Children Of Fiends

by C. Chase Harwood

  He noted the heavy blanket of snow that had gathered outside, some of it drifting higher than the window ledge. He should have known better. The spring storm had howled around his small house for most of the previous day and into the night. Storms like that frequently brought down electric lines or fouled transformers. It was probably the tenth time since New Years that a storm had knocked out the power. How could he have forgotten his slippers? The rotgut that the islander’s called whiskey probably hadn’t helped.

  Groaning, he threw off the blankets, gingerly set his feet on the floor and hopped into the bathroom where he could at least grab his robe and stand on a terry cloth rug. His morning routine usually started with a hot shower, but with no electricity, the instant hot water heater would be dead too. Instead, he ran a wet comb through his hair (at thirty-six his vanity was still very much intact) and let the faucet run to wash his face and brush his teeth. His were strong features, with cheeks and forehead assembling themselves into hard Teutonic plates accented by thick lips and a blunt, hawkish nose. It was the face of a man whose genetic mix suggested a long lineage of warriors. As he filled an empty toothpaste-stained glass, feeling grateful that the pipes hadn’t frozen and that there was still a bit of water pressure, he slapped a handful of pills into his mouth. The capsules kept him from turning into a mindless killing machine and were a drag to swallow without water. The only other liquid in the house was the so-called whiskey.

  Normally he ate his breakfast cereal with goat’s milk and a glass of weak tea, but the weather had kept Mister Helprin from making his usual delivery. The sturdy farmer had managed to breed a hardy herd that could survive the harsh climate of Nantucket, producing enough milk for the whole colony. Dean stoked the bed of coals beneath the ash of the previous night’s fire and got it roaring again and sat, absorbing the warmth, brushing last night’s book to the dock on his reader and scanning the Boston Globe. The headline: Moroccan Freighter Arrives With First Citrus caught his eye. He knew the reporter. Had met him as an embed during the Exodus. Two years earlier, the same guy had come out to the colony to do a story. As one of a handful of immune people, the fellow was the first outside voice to offer an opinion on the life and times of the Nantucket exiles. His fame had brought the plight of the Halflies to the public back on the mainland. Things had turned a little for the better after that.

  There was another article on the gradual re-warmth of the planet: the effects of millions of tons of smoke, ash, and dust trapped in the Stratosphere finally dissipating. The hope was that the next half of the year might see freezing weather wait until the end of September, offering the first growing season outside of hot houses in nine years.

  He shoveled his walk. He didn’t expect any visitors, but the exercise felt good and his military mind simply couldn’t abide a snow covered walk. One of the island’s two diesel powered snowplows had been by and the street was relatively clear. The colony had agreed to use some of its precious fuel for the two vehicles; the need to support commerce far too great to allow the roadways to be impassable. Despite the previous day’s storm, the village was slowly coming to life. Dean could smell Fitzwell’s Bakery pumping out the scent of the day’s bread, and he quickened his pace as his only slightly sated stomach reminded him that onboard the Ginger Girl, Cookie would have biscuits hot and ready.

  Passing over the treacherous cobblestones that still made up the streets of downtown Nantucket, Captain Stewart Dean’s long legs deftly marched him to the wharf where his ship lay tied to her berth. He could see men crawling in the rigging amongst the schooner’s three tall masts. The crew had risen before dawn to prep her, sweep off the snow and ready her sails. Smoke rose from the forward galley warming and thickening the air with the smell of more baking. As he stepped out onto the long pier where the schooner was docked, he passed row upon row of massive private yachts that had been long ago converted to permanent housing. Many of his crew lived aboard these boats, their owners long dead or finding little need for a luxury yacht left behind on what was effectively a leper colony.

  When America fought to reclaim the New England states, Nantucket had become the home for the Halflies; an unfortunate (or fortunate, depending whether your glass is half full or half empty) group of humans who had become infected with Cain’s disease and had received what was then considered to be a miracle medication. The potent cocktail, if given in time, arrested the raging bacterium – temporarily short-circuiting its ability to breach the blood-brain barrier. To enjoy this miracle, the victim was destined to take a daily handful of pills for the rest of his life or succumb to the beast that would replace him. Captain Dean was a former Navy Seal who had contracted the disease nine years before, while trying to finish an impregnable wall against millions of his infected fellow Americans. Dean’s team had the job of securing and ultimately destroying the Newburg-Beacon Bridge, the last major crossing for the Hudson and the final escape path for thousands of uninfected refugees. Inevitably a hoard of Fiends had come on the tail of the fleeing healthy. The Seal Team hadn’t finished setting the demolition charges and to their profound frustration, after urgently setting off what they had, the bridge stayed in place. Despite a huge amount of firepower, the Seals had been overrun. Only Dean and one of his ensigns had escaped, both bitten and in rough shape. A medivac to a converted euthanasia station had got them to a medic with access to the then experimental drugs. Dean and the ensign (now his boatswain) survived and had been living in exile ever since. He would leave behind a son and wife, and he let them go rather than remain a haunting reminder of someone they could never touch or lay physical eyes on again. That’s what he told himself anyway.

  Despite the cocktail of pills, he and the rest of the island’s residents were still highly infectious to healthy people. As such, they were offered permanent, so called, accommodations on the 48 square mile island of Nantucket. The residents also had to agree to sexual sterilization (infected persons passed the disease on to their offspring in a genetically mutated form). A child of such a union was, by all accounts, an evolutionary nightmare and the foundation for modern day fairy tales that spoke of demons born with nothing but wickedness in their DNA.

  As he approached the gangplank, his boatswain, Ensign Lance Palmer, spotted him. The man brought out his whistle to announce the arrival of the ship’s captain and Dean offered a brief salute as the crew paused and came to attention. Though the Ginger Girl was a commercial vessel, many of her crew were, like Dean, former Navy and used to the hierarchy of the military. The captain moved to the stern and found his First Mate, George Sanders, in the master’s cabin at the navigation table. Sanders stood along with the Pilot for the Nantucket harbor, Kevin Jenkins. The men had been bent over a chart of the Nantucket Sound, steaming cups of tea in their hands.

  “Morning, Stew,” said Sanders, offering Dean a cup.

  Jenkins nodded at Dean and set his cup down, pointing at the chart, “Telling Sanders here, Rights spotted last evening about here. Twas the timber ship comin’ in. ‘Er cap’n said it was a big pod. Maybe twenty adults, several calves. Noticed ‘em from afar. Orcas, must’ve peeled off a calf. Said it raised quite a froth.”

  Sanders said, “Ship’s about rigged, Cap. We could be out there in two, three hours. Jenkins here, says they were heading southwest, practically crossing our front door.”

  Cookie entered with a steaming tray of biscuits, “Mornin’, sirs. Fresh out of the oven.”

  “My growling belly says thank you, Cook,” said Dean through a quick mouthful.

  Cookie nodded with pleasure, “Sir.”

  As he chewed, Dean pointed at the chart, his finger hovering over an area of ocean covered in Xs. “Gonna get themselves into the mills, looks like.”

  “Could be, sir,” said Sanders.

  “Well, what are you waiting for, George? Let’s put out.”

  “Aye-aye, sir.”

  One hundred and forty years before, the Ginger Girl had been a trading schooner. At 132 f
eet long (172 with her bowsprit) she was among the last of her type when steamships replaced nearly every commercial sailing vessel. Her primary route had taken her to Shanghai where she brought back ginger root in exchange for cotton grown in South Carolina. In the early twentieth century, she had come into the ownership of a railroad magnet who had converted her for pleasure cruising out of Newport Road Island. During the next half century she passed into the hands of other wealthy men, remaining a large luxury yacht, always with a full-time professional crew. There was a brief stint from 1942 to 1944 when she was commissioned as a submarine watcher during the war. In 1969 she was trapped in a probate battle and allowed to rot on a dock while an unsettled estate paid the rent for a decade. In the nineteen eighties she was donated to a maritime school in Connecticut, which used her as a dry-dock classroom for wooden ship construction. Later, the school put together the funds to repair her and she became a floating classroom. Then in 2002 the school failed and she was sold off at auction, finding herself a sixth life taking tourists out on day cruises from Nantucket. In 2021 she survived the U.S. Marine invasion of the then infected island to wipe it clean of Fiends. Now she found herself converted to a fast whaling ship. Her cargo: a precious resource of both food and lamp oil – a rare commodity that could be bartered for goods from the mainland and beyond.

  In absence of a large resource hungry polluting human populace, and despite the ravages of a ten-year nuclear winter that left all but the planet’s equator in permanent overcast, the world’s whale populations had veritably exploded. After calving in the warm and sunny center of the planet, they continued to return to their traditional feeding grounds in the colder climes, where surprisingly, the krill population remained robust. The Ginger Girl didn’t have to roam far to get her share of the great fatty mammals, which was fortunate since her hunting grounds were geographically limited. As a condition of her use in the sea beyond the three mile zone surrounding Nantucket (the limit of where the island’s fishing fleet was allowed to work) the schooner, like all Nantucket boats, was fitted out with a radio beacon that broadcast her position to stations along the mainland at all times. Additionally, every resident of the island was implanted with a transponder chip. As a requirement of accepting exile over euthanasia, the residents were required to be monitored 24/7 to make sure that they never encountered the healthy. To insure that no healthy came within spitting distance of the Halflies, shipments to and from the island were left at floating wharfs out in the harbor.

  The breeze was up early and the Ginger Girl cut through the two-foot swell with a full set of sails. Dean stood by the helmsman, Mr. Burrows, enjoying the feel of the salt air. Despite the deep chill, the gritty moisture brought some rose to his cheeks; a bracing sensation that his skin never failed to enjoy. He glanced toward the lookout, perched two-thirds of the way up on the forward mast, and felt a tinge of sympathy for the man. The frigid breeze up there would be very harsh. The sailor was fitted out with the warmest gear but his eyes would still be exposed to look through his binoculars. Along with searching for their prey, the lookout also had the important job of gauging the depth and breadth of the submerged parts of the hundreds of icebergs that dotted the ocean around them. A berg that appeared as a small lump on the sea’s surface could just as easily be a deadly floating mountain - its sharp edges capable of shredding the wooden planking of the schooner’s hull.

  After an hour, with the Ginger Girl making a healthy twelve knots, the lookout yelled out, “Whales ho!” and pointed to the north-northwest. In the distance, a small geyser of water separated itself from the chop of minor whitecaps, followed by another. The whale’s means of breathing was, unfortunately for them, a great white flag that drew in their pursuers. Beyond the whales stood a man-made forest that rose from the sea: wind turbines, thousands of them, dotted the horizon and disappeared over its edge. They had been placed there before Omega, after a hard fought philosophical war between green thinking futurists and oil addicted presentists. For America, or what was left of her, they were much of the lifeline that kept a society dependent on electricity alive. They were also strictly off limits to anything but navy shipping.

  Sanders let his binoculars fall to his chest and spoke to Dean from the side of his mouth, “Awful close to the line, Cap.”

  “Mmm,” was all Dean replied then turned to the helmsman, “Ten degrees to port and hold your course, Mr. Burrows.”

  “Aye, Cap.”

  Sanders yelled out to the crew who handled the sails, “Coming ten to port, close-hauled!”

  The Ginger Girl’s deck slowly tilted to the right as the men brought the sails in tight, keeping the same airflow over what were really inverted wings while the boat beat to windward. Just like an airplane, which gets its lift from the vacuum created at the top of the airfoil, the Ginger Girl’s sails pulled forward in an effort to fill their own vacuum. At such a tight angle of sail to the wind, the speed of the ship bled off with the less efficient arrangement, giving Dean just what he wanted, a direct path to the whales while not over shooting them.

  “Prepare the boats, Mr. Sanders.”

  Sanders called out to the harpoon crews who were already getting one of the two skiffs hanging off the starboard side ready to lower. Each boat had a team of three men - two to pull the oars and a third as the harpoon man. As the schooner bore down on the pod of Right whales, the lines holding the sails were released to reduce the speed further and the deck crew lowered the first skiff with its hunters aboard. As the skiff hit the water, the lines holding it were released, and as the two men at the oars pulled hard, the pod dove out of sight. The Ginger Girl pressed on and the second skiff was lowered, with the hope of boxing in the big mammals when they surfaced next.

  Jamesbonds Boonmee was a small man in stature, but made up for it in muscled bulk. Ten years before, his parents had made the unfortunate decision to visit family in Virginia. The FND-z epidemic was beginning to germinate in Florida, and was only weeks from exploding into a national pandemic. As members of a nomadic seafaring people, the Boonmees were considered sea gypsies (or “chao lei” - in Thai) who made their livelihood fishing off of and around the island of Phuket. Jamesbonds’ auntie Nim had made the rare choice among her people to live abroad, emigrating to America, getting a degree at Georgetown, and finding work in hospital administration at Walter Reed. Auntie Nim had saved hard and had finally sent for her family so they could see where she lived and discover the amazing country that was America. Days after the Boonmees arrival, there was a sudden ban on international flights to and from the U.S. Later, in the madness that became the evacuation of Washington, twelve-year-old Jamesbonds had become separated from his family, never to see them again.

  The Harris’ had been on a family spring-break cruise when the news broke of multiple Cain’s outbreaks, and they had sailed to Annapolis to try and find more of their kin who lived there. Instead, they found chaos. A failed search for family had them scrambling to get to their 40-foot sloop. They cast off with hundreds of desperate people charging the docks, swamping other fleeing boats. Once safely out into open water, they were surprised to find Jamesbonds hiding under their inflatable dingy. Taking pity on the orphan, they brought him to their home on a small islet attached to the greater island of Jamestown Road Island. The residents there destroyed the bridges to their sanctuary and survived most of the madness that befell the country. In the face of growing hunger on the overcrowded island, Jamesbonds became somewhat of a savior, putting his vast skills at fishing to work to feed the Harris’ and many of their neighbors. It wasn’t quite enough, but it kept them all from starving.

  That luck turned when Jamestown had been liberated before the infected population in greater Rhode Island had been eradicated. Suffering from malnutrition, Jamesbonds had been transferred to a field hospital outside of East Providence. Days later it came under assault from a pocket of roaming Fiends. The creatures were destroyed by the well-armed hospital staff, but not before several people
had been attacked and infected. While he lay weakly on a hospital bed, seconds away from having his throat torn out by two rabid females, a doctor ran in and shot the ghouls down. Alas, he had gotten a fair amount of their spittle in his screaming mouth and that was that: He was immediately treated with the new drugs, which arrested the disease, but doomed him as a carrier.

  With the salty spray of a breaking whitecap dousing his face, Jamesbonds found himself at the bow of the whaling skiff, harpoon in hand. With exceptionally well trained eyesight born from diving for fish as a youth, he could see the shadow of a Right whale off their port side rising to the surface. “Left! Come left, my friends! Pull hard!” he called out to the oarsmen.

  The rowers drove their oars into the sea, the port man pulling harder and deeper to turn the boat. Making sure that his feet were firmly placed under the webbed strapping on the deck, Jamesbonds leaned out over the bow and raised his harpoon. Ten yards ahead, the whale broke through, its white callosities giving the animal the appearance of a rising rock. A spout of breathy seawater rained down upon the men. The rowers too pulled with greater urgency. They had but a few seconds before the animal dove again.

  Spying the point just before the whale’s spout, in the general area of the brain, Jamesbonds heaved the gear with all his might. A spool of heavy nylon line spun out from the bucket between his knees. The fiercely pointed object plunged into the top of the whale, driving its tip at least two feet into the animal’s thin skin, thick blubber and muscle. At the moment of impact, a short fuse was ignited on a grenade-like charge just behind the spear tip. The grenade went off just as the whale’s body heaved at the unexpected assault. Shrapnel fired deep into the beast, shredding much of the brain. At eight times the size of a human brain, there was much neurological damage, but not enough to stop the big mammal’s muscles from connecting with its final instinct, to dive.