had a playground with low, soft things to climb on—all fish
themed—like the play area of a shopping mall. In addition to the expected
assortment of gifts and designer goods for sale, there was a game shop and an
ice cream stand.

Judith heard a shuddering sob. A pale woman sitting on the floor near
her spoke softly to her mousy son.

“Neal, sweetie, we’ll go home as soon as we can. I know you’re scared.”

“I’m cold, Mommy.” The boy’s teary eyes were wide and luminous.

“I packed sweaters in our suitcases.” The woman hugged the boy close.
“We’ll find them after we have some lunch.”

Judith felt very alone. It couldn’t be true about San Francisco. Her
mom and the kids would be all right. She would see her father again. The
captain had to be wrong. The whole country couldn’t be wiped out, even if the
volcano had erupted. She had too many things she wanted to do with her life,
too many plans. There had to be some mistake.

She joined Simon and an old man with a large gray mustache.

“We need to keep people busy and avoid a panic,” Simon was saying.

“You’re right,” the older man said. “That kind of fatalism never did
anyone any good.” He jerked his head in the direction the captain had gone.

“I agree with Simon,” Judith interjected. “We should also figure out
how much food and fresh water we have.”

“I’m sure Ana
Ivanovna
can help us with
that,” Simon said. “First, we need to get everyone fed in an orderly fashion
and organize some people to—”

“Excuse me.” A voice broke into the conversation. “Why are you making
the decisions now? You don’t work for the cruise line.” It was a middle-aged
woman, Latina in appearance, wearing a polo shirt, with sunglasses on a cord
around her neck. Several children surrounded her, including a sharp-eyed
adolescent girl.

“I’m not deciding anything,” Simon said. “I’m just trying to help.”

“Why should you be in charge?”

“I’m not trying to be in charge.”

Judith thought it was perfectly obvious that Simon should be calling
the shots. He was remarkably calm considering the circumstances. And he wasn’t
as unsettling as Captain
Martinelli
, that
was for sure.

“There’s room for everyone to lend a hand,” said the man with the
mustache. “No reason we can’t be civilized.”

The woman eyed them. Something about her face made Judith
think
of a seagull. “I’ll gather the passengers for the
meal.”

“Thank you,” Simon said. “Everyone will feel better once we get some
food in us. What’s your name?”

“Rosa Cordova.” The woman swept back up the steps, the children
following her. Simon gave Judith a look that was probably meant to be a smile
and then started down the stairs.

“I have to find my daughter,” he said.

Judith shivered. She still wore her jogging gear. The plaza had grown
darker, colder. Many of the lights were off. The skylight above them looked
like dark sunglasses. Was that ash? What would they do if the sky never
cleared?

She thought about her family, but she couldn’t reconcile what the
captain had said about San Francisco with reality. They would get to Hawaii in
four days and discover it was all a terrible mistake. They just had to hold on
until then. The first order of business was to get warm.

She went into one of the shops, smelling wood polish and cotton when
she pushed open the door. No one manned the register. Her debit card was tucked
into the pocket of her running shorts, but that wouldn’t do her much good here.
She hesitated,
then
put on a sweater with the
Catalina
’s logo screen-printed on the
back. She found a pair of navy-blue yoga pants and pulled them on over her
running shorts. The feeling of thick cotton against her skin was comforting,
almost like a hug. She pulled off the tags and pocketed them. She’d find a way
to pay later, when the world was back to normal.

She took a pile of sweaters from the rack and returned to the plaza.
She gave one to the boy, Neal. His mother gripped Judith’s hand wordlessly.

Judith went over to a group of people who looked like they had come
from San Diego. They wore an assortment of office clothes, workout gear, and
even a fast-food uniform, complete with a visor and a button that said, “
How can I help you?”

“There are sweaters in the gift shop,” she said. “Under the
circumstances I think we can use them. Spread the word.”

They thanked her and began to tell the others.

Judith clutched her pile of sweaters close and made her way back to the
reception lobby, where they’d left the pregnant woman, unsure what she would
find there.

Simon

The
tall sailor still sat on the plush carpet steps, running his hands over his
shaved head. He kept shaking it, as if arguing with himself, denying something.

“Excuse me,” Simon said. “I wanted to thank you for your help at the
door. And on the gangway.”

“Just doing my job.” He stood and rolled his broad shoulders. “Name’s
Reggie.”

“Simon. Did you see where my daughter went? I told her to find the
deepest corner she could and shut the door.”

“Try the laundry room and the bowling alley,” Reggie said, “and the
engine room if she’s not afraid of big machines.”

“She’s definitely not afraid of machines,” Simon said. “How do I get
there?”

Reggie gave him instructions, and Simon set off into the bowels of the
ship. He made his way down staircases and through corridors, occasionally
passing bewildered-looking passengers and crew. He asked if they’d seen a
little girl with pigtails and urged them to head to the plaza. No, he didn’t
know what was going on. No, he didn’t think they were going back.

The ship was large, but it wasn’t the biggest cruise ship he’d seen by
far. It didn’t belong to any of the major cruise lines, based on the logos
painted on the bulkhead. It seemed to do family-oriented cruises to Mexico and
the like. Had this ship even been as far as Hawaii? Simon wasn’t sure he liked
the captain’s plan. He wanted to get back to San Diego as soon as possible. It
couldn’t be destroyed. It just couldn’t.

He checked the laundry room, calling for Esther as the cotton piles
swallowed sound. The clean scent of detergent masked the charcoal smell of the
ash still clinging to his clothes. Where was she? Rationally, he knew she
couldn’t have gotten off the ship, but panic still clutched at him with every
second spent searching.

After ten minutes he opened the engine room door. A loud roaring filled
the cavernous space, rattling his eardrums. The big engines looked like windowless
cars lined up in the center of the floor. A metal catwalk ran around the outer
edge of the two-story room. Simon stepped onto it from the doorway, his
footsteps clanking.

A pair of men stood on the catwalk, staring down at the engines. One
took a long swig from a hip flask. They must know what was going on outside
then.

“Excuse me,” Simon shouted above the noise. “I’m looking for a little
girl. Pigtails. Blue T-shirt. Have you seen her?”

The man with the flask looked at him, eyes bloodshot, and answered in a
language Simon didn’t understand. The other man nodded and uttered what sounded
like a curse word. Simon gestured toward the machines. The men shrugged and
didn’t stop him, so he climbed down a flight of metal steps to the lower level.

His feet vibrated with the motion of the engines. He walked along the
room, calling for Esther. It was well lit, even though the rest of the ship
seemed to have switched to emergency power. The fluorescent lights threw sharp
shadows across the machinery.

“Esther! Are you in here, button? It’s Daddy.”

He reached the end of the room and rounded the big engines. He started
back, passing a row of machines with pipes running out of them, perhaps pumps
of some kind.

“Esther?”

“Daddy?” Her voice was so
small,
Simon almost
didn’t hear it above the growl of the machines.

“Yes, button. It’s me. You can come out now.”

“What’s going on? Are we at sea?”

A pair of large eyes appeared beneath one of the big pipes along the
edge of the room. Esther stood. There was a long smudge of grease across one
side of her round face, as if she had lain down on the floor. For some reason
the sight made Simon want to cry.

“We’re sailing somewhere safe right now.”

“Where?”

“Hawaii. Doesn’t that sound nice?”

“Where are Mommy and
Namie
? Are they sailing
to Hawaii too?”

Simon looked down at his daughter, with her messy pigtails and her blue
Thomas T-shirt, and finally let the truth engulf him. He sat on the floor and
pulled Esther onto his lap, hugging her close. She felt small and warm in his
arms. He would keep this little girl safe no matter what happened next.

“Mommy and Naomi were in San Diego, Esther. They . . . they’re . . .”
How could he explain this? What if he was wrong and they got out? “There was a
big volcano in Wyoming. It erupted. When that happens, there’s lots of ash in
the air and it can go really far away if the explosion is big enough and the
wind is strong. It’s really dangerous, like poison.”

“Is that the smoke we saw?”

“Yes. That was the ash from the volcano. If anyone breathes too much of
it, they . . . they could die.”

“Can’t they hold their breath?” Esther asked.

Simon passed a hand over his eyes.

“Not for long enough,” he said. “Not when there’s that much ash. If it
rains it also gets really heavy, and it can make houses fall down on people.”

“What if they went far away?” Esther said. “Like us. We got away on
this big boat, right?”

Simon cast about for a hundred different reasons why it might be true.
What if they found gas masks?
A safe basement?
Was it
possible? What if they had decided to drive to Mexico instead of going to the
dentist? Would they be far enough away in time?

“We did. We were really, really lucky. I think most people weren’t as
lucky as us today.”

“Is Mommy dead?” Esther spoke so quietly that Simon wouldn’t have heard
her if he hadn’t been dreading those very words.

“I don’t know. I think so.”

“And
Namie
?”

“They were together.”

“Can we go back and find them?”

“I don’t think we can go to San Diego again for a while. Maybe weeks.”

“Did our house fall down?”

“I don’t know, button.”
   

“What are we going to do without Mommy?”

“I don’t know.”

The tears came then. Simon hugged Esther closer and wept into her tiny
shoulder. Her Thomas T-shirt grew damp from his tears. Esther didn’t cry, but
she gripped him tightly with her small, warm hands. The engine vibrated
solemnly at his back.

Judith

The
women in the reception lobby were crying when Judith arrived with her pile of
sweatshirts. The older one with lavender hair and the long peasant skirt sat on
the floor, rocking back and forth. Judith hadn’t realized before how tiny she
was. She was holding the hand of the woman lying on the couch, whose eyes were
closed.

Blood and fluid matted the cushions. It made Judith’s stomach turn, and
she looked away. The woman with the cross necklace was on her feet. Her cheeks
were wet and her shirt was covered in blood.

In her arms was a tiny baby. Bright-red hair dusted its head, still
glistening with fluid. The woman hummed a hymn over the baby as her tears continued
to fall.

“Is she . .
. ?
” Judith cleared her throat.
“Is she okay?”

“They both are, honey. They both are.”

Wordlessly, Judith handed over the pile of sweatshirts. She helped the
lavender-haired woman, who introduced herself as
Bernadette,
wrap the exhausted new mother in soft cotton. The other woman cleaned the baby
with fragments of her own soiled clothes and then wrapped
herself
and the newborn in clean sweatshirts.