The Boat

by Christine Dougherty

  “I know, honey, I know you did. Just go in there and look at the picture books, then, okay? But stay in our room. I’ll ask Bonnie to come sit with you. Keep you company. Will you do that for me, Baby?”

  The little girl nodded and trotted toward the salon. She waved one hand to Jade on the way. “Bye, Jade, I hope you feel better.”

  Jade never looked up.

  ~ ~ ~

  Steve stood next to Maggie on the back deck of ThreeBees. They both looked at Jade, who’d fallen asleep on the deck bench right where Babygirl had slept that same morning. Carl had told Maggie that Jade wasn’t really asleep, not in the sense of the restorative state we are accustomed to. He said that she was in something called a fugue state, on the verge of catatonia, overwhelmed with guilt and sorrow, completely unable to cope. He said they’d have to watch her very closely.

  Maggie had agreed, but not for precisely the same reasons.

  “Has Adam asked you why you’re moving?” Steve asked, still not taking his eyes from Jade.

  “I told him we wanted to try and get out a little deeper, test the waters for fish. He didn’t question it beyond that.”

  “No, he’s preoccupied. That John Smith seems to have him a little in thrall.”

  Maggie frowned and looked at Steve. “What do you mean?”

  “He’s made the guy his right hand man. Already. I mean, that’s some pretty short acquaintance, wouldn’t you say?”

  Maggie nodded and her eyes went back to Jade, where she lay curled on the bench. She looked like an exhausted child, but Maggie did not feel moved. She realized she was assessing Jade with a coldness she would never have thought herself capable of. In her mind, she had already classified Jade as potentially ‘other,’ or ‘undead.’ At least in possibility, if not in actual fact.

  And the possibility was enough to justify the caution. It’s the reason that had put Singer adrift in the first place, wasn’t it?

  “We have to put her out on the rowboat,” Maggie said, her voice calm, her eyes never leaving Jade.

  Steve shifted uncomfortably. “But was she bit or scratched or marked up at all?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. We’re all so cut up and banged up and malnourished…who can tell if her cuts and scrapes are from yesterday or this morning? We can’t take the chance.” Babygirl flashed into her mind, all big eyes and vulnerability. Was that what was making her feel so adamant? Babygirl’s safety?

  Primarily, yes, it seemed so. It seemed she’d developed some sort of maternal instinct after all.

  She didn’t want it, but she couldn’t deny it.

  “Help me with her. Be careful in case she comes to and struggles.”

  Steve felt a cold reluctance trying to fill his limbs with lead. They couldn’t put that exhausted, skinny, run down girl out by herself in a rowboat. She’d get sunburned; she’d die from exposure.

  “Can’t we lock her in her room? At least she’d have the bed.”

  “Well, but then what? What if she changes?” Maggie whispered furiously and tears danced at the edges of her eyelids. “Escort her out? Abandon the boat?” She took a deep breath, steadying herself. She wiped under her eyes. “What choice do we have? Tell me. I’m willing to listen.”

  He realized that Maggie did understand the consequences…and the possibilities. She’d just thought it through quicker than he had. He looked at Jade again and shook his head.

  “None, I guess. You’re right. I just wish…” He trailed off, shrugging.

  “Yeah, me too. Everyone else, too, you know? But this is where we’re at. This is what we need to…to deal with.” Her eyes were full of grief and an aching exhaustion that Steve thought was probably mirrored in his own.

  “Yes, you’re right,” he said. “Let’s get it over with.”

  With Carl’s help, they placed an unresisting Jade in the rowboat. They covered her with a white sheet and packed in a waterproof canvas tarpaulin, water, beef jerky and hard candy–some of the staples of their diets.

  “Three days at the most. That’s all. Then we’ll know.”

  Maggie said the words but they all three nodded, as if making a compact.

  Steve played the line out, hand over hand, until Jade floated a hundred feet away.

  They stood quietly together until Maggie took up her post on the deck chair. It had been too much like a wake, they way they were standing there. Jade wasn’t dead, she told herself.

  Not yet, anyway, she answered herself, and shivered.

  ~ ~ ~

  “What’s the deal with this John Smith guy?” Carl asked Steve. They had moved to the side of ThreeBees, sensing that Maggie needed some space. “Maggie thought there was something off about him?”

  “Yeah, I don’t know what it is. He’s a sycophant, but a discreet one. I don’t think Adam would ever recognize that about the guy.”

  Carl snorted. “Not likely. Not when your ego’s as big as his. Takes a lot of stroking to keep that sucker inflated.”

  “Is that your professional assessment?”

  Carl laughed. “No…that one’s all personal. All kinds of personal.”

  Carl had had a few run-ins with Adam back at the beginning, when everyone was still getting their shit together. Carl didn’t like Adam, didn’t like his manipulations and fits of pique. He recognized a God complex but also an almost ridiculously stunted sense of self worth…a strange combination. Possibly dangerous, especially in light of the power he’d been able to achieve. Adam had been lucky so far that most people were too tired and depressed–still trying to recover themselves as people–to take issue with very many things.

  But look at a situation like Sujon and Muhammad…that was poor decision making at its finest and it had gotten Muhammad killed. Sujon, too, if you followed the line of reasoning out to its bitter end.

  A bad decision that had cost two lives and it had been based on anger and bruised ego. And fear. Fear of someone else getting the upper hand. Fear of being pushed aside. And now Adam had acquired a genuine toady?

  Something might have to be done, sooner rather than later.

  But who would do it? Who had the authority?

  No one, that’s who. It was troubling.

  “Maybe I should take a ride over there today. Talk to the new guy,” Carl said.

  “Not a bad idea. I’d like to hear your assessment; hopefully you’ll prove me wrong. Maybe I’m just adding worries to my worries,” Steve said and sighed. “I think I’ll stay here in case Maggie needs me. In case anyone here needs me. I mean, if they need help with anything.” He fumbled and stumbled his way through his last sentences and then glanced at Carl.

  “Huh,” Carl said and crossed his arms over his chest. The barest hint of a grin sat comfortably under his beard.

  Steve’s face soured. “‘Huh’ nothing. Hey listen, why don’t you go look under someone else’s hood?”

  Carl nodded. “Will do.” But he didn’t move.

  Steve punched him on the shoulder.

  ~ ~ ~

  “I can’t get Brian to wake up. He is out!” Randy said, coming across the deck. His shorts were strapped across his shrinking but still big belly with what looked like a length of clothesline. He looked like a hillbilly or a homeless person. Bonnie must not have seen that get-up yet, Maggie thought, amused.

  “Let him sleep,” she said. “He probably needs it. I’ll make sure he gets up in time to eat something for lunch. You know he’s only nineteen?”

  Randy dragged a chair across the deck and stationed it next to Maggie’s. He nodded to Steve, who sat on Maggie’s other side. “Yep, I know. Nineteen, Jesus Christ almighty, that’s young. I barely remember it.” He tilted back in the chair and closed his eyes. “Sun feels good.”

  “Is Bonnie sitting with Babygirl?” Maggie asked.

  “Yep, looking at picture books. That little one is sweet, isn’t she?” Randy cracked an eye open and glanced at Maggie.

  Maggie nodded, but then her gaze slipped back to Jade on the rowboat.


  Brian stumbled from the salon, scrubbing his face with his hands. His eyes were red-rimmed and seemed sunken into the dark circles surrounding them. He shuffled like a drunk. He looked more like a man emerging from a coma than a restful night’s sleep. Maggie felt a wrenching tug of pity in her heart. They’d all been through so much. It seemed there was no end to the misery.

  “What’s up?” Brian said, seeming to address his own feet. He shoved his hands into his pockets and squinted out at the rowboat. “Singer okay?”

  Chapter Nine

  Sami and Candy were in bed, but they weren’t sleeping, not anymore. Sami had wakened them both with his silent struggles. Another nightmare.

  “Same one as before?” Candy asked, cradling his head in her lap and caressing his thick, black hair.

  “Yes. Always that same one. Always that same ending.” His voice was slightly muffled. Despite the terror and sweat, he was already falling back to sleep. His hand opened and closed on the bunched-up hem of Candy’s baby-doll nightie.

  Opened and closed.

  Like a baby, she thought. All men revert when in distress. She’d noticed this before. She sighed and tipped her head back against the hand-carved, teak headboard. Sami had a nice room. One of the nicest. Most people had to cram four or six to a room, but not Sami. Because he was Adam’s right hand man.

  Or had been, anyway. Until that Smith guy showed up.

  Candy didn’t like him and Candy was a good judge of character. Very good. Maybe because her own manner of dressing was camouflage…she could see out but no one could see in. People tended to reveal themselves around her.

  She had noted the glittering lack of humanity in Smith’s eyes as he’d surveyed the other passengers. This guy had just been dragged from a life raft? Not likely. Most of the people on Flyboy had been here for at least two months, safe, warm, fed…and they still looked like recent refugees from hell. Candy didn’t know what John Smith was selling, but she surely wasn’t buying it.

  And she’d have to make sure Sami didn’t make a purchase, either. In her own practical, unromantic, clear-eyed way, she loved Sami, and more than that, she protected him. She didn’t know if it was his given nature or the fact that he was a foreigner or a combination of both those things, but Sami was too vulnerable. Emotionally vulnerable, she amended to herself. Physically…he did okay. She felt a fluttering of lust in her lower belly as she raked her fingers through his hair.

  But he was already back to sleep and she was tired, too. So she thought about Sami’s dream, instead. It was a lust killer, for sure.

  He had it almost every night, but it started differently each time. He’d be eating in a restaurant, riding a bus, or hailing a cab and everything was prosaically normal. Mundane. But then a hand would grasp his ankle and he would turn and holding onto him would be a half-body: a head, a torso, and an arm. Its face was rotted almost to the bone, the muscles brownish and crumbling, veins and arteries darkly purple, the lips gone, the nose twin holes under a bridge of yellow cartilage. He couldn’t tell if it was–had been–a man or a woman. But its eyes were blue, bright with life and tortured awareness…nothing like the dead eyes of the walking corpses they’d all encountered at the end.

  In his dream he would panic and try to yank his foot away, but the half-body held fast, its grip like that of a vise, seemingly ten times as heavy as a half a body should be. It would twist, rocking itself toward him, closer and closer. He would become aware of a susurration emanating from its throat…aaallll…oooorrrrr aaauuuuuuuuulllll…and its mouth would begin to snap open and closed, even as it whispered. It got closer and closer and Sami would see that his pant leg had pulled up, exposing his shin, his calf, his ankle. Then the teeth were on him, sinking in, searing like a brand and he would hear the accusatory whisper as it cleared the channels of his deciphering mind: all your fault…

  When he recounted the dream to Candy, his eyes took on a deep despondency that she didn’t like. In Candy’s view, the world was a cold, tenuous place, with little room for the fragile vulnerability of self-doubt. That was something she’d always known, even before the sickness. But Sami didn’t know it. Sami didn’t know that the real enemy is other people…not the sinkers and walking corpses.

  Look at Adam, for example. He was more than willing to lord it over Sami even though Sami was–quite literally–a better person. But Adam had a way of shrinking Sami, reducing him until Sami felt unsure of every decision, shrunken even in his own estimation of himself.

  Adam had gotten a hold of Sami when he and Candy had first come aboard. At that time, they were still pretending to be coincidental acquaintances only. Old habits, dying hard. She hadn’t been able to protect Sami from Adam’s poisonous rap.

  Adam had latched onto Sami almost immediately. He seemed to like everyone calling Sami Dr. Rafiq; he liked the automatic respect that title demanded. Adam acted as though he had discovered Sami, sponsored him in some way, and that Sami’s title should somehow convey to him, too. And if not the title, then at least the respect.

  Candy had seen the dynamic before. She understood it. Sami was Adam’s prize, the possession through which he would buy esteem. If you don’t have a title yourself, the next best thing it to have someone with a title looking up to you. Standing on the shoulders of giants? Yes, that was some of it, but if Adam was standing on Sami’s shoulders, then he was also shitting down Sami’s neck at the same time.

  Because it was obvious that Adam also resented the respect that Sami received…he resented and feared that people were drawn to Sami: his kindness, thoughtfulness and calmly quiet nature. After something terrible had happened, who would you want to sit next to? The guy that would sit shoulder to shoulder with you in companionable solidarity? Or the guy that worried and fidgeted, discontentedly stirring up trouble and unnecessary worry?

  Candy would pick a Sami over an Adam every time.

  Sami had confessed to Adam the first night they’d been on board. There were just over a dozen people at that time…dazed and uncomprehending ghosts, each with a story of horrific survivorship that they seemed compelled to tell every new person who came on board.

  Candy listened to each story with equanimity, holding them at a mental floodgate, but Sami’s eyes grew rounder, more shocked, as if for him these stories were not only burdens, but cumulative.

  Adam had been the one to assign them their rooms that night. He had put Candy in with three other women based on the fact that they expected more survivors. Then he’d taken Sami aside, questioned him about his title, wanting to know what kind of doctor he was. He told Sami that it was of course because everyone would feel better if they had a medical doctor on board. Candy didn’t believe that for a minute. She knew Adam’s type and she knew even then that Adam was looking at Sami like the candle that was going to draw the most moths. And Candy would bet that, above all, Adam was a collector. A collector of insults, hurts, grudges…maybe even action figures, if he’d never found himself a woman. And the women that would be able to stand his Napoleonic tendencies would be few and far between.

  Sami–exhausted, miserable, separated from Candy and burdened with the stories of the other survivors–had broken down. Consumed with guilt and shame, he’d mistaken Adam’s calculated interest for genuine human concern. He’d told Adam of what he perceived to be his failing, seeing the potential for just what had occurred and not acting on it. Not putting a stop to it. His cowardice, as Sami saw it, was the thing that had doomed the world to its current fate.

  That’s when Adam had stopped calling him Dr. Rafiq. Even though he corrected anyone else who tried to address Sami by his first name.

  Now John Smith had come along and Candy watched as he drew Adam in through flattery and manipulation. She knew it could be a good thing; or it could be bad. Either Adam’s relationship with Smith would set Sami free…or Sami would become the low dog on the totem pole, the whipping boy for both of those psychopathic assholes.

  Candy would watch and see which
way it was playing out. She’d rescue Sami if she had to, she didn’t mind. She considered herself more fortunate than most of the other survivors because she felt almost entirely the same now as she had before this whole shitty mess.

  To Candy, the world was a terrible place, now and before. She’d seen her own brother into his grave because of a disease that had been largely ignored by mainstream society because of the perception of who, specifically, got the disease…and she’d seen even worse than that.

  Walking corpses and sinkers hadn’t made the world an endurance challenge.

  The real people–the living–had done that.

  ~ ~ ~

  Sami sat next to John Smith on the small upper bridge deck. John was staring intently at Adam and Carl on the lower deck. They were at the very back rail, away from anyone else and Carl looked frustrated. Twice, he gestured to the main body of Flyboy. He wanted something, that much was obvious, but Sami wasn’t able to determine what it was that Carl wanted.

  Sami glanced uncomfortably at John Smith. All conversation had ceased as soon as Adam had walked away. It was as if Sami did not exist in John’s world. It made Sami very uneasy. Very nervous.

  “That Carl is a very big man, isn’t he? He looks like a pirate! Very fitting for the boats, wouldn’t you agree, John?”

  John Smith didn’t even bat an eye, only continued to stare at Adam and Carl.

  “The funny thing is, he is a psychologist. You would never guess it, would you?” Sami laughed nervously.

  John blinked once, closing and opening his eyes slowly. Then he looked at Sami. Sami felt a shiver of unease at John Smith’s unblinking gaze. John’s eyes reminded him of something…

  “A psychologist?” John asked.

  Sami nodded and smiled. “Yes, as I was saying…you never would have guessed, would you? He looks very intimidating at first blush but as soon as you talk to him, you see that–”