by Jase Kovacs
EBB TIDE
Written by Jase Kovacs.
FIRST EDITION. December 20, 2016.
Copyright © 2016 Jase Kovacs.
This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.
The Captain quotes the poem Invictus by WILLIAM ERNEST HENLEY
Table of Contents
Copyright Page
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
For Jolene
Chapter 1
I ghost alone under a staysail and deeply reefed mainsail towards the wrecked cargo ship. A castle of twisted steel and rusted iron piled up on the rocky shore. The sun has fallen behind the stony crags that crest the island like the spine of a great sleeping lizard. The sky is banded with colours: apricot, cerulean and a deep indigo that fades to black. A spreading fan of wake marks the passage of my yacht, the sea glimmering with the faintest traces of phosphorescence.
The breeze flickers this close to shore. Bullets of wind roll down the mountainside, the peaks still warm from the day, the bay cooling and drawing air towards me. The staysail luffs and flaps and I steer downwind, making three knots. My depth sounder hasn't worked in eight years. The water is deep blue here. No bottom to be seen. I don't bother casting the lead.
To the north east of the bay it shallows; I can see yellow bands and dark shadows over to the starboard side, where thin rocky headland reaches out. This is where I will anchor tonight, when I have ten metres under the keel. Half a mile from the shipwreck. As good a moat as any.
One of my first memories is us anchored in a bay much like this one. But not this one. Before the Great Dying. Before the world ended. When we were a family. Dad, Mum, Jayden and me. Lying on deck, picking stars. They're all gone now. Voodoo is my boat now. She is my home. She is my sanctuary. She is all I have left.
I glass the wreck with Dad's 7x50 binos. The left lens has a hairline crack but they are still good. Older than I am. The ship is deserted of course. Great streaks of rust dribble down her scarred flanks, almost obliterating her name: BLACK HARVEST, CHINA, written on her stern in letters a metre tall. Appropriate name. She was a bulk cargo carrier, servicing the islands of the Pacific, carrying all manner of goods in her cavernous holds, her four cranes once dipping and plucking containers with the elegance of storks bobbing for fish. Birds line the rails and spiral overhead, searching in the last of the day's light for a silver boil of feeding fish. No other movement. No people to be found. Everyone is dead.
At least, that's what I pray.
I can see the faint trunks of coconuts palms, pale ghosts looming of a thin strip of beach, almost lost in night's curtain. When I think I am in the right place, I put the helm over and turn Voodoo into the wind. The staysail shivers and then shakes and I furl it, drawing in the line to the cockpit hand over hand, as always feeling pride in the smooth roll of the furler. It seized three years ago and I repaired it with bearings I scavenged from a Lagoon 440 I found cast up on a reef in the middle of the Solomon Sea. Not an easy job.
I move forward to the bow, pausing at the mast to slip the main halyard from its cleat and let the mainsail fall and be gathered by the lazy jacks that form a rope cradle between the boom and the mast.
At the bow I watch the faint dying ripples as Voodoo is slowed by the breeze. When the wake can barely be perceived, I let go the CQR anchor. It's my light option, weighing about fifteen kilos, with thirty metres of 10mm chain spliced into sixty of half inch manila rope. The twenty five kilo Bruce is heavier and has sixty metres of 12mm chain and will probably grip better in the broken coral bottom but I may have to raise it quickly so I go with the lighter option. The wind pushes Voodoo back and I pay out chain slowly, the rattle of the links echoing back from the cliffs like the fading memories of the time before.
That night I sit with my legs curled under me in the cockpit and eat raw an albacore tuna I hooked that afternoon on a 25lb line using a lure made from hooks wired into a teaspoon. Its glittering bubbling wake irresistible to pelagics. When I was young, you could trawl for days and never catch anything. The ocean a blue desert scoured clean by rapacious fleets of trawlers. Now the fish are coming back. Now that the cities are dead and their insatiable maws are no longer sucking the sea empty like great whales straining all life from the ocean.
I sleep for a while in the cockpit and then wake at midnight. My hand drops to feel the comforting cool smooth stock of the M4 assault rifle Dad looted from a Philippine gunboat in year two. He always hated guns. Said he had had his fill of them after twenty years of Army. Even after the Great Dying, he resisted their pull. It was only after we had three men come on board in the dead of night with cruel intentions in mind that he relented. After he shot one with a speargun and saw the other two off with a hatchet we used to cut driftwood and then had to go back and finish off the first man with the same hatchet.
The moon is waxing half full just above the eastern horizon. To my sleep bleared eyes, Black Harvest looks like the carcass of a great dinosaur cast ashore.
You shouldn't be stupid says Katie.
It's a cargo vessel. It is sure to be worth it.
It's a carcass in the desert, the only island for a hundred twenty miles. Any vultures will be there.
So? So what?
It's a trap. A dark maze. You'll be trapped. No light. Rotting, rusting stairs. Deadfall and oily bilges and hull awash with spoiled diesel and seawater.
You're right. There could be diesel. Imagine that. Good diesel.
Good diesel after thirteen years? You're a fool. Why not imagine good petrol. Fire up the old Yamaha you still keep for god knows what reason and go ripping around the bay. Why not go waterskiing while you're at it?
You coward.
This is how I go. Talking back and forth. An invented person my companion. Imaging a friend to stave off madness. Someone to yell at when things go wrong. Someone to share victories with. In the first year after Dad passed, I spoke to him. But each time, it reminded me that my family had truly gone into the darkness. So I invented a friend. Much like me. A woman about twenty. She's more sensible than I am. More cautious and pragmatic. Talking to her has saved my butt more than a few times.
Her name is Katie.
She says nothing after I fling my insult and I know I have gone too far. But I don't take it back. I sit instead and watch the ship as the half coin moon climbs slowly into the sky.
Chapter 2
At dawn I load the dinghy. I used to have an inflatable Zodiac but the seams failed in year three and it was a pain to row anyway and after Dad accepted that there was no more petrol we got rid of it and he made a rowing dinghy out of plywood. It's a short, stout boat, two metres long, a metre wide, fat like a beetle yet with a shallow draft so she cuts well through the water. She can be split in half
simply by removing three wing-nutted bolts, so she takes up less space when I lash her to the foredeck for a passage. I still have the 9.9hp Yamaha two stroke on the stern rail because you never know.
I watched the ship from the first hint of dawn. Glassing it slowly from bow to stern. Hoping to catch out some night lurker. Instead seeing only squabbling birds and streaks of rust and birdshit. There are six containers on the bow, in front of the first crane. Their doors half open.
There have been people here says Katie.
I ignore her. I have my M4 and three twenty round magazines in a belt rig, the magazines snug in their shingles. Mounted on the rifle is an underbarrel Surefire torch with my last good rechargeable battery inside. I have a large waterproof drybag holding thirty metres of rope that I have linked up with a snap shackle and a neat climbing rig that I can use to climb a ship's side and descend into its hold. I have a slingshot rigged up with fifty metres of 40lb fishing line that I use to cast a weighted shot over the railing of the ship so I can raise my climbing rig. I have two plastic bottles of water and a couple of dry ships biscuit. I have a VHF waterproof handheld that amazingly still works, not that I have found many ships to talk to over the years. I have Dad's binos and a folding lockblade and a small medkit and a couple of pencil flares in my belt rig. Also in the dry bag is my foraging kit, which is a couple of spanners and a multimeter to test any electrics I find as well as a pry bar and small bolt cutters.
I row over to Black Harvest. Katie sits on the gunnels and smirks at me. Why did it have to be called that? Why not Jade Dawn or Pacific Trader or The Merry Ship that definitely isn't full of rapists and cannibals?
Shut up, I say as I bend my back and burn my nervous energy dipping the oars and driving us across the bay. There's a light southerly headwind and clouds are piling up in the south east, tinting the dawn cold and hard. That's the problem with an imaginary friend. They never do any work. Only run their mouths.
I'm a carrion bird. That's what the end of the world has made me. A scavenger. A picker of corpses. A overturner of rocks, hoping, praying to find something valuable beneath. A fishhook. A spanner. A good battery. A box of electrical parts. My greatest find was that Lagoon, wrecked on a reef, its bulbous fibreglass hull split like the shell of an albino beetle, one ama torn off by some long passed storm. Ground and broken and studded with oyster shells and barnacles and a black carpet of algae as slick as oil. I damn near killed myself climbing aboard. But within, oh my god, was it worth it! A box of 316 stainless bolts. A working autopilot! Paper charts for the north coast of Australia, miraculously dry and untouched by mildew and mould. And, best of all, six kilo tins of two part nonsag epoxy. All of these goods for trade.
Before the Great Dying, a cruiser had to be self sufficient. We would sail to remote, exotic destinations and when, inevitably, something broke on the boat, you would have to know how to fix it. My father was the skipper and mechanic. My mother was the navigator and electrician. We never could get our fridges to work right but apart from that we could deal with anything the sea served us.
But even the most skilled improvisers need spares and tools and supplies. Once a year or so, Dad would put us into a port and we would haul out and service. Names that have an exotic, far off cadence. Rebak. Labuan. Kudat. Samal. Bustling cities where the facilities existed to work on our boats and keep the dream alive.
Now those towns are off limits. Any big city is a host for the infected. Mum called them Typhoid Marys. There's an old story Mum told us, about a woman who had typhoid, didn't get sick but still would infect others. As in, the creatures have the plague but it doesn't kill them. It just changes them. Other people we've met call them infected or zombies or monsters or vampires or just them. Whatever. What does it matter what their name is? The creatures don't care what you call them. They just want to feed.
The plague killed 99% of people. Half of a percent remained alive. Driven mad with fever dreams and the pain that twisted their bodies into pretzels, split their mouths and burned out their souls. Carriers of the plague, scrabbling for life in the ruins of the time before, ready to infect any healthy person who comes too close. They have a... compulsion I guess. To spread their disease. To inflict on others the pain and torture that is their daily grind.
The other half a percent? We're the survivors. Those who have managed to remain pure. There is no immunity. No vaccine that we know of. The original plague was airborne, but that seems to have died out. Now its vector is blood or fluid transfer from an infected. Our only protection is avoidance. Those that survived the first waves of the plague were those who had no links to shore. Sailors. Islanders. People in remote communities, whose isolation was once a curse yet now it was their salvation.
For those of us that remain, our watchword is Quarantine.
But we still need parts. We still need supplies. If we don't want to slide into complete poverty. There are still riches to be had, on the dusty shelves of deserted stores or in old resorts or towns scoured by tsunami and monsoon.
And in shipwrecks like this one.
So I paddle on. I ignore Katie's prophecies of doom and row towards Black Harvest.
Because who knows what I will find within?
From a distance, she doesn't look too bad. There is always the illusion with a wreck that she is just resting on shore and that perhaps, with the right crew, we could refloat her. But that illusion dissipates like mist as I draw close.
I row slowly down the starboard side of the ship, towards the stern, craning my neck. Looking for footholds or the rungs of a steel ladder, welded to her side. Part hoping, part dreading the sight of a face peering down at me.
The great plates of her hull are buckled and loose, swinging free in places with the wash of waves spilling within. Even after all these years, there is a still a slick of black oil glimmering around her stern, perpetually renewed from some fractured reservoir within. A great gash splits her side, about mid way down. Pipes and walkways exposed like veins and tendons in a wound. The water on the starboard side is quite deep and the surf slapping against her makes landing here impossible.
We're on an ebb tide. The plimsoll line is fully exposed and the ship's propellers, each as wide as I am tall, are bent and buckled from where they clipped rock and reef on the way in. But I can tell that this ship has not drifted ashore. It was not cast here by a storm. It hit the island dead on, at speed. Its bow was driven high, over the reef and onto the rocks, the keel of the ship lifting and buckling as it split almost in two. Its back broken.
This ship rammed the island.
I tie off the dinghy in the sheltered overhang of the stern. The bay shelters the ship from the prevailing southerly swell and the water here is quite calm. The portside might be even more sheltered but I don't bother – I've made my decision. I'm going to come up her stern and clear forward. I push the dinghy out to the limit of the painter and bend back so I can see up to the rail. Ten, eleven metres? Not a great distance, all things considered.
My slingshot has surgical rubber bands cupping a small leather pocket into which I slip a lead sinker as big as my eye. I've tied fifty metres of fishing line to the sinker, which I will use to loop my climbing rig over the rail.
I draw back the pocket, my left hand trembles slightly under the strain, and sight on the stern rail.
That's it, says Katie. On target.
I let fly.
Chapter 3
Electrics are the problem. They used to make everything so easy. Depth sounders clicking away. GPS showing exact positions on electronic charts. Computers for work and entertainment. We even had a satellite internet puck that could get service in the middle of the ocean and give us weather reports at a snail's pace. What a time it was to be alive. But now the machines are failing one by one, each little robot death an undermining of the delicate support network that keeps us going.
And, of course, radios. VHF for line of sight. HF for long range. Problem with radios is they're not much good if you've got no on
e to talk to.
We always maintained a radio net when we cruised. Back in the day. Us and a dozen friends, all popping up on the same frequency each day at 2230 Greenwich Mean Time. It was a yachtie chat line, a dozen boats scattered across the Pacific and Indian oceans, fading and coming in according to the whims of the atmosphere and electromagnetic interference and sunspots and what not. Wet Dream, Stan and Stacy in Ponepei, Micronesia. Sophie in Raja Ampat, my favourite boat because they had children as well, Calypso, a girl two years older than me, my best friend. Reuben James, a retired American navy officer who provided weather reports to us all from the Philippines, his yacht hull crusted with coral, the old man on his ship like a Viking king waiting for someone to light the pyre. And others. All popping up, a community bonded with radio waves and meetings in remote atolls once a year.
All gone now.
We were on passage from Palau to the Philippines when it happened. Chuck's dry voice coming up on 12356mHz on the HF, Good Morning cruisers, this is Rueben James, can I have a rollcall please?
All of us signing in one by one. I was only six at the time, but I could imagine Chuck carefully noting which boats were on-net today, ticking them off, so he knew which weather reports to give.
Has anyone heard from Labyrinth?
Yes. This is Firebird. I can hear them but I don't think they can hear you. It must be a sunny day in New Guinea.
I have told him enough times he needs to space his HF antenna off his backstay. Very well, can you relay please? Chuck's voice as always taciturn yet courteous. Weather for northern Indonesia as follows...
After the weather, Chuck would grow jocose.
Those of you about to make landfall in Asia may wish to hold back a few days - there's a nasty flu going around. Oh boy, everyone seems to have it!
Careful Chuck! It was Larry, a good natured solo English drunk sailing a thirty foot sloop named Razzmatazz around northern Borneo. At your age you don't want any sniffles.
