Sestra scratched at her thighs in remembrance. No doubt the welts would return when the rain dried up. Luckily for her, that hadn’t been an issue for the past few weeks. The sky clotted with prepubescent clouds still considering what they wanted to be when they grew up, and it had rained every day for the past week. There may not be any food, but they had clean water. For now.
Sestra scanned the water’s surface in either direction. Smooth as glass. A bad sign. There were no crabs to pick out of clumps of seaweed, no fish to needle out of islands of trash, nothing to rummage or drag her attention out of the gutter. She’d stab her own eyeball out for a turtle right now, but there hadn’t been a sighting in ages.
“Everything is dying,” Rob said.
“Just now getting that, are you?”
“One day I’m just going to toss you overboard.”
Sestra righted herself. “Then who would you yell at every fucking minute of the day?”
“I’d finally save my breath.”
“Your head would pop off your shoulders like a cork with all the pressurized judgment. Your slow leak of annoyance is all that’s kept you going.”
His mouth didn’t move, yet his lips turned to stone.
Sensing the overstep, she redirected. “Give me the hook.”
“What for?”
“Just give it to me.”
The hook wasn’t so much a proper hook as it was a bent piece of metal from the boat’s engine. Rob had taken it apart after the propeller had warped in some rough seas. They had no gas, but he’d refused to touch it prior to that. You know, just in case they happened upon a fuel pump.
Hook in hand, Sestra punctured her forearm and flung it back into the water before Rob could protest. It stung like crazy.
“You’ll pass out before you catch anything with that.”
“Calm down.” It wasn’t like her personal well-being was what concerned him.
“Only the big ones like blood.”
She shrugged. He was probably right. So what if he was? “I could go for some shark fin right about now.”
“You know what I meant.”
“I know what you meant.” She just didn’t care.
“You’re obsessed.”
“I’m obsessed? Shit.”
Sestra was wandering into dangerous territory. Posies were always dangerous. Just bringing them up was like a call to arms between the two of them. Sestra instinctively clutched the hook, while Rob cloaked himself in his own sense of righteousness. All the man had left was his unshakable faith in a purpose. There was a reason for all this horror, even if he didn’t understand it. There was a reason his wife and son were dead and he was not, even if he didn’t like it. There was a reason he was stuck on this boat with Sestra, even if he was miserable. Who was he to challenge the will of God? He’d rather die a prolonged, offensive, unhappy death, all on the risky bet of divine reward for his dogmatic perseverance.
As for Sestra, she was more inclined to spit in the face of any god who would do this just to make a fucking point.
After about ten minutes, Sestra drew up her arm and clamped her hand over the shallow wound. It wasn’t even bleeding anymore. The saltwater had licked it clean until all that remained was a jagged pink cut. A waste of her time. She could slit her throat and nothing would come in an ocean this vast. It didn’t help that their long line had snapped in the mouth of a whitetip a few weeks ago. The thing swam off with it in a frenzy, taking with it all the plastic jugs used to keep the line afloat. After that happened, they were left with just their hook and hands.
She gnawed on the tip of her pinky, consoling her hunger with the sensation of something meaty in her mouth. Even if it was her meat.
“Stop that,” Rob said.
“I’m hungry.”
“You’re the last thing I’d ever eat.”
“I got a few good steaks left in me, I think.” She bit her finger hard enough to bruise.
“I wouldn’t eat you,” Rob said.
“Why not?”
“Food poisoning.”
Sestra snorted, letting her finger drop.
The two each fell into their own starvation stupor, staring at things, making irritating noises with their mouths, chewing on their fingers. Sestra clicked her tongue. It stuck to the roof of her mouth like tacky sandpaper.
Rob closed his eyes, but his brow scrunched every time she clicked her tongue, so she kept doing it, and he eventually opened them again.
Sestra quieted every time he did and listened to the stillness. It was quiet, as if all the sound had been sucked away with a straw. Quiet not because she couldn’t hear anything else, but because nothing else was there.
Rob looked toward the sky and grimaced.
The air was heavier, though Sestra didn’t know the scientific reason for it—barometer dropping, humidity rising, things that an experienced seaman would notice with one good sniff to the air. Sestra’s nose and eyes were shriveled and useless now. All that worked anymore were her ears.
Storms brought with them everything a person expected a sea storm to bring—violent winds and waves, water, sinking, drowning, death. They were terrifying every time, yet somehow, she and Rob had managed through each without dying and, magically, without being separated either. Somewhere up there, Rob’s God was laughing his ass off.
Destruction was only one of the appetizers a sea storm brought to the table. With it also came whatever had been dredged up from the sea floor. All sorts of shit bobbed to the surface in the hours following a typhoon, all mixed up as if with a soup ladle. Anything alive rushed to the spot the storms had just left. They might even catch enough of something to keep them alive another few weeks.
But fish and dead turtles weren’t all the creatures a storm stirred. The larger monsters always followed the littler ones.
Rob ran a finger over the edge of the gunwale. This beauty had suffered through a lot and kept floating. Sestra rubbed the fiberglass of the platform lovingly—this stupid boat was as stubborn as she was.
“She can’t handle much more,” Rob said.
“Beauty will be fine. She always is.” She had to be.
“If you say so.”
“Besides, there will be fish.”
“Storms always bring something, and it ain’t always fish.”
Sestra snapped. God, he was annoying. “Well, you could just die now if your patience is waning,” she said, knowing that pesky faith of his would always get in the way of her good ideas.
Hours passed, and the air became thick, smelling of home, as if the only part of earth not totally sunk was the little bits clinging to the clouds. It reminded her of that first day, before she’d known exactly what was happening, back when rain was just rain. The wet-dirt smell made her long for a park bench and grass and stoplights. It made her hungry. It’d been so damn easy to get food then, even if she’d been strung out and poor. All the convenience stores to steal from, garbage cans—shit, she could get arrested and they would feed her. All that food she’d pushed away—now she got a cluster migraine behind her eyes just thinking about.
She’d been so stupid. Everybody had been stupid. Now everybody was dead.
“What are you doing now?” she asked, before her memories drove her crazy.
“Camping,” he said.
Sometimes he was camping, sometimes hunting. One time he was watching the Super Bowl. The point was that, whatever he was doing, what he wasn’t doing was floating on a boat in the middle of a ruined world.
“The mountains?”
“No, but lots of trees. I’d make a fire and stay up all night until it burned itself out. We’d eat beans, and David would complain until I sent him to the tent without dinner. But he’d find the jerky. Nose like a bloodhound, that one. I wouldn’t care, though.”
“You made that jerky yourself, did
n’t you, Rob?”
A scoff was his response. “Elk.”
“Like reindeer?”
“Like elk.”
“I always thought they were the same thing.”
“Elk are bigger. Reddish. Reindeer are brown and live farther north.”
“Like the North Pole?”
He nodded. “What are you doing?”
“Sleeping in an abandoned car behind the Food 4 Less.”
Rob pursed his lips. He disapproved of such talk, even if that was what she’d likely be doing right now, under more favorable circumstances. She’d be so high, and it would be glorious.
“I used to walk this road near the house I grew up in. It was next to the dump, so there were these huge walls of dirt and there’d be tractors and bulldozers and shit driving along the top of it. The dump was closed, so I always wondered what they were doing there. Rearranging old garbage? It was just like every other street, really. It didn’t even smell like a dump, except sometimes early in the mornings. The road was lined with palo verdes, and every spring they would bloom yellow. It took just a little bit of wind at just the right time, and the blooms would fly off.”
She wasn’t sure what made her even think about it. She’d never paid much attention to it all those times she’d paced that sidewalk. It was the first thing to pop into her head that wasn’t inside a needle.
“I’d be eating a cheeseburger,” Rob said.
“Tacos.”
“I used to brew my own beer.”
“You did?” He had told her before. Many times. But he either forgot or didn’t care.
“None of that IPA bullshit. A good, stout beer. Bottled it in my garage.”
“I’d slit my wrists for a good beer,” she said. And she meant it.
Rob tried to smile. It was more a seizure of the lips over dry teeth. “The best.”
Sestra fell asleep hungry, if what she did could be called sleeping. It was like staying awake all night and suddenly it was morning, but instead of morning, her boat was flooding, and Rob was screaming at her to wake up. One of those types of sleeps.
The storm she’d predicted heaved them into the sky and down again, their boat sloshing around like the last ice cube in a glass of lemonade. Water attacked from every angle—up, down, east, west, from inside her and above her. It poured down, the atmosphere split like a waterfall, and they were trapped in the crash. Every breath was a choke and a gasp to keep it out. Eyes closed, she bailed water out with her hands, unable to think straight and come up with any better ideas.
Nothing she did could keep up. The water rose from her toes to her ankles to her knees, and then it was everywhere, nothing below her feet but emptiness. Thrashing and kicking, she sank anyway. Down, down, down, suffocated by darkness.
Then the boat was fine. The sky was clear. She had been dreaming.
The boat teetered as she startled awake, the sloshing of the water against the hull the only noise in a soundless night.
She’d been certain of a storm, so certain that it had haunted her sleep. Was she sure she was even awake? Had she finally just drowned and gone to another, blacker layer of this swampy hell?
Rob remained where she’d left him, leaning against the side of the boat with a hand over the edge.
The moon shone like oil over the water, shimmering as it gently swayed. Sestra stuck her hand overboard, grazing the surface just enough to get her fingers wet. Ripples ricocheted like delicate lace, fading into the ocean’s girth.
So calm. Too calm.
If you’re there, she thought, come on out. She knew they couldn’t hear her, but sometimes she thought she could feel them, the posies. Rob had pinned her down and called her a demon the last time she’d made the mistake of mentioning it. Posies terrified Rob. He hated them. As much as she tried, she couldn’t bring herself to hate them, even though she should. As if the flood wasn’t enough, these beasts came along and picked at the survivors. Dragged them to the depths with their merciless grip.
The bodies always disappeared. Of all the dead bodies that popped back up because of gasses and decomposition, none seemed to have been taken by the posies. Sestra would turn them over, searching for suction marks or bruised choke marks around their necks, but never found evidence of such an act. Every other flavor of death might show on the surfaced corpses—shark bites, decay, disease, starvation, even some that looked utterly beat to death by human hands, but never a mark of the posies. Those victims were wrenched below into a murk Sestra could only imagine.
She herself had never seen more than a glimpse of a posy—an electric flash of tentacle. They’d drift in the current like gobs of kelp or coast just below the surface only to zip away like a frightened school of fish. Every shadow made Sestra clamp her mouth shut just to keep her insides from spilling out in alarm. Then they’d be gone.
Those sea monsters invaded the last refuge of the survivor—their minds, their hope, their willpower. They took those last few things people assumed to be their biological and philosophical rights and left them barren.
Now, in all this silence, Sestra was sure there was a posy close by, but it concealed itself well. It was always the things she couldn’t see that scared Sestra the most. The water was still warm, which surprised her, even though it shouldn’t. The water was always warm, despite the weather or the time of day or location. Sestra always figured that the end of the world would be cold. But expectations had a way of letting a person down. At least hers did. Maybe one day she’d stop making them, but until then, she’d continue to recoil at the heartbeat warmth of the water below her, wondering what inky bastion of bad energy lurked below.
She fully submerged both hands, the ripples of the water tearing her image apart, warping and bending the light through a watery lens. Just call her the Invisible Woman, defying physics and all that shit. People used to say that mutant abilities like that were impossible, but they also might have said that it was impossible for a single storm to wipe out the whole of the world in a single go. Where was the fucking science behind that? It seemed to her that nothing was impossible anymore. Perhaps it never had been, but thinking so was the same as it being so.
The boat rocked. Up, down, up, down, up and down again. She yanked her hands out of the water, tucking them across her chest. Then it stopped. Something out there was moving.
“Do you see it?” Rob asked.
“Not a damn thing.”
“It’s a posy.”
“Maybe.” Maybe it was and maybe it wasn’t, but doubt didn’t stop the hammering in her chest and whooshing noise in her ears.
Up, down, up, down again. It started and stopped in little bursts. A frenzy? The waves slapped at the hull in a panic, as if in a hurry to be anywhere else.
A lumpy bulge materialized in the distance, an uneven mountain in the middle of the sea. The stench hit shortly after, the familiar scent of rot.
“Whatever it is, it’s dead,” Sestra said.
Smaller shadows bobbed up and down, encircling the mound like rats. Sestra grabbed one of their oars. They weren’t really oars, but disassembled pieces of the boat propeller. The curvature made them decent emergency paddles. It had taken Rob months to slowly shave them off the main shaft of the propeller, and as such he was particularly protective of them.
“Be careful,” he said.
“I’m not going to drop your stupid oar.”
“You said that last time.”
“Not like we needed more than two anyway.”
The carcass turned out to be a whale. Big—a sperm whale or maybe a gray whale. In the dark, it was difficult to tell.
Creatures shot away from the carcass as they approached. Rob slapped at the water with the oar, hoping to stun something. The bigger animals couldn’t be bothered by their stupid antics. There were sharks on either side of her, whitetips or blues probably, but it was
hard to tell. If anything, Sestra’s presence made them nose their way into the whale even harder. Smaller fish pecked about at a safer distance, making little marble-sized whorls in the water as they flurried about.
Sestra took it all in; it was alive. The death of one of Earth’s mightiest drew the survivors out of their ghillie suits.
Rob whooped.
“You catch something?”
“No, but I whacked it good. Watch for a floater.”
The hook clattered about the floor of the boat in the excitement. Sestra took it and said, “Keep the boat close.”
Before Rob could open his mouth, she hopped overboard, launching herself at the whale. Never much for physical fitness, the added stress of not eating and muscle lethargy guaranteed the two-foot leap was a miss, and she landed farther away from the damn thing than when she’d jumped. Despite the temperature, the water shocked her. The sharks, burrowed into the side of the whale, paid her no mind as she squeezed her way in between them.
“Oh God, where’s the hook?” Rob said.
Spitting water between her teeth to answer, she held it over her head. “I still have it, asshole.”
“Watch out for the sharks.”
“Yeah, thanks.”
The energy of the frenzy seeped into her. She was one of them, crazed with hunger, fueled by a testosterone spike and animal carnality. The tearing of flesh from the dead animal reminded her of the sound of zippers on a long jacket. It wasn’t quite the same noise, but it had a rhythmic quality and her mind couldn’t help the comparison.
Using the hook, Sestra rappelled up the whale’s flank and just started stabbing it. Though not edible, it was perfect chum. Rob thwapped at the water, hoping to hit something they could eat.
She jammed the hook down and down until it couldn’t go anymore. The whale must have been floating for a day at least. Its belly was loose and beginning to slough away. Zip zip, she followed the lines of the underbelly, cutting through it rather easily. Healthy skin was taut, elastic, had a meaty density to it, but this felt more like a banana peel. It cut too easily and stank like death.
A Flood of Posies Page 5
