Burnt Sea: A Seabound Prequel (Seabound Chronicles Book 0) (6 page)

“There was supposed to be a nurse. Did she help you?” Judith whispered
to Bernadette.

“Yes, dear. She was here for the worst of it. She just went down to the
clinic to get some supplies. Our girl Constance is going to need stitches. She
wouldn’t trust anyone else to get the right stuff, and Penelope here knows
plenty about looking after babies.”

Penelope smiled over the newly swaddled form. “This is an angel. The
Lord will look after us. Don’t ya’ll worry about a thing.
”

“Stitches?” Judith felt ill. “Should we move her down to the clinic?”

“Best to keep her still. We’ll move her somewhere safe and clean as
soon as she’s patched up.”

Judith fought down the bile in her throat. She couldn’t stand blood,
and even talking about stitches made her feel nauseated.

“Umm, I don’t think I can help with that.”

“Of course not, dear,” Penelope said. “We have things under control
here. Would you like to hold our little Catalina?”

“Catalina?”

“She’ll go by
Cally
for short,” the woman on
the couch said, lifting her head slightly. “Like my mother, Calypso.”

“Oh, um, no. I don’t like
ba
— ”

But Penelope was already thrusting the tiny cotton-wrapped bundle into
Judith’s arms. The baby barely weighed a thing, but Judith held her out in
front of her like a twenty-pound sack of rice, both arms stiff. Catalina had a
snub nose and ears like mother-of-pearl shells. Her hair looked even redder now
that it had started to dry. It was soft like down. Her skin was nearly
translucent. Judith could see the veins pulsing on her tiny temples. She swallowed
a gag and quickly handed the baby back to Penelope.

“I’d better go see if everything’s okay back in the plaza,” Judith
said. She wanted to get out of there before the nurse returned.

“Wait!” A face popped up from behind the computer on the reception
desk. “Did the captain make an appearance? What’d he say?”

“Who are you?”

“Nora. I’ve been trying to access the net. Had to break into the ship’s
system.”

Nora had spiky pink hair and at least a dozen earrings in each ear and
two in her eyebrow. She appeared to be in her late twenties. Judith introduced
herself and joined her at the reception desk, turning her back on the three
women with the baby. She didn’t understand how they could sit there and coo
over a wrinkly baby with all that blood around.

“Do you have an Internet connection?” she asked. For one wild moment
she thought about emailing Donald
Herz
to tell him
she wouldn’t make it to her interview. In a way it was easier to think about
that than about her family. Captain
Martinelli
had to
be wrong about San Francisco. She would email her parents to let them know
where she was. They would answer her. Everything would be fine.

“I’ve been trying,” Nora said. “I’ve only been able to log on for
seconds at a time. It’s worse than spotty dial-up.”

“Did you check the news?” Judith went around to the other side of the
desk to sit beside Nora. The woman was relatively calm. Judith respected that.
“The captain was telling everyone some pretty crazy things in the plaza. He
said the Yellowstone
supervolcano
erupted.” Judith
tried to laugh. “It can’t be that bad, can it?”

Nora shook her head. “It’s that bad. The networks in New York are
broadcasting. Anything based in California or the Midwest is silent as the
grave.”

“What do the networks in New York say?”

“Apocalyptic headlines.
Fear-mongering talking heads.
The usual click-bait bullshit.”

“You don’t think it was Yellowstone, then?”

“Some people say Yellowstone,” Nora said. “I don’t know yet. Need more
data.” She twisted the ring in her eyebrow, making Judith feel queasy. “You’ve
seen the documentaries, right?”

“Not really.” Judith didn’t waste her time with conspiracy theories and
doomsday predictions. The chances of that kind of thing happening in her
lifetime were vanishingly slim. And yet . . . “What do the documentaries say?”

“That it’ll get worse before it gets better,” Nora said. “The day of
the eruption is killer obviously, but the scientists think the US probably
wouldn’t be able to produce a harvest in the years afterwards because of
weather disruptions. It’s like climate change on steroids. The big problem is
that there might not be any food to get from overseas either if the harvests
fail there too. Depending on what happens to the weather, we could go for years
without a proper harvest.”

“What would we do then?” Judith asked. This was all hypothetical,
surely.

“Starve,” Nora answered. “That’s what the documentaries say at least.
It’ll happen all over the world.”

“This doesn’t feel real.”

“Tell me about it,” Nora said. “Hey, the net’s back. Let’s see if we
can get the BBC. They’ll sort out the bullshit.”

Her fingers flew across the keyboard. Judith had never seen anyone type
so fast.

“Here we go. Fuck.”

The BBC page loaded slowly, opening a few pixels at a time. The picture
that emerged was a simulated image of North America. The headline, in
eighty-point font, said simply,
catastrophe
. The simulation showed a crater
the size of Washington over Yellowstone National Park. Contour lines marked the
estimated ash fall range. California had been swallowed up. Lower Canada and
the desert in the Southwest. To the east, the disaster squeezed outward like an
amoeba. It ate up the Great Plains, the
Midwestern
cornfields, threatening Pennsylvania, sitting heavy above the Deep South. The
Eastern Seaboard looked untouched for the moment.

“Damn,” Nora breathed. “It says casualties could be in the hundred
millions. That’s eight zeros.”

They stared at each other for a moment. There was no scope to
comprehend this catastrophe. A hundred million was an abstract number, a fiction.

And California was buried. Judith’s whole family was there. She hadn’t
been close to her parents since their divorce. But even when they fought over
custody, argued about money, or paid more attention to their work than to her,
they had still been there. She could always go home. Now her whole life had
been swallowed up in a single morning, and she couldn’t do anything about it.

“Isn’t anyone sending help?” Judith said weakly.

Nora turned back to her computer screen. Where before she had been
purposeful, now her fingers moved clumsily. Judith felt like she was seeing
everything from underwater.

“It says the president is in a secure location. Communications are
spotty.” Nora clicked down through the article and scanned the accompanying
headlines. “There’s not much real information.
Experts
speculating about the potential toll.
They keep linking to a documentary
from a few years back. People in the UK are rushing stores and stocking up on
food and supplies.” Nora pulled up another page. “Same thing’s happening in the
rest of Europe. God, I wouldn’t want to be working at a grocery store today.”

“What about the military?”

“Let’s see . . . Highest alert, obviously . . . All bases closed to
civilians. Planes grounded all over the world, even air force. Navy ships in
the Pacific are heading for a rendezvous at Pearl Harbor.”

“Really? That’s where we should go.” Judith thought of the warship
pushing through the boat jam so recklessly, so confidently. She wanted to call
in the cavalry, to have men in uniforms move in and set things to right. “The
navy will keep us safe. I bet they’re already coordinating relief efforts.”

“Maybe,” Nora said. “Ugh, the net’s gone again. I’ll see if I can get
it back.”

“The captain was staying in touch with people via radio up on the
bridge,” Judith said. Captain
Martinelli
had called
it the end of the world. He may have been right about the volcano, but that
didn’t inspire confidence. There was no way it was that bad. Things would clear
up soon. They just had to give it some time.

Nora pounded at the keyboard in frustration,
then
pushed back from the desk. “I can’t get it to work. All this ash can’t be good
for the satellite signals.” Nora hammered the keys again, but the screen stayed
blank. “Nope, it’s gone again.”

They stared at the blank screen for a few minutes. A hundred arguments
for why it couldn’t be as bad as the news said rioted through Judith’s mind.
But she was finding it harder to explain this away. Just a few hours ago she
had been preparing to take her first steps into a bright, shiny future. She had
done everything right. But now she sat in a cold cruise ship lobby with a group
of strangers, one of whom had just delivered a baby for goodness’ sake!

“What are we going to do?” Nora said quietly, almost to herself. She
pinched her largest earring, a ball with spikes coming out of it, like the head
of a mace, almost hard enough to draw blood. The report from the venerated BBC
had brought the true weight of the disaster tumbling down on their heads.

“I don’t know,” Judith said. She remembered Simon saying they should
keep people from panicking. She couldn’t process the implications of what had
happened, but she had to do
something
.
“It looks like we’ll be on the ship for a few days. Maybe we should make sure
everyone has somewhere to sleep. Do you know how many people this ship can
hold?”

“I can probably get a deck plan,” Nora said. She tapped at the
computer. “Oh, and I found the passenger manifest.”

“How many rooms are there?” Judith asked.

“Give me a sec . . . Looks like there’s enough space for seven hundred
fifty passengers and two hundred fifty crew. Six hundred forty-two passengers
were checked in, but I don’t know how many of those are still on board, or how
many extras we picked up. I think that Simon guy was collecting names.”

“There had to be a hundred of us running on from the city, maybe more.
I’d be willing to bet there are at least a thousand people on this ship.”

“If that’s true, there won’t be enough passenger rooms for all the
runners,” Nora said, bringing up a diagram of the ship on the screen. Each room
was labeled with a number and occupancy figure. The ship didn’t look all that
big, actually. Judith had thought cruise ships usually carried thousands of
people, but this wasn’t that kind.

“We’re going to have to put some people in crew cabins,” Nora said. “I
don’t want to piss anybody off, but I think we should move the single passengers
into the smaller cabins so we can keep families together and possibly pair a
few people up.”

“That sounds reasonable,” Judith said.

“The cruise guests aren’t going to be happy about being kicked out of
their cabins.” Nora peeked over the top of the computer at the women with the
baby.

“It’s for everyone’s good,” Judith said. “People will have to make
sacrifices until we get back to shore.”

“Yeah, but how do we get them to agree?” Nora thumbed at her mace-head
earring. There was a tiny silver tortoise beside it.

“We don’t give them any other option,” Judith said. “Let’s get everyone
assigned and sent on their way before they have time to complain.”

“All right. We’ll need a full list, though,” Nora said.

“People will come up for the food,” Judith said. “We can get everyone
sorted out over lunch.”

“Roger that.”

The nurse,
a squat woman in a floral sundress, bustled
back into the reception lobby
. She had a threaded needle laid out on a
tray. She passed the tray to Bernadette, pulled out a huge syringe, and leaned
toward the woman on the couch. Judith blanched. She turned quickly to Nora.

“Let’s head down there now. We can let people know what we saw on the
news.”

“Good idea,” Nora said, eyeing the medical preparations. “Let me just
shut the computer down. We’ve got to save power.”

They left the reception lobby, Nora clutching printouts of the ship’s
rooms in her hands, crumpling them slightly. They didn’t walk fast enough for
Judith, though. The woman on the couch moaned, and Judith put her hands over
her ears to block the sound.

Chapter 6—The Dining Hall

Simon

Hundreds crowded into the
Atlantis Dining Hall for
the meal. Two long buffet counters and rectangular “family-style” dining tables
were arranged across the room. A row of windows filled one wall. The sea outside
was restless, churning darkly beneath the sullen sky. It was a gray day,
already so different from the sunny moment when Simon had decided to walk along
the harbor. That had only been a few hours ago.

He turned his back on the windows and focused on the people filling the
tables around him. The dining hall didn’t have room for everyone to eat at
once, and people were already lining up outside, waiting for their turns. Many
wore
Catalina
sweatshirts with cheery
slogans about islands, vacations, and paradise in shades of turquoise, purple,
and sunshine yellow. The dining hall had similarly bright walls and fixtures,
incongruous given the dull gray beyond the window.

Ana
Ivanovna
directed operations by the
buffet tables. She served huge trays of fresh California fruits and vegetables
and assorted sandwiches. Compared to famously extravagant cruise buffets, it
was simple fare. Any complaints about the lack of hot meals and dining options
were met with swift dismissals.

“I am not wasting energy when there are refrigerators to run!” Ana
said, waving people away with a spoon dripping fruit juice.

Simon thanked her as he filled a plate with sandwiches for himself and
Esther. Frank Fordham sat at a larger table alone, so Simon carried their plate
over to him. A few people looked up and nodded as he passed them. Esther
studied them curiously, unafraid.

“Frank? Can we join you?”

“I suppose.” Frank waved his hand vaguely. He scanned the room, perhaps
still hoping to find his son.

“This is my daughter, Esther.”

“Hello.” Esther hopped into the seat next to Frank. “What’s your name?”

“My name is Frank.”

“Do you like Thomas the Tank Engine?”

“What?” For the first time Frank’s eyes landed on Esther, pulled away
from his futile search.

“Thomas. He’s a train. He has lots of friends, like Percy and Toby and
Mr. Conductor.”

“I’ve seen Thomas before,” Frank said, a hint of a smile on his lips.

“He’s really cool,” Esther said. “Sometimes he has engine trouble and
his friends have to help him. I like engines. I can fix cars. I’m helping my
daddy.” Esther took a huge bite of a sandwich.

“Can you?” Frank said. He leaned closer to Esther, his mustache
twitching. “I used to make engines. I was an engineer.”

“What kind of engines?”

“Ones for moving water. For purification systems, that sort of thing.”

“What’s
purication
?” Esther asked.

“Purification,” Frank said patiently. “It means taking dirty water and
making it clean enough to use again.”

“That sounds cool,”
Esther
said, her mouth
still half-full of sandwich. “It’s not as cool as train engines, though. Those
take people places.”

“You’re right. Trains are cool.”

The dining hall buzzed with earnest conversations. Everyone was calmer
with a bit of food in them. They were already settling in for the journey,
sharing where they were from and exchanging theories about what had happened.
The two couples at the nearest table debated how far the volcanic ash could
spread, raising their voices over the issue of wind speed.

Simon looked around for the captain, but he was nowhere to be seen.
Simon still wasn’t sure they should have told everyone about the volcano until
they had more information. If the captain was wrong, everyone could be worrying
and debating unnecessarily. As it was, it didn’t feel like reality had set in
yet. They could almost be on a regular cruise.

Judith walked over from the buffet table. She now wore a
Catalina
sweatshirt too. The pink-haired
young woman who’d offered to help with the reception computers followed.

“Is it okay if we sit with you, Simon?” Judith asked.

Her question was tentative, but Simon got the impression that Judith
was generally quite confident. It was something in the way she set down her
tray and pulled back her chair. Her movements were swift and straight.

Simon introduced Frank and Esther. Judith introduced Nora.

“Your hair is pink,” Esther said.

“Be polite, button,” Simon whispered.

“It’s okay,” Nora said, grinning at Esther. “My hair is pink as a pony.
That’s what my mom says.”

“Ponies aren’t pink.” Esther wrinkled her nose.

“You’re absolutely right. My mom’s a little crazy.” Nora laughed, but
her voice was raw.

“Where does your family live?” Simon asked.

“Texas,” Nora said. “I don’t know how they are yet.” She thumbed at the
row of earrings glinting in her ear.

“Nora got onto the Internet for a few minutes,” Judith said. “The news
confirmed what Captain
Martinelli
said . . . about
Yellowstone.”

“Was your source—?”

“Saw it on the BBC.”

It felt like all the air had drained from the room. Simon had been
hoping the captain was delusional. But it was true. This could be the end.

“The map might be wrong,” Nora said, fiddling with her earring again.

“Did you see any pictures?” Simon asked.

“A simulation of the ash fall.”

“Did you get in contact with anyone?” Frank asked. “I need to find my
son.”

“My webmail wasn’t working,” Nora said. “The social networks are
overloaded. I couldn’t get through to any of them.” She paused for a heartbeat.
“Half of Texas is covered, but they have a chance.” She looked down at the
sandwich that sat untouched on her plate.

“Where’s your family, Judith?” Simon asked.

 
“San Francisco.” She too
studied her sandwich intently.

“I’m so sorry. My wife and other daughter were in San Diego.”

He thought about Nina, her rich brown eyes, her smile,
the
warmth of her skin. He remembered sneaking glances at
her in the university library, inviting her to study with him beside the
greenhouses, taking their newborn baby, Naomi, from her exhausted arms.
Stop. This won’t help anyone.

Judith met his eyes, utterly vulnerable for a split second. Then it was
as if a cloud of ash covered her eyes, cloaking the light. Judith cleared her
throat and straightened her back.

“Nora got the room plans for the ship off the computer,” she said
briskly. “If we’re going to be here for a few days, we should assign rooms so
everyone has somewhere to sleep. We may need to make a few people move to crew
cabins so there will be room for all the families, though.”

“I’m not sure we should be making people do anything just yet,” Simon
said, matching Judith’s businesslike tone. “We can find places for people to
sleep in the restaurants for the time being. There’s probably a spa with beds
or mattresses too.”

“Everyone’s going to have to make sacrifices,” Judith said.

“True. But I think we’ve all made enough sacrifices for today,” Simon
said.

An awkward silence descended on the table. Then Judith nodded.

“Sure,” she said. “Oh, the pregnant lady had her baby. It seems fine.”

“And the woman?”

“She’s getting stitches, but the nurse said she’ll be okay.”

“That is good news,” Simon said. “And terrifying news, to have a
newborn in these circumstances.”

“There’s a baby?” Esther asked. “Can we see it?”

“I’m sure it needs to sleep right now,” Simon said. “We’ll go see it
later.”

“Can we name it Thomas?”

“It’s a girl,” Judith said. “The mother named her Catalina.”

“That’s a weird name,” Esther said.

Judith leaned close to her. “I think so too,” she said.

Esther grinned.

“Shall we take a look at those room plans you found?” Simon said,
pushing the rest of his sandwich over to his daughter. “I’ve been collecting
the names of the people on board. We can start matching them up.”

“Sure thing, boss.” Nora unfurled her stack of papers and spread them
across the table.

They bent close to the diagrams and started working through the
handwritten lists, crossing off those who were still on the ship. It felt good
to do this straightforward motor task. The group avoided any further talk of
families and focused on the simple puzzle of finding somewhere for everyone to
sleep.

Judith

They worked all afternoon and late into the evening getting everyone
food and a room or a mattress. Their little group began to gather helpers. They
still hadn’t found a high-ranking member of the cruise staff to take over, but
a woman named Willow Weathers, who sang in the lounge every night, knew her way
around the ship. She told them about all the additional spaces where they might
find extra blankets, sundries, and more space for people to sleep.

Judith and Nora managed the room assignments. They spread out the
diagrams on one of the bigger tables near the entrance to the dining hall and
ticked off names as people came over to confirm whether they had a place to
stay and whether there were any empty beds in their rooms. There were some
complaints, but most people were too exhausted by the day’s events to protest
too much. If anyone didn’t know where to go, either because they had still been
in the process of checking in or because they were runners, Judith or Nora
would give them a room number. Willow Weathers would then tell them how to get
to the correct deck or assign a porter or a member of her backup band to help
them.

Simon divided people into teams to search the ship for anyone who
hadn’t been accounted for yet. He dealt with any miscellaneous questions as
best as he could, turning to the three women for
their
input often. Judith kept an eye on him as he delegated tasks and listened to
the passengers’ concerns. With his quiet voice and unassuming demeanor, he had
a calming effect on people. He could resolve conflicts with a hand on the
shoulder and a soft word of encouragement.

When Rosa Cordova, the woman they had met earlier in the plaza,
demanded additional rooms for her large family, Simon listened patiently and referred
her to Judith. The survivor count had climbed past the thousand
mark
, and Judith explained they needed every room filled to
capacity. Rosa grudgingly accepted Judith’s verdict. She looked to Simon to see
if he had noticed, but he was already dealing with a dispute between two older
men. He apparently trusted her to take care of Rosa on her own.

Most people cooperated. They only needed to stay on this ship for a few
days, and then they’d be safe. They set their sights on Hawaii.

By the time everyone had been fed and assigned a room, night had
descended. Simon picked up his daughter, who had fallen asleep leaning against
a support pillar near their table, and told Nora and Judith to get some rest.

Nora invited Judith to bunk with her in her stateroom on the eighth
deck. It was about the size of a college dorm room and had a queen-sized bed.
The bathroom door retracted like an accordion, and a closet/dressing area
separated the bathroom from the rest of the stateroom. The walls were painted
sandstone, and large abstract prints hung above the bed in mostly sea green and
purple. A small desk with a round cushioned chair sat between the bed and the
floor-to-ceiling window. A little square balcony jutted out from the ship,
divided by a low wall from the balconies on either side.

“Toilet still works,” Nora said, poking her head around the corner of
the dressing area.

“That’s a relief. Hope it stays that way.” Judith sat on the edge of
the bed, rubbing her feet. She was thankful for her comfortable running shoes,
but it had been a very long day. “Do you think the ship will make it all the
way to Hawaii?” she asked.

“It should,” Nora said. “We made it out of the ash fall.” She sat down
on the other side of the bed and began removing her larger earrings.

“How much longer do you think it’ll take to get there?” Judith asked.

“Maybe three more days. A normal cruise does it in four to five, and
we’ve been booking it.”

Judith studied the other woman. She had tossed her heavy black trousers
onto her suitcase, which had been delivered to the room before the chaos began.
She had a tattoo of an upside-down tree stretching most of the way down her
thigh.

“Nora,” Judith said.

“Yeah?”

“Why were you cruising by yourself? Don’t people usually do that sort
of thing with friends?”

Nora was quiet for a moment. “This is supposed to be my honeymoon,” she
said finally. “I know I don’t look like the cruising type, but my fiancée
really wanted to do one. She loved the beach and Mexico and the sea . . .” Nora
fell silent.