The Boat (3 page)

Maggie dragged her mind away from resenting
Flyboy
and put it back on task. She was being a real bitch today–if not outside, then certainly inside. She needed rest and time alone: a bath, a drink, a magazine that hadn’t been looked at eighteen times already. All of those things were near impossibilities in their new world.

She got a firmer grip on the fishing net and scanned the floor of the rowboat. Two fingers lay under the seat and she scooped them up and over the side, her face set in lines of disgusted determination. She had to hunt for the third; it had made it to the front of the little boat. She was reminded of snakes and chickens, both purported to ‘live’ quite some time after being divided from their heads.

She shuddered, hoping it wouldn’t twitch when she touched the net to it. That grossed her out. She finally got up enough nerve to reach forward and with one smooth movement, flung it up and over the side. It made a little ‘plip’ sound when it hit the water. She sighed and sank down onto the middle seat, blowing out a held breath.

She scanned the horizon, as had become habit, her eyes skimming from beach to road to the little motel and its surrounding cabins. They hadn’t seen any new survivors for weeks now. But you never knew.

“Maggie?”

She jumped and turned, her heart racing, but it was only Babygirl. She stood at the edge of the deck and looked at Maggie with worried eyes. “Did you get rid of them fingers?”

Maggie nodded and smiled. “All gone, Babygirl.” She scrambled up onto the deck and took Babygirl’s hand. “Want to eat?”

But Baby’s eyes went past Maggie and her face clouded. “What man is that?” she asked.

“Man?” Maggie echoed, confused, then turned to the starboard side. A yellow life raft floated twenty-five feet out. A man lay spread-eagled in the center, unconscious or sleeping–Maggie couldn’t tell which–but she could see that he was covered in blood.

Chapter Three

Maggie dropped Babygirl’s hand and gave her shoulder a small push. “Go get Randy. Tell him bring the walkie.” Baby nodded and trotted away. “Denny! Brian!” Maggie called and they stumbled from the salon, bleary-eyed. Napping again. Christ, those boys could sleep twenty out of twenty-four hours.

Denny was dark-haired and Brian blond, but beyond that, Maggie thought the two of them had an almost troubling similarity. She knew that was largely because she wasn’t looking at people the same way anymore. Although once a warm and friendly woman, she’d become colder since…everything…had happened. She didn’t give the other members of the boat the attention she would have in her past life. She didn’t question them or think about the things they told her. She felt inner-turned, like a pill bug rolled tight onto itself; a hard shell protecting her from her surroundings. She didn’t want to let anyone in. Babygirl was bad enough with her growing need for mothering.

“What’s up?” Denny asked. His eyes slid down to Maggie’s legs and then back up, over her stomach and breasts.
He wasn’t lecherous, he was young
, Maggie reminded herself,
he can’t help himself
. She didn’t take it personally. She found it ironic that she probably looked better now than she had for much of her life. She was thin and fit from the extra exercise and lack of excess food, and she moved with a confidence she had never realized came from having muscles.

“Dude,” Brian said from just behind Denny and pointed. “There’s a dude out there, man.”

Randy huffed up, walkie-talkie in hand. “What’s going on?”

“Dude in the bay, dude,” Brian said.

Randy blinked at him and then turned to Maggie. “Dude in what? What is he talking about?” Randy liked to act as though Brian and Denny spoke a completely different language from himself.

In a way, they did kind of, Maggie thought.

She pointed past Randy. “There’s a man out there on a raft; see him?”

Randy turned and squinted out over the bay and then nodded. “What do you think? Sinker? He’s covered in blood.”

Maggie shook her head. “I don’t know. We have to go check. Call Steve, would you? It would be best if–”

Randy nodded, bringing the walkie up. He depressed the button. “Hey,
Big Daddy
, you guys there?
Big Daddy
? This is ThreeBees and we have a, uh…a situation over here, over.”

“What’s up, ThreeBees? Over.” The voice that came through the walkie-talkie was thin and tinny. Almost as one, Randy, Maggie, and Denny looked in the other direction to the fifty-foot tug sitting pugnaciously between them and the
Flyboy
. The words
Big Daddy
were spray painted across the black hull like dripping, pirate graffiti. A man stood at the rail outside the engine room, walkie in his hand.

“Yeah, hey, Steve,” Randy said. “We have a man floating on some kind of raft. He’s uh, he’s pretty bloody. And not moving. Over.”

“Sinker? Over.”

Randy shook his head. “We don’t know. Can you send someone to check? Over.”

“On it, ThreeBees, over and out.”

Randy grinned a little sheepishly, letting the walkie fall to his side. Brian sank down onto a deck chair, running his hand though his hair. Denny was red in the face. “Dude, I could have taken a jet ski and checked it out. Brian’d gone with me, right dude?”

“Yeah, man, ‘course,” Brian said, but there was little conviction in his voice. Denny blew out a disgusted breath and turned, hands on hips, as three jet skis whined away from
Big Daddy
. They sounded like apocalyptic wasps.

Denny hated being stuck on the ThreeBees. It was old people as far as the eye could see, he felt, and he and Brian were only nineteen. Maggie was at least kind of hot, but she was old, too. Jade was hot, with her long black hair and exotic black eyes, but Jade rarely came out of the room she shared with the old lady. Her brother Singer would join the two of them in there and they played mahjong or something equally boring all damn day.

Fuck, I wish I was on Big Daddy
, he thought.
Or even Flyboy would be better than this floating retirement community we’re on now
.
Big Daddy
was a sausage fest, but it still would have been better than this. His eyes tracked the jet skis as they went by. Steve was on the front one and he gave the ThreeBees a short wave as they went by. Steve was a pretty big dude, blond hair kept very short, sharply intelligent blue eyes, and very much in charge on the
Big Daddy
. But he was a fair guy, from what Brian had overheard. He was calm and decent. Not like the dude that ran
Flyboy
, that dick Adam.

Twenty three of the men in the twenty-five to fifty-five age range had ended up with Steve on the
Big Daddy
. It took a lot of muscle to manage the tug. It was a big, bulky boat, powerful but lacking grace. Sometimes at night, Denny would look across the water and listen as they played music over there and laughed the loud, raucous laughter of men out of the censorious hearing of women. A bottle would be passed around, adding to the merriment. It was odd, too, that many of the men over there had been single before the event. They’d had few ties and now were quicker to recover their equilibrium. For some–the ones who’d felt uneasy in a technology-oriented society–this brave new world came almost as a blessing and they lived out the fantasy of seafaring warriors: Vikings or maybe even pirates, a little boy’s dream finally come true.

Denny wished fervently that he and Brian were part of it. But fuck no, they were stuck on the ThreeBees. Christ, even the name was homo.

The three men neared the life raft.

Steve put up one hand, signaling the other two drivers to stop about fifteen feet from the raft. It bobbed harder in the small wake thrown up by the jet skis. The man inside lay on his back and his head rocked side to side, as if telling them not to rock him so hard. He looked young–early twenties at the most. His eyes were closed and there was a long gash across his forehead and most of his face was covered in blood: fresh near the wound but drying to a brownish maroon in the creases of his neck and in his hairline.

It was hard to judge how long ago the man had been hurt. Steve had seen a lot of injuries in that frantic week it took to attain the shoreline and quick assessments of the injured had become a habit. With the sun and wind…this could be a relatively fresh wound. Steve scanned the horizon in all directions. There were no other boats that he could see, save their own small armada. Where had this guy come from if there wasn’t another boat around? He could have cast off from land and been carried by the current, but that seemed a long shot considering the distance–and it wasn’t a large raft.

The one sure thing was that this guy wasn’t a sinker; sinkers didn’t bleed. If they were somewhat fresh you might get a coagulated, blackish jelly from them but if they weren’t fresh, then the most you might see from their veins would be a dried up crumble that looked almost like coffee grounds.

Steve reached out with a gaff, hooked the rope threaded through cleats around the raft’s edge and pulled it closer. He scanned the interior, seeing if there was anything useful aboard. That scavenger mentality had already become so ingrained that he hardly noticed he was doing it. Another condition of the times.

A hunting knife–big with a serrated section across the back of the blade–lay near the man’s hand. A twitch of unease went through Steve’s mind. The placement of the knife was off…somehow fake looking, something was missing. As though someone had gone to some trouble to–

“Hey, little help?”

The man’s eyes were open. They were bright, bright blue and the whites looked very white, contrasting strongly against the mask of blood. His voice was raspy, barely there.

“Can you move?” Steve said and the man closed his eyes again. He nodded slightly and then struggled to sit up, bringing a hand to the gash on his forehead. He opened his eyes again but they were slitted in pain.

“Can you make it across to a jet ski?” Steve motioned Carl forward. Carl’s jet was a two-person job, big and roomy. “Can you climb up with Carl?”

“Come on, man,” Carl said, leaning forward and offering his hand. “Ease on up here.” Carl was big, bigger than Steve, and dark. His wildly growing mass of curly hair and beard made him look like a virile pirate. He looked as though he should have been riding some kind of sea dragon of yore rather than the ubiquitous jet ski.

The man scanned Carl up and down with a look of unease. Then he reached forward shakily, coming onto his knees. Carl’s hand was like a bear paw, covering the man’s entire hand, and when the man slipped, Carl was able to life him bodily across to the deck of the jet.

Steve had another twinge of apprehension. There was something off about the guy, something…Steve shook his head.
There’s something off about all of us
, he thought. 
Nothing seems exactly right anymore. Because nothing
is
exactly right
.

“Get him to ThreeBees,” Steve said, raising his voice to be heard over the jets. “Maggie can see about that cut then we’ll get him sorted.” He watched as Carl started away, the man holding fast to the giant’s back.

“Dave, tie that raft up to ThreeBees and then head back to
Big Daddy
, okay?”

Dave hesitated. He and Steve had met up three days after the shit hit the fan and had been together ever since. Dave had seen the hesitation in Steve’s eyes.

“What is it?” Dave asked, raising his voice, reaching for the raft with his own gaff, and then grabbing for the rope curled untidily at its bow. “What did you see?”

Steve shook his head, but his gaze went involuntarily to the departing jet. He shook his head again more firmly. “Nothing. It’s nothing. I’ll see you back at
Big Daddy
. Hour at the most.” Even as he said it, Maggie came to his mind. He might be longer than an hour.

Dave started away, the yellow raft bouncing jauntily in his wake. Dave was young and handsome in a clean-cut, college way, his brownish blond hair blown sharply back from his face. The scene would have been set if the raft had carried two pretty co-eds in bikinis with beers in their hands, laughing and squealing at the speed.

World isn’t like that anymore
, Steve thought. He powered off his jet and the silence that fell was a relief. Even the imaginary laughter of the pretty coeds faded off to the horizon.

Water lapped the edges of the jet, washing up and over his feet. Despite the sun, he shivered and the sky seemed to darken. The swamp. That had been the worst and not just because of wet feet, either.

Because of Amelia and what had happened to her; that’s why the swamp had been the worst.

~ ~ ~

Steve had lived in central Jersey, just outside of Princeton, and he taught at the university. He liked the dichotomy of the bustling, townie atmosphere of the campus only a fifteen minute drive away from the secluded silence of his little house in the woods. When he was home, he couldn’t even see his nearest neighbor.

Best of both worlds.

But the campus had become a very uneasy place during that last week. The rumor among the students was that lots of people were dying of a strange new flu, and it wasn’t just the really old and the really young this time–it was everyone. They were hearing (and repeating) that the government was covering up the numbers and trying to soothe everyone with the platitude of get rest, stay hydrated and you’ll be better before you know it. 

But the rumor persisted: if you got sick, you died. And that wasn’t even the worst part of what was said to be going on.

The rumors had begun in the spring and had been mere blips on the radar at first. A few mentions on Twitter and Reddit, a couple of uneasy Facebook posts. Someone had posted a ten-second video clip to YouTube of police in riot gear beating a small group of students outside a California university infirmary–they might have been protesters, there was a lot of that going around lately. Something was happening behind the students, something impossible to see clearly in the shaky, obviously hand-held, low quality video. Something–some
one
–staggered down the stairs from the infirmary and the students had surged away from it like panicked sheep, looking over their shoulders and screaming, almost overwhelming the police line. The police had pushed back, batons swinging, and then the video had cut out but not before an astute observer could have noticed the rally cry from the students: “dead! dead! dead!” which they yelled over and over. It had more than three hundred thousand views within an hour and then mysteriously disappeared, leaving only the warning ‘owner has not verified content’. The comment portion remained for a day longer, becoming more strident, and then that was gone, too.