“So…so we’re just stranded out here?” Cody asked.
“Well, we can’t get back to the shore using the engine,” Artem said. “Not that we exactly wanted to go back there anyway. It just means we’re going to have to rethink things, that’s all.”
“Rethink things?” Cody asked. “That makes it sound like there’s a plan. Has there ever been a plan?”
Adam tensed. His friend was ramping up to a heightened emotional state. If they didn’t monitor things, this could easily lead to another breakdown.
“Let’s just go back to bed and wait until morning,” Adam said. If he could just get Cody back in his room, Artem and Sara could start figuring out their next move.
But Cody didn’t get up from the table.
“It figures,” he said. “After all the work we put in trying to get away from the mainland, after all our fighting to survive, they set off the mother of all bombs that has a blast radius so large it hurts us all the way out here. Doesn’t that just figure?”
“Cody,” Adam tried.
Cody ignored him. He picked up his cocktail and took a long, deep drink.
Chapter 19
Adam awoke in his cabin with the sun coming through the curtains and a feeling like lead in his stomach.
It took him a few seconds to remember what had happened, to assign a reason to the guilt and despair welling up inside him.
And then the image of Cody’s body, sprawled on the deck downstairs, came back to him.
He had left his friend there. He hadn’t known what to do. He hadn’t been able to face the prospect of throwing the two bodies overboard, a task he knew that by the light of day he wouldn’t be able to avoid. He’d taken the open handle of vodka instead and retreated to his room. He’d drunk…
He sat up.
His head throbbed. It had been years since his last hangover. He leaned over and braced himself on his palms. For a moment he almost welcomed the pain and disorientation. It was a distraction from the bleak horror of his memories from the night before.
There was probably a painkiller in the first aid box, he thought. But taking a painkiller would mean leaving the safety of his cabin and going back down to the lower deck, where two bodies lay waiting for him to dispose of them.
Would they have started to decompose already?
Would they have the rotten, necrotic smell of the corpses on the oil tanker?
Thinking about the tanker made him remember vital, living Cody, who had been so desperate to go over to the other ship and look for food. He was brave, Adam thought. He did want to live. He lost it at the end there. The drinking and the drugs got the best of them. But the real Cody, the person he was at heart—he wanted to survive this.
And then there was Artem. Artem had been so determined not to let others drag him down. He had been firm about the fact that he wasn’t going to die because somebody else couldn’t adapt to what the world had become. But he never cut any of us loose, Adam thought. He had a million chances to do it. He could have tossed Cody overboard any time. He could have refused to bring us up after we visited the tanker. But he stuck with us. He cared.
He would have hated the way he’d died. It was without meaning. Without purpose. It was one death in a huge smoldering ruin of a world.
But I’ll remember him. Adam thought. I won’t let it be in vain. I’ll go on. He would want me to.
Artem, he thought, would have been telling him even now, in his gruff voice, to adapt. To make the best of the situation. Sara needed him to step up. He owed it to himself to step up.
He could handle this. He knew he could.
Summoning his courage and strength, he got to his feet. The ship seemed to be swaying beneath him more than it ordinarily did, but that was just the hangover, he knew. He could walk it off. He would get some painkillers, a glass of water, and things would steady out for him.
First, though, he would get Sara.
Her cabin was on the second deck. Adam descended the stairs with his eyes glued to his feet, not yet ready to look over and see the remnants of last night’s brawl. He could face it when he had Sara by his side, he thought. The need to be brave for her sake would be the motivation he needed. But until she was with him, he would allow himself this weakness. He would not look.
He knocked on her door.
No answer.
“Sara?” he called. “Come out, okay? Or I could come in, maybe?”
Nothing.
“Listen, I know last night was…was fucked up,” he said. “I know this whole situation is fucked up. I’m scared too. But we need to do something, you know? We need to work together and figure out our next steps. I need you. Come out, okay?”
Again, no response. He had been sure that would do it.
Maybe she had fallen into a depression, he thought. That seemed possible. After all, he’d broken a six-year sobriety streak after last night. Maybe she was in such a dark place right now that she wasn’t capable of answering him.
“Okay,” he said. “I’m coming in.”
He rattled the doorknob, fully expecting it to be locked, but to his surprise, the door opened.
The room was empty.
He frowned. Where was she?
He stepped back out of her cabin and over to the kitchen. It didn’t seem likely that she’d gotten up and made breakfast, under the circumstances, but maybe adherence to her old routines would have comforted her?
But no. The kitchen was empty too.
Could she have gone down to the lower deck to begin cleaning up from last night? Summoning all the courage he possessed, Adam walked over to the balcony and peered down.
The scene was even worse, somehow, in the light of day. Cody sprawled unnaturally in the exact same position in which Adam had left him last night. Artem lay in a pool of his own blood, which Adam could see clearly now that the sun was up. The blood was starting to congeal, and Artem’s hair had become matted.
And Sara was nowhere in sight.
Adam made his way slowly down to the first deck.
“Sara?” he called out.
No answer.
He searched inside, by the bar. He checked the first-deck bathrooms. He went back up to deck two to check the control center, but she wasn’t there, either. He went up to the top of the ship and tried all the cabins up there.
No Sara.
She wasn’t on the boat.
Had she left him? Had she taken the tender and struck out on her own?
She wouldn’t have done that, would she?
Before last night, he would have said no. But now he couldn’t be sure. What had happened had rattled her badly, he knew. Two people had died, two people they knew well. In a way, the four of them had become like a little family out here at sea.
And it wasn’t just the fact of the deaths either. Adam and Sara had been directly responsible for what had happened to Cody. They had felt his life leaving him, although they hadn’t realized it at the time. Adam knew that those few minutes on deck, holding his friend down as his struggles grew weaker, would haunt him for the rest of his life.
He made his way down to the launch, where the tender was usually tied, and looked over the edge of the ship.
The little boat was still there.
Sarah hadn’t taken it.
What the hell?
But he knew. His body felt it before his mind fully processed it, and he felt his heart beginning to sink. It wasn’t until his knees struck wood that he realized he was actually sinking, that his legs had given way beneath him.
Too much. It’s too much.
If Sara wasn’t on the yacht and she hadn’t taken the tender, there was only one other place she could be.
Adam couldn’t get to his feet. He was too overwhelmed, too shell-shocked. But he managed to crawl to the side of the boat. He clung to the rail and peered down at the water below, as if her face might rise to the surface and confirm what he already knew.
She was gone.
She had jumped.
There was no other conclusion he could draw.
I shouldn’t have left her alone, he thought. She had wanted to be alone, she’d said as much, but that was no excuse. He shouldn’t have given in. He should have realized how fragile she would be after what had happened. How fragile they both were. They should have taken care of each other last night.
Instead, I went off and got drunk. And now look what’s happened.
Adam shook his head fiercely. He wouldn’t fall victim to those thoughts. This wasn’t his fault. He would never have left her alone if he’d had any idea what she was thinking. And the fact was that Sara had never given any indication, before last night, that suicide was something she would consider. She was like Artem. She was a survivor. She had been baking cookies, for Christ’s sake! Cookies at the end of the world.
And now she was dead.
No, there was no way he could have seen it coming.
He got his feet back under him, awareness of the fact that he was sitting on a deck with two dead people seeping back in. He needed to get some distance, to clear his head. And speaking of his head…
He made his way up the stairs to the second deck and found Artem’s first aid kit. Sure enough, there was a bottle of painkillers. Adam shook out two and swallowed them dry, closing his eyes as he did so. These couldn’t take effect soon enough.
Time seemed to slip through his fingers as he sat there with his face in his hands, delaying the inevitable. He was the only one left. Just yesterday they’d been together, all four of them, sitting down to a meal of cookies. And he’d thought he had problems then!
He almost had to laugh at himself, but he was too miserable to summon any laughter. His biggest problem yesterday had been a little moral hand-wringing about the prospect of drugging Cody. He would have drugged his friends—any one of them—without batting an eye today, if it meant he could have them all back.
We should have put the tranquilizer in something else, he thought idly. But what tasted stronger than vodka? If Cody had tasted it in the cocktail, Adam thought, he probably would have detected it in anything.
“God,” he whispered. “What do I do now?”
The deaths of everyone he knew were horrific enough. But there was also the question of what this meant for Adam’s prospects. This boat was dead. There was food and water here, so he could eat and drink for the time being, but he couldn’t go anywhere.
There was always the option to take the tender back to the mainland. Adam had never driven the thing before, but he’d seen Cody do it. He could figure it out, he thought. It had looked pretty straightforward. He didn’t know what he’d be going back to, but it had to be better than here. This was just a floating coffin now.
And the mainland’s just a crematorium.
Okay, no. It didn’t have to be better back on land. It could easily be a lot worse. He might get hit by a ship in the night out here, but he stood a strong chance of coming in contact with the virus if he went back. And if the virus didn’t get him…well, someone had definitely used some kind of weapon last night. Maybe they were planning to use it again.
“So that’s what it comes down to?” he asked himself quietly. “Die here or die on the mainland? That’s what’s left?”
Maybe that’s all there ever was. Maybe this yacht escape never stood a chance. What were we going to do, really, in the long run? We were kidding ourselves.
A single tear tracked its way down his cheek.
What if no one was left in the world? What if he was it? The last of the survivors? Was there even any point in trying to go on?
Maybe he should call it quits right here and now. Maybe he should climb the stairs to the third deck and take Sara’s way out. The way Cody had tried to take. The way he had seen so many take from the edge of the Golden Gate. Bodies in the ocean. What was one more?
Maybe he should go back downstairs and get the painkillers—or better yet, the tranquilizers—and blast off one last time. One last high. Go out with a bang, the way Duane and Max and Krista seemed to have been bent on doing during their time on the boat.
Or he could take the remains of the vodka up to his room and drink, spend his last hours pouring the stuff down his throat until his system couldn’t take anymore and he blacked out and never came back around.
Maybe…
He heard Artem’s voice in his head, as clearly as if the captain had been standing beside him. “The people who are going to survive in this new world will be the ones who can adapt. The ones who can learn how to do more than just keep their bodies going. The ones who can figure out a way to be happy some of the time.”
Did he have anything left to live for?
You have to find something. That’s what Artem would have said. If you’re going to survive, you need to find a reason to go on. It’s not going to be handed to you, the way it was before the virus. The world isn’t going to just give you things anymore. If you’re going to be happy, you need to grab that happiness.
Adam had always thought of himself as the kind of person who could do that. Now he didn’t know anymore.
If he was going to survive from here on out, it would take a lot more work and a lot more strength of character than he’d had to show so far.
Maybe it would take more than he had.
There was one thing he could do. Slowly, he made his way back down the stairs to the first deck where the two bodies lay. They were hard to move, and Adam was hard-pressed not to think about what he was doing as he dragged them to the railing. He levered first Artem, then Cody up over the side, tipped them carefully, and let them fall. The two splashes seemed anticlimactic. It wasn’t until he turned around that he felt the full weight of his aloneness on this boat.
Dazed, he went to the kitchen and got a rag and some dish soap. He spent the next several hours scrubbing the deck, trying to remove the stains of Artem’s blood. By the time the sun was high overhead, though, the stain still hadn’t lifted or even faded very much.
Exhausted and defeated, Adam gave up. He threw the rag over the side of the boat and into the ocean, crawled to one of the deck lounge chairs, and fell into a fitful sleep.
Chapter 20
He awoke to the rain on his face.
Sometime while Adam had been asleep, a storm had blown in, and now it was absolutely dumping down on him. He was soaked through.
He wondered if the storm had come out of nowhere, the way it seemed to have, or if it had begun with sprinkles of rain that had failed to wake him. Both scenarios seemed equally possible. He was so weighted down by everything that had happened to him that it was completely plausible to think of sleeping through the rain. Sleeping in the rain.
But he was awake now, and he got to his feet, wondering what he should do. Artem would have been in the control center right now, he knew, but there was no point in that. The control center was dead. If you needed to do anything to a yacht during a storm, Adam wasn’t going to be able to do it.
He might as well go back to his room and wait this out.
Suddenly, the floor seemed to drop out from under him, and Adam went sprawling to the deck. A moment later, the floor caught him again, and he huddled there, shaking and feeling like nothing so much as a drowned rat, noticing the pitch and toss of the ship.
Adam had grown so used to being at sea that he hadn’t actually felt the movement of the ocean in weeks. But now, provoked by the storm, the sea was talking. The sea was raging. And a spike of fear went through him as he realized he was going to have to contend with this angry sea completely alone, without the benefit of Artem’s knowledge or experience, Sara’s calm presence, or even the familiar face of his best friend.
He scrambled to his feet and ran to the railing, thinking only of seeing what he was dealing with. But this turned out to be a mistake. The ship’s movement was much more pronounced at the side. It pitched up so hard that Adam had trouble keeping his feet under him and grabbed the rail to help him balance. The ocean seemed to melt away beneath
him as the yacht was lifted by a wave, and Adam moaned in terror.
The boat crashed down again. The next wave caught him in the face with such pressure that it sent him skidding backward across the deck, choking and gasping for breath.
Would it be better or worse to be inside while this was going on? He had no way of knowing. Going up to the third deck definitely didn’t seem like the right move, though. He wanted to stay as low to the ground as possible.
What he wouldn’t have given right now to have Artem here! Artem would have known what needed to be done. More than that, Artem would have been commanding. He wouldn’t have been anxious and fluttery, the way Adam was feeling right now. He would have barked out orders, and Adam would have been able to focus on getting those orders done.
Stop thinking about it. Get down to business and solve it yourself. It’s the only option you have left if you want to stay alive.
And he did want to stay alive. Even in the midst of the panic and terror, he felt a sense of relief at the knowledge. He wanted very much to stay alive. Now the weather and the ocean and the boat were doing all they could to take that choice out of his hands, but Adam felt a sudden determination to fight back. The virus hadn’t taken him down. He’d be damned if some storm was going to do it!
The rope, he thought. I need to find the rope.
They had never managed to bind Cody. The rope they’d been planning to use for that task must still be around here somewhere. It wasn’t as though anyone had had the time—or the inclination—to clean up odds and ends after that dreadful night. The rope must have been dropped on the deck at some point during the fight. Where was it now?
Maybe it’s already been washed overboard. Maybe it’s gone.
No. It couldn’t be gone. He’d already pinned his hopes on it. He needed it. It had to be here, it just had to. He looked around, feeling terrified and desperate—
There.
It had fallen into the hot tub at some point. Now the waves were sending the water splashing up out of the tub, so high that the thing was almost empty, but the rope lay floating in the little amount of water that remained at the bottom. Adam dropped to his hands and knees and made his way across the deck of the ship, reached down into the pool, and pulled the rope out.
Escape The Dark (Book 1): Dark Tides Page 15
