Burnt Sea: A Seabound Prequel (Seabound Chronicles Book 0)

by Jordan Rivet

  Michael’s sprained foot was taking longer to heal, but he claimed the pain wasn’t too bad. He’d been working hard alongside the crew, very serious about pulling his weight. He and Judith had spent a lot of time together over the past few days. They tried to keep it light, but they were hanging out pretty much whenever they weren’t working. He was sweet and kind and reassuring. Even though this flirtation of theirs wasn’t supposed to be serious, he was already the brightest spot in Judith’s life. She didn’t want to think about what would happen when they reached land.

  Michael grinned at her. “Maybe we can sell them some of our seaweed. It’s so tasty.” He lifted a clump of the stuff toward her face.

  “Yeah, delicious,” Judith said, avoiding his hands and ducking to poke Michael in the stomach.

  He tried to tickle her with his seaweed-covered hands.

  That’s when they heard the scream. It was an ugly, earth-rending sound, reminding her of those terrible moments in San Diego, of the fear and the ash. The three of them leapt up and ran to the starboard lifeboat deck.

  Bernadette, the lavender-haired woman Judith had first seen cooing over the pregnant lady, was the one who had screamed. She leaned over the railing, trembling like a scared puppy. Michael put an arm around her shoulders and pulled her away from the edge. Judith and Manny exchanged glances and looked down together.

  The water below was a murky brown. Debris floated thick here: mattresses, chairs, wooden street signs, plastic dishes, even canned food. A bloated body bobbed amongst the detritus. It was facedown, but it was clearly a woman. The wind swirled, stirring up the aching, nauseating scent of decay.

  Further out to sea the water was thick with floating junk and rotting corpses. It looked like an entire town had washed out to sea and then drifted on a current straight into their path. Judith held her breath, wishing she could keep holding it forever. People around the ship began to notice what was going on. Some joined them at the railing to stare. Others fled for the safety of the Catalina’s depths.

  “Where’s all this coming from?” Judith asked. “We’re getting close to the Phil— ”

  She turned and saw Manny’s face. His dark skin looked gray, drained of blood. Of course. They were entering the waters around the Philippines. This was Manny’s home. She had endured the horror of seeing California buried in ash. Now it was Manny’s turn.

  He stayed very still. While the others moved around the ship, discussing where the debris had come from in low voices, Manny simply stared, face impassive. He must have gone into shock. Judith put her hand on his arm, but he shook it off and stayed where he was.

  Simon came onto the deck. He shook people out of their stupor with quiet, measured words.

  “I’m sorry, folks. Let’s take a few minutes of silence. I’m sorry, folks.” He repeated the phrase like a mantra. “Let’s take a few minutes and then see if we can make our way through. I’m sorry, folks.”

  As he walked among them, the people turned to him like he was a prophet. Some touched his arms as he passed, as if to draw strength from him. He stayed calm. Judith couldn’t imagine how. They sailed further into the flotilla of the dead. She tried to imitate his stance, his facial expression, anything that would grant her some of his poise. She caught sight of Michael, who had returned to the deck after depositing Bernadette inside. He, too, looked at Simon as if he were an apparition.

  “I’m sorry, folks. I don’t think we’ll find solace in these islands. We need to make sure nothing gets caught on the ship. We don’t want to carry any diseases with us. I’m sorry, folks, but we need to get to work.”

  As if in a trance, the people followed Simon’s lead. They lowered the lifeboats until they hung a few feet above the water so they could use billiard cues, curtain rods, anything they could find to push the rotting, potentially disease-ridden bodies away from the hull.

  After some debate they decided to pull up any sealed food items: bags of chips, canned vegetables, even packages of noodles. They risked bringing disease aboard, but they were becoming desperate. They would run out of food soon. Even if they managed to reach land, they had to get what they could from these waters. There was no guarantee there would be any food left for them on land.

  When the groups had been down for long enough to fill their boats, they hoisted them up and unloaded the salvage, piling it on a sectioned-off portion of the deck to be examined and scrubbed clean with laundry detergent. Then they dropped the lifeboats back down toward the water.

  Judith joined the unloading crew, while Michael climbed into one of the lifeboats. He and the others covered their mouths and noses with clothing before they approached the putrid water. Michael met Judith’s eyes before disappearing below the ship.

  Manny didn’t join the crews in the lifeboats. He wasn’t the only crew member from the Philippines by far. Some cried, lying prone on the decks. Some wept as they worked. But Manny just stared at the sea.

  They worked in near silence. A few of Judith’s scabs opened, staining her blouse in a pattern like bird tracks. Her hands grew sore from lifting the slick items. They smelled like fish and death.

  After an hour a new group of Catalinans, organized by Simon, took over for the salvage crew. He instructed the first workers to scrub themselves down with laundry detergent on deck, then go inside, get some food, and try to find some peace. Judith tried to get Manny to come with her, but he stayed exactly where he’d been since they first saw the bodies.

  Judith didn’t think she would ever eat again, but she picked up her ration from the dining hall—bread made from some of their last remaining flour—and brought it up to Manny. She offered him the bread, but he didn’t react. He just stared at what had once been his home. Judith didn’t know what else to do.

  It grew colder. Judith tried to get Manny to come inside or even to sit down, but he didn’t acknowledge her. So she stood beside him instead, joining his silent vigil.

  Simon

  The only coherent thing Simon felt was relief that he’d stopped Esther from going outside.

  When the first shouts filtered through the corridors, he’d told her to gather Neal and the other children and see if they could figure out how to get the projector in the cinema deep inside the ship to work. That would keep them occupied for a while. He’d found Bernadette at the entrance to the deck looking as frail as a baby bird and asked her to go down to watch over the children.

  On the deck the cool night air carried death. Simon forced away all feeling, clinging only to the relief that his daughter was protected from this. There were too many things he couldn’t protect her from, but this was a sight she didn’t need to carry to her grave.

  Despair lurked among his people. They stared, rigid, at the bodies in the water, or broke down in tears. They’d seen too much, had their hopes shattered too many times. Simon couldn’t allow that despair to touch him too. So he walked among them and voiced the sorrow he refused to feel.

  “I’m sorry, folks. I’m sorry, folks. I’m sorry, folks.”

  Then he made them get to work.

  The process was both cathartic and traumatic. They had to move, act, sweat. They had to feel that they were doing something, anything, in the face of a world that had spiraled so far out of their control. He told them to gather everything that might have a shadow of a possibility of being useful one day. Even if their fuel ran out and they never found land, they could feel like they were preparing for something better.

  Simon himself felt nothing.

  When he saw the first child-sized body, he nearly lost the tenuous grip he had on himself. So he followed his own advice and returned to the interior of the ship to coordinate a new shift of workers. Figuring out who would need a break and who was available was soothing. He made sure everyone scrubbed their clothes and hands thoroughly before going inside. They couldn’t risk contaminating their little world. The work helped to consume his attention, and eventually he was able to climb to the top deck and survey their position with a c
lear head.

  From a higher vantage point, he could see the hunched shapes of islands sprinkled around them. At first he’d mistaken them for low-lying clouds. It was getting darker, but there were no man-made lights. Where were the warm, humming windows? The coastal campfires? Where were the people? Could it be that whatever storm surge or tsunami had swept through the islands had scoured them of all life?

  He walked along the top deck to the broadcast tower. It had an entrance through the bridge, but also one directly from the deck. Vinny sat in his crow’s nest, staring out at the silent islands.

  “Hey.” Vinny didn’t respond when Simon entered. “Do you have anything on the radio?” Simon asked, already dreading the answer.

  Vinny didn’t turn around. “Thought we should be there by now,” he mumbled. “Didn’t want to say anything. Thought we should have been picking up signals from the Phils by yesterday evening. Maybe we were just moving slower than I calculated, or we were wrong about our position after the last storm. There’s so much fucking silence on this radio. I thought we’d hear something by now.”

  “Maybe they don’t have the capacity—”

  “Simon. Radio is old. It’s basic. If someone out there were capable of broadcasting, they would, at least within this range. Whatever happened here did enough damage to take down the towers and whoever is out there to send a message. I expected this kind of radio silence at sea but not when we’re within sight of land.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “If there’s anyone left in these islands, they’re in more trouble than us. We’re not going to find help here.”

  Simon had hoped they’d reach someone in the mountains, someone on a rescue mission here. Someone.

  “So we keep going,” he said. His voice was hollow and he knew it. “We keep sailing and hope they’ll help us when we reach China.”

  “Yeah,” Vinny said. “We keep sailing. And God help us all.”

  Chapter 19—The Harbor

  Judith

  Michael and Judith brought Manny back to his cabin. He was freezing and feverish after watching the sea carry away the ruins of his homeland for hours. When he grew too weak to protest, they guided him to the crew quarters deep down on the third deck. His roommate, also from the Philippines, had been huddled in his bunk already, and he didn’t look up when they brought Manny inside.

  “Manny, you have to eat.” Judith had instructed, rather than coaxed.

  She felt too raw and tired from the events of the day to display any sympathy. She focused only on what Manny needed: food, warmth, and sleep. When he didn’t respond to her, she got Michael to force him to sit, and then she pulled pieces off the stale bread she had brought from the dining hall and fed them to him bite by bite.

  “Come on, Manny. Swallow.”

  Manny ate, staring at nothing and following her instructions like a machine. When he finished the final hunk of bread, she took the shoes off his feet herself and made him lie down. She covered him with a blanket and tucked it tightly beneath the mattress.

  “Sleep,” she ordered. Then she took Michael by the arm and guided him toward the door.

  “Wait, Judith,” Manny said hoarsely. “Thank you.”

  She nodded at him and left the room without another word.

  Judith and Michael stood in silence in the corridor outside Manny’s door. The dim emergency lights bathed Michael’s face in a haunting glow. His clothes were still wet from being scrubbed down with detergent after his shift in the lifeboat. Judith felt fragile, like a porcelain cup that had been dropped too many times. If he said a word, she might shatter.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  “No,” she answered. “None of us are.”

  “Yes.”

  “Would you walk me to my room, please?”

  They had to climb five flights of stairs to get to her little stateroom. The cabin Michael had shared with another crew member for the past few nights was on the fifth deck, but they passed it without slowing and continued toward the eighth. Judith reached out to take his hand.

  At her door Michael made no pretense of saying good night. He merely stepped back to let her enter first and followed her into the room.

  They undressed each other slowly, gently, not unlike that first night. This time they were in a different kind of pain. Michael ran a finger along the tender patches of her healing skin. His hands were icy from the seawater. She took them between her long, thin fingers and kneaded warmth into them. He kissed her forehead, traced silent tears down her cheek.

  “It’ll be okay,” he breathed into her ear. “We’ll be okay.”

  Judith didn’t answer. She simply wrapped her arms around his neck and pulled him close.

  It was the first time they’d spent the night together since their trip to the atoll. Maybe they would part ways. Maybe the world would truly end. But right now Judith wished she hadn’t wasted a single minute.

  It was still early when she awoke to the sound of Michael’s steady breathing and his arm pillowing her head. The weak morning light struggled to break through the clouds outside her cabin window. Judith drank in the warmth of Michael’s body beside her. She felt sore from the work of the day before, but some of the heaviness in her heart had eased.

  She slipped out of bed and got dressed in the second outfit she’d acquired through the rationing operation a few days ago. She opened the door to her tiny balcony and slipped outside, expecting to see the usual stretch of dull sky and turbulent purple sea. But the emptiness was gone. From the balcony high in the Catalina’s side, Judith looked out on a city.

  Simon

  Simon had found Esther and the other children curled up in the projection room of the cinema. The projector made a low clicking sound, sputtering ineffectually. Mangled film lay around it like a giant bird’s nest.

  Esther slept with her head on a film canister. Bernadette had fallen asleep in the projector operator’s chair. Simon left her alone and lifted Esther into his arms.

  “Daddy, we broke the movie machine,” Esther mumbled.

  “That’s all right, button.”

  “I tried to fix it, only I got tired.”

  “We’ll try again tomorrow,” Simon said.

  Esther’s response was lost in the folds of Simon’s jacket as she snuggled closer to him. He carried her to their cabin and pulled all her extra clothes over her head before tucking her into bed. It grew colder every day.

  Simon lay awake for hours staring at the ceiling. He wanted to scrub the sights of the day from his brain, but they floated, bulbous, in front of his eyes. If Vinny was right about the lack of radio signals from the Philippines, he feared what would happen when they reached China. With over a billion people, China would have to have someone they could talk to. They had been at sea for nearly two weeks, most of that time without news. Who knew what the world would be like when they finally managed to reenter it?

  Simon rose before dawn the next morning, knowing it wouldn’t take long to arrive at the next coast. He wasn’t sure where they’d be exactly. He hoped to assess the situation—and maybe even make contact—before most of the ship awoke. Esther was sleeping soundly, wrapped up in all of her clothes. She stirred a bit as he eased the door open, then settled back to sleep, burrowing further underneath the periwinkle sheets.

  The slumbering Catalina was an eerie place. The new duty roster ensured that someone was always up and keeping watch, but Simon didn’t see anyone until he reached the bridge.

  He found Ren overseeing the woman she and Vinny had recruited to help out in the bridge and radio tower. Kim Wu, Simon remembered, had worked in IT, and she was a runner. Simon had encouraged Ren to select a few additional people to teach about the ship’s operations. If nothing else, he hoped training them would keep her mind off of Nora. Keeping people busy wasn’t a sophisticated leadership strategy by any means, but Simon would use it until it stopped working or someone else was ready to take charge.

  “How’s it going up
here?” he asked quietly.

  “We should be able to see the coast any minute,” Ren said.

  “Has Vinny heard anything?”

  “I don’t know,” Ren said. “He hasn’t reported in a while. Kim, go up and check on him, would you?”

  Kim jumped up and disappeared into the radio tower. Simon wondered if she was Chinese, and if so whether she could help them speak to people when they finally disembarked.

  “Do you know where we are?” he asked.

  “According to the map, we should be making landfall somewhere near Shantou,” Ren said.

  “Know anything about it?”

  “It’s a Chinese coastal city in Guangdong,” Ren said, shrugging. “Not much to know. Port. Hundreds of identical skyscrapers.”

  “Let’s hope they’re friendly to refugees.”

  “Ren! Simon!” Kim stumbled back down the ladder. “It’s Vinny. He’s . . . I think he decided to . . .”

  She trailed off, gesturing up the ladder. Then she marched to the other side of the bridge, as far as she could get from the radio tower.

  Ren looked up at Simon, her eyes already filling with tears. She must have guessed the same thing he had. It was bound to happen eventually, but Simon didn’t think Vinny would be the first.

  It only took a brief glance into the radio tower to confirm his suspicions. Vinny had hung himself from an air-conditioning pipe on the ceiling. His body was angled away from the windows facing the sea. With everything they had endured, Simon had feared someone would take this way out, but it was still a shock to see his fear realized.

  Simon didn’t look at Vinny’s face as he climbed onto the communications console to disentangle the wire. He had to touch Vinny’s fleshy neck, and he discovered that his body was still warm. He must have stared out at the sea all night long before deciding to do this.