Extinct

by Hamill, Ike

  Robby settled his gaze on the lighthouse and tried to adjust to the new swells they were hitting from their new course. Inside the breakwater, the waves calmed quite a bit, but now they were headed back out to the big stuff. Robby wiped his mouth on his jacket sleeve and handed the bag towards his mom, figuring he was done for a while. In fact, he figured, he might be done with food for a while too, since it looked like they had to stay on the boat.

  Sarah didn’t take the bag.

  Robby shook it and said, “Mom? I think I’m done.” He heard the door—the one that led to the stern of the boat—close behind him. Robby dropped the bag, forgot about nausea, and spun around. Sarah was looking off to the horizon, back towards the shore, like she couldn’t tear her eyes from the destruction of the once pretty port town.

  “MOM!” Robby screamed, throwing open the door.

  She didn’t look around. The boat chugged on, still heading roughly west. Robby sprinted towards his mom. She was only a few steps away, but with the bobbing motion of the deck he felt like he was running through molasses. She got to the stern before he reached her, and he saw his mother put a foot up on the taffrail and step up.

  She didn’t jump in, or even complete her climb. Robby’s mom just got plucked from the back of the boat into nothing. She jerked upwards and then simply disappeared. Robby skidded to a stop and pumped his legs furiously backward, like he could kick away what he’d just seen. The boat bobbed and the deck came up to meet Robby’s feet. He slammed himself backwards into the cabin door, which swung shut.

  Robby pawed at the handle, threw open the door, and pulled it shut behind him. He stared through the window at the space where his mom stepped up into nothing. He scanned the sky for any sign of her. The engine rumbled on while Robby tried to process what he’d seen. When Paulie and his dad were pulled up and away, he figured they must have gone somewhere, not just vanished. His mom had been mid-stride, then she’d been jerked upwards by an unseen force, then poof, gone. Robby pushed back from the window and backed into the wheel. He tore his eyes from the stern and looked around to the instruments.

  The boat drifted off-course a bit. Robby corrected it, looked at the GPS, and then pegged the throttle. He swallowed hard, and willed himself to not throw up again. Every few seconds he took his eyes off the horizon and looked down to fiddle with the chart. He wanted to be sure he had a clear shot—the coast of Maine has so many islands and channels even a local could get turned around, and Robby barely ever traveled by boat, let alone navigated.

  He only glanced back twice to check the progress of the tornados. Part of him wished he’d somehow see his mom back there, and another part feared she’d be there, hovering just over the transom, beckoning for him to join her. He tried to work the problem; tried to figure out what had motivated her to leave the cabin and step up to be taken.

  ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪

  “MOM?” ROBBY CALLED out into the whiteness. All he could see was white. He woke up on the deck of the boat, shivering in the cold, damp air and surrounded by dull, thick white on all sides. Robby hugged his arms around himself and his jacket crackled with ice.

  “Mom?” he yelled again. “I’m here. Where are you?”

  Robby stopped breathing and just listened. He couldn’t hear anything except the lapping of the ocean against the side of the boat. Logic started to return to his sleepy brain. When he woke up to the white fog, he thought he’d finally been taken. He thought he’d been plucked into the sky. Now, as he considered the rocking of the boat and the sound of the ocean, he realized he was still on Earth and his mom, dad, and all his friends were gone.

  He dropped to his hands and knees and crawled until he found the side of the boat. From there, he guessed the direction and found himself back at the cabin of Carl Deemer’s boat. He let himself in. All the instruments were dark; nothing on the boat worked at all. He couldn’t get the engine started or even see anything out the windows except the white fog.

  The motion of the boat finally overcame Robby and he started to retch again. His back arched and it felt like his esophagus was collapsing in on itself, trying to vomit up stomach contents that weren’t there. Robby shook and gagged and collapsed to the floor of the cabin.

  His gags turned to sobs. Robby balled up his gloved hands and cried into them. He cried for his mom and dad, and Jim, who always stuck by Robby. Jim even changed schools when Robby did, just so they could still eat lunch together everyday. Robby cried for Brandon, and Ms. Norton. He even cried for Paulie, who’d been plucked from the Earth while still holding on to Robby’s jacket. If his dad hadn’t held on so well, Robby would have sailed right off with Paulie and he never would have needed to deal with everything all by himself.

  Robby hugged his knees to his chest and curled up into a ball.

  Robby cried for the puppy he was supposed to get next summer when Bill Carver would finally breed his pretty black lab again. He was going to name the puppy Buster and teach him how to do all kinds of tricks. The tears and snot turned cold on his sleeves and Robby pulled his hood further down over his head.

  The boat drifted, the waves lapped at the hull, and Robby cried.

  Robby hitched in shallow breaths into his heavy lungs and eventually he dozed.

  The second time Robby woke up on the boat it was from hunger. He glanced up at the windows—everything was still white outside the cabin—and slid over to the backpack his mom packed with leftovers. He took off his gloves to peel apart a turkey sandwich. He thought he could handle the mayo-smeared bread, but the turkey seemed too daunting. His stomach clenched and twisted around the bread, so he chased it with water until it settled down. Both the bread and the water were ice-cold. They felt good going down—chilling, but pleasantly shocking.

  He stood up slowly, slightly swaying on his feet, and steadied himself on the console. A garbage bag with spit and vomit sat on the floor a few feet away. Robby looked out the window and waited for his nausea to return. He knew it was just a matter of time—the boat still swayed and bobbed, and he couldn’t lock his eyes on the horizon. He figured his meal of bread and water wouldn’t stay down long.

  The fog looked like it might be thinning. He wasn’t sure until he looked out the back windows. He could now see the stern of the boat, where as before he barely make out the deck. Back at the console, all the instruments still sat dead. He flicked switches and turned dials, but nothing responded. The only thing moving was an old gimbaled compass. It rocked gently with the movement of the boat, and the needle spun like the second hand of a clock.

  The fog brought a heavy cold—the moisture seemed to penetrate his clothes and go right to his bones. When Robby was a little kid, his parents took him down to Washington DC in January. The cold down there felt like this. Even though the temperatures in Maine dipped well below zero, it was a surface cold. All you needed to do was brush off your clothes and stand next to a fire for a minute, and you could warm back up. Cold with humidity felt much worse. Now, with the engine dead and the meager heater dead with it, the cabin felt like a cold, clammy tomb.

  Robby let himself out onto the deck. It was even colder outside, but moving around felt good. Robby put his gloves back on and carefully made his way around the boat. He looked for any way to propel the boat—an oar, or even a long plank—but he realized he didn’t even have a way to figure out which way was west.

  At the side of the cabin, Robby found a handle and a bar mounted as a handhold. He grabbed it with both hands and stepped gingerly up onto the rail of the boat, where the lip was covered in a no-skid surface so you could climb to the bow. He worked his way, keeping his belly pressed tight to the outside of the cabin. The gentle swaying of the boat seemed amplified once he was clinging to the side. On the bow he found a gaff—a long hook with a stick—and a square hatch which led to the ship’s hold.

  He sat down on the hatch and looked out into the fog. He shoved up his sleeve. His watch stopped at twelve twenty-one. The date said it was still the twenty-fifth. R
obby wasn’t certain how long he’d spent asleep before he woke up in the fog. In fact, he didn’t even know why he had fallen asleep in the first place.

  Right after his mom disappeared, Robby moved to what he felt was a safe distance off the coast. He held the boat about two miles west of shore and navigated south and west. The last thing he remembered before the fog was deciding to swing the boat wide around a bunch of islands which showed up on the GPS. He didn’t know if the disappearances of his friends and family were related to proximity to land, but he hadn’t seen anyone disappear in the open water, so he figured he would test that theory.

  Now, adrift in the fog, he didn’t know if he was out to sea or a hundred yards from the rocky coast.

  He took a mental inventory of his supplies. His mom packed enough food to last several people a couple of days. Now he was alone and he could probably ration it out to more than a week if he needed to. Of course, he’d be lucky to keep anything down, but at least his hasty meal of bread and water were still sitting pretty well.

  On his way around the other side of the cabin, Robby’s glove slipped on the bar and his foot skidded off the rail. He dangled for a precarious second before getting his footing back. He bit down on his glove and tore it from his hand. The bar was almost painfully cold to touch, but he figured it was warmer than the water below.

  Back in the cabin, he sat on the bench and tried a piece of the turkey from the dismantled sandwich. It tasted good, and felt fine going down. It seemed like as long as he just let himself sway with the boat and didn’t try to fight it, he felt okay.

  A burst of static exploded from the radio and Robby spit a piece of turkey on the floor.

  He jumped up and ran over to the controls. He turned down the volume and swept up and down through the radio frequencies. He found nothing but static.

  “I must have left it on when I was screwing with stuff?” he mumbled. “Oh!” he said.

  He tried the engine. It cranked slow at first, then the starter seemed to warm up and the engine sputtered and coughed to life. Robby flipped on the navigation system and the heat while the engine idle evened out.

  The GPS display flashed a message reading “Acquiring Satellites,” for several minutes and then settled down to a warning—“No Satellites Found. Check Antenna.”

  Robby sighed. He turned on the electronic compass and the depth finder. The instruments declared the depth of the ocean beneath him was thirty-one meters. The compass numbers seemed to change randomly, never settling down to one figure. On the gimbaled compass, the old manual standby, the needle swung back and forth between forty and two-eighty.

  Robby cranked the wheel to the right and gave the throttle a little nudge. The compass continued to fluctuate, but the average heading it reported moved counter-clockwise around the dial. Robby kept spinning the boat until the compass needle pointed towards the stern of the boat most of the time and then he tried to straighten it out. It turned out to be difficult to find “straight.” He adjusted the wheel for several minutes until he got the compass needle where he wanted it.

  Now that he thought he was pointed roughly south, Robby turned his attention to the depth gauge. It climbed to the upper thirties. Robby steered the boat a little to the east and kept an eye on the depth, hoping to not get too close to shore unexpectedly.

  Very slowly, the fog thinned. First, he could clearly see the bow, and then he caught a glimpse of the ocean in front of the boat. The compass began to even out as well. Robby dug through a pouch mounted behind him and found a chart. He didn’t have any way of knowing where he was on the map. Even the depth didn’t give him a clue—the depth soundings showed he could be twenty yards or two miles out to sea.

  Robby smiled when the GPS flashed back to “Acquiring Satellites.” He held his breath until the device found the signals it needed to show him a map. The arrow showed the boat moving roughly south, about a mile east of a little island, still off the coast of Maine. He increased the speed a little and steered a little to the right—starboard, he corrected himself—so he could head in closer to shore. Even though his nausea passed, Robby didn’t want to get stuck out on the boat if the fog happened to come back. He figured his best bet was to head for shore.

  He didn’t reach the shore before he spotted more fog rolling in from the north. The fog spilled over the snow-covered trees that lined the coast and then rolled out over the water in his direction. Robby turned the boat south and pointed it to the left of a small peninsula. The map showed a small town on the far side of the peninsula. Robby made up his mind to land there.

  When he rounded the peninsula, Robby jerked the wheel to the left. The same dancing tornados landed on this town too—tearing up buildings and dropping debris into the ocean. Robby pressed his face to the glass to see the destruction while the boat carried him safely away. It looked like these tornados just started their work. He watched as the windows exploded out from a house about halfway up the hill. The shingles peeled away in patches before the building was obscured by the dark funnel cloud.

  At the shore, a couple of piers had slips for medium-sized boats. They bobbed in the turbulence created by the trash dropped in the water by the tornados. Robby squinted at a shape on the pier. He reached down and dug through the pocket mounted to the wall, coming up with binoculars. It was tough to get them focused, and his stomach did a low, sick flop, but he managed to train the binoculars on the shape on the pier.

  He reached down and killed the throttle, dropping the engine back to idle. The shape on the pier was a person—an adult—waving his or her arms. Robby turned the wheel and eased the throttle forward, bringing the boat around to face the town. The water between him and the pier was dotted with floating debris. Robby clenched his teeth and increased the throttle until the engine throbbed and the bow cut through the waves.

  Swells rolled out from the shore. One of the tornados dropped a big load of bricks and rocks and the splash obscured Robby’s view of the person on the pier. He stared, unblinking, until he could see the person again. They backed up a little, away from the end of pier, and Robby could see why—something dropped on the end of the dock and knocked away a giant section.

  A flurry of papers rained down, blown out by the wind, and landed on the boat. One document stuck to the windshield and Robby ducked to the right to see. A police car dropped into the ocean. The nose sank first, and the trunk stuck up out of the water like a big blue tombstone before it slipped out of site. Off to the right, a red pickup truck landed with a giant splash.

  Back at the shore, the person still waved both arms overhead. It looked like a man, Robby decided.

  “Why don’t you get out of there?” Robby whispered.

  A giant log floated directly in Robby’s path. He pulled back on the throttle and maneuvered around it. He was immediately blocked by section of clapboarded wall. Robby put the boat in neutral and banged his way through the door to the deck. He climbed the ladder which ran up the back of the cabin. With a little elevation, he saw the extent of the problem. The ocean between him and the man on the shore was becoming a minefield of debris, and every second the tornados dropped off more pollution to block his course.

  Robby climbed down and went back in the cabin. He couldn’t even see the man anymore, the air was thick with dust, and everything on the shore was a fuzzy blur. He tried to use the binoculars, but couldn’t find anything to focus on.

  Robby stood there, trying to spot the man, while junk floated out to him and started to surround the boat. When another car splashed down a few dozen yards from the boat, he jumped and nearly screamed. He frowned and spun the wheel to the right. He brought the boat around so his back was to the pier before he gunned the throttle. The boat ground through the chop and the waves at its stern seemed to help push the boat along. Robby never looked back to try to spot the man again.

  Down the coast he saw two more towns being dismantled; he gave them a wide berth. Robby lost track of time. He just steered the boat to the left of th
e next point or the next island and checked the charts to make sure he was staying out of shallow water. Eventually, the GPS told him he was entering Casco Bay, and then across the bay, the entrance to the city of Portland. Robby veered the boat to the left, dreading the destruction he would see to the small city.

  Eventually, his curiosity won out and he let the wheel drift to the right a bit. He passed within a mile of the islands which protected the port, and saw glimpses of the city skyline. He expected destruction, but he couldn’t spot any, even with the binoculars.

  The fuel gauge showed a little less than half a tank. Robby decided to keep heading south.

  ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪

  EVEN FROM OUT on the water, Robby could see the snow accumulations south of Portland didn’t nearly measure up. Some places looked like they’d only received a dusting, although the grey sky seemed to promise more was on its way. Robby spotted a private dock that looked like it had deepwater access, and he headed to shore.

  His landing was tentative, but reasonable. He was so afraid of bringing the boat in too quickly, it took him forever to sidle the boat up to the dock. He reversed several times to account for lateral drift, but eventually he got the boat alongside the floating dock and jumped out with the stern rope. He tied it up the best he could and looked to the shore.

  There was no beach here—the land came down to the water’s edge and then dropped off suddenly. A wooden staircase, built into the side of the hill, gave access to property above. Robby filled a backpack with some food, flashlight, and basic supplies and climbed up the stairs. He gripped the railing to make it up the stairs. They were fine—not slippery, and not too steep—but Robby’s balance was tweaked from the long boat trip. He constantly felt like he was falling to the left, and his rubbery legs wanted to compensate.

  At the top, he found a well-groomed lawn, still greenish, under about a half-inch of snow. A flagstone path led past a flagpole, between gardens, and up to the back of a big building. The side facing him was virtually all glass, affording excellent views of the ocean.