The Blue (The Complete Novel) (29 page)

            “We did it boy!” I yell before I even know what I’m telling him we did. And then he starts up, battling the metal bars and trying to break out. I leave the hatch open and let the bright sun pour down some into the stinky cabin. I only pay each body a quick glance and then look away. And I can’t seem to comprehend that I did all of this. Just me. And I look at Voley and the lock setup and almost try putting a few bullets into it. But I know I can’t trust the ricochet, and that even one stray bullet is too much risk. It’s like I couldn’t even go on if something happened to him now. So I use the flashlight to scour every shelf of the cabin for the key, but there’s nothing. I find more fuel, some food, maps, clothes, and other gear, but no key. And finally, when I know there’s nothing I can find below the deck to free him, I promise I’ll be back, and go above again.

The blue line in the sky is so fat that I think I’m dreaming again. And the winking sea smiles back at me, no threat at all. I make my way over to the bow hatch and lift the door. I climb down into the tight storage space and ignore the corner filled with bones and try to find anything that might break the lock. But there’s nothing. So instead I grab some of the silver cans from near the bottom of the compartment and bring them back onto the deck. At least I can feed him, I tell myself, as I try to smash the can apart. And when it doesn’t do anything but dent, I go grab the knife and start to stab and twist into it. Finally, I get a slit wide enough that juice starts to come out. I pull it up to my nose and smell it. And then, without a note of anything rancid, I let the stuff fall onto my tongue. It tastes delicious and I force out a giant wad of the peas into my hands and then shovel the rest into my mouth, barely chewing. And then I drink the pea juice and look up to the sky and open my mouth. The rain is barely falling now and I get just enough to wet my tongue. And it’s just when I’m about to break the second can and bring it to Voley that I hear the noise. It’s a voice.

I freeze and grab the gun from the deck by my side, the whole time thinking it will be too late. I stick the butt under my armpit and pivot, facing the long sleek floor of the deck all the way back to wheelhouse.
Someone else is on board the ship.
But then it hits me: The radio.

            I run past the center hatch and throw down the can of peas. By the time I get to the receiver there’s nothing but white noise again. And I click the receiver and wait, saying hello over and over again until I realize I must have imagined it. Or else there really is someone else alive on the boat. Some compartment I haven’t discovered. It’s only after I’ve about given up, and am ready to check below deck to see if one of the men somehow survived, and had only been knocked out, that the static clears.

            “Pikes Peak here. Do you copy?” comes the woman’s voice. I practically fall over the receiver and my hand is shaking when I press the button in. Yes, I’m here, I reassure her. And then I click off as fast as I can and wait. My eyes dart around in apprehension, watching the too-good-to-be-true horizon, the flat stretch of canvas brown, as flat as I’ve seen it since Wyoming. And then, I twist around and study the white formations stuck in the horizon. And even as she responds, I can’t help but realize something impossible about the sight—the shapes haven’t moved. They haven’t even stayed the same size.
They’re getting bigger. Too big to be ice.  

            “We thought we’d lost you for good,” she says shakily, tension running just as high in her voice as mine. She tries to hide it with a chuckle.

            “We’re fighters,” is all I can think to say. And it dawns on me that I’m trusting her way too much. That it’s impossible to trust anyone as much as I want to trust her now. And that I’ve let my guard down maybe because she’s a woman. Or because she’s just a voice making promises over the radio. But I let her go on because the high I’m riding must be as good as the red powder. And she asks me—have you come across anything? And I know what she means. Mountain skylines. But as she says it, and as I stare at what I thought were the remnants of the pack, I know I was wrong. They’re mountains. Or an island. Or something. I’m sure of it. Because now I can see shades of gray shale against the white. I almost squeal it out to her.

            “I see some now,” I say, and even before she responds my hand grips tightly around the handle of the gun. Like she’ll spring out with her band of face eaters as soon as she knows my location. That she’s waiting to do the same thing to me as the ones in this ship wanted to do. But her voice keeps pulling me in the opposite direction—each time I hear her talk to me, it sounds strangely calming, like  hers is a voice I’ve heard before a million times. And it keeps soothing my doubts, telling me I really can trust her. That I have no other choice.

           
Let her know what they look like
races through my head, trying to move my tongue to speak. And she keeps asking for the description. But for some reason, I can’t say anything. I don’t want anyone else to come near Voley or me. There’s no one left to trust in the world. They all died out there on the pack and in the Colorado snow. So I let the radio fade to white noise and silence, and then I shut it off. It’s not worth the risk, is it? We can do it on our own. We’ve always done it on our own. And leaving the radio off from my fears that have mixed with elation into some kind of powerful fuel of adrenaline, I float across the deck under the rising heat and find my way down into the compartment. I grab the peas from the floor. The engine rumbles louder than the rain now, and I think that the last drops are hitting. And soon it will be dry and hot again. And that maybe we’re running right back into the pack, or the same death mountains we escaped from after Nuke Town. But I don’t care. We don’t need anyone’s help. And I break open the can and let Voley slop it up between the bars. I pet him and ask him what we should do.

            “Should I tell her boy?” I ask. He lays down, placing his head flat on the ground with his nose poking through the bars. The can is bone dry now, and I pull it away as he tries to lick the shredded metal. Finally he just closes his eyes as I pet him, content to not answer me and fall asleep. I flick his ear and let my mind wander. For a strange and long spell of time, I lay down on the dirty floor next to him. My mind drifts off, playing through a thousand scenarios of hope and death, measuring each one against the facts. The blue is back. There is land again. We have a ship. We have food. We don’t need help from anyone.

            But then something else pushes through my head. How long will it be until you run out of fuel? Food? You’re all alone and you’re going to die eventually. This is your only shot. Before too long, you’ll drift out of range forever, and then that’s it. No more luck. No more chances.

            And it fills my head like a light bulb: Remember where she is—she’s in Leadville. That’s the place. That’s the only place you’ve ever tried to get to. And suddenly there’s not even a question. We’re going to Leadville, I tell Voley, and I go back up onto the deck. And as I approach the radio to tell her where I am, I remind myself that there’s enough ammo here to put up a good fight. But we have to take the shot. So I tell her:

            “I see mountains,” I say. I click off and wait for the reply. It comes back almost right away, like she never left the radio. She asks me to describe it to her.

            “Three triangle peaks. To their right, a long flat slope going up. And then, the right side of the thing has a hooked edge. Like an
r.
The sky is almost all blue right above, and the rain’s letting off.”

            It takes forever for her to respond, so long that I start spying out over the water, expecting a sneak attack. Regret starts to build as I repeat, Hello? But she doesn’t answer for another twenty seconds. Then, finally, she tells me to hold on. Something urgent in her voice makes it sound like something has her captivated. Maybe she’s a prisoner of someone else, and they use her on the line to lure in their victims. But I know it’s all paranoia now. That it’s eating me alive because my body is so beat up. And finally, through a choked voice, she asks me if I see another island directly behind the one I’m looking at. I tell her I don’t see anything behind it, but as soon as the words spill out of my mouth, something appears between the indents of the three peaks. A long flat shelf of gray rock. I can only see a hair of it. But there’s definitely something there, behind the peaks. I don’t tell her though, and I ask her where that is—what she’s describing. She tells me to wait it out and look for another, long flat table of a mountain. She calls it Table Mountain. And if that’s what I see soon, then they might just know exactly where I’m at. I do everything I can to hold back, and I try to fish for more information. All I get out of her is that it would be too lucky. Too lucky to be Table Mountain. But she’s saying it like she thinks it really could be.  

            “Where the hell is Table Mountain?” I finally squeeze out, angered that she might be playing games with me.

            “Close to Curley Peak. Less than 100 miles from here,” she says.

            “We didn’t drift to Kansas?” I say, my gut dropping through the floor.

            “You wouldn’t be getting through to us if you were that far. The signal is too clear.”

            And I can do nothing more. All of the sudden it pours out of me. I tell her where we are. I tell her I see the long flat table of gray behind the three peaks. And then, in just another minute, after exultations and another voice crying out, she tells me they’re going to send out a boat.

            “What direction are you drifting?” she asks me. And without telling her any of the details, I just tell her to look for a ship. She asks me what I mean,
a ship,
and I say I can explain later, but I’m in a ship now. And I can follow her back to Pikes Peak in my ship if that’s where I really am. And like she’s suddenly lost all faith in me, her voice goes limp and she asks me, dead cold: “Who’s with you?” And I know. She thinks I’m the one setting her up now. That somehow it was all a ploy. And that I’m a hostage of the evil men that roam the Colorado sea and they’re using me to get to the location of Pikes Peak to take everything that’s left of their civilization there. To burn the veneer down for good. But I tell her twice: I’m alone. Alone. Me and Voley. We took a ship. They tried to take us but they couldn’t. And I tell her I’ll leave it at that until we meet. Until I see if this is all real.

            Somehow, she’s half-satisfied with that. But I feel like I can trust her more now for some strange reason. Because she was worried that I might come to hurt her, and that means her own company can’t be too bad. Not if they’d fear me. Not anything I can’t take on with four machine guns and a lot of ammo. But something else tells me I won’t need to. It’s the strangest sensation in the world—the old feeling that I’m finally heading home. That we’re going to rest at last. And turning the wheel just a little bit to angle us in on the mountain range, I head back down to Voley.

Chapter 30

The day passes too slowly, and keeping the ship by the land is all I can do to bide the time. I go up and down, feeding Voley and talking to him, petting him, and getting some water in his cage, and then coming back up top and watching the land and the steady ocean. Nothing looks dark in the sky until night comes, and when the light of the sun starts to disappear, the stars come back out like clockwork. As if they’d never went anywhere in the first place. Always watching us from behind the layers of film and wind.

            Finally the waiting gets the best of me and I turn the radio back on, hoping to find out how long it will take the boat from Pikes Peak to make it 100 miles. When I get nothing but static, I play the visuals from the day over and over in my head, imagining where the shoals might be if I drift in too close to the long mountain range. Every half an hour I start to feel the boat tugging, like the sea wants to drag her in toward a long underground table of rock. The dark shape against the deep gray doesn’t give me a good idea of depth perception, and all I can do is turn the wheel and shoot back out to sea some, and then turn off the throttle. Everything rolls softly and gently, and the rain comes down over me like fine mist. I wait as patiently as I can for something other than static to pierce the radio. Finally, sometime in the middle of the night, I hear a voice come through. It’s her.

            “This is Pikes Peak. Copy?” says the woman. I don’t wait—instead I come on right away, desperate to know if this is all real, to see someone who might be good instead of evil. When will they reach me? I ask. And then I hold my breath, hoping it wasn’t all a lie, or that they turned around—or worse yet, the sensation in my gut that they never even launched. All of it just a false alarm. They were looking at the wrong map. Or maybe the ice has closed in around them. But she comes back loud and clear and confident:

            “Unless they hit weather, they’ll see you sometime in the morning.”

            And then, after I have her repeat that for me, I listen to the details of the boat:
a red and black cutter vessel—two men aboard
. The thought alarms me—
two men—
but I don’t let it derail my hope. We’re in too deep now and there’s no turning back. I’m convinced they’re going to save us. Take us to Leadville. And then, right before I’m about to cut out for the night and go back down to Voley for a bit, she asks me, for the first time since Plane Floe, about the equipment. I lock up, because I have no idea what to say. Whether to keep the lie going, or to spill everything over the radio now and risk the rescue turning back. When she asks again when I don’t answer, and the static starts to drill into my ears, taunting me, I shut the radio down to make it look like the battery died. And then, having finished my conversation with Pikes Peak for the night, and resting on the wild hope that a boat shows up in the morning, I head across the pattering deck and down the stairs to waste the night by Voley’s side.