Freeing a one-foot section, she heaved it in Rob’s direction. He’d maneuvered himself right behind her and caught it with a disdainful glare.
“This don’t look great, Ses.”
“Want me to check the cellar for the prime rib? Fuck—ow—I got bit.” Her foot slipped in the water without realizing.
Not a shark. Smaller. A barracuda or some other pointy fish.
“Get out of there before you get eaten.”
“I’m okay. It wasn’t the sharks.”
“No. Ses, get out of the water.”
“Just a little more. This is primo chum, Rob.”
Rob didn’t protest any further, but he also didn’t catch the next piece of whale rot when she chucked it to him. Luckily, it still made it onto the boat.
“Damn it, Rob, what are you doing?”
He stared past her, beyond the sharks and the whale. Then she felt it.
Her toes chilled suddenly, pierced with a blast of cold. The kind of cold that arose from a deep place where nothing could possibly be warm. Sharks untangled themselves and fled, and everything else darted away like shrapnel, leaving Sestra alone with a stinking heap of decomposing whale.
“Get on the boat. Get on the boat right now.”
Rob was already grabbing for her, and the panic between them made her clumsy. It took twice as long to get her into the boat than if she’d done it by herself. It was one of those moments where the brain clicked off and all she could see was RUN scrolling across her eyelids. Get the fuck out of the water. Get out of there, get away. The primitive feelers she’d cast out without thinking had sensed danger.
A goose egg formed from her headfirst collision into the floor of the boat. Rob stabbed the oar into the water, paddling as fast as his arms could work, but it was a big boat for such small oars.
The silence and emptiness returned. Frenetic tearing and splashing funneled into the singular, frantic thwap of oars hitting the water and heavy breathing. Her terror was almost soothing. Fear was a comfortable, familiar place.
Sestra watched the whale carcass slowly recede into the shadows again. If anything else was there, she never saw it.
“What did you see?” she asked.
“A wave.”
Her stomach leapt and sank.
A wave. One. She’d felt the cold, and she was still here. Rob was still here.
“It’s out there,” she said, because it was.
Neither of them would sleep that night, each taking turns paddling, cleaning meat, paddling, staring aimlessly, paddling again. They continued that way until sunrise, staring at each other and not speaking, observing the other’s slightest twitch, blink, the slightest shift of position making the other jerk in alarm. By morning they had returned to their regularly scheduled indignation of one another.
“It might not have been a posy,” Sestra said, hours later.
“Does it matter?”
“Probably not.”
The smell of rotting whale meat turned her stomach, and hugging her knees, she clenched her jaw and prayed not to vomit. Rob refused to chum with it, still fearing what it might attract.
They passed the time sunning strips of the one fish they’d managed to catch and fighting over the parts that couldn’t be jerkied, like the liver, which was surprisingly sweet and dessert-like.
They napped. Rob snored softly, never more than a hard blink away from total alertness. Sestra focused on her elbows, the only part of her not in pain. The bite on her calf stung as it dried, cruising full throttle toward infection. It was deep, but not particularly large, and so perfectly circular that it made her anxious to look at it.
Nightfall didn’t bring much relief, but she was tired of laying like a useless lump. Grunting, Rob stirred at her fidgeting. He kicked the oar toward her.
“You need something to do.”
She did, so she took it and plunged it into the water. She rowed and rowed, trying to ignore the sting of her wound throbbing through her ankle. She rowed because she had nothing else to do.
She rowed because, no matter where she was, she was never far enough away.
CHAPTER FIVE
It sounded like teeth and bone. The jolt of the collision made Sestra forget what she’d been doing just seconds before. It was night and storming and raining and Rob was barking at her to hold the water jug up higher. No, higher! Then they crashed into something big.
Ever since they’d run across that whale, Sestra had felt off. That sensation of being watched crawled all over her, so when the boat crashed into something large enough to stop them dead in their tracks, she felt certain they were about to die.
“Oh Jesus,” Rob said, lurching onto his feet too fast. Sestra yanked him down again by the tails of his shirt, or else he might have thrown his dumb self overboard.
Despite the roaring in her head and espresso shot of adrenaline, Sestra calmed herself enough to trace the silhouette of what had struck them.
“It’s a boat,” she said. “It’s a fucking boat, Rob.”
Their shitty skiff rubbed along the long, boxy gunwale of the shadow boat, their prow hooking against the exposed anchor of the new invader. The sea was calm despite the rain, and the two vessels floated alongside one another. Sestra and Rob stared and waited for an explosion or a machete-wielding pirate to attack them. They stared and stared until it hurt to keep at it.
Minutes passed. Maybe an hour. Sestra finally stretched out her legs. Her hands ached as she pried them away from the oar handle. They used to meet a lot of people in the beginning. Some of them were scared, meek and pleading, and then they died and were eaten by the desperate few who remained. People weren’t people anymore; they were bags of precious meat.
“I think it’s empty,” she said.
“They could be doing the same thing we are.”
“Or it could be empty.”
It looked like a tugboat, something out of one of the Little Golden Books she’d read as a child. It was cartoonish in its exaggerated, patchwork construction. This thing had been beaten, taped, nailed, zippered and prayed together, probably with only recycled pieces of itself. It could collapse at any minute.
Her knees popped as she stood, and Rob glared at her with shiny eyes, refusing to move.
“I’m going to go check it,” she said.
“No, you ain’t. Not yet.”
“You want to stare at it all night then?” she asked, with complete understanding that this was exactly what he intended to do.
“Wait until daylight. Make them come to us.”
“If you’re so fucking terrified, then pry us loose and let’s be done with it.”
But he wouldn’t do that. He wouldn’t dare cast away any boardable vessel when theirs was such a heap of shit. Pontoon boats weren’t made for long seafaring voyages, and they’d been swept into the ocean more than once as waves pounded at them in all directions.
The portholes oozed black, hiding everything behind them. There were a lot of places a person could hide on a boat like this. In the old days, it had probably housed six to eight adults comfortably, which translated to fifteen-plus people post-flood. Something like this was either crammed with survivors or a floating morgue for their corpses. Neither of which she was particularly eager to find, but the dead kind had the built-in benefit of not being quite as stabby.
“Look at those,” Sestra said, pointing to a porthole. “They’d have to peek through those to see us. You think we wouldn’t have heard someone tiptoeing around by now?”
Rob closed his mouth and passed her his hook.
The tugboat sat about a foot higher than their boat, and Rob raised a knee for her to launch herself. The movements felt foreign, like she wasn’t the one making them, and she flopped onto the deck in a heavy tangle of limbs. The thwomp of her sack-of-sticks body reverberated in a seismic ripple a
cross the wooden deck.
Behind her, Rob cursed at her. “God damn it.”
“Language, Rob.”
“Shut your mouth, woman.”
Pointless. “Why? If anyone’s there, they already know I’m here. Hello?”
Smoothing her rags, she squeezed the hook and called out a second time. “Hello?” The o dragged on, uncertain.
This was a lifeless vessel—she felt it in her bones—but dark was dark, and her mind was more deranged than ever. She remembered watching a neighbor kid play a video game when she was eight years old, and in it, the good guys had to fight a giant squid that snaked its tentacles around a sunken ship, beckoning the characters through portholes just like the ones on this boat. She imagined that now, but instead of happy primary colors, this tentacle was gray and slimy and moved like suffocating smoke. Anything could exist in the dark. It was the only region logic had yet to map.
She stomped, heavy-footed in part because she was clumsy on a good day, but also because she’d rather not surprise anything.
The helm appeared abandoned. A ladder, glistening with grime, clung to the wall like algae. Climbing it was like learning to walk again, but she managed, peeking her head up just enough to see that it was unmanned, then sliding down again.
Rob said nothing as she shook her head at him. Down I go, she thought. Down we go.
“Hello?” she said again, hoping that someone might just respond and save her the trouble of having to appear braver than she was.
It was quiet. Moonlight poured like spotlights onto the defunct two-way radio and a foam ring buoy. The stairs at her feet sunk into a deeper, hotter dark. The mouth of it sweltered, thick and humid and dank, like the smell of clothes left to sit in the washing machine a day too long.
For all she could tell, not even the tiniest sliver of light seeped into the boat’s depths, and that boded anything but well for her.
Her heart thudded voraciously, it not having to work this hard in months. Then again, the pressure felt good. This was different than the usual panic—this was an adventure as rare as discovering the ruins of some famed, lost city. Fuck, it might as well have been a lost city. How long had it been since they’d run across a functional boat? Four months? Probably more. It was amazing to realize just how little they were in such a big world. It had never appeared that way to Sestra before the flood, her world comprised of nothing but the pavement under her feet and familial disapproval. With no family of which to disapprove and no lonely roads to stalk, she now spent most of her time staring down the barrel of an incomprehensible vastness. An unending, terrible emptiness that wrecked her so thoroughly that even a haunted vessel such as this was a greater find than she could ever dare to hope for.
Plus, this she actually signed up for. It was nice to have a bit of agency for once, which made her all the more eager to continue on.
Her eyes adjusted after a few moments, but only enough to make out the depth of the space. It was sparse, yet contained. Beyond the tugboat was wilderness and depths far darker than this windowless room. People had lived here; someone had slept on that dinette made into a bed, another on the floor. Her feet snagged on fabric bunched on the floor, as if left in a hurry. Left where? Gone where? The space from wall to wall was hardly larger than the span of her arms. It smelled like animals, like people. But there didn’t seem to be anyone here.
“Fuck,” she said, because she knew.
Feeling her way along the walls, she found a window, found nails driven into the sill holding up a piece of wood. It wouldn’t come up.
A cursory inspection of the remainder uncovered a small kitchenette space, all the cabinet doors missing aside from one, and when she opened it, hundreds of little things tumbled out at her. In the dark she couldn’t discern what, but it was a Chex Mix assortment of textures and sizes, popping out at her like an overstuffed confetti gun.
Debris clattering to the floor around her, she called up to Rob. “There’s no one here,” she said. There wouldn’t be. Sestra knew exactly where they’d gone but didn’t have the heart to say so. Not to Rob at least. As if he needed her to remind him.
“They’re gone,” she said again, feeling the sway of the boat as Rob stepped aboard. His girth, impressive for a starving man, blocked out the light she didn’t know she had until it was gone. The total blackness was better. She couldn’t bear to look at it for too long and didn’t need Rob to see it like this. Lived in, as it appeared to her. Just missing them was almost worse than having never found them.
“Just barely.”
“Yeah.”
The ripeness of people still lingered.
“I can’t see shit down here,” she said.
“The deck, then.”
“I think I’ll stay down here for the night.” The dark concealed more than just enemies and spies. It concealed her, too, and she took a modicum of comfort knowing that nothing could see her, just as she could see nothing. Being in the dark was bad, but having it below her was worse. She had enough darkness wiggling around under her back while she slept.
And she did sleep. The last sounds she heard were those of Rob hefting himself in and out of the engine room, searching for anything salvageable, usable. Nails, bolts, and the like were excellent fishing and stabbing tools, and there were never enough to help keep the fishing line attached to the hull. She knew he was looking for gasoline, but secretly, because he knew it was a fruitless venture. They each had their own impossible search. It gave them something to do.
A trickle of light and the sound of sparrows in the trees woke her, until she opened her eyes and remembered that there were no more trees and no more sparrows, and the sound was just a poisonous memory. She missed the birds. In the beginning, before all the birds died, she would lure them to their boat with pieces of fish, if even that. The birds were as desperate as she was to find a place to rest, and they’d often land on the deck out of exhaustion and lack of options. Once there, she’d catch and kill them, stabbing them with the hook and drinking their blood. It sounded grotesque, but grotesque survived where dignity did not. Rob, however repulsed, never complained when he got his share.
The light crawled down the stairs and into the cabin, just enough to blanket her lower half. The two round windows were nailed shut. Not even a pinhole of light from outside penetrated beyond the barriers.
Rob’s tinkering dragged her out of her sleep fully. She wondered if he’d ever stopped from the night before. It must have been at least two or three hours. There couldn’t have been so much left to sift through to keep him occupied that long.
Her body ached as she pushed it up off the floor. The wood was softer than the fiberglass of their own vessel, and she hadn’t slept in anything but the fetal position for nearly a year. Her limbs stung as she moved, punishing her for not keeping them tight and protected against her body. Awakening from her slumber stabbed like needles as the blood rushed back to her.
Rob was sitting cross-legged on the deck, engine parts strewn around him like a nest. His back to her, she watched as his blackened fingers fiddled with a new kind of treasure.
“No shit,” she said. “How much?”
“Half a spool, at least.”
He’d found more fishing line.
“There’s hooks on the back of the boat that they used to tie off. If they had a line going, though, it’s gone now.”
“Anything else?”
He kicked a hollowed-out motor. Leathery strips of fish rolled out of a bundle of loose, dirty grey fabric.
“It’s where I found the fishing line, too,” Rob said.
“Is this it?”
“So far as I can tell.”
It wasn’t much—a few strips of half-dried fish that smelled slightly rancid. Whoever had lived on this boat before them had been seriously close to starving to death unless they put that fresh line to use.
“You think they were boarded?”
Rob didn’t look at her. “Who knows?”
“What do you think?”
“If I had to wager a bet, I’d say no. There isn’t a speck of blood anywhere. No signs of a struggle up top.”
“Or they were taken under.” Sestra had to say it. She preferred to avoid the indigestion of ignoring the elephant in the room.
Rob’s head dropped a notch. An ever-so-slight affirmation.
Fuck. Somehow it was worse with Rob’s acknowledgment. A single splash and bloop—another person was gone forever. As if the flood hadn’t taken enough.
“I’ll check the cabin again.”
Rob ran his fingers over scattered pipes, ignoring her.
The cabin glowed from the light of the stairwell, contoured by the purple shadows of dawn. There wasn’t much. She ran her hands across the wooden walls, smelling cedar but knowing it wasn’t actual cedar wood. The barren walls ran parallel to a low-hanging ceiling just tall enough for Sestra, yet too short for Rob, who stood just a few inches taller. The dinette to her right was missing three of the four cushions, and the Formica tabletop had veiny knife gouges running its length, doubling as a cutting board. The back wall housed a slim counter and four small cabinets, all empty aside from the one she’d dumped last night in her hasty search. To the left of her was nothing but empty screw holes where some sort of furniture used to be secured.
The blanket tangled around her ankle as she meandered across the boxy cabin, then caught on something, catching her feet like a tripwire.
From atop the deck, Rob sniffed at the clatter of her body smacking against the floor.
“Shit. I’m fine, by the way.”
She tried to kick the blanket away from her, but it caught again. This time she noticed the corner of it tucked underneath the wood, then following the slightly lifted plank, saw the small divot where a handle used to be. Nearing it, nose to the wood, was the unmistakable odor of ammonia and sweat.
A Flood of Posies Page 6
