by David Jurk
For the rest of the morning, I stayed on Windswept, keeping an eye out for anything at all that might suggest people were alive in the area, but truly, I neither saw nor heard any indication of that at all. So, I relaxed, cleaned up the cabin, and did a thorough check of lines and sails. The drive batteries were already back to full in the sunshine, and it felt wonderful to feel at least a little safe. It was as though I’d found myself tucked away into some small, hidden sanctuary. I had no explanation for it, and no inclination to question it.
Still, there were things to be attended to; first and foremost my frighteningly low food supplies. Hanapepe and Eleele were small towns; maybe the exodus had been less chaotic, less violent; perhaps there’d not been the same panicked rush on food stores. I wouldn’t need to find a huge amount of it – I’d get by fine with a few canned goods, a little cheese and some rice, maybe some eggs that I could coat with oil to preserve; even that much would go a long way. But to find anything meant going ashore and I kept putting it off.
But by early afternoon, after the full night and more than half the day seeing nothing alive other than sea birds and chickens, and hearing nothing more threatening than the barking of dogs in the distance, I untied the kayak and slipped into it, paddling quietly toward the marina docks. After considerable thought, I left the Tyvek suit behind and put the respirator in the backpack; if I saw someone, I’d have time to put it on, and the day was just too beautiful to muck it up with the damn suit. And I had the Beretta; if I needed to suggest to someone that they keep their distance, it would make a strong argument.
There was a low embankment next to the docks, a sandy two-track going down it to the water, and I drifted onto it, got out and dragged the kayak out of the water. Looking carefully around, I walked toward the nearest building, a white-washed garage with faded paint; Hanapepe Marine. The two bay doors were open, and I glanced in. There was a large fishing boat, set on blocks, apparently in dry dock for repair.
It was a Grady-White, a quality boat, ten meters long. I walked up and saw immediately that the engine had been removed – evidently lifted out for repair. Out of curiosity, I climbed up into it and spent the next ten minutes exploring. I expected nothing but emerged with a dust-covered gem of incalculable value; a small crate labeled ‘solar still’. If it was in workable condition – and it seemed to be unopened and still in the factory carton – it was a find of extraordinary importance. Yes, it was for emergencies only and yes, it was achingly slow, but it could provide two or even three people with enough water to live on, day after day, consuming no more power than sunshine. And folded up, it was no larger than a briefcase. I jumped down from the boat, cradling my treasure, and felt that it was an omen; the feeling of safety, of shelter here in Hanapepe, only grew.
I walked about the shop searching, carrying my treasure, but aside from some heavy tools that I had no space for, there was nothing else of value to me. The remainder of the marina consisted of a small office building, hardly more than a shack, and a few empty boat cradles. If I wanted to roam further, it meant what amounted to a shore excursion and with the acquisition of the solar still, I felt the morning had already been a tremendous success – and decided not to push it further. If the events of the past couple of days had taught me anything, it was to move with caution.
I returned to the kayak and stowed the sill, paddling back to Windswept, feeling buoyant with optimism. The still proved small enough to be stowed in the port ama – one of the few things small enough and light enough to be packed in such an outlier location. I was almost as giddy at finding something useful to be stowed there as I was to have found the still in the first place; happy enough that I asked Ray for some music. Would he have anything in local storage? Indeed, he would – fourteen million, seven hundred thousand, six hundred and eighty-eight songs in a wide variety of languages. Oh, and would I like to select a film? He had a rather substantial library of visual media as well. I spent the next several hours with a light heart, humming and sometimes singing along as I worked at hand-sewing a Dacron patch over a chafed edge of the genoa.
But perhaps so quiet a chore was ill-timed, or perhaps the music affected me because my mood gradually deepened toward quiet sorrow despite the sunny day. A wave of loneliness washed over me, and I was gripped with melancholy. It wasn’t necessarily that I felt like talking to someone, I just felt the weight of being alone. I saw quite clearly that this was my future; to be alone in everything I did - eating alone, traveling to whatever the next destination was alone, sleeping alone, waking alone, fighting for survival alone and eventually - a week from now, fifty years from now – I would die alone. The weight of all those hours, all those nights and days stretching out before me, however many or few they might be, seemed to me in this moment to be nearly unbearable.
“One day at a time,” Rachel whispered. Her laughter, like the pealing of the purest bell, rang through my head and though she startled me, I had to smile.
“I know,” I replied. “That’s exactly the problem, Raich.”
“Not to worry,” she said. “You’ll see.” She was just so confident.
“Will I?”
Her light laughter echoed again, but there was no answer.
And as I finished up the patch and looked it over with a critical eye, I knew one thing with certainty; I wasn’t entirely alone. And whether that meant madness or whether it was truly her, it brought me a great measure of peace.
But mad or not, I needed to address certain pragmatic realities. There was no doubt that I had to go into town. I wasn’t at all sure where I was headed next, but wherever it was, I couldn’t head out across an ocean with nothing more than fishing gear and the little food I had left. Between Hanapepe and Eleele, there had to be food somewhere. Whether I found it in a store or had to go house to house looking through cupboards – it wouldn’t matter other than for the ugliness of what else I was sure to discover if I had to search through people’s homes. I just wanted a decent cache of canned goods – they’d last indefinitely and keep me alive until I figured something else out. Though I had to admit I wasn’t sure how long indefinitely actually was. Eventually, the cans themselves must rot or rust, I supposed – but when?
And what did I imagine I was going to work out as an alternative, as a long-range plan? Did I think I might start a little farm? Find a tractor? Planting what? How? Another note to self: find a garden store and start collecting seed packets. Find tools, learn survivalist skills. Because even if I started catching fish, just being a sea vagabond wasn’t going to work forever.
I decided to wait until morning and spent the rest of the day and early evening rigging up traps and obstructions for anyone trying to board me while I was sleeping, a sort of secondary perimeter if someone got past the radar. I thought of Joshua Slocum and his simple approach of scattering nails on deck, and with that in mind, I did what I could. Removing the ama nets was an obvious one; anyone boarding an ama would find themselves with the need to cat-walk along the narrow, sloping connecting beams. I unwound several meters of heavy monofilament from the fishing supplies and completely encircled the main hull, wrapping the line roughly knee-high using the bow and stern pulpits to hold it in place. It could be cut, of course, or simply climbed over – but in the dark it would be invisible, and at the very least would cause noise or vibration as someone bounced off it, and at best, trip them noisily onto the deck or even into the water. And that was all I could do – that and keep the radar on, as always.
The sun was down no more than an hour before I went below and lay down on the settee, reading, fighting to keep my eyes open. I gave up, and turned the light off, quite sure I’d lie awake for a while, but sleep took me at once. When I opened my eyes, in blackness, there was the uncomfortable sense that something had awakened me, that there’d been a sound. I lay quietly, listening for the slightest movement. And it came; the heavy roll of something in the water off the port side, very close, and I climbed silently off the settee, my heart hammering
. I crept on bare feet to the hatchway, pulled the Beretta free and slid the safety off. Crawling into the cockpit on hands and knees, I stayed low and peered out over the port gunwale just in time to hear a muted splash. In the starlight, I suddenly saw the cause - a monk seal, trying to make his way up onto the ama. I stood, irritated and relieved at the same time, and decided to walk over and whisper a few choice words to the damn thing. Forgetting about the monofilament, I hit the line with my lower legs, stumbled awkwardly over it and somersaulted into the harbor.
Even as I was in the air, having realized what I’d done, I began to laugh. Then I hit the cold water. Yelling as I broke the surface, I swam to the stern and crawled out. As I was toweling myself off, trying to get warm, it occurred to me that I hadn’t come back aboard with everything I went in with. I’d dropped the Beretta in the bay. My first instinct was to dive back in, but the depth here was at least ten meters, the water was dark, and the bottom soft. It made no sense whatsoever to try to find it right then - I’d wait for daylight and use a snorkel and mask. Back warm in the bunk, I waited for sleep to return, telling myself that surely I’d find it, and if not, I still had a second one. But I didn’t live in a world anymore in which pistols were manufactured; nothing was manufactured now, and if I’d lost this – particularly in such idiotic fashion – at some point it would haunt me.
Morning brought another sunny day of eighty degrees, and I unwrapped the monofilament from the hull, replaced the ama nets and dove into the harbor with snorkel, mask and fins. But it was pointless – this was not the crystalline clarity of Hawaiian reefs; this was cloudy murkiness, fouled with oil. Settling onto the muck bottom, I sunk in seconds to my shins, fins and all. What likelihood was there that I’d find the pistol in this? I dove a half-dozen times, until I was exhausted and breathless, and in the end came out empty-handed.
The day got worse – the barometer dropped abruptly and continued to slide, and I felt the wind backing to the west. If it continued to freshen and backed further, I knew it meant Kona winds. If I was truly serious about searching for food, it needed to be soon - if we did get Kona winds, the blow would come from the southeast and our position would become very uncomfortable. We needed either to place another anchor or move inside the inner breakwater to the marina. There was plenty of room there and I could set spring lines to the docks, holding us in a four-point web. Secured that way, we could ride out almost anything. In the end, though, I decided the isolation of the outer harbor was more attractive to me and so laid in another anchor, testing and retesting all three to ensure we held steady.
Losing the Beretta had left me impatient with myself, angry at my carelessness and dismissive of my tentativeness; I resolved to go into town with no further delay. Still, there were preparations to make, and by the time I launched the kayak the wind inched its way further aback, blowing a steady eighteen knots with gusts to twenty-five. I needed to hurry. And this time, remembering the Walmart in Lihue, I carefully placed one of the explosives into the backpack, and after thinking about it, padded it with towels in what was probably a futile attempt to make it safer.
I was back at the sandy embankment in just minutes, dragging the kayak completely out of the water and flipping it over to better spill the wind. I had the Tyvek suit on, with the respirator hung around my neck – if I needed it, it’d be easy enough to slip it into position. I was also carrying one of the automatic rifles. It had occurred to me that if I was going to carry a weapon, I needed to make sure it would provide such overwhelming firepower that something like a crossbow couldn’t endanger me. I’d had quite enough of the sound of those bolts screaming past my head.
Reaching the top of the embankment, I found myself in a somewhat dilapidated commercial area of sandy parking lots and nondescript single-story buildings of unpainted sheet metal. It was purely a working waterfront, as blue collar as anything I’d ever seen on Hawaii, with very little, if anything, dedicated to tourism. I wondered if that weren’t a good thing; no tourists here to panic when the plague hit, no crowd of strangers descending on food stores, no easy victims.
The parking lots seemed entirely normal; a few cars, no damage, no obvious panicked exodus – entirely unlike the Marriott and the marina at Kalapaki Beach. I walked past a few cars and looked in; no keys. And no bodies.
I walked to the nearest street and found myself at the corner of Waialo Road and Aka Ula Street. Aka Ula? Didn’t that translate as reddish? I looked down it, due east. Hanging in the sky at the end of it, on the horizon, was the red star, and it came to me what an ugly thing it was, dully blood red, irregular and swollen like some malignancy. Christ, what an unsettling thing.
I turned and looked north toward Eleele, which Waialo Road ran directly into. There were a few low buildings along it, and beyond them, no more than three hundred meters from me a large sign with red letters: Big Save Market. Here I come, I thought, and headed straight for it.
In fifty meters, the first tourist shops appeared; a small strip mall of souvenirs, sundries, a grill and the ever-present craft brewery. Then a dive shop and a marine charter company. Perhaps the place wasn’t quite as free of tourism as I’d hoped, yet I saw no signs whatsoever of violence – no broken glass, no forced doors, no bodies. The few cars I encountered were parked normally. I tried a few doors as I passed them; locked.
In another fifty meters, another brewery, this one with a small restaurant in front, a sign advertising “Kona Beer” swinging freely about in the wind. I stopped to look in the windows; there were a few small tables, all quite untouched, as though they’d closed for the day. The door was locked. Maybe on the way back, I told myself, if the Big Save doesn’t pan out, I’d break in and see if the taps held any beer. Weren’t they powered by air pressure and not electricity? They may still work.
The rest of the walk toward the Big Save was uneventful and entirely routine – almost normal. Almost. Away from the water, the sounds of seabirds faded and the dogs I’d heard earlier had stopped barking – and hopefully, left. The breeze was stiff, but at my back and the day was sunny and pleasant. But quite odd; one moment seemingly a typical stroll along a pleasant street and the next an eerie foray into a village empty of people, empty of all signs of life. Every house, every building, every traffic light or walkway sign; all were dark and quiet. It was as though a switch had been thrown and people had quietly packed up, locked their doors, turned off the lights and left.
It took no more than a few minutes to reach the market, which wasn’t actually on Waialo Road, but at the end of a parking lot past a rickety old Post Office, a Subway shop and a Ramen noodles restaurant. I was feeling greatly encouraged; as I walked past the shops toward the market, there wasn’t a single sign of vandalism or violence.
The Big Save was the first food store I’d seen on Kauai with intact windows, and my hopes rose even further. The store’s advertising, pages of newspaper displaying daily specials, were taped to the inside of the windows, blocking any view of the interior. I went quickly to the front doors and found them to be motorized and very heavy. Obviously, with the power out, they wouldn’t open. Still, it was only glass, and I needed to get in. I looked around, found a baseball-sized rock and heaved it. Expecting to see the glass shatter, I was startled to have the rock ricochet off, coming right back at me. I stared, picked it up and heaved it again with the same result. Then I walked over and gave it a good heave at one of the large windows with exactly the same result. Everything stubbornly refused to shatter.
I walked up to the doors and pressed my fingers to the glass – except it wasn’t glass at all, but some sort of polycarbonate, probably Lexan. This was material I was familiar with, having used it – or substance similar to it – for the porthole glass on Windswept. It was literally bulletproof. Maybe so, I thought as I began slipping the pack from my shoulders, but it sure as hell wasn’t bombproof.
There wasn’t much to think about other than where to run, and whether to blow the doors or the windows. I decided running
around the corner of the building would work fine – putting two brick walls between the blast and me. And I’d blow the doors – the windows were much closer to the groceries inside – if there were any.
One last look around; I took a deep breath and pulled one of the charges from the backpack and pushed it against the bottom of the door. Pulling off the cellophane cover, I struck the electric match and ran like the furies of hell were after me, along the wall and around the corner. As I ran, I counted; one thousand one, one thousand two… I was nearly half way toward the rear of the building when I heard the blast, then felt the vibration. I stopped, turned and ran back – smoke and dust rose in a huge cloud rapidly dissipating in the wind. Both doors had been blasted completely free of their frames and lay twisted on the floor of the store. Shards of Lexan impaled the ground like spikes. I rushed in, found it too gloomy inside to see, and ripped the newspapers off the windows, letting in more light. Then I turned and surveyed the store.
“Sweet Jesus,” I whispered out loud, “I’ve hit the fucking mother lode.”
The shelves ran front-to-back; from my vantage point I could see most of the contents of two rows. They looked normal, fully, gloriously stocked. Grabbing the first cart I saw, I raced to the first aisle and began, with unrestrained greed, to collect my bounty. Then caution drove a cold stake into my gut and I unslung the automatic and walked along the aisles, peering down each, making sure no one else was in the store. Having checked the aisles, I walked to the back and looked for an office or storeroom. There was a double set of swinging doors in back, unlocked, and I went in, cautiously, and checked. There was a small office, the interior of a single loading area, and a small butcher’s counter – all deserted, all seemingly untouched.
