Dispersal

by Addison Gunn

  Inside the greenhouse, Joseph inspected the crop—a batch of sunflower-grapes, now eaten down to their stumps. He gripped the sides of his head, scowling. “Son of a bitch!” With a primal cry he swatted the air and smacked a locust down, then another—as if he could bat the teeming millions away with his bare hands. “Fuck!”

  “Joseph!” Samantha cried, feeling the rage permeate him with growing intensity.

  “Goddamnit!” he continued, ignoring her. He kept smacking the air, punched the locusts, repeating, “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”

  The full scope of his anger hit Samantha in the chest, filling her so quickly, her skin slicked with an icy sweat. Her fists clenched, her teeth ground together with an audible crack. She wanted to kill everything. She wanted to set fire to the whole farm and watch it burn. She dug her nails into her palms and tightened her grasp, using the pain and the throbbing in her shoulders to pull herself out of the anger.

  She didn’t want to burn anything, she reminded herself. She didn’t want to destroy the Earth.

  “Joseph,” she called, stepping through the swirling throng and grasping his shoulders. “Joe!”

  His tense body slackened in her grasp almost instantly, and he fell to his knees beside a sunflower-grape stump. Reaching up, he clasped her fingers in his and heaved, panting as he fought to control himself. “Oh, Sam. Every crop is lost. Everything.” He choked back tears.

  She held him there, on his knees in the dirt, pulling his anger out and calming his aching fury. After a moment, he got to his feet and turned to face her. The handkerchief covering his nose and mouth was soaked. He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands and sighed. The relief radiating off him was palpable.

  Once she felt comfortable, she released his shoulders, then dropped her hands to her sides, but before she could speak, a surge of panicked energy struck her from behind.

  Sensing it too, Joseph jogged passed Samantha, coming to a skidding stop at the greenhouse doorway.

  Outside, every man, woman, and Infected child, Regular and Archaean alike, had scattered across the farm. Every soul ran in unbridled chaos, smacking locust-armadillos out of the air with their bare hands and sobbing into their face coverings.

  In a unified chorus their voices chanted, “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!...”

  5

  “WHAT THE HELL was it?” Lewis demanded.

  Miller shook his head and took a sip from his mug. Seaweed tea was bitter and grassy, but it was all there was available these days. It was no substitute for coffee and lacked any caffeine at all, but it was hot. He still hadn’t had the chance to change out of his wet uniform and could feel the early stages of hypothermia setting in.

  Gray’s makeshift office was cool now that the sun had set. Initially the games room, Gray had commandeered the space early on in their voyage because of its ample size with the full intent on moving ‘once things settled down.’ They never had.

  Miller shifted with a wet squish in the folding chair, where he sat across from Gray’s desk—ping-pong table—and eyed Lewis, leaning against the wall by the dart board. “Your guess is as good as mine,” Miller said, cracking his aching neck with a sharp twist. “A shark, maybe?”

  Gray slid off his suit jacket and tossed it onto the back of his chair. “With scales?”

  “What else has a dorsal fin?” Lewis asked.

  “Who knows anymore?” Gray grumbled.

  “The ship’s manifest had a hundred and fifteen people and we only brought back seventy-eight,” Miller explained. “Sixty of them alive. That’s thirty-eight unaccounted for. Some may have been swept out to sea—but it’s also possible they were dragged under by whatever was under that dorsal fin. I know of at least one for sure.”

  “We’ve had our ships attacked before, this is nothing new,” said Gray.

  “Sure, by tusk-fiends and goliath brutes”—Miller examined his blue-tinged fingernails as they gripped his mug—“mammal-like predators, but the marine creatures have pretty much left us alone. The occasional whale now and then pops up, even a shark, but they don’t do much more than bump a ship a few times and move on when they realize boats aren’t edible. There’s never been a hull breach.”

  “Are we near a coral reef? An uncharted sand bed, or something?” Gray asked.

  Lewis shook his head. “No. We’re in deep.”

  “None of the other small ships reported problems,” Gray said. “Right?”

  “It was a deliberate attack,” Miller said. “Something poked a hole in the Dunn Roven on purpose.”

  “You’re saying a sea animal figured out that if it stabs a hole in a boat, edible things fall out?”

  Miller raised his eyebrows. “I guess I am.”

  Gray puffed out his cheeks. “And what are we supposed to do about that?”

  “Bring the others on board. Us, or the other cruise liner. The two sailboats especially. Anything less than thirty meters, or with a wooden hull.”

  “And put them where?” Gray asked. “We’re packed to the hilt as it is. It’s worse on the Princess Penelope; even with the new hydroponics farm, they’re down to feeding people once a day.”

  “It’s only forty or so more people,” Lewis interjected. “I think the Rose Bud has twenty. Minerva’s Wand, maybe fifteen. Robin’s Nest has ten.”

  “But when does it stop?” Gray asked. “Every time we see a small boat we can’t just absorb the crew.”

  Lewis frowned. “How can we not?”

  “Do you know how many people die on board every day?” Gray asked.

  Miller didn’t know and didn’t care to guess, but he had the sense Gray was going to tell them anyway.

  “We’ve got a flu going around, and it’s rough,” his boss continued. “The labs can’t produce the meds fast enough to keep up with demand, and food supplies are wearing thin. I know, initially, I said there was safety in numbers, but now I’m rethinking that. We can’t bring any more people on board. The next ship that goes down will have to be absorbed someplace else.”

  “You’re leaving three ships exposed,” Miller said. “That’s forty people. The least we can do is warn them.”

  “And have them demand to be brought on board? No.” Miller frowned and went to speak, but Gray cut him off. “Don’t tell me you hadn’t thought the same thing. Conditions here are deteriorating by the day. Let’s not add to it.”

  Miller had to confess, he had thought the same thing—not too long ago, in fact. But the reality of leaving forty people out in the water like sitting ducks was a lot different than thinking it. He’d seen what this creature could do. “I don’t like it.”

  Gray nodded. “Me either. Let’s hope we come across another wayward cruise liner and we can dump them there. In the meantime, we head toward Iceland as planned.”

  EVERY JOINT ACHED. With heavy footsteps Miller left Gray’s office, passing the hydroponics pool on the sun deck. Sweeping past the empty observation area—normally packed with people desperate for fresh air—Miller didn’t bother to seek shelter from the drizzle, but plodded through the wind and rain, his mind racing with images of scaly fins, entrails, and the drowned victims of the Dunn Roven.

  What he would have given for a chance to walk on solid earth! Gripping the railing for balance as the ship swayed, Miller felt his fingers throb with every grasp.

  He needed sleep. He needed a hot meal. A lukewarm shower in his cabin and a semi-clean set of sheets seemed like a luxury he didn’t deserve.

  They were failing. Maybe they were doing their best, but Schaeffer-Yeager had done a fuck-shit job of maintaining control of their compound in Astoria—much thanks to that crazed lunatic Bob Harris, now ash under a nuke of his own making—and somehow, floating on the high seas on a cruise liner, S-Y was doing it again.

  They weren’t even fighting Infected anymore, aside from random boats here and there, and they were still somehow fucking it up.

  Yes, they were self-sustaining, self-policing, and surviving on the high seas, but Miller w
ould hardly call it living.

  It was purgatory, he realized. Passing the stadium on his way to the Crow’s Nest Bar and the rest of Cobalt, the thought crossed his mind. They’re trapped in a hellish limbo.

  Somewhere between Heaven and Hell lay the oceans of this new Earth—changed by the awoken Archaean parasite and evolved from whatever the hell this new ecosystem had become. Neither free nor slaves, the survivors of New York City merely existed.

  Miller knew he should look for solutions, that there must be answers to all this. Somewhere in the depth of all the images floating around his mind, the key to the future lay.

  Maybe it didn’t. Maybe that was just fatigue talking.

  His mind wandered to thoughts of Samantha and the Archaeans, left behind in the fallout of Harris’s nuclear bomb. Then voices raised in anger caught his attention, dragging him back to the ship.

  “I don’t have time for this!” Doyle was yelling.

  Miller entered the bar and surveyed the scene.

  Standing from his stool in the corner, Doyle swiped his hands in the air at Hsiung’s fist. “Give it to me.”

  Stepping back, Hsiung swung her fist high and away, extending her free hand in front of her to fend the sniper off. “No.”

  “This is none of your business,” Doyle spat, red-faced.

  “It is if you’re on this shit while on duty,” Hsiung shot back.

  “Never bothered you before. Besides, what I do in my downtime is not your concern.”

  “There’s no such thing as downtime anymore,” du Trieux drawled.

  “Bugger off,” Doyle snapped at her.

  “What the hell is going on here?” Miller asked, stepping into the middle of the room and positioning himself between Doyle and Hsiung.

  No one spoke a word. No one moved.

  From his perch behind the bar, Morland merely shook his head, then looked to the floor. Du Trieux, standing beside the door, stared back at Miller with a blank expression.

  “Does someone want to explain to me what’s happened?” Miller pressed.

  More silence.

  Finally, Hsiung lowered her arms and held out a plastic baggie toward Miller. He knew immediately what it was.

  Doyle stepped forward to retrieve it, but Miller beat him to it, snatching it from Hsiung’s hand. He looked inside the baggie at the thin piece of paper. There was hardly any left—a square barely three by three inches.

  He hadn’t known Doyle was still on the stuff. Miller wasn’t sure where or how Doyle had managed to get more, if he had. He’d assumed, given how rough Doyle had behaved at the beginning of their sea voyage, that he had come off his addiction—hell, Miller had taken some himself, during the worst of the Charismatics battles—but to know that Doyle was still taking it was unwelcome news. He thought this was over with.

  How had he missed this?

  “Where’d you get this?” he asked Doyle.

  “You fucking hypocrite,” he said.

  “Where did you get this?” Miller repeated.

  Doyle clenched his jaw and spoke through tight teeth. “That’s old.”

  “You don’t have someone cooking this aboard, do you?”

  “No,” Doyle said.

  “He’s high as a kite,” Hsiung said. “Look at him. His pupils are black holes.”

  “Have I ever missed a shot?” Doyle spat at her. “Have I ever not done my job?”

  “That’s not the point and you know it,” Hsiung argued. “We could get called up at any moment. Haven’t you noticed? It’s twenty-four-seven on this stupid boat.”

  “I know,” Doyle said, reaching his hand out to Miller for the baggie. “Don’t you think I know that?”

  Miller tightened his fingers around the plastic. He knew Doyle had been acting tense lately—hell, he could hardly blame him—but he’d always believed Doyle had a handle on his drug use.

  Doyle was right about one thing: he’d never missed a shot. He’d never been off his game, at least, not that Miller had noticed.

  Had Miller been so distracted with his own shit he’d failed to see Doyle struggling? He didn’t think so, but it was a real possibility. He wasn’t perfect.

  “Okay,” Miller said, handing the baggie to Doyle.

  Doyle took it and stuffed it in his pocket.

  Hsiung cursed and kicked a barstool.

  “But if I find out you’ve got a supplier on board, then you and I have a problem. You understand?”

  Doyle had good enough sense to look sheepish. “You got it, boss.”

  “Last thing we need on this ship is a bunch of strung-out refugees.”

  “I said, I got it,” Doyle said, sinking back onto his stool.

  “This is bullshit,” Hsiung said, walking out the door.

  Miller had no reply to that. He looked to du Trieux and Morland, then back to Doyle. “Get some sleep. That’s an order.”

  Wordlessly, Doyle hopped off his bar stool and exited. Morland followed behind them, mumbling his good-bye.

  Du Trieux lingered at the Crow’s Nest door, her arms across her chest.

  “You got something you want to say, Trix?”

  She pursed her lips, then shook her head. “No.” Then she left, leaving Miller alone in the bar.

  Standing there with his thoughts and in the wake of his deteriorating team, he’d have given his whole left leg for a shot of whiskey.

  6

  ANGER AND FRUSTRATION pulled Samantha down, threatening to drag her into darkness.

  Before her, the farm swirled in disarray as people slapped locust-armadillos out of the air, cursing in loud, chanting voices with every swipe.

  At the mouth of the greenhouse, she watched the turmoil, equally disgusted at the display and intoxicated by its power.

  “Fuck!” shrieked Joseph beside her, slapping at the locusts.

  Samantha reached out and gripped his forearm, concentrating on filling his mind with a controlled, steady energy. “We must stop them,” she said to him as he raged.

  They stood together, their feelings mingling. Joseph’s frustration pulsed as her cognizance soothed. Back and forth, ebbing and flowing, Samantha gradually prevailed, bringing Joseph into the light and using him to amplify her sedate message.

  A ripple of calm floated from them, cascading across the field of enraged Infected until their arms fell, their cursing subsided, and finally they stood among the smokers and the locust-armadillos, staring about themselves in confusion.

  “Cut the smokers,” Joseph shouted across the field.

  The rattling din of the motors stopped. The roar of the insects was almost quiet in the aftermath.

  Confident the crisis had been averted, Samantha dropped her hand from Joseph’s arm.

  He looked at her with an expression of bewildered awe. “How is it possible for one person to wield so much power?”

  Samantha shrugged off the suspicion coming off him and stepped into the field. Ignoring the puzzled expressions and moods radiating from the crowd, she walked down to a small crowd gathered beside the farmhouse.

  A rising sense of perplexity radiated from the group, as they parted to reveal Susie—the Archaean—lying on the ground, bloodied and bruised beside her trashed smoker.

  “What happened?” Samantha cried, dropping to her knees beside her and pulling off her own overshirt to cushion the woman’s head against the ground. “Who did this? How?”

  Semi-conscious, Susie blinked at Samantha. “The Regulars.”

  Hot shame blazed off the crowd and in unison they took a step back and away from Samantha and Susie. Sam’s mouth went dry.

  It was common knowledge since the spread of the Archaean parasite that once an individual had been accepted into a commune, it was impossible for another member to harm them. It was as if they had beaten themselves into the ground.

  How was it now that they had turned on their own?

  “Take her inside,” Samantha said, fighting her dread. It would serve no one to whip them into a panic again
. “Tend to her wounds.”

  As they dispersed, lifting Susie from the ground and carrying her inside the house, Joseph approached and helped Sam back to her feet.

  “How—?” he began.

  “The guilt. Do you feel it? She must have been struck during the burst of anger, and then a mob formed. I saw it often enough during the invasion.” She stopped and took a moment to push reassurance toward Joseph. The remorse emanating from him was strong. “It couldn’t have been prevented, Joe. Mobs are a natural consequence of the hive-mind.”

  “Maybe so,” Joseph said, his mouth forming a thin, grim line. “But to turn on one of their own?”

  “We’re not their own, are we?” Samantha said. “She was an Archaean.”

  IT WAS SOME days later, and they sat around picnic tables in the barn. Long strips of daylight fell across the floor from the open loft door and windows overhead. There had been no horses for years, but the barn still smelled of oats, hay, and manure.

  Around the tables sat Joseph, Susie—still black and blue, her arm in a sling—and the ‘Bishops,’ the ruling Archaeans, of each of the ten commune farms. Samantha stood and cleared her throat.

  “We hold this meeting,” Sam began, “to discuss...”

  “...the commune is failing,” Joseph said.

  The talk came in a rush of feelings and words.

  “There won’t be enough food for winter—”

  “—we’ll need alternative sources—”

  “—what about the archers?”

  “There hasn’t been any game in weeks—”

  “—we’ll have to expand the hunting perimeter—”

  “—what about the livestock?”

  “One thug-behemoth could feed a farm for a week.”

  “There aren’t that many left—”

  “—we let most of them go when the grain crops failed.”

  “Perhaps we should leave, look for alternative land—”