To Sail a Darkling Sea

by John Ringo

  “Flotilla.”

  “Spotted surface activity, probable tuna, moving to target-of-opportunity fishing ops, over.”

  “Stand by, Lines.”

  “Like I’m going to let these out of my sight,” Sophia muttered.

  Tuna moved fast and often the only sign you got was a cluster of birds. When the tuna were done eating whatever was at the surface they’d dive and be gone. That could take hours or bare minutes. You either went for them or you lost them. And since this wasn’t a big migration period in the area, fish had been scarce.

  Since the only fresh food the entire squadron got was fish, and tuna was at the top of the menu, fishing ops was right up there with searching for survivors.

  “What do we got?” Paula yelled from the transom deck.

  “Probably tuna,” Sophia yelled back. “Look big! Three polers.”

  “On it!”

  “Lines, Flotilla.”

  “Lines,” Sophia answered, keeping an eye on the birds.

  “Roger fish-ops. We need a cut. Report to Large after taking on fish.”

  “Aye, aye,” Sophia said. “Lines, out.”

  Then she keyed the intercom again.

  “It’s on like Donkey Kong!”

  * * *

  “What are we doing?” Rusty asked, holding onto a metal bar.

  He wasn’t a big fisherman but he sort of knew how you did it with deep-sea fishing. There was a chair and a big reel and you sort of cruised around until you got a bite.

  You didn’t go charging across the ocean at full speed with the boat rocking from side to side like it was going to sink.

  And there was one big rod with a big reel. Not what Paula and Patrick were rigging, which was three really long rods with lines at the end that all led to one big hook. The hook didn’t even really have a lure on it. Just a big plastic bird-feather.

  “What we’re doing is rigging the poles,” Paula said. “What you’re doing is waiting till we’re rigged, then I’ll explain.”

  “Got it,” Rusty said. He couldn’t even figure out what knot she was tying. It was complicated was all he could get.

  “Right,” Paula said, standing up easily despite the bouncing of the boat. “First of all, glad you’re here. You’re about to get one hell of a workout. ’Cause here’s how it works. We stand by the transom, that’s the bulkhead at the back of the boat. Sophia will drive over near the fish. We then all three, together, flip the lure out over our heads and tap our poles on the water. Just follow along with us. When a fish hits the lure, you just hold on tight, lean back and pick it up out of the water and throw it backwards over our heads. We gotta do that together and pretty hard. Then we go back and do it again. We’ll stop from time to time to cut the fish up and store them. We’ve got a big cooler for them. You got it?”

  “Got it,” Rusty said. “I think.”

  “You’ll figure it out,” Patrick said. “First time we tried it it was a disaster.”

  “It wasn’t a disaster,” Paula said.

  “You weren’t the one that got hit in the face,” Patrick pointed out.

  “You were only knocked out for a minute,” Paula said. “Reminds me, we need to get the helmets and face shields.”

  “Or pulled overboard,” Patrick pointed out.

  “And the life vests . . .”

  “Then there’s the smell . . .”

  “And the chum. Can’t forget the chum . . .”

  * * *

  “You’re supposed to use live fish for this,” Paula said, standing back from where Rusty was tossing chunks of decaying fish over the side. “But we don’t have any. Anything will do, really.”

  Rusty had gotten used to not wanting to throw up from the smell. But apparently they were low on respirators or he’d be using one. The “chum” was all the “stuff” they hadn’t used from previous fish. It had been kept cool but it had still started to rot and smelled just awful.

  “And we have customers,” Patrick said, looking over the transom.

  “Toss a bunch of that crap over the side,” Paula said. “And grab your rod.”

  The rods were longer than the aft deck. The thick lines attached to the ends were barely half their length. Rusty still wasn’t sure how this was going to work. But there were fish behind the boat, rolling to the surface feasting on the heads and entrails he’d tossed over the back. They were falling behind quick, though, ’cause the boat was moving so fast.

  “You take the middle,” Paula said.

  “And watch yourself or you’ll get hit in the face,” Patrick added.

  “Okay,” Rusty said.

  “Just follow our movements,” Paula said.

  She brought her rod down overhead until it was dangling with the lure just barely in the water.

  “Now, tap, like this,” she said, dropping her rod and tapping the water’s surface.

  As he brought his own rod down, he felt the line go taut and was nearly pulled over the side.

  “Get your feet,” Patrick said as the three lines jerked each of the poles. Suddenly it went slack.

  “Damnit,” Paula said, jigging the lure again. “Pop it! And keep your balance this time!”

  The line got hit again but this time he was planted.

  “One, two, three, pull!” Paula said quickly.

  On the “pull,” she and Patrick leaned back, pulling the rods back and yanking a fish out of the water. It headed right for Rusty who was in the center.

  He dropped his rod and dodged to the side as the fish came flying past his head.

  “Try to be some help here,” Paula said. “Grab your damned pole at least!”

  The fish had thrown the hook already and was lying on the transom deck flapping its tail. It was bigger than any fish Rusty had ever seen except on TV shows. If he’d picked it up it would have been nearly to his waist.

  He tried to ignore it and grabbed his pole. They started to flick the lure back out but he wasn’t ready and it got tangled. By the time they were untangled, the school of fish was out of range.

  “Coming about,” Sophia yelled.

  “You getting this?” Paula asked sharply. “When we get on the school, we all three, together, toss out the line. Then we all three, together, pop it. It’s called jigging. When we get a hit, we all three together, pull. I won’t go one-two-three this time. Just when it’s on I’ll go ‘Pull’ and we all pull. Got it?”

  “Got it,” Rusty said.

  “Try not to go over the side, drop your pole or get hit in the face by one of the tuna,” Paula said. “That’s pretty much the safety briefing.”

  “Patrick,” Sophia called. “Throw some chum!”

  “Got it,” Patrick said, leaning over and tossing some of the chum into the water.

  “That’s bringing ’em up,” Paula said. “Pop it,” she added, jigging the lure. The line went taut again and Paula looked at him.

  “Ready, pull!” she snapped.

  This time, Rusty just dodged to the side as the fish came flying out of the water.

  “Ready, flick it back,” Paula said. The fish had already fallen off the half-hook.

  “Got it,” Rusty said, this time getting the flick right.

  The line had barely hit the water when it went taut again.

  “PULL!

  “And flick . . .

  “And PULL . . . !”

  * * *

  “I think that’s all we can handle for now,” Sophia said from the bridge. “Certainly all Rusty can handle.”

  Rusty had slipped on one of the big fish covering the deck and was now sprawled out in the middle of fish goo and blood. When the fish were hooked it caused them to bleed. Between their thrashing and being thrown through the air, the transom deck as well as the bridge bulkhead were covered in spots of blood. So were all three of the fishermen. Even Sophia up in the flying bridge had some spots of blood on her.

  “Might as well get to dicing,” Paula said, giving Rusty a hand up. “Patrick, knives.”

/>   “Sorry about that,” Rusty said. He was looking sort of gray.

  “It does take it out of you,” Paula said. “It’s all in the back. The first time Patrick and I tried it alone we could only get about half the small ones. The rest were just too big. Having you as a third was a real help.”

  “I should have been more,” Rusty said, shrugging. “Just ain’t got my strength back.”

  “Some fresh sashimi will help with that,” Paula said, grinning.

  “What are these?” Rusty asked.

  “Big eye tuna,” Sophia said, pointing to the eyes. She’d left the helm and slid down the ladder to the transom deck. “They’re generally a deep fish. They spend most of their time at more than twenty fathoms. But they come up to the surface to warm up and if there happens to be bait they’ll get on it. Good size ones, too. This will feed the flotilla for a few days.”

  “What’s next?” Rusty asked.

  “We’ll cut off the heads, gut them, then throw them in the cooler,” Sophia said. “We’ll keep the heads and guts for chum for the next time. Those go in the freezer.”

  “Freezer?” Rusty asked.

  “You need to flash freeze fish to keep it tasting good and the right texture,” Sophia said. “We don’t have a flash freezer. The Large does, but most of this will be used up in a few days by us and the rest of the flotilla. Cooler’s good enough.”

  “Knives,” Patrick said, opening up a box filled with fillet knives and sharpeners.

  “Now to the really bloody part,” Sophia said, smiling. “And they talk about Faith getting covered in blood . . .”

  * * *

  “Respirators,” Rusty said, holding up a box.

  “Too bad they didn’t use them,” Paula said, taking the box and looking at the manufacturer. “Some European brand. I don’t think they’ll work on ours.”

  Which was a pity, since they’d about used up all their filters. Doing this job without respirators made it damned near not worth it. And this boat wasn’t even particularly bad. There were only two people onboard. From the pictures they’d found, husband and trophy wife. The trophy wife had been on the back deck, nude. Probably zombied. The husband had been in secondary cabin, ditto. Guessing, the wife had gone first, the husband had locked himself in a cabin then turned.

  It must have been early on in going to sea because by the time the team boarded, the wife was a clean-picked skeleton from seabirds and the husband was a mummy.

  Despite not having useable respirators, the seventy-foot sailboat was, otherwise, chock full of goodies. How people loaded to flee a plague was, in many ways, idiosyncratic. They’d salvaged one boat that was full of books. And they’d loaded as many as they could, since books were the main source of entertainment these days. Books could be traded for other stuff.

  There were a few consistencies, though. Boats with women onboard loaded lots of toilet paper. Sometimes much or all of it had been used up by the time the crew died but generally not. They also loaded lots of feminine hygiene products. This one had both. They’d found one boat that must have been owned by a restauranteur or a chef. It was positively packed with spices as well as various tasty goodies.

  But there were several consistent salvage materials. Just about every boat had loads, boatloads, of alcohol, jewelry and, often, fine cigars. It was, like, the first thing most people packed. They’d grab their jewelry and booze and smokes if they had them. Then there was the fact that they tended to drink the cheap stuff first.

  So when they boarded a boat, they almost always found some really nice jewelry and high-quality booze. The kind of people who could afford yachts tended to have both.

  “Lots of halfsies,” Paula said, looking over the bar in the saloon.

  “Mix and match,” Rusty said.

  To conserve space, they tended to combine partially full bottles. They tried to make sure it was the same “type,” bourbon with bourbon, scotch with scotch. But mistakes happened. Gin and vodka was okay. Rum and scotch not so much.

  “There is a god somewhere that is angry because we’re combining stuff like Cutty Sark with fifty-year-old Laphroaig,” Paula said. “We are one day going to run afoul of him and he will raise a great storm to punish us.”

  “What is . . . Famous Grouse?” Rusty said.

  “Scotch,” Paula said, hefting a box of pasta onto the deck.

  “Got a case of that,” Rusty said. “Now if I could just find some shoes . . .”

  They’d turned up a set of max sized galoshes on a boat but so far the security specialist didn’t have any real shoes. Or pants that fit. His jeans fit around his narrowed waist but stopped mid-calf and were a bit tight in the crotch. Not that Paula minded the latter.

  “We could strap a couple of inflatables to them,” Paula said.

  “Very funny . . .”

  * * *

  “And we’re clear,” Sophia said. “There’s a ship to the southeast the Last At Sea spotted. Said there were some infecteds on deck so they banked off. We’re to check it to see if it’s worth sending a salvage and recovery crew.”

  “I’ll get my gear ready,” Rusty said. “I hope I don’t have to do one of those boardings like Faith did.”

  “Eh, I’ll just pot ’em off with what my sister would call a Barbie gun . . .”

  * * *

  “What is this thing, a ferry?” Paula asked, fingers in her ears.

  The vessel named Pit Stop was a bit over a hundred feet long with a large bridge and presumably crew area forward and a low-set rear deck that could clearly be opened up at the back. The back deck had a vintage car, an inflatable and four pallets of stores piled on it. It sort of looked like a ferry. The difference was, it was also rather thin and lean looking. The design was actually vaguely similar to the cutter they’d cleared.

  “No clue,” Sophia said. “But if you’d give me a minute, this isn’t as easy as it looks.”

  Sophia was laid out on the flying bridge with earmuffs on and an accurized M4 with a Leupold 9x scope propped up on a cushion. She’d wrapped the strap around her arm and was carefully preparing her shots.

  Sophia was more than prepared to give her sister props for close-quarters zombie fighting. Faith was a brawler, always had been. When they went to tactical ranges, Faith regularly beat her scores.

  When they went to target ranges, Faith went home pouting. Sophia had been planning on trying out for the Olympic shooting team when she got a little older.

  Faith was a brawler. Sophia was a sniper.

  The problem was catenary, the relative motion of two vessels bouncing up and down and side to side on the ocean. It meant your target was always moving all over the damned place. Which just meant that you waited for the right moment to take the shot. If you tried to follow the target, you ended up chasing it all over hell and gone. The U.S. Navy SEALs might have figured out a way to chase the target. Sophia had time. She waited.

  * * *

  There was a crack and Paula flinched as one of the infected dropped with an almost unnoticeable hole in his forehead and the back blown out of his head.

  “Damn,” the mate said.

  “Come to Seawolf,” Sophia whispered. “Be good little zombies. Yuck . . . they do eat brains . . .”

  * * *

  “That’s why so many survived,” Sophia said.

  As a skipper, and an acting ensign, whatever that was, she really shouldn’t be doing boardings. But when they’d left the main squadron, Rusty was the only volunteer for “hostile boarding specialist” that she could scrounge up. And clearing something this size was a two-person job. Paula and Patrick were trustworthy to hold the boat. Not so good at clearing zombies.

  Fortunately, one of the ships they’d cleared had some double-ought and a couple of pump shotguns. So they both had adequate firearms. Rusty had some body armor borrowed from the Coast Guard. It wasn’t really his size, as usual. And he still didn’t have real shoes.

  Needs must.

  The reason for the surviving i
nfected was a set of bags of rice on the pallets. The zombies had gnawed into the rice bags and had been feasting on the rice. And from the looks of things, the occasional bird that had tried the same.

  There was also freshish rainwater pooled in the inflatable on deck.

  “Water, food, zombies,” Sophia said, pointing. “No fresh water, no zombies.”

  “I wouldn’t drink that,” Rusty said. The water was clearly foul. Then he thought about it. “Yeah, come to think of it, if I had that on the Voyage I’d have drunk it.”

  “Interesting fact,” Sophia said, cautiously rounding one of the pallets. “With water like that, the trick is to use an enema.”

  “Seriously?” Rusty said, grimacing.

  “Your rectum sucks up water from your poop,” Sophia said. “It’s why it comes out solid. The water gets drawn out by the rectum. And it also filters out the bad stuff, obviously. So if you’ve got really foul water and you really need it, you just give it to yourself as an enema.”

  “I wish I’d known that on the Voyage,” Rusty said. “I was mixing water and urine.”

  “Which was why you survived,” Sophia said. “Won’t work with salt water, by the way. But you can even survive, for a while, on small quantities of salt water. The problem is, it’s actually the salinity of the human body. So your body can’t really absorb it well. But when you’re really dehydrated, your salinity increases compared to salt water and you can survive. For a while. Then you go fricking nuts and die. Also the problem with urine. When you’re recycling, you’re still losing water and the salinity, not to mention urea, gets higher and higher and you die.”

  “I really don’t want to be back in that situation again,” Rusty said.

  “And, hopefully, you won’t,” Sophia said, regarding the open hatch on the deck. “Any zombies in there?”

  “Want me to yell?” Rusty asked.

  “Nah,” Sophia said. “I’m pretty sure any that are alive would have come for the feast . . .”

  * * *

  The only “survivor” hadn’t. He’d hanged himself in the small cabin he was trapped in. But most of the belowdecks watertight doors were closed. The engine room was in good shape, as was the bridge. Pretty much the only areas messed up by the infecteds was a companionway. And the cabin with the suicide was a bit rank.