At the End of the World

by Charles E Gannon

  Bottom line: between the untouched cistern and storerooms, we had more water and food than we could carry. The only other thing we did grab was the pool treatment chemicals and cleansers: key ingredients for our homemade decon bath. We had no way of knowing exactly what did or didn’t kill the virus, but we were pretty sure that those chemicals would do the trick. Question was: how to get all that down to the dinghy?

  The answer we’d been hoping for—a car—was, to coin a phrase, a non-starter. The buggies and small vans were too screwed up. The same storm that had roughed up the bayside restaurant had toppled trees that mashed or trapped half of the vehicles, including most of the ones that I might have been able to hotwire. A bunch of others had been trashed by humans, both normal and turned. And almost everything with wheels had a plastic tube hanging out past its unscrewed gas cap, its tank drained. I wondered how the hell we were going to get all the goods down the hill.

  And that’s when I stopped for a moment and realized, it’s a hill. Duh.

  I walked to the most intact car that was close to the road and opened the door.

  Chloe, who still hadn’t forgiven me for going stiff and brusque on her, muttered, “Hey, genius; that one has a tube sticking out of the gas tank.”

  “Yeah,” I answered, leaning inside to check the basic controls, “I know.”

  “So?”

  “So check the tires.”

  “For what?”

  “Just make sure they have enough air.”

  Prospero heard us, left off organizing the salvage. “Alvaro, I don’t know how you expect to get that car running—”

  “I don’t. I expect to get it rolling.” When he didn’t understand right away, I added: “It’s a manual. I just checked the clutch. It slips into neutral no problem. Hand brake still works.”

  Prospero laughed, shook his head.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Really?” he asked. “You don’t see? Here we are, half dozen people with IQs on the right side of the bell curve, and none of us see the obvious. Until now.” He stared at the car and shook his head again. “I’ll organize the loading.” And off he went, still chuckling to himself.

  Chloe was standing next to the car. “You want I should push?” I couldn’t see her face with the moon behind her, so I couldn’t tell if her voice was sullen, embarrassed, or both.

  I smiled. “Let’s get it loaded first.”

  * * *

  It was a good thing we found the Zodiac and that it was in such good shape. If we had tried to put all of the salvage and ourselves in the dinghy, we’d have sunk. As it was, even with me and Jeeza making sure the overload stayed lashed down in the Zodiac (they are good for carrying people; not so much for cargo), both boats were riding low in the water and were about as responsive as garbage scows.

  But it was a short run back and we off-loaded our haul before dawn. We got the boats up on deck just as the sun’s rays started painting orange-gold ripples on the water to the east.

  We’d anchored Voyager in a sheltered part of the bay, but that hadn’t made us feel any better about the necessity of leaving her uncrewed. The dogs had been even less enthusiastic about that decision. We’d had to lock them below to make sure that they didn’t try to swim after us. That was after Prospero suggested leaving them topside on leads, which Rod answered by going over to big, smiling, drooling Daisy and lifting her lip. He looked meaningfully at her exposed teeth, then at the leashes in Prospero’s hand.

  Who made the same comparison and nodded. “Right,” he said, and took the leads back below.

  Our consensus as we headed for our bunks that dawn was to never, ever, leave Voyager without an anchor watch again. But I wonder if that resolve will hold the next time we have to go on stalker-infested shores. There’s strength in numbers, and when there are only six of you, everyone counts.

  We slept past noon. Would probably have slept longer, but dogs are essentially big, furry, alarm clocks. When you’ve been in bed so long that their stomachs, bowels, or bladders are starting to complain, they let you know. Daisy is particularly effective in that role, as her tongue is almost as wide as our faces. Or at least it seems that way when you’re being licked by it.

  Frankly, I was grateful that she only let me sleep five hours. I don’t usually have nightmares (my dreams are bad enough; like Dali on acid), but scenes from the second pousada were on endless loop in my head. Waking from that was a relief.

  It seemed that no one else slept very well, either. We dragged ass until we hit our bunks again that evening, but by then all our new-gotten gains were secured for heavy weather and balanced so that Voyager wouldn’t sail crank. The next day—yesterday—we weighed anchor and made for where we are now: Rocas Atoll.

  * * *

  We got two greetings upon arriving at Rocas Atoll: the raised claws of a bunch of defiant sand crabs, and the raised (but skeletal) hand of the human body they had literally stripped to the bones.

  They were suitable introductions to what is probably the strangest place I’ve ever been to. Rocas Atoll is seemingly barren: just sand, coral powder, two buildings on stilts, and two “lighthouses” that more resemble the trusswork towers that hold up powerlines. You can count the number of palm trees without running out of fingers and toes. These features are all located on one of three islands that barely remain above water at high tide. Twelve feet is the maximum elevation above sea level.

  At low tide, though, the atoll’s oval shield wall of coral and ossified algae, buttressed by sand banks, rises almost five feet above the ocean swells. There are two inlets, one to the north, and a much smaller one to the west (leeward). The area inside the natural weather-wall is about one half wide-open lagoon with a depth of up to twenty feet, and one half coral maze pockmarked by tidal pools. The punishing equatorial sun heats the water trapped in the pools to as much as 99 degrees Fahrenheit. Meanwhile, the ocean just outside the coral reef hovers around eighty degrees.

  When the sea rushes back in at high tide, so do the big fish, including some impressive sharks. As the water rises, the three islands look (and feel) like they are always just one big wave away from being smothered under the surging blue risers. The upper surface of the coral maze is submerged (barely) and the spaces between its craggy walls become deep-flow highways where a wide variety of critters come to eat—and often, be eaten. When the water begins to recede, the big fish retreat to the lagoon or back out to the waves.

  According to a guidebook, the atoll is actually a coral accumulation on the peak of a seamount less than five fathoms down. The crest of that seamount extends in every direction and works like a baffled wave break, ensuring that the three islands don’t get swamped by large swells or breakers. I swear, if I had invented Rocas Atoll as a setting for a science fiction novel, readers would have laughed and tossed it away: too many implausibilities.

  As I write this, I’m sitting on the narrow porch of one of the shelter-shacks on the “big island” of Farol—which is a whopping eleven hundred yards long and two hundred twenty yards wide. About fifteen feet away, the one lifted finger on Mr. Skeleton’s hand (the middle finger, of course) points to the west. As if reminding us that is the way to the destination we all decided upon: Kourou.

  However Mr. Skeleton got here, Rocas Atoll didn’t save his life. If he had any fishing gear, there’s no sign of it. There were three desiccated lobster-shells around the biggest shack, but it’s impossible to tell whether they’d been caught by him or prior visitors.

  We, however, have had no problem grabbing all the lobsters we can eat, although we have to be careful when grabbing them from the tidal pools. Shark repellent is hit-and-miss, so we always keep the FALs handy, too.

  So that’s life on Rocas Atoll. We’ve rigged condensation collectors (we use the ship’s purifiers as little as we can) and although our diet is still predominantly seafood, lobster is a pretty good change. We’re almost caught up on sleep. When we are, we’ll figure out where we should go next.
r />   And if Kourou is still our final destination.

  November 10

  Kourou scares the shit out of us. All of us. I mean, if the first pousada on FdN almost undid us, how are we going to make our way around a huge, flat facility and its buildings, all of which are probably infested with stalkers? Since leaving Ascension, most of us have talked with Prospero about what will be involved, but never as part of a group conversation, and never with enough time to drill down into the nitty-gritty details. Mostly because, at sea and on a small boat, there’s always something else that needs doing.

  That pattern of endlessly deferring the topic of Kourou stopped today. But not because we decided, as a group, that the time had come to grapple with it. Nope. Ironically, it came about because I was still spooked by what had happened on Fernando de Noronha.

  Specifically, I’d been dealing with a bad case of pretender’s syndrome ever since I almost got us killed on Fernando de Noronha. Of course, the biggest problem with my overcoming pretender syndrome is the fact that I really am a pretender. And for the foreseeable future, there’s no way to change that. So the real question was: how skilled a pretender can I become?

  To be clear: everybody was very cool about what happened on FdN. In fact, no one thought I did anything wrong. When I tried pointing out the mistakes I made, Jeeza sat me down like she was channeling Willow and demanded to know what I thought I could have done better. When I told her, she called my examples “toxic hindsight.” It took me a few moments to unpack that and realize she meant that I was beating myself up with Monday-morning quarterbacking. She and the others had just chalked it up to “shit happens.”

  But to be frank, that attitude will get people killed. Because if you don’t acknowledge that you could have done better, then you never will. It’s simple logic: accepting the reality of failure is the only way to improve. And here’s the reality of what happened on Fernando de Noronha: the only reason we all survived is because we got lucky. I know—I can feel—how much real training would have helped me be the kind of leader we needed. The kind of leader that the Captain had been—the full measure of which I am only now coming to realize.

  Sure, we all knew that the SAS were among the baddest of bad-asses. But what we didn’t—couldn’t—understand is how much specialized training is required to produce, and maintain readiness in, that kind of soldier.

  Take my current crisis of incompetence: the tactics and execution of what the older military manuals call “close quarters combat,” or CQC. According to Prospero, even if you’re trained to be an infantryman, you’ll only get a few weeks of those drills. If that much. But SAS and other special units get many times that amount of training, with regular refreshers and updates along the way.

  And then, there’s me, who’s trying to inform my (maybe?) common sense with the few relevant manuals we salvaged from Air Force lockers on Ascension Island. But if that doesn’t work out, hey, no pressure. What’s the worst that could happen? Maybe kill a few, or all, of my friends through incompetence? It would be really, really funny if it wasn’t so fucking serious.

  I think about it all the time, now. I try to write down everything I’ve ever read or seen about actual close combat, try to delete the bullshit that Hollywood and games hammered into my head, and try to remember that more than half of what’s left just doesn’t apply when you’re fighting stalkers instead of soldiers.

  But the hardest job of all is to keep working at it when you know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that you are never going to be the leader that your friends deserve. Because no matter how hard you try, your lack of real training and experience is almost sure to get them killed, sooner or later.

  Or when you get to Kourou.

  So a few days after arriving at Rocas Atoll, I managed to pull my brainless head out of my despondent ass and work the basic problem: how can I materially and reliably improve our odds of surviving a CQC engagement?

  First answer: avoid CQC engagements. Obviously. Operation Wizard’s Tower was a product of that realization. But if the first pousada on FdN has proven anything, it’s the invariable truth of the Captain’s mantra: no plan survives contact with reality. So, even though we may try to avoid CQC, there’s just no way to be sure we always will. Which means we have to get better at it.

  Second answer: don’t let what you’d like to achieve get in the way of what you can achieve. Just because I’ll never be the Captain doesn’t mean I can’t keep improving. Which goes for any/everyone.

  And, third answer: Getting better at CQC doesn’t involve a mystical personal transformation. It involves drilling a finite set of skills until—just like aikido—those skills not only improve, but become second nature.

  And that third answer was arguably the most important, because it pointed toward a concrete and immediate course of action. Since we were in a safe place, with enough food, water, time, and ammo, I proposed that we set up the best “run-and-gun” course we could on the closest island: Ilha do Cemitério. The crew didn’t just agree; they were stoked. I got to work.

  “Cemetery Island” is a perfectly flat ellipse of sand, four hundred yards long by two hundred yards wide, and, at high tide, only six feet above the water. We laid out both a basic practice range and a training area for live-fire exercises.

  I kept the run-and-gun drills restricted to pistols, shotguns, and the M4s: our CQC go-to weapons and the ones for which we have the most ammunition. But we didn’t start with loaded guns. The first few days were nothing but dry-fire run-throughs, first as individuals, then in two-person teams. That, and daily range work, didn’t just produce modest gains in marksmanship; it helped me see each person’s gifts and limitations more clearly.

  For instance, Prospero’s training, however modest, meant his skills came back quickly. So I put him in charge of creating and running the live-fire drills. The only time I’ve had to intervene is when he defaults to his by-the-book tendency and starts working on tactics that are pointless when you’re facing the infected.

  Steve’s innate calm makes him really reliable. He is the person least likely to get excited and sweep a teammate or forget trigger discipline. He’s also really comfortable with a pistol, arguably as good as Chloe.

  At first, Jeeza got easily flustered during the drills, but overcame that pretty quickly. She’s still most comfortable with a shotgun, because it “feels further away” from her. I’m still not sure what she means by that, but she eventually got into the groove of the drills and has proven to be the most graceful of us. I don’t mean she does leaps and pirouettes as she goes around the imaginary corners we’ve staked out in the sand, but she moves smoothly. Once she knows what she’s doing, there’s no wasted motion.

  Rod is not a natural at CQC, never will be. He has a tendency to overthink everything. So do I, but when it’s time to act, I can slide Mr. Brain over into the copilot seat. He remains alert enough to mutter the occasional suggestion, but mostly, he knows to shut up so that Captain Action can fly the plane. But with Rod, Mr. Brain is in charge. All. The. Time. And the closer the enemy approaches, the more of a deficit that becomes.

  I’ve learned that being small can sometimes be an advantage in CQC. Not for knocking down the doors, obviously, but when it comes to going low and fast, hugging corners, and still being able to recover and fire quickly—well, when your body is smaller and limbs are shorter, you can change position more easily, more quickly.

  Unfortunately, Chloe got more and more pissed as she learned the opposite: that her size and strength come at the expense of flexibility and agility. She isn’t actually heavy, anymore, but she’s still built like—well, yeah; she’s built. Solid; low center of gravity; strong, thick limbs—but not great for the kind of hide-and-go-seek-on-acid moves that can help you in CQC. Also, while she’s still better than the rest of us with guns, that advantage is not as great when it comes to shotguns and pistols. Hardly a surprise: she grew up shooting medium and big game at three hundred yards or more. Only a certain amount of
that skill translates into the snap-shot/duck-and-go craziness of clearing rooms and hallways.

  So days passed and progress was made. Then, today, after returning to Farol from only our second set of live fire exercises, Prospero skipped cleaning his weapons and instead, just passed by with a nod and waded back out to Voyager. When we were done cleaning our own weapons, we followed, thinking that maybe he’d gone ahead and fixed lunch for us.

  He had. After a fashion.

  Around the chart table were small plates and fish patties. Cold fish patties. Not a delicacy, I assure you.

  In the center were our nav charts of northern Brazil and the Guianas. There was a pin in the small state labeled, “French Guiana.”

  We looked at Prospero, then at the fish patties, then at the pin. I suspect we were all thinking the same thing: “Which do I dread the most, right now?”

  Prospero didn’t give us a chance to decide; he pointed at the pin. “Kourou. You’ve read the files, I take it?”

  Silence.

  Prospero cleared his throat. “By which I mean, the folder of information I put in the ‘to read’ box.”

  More silence.

  “I see.” He sat. “Then here are the basics.” We took our seats. The fish was looking more appealing with every passing second.

  Prospero consulted one of his larger laptops. “Kourou is the third largest city in French Guiana. It is also the second largest port, after the capital at Cayenne, approximately forty miles to the southeast. The Kourou River provides the flow for the city’s deep-water anchorages, since there is no bay to speak of.”

  “So, the rest of the coast is…what?” Chloe asked. “Beaches?”

  “Mangrove swamps and mudflats, mostly,” Prospero answered. “The latter shift constantly. Pre-plague, they were recharted every few years.”