The Boat

by Christine Dougherty

  His mom never touched him if she could help it, but Dad did; they played all the time. He told Mikey that Mikey was lucky to have a young dad, a fun dad. When they swam together, his dad would tickle him, grab his ankle, grab him by the waist and throw him up and up. Mikey would splash back down into the water, sometimes fighting for breath, choking on a lungful of water and Dad would be laughing. Mouth wide, hahaha and weird breath.

  Mikey tried it sometimes at night. He was up a lot when his parents slept in their bed. He’d go to the little bathroom downstairs off the kitchen and drag a chair to the sink and stand at the mirror. He would open his mouth wide and say “haha” and “hahaha” and try to make the weird breath. It didn’t sound the same so he stopped doing it.

  Sometimes he stood and watched his parents as they slept. They kept their eyes closed for a very long time. Mikey didn’t know how they did that. He tried, but his eyes always wanted to stay open. Mikey didn’t have control over his eyes. They would burn with too much air and too little sleep. He would rub his eyes and stand at his mom’s bedside. Her mouth would hang open and he would stare at her cheek and think about the minnow. The hook going in. Sometimes it made a little ‘pop’ sound when it did.

  The cold fish blood.

  People blood would not be cold, though. He knew that already. Because people were not fish. His dad said.

  When he turned four, they put a box on the floor and told him it was his birthday present. The box moved and he didn’t like that. He knew boxes should not move. He kicked at it and Dad said, “Whoa, whoa, hold on there, Mikey, let me show you what’s in the box.” His dad and mom had exchanged a glance that Mikey could not read. They were always doing things with their eyes…with their eyebrows…that Mikey didn’t understand.

  Dad opened the box and a puppy was in it. It had brown wavy fur, brown eyes, and a brown nose. “That’s a Chesapeake Bay Retriever, Mikey, and he’s yours, son. You can even name him.”

  Mikey had looked from his dad to his mom. She had her hands put together and pressed under her chin. She was not baring her teeth but she had stretched lips. And water leaked from her eyes. “Isn’t he a cute puppy, Mikey? Isn’t he sweet? Everyone loves puppies, Mikey, and you will, too. It will make you…happy. Puppies make people happy, honey.”

  Mikey had looked at the puppy a little while longer, waiting for happy (whatever that was) and finally Dad took the puppy out of the box. It had come to where Mikey stood. Its tail was moving and it was jumping. Its pink tongue hung loosely from its brown lips.

  Mikey kicked it. Hard.

  His mom was yelling as his dad swept him up and carried him down the hall into his room. She yelled after them, “I told you! I told you there was something wrong with him!” Her voice was weird like she was choking.

  His dad had put him on the bed and then he had paced back and forth, back and forth. He did it so long that Mikey decided to pick up one of his books instead of watching his dad pace. The pacing was boring.

  So he’d begun to slide from the bed, his eyes on the book he wanted, when his dad picked him up by the arms and yelled into his face, shaking him roughly. “You can’t hurt things! That’s just a defenseless puppy! What is wrong with you, Mikey?”

  Mikey saw the anger and fear in his dad’s eyes and came to a conclusion. They hurt the fish all the time; hurting fish was okay. But hurting a puppy was not okay, most definitely not.

  “You can’t hurt puppies, Daddy,” Mikey said. Like a foreigner trying to learn a language by ear, repetition would become his Rosetta Stone–though not much repetition was ever needed; Mikey was very bright.

  His dad lowered him back to the bed, mouth agape. “Mikey, you spoke?” It was both a statement and a question, as if he was trying to convince himself of something.

  Mikey nodded.

  “Cath! Honey, come in here!” Joy and fright were uncomfortable companions in his tone. They would become more comfortable as time wore on–Mikey’s actions would demand it.

  His mom came to the door, holding the puppy in her arms. Her lips were tight. Puckered.

  “Say it again, Mikey, say what you said before.”

  Mikey looked from his dad to his mom.

  “You can’t hurt puppies, Daddy,” Mikey said. His voice was tiny but his pronunciation and diction were perfect. It was as though he’d been speaking for years. His parents stared at him in amazement. They’d had him to a doctor once but the doctor had said he would speak when he chose to. There was nothing physically wrong with him. That advice had cost them fifteen dollars that they didn’t have.

  Mikey’s parents were poor, very poor. Mikey knew this from overhearing them talk together when they thought he was asleep. His mom wanted to go back to a place called California where she had been a little girl, or to New Jersey where Daddy had been a little boy…but his dad wanted to stay where they were: Mexico.

  They stayed in Mexico.

  When he turned five, his dad started to teach him things from books. He said that Mikey would go to school right here at home, right in the kitchen, isn’t that cool? Mikey didn’t know if it was cool or not, but he knew to nod. He knew by now that certain phrases–certain tones–demanded that answering nod. He was learning to parrot.

  Mikey would study at the little round table. When he felt his dad’s eyes on him, he would reach over and run his hand over Chief’s head. Dad liked that. He liked when Mikey petted Chief.

  Chief was big now, with wavy brown fur that felt coarse under Mikey’s hand. The muscles of his brown head would jump and squeeze when Chief panted or twitched his ears and Mikey liked to feel the muscles, although he didn’t know yet that that was what they were called. Mikey had an intense desire to see whatever it was that jumped under his hand and how it made Chief’s ears move. How would he get to see?

  Chief liked having a hand on his head. Mikey didn’t know why–himself, he hated to be touched.

  Mom worked at a hotel, helping people by making sure their rooms were nice and clean. But then she lost her job. His mom and dad fought and fought for three weeks and they ate more and more fish until one night, his dad said, “Fine, we’ll go back to Jersey, then you’ll see, Cath. We’ll be no better off. We’ll be worse off. Much worse.”

  “Because you’ll have to get a job? Is that what’s killing you? That you’ll have to work for once?”

  “I’m young! I don’t want to waste my life doing a job I’ll hate! Do you want to be like your parents? Sweating yourself into an early grave? You think that’s cool?”

  The fight ended the way all the bad ones did: violently. They hit each other and pulled hair and spit and punched and screamed. Sometimes, Mikey would come out of his room to watch. When they were to this point, they never noticed him.

  Often there was blood. Mom or Dad or both would have bloody noses or sometimes cuts on their faces. They would have bruises, black eyes, occasionally a broken finger or toe. Then they would strip and do something else. Sometimes it was more violent, more intense than the fighting. They breathed heavily and moaned and cursed. There was more hair pulling. Mikey didn’t know what they were doing. But there was something about it that excited him…especially if there was already blood.

  They moved to New Jersey and lived in his dad’s parents’ house. Mikey’s grandmom and granddad.

  Mikey didn’t understand his grandparents at all. He didn’t understand the things he had to do. He didn’t know what was expected of him.

  Then there was school. And church. And cold. And shopping. And clothes and shoes. Even the food was different. Nothing Mikey had ever had before, things like hot chocolate. Noodles and cheese. Peanut butter and jelly. And the fish was covered in a crunchy crust and shaped like a plank and covered in cold red from a bottle. And it didn’t even taste like fish.

  Mikey stopped talking again for a little while. But his granddad didn’t like that. His grandmom took him to another doctor, in a big building with lots of other people around, other kids. And they had looked at
him and into him with lights and things on scopes and prodded him and took his picture…

  And they told his grandmom that he would talk when he was ready. There was nothing physically wrong with him.

  Eventually he did talk again. He was learning. Learning his new life.

  He learned to suss out who was important. He learned that the one who made the decisions was the one you wanted to be near. He never played with Dad anymore because his dad was…weak. Reduced in some way that Mikey couldn’t yet articulate but that had to do with the fact that his dad lived in the basement and rarely came out. He yelled a lot and Granddad had to go down and make him be quieter. Then sometimes his dad would cry. But Granddad ignored the crying as though it was beneath him. Not worthy of notice. Mikey liked that. He liked Granddad because Granddad was mostly one way: cold. Mikey appreciated it. It was easy to understand.

  Eventually his mom left and then some time after that, his dad left, too. Sometimes he came back to visit and would ask did Mikey want to come live with him? But Mikey always said no. Mikey endured his dad’s visits…nothing more. It was just time passing as far as Mikey was concerned.

  Then his dad stopped visiting, too. By that time, Mikey was eleven and in the fifth grade. School, he found, was no different than anything else–it was just a matter of finding a solid spot to stand and letting everything occur around you.

  Mikey got along okay.

  Then Chief died.

  Chief had stayed with Mikey. His dad had said you shouldn’t separate a boy and his dog. Mikey had been bewildered by that but had filed it with every other bewildering thing that people said and did.

  Chief wasn’t very old, but he got sick. Cancer, his grandmom told him, cancer that was eating him up inside.

  Mikey thought that was so interesting. Something was eating Chief from the inside? But how would that work, exactly? He started watching Chief with avid interest; sometimes laying his head on Chief’s chest when the dog lay sleeping by the couch.

  To his grandmom, Mikey looked just the picture of a boy devoted to his oldest, bestest friend. But in reality, Mikey was trying hear the chewing.

  Then one morning, Chief had been dead in the kitchen. Mikey was curious about the cancer. Would he be able to see it? Could he catch it in a jar? So he had gotten the big knife from the butcher block where Grandmom kept it and he had…

  They took him to another kind of doctor after that. A doctor who wanted to talk and talk. Mikey learned a lot from this doctor. He learned the difference between himself (abnormal) and everyone else (normal). It was more or less an accelerated course in ‘fitting in’ and Mikey could never have learned so much on his own in the same short time span.

  It was very helpful.

  He’d learned to hide the things that satisfied him, and to hide them well, because they were atrocious to other people. Years went by and Mikey fit in better and better, more and more, until he was well-liked and even loved by the people around him. He was valedictorian of his high school. He had a girlfriend. He began college. He had even decided his major: psychiatry. But then everything changed.

  He had watched with curiosity when his roommates died and reanimated and then eaten his current girlfriend. He’d pushed her out of his room and into the shared living room where his roommates stumbled in clumsy circles, moaning. He wasn’t sure what reanimated humans would do and he wanted to see.

  And he had seen.

  It had been exciting as they tore her apart. It had taken her a long time to die because she had fallen face down and it was a while before they got to her jugular. The screaming was irritating, but Mikey (now Michael) had merely tuned it out.

  He called up the memory of his parents fighting, the blood and the moaning. That had been powerful…but this…this was even better. He felt as though sparks were jumping and snapping in his brain. He watched as one roommate gagged and threw up a wad of wet hair. A good portion of his girlfriend’s teacup-handle ear lay in the vomit.

  It was satisfying in the way gutting fish had been; gutting Chief.

  He’d found a good vantage point to view the carnage and for three days watched as people died and reanimated, or died and stayed dead, and ate each other indiscriminately. It was the best time.

  But then it had stopped. There were no more survivors except himself. No one for the walking corpses to go after.

  For the first time in his life, Michael had felt an emotion: depression. Black, smothering, unmanning depression. He couldn’t get the carnage out of his mind, the swelling, almost sexual, feeling he got when he saw the killing occur.

  He needed it.

  But then he fell ill. In his depression, he neglected himself. He didn’t eat. He barely drank anything. He lost fifteen pounds in the space of one week. He contracted bronchitis that quickly became pneumonia and in his run down state, it was nearly fatal.

  He was found in the back of a CVS by another survivor. She was ransacking the pharmacy, looking for anything that would come in handy, when she found Michael curled up next to a blood pressure machine.

  She shook him and he came to briefly. She asked his name and he could only shake his head, made mute by the clogged, drowning feeling in his filled lungs.

  “How about John? John Smith?” She’d smiled down at him and he’d gone away again, the fever carrying him to dreams of bloodied teeth under cracked lips, rich, red organs spilling forth, and over and over he saw the ear vomited up by his roommate.

  The woman and two others had come back for Michael, referring to him as John, and transported him to where they had made an encampment in a nearby apartment building. Over the course of the next two weeks, Michael, now John, was nursed back to health.

  Once healthy, he repaid their kindness by leading a contingent of the reanimated humans to the apartment complex while the people inside slept. Michael (John) was not afraid of the undead humans…not in the way the other survivors were. To Michael (John) they were simply another type of human, a fun and slightly dangerous type. In some ways, they were easier to understand because they were so singular in nature. They only wanted one thing: to kill and eat the living.

  It had done more to buoy his spirits than any antibiotic ever could. The depression lifted. John Smith, formerly Mikey and then Michael, decided to keep his new name. It was as though his own last fever had burned his old life away, awakening him to this new purpose, this extraordinary new human he had become.

  When he had discovered the survivors on the boats, it had been even better. The last boat he’d been on, the Open Rhodes, had been very exciting. There had been six strong people on that one. The carnage had been magnificent and deeply satisfying. He almost hadn’t gotten away, so enamored was he by the killing.

  But Flyboy would be even better. John Smith had never seen a boat as large as Flyboy. It would take a long time, maybe a day, maybe even two, for the festivities on such a large boat to be over.

  He’d swum out from shore in the first light of dawn, towing his yellow life raft until he was close to the smallest boat, the Barbra’s Bay Breeze. He knew the little raft would be hard to see in the yellow, morning light. Then he had climbed aboard, cut his forehead, and waited for them to ‘find’ him. He knew they would eventually and he also knew that being injured or ill made people accept you quicker.

  That was how humans operated.

  The undead ones, anyway.

  ~ ~ ~

  John Smith swam past Big Daddy.

  In the wooden rowboat he towed, Jade’s first life burned out.

  Then her second began.

  ~ ~ ~

  His slow and even strokes brought him to Flyboy in less than fifteen minutes, but getting his prize on board would be tricky. It wasn’t late, only somewhere around nine or nine-thirty–pre-sickness, it would have been prime time but now, with lack of resources and lack of interest, people tended to be out just after the sun had fully set.

  John paddled near the hull of the big boat, heading for the back. There was a low
portion–kind of a large step–that would give him access to the other decks. He’d hang back there until the ship was completely quiet. Then he’d haul the rowboat in and let the fun begin.

  He clambered up onto the step and turned to sit. His lungs, still feeling the lingering effects of the pneumonia, were grateful for the break. He could just see into the rowboat, fifteen feet away. The girl was moving sluggishly, writhing in the bottom of the boat. She was very small. A curl of doubt wormed into John’s consciousness. She wouldn’t be able to overpower anyone. He’d have to give her a helping hand.

  At that thought, the literal image floated into his mind of his hand in the girl’s mouth, being bitten. Would he feel different? If he were one of the cold reanimated? It occurred to him that in some ways, he was already more like them than he was the other, hotter humans.

  Maybe like the transition from Mikey to Michael and then to John, becoming a walking corpse was part of his destined path. Maybe the undead John, nameless from then on, was his ultimate form. The idea held a certain power.

  Somewhere behind him, in the depths of Flyboy, Adam was tossing and turning in his room, thinking about Sami and secrets…thinking about checking on John Smith and deciding against it.

  John Smith sat waiting as August tenth became August eleventh. It had been just over two months from the time of the sickness and John was eagerly, if quietly, anticipating the hell he was about to unleash.

  He had waited this long.

  He could wait a bit more.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “Shit, shit, shit…” Brian said, fairly dancing with agitation. It was somewhere around two in the morning and Brian had taken over the watch from Steve about fifteen minutes earlier.

  Steve had pointed out the slack rope and told Brian to keep an eye out, make sure she didn’t drift too close. The lack of tension wasn’t in itself cause for alarm. The rowboat often drifted enough for the rope to hang limply from the cleat.