Escape The Dark (Book 1): Dark Tides

by Fawkes, K. M.

  “That’s okay,” Adam said. “I can have something else.” But a knot of anxiety tightened in his stomach all the same. He hadn’t worried about running out of supplies since boarding this ship, not really. He had known the day would come, of course, but it had seemed far out in the future. They had embarked on their voyage with waffles and fresh fruit for breakfast every day. How could he worry about food when such delicious meals were being prepared for him by a personal chef?

  He wandered out to the front of the deck where the fruit garden was kept. Sara was there, poking at the plants with a finger. “Any berries today?” he asked.

  “A few,” she said. “The plants aren’t looking too healthy, though.”

  “No?” He came up beside her and immediately saw what she meant. The plants were wilted and waxy-looking, and they’d lost a lot of their color.

  “I don’t think they’re going to live much longer,” Sara said quietly.

  Adam abandoned the idea of berries for breakfast and went back inside. He found a box of cereal, poured out a small bowl, and took it out onto the deck to eat. The cereal tasted a bit stale, but it was certainly better than nothing.

  Artem sat down beside him. “We should come up with a plan to ration food,” he said. “We can’t keep eating the way we have been, or we’re going to run out.”

  Adam nodded. “We’re going to run out anyway.”

  “Well, I’d like to live as long as possible before that day comes, if it’s all the same to you,” Artem said. “You never know. Maybe something will change.”

  Adam nodded. Maybe something would.

  Artem spent the rest of that day in the kitchen taking inventory of their food supplies, drawing up charts that broke each item down by calories, and posting clipboards that required each person to report on what they ate every day. “No more than eight hundred calories,” he said.

  “That’s nothing,” Cody complained.

  “It’s incredibly generous,” Sara said. “Eight hundred calories a day in a survival situation? We’re all going to get pretty skinny, but we’ll survive.”

  For now, Adam thought.

  A storm blew in that night, and the waves that rocked the ship were so high that Artem ordered everyone to go inside and stay there. Adam wrapped himself up in the blankets from his bed and stared out the window, watching as lightning struck the water, watching as waves smacked the glass of his balcony doors. If the ship capsizes, he thought, it’ll all be over real quick. No one will be able to tell the difference between our bodies and the ones of the people who jumped from the bridge.

  He would never jump. He promised himself that, right then and there. No matter how bad things got, he would keep fighting until he had nothing left to give. He wanted to survive this.

  He was up all night, but by morning, the storm had abated and the water was calm. He came out onto the third-floor deck and looked over the railing. Sara was standing below him, gazing up at the sky, which was still full of clouds.

  “Do you think it’s over?” he asked her. “Or is it going to start up again?”

  “I hope it’s over,” she said. Her voice was hoarse and her eyes were bloodshot. Adam thought she’d probably been up all night, too.

  With the clouds covering the sun, it was too cold to go into the pool or even to sit out on the deck chairs for long. Nobody had packed anything particularly warm except for Artem, who had a windbreaker with flannel lining. It occurred to Adam to wonder what they would do when winter came. He had never thought they’d be on the boat that long, but now it was beginning to look as though that was exactly what would happen.

  If we live that long.

  The following day, the storm hadn’t started up again, but the sky hadn’t cleared either. Adam awoke to see Artem going around the ship and turning off the lights.

  “No cooking,” he said gruffly as Adam headed into the kitchen.

  “What? Why not?”

  “The solar panels aren’t getting any light,” Artem said. “We can’t recharge, and it takes a lot of power to start this thing up. Essentials only. No lights, no electric appliances. No running the heat in the goddamn hot tub.”

  “We’re rationing the electricity now too?”

  “It has to be this way,” Artem said. “I want the boat to run if we need to start her up.”

  Adam nodded, knowing that the captain was right. They could get by without lights. They certainly didn’t need hot water in the hot tub. Still, it was one more thing. One step further away from civilization. One step closer to its collapse.

  “At least we still have water,” Sara said. “At least the water distiller works. If we lost that, it’d be game over.”

  “What about the radio?” Adam asked. “Can we still listen to that? I want to know what’s happening on the mainland.”

  “There are batteries for the radio,” Artem said. He disappeared into the control center and came out with the handheld radio and an unopened package of batteries. Gripping the package between his teeth, he ripped it open, shook the batteries out, and fit them into the radio.

  Adam picked it up and turned the knob as Cody came wandering into the kitchen. He wore only his boxer shorts and an undershirt and looked as if he hadn’t slept in days. He strode right past them and into the pantry, and they all paused as they heard him clattering around looking for something to eat.

  Adam bumped up the radio’s volume a few notches and set it back down on the counter, leaning over so that he could hear it. Sara leaned over too.

  The news was being read by a woman they’d never heard on the radio before. That wasn’t altogether surprising. Adam had noticed that the broadcasters tended to turn over pretty quickly. No one had commented on that fact on the air. Were they dying, he wondered, or were they running away to be with their families? Probably some combination of both.

  The woman giving the news today sounded untrained, as if she’d never been on the air before. She probably hadn’t, Adam thought. This was probably her very first broadcast job, and he was willing to bet she’d been in the mailroom six months ago. He could only imagine how hard it must be to keep finding people to put on the air these days. Whoever was in charge, he was sure, would take anyone they could get.

  “The death toll continues to rise,” the woman said. “As of right now, we’re, um, not sure how many people have succumbed to the virus, because the vast majority of households have stopped reporting. If you, um, have a death to report, you can do so by contacting this station or calling City Hall—is City Hall still taking death reports, actually? Okay, we don’t know if you can report to City Hall, so if anyone has information about that and wants to call in, that would be helpful to know. Yeah.”

  She took a deep breath, and Adam sensed that she was trying to steady herself. “We can report that there are no functional MRI machines in the cities of San Francisco, San Diego, or Los Angeles. Farther afield, we’re not sure. There are some reports of a machine in Boise, Idaho that might still be working, but at this time we can’t confirm that. Once again, if anybody knows for sure and wants to call in, that would be helpful.

  “We’ll continue to broadcast from this channel for as long as we can. Anyone with any information is welcome to call in and share. At this time, we’ll, um, read a list of known dead individuals reported in since yesterday.”

  The woman began to read off a list of names with no more emotion than Adam would have given to reading off a grocery list. He supposed that made sense. If every broadcast ended with a list of the dead, she must be getting a little desensitized to it.

  The pantry door opened and Cody emerged with a can of beans. He pulled off the top, dumped the beans into a bowl, and headed toward the microwave.

  “No electricity,” Sara said.

  “What?” Cody stopped and looked over his shoulder at her. “What do you mean, no electricity?”

  “Artem says we shouldn’t use anything electrical,” Adam said. “We’re not getting any solar power right now
because the sky’s been so cloudy for the last few days, so we’ve got to try to make the energy we have last.”

  “Are you for real?” Cody asked.

  “He’s got a good point, man,” Adam said. “If we need to move, we want to be able to start the boat. We won’t be able to do that if we use all our power on things we don’t really need.”

  “You’re listening to the radio right now!” Cody put the bowl of beans down with such force that some of the beans slopped over the side and onto the counter. “How is that not wasting energy!”

  “We’re using batteries,” Sara said. “Artem had batteries.”

  “So you’re just going to do whatever Artem says from now on, is that it?”

  “We’re not doing it because Artem said it, Cody,” Adam said. “We’re doing it because it makes sense. Come on, you don’t want to be stranded out here with no power. We have no idea when the sky is going to clear.”

  “This is fucked,” Cody said. “This is so utterly fucked.” He grabbed his bowl and stormed out of the kitchen. They could hear his footsteps receding all the way upstairs to the third deck and into his room, where he slammed the door.

  Adam and Sara looked at each other. Neither of them seemed to know what to say. Eventually Adam reached out and switched off the radio. There was only so much bad news he could listen to at once. He had to take it in small, controlled doses, like medicine. Too much too fast and he’d poison himself.

  Maybe that was what had happened to Cody. Maybe that was why he’d reacted so dramatically to hearing the radio on just now. Maybe he just couldn’t take hearing the news anymore.

  It occurred to Adam that, in addition to rationing food and electricity, they needed to start rationing what they forced their minds to accept. One of the benefits of being away from the mainland was not having to confront the sheer horror of everything that was happening to humanity all the time. By spending the nights alone on his little balcony looking out at the glassy water and the stars, Adam thought, he was probably quite literally keeping himself sane.

  With a pulse of dread, he realized that Cody was starting to crack.

  Chapter 12

  The four of them spent the rest of the day avoiding each other. Cody had gone to his room, and Adam didn’t want to run into him, so he went down to the first deck. It was too cold to go for a swim, and with the heat in the hot tub off, he couldn’t get in there either. If only the sun would come out, he could have gotten in the water. Adam knew himself well enough to know that a quick dip would help his muscles relax, and when his muscles relaxed, the bulk of his stress and unease would melt away.

  He felt as though he was on the verge of something. As though things were about to change again. It was probably because of all the rationing they’d had to implement over the last couple of days. Before, it had been easy to lose himself in the business of going about his day. Now everything Adam did—everything he didn’t do—reminded him that their time was running out.

  Sara emerged on the deck as the sun was going down. “Where have you been all day?” he asked her.

  “In my bunk,” she said. “I needed time to think. Time to be alone.”

  He nodded. “I guess we all did.”

  She produced a deck of cards. “I found this in Ray’s locker,” she said. “Looks like he left it behind when he went ashore. Do you want to play something?”

  “Sure,” he said. “Might as well, right?”

  “We should ask the others, too.”

  Adam nodded. “I’ll go get Cody.”

  “No need,” Artem’s gruff voice spoke up from above them, and Adam and Sara looked up to see the captain and Cody standing on the second deck and looking down. “Game of cards, is it?”

  “Something to get our minds off of things, I thought,” Sara said.

  “Not a bad idea,” Artem agreed. “There’s a candle in the closet there. I’ll get it.”

  “I don’t see why we can’t just turn the lights on,” Cody said. “It’s night, for God’s sake.”

  “If the power gets too low, we’ll have to choose between the overhead lights and the running lights,” Artem snapped. “You don’t want to be out here in total darkness. That’s how ships get sunk.”

  “The power isn’t that low yet,” Cody protested. “Not anywhere near.”

  “And we want to keep it that way,” Artem said.

  “Look, it’s fine,” Adam said. “C’mon, Cody, let’s just play, all right? We’ll be able to see fine by the candle.”

  Still grumbling a bit under his breath, Cody took the seat beside Adam at the table. Adam felt frustrated. He understood his friend’s need to vent, but Cody had been acting as though he was the only one going through something here. We’re all hungry, Adam wanted to tell him. We’re all scared. But he couldn’t buckle. The longer they held it together, he knew, the longer they’d survive.

  The people who jumped off the bridge were the ones who couldn’t hold it together. That isn’t going to be me.

  Artem lit the candle and balanced it carefully on a little porcelain plate in the middle of the table. It cast enough light to see by, but the light flickered eerily. Adam thought back to his first night on this boat, his first night in the cabin Cody had given him. How surprised he’d been by the luxury here. Now there were four of them huddled around this tiny flame. The world seemed to shrink and keep shrinking.

  But it’s all still out there. What must it look like now? What do the streets of Paris look like? What’s going on in Australia? It was the one thing the radio never told them. He had a clear picture of what was going on in California, but the rest of the world was a mystery.

  Sara began to deal out the cards. “Does everyone know euchre?”

  “Yeah.” Adam picked up his hand. “I learned it on the set of my TV show, actually.”

  “You taught me how to play,” Cody said. “Remember that?”

  “Not really,” Adam admitted. He had so often been high in his years of friendship with Cody that a lot of it was a blur.

  Artem was seated across from Adam, which made the two of them partners in the game. Artem called spades for the first trump suit and led with the ace of clubs.

  “Too bad we can’t play for food,” Cody said, following suit with the king.

  “What, like you’ll bet your ration that you’ll win this trick or something?” Adam played low, since his partner already controlled the hand. “That’s a terrible idea.”

  “Why is that a bad idea? Be a good way to get some food.”

  “Or lose all your food.”

  “Food isn’t a game,” Artem said gruffly.

  “I was only joking,” Cody scowled.

  “It’s not a joke, either.”

  Sara played the nine of clubs and took the trick. “Can we please stop fighting?” she begged.

  “Sara’s right,” Adam said. “We need to relax. It’s just the four of us out here. We’ve got to be able to get along with each other.”

  “Tell him to get along,” Cody said.

  “I was telling him,” Adam said. “I’m telling you both. I’m reminding myself. Okay? We all need to remember. It doesn’t help any of us if we’re constantly blowing up at each other.” He reached out and rested a hand on Cody’s knee. “Come on, man. It’s been a hell of a couple of days. Let’s just relax and play some cards.”

  “Wish I had a beer,” Cody said mournfully.

  To Adam’s surprise, Artem chuckled at that. “You and me both, kid.”

  The smile that crept across Cody’s face was hesitant at first, but as it spread it grew genuine. It was such a relief to see his friend smiling again. Maybe things would be all right. Maybe the sun would come out again. Maybe they’d discover a new source of food. If Artem and Cody could get along, surely anything was possible.

  “Your lead,” Artem said to Cody.

  Cody advanced a card, and they played on in silence for a while. They were fairly evenly matched, which made the game more fun—no o
ne seemed to pull too far ahead. Finally, after about an hour of play, Artem and Adam scored the final point and won the game.

  Sara collected the cards and packed them back into their box. “We should do this regularly,” she said. “Don’t you think? It would help us keep our minds sharp.”

  Artem nodded. “Probably a good idea. There’s not much to challenge us out here on this boat, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t challenging days ahead.”

  “What do you mean?” Cody asked.

  Artem shrugged expansively. “Eventually we’re going to have to put her ashore.”

  Cody stared. “We’re not going ashore,” he said. “We agreed that we wouldn’t.”

  “We agreed that we wouldn’t while there was a better alternative,” Artem said. “Rationing’s not going to last us forever. Eventually we’re going to have to go in search of more food. I’m not about to die out here at sea.”

  “You’re not seriously talking about going back to the mainland?” Cody demanded.

  “What’s the problem?” Artem asked. “We’ll decide together when it’s time to go.”

  “The problem is that we just sent our friends back without us!” Cody said, getting to his feet so suddenly that he upset the table they’d been playing on.

  The pack of cards bounced on the deck, skidded to the side, and slipped beneath the railing. Sara, who had dived for it as it fell, came up rubbing her elbow.

  “What was the point in splitting up!” Cody half-yelled. “Why did we let them go back on their own if we were going to follow them a few weeks later?”

  “Cody,” Sara said, a pacifying tone in her voice, “Artem didn’t mean California, necessarily, he meant—”

  “How the hell would you know what he meant?” Cody said, rounding on her. “Have you two been making plans without me? Is that what you do all day while Adam and I nibble on our goddamn beans?”

  “Nobody’s been doing anything without you,” Sara said. “Don’t you think you’d notice, on a ship this size? Don’t you think you’d come across people whispering to each other if it was going on? Nothing’s a secret here.”