the mortis (7 page)

He takes the boat into the center of the rock encirclement. 
He goes hard with the paddle, trying to push ahead past the cape and pivot around to the other side, to head back toward shore.  The crashing sound of swells around him.  A constant showering of spindrift against his face and the sting of salt, caustic, the burning in his sinuses.  He channels through, and he’s almost turned the corner when a surging wave broadsides the craft and sends it slewing off, listing.  It tips sharply to the side.  He leans his body upwind, trying to stay steady, bracing strongly with the paddle, and for a moment he thinks the boat will hold but then it bellies over, capsizing entirely, deck down.  He skids out of the cockpit into the boil. 

Carried by the vest, he bobs to the surface.  Thrashing, wild-eyed.  His breath is spastic and shallow.  There is the deafening sound of the churn on all sides of him, and before he can even begin to get his bearings he is snatched by an eddy line and driven toward the coarse stone headwall.  Swept back and upward. 

He impacts head-on, and his brow cracks against the flat rock face.  The world goes white and he blinks rapidly, seeing nothing.  There is the immediate smell of gunmetal.  The quick warmth of his own blood.  Blindly he manages to turn himself around so that his spine is riding the wall.  His body rises and falls, helpless, and the rear collar of the lifejacket rasps against the basalt ridge. 

The world gradually comes back to him.  As his eyes refocus, he spots a sheltered position embayed from the constant train of waves and he moves toward it.  Kicking, edging along the pocked wall.  The spray of water shedding radially off the rocks into his eyes, his nose.  His head is pulsing.  He makes his way across to the bolt-hole crevice and wedges himself in as much as he
’s able.  It’s a better position, but his body still lurches sickeningly up and down.  He coughs and spits.  He wipes blood from his eyes.

To his left he sees the upended kayak.  Its pale underbelly.  The hull is pinned against a small rock formation, and whitewater is roostertailing off the end.  The paddle is on the surface, straining against the tether line, whipping to one side and then the
other like a leashed animal—it isn’t very far from him.  Maybe five yards, that’s all.  He could probably reach out a hand and take hold of it, pull the nylon line hand-over-hand and haul the boat free.  The entire thing is only about forty-five pounds.  But stranded at the periphery of the churn, he can’t force himself to move forward.  He just stares, lost, trying to regulate his breathing.

Beyond the cape, past the rock formations in front of him, there is nothing but open water for about five hundred miles northward.  Just an empty expanse.  It seems impossible, but if you could cover that five hundred miles, you
’d reach the continent—which could be a good or a bad thing.  It’s hard to be certain, since there’s no way of knowing how the disease has impacted life on the mainland.

You can
’t see the continental landmass at all from this distance.  The curvature of the earth being what it is.  Looking toward the skyline, there’s nothing visible other than vast horizon, the ocean stretching, desolate, all the way to the offing.  But the continent is out there somewhere, and there was a time when they considered trying to row the stretch.  Just taking out a tandem sea-porter and paddling all the way to landfall.  Fifteen to twenty days on the water, that’s what he figures.  Fifteen to twenty days, given a fully laden boat and eight hours at the blades before every sundown.  As with everything, potable water would be the main issue, but he always thought they could carry enough in cargo.  Lee never believed in the idea, though.  Sometimes when you’re lost it’s better to stay where you are and wait, she told him.

Park
helplessly watches the grounded kayak—in spite of the proximity, it seems unreachable—but he can’t just abandon the boat and swim the distance to shore, so he makes a decision: when the wave cycle is at its trough, he pushes away from the headwall and lunges, arm extended, toward the tethered paddle.  Reaching to catch an edge of the blade.  Treading water.  He fumbles with his fingers and takes hold; he inches up and grips the haft.  He scissor-kicks and heaves with his arms, and the force of the next wavefront propels him backward to the outcropping.  He holds his breath.  He concentrates everything on his grip. 

The kayak comes free.  It turns itself over and then it
’s thrashing wildly on the tether’s end.  His spine hits the headwall but he maintains his hold.  The rush of water sends the boat surging in his direction, and he uses the line to tow it in the rest of the way until it strikes the outcropping beside him. 

He doesn
’t wait.  When the wave cycle hits its trough, he scrabbles onto the deck and swings one leg over the carry handle, straddling the rear of the kayak, keeping his chest down and his back flat.  He throws the paddle into the cockpit, slides his body forward and then drops his legs through the entryway. 

He pivots and slides into the seat and immediately takes the paddle and starts feathering the water with the blade, steadying himself.  The next wave hits, and he braces the boat against the rocks.  He rides the wall, skimming alongside, running parallel, with the hull scuffing against granite.  He tries his best to align his movements with the wave cycle, moving forward in intervals until he can turn the corner on the outcropping.

The waters are blessedly calm on the row to shore.  He pauses at around the halfway mark, eyes closed, and allows the kayak to skim along.  He rests his shoulders, head down.  After a time he sets the paddle on the deck and gets to the business of bilging out water from the cockpit flooring—around a foot and a half of ocean, up to mid-shin.  It doesn’t take him long at the pump handle before he accepts that the satchel and everything it carried is gone.  Some part of him knew already, but now it’s confirmed.  He checks his clothes, his belt.  The kitchen knife is also gone. 

He unbuckles the vest even though he shouldn
’t.  He shrugs out of it and lies back, gently probing the wound on his forehead.  When he’s satisfied it’s not too deep, he rips off another piece of his shirt hem and ties it on.  He tries stretching the stiffness out of his arms but it doesn’t help, and so he quits and just rests his head on the deck and stares upward. 

The sun is at ha
lf-mast.  Rampant blue skies—no sign of the Bengal monsoon cloudfronts, in spite of the season.  A black and white tern, solitary, winging overhead.  He closes his eyes and thinks about his sad excuse for a plan and considers reshaping it, but in the end he can’t think of any other way forward so he opens his eyes and carries on.

Eventually he is able to bring the boat into a longshore current that pushes toward land.  He rides the current most of the way in, but at a hundred yards off the coast he digs out and lets the boat drift.  He squints at the coastline.  The staterooms on the water-facing side of Resort Lavelha.  Its white stucco walls and archways, the saltillo terra-cotta tiling and the sculpted botanics of its landscape architecture.  The sunlight, shining on the corpses assembled on
its beachfront, piled in the sand at the wrackline like pale driftwood.  All of their rigid bodies.  The disease often ends a life in this way, with a terrible kind of rigor mortis where all of the fibers of the musculature simultaneously contract, locking together.  No movement, no way to draw a breath, nothing. 

Park sights a landing position east of the main beachfront.  Nothing but a small sandspit
at the foot of a steep bluff—out of the way, but still near enough to Lavelha for efficient foot travel.  He comes in apace, grounds the boat in the shallows and dismounts, jogging in the sandbar, guiding with a grip on the carry handle.  Splashing through.  He drags the kayak up onto the narrow shoal.  The sound of the keel ridge grating on wet sediment.  He tosses in the paddle and starts to scan his surroundings, breathing hard, slightly crouched down. 

Above him on the ridgetop there is enough tree cover to keep the site more or less concealed from the resort.  He
’ll have to climb his way out and back in again later, but that’s the price of seclusion, a price generally worth paying.  He squats down and wrings out his pants at the cuffs, then starts looking around the shoal for something he can use to defend himself.

During the search, h
e comes across a few limbs that have fallen from the tree-lined ridge and he tests them, but there’s nothing sturdy enough to serve as any kind of blunt-force weapon.  Instead he decides to gather an armload of the fuller branches and drape them across the kayak deck for camouflage, working under the assumption that he’ll be coming back again—that he’ll be making a return trip. 

Just off the sandbank he finds a tapered shard of shingle stone.  He hefts it, getting a sense.  In the end he decides to pocket it, and then he retur
ns to the boat to check it over one final time.  As he examines the hull, he remembers the forward deck hatch—a compartment built right into the fiberglass structure—but when he pushes aside the branches and opens the hatch cover, there’s nothing there.  Nothing inside the mesh storage bag, nothing useful anywhere on this sand bank.  He re-conceals the deck with the tree limbs, then he approaches the side of the bluff and starts planning how to make his way up. 

It isn
’t his first time returning here—he has slipped into the Lavelha out of necessity a few times since the collapse hit, and not just on the outer grounds, foraging; he has actually gone inside a few of the desolate hotel buildings.  One of the cafés on the west wing, the fitness center locker room, the Manakory Lounge.  The Recreation Annex, the outdoor pool enclosure, the daycare facility.  But all of those were on the outer fringe of the resort complex, not here—not in the heart.  He’s never been inside any of the guest suites since the collapse, and he’s never been on the grounds at all without his wife nearby. 

The disease is at its worst in this place, on the Lavelha grounds; this is the site where the collapse first took root on the islet.  Three months ago, there were around five thousand living souls here. 
Five thousand.  Vacationing, mostly, but there was a conference taking place at the Lavelha also—some multinational based out of Tanzania had sent its executives on a team-building retreat.  Zip-lines in the tree canopies and trust-falls and small-group breakout sessions and whatnot.  So there were the vacationers and the conference-goers, and they totaled around five thousand.  The hotel was proud of the fact—the concierge let him know the figure at check-in time. 

  Out of the five tho
usand, almost all got sick—children, women, men, everybody; it didn’t matter.  Almost every guest contracted the disease, and afterward almost all of them stayed in the vicinity of the hotel.  Maybe it was the familiarity.  Maybe it was the difficulty of traveling anywhere else, or maybe it was pure instinct, staying where the resources were most concentrated, who knows the reasoning, if there was any.  Thousands have succumbed to the sickness over the past twelve weeks, but even accounting for the dead, on any given day you could still have hundreds of people walking these grounds.  Some of them are outright violent, others indifferent, but all of them without exception are volatile and unpredictable.

The hotel staff saw what was coming; they got
the hell out of the Lavelha early on.  Rina included.  The instant it became clear that this was a mass epidemic and not a handful of scattered cases, the staff loaded themselves into their three cheapjack buses and hauled off back down the murram, southwest to the town of Cãlo, no looking back. 

At the time, the entire staff was made up of Torluna locals, members of the ethnic Mirasai— all of them dark-skinned, all of them
a hundred percent pure on account of their isolation—and Cãlo was home.  The Mirasai would commute up the dirt road every morning before sunrise in those buses to work at the hotel or to work in the Trap, and then they’d go back home again at nightfall.  Seven days a week.  Only a few dozen staff remained on the grounds of the hotel around the clock, but now they’re gone also: everybody is either dead or back in the enclave. 

In theory you could make your own way across the islet to Cãlo.  Go West, young man, down the murram.  Try to hide yourself among the town
’s shanty houses and colonial-era stucco buildings.  Cãlo is a safe haven, disease-free as far as anyone can tell, but you can forget about going because they’ll never let a foreigner in past the border.  Unless you’re one of the Mirasai people, the town is off limits.  They might let in a tourist or two who can show a passport from an African nation, maybe, but even that’s not for certain.  It’s all just rumors, the things you hear. 

What Park knows for certain is that the Mirasai have set up vehicle barricades—metal sawhorses and bales of barbwire and rusted-out sedans set on their bare rims—all along the dirt road leading into Cãlo, expressly to keep people like him and Lee out.  It doesn
’t matter that his skin is brown and hers browner.  The Mirasai won’t stand and watch as an influx of Americans and Canadians and Australians and Europeans carry their foreign plague in from the resort.  From what he’s heard, there are armed Mirasai militiamen stationed at the roadblocks on the murram around the clock, watching for border crossers.