by Anna Dove
“Well, to be honest, I’m not sure how far out it is. There’s no light. I’ve been estimating—and I believe we are decently far from land but I can’t be sure. So it would be dangerous to turn around if I can’t see. At this point—at this point, I think it’s best if we just try to wait it out until morning.”
The air began to cool, and little droplets of water sprayed up into the sailboat as the water lapped against its sides.
“Maybe if it’s going to rain, we should spread the sail over this portion of the sailboat,” said Haley, pointing to the empty spaces on either side of the thwart. “We want to protect our food.”
As she spoke, a raindrop fell on her head, splashing cool against her face. A moment, and then another leisurely droplet on her forearm.
They lowered the sails from the mast as the raindrops began to fall from the sky, small, interspersed raindrops at first, that did not increase in frequency or volume until the sails had been spread like a tarp over the sailboat and all four occupants lay below. They fit snugly, but comfortably.
The rain fell softly on the sailboat for the next four hours, pattering the sail above them. Haley lay on her back with her bag on her stomach, listening to the soft lullaby of the rain. The darkness, the swaying of the boat, the comforting sound of the rain—she fell in and out of sleep, dozing and waking up to listen before dozing again.
In the middle of the night, the rain pattered its last few drops on the sailboat and then moved southwards, and the clouds cleared from the sky, revealing the brilliant half-moon.
Haley awoke to Carlos sitting up next to her and remarking that the rain had stopped. She pushed the sail back and peering out of the boat, saw the bright moonpath reflecting on the surface of the water, the Milky Way galaxy stretching in a grand arc across the heavens, and the distance dark smudge that would be the western shore of Maryland.
They were alone on the water as far as the eye could see. She pulled back the sail, the remaining droplets running off over the side of the sailboat. The others moved up to the thwart and took in the beauty of the gentle water stretching out to meet the galaxied heavens. A breeze played lightly in the air.
“Help me get this back up,” said Elizabeth, and they all pitched in to quickly hoist up the mainsail and jib. Catching a faint breeze with a quick hand, Elizabeth guided the sailboat skillfully, needing no compass as she kept the bow pointed towards the North Star.
15. No More Bourbon
“Be not the slave of your own past - plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep, and swim far, so you shall come back with new self-respect, with new power, and with an advanced experience that shall explain and overlook the old.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson
Jack Hoffman stood in the doorway, tucked out of view of the alley in NE Washington. His face was thrown into shadow, but his eyes watched the entrance to the alley like a trapped cat, fixed with a queer resolve on the narrow passage. He leaned against the side of the doorway carefully, his weight shifting. One hand slipped inside his jacket and stayed there. It was a warm night, and so one might have found it peculiar that he wore any sort of jacket.
Presently another figure came into view, entering the passageway and treading heavily on the pavement. The same swaggering gait--it was the man who had previously provided Jack with alcohol at the Supreme Court. He strode confidently down the alley, and his lips puckered in a whistle.
As he passed the doorway, Jack stepped noiselessly from the shadows and fell into step behind the other. The other man ceased whistling, and abruptly stopping for a split second, swung his elbow back and pitted his follower in the chest. Jack stumbled back for a moment, his hands rising up for balance, and then he flung himself forward, knocking the other to the ground.
They struggled and rolled in deathly combat, each straining in a fight for their very lives. These were no amateurs; they positioned their bodies and attacked each other with expertise indicative of many years of training. They were up; they bounced from wall to wall in the narrow alley. Jack finally landed a hook on the other man’s jaw, stunning him momentarily; one moment was all that was needed. Jack’s hands found their way to the throat of his rival, and stayed there. A thrashing, a desperate clawing, and then the other man fell very still.
Jack let go, and the other crumpled to the pavement.
“I knew it, you dog,” said Jack quietly. He stared down at his dead rival unflinchingly. “I’d best be going now. You already got what you wanted from me. Seems like you and whoever else involved in this sickness, seems like you want me gone. Fine, so be it, I’ll be gone.”
He turned to step away, and then paused, turned back and knelt by the body. Taking off his jacket, he covered the face. His hands moved from the jacket to the dead man’s shoulder.
“How did they get you, Rick?” he said, and his tone had changed remarkably. He spoke with a great sadness, a heartbreaking gravity, that was no facade but that welled from the depths of his being.
“I’m sorry I had to be the one,” he continued, under his breath. “I’m sorry. I won’t remember you like this, I promise. I’ll remember you playing cards in Tehran, and I’ll remember that damn picture you carried around with you all the time. Jessica, right? I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry. I hate them all the more--how the hell did they make you like this? I swear to you, I’ll avenge you, you and all the others of whom they’ve disposed like pieces of trash to be burnt. This wasn’t my fault, friend. Wasn’t my fault. I’ll promise you, this won’t be how I’ll remember you.”
He rocked back on his heels and looked up at the sky.
“I’ll remember you buttoning up your jacket, and lacing up your boots, and facing the enemy side by side. Those were great and terrifying days. What a shame, that our existences are so whittled down when we become pawns in another’s hand. You used to be one of the best men I knew. What was it? How did they get you?”
He fell silent for a minute, and the night air closed around them.
“Well, then, goodbye,” he murmured hesitatingly, and his voice trembled ever so imperceptibly. “See you on the west side of the moon.”
Leaving his jacket, he went from the alley into the street, where the moonlight illuminated his features. His hands shook, his pale, long fingered hands with skin seemingly transparent to purple veins below.
Jack Hoffman was an alcoholic. He suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, acquired from his time deployed in Iran. And he had, in his pocket, a small bottle of the last alcohol he had been able to obtain since the attack two weeks ago, a Bombay gin.
He had to leave this city. There were too many people who knew that he was a lynchpin in the attack, that he knew too much. He had watched the attack happen, the electrical grid disintegrate, the death toll rise as people battled desperately over food and water. How many people had been involved, and at what levels? No doubt Reed was involved, but how many others?
He thought back to his time on Baker Island. The names of all those involved rolled around in his head like marbles, and he reached for the gin, and then decided to wait, considering that this was the last he had.
His mind, his body, depended chemically on alcoholic stimulus every day. He had built an incredible tolerance to the substance; he could drink the better half of a handle of whiskey and still function reasonably. He tucked his chin to his chest and walked on, his step quickening as he thought of the fact that the last alcohol he had was in his pocket.
His resources were drained. If there had been a way to obtain liquor in the city, he would have stayed. But there was nothing. The liquor stores had long been raided. The city of runners and alcoholics was drained dry of alcohol, and he could do nothing about it.
He also knew that his name was on the list of people to be killed. Whoever was behind all of this, they had not spared civilians and they would stop at nothing to exterminate him like a pesky fly on the wall. It would be wise to leave before they found him, to disappear into the great expanse of quiet land.
His feet took him northwards. He walked past quiet buildings and dark windows with a heightened sense of alertness, watching and listening. They towered above him like great forlorn shells, dark ghosts of the life that had used to exist. He wondered how many people were cowering inside, caught between sleep and alertness, praying for daylight to come.
Soon the residential area of southern Maryland presented itself, with its suburban brick buildings. He kept along the main streets, weaving in and out of the shadows cast by the moon. Empty cars lined the streets--cars that suited men would have driven every day to work, would have spilled coffee in, would have stored paperwork in, would have played their favorite songs in. Empty now, and rather unalive--looking. Quite spooky, to be honest, and Jack thanked whatever vague deity he could think of, that he was not a timid or superstitious person.
There was no one on the streets. By now, an unspoken social code had emerged, that the only people who would dare leave their houses at night were murderers and thieves. By day, everyone minded their own business, ignoring each other as they passed on the street, restrained by the fact that survival was more important than war. Water-gathering was done by day, animal hunting, cooking over fires—all of this happened in the daylight. And as the last rays of sun disappeared each day, families would bar themselves inside their houses, apartment mates would lock their doors, and the nightly sentry shifts would take place. For at night, those who did not have the knowledge or resources to survive would prowl, looking for those who did. Many had moved away from the cities anyway, recognizing that the lesser the concentration of people, the higher the chance of survival.
Jack had been trained to survive, and he had been trained to kill. If he had not been an alcoholic, he would have been one of the individuals in the country who was least affected by the attack. He knew every plant, every animal, he knew how to find water and create shelter. He could fight off an assailant with the tenacity and skill of a professional—indeed, he had much practice oversees in this department, with men much more dangerous than suburban prowlers.
In the early hours of the morning, his head began to hurt as the cushion of liquor from the night before started to wear off. He pulled the small bottle reluctantly from his pocket. His hands trembled and his skin, pale and clammy, showed beads of perspiration. Twisting open the lid, he held it to his lips and felt the burning in his throat as he swallowed.
As he drained the contents, his headache diminished and he knew he needed to find a place where he could suffer through the symptoms that would start in the next twenty four hours. It would need to be dark and protected from view. If his body could survive the withdrawal, he would need water and food for recovery.
He would be best situated near a stream, he thought. He veered to the west, into the woodlands near Rockville, and followed the terrain downhill. There would always be water at the lowest point; after less than an hour, he found it—a little babbling brook, gushing peacefully over a bed of stones. It sounded pleasantly in his ears.
He gathered branches from the ground, a variety of sizes. The two largest ones he laid adjacent to each other at their ends, so that they created a sixty degree angle. He layered more branches above, stabilizing the walls by placing a cross-branch every now and then across the top of the angle. When his shelter had reached three feet in height, he placed branches along the top as a roof, and covered them with a bed of leaves.
Tearing up patches of moss from the ground around the shelter, he laid them carefully inside to create the most comfort possible. He then took the empty bottle from his pocket, and filling it with water from the brook, laid it next to where his head would rest.
He could bear any fight; the desperate movements, the pain, the exhilaration and adrenaline, the grotesque nature of death—but as he stood and surveyed this little bunker, his eyes welled with helpless tears. How savagely unfair, that having won so many fights, he might be killed now not in a glorious show of bravado but slowly and quietly by his own body, turning in on itself. This made him very angry, and he spat on the bunker. It was the cruelest of ironies, that he would be robbed even in death. To escape a thousand bullets, live through a stabbing, fight in hand to hand combat, bear the brutal heat of the desert and the despair of loneliness,--he had flirted with death, daring it to come fight him. And now, he faced it while the forest breezes cooled his brow and the sweet chirping of the crickets soothed his ears, weaponless, emaciated, weak.
Walking to the brook, he cupped his hands under its surface and splashed water onto his face. The coolness soothed him. Sitting for a moment with the water dripping off his face, he watched as the stones below current reflected the moonlight. A memory flashed through his mind--himself as a child, picking up stones from the bottom of a lake that had that perfect round, flat shape for skipping. He would pull back his arm, and send the stones flying across the shining surface, in perfect arcs, as if they were alive, until the stones lost momentum and plunked down one final time. It struck him that his life was the same as that of a stone being skipped--hurtling through time, up, down, up, down, until at last it sinks. He wished he had never been picked up from the bottom of the lake, never been flung out into the air at all.
He drank long from the brook, and relieved himself, and then went to the bunker and laid down. He could not sleep. His eyes roved from branch to branch lining the makeshift roof above him. The babbling of the brook went on and on, never ceasing.
His hands sought the mossy earth and he grasped the softness in his hands. Since he was alive, he would rather not die, he decided. He liked the spongy moss and the clean, gurgling brook. He breathed deeply and the cool night air filled his lungs. He prayed to no one in particular, voicing his concern that he might not live through the next two days, and that made him feel a little better, but not much.
The air became a little warmer presently, and some birds began to sing. Jack realized that it would soon be morning. He drank the bottle of water, got up and refilled it, and then laid the new bottle by his moss pillow. He noticed a headache.
By noon, he was not himself, as the chemicals in his body ravaged his internal systems.
The woods surrounding him shaded him from the sun as he writhed suffering. They spread their leaves peacefully over him, as if they were trying to help. The ground was soft and kind beneath him, supporting his shaking frame. Singing hopefully in the treetops, the cardinals flashed to and fro agitatedly, wishing that they had human hands to help this poor soul. Sympathy was in the grain of the tree bark, dripping from the dew in the grass, ripe in the berries that fell from the bushes. The earth absorbed his cries, did not tremble as he tore in agony at it and pounded his head against it in rhythmic succession.
As dusk fell, Jack had fallen deathly quiet, having crawled back into his shelter. His head lay motionless on the pillow, and the breeze wafted over him, sifting some of the leaves on his little roof into the air, where they fluttered quietly to the ground.
16. The Search
“Everyone who got where he is has had to begin where he was.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson
A few days after having set sail, and yearning for dry land, our travelers docked at the marina by the lighthouse in Havre de Grace, Maryland. Haley felt an instantaneous rush of relief as she saw the familiar buildings beyond a row of trees. They climbed from the boat onto the dock, on which Haley had spent much time as a younger person, writing or reading or watching the sailboats pass.
The cool April night air nipped at their noses, and they pressed on, pushing forward their feet one after another in a weary manner. They were tired, they were hungry, they were chilled.
Haley glanced at Junetta, fearing that the older woman might be lagging, but the grandmother’s leather boots kept pace in the grass, slow but steady. She marveled at the endurance and tenacity with which Junetta carried on; the woman seemed to have inner wells of stamina in reserve, kept away until the moment required their usage.
Elizabeth paused
for a moment and took a package of crackers from the backpack, and passed it around. They all drank from the water bottle and then wordlessly continued on.
Havre de Grace is sunk in a valley, bordered by hills that lead up to the town of Aberdeen. Haley’s childhood home was halfway up this hill, in a little agricultural community with evenly spaced modest homes on two or three-acre plots. There were gardens and small pastures for animals.
For the first time, the attack suddenly became very personal to Haley. One can desensitize oneself to horrible events when one is not personally involved with or related to the people suffering. Haley had, in an attempt to preserve emotional and mental stability, disengaged with the victims of the attack, avoiding eye contact with anyone on the street, pushing from her mind the images of falling planes, screaming children, smashed-up cars, the universal expressions of terror and helplessness that had been sketched on the faces of everyone that day. She had barricaded herself away from all of it, focusing on the pressing matter of survival. Yet now, passing the darkened homes of neighbors she knew, of friends who she had grown up with, an overwhelming sense of anger mixed with some real fear overcame her and tears welled into her eyes.
Two hours after docking in the Harbor, they finally found themselves standing in front of the house in which Haley grew up. It was a modest rancher, very unique, with stone portions around the front door and red barnlike slatted wooden exterior walls. A flower garden with a few blooms and many weeds grew to their left; Haley remembered planting tulip bulbs with her mother Judith the previous fall. They had put them in just before the frost. She remembered pulling weeds, watering plants, watching as little buds grew, hunting for monarch caterpillars amongst the milkweed.
Haley looked up at the house before them, its dark windows lonely and bleak, and suddenly she could not see; tears spilled over her cheeks and she crouched on the ground. Never before had she been afraid to enter this house. Her entire life, it had been a solace, a nest of comfort, with familiar warm smells and constant laughter and noise. Her memories crashed into her mind like a forceful wave, chasing her brothers while playing tag, kissing her baby sister’s forehead, opening Christmas stockings, waking up before anyone else and making coffee cake so that they could all eat breakfast together. Those were the moments she liked best, when the entire family was gathered around the table with coffee cake, talking and poking fun, the laughter, the light--
