by Noah Mann
“I’m not sure which I’m happier about,” I said. “That they found useable fuel, or these longnecks.”
I sipped at mine, still on the first bottle. Neil was well into his fourth.
“What were you thinking about?” Grace asked, her beverage a straight up glass of tea that one of the men from San Diego had brewed in a huge batch. “Just a minute ago.”
I’d thought we’d slipped past my friend catching me in thought. But the reprieve had only been momentary.
“I was thinking about home,” I said. “That’s it.”
A dull ache spiked suddenly on my chest, right where a chunk of concrete had bounced off of me during the pit’s collapse. The tactical vest I’d worn then had provided enough of a buffer to save me from any broken ribs, but not a serious bruising. I reached to the spot and rubbed hard against the pain that came in intermittent waves.
“Your chest?” Grace asked, noting my discomfort.
It was the nurse in her zeroing in on symptoms.
“Not a heart attack,” I assured her. “Just something to remind me of being buried alive.”
As I massaged my sore flesh I felt something else that was a reminder. A talisman that took me back to Mary Island. Something in my shirt pocket. I reached in and retrieved the small round of reddish metal.
“What’s that?” Grace asked.
I held the plain medallion between my thumb and finger and stared at it.
“Kuratov gave one of these to each of his men,” I said.
“One of Schiavo’s men took that off a dead Russian on Mary Island and gave it to Eric,” Elaine explained.
Grace’s expression soured at what she’d just heard.
“You’re going to keep it?” she asked.
I held the keepsake. I felt it. Then, I wanted it no more.
“No.”
I flicked it over the edge of the dock and into the harbor. It disappeared silently and unseen into the cold, dark water.
“Not a place I want to remember,” I said.
Neil leaned forward in his chair, a sappy, buzzed smile on his face.
“In high school, this guy never threw anything away,” my friend shared. “He had gym socks from his freshman year still in his locker when we graduated.”
The mocking laughter that sprang from that revelation was deserved, I knew.
“Hey, I’m not the only one hanging onto things that have no use anymore,” I said. “Am I, Special Agent Elaine Morales?”
“Oh, please,” Elaine protested. “My FBI credentials are not equivalent to old gym socks.”
“You think that’s over the top?” Grace asked, nudging Neil with an elbow. “Show them what’s in your cargo pocket. Go on.”
My friend fumbled with the button on the pocket that sat mid-thigh on his pants. After a few inebriated seconds, Grace leaned over and retrieved what she’d only hinted at.
“His passport,” she said, holding up just that. “Mr. State Department world traveler still carries it with him. Everywhere. Like he’s expecting some customs agent to pull him aside and ask for his papers.”
“Some of those customs guys are pretty scary,” Neil said.
Elaine reached out and took the passport, flipping through the pages, eyeing all the entry and exit stamps from points around the globe.
“Oh, to be able to travel as you did,” Elaine commented.
Grace stood right then and took Neil by the hand, easing him up from where he’d sat. She took the nearly empty bottle from him and set it down on the dock.
“Mr. World Traveler here needs to walk some of his celebration off,” Grace said, pulling him along.
Neil reached unsteadily back toward his passport, missing the stiff document by at least a foot.
“You live vicariously through that for a while, Elaine,” Grace said. “A more sober representative of our government will get it from you later. Keep an eye on Krista for a bit?”
“Of course,” I said.
Grace led Neil up the dock and toward town.
“He’s letting loose,” I said. “He needs to.”
“He’s definitely feeling little pain,” Elaine said, handing my friend’s passport over to me as she, too, stood. “I need to hit the little girls’ room. Be right back.”
She crossed the dock to a shed where some portable facilities had been brought back to working order. Left alone I watched Krista play, and saw the first stages of supplying the Northwest Majesty begin, workers stacking pallets of supplies retrieved from the pit near the ship’s loading ramp. Sitting there, taking it all in, the sights and sounds and feel of the day’s waning hours, I opened my friend’s passport and flipped through it, marveling at the places he’d been.
Russia. Japan. Ukraine. England. Egypt. South Africa. China. Thailand. And on, and on. Country after country that his midlevel position at the State Department had afforded him the opportunities to visit.
Except...
Except there were some countries not listed. No entry and exit stamps for places he should have gone. For one place I knew he had gone.
Brazil.
It was where he had traveled with a US team to consult on the blight. Where he’d learned enough information to convince him that warning me was a prudent, if illegal, thing to do.
“Brazil,” I said aloud, confused.
Certainly a country suffering through the early stages of the blight would have tracked who entered and exited their domain with extra vigilance. Wouldn’t they?
But there was more. There was not one stamp in his passport from any country south of the border. No Mexico. No Central America. No South America. None. Yet, as he’d told it, he was a state department liaison between the Brazilians and American agricultural officials. Why would that job fall to him, someone with no apparent expertise in that part of the world? Wasn’t that the point of being a liaison? To be the expert on the place you were traveling to?
I looked back through the stamps in his passport, just to make certain I hadn’t missed something obvious. But I hadn’t.
“You okay?”
I looked up. It was Elaine, back from her bathroom run.
“You look like someone just stole your puppy,” she said, then sat down next to me.
I closed the passport and handed it to her.
“You can give that to Grace when you see her,” I said.
Elaine opened the front cover and again perused the places my friend had been, her attention fixed on thoughts of those faraway lands. Lands that were now dead places on a once green world.
Neil...
I didn’t know what to think about what I’d seen. And I didn’t know what to do. Broaching the discrepancy between his documentation and the narrative he’d shared with me might be the simplest thing to do. But was it the right thing to do?
Grace, while not fragile, had begun her pregnancy under trying circumstances. If there was some reason why Neil had concocted a story about visiting Brazil as the blight began its spread, I had no way of knowing if its revelation would bring an unnecessary strain upon Grace. And upon them. She needed him. Krista needed him. And he needed them.
And what was there to gain if I did confront him with what I saw as evidence of a lie he’d told me? A rather large and important fabrication. Would any good come of it? Was it even important right now, as we prepared to leave Skagway for home?
No. It wasn’t. I knew that. When we’d returned, and had a chance to adjust once again to life in Bandon, life as a community of survivors, then, maybe, in a casual way I could ask my friend about it. For now...
“It’s going to be a nice night,” I said, reaching to the chair next to me and taking Elaine’s hand in mine.
“Yeah,” she said. “It is.”
We sat there and let the day dwindle away. Watching Krista play. Letting the world spin on.
Forty Seven
In five days, two less than what Martin had estimated, we boarded the Northwest Majesty and maneuvered cautiously out of Sk
agway’s harbor, down the Taiya Inlet, and past Baranof Island and Port Alexander to open water. There would be no creeping along the inside passage, down narrow channels between the mainland and rugged islands.
Our voyage home would be on the ocean. On the Pacific. That word translated roughly to ‘peaceful’.
Not every day that followed, though, could be described as such.
Forty Eight
Two days after leaving Skagway I stood at the starboard rail as the Northwest Majesty sailed through calm seas, the vast Pacific to the west, islands and the mainland to the east. The ocean faced me, and I it. Across it there were almost certainly people like me, like us, who had hung on. Who had survived. Maybe some who were thriving. Men, women, and children who’d been through similar hells to those we’d faced and come out more than alive.
I wanted to believe that.
The hells we’d been through were behind us now. That, too, I wanted to believe. As farfetched as it might have seemed not too long ago, I was beginning to consider that there might be some semblance of a government left. One that, after stumbling through foolish and tragic mistakes, was gaining its footing in this new world. It, like the rest of the nation, had been whittled down to the minimal amount of moving parts necessary to maintain some functionality. The organs of the state had been starved to something closer to what the founding fathers had envisioned. Institutions lean and focused on the necessary.
It had only taken the near destruction of the nation, and the human race as a whole, to bring about that possibility.
That, though, was a distant consideration at the moment. If anything, this was a new beginning not only for governments, but for those they served. For people like those of us aboard the Northwest Majesty.
It had taken a week while the fuel was transferred to prepare the once luxurious cruise ship for departure. In shifts it was cleaned, debris removed, though there was no major damage to it. The Vensterdam had suffered the totality of the Russian assault. The Northwest Majesty’s systems were mostly intact, and repairs made those that weren’t at least serviceable for the six hundred or so who would board her.
Provisioning took up the final days in Skagway. Pallets of MREs and canned stable foodstuffs were loaded. Enough to feed those aboard during the journey home, and to leave with each group who departed to supplement what they would, hopefully, have waiting upon their return. In Bandon we’d left a healthy amount, enough for months. Enough to carry the whole of the town’s population through the end of the year and toward spring. With what we’d be bringing back with us, we could make it through the next fall.
There was the hope, though, that there would be more waiting for us. Things to harvest when the time came. Things green and alive and wonderful.
That was the hope. In fact, I believed, in the long run, it was our only hope.
But that desire had to be paired with what I knew. With certain realities. How could relationships, lifelong friendships, continue unless predicated on some new understanding? Or on accepted avoidance? Could I erase what had happened and just hold with better memories? Football games and double dates. Ditching school and hunting trips. Superbowl bets and too many laughs to count.
Could I?
Should I?
The apparent lie Neil had told me, as hard as I’d tried to force it out of my thoughts, refused to exist in that state of denial. Whenever I saw him aboard, walking with Grace, or playing tag with Krista in one of the empty ballrooms, it rose again, hanging there in the negative space between us like some sickness. I didn’t let on that I had any doubts about the story he’d shared, but, in all honesty, I tried to avoid those moments where we would end up alone together. Doing so was easy enough most of the time. He and Grace were treating the voyage as a sort of last getaway before the realities of a new family member began to draw near.
But in those few instances where I did stand with my friend, away from others, the thing that was nothing and everything all at once gnawed at me inside. And when it did I found myself shifting any discussion that arose to the old, and the familiar. To reminiscences of our youth. Of the place where we’d come to know and trust each other.
It was a place, a time, a feeling I feared I’d lost forever.
“What are you thinking?”
I turned away from the rail and saw Elaine just behind me. She stood in a spot where, in another time, in the old world, vacationers would be strolling about, on their way back from one of the ship’s restaurants, or on their way to one of the nightly shows which certainly played in those happy times.
“I’m not sure.”
She stepped closer. Then close.
“People who stare at the ocean are usually thinking of somewhere they want to be.”
It took me a moment to trace my thoughts, and then I realized she was right.
“Missoula,” I said. “A long time ago.”
“Why?” she asked, genuinely curious.
I could’ve answered with a simplistic explanation that I wanted what had been then to be now. That, though, wouldn’t scratch the surface as to the why. It would keep the reason, which was born of doubt, an impossible uncertainty, close. Just for me.
But I was more than just me now. I was part of us. I couldn’t keep what was tearing at me to myself anymore.
“Neil lied to me,” I told Elaine.
She shifted position and stood next to me at the rail now, listening. Wanting to know.
“When he was buzzed back on the dock we got a look at his passport. We were looking at the stamps after Grace took him for a walk to sober up.”
“I remember,” Elaine said.
“I told you before how he warned me about the blight,” I reminded her, and immediately the look about her changed to one of coming realization.
“He went to Brazil,” she said, recalling what I’d shared. “He was part of an advisory group or something. Working on the blight.”
“There were no stamps in that passport from anywhere south of the US,” I said.
She puzzled visibly over the inconsistency.
“Maybe it was just a mistake,” she said. “He might have had to replace the passport.”
“Most of those stamps were from years before the blight hit,” I countered.
She thought on that for a moment.
“I don’t know, Eric. I wish I had some explanation.”
“Yeah. Me, too.”
“You obviously haven’t talked to him about it,” she said. “Is this really important enough to tie you up in knots?”
“No. No, it’s not. This is the first thing resembling relaxation any of us have had in...”
“I get it,” she said.
“There’ll be time,” I said. “Once we’re back in Bandon and settled in. It can wait.”
That’s what I told her. But it wasn’t the reality I was projecting.
“You need a break,” Elaine said. “From everything.”
“That’s why I booked us this cruise,” I told her, trying to lighten the moment.
In her eyes I could see that I was failing miserably.
“Look, I get that you can’t just let go of what he said completely. But can you put it aside for a while? For me?”
I imagined I could. If what had transpired was vexing only me at the moment, I could, as Elaine requested, put it aside. Especially for her.
“I can do that,” I said.
“Good,” she said, and took my hand. “Come with me.”
Forty Nine
Of all the necessities that had been stripped from the Northwest Majesty during her appropriation by the government for use as transport, the tailor and dress shop aboard remained relatively well appointed. Few in the post blight world had seen any need for evening gowns and tuxedos.
Elaine, though, was one of those who did.
“Overdressed really doesn’t begin to convey how I feel.”
That was what I said to Elaine as we walked hand in hand across the ship’s atrium, past fa
ux greenery still vibrant, our attire more fitting to a night of fine dining and dancing than to some post-apocalyptic journey home. She’d found a tuxedo that fit my trimmer than usual frame almost perfectly, and a long dress that hugged her form in ways that made me forget the why of our being where we were and allowed me to just cherish how absolutely beautiful she was.
As we passed a gleaming panel of glass I took in my reflection.
“Lipstick on a pig,” I said.
Elaine nudged me playfully.
“What are you saying about my taste in men?”
We continued on, others aboard glancing our way with approving looks. As we descended a shallow flight of stairs toward the lounge I heard music. Not canned tunes piped through speakers, but real, simple, beautiful music. A piano.
Coming into the lounge I saw the source of it.
Angela Schiavo sat at the piano which was a fixture in any ship’s lounge, her fingers tapping the keys with light precision. She was not in uniform, but attired as a civilian in scrounged clothes, jeans and a blouse, that softened her appearance and highlighted the simple beauty about her. Sitting next to her on the instrument’s cozy bench, alternating between watching her play and just watching her, Martin seemed to very much agree with my assessment. To put it plainly, he looked smitten.
“I hope you’re okay with the music I arranged,” Elaine said.
Schiavo and her team were accompanying us on the voyage home. On everyone’s voyage home. With the first stop being to transfer us to shore, they would continue on, to Santa Barbara to disembark the Yuma group, and then onto San Diego with the group which had survived in that city. From that point, there was no indication where she and her men would be sent.
This was very likely one of the last times we would have to spend with her.
