The Drowned: Deluge Book 1: (A Thrilling Post-Apocalyptic Survival Story)

by Kevin Partner

  He turned the lights off and went outside again. A cow bellowed from the shed to his right as his eyes took in the little kingdom he’d created here. He pulled a small device from its holster on his belt and activated it. The screen lit up with a map of the tripwires and sensors, as well as a picture-in-picture view from the main CCTV camera at the front gate. He swiped from one camera to the next and saw what he expected. Nothing.

  Then he steeled himself to switch to the cameras hidden on top of the hills surrounding his farm. Despite the readings coming in from the ocean buoys, he’d hoped his modeling had been wrong, but then he’d seen the dirty waves rush into the valleys, finally cutting off the little rocky ridge that he’d built his shelter on so it was now an island on a black, debris-filled sea. They’d miscalculated—him and the team he belonged to—but then the situation was unprecedented. They’d set out to solve the problem of climate change, but the medicine had proven to be worse than the disease.

  He was about to put the device back when it erupted into life with a burst of staccato buzzing. It was the front gate. The infrared movement sensor stationed a hundred yards farther along the road leading to the farm had been triggered. Could it be Joel? It had to be. No one else knew about this place.

  Ed ran across to the ATV parked up beside the main farmhouse and double-checked the handgun at his hip. He sped toward the gate, only slowing down as he neared it. The ATV was electric, so it was quiet, but he desperately wanted to see any intruder before they saw him. It could be a bear or perhaps a deer. But he prayed it was Joel.

  The fence was of heavy-duty chain-link with spikes at the top—the sort of thing you might normally find outside a prison. A gate wide enough, when rolled back, to admit a truck, sat beneath a lookout point built into the fence itself. Ed scrambled up the ladder and crept to the edge of the reinforced wall beneath a window looking out onto the lane.

  Two people. Neither of them Joel, unless he’d undergone extensive plastic surgery. Ed examined them in a pair of binoculars he’d put up here for the purpose. One of them was a late middle-aged man with a white goatee, wearing a checkered shirt and “old man’s” baggy jeans. The other, a younger, chubbier man—teenage, probably—had blood on his white T-shirt and an arm around his companion.

  “Hold it right there!” Ed called, leveling his weapon through the chain-link fence.

  The two men froze, then looked up to where he kneeled and raised their hands.

  “We need help!” the old man said. “He’s bleeding!”

  “Where did you come from?”

  The old man gestured back the way he’d come. “Got washed up by the wave. Found Max here. Followed the road. Look, fella, this ain’t The Walking Dead or nothin’. We ain’t infected. We ain’t armed. If it helps at all, I’m a minister.”

  It didn’t help. Ed was a man who believed in the universe he could measure, and nothing else. Mind, where had that gotten him? Alone on an island surrounded by an ocean he’d helped create.

  He’d considered what they would do about intruders, but he’d figured on having Joel to help him decide who to let in and who to…what? Shoot? Whatever; Joel was the people person. Ed’s nickname at school had been Data. At least, to his face. He’d known it was intended as an insult, but he’d always admired that Star Trek character. Data had always tried to do the right thing.

  What would he do in this situation?

  The safest thing would be to gun them down. He wasn’t going to do that. Ed Baxter might have been responsible, at least in part, for the deaths of millions—perhaps billions—but he’d never killed anyone face-to-face.

  Could he turn them away? If he did that, they might try to get in some other way, but there were enough booby traps and alarms in the forest to be pretty certain they wouldn’t manage it. But only pretty certain.

  On the other hand, he wouldn’t be able to put the genie back in the bottle once he’d let them in. Not easily, anyway. The weapons were all secured under combination lock, but it wasn’t hard to find blunt objects to attack someone with on a farm.

  “Come on, friend!”

  In general, Ed had learned that those that called him friend rarely were.

  “Are you gonna let him die?”

  As well as all the others. One more featherweight to add to the scales of justice.

  But it was enough. He was a fool, perhaps a coward, but he wasn’t a cold-blooded murderer.

  He climbed down, unlocked the gate, and pulled it open.

  The older man began moving unsteadily toward the opening, then stumbled under the weight of his companion. Sighing, Ed lowered his weapon and, realizing that he was now past the point of no return, helped the two of them through the gate.

  “Thank you,” the older man said as they lowered the now unconscious teenager onto the small trailer on the back of the ATV. “My name’s Hank, Hank Proctor.”

  “Ed Baxter,” Ed responded, taking his hand before going back to the gate and locking it shut again.

  Hank nodded along the track. “You got a house up there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Guess I’d better get walking.”

  “Sorry,” Ed said. “I’ll meet you up there. What’s his name?”

  “Max. Don’t know any more than that.”

  “How did he get injured?”

  Hank shrugged. “He was bleeding when I found him. Haven’t gotten any sense out of him yet. I just knew he needed my help.”

  Ed climbed onto the ATV and, after turning to make sure the young man was secure in the trailer—and still breathing—gently headed back along the lane to the farmhouse, looking over his shoulder every few seconds in case Max stirred.

  Ed left Max in the trailer, fetched some water, and removed the bloodstained T-shirt. By the time Hank caught up with them, Ed had cleaned the wound and was studying it closely.

  “You say you never met him before?”

  “No. Found him on the beach. Well, where the water met the mountain. More of a riverbank, really. Told me his name but didn’t say much else since. I reckon he wouldn’t have made it more than another quarter mile if we hadn’t found your place.”

  Ed looked up from where he was examining Max’s torso. “You see this,” he said, gesturing at the perfectly round wound. “This is a bullet wound.”

  “What?”

  Ed wasn’t a people person, but he could tell a genuine reaction when he saw one.

  “Good Lord above.” Hank was obviously thinking exactly the same as Ed. Was the injured young man merely an innocent victim of some hit-and-run attack? Or had they brought a violent criminal inside what should be a safe place?

  “Come on, let’s get him inside,” Ed said. He’d spent a year at medical school before switching tracks to microbiology, so he knew how to dress a wound. “I’ll treat him, then I’ll lock him in.”

  Hank nodded. “I’m sorry, Ed. You did the Christian thing by letting us in. I sure hope I haven’t betrayed your trust.”

  “Don’t worry. It’s done now. He’s too weak to be a danger at the moment. We’ll give him a chance to tell us his story, and then we’ll decide.”

  “Frontier law?” Hank asked, eyes wide.

  “Frontier law.”

  Chapter 4

  Drowned

  “¡Caray!” Tom whispered. Even Jodi had joined them as they stood, shading their eyes and staring out to sea.

  Dozens, perhaps hundreds of boats of all sizes bobbed in the deep ocean. The closest were still some way off, but Ellie could see they were low in the water and crammed with people. Arms waved in their direction, and the ocean breeze carried their desperate cries.

  “Looks like some sort of refugee flotilla,” Patrick said. “Are they heading for Florida, d’you think?”

  Ellie shook her head. “They can’t be, surely? Most of those boats are barely fit for inshore waters. They don’t stand a chance of crossing the straits. And, in any case, what are they trying to get away from? Has there been another revolution?�
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  “Why don’t you ask them?” Jodi said. “Maybe we can help.”

  Ellie spun on her. “Are you serious? If we approach them, we could be overwhelmed. I signed up to look after you, not an entire fleet of refugees.”

  Patrick cleared his throat and pointed at the nearest of the boats. “We can’t just sail away and pretend we didn’t see them.”

  “Can’t we? Who says? And who’s captain of this vessel, Mr. Reid?”

  “Hey, there’s no need to get your knickers in a twist,” he snapped, “but in case it isn’t absolutely bloody obvious, people are going to drown if we don’t do something!”

  Ellie jabbed a finger at him. “Now you listen. This isn’t one of your movies, so don’t go all action hero on me. This is about keeping us safe. If we get too close, they could board us. We don’t even know if they’re armed. Have you thought about that?”

  Reid gave a grunt of frustration, but subsided.

  “We can’t just sail away,” Tom said, drawing Ellie to one side.

  She sighed. “I know, but I’m not moving the boat into danger.”

  “Let me take the dinghy. I’ll go on my own. Talk to them, find out what goes on. Then we can decide.”

  “I decide, Tom.”

  “Sure.”

  She took a moment before nodding. “Okay. Go get it prepared.”

  He smiled. “Aye, Skip.” Then he turned to go.

  “And I’m coming with you.”

  She thought he was going to object, but he simply touched his forehead and headed off.

  But Patrick did protest. “You can’t go. If anything happens to you, how will we get back?”

  “What happened to your concern for those people, Patrick? Look, there’s plenty of fuel, so you could make it back to Florida without needing to use the sails. Or you could rescue one of them,” she said, waving her hands in the direction of the little boats. “There’s bound to be one who knows how to steer a boat like this. Of course, he might slit your throat first.”

  He opened his mouth to reply, but she’d already slid down the ladder toward where Tom was dragging the inflatable dinghy out of its storage locker.

  Ellie steered the dinghy toward the boat Tom had suggested. It was one of the least crowded and seemed in good condition, making it less likely they’d try to steal the inflatable at gunpoint. Ellie had a pistol in a holster behind her back, and Tom was also armed. She shielded her eyes against the spray as they headed toward their target, suddenly realizing how hypocritical she’d been to dismiss Patrick as just an actor when, right now, she felt as though she were in a movie herself. Cling on to that, Ellie, she told herself. Don’t imagine this is real.

  She lifted the outboard as they got within a couple of oar-lengths of the little boat. It was a battered trawler, sky blue paint flaking off the hull and rust stains along the gunwale.

  Tom called out, “¿Quiénes el capitán?”

  A small man wearing a navy blue baseball cap emerged from the cockpit. “¿Puedes ayudarnos?”

  “Let me speak to him, Skip,” Tom whispered. “He looks all beat up and it’ll be easier for me to find out the full story. Sound good?”

  She nodded and, without another word, Tom leaped over the side and swam to the other boat.

  Ellie sat, nervously watching him talking to the man as the other occupants of the little boat gathered around, some of them obviously pleading with Tom. As she watched, she became aware that nearby vessels were turning toward the dinghy.

  Finally, Tom pulled himself away and swam back. Despite the danger of the situation, she experienced a momentary thrill as he climbed out, his drenched T-shirt clinging to a well-defined chest.

  “I think we should go back to the boat,” he said.

  “What did he tell you?”

  Tom glanced up at the boat he’d just left and shook his head. “I tell you everything once we’re out of here. It’s not safe.”

  “Thank God,” Patrick said as he helped them back up onto the aft deck.

  Tom tied the dinghy and dried himself on a towel. “His name is Juan Lopez,” he said.

  Ellie, whose patience was paper-thin at the best of times, almost said out loud how irrelevant she thought that was. Get to the point.

  “He was working on his boat in the harbor when the sea…went up.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Reid asked. “A tsunami?”

  Tom shrugged. “I guess so, but it wasn’t like in the movies. No offense.”

  “None taken.”

  “He said it was as if God had poured more water into the ocean somewhere. Like in a bath when you turn the tap on. There’s a wave. But the main thing was that the sea just seemed to get higher. It just kept coming. So, he followed the water in and tried to rescue people. Havana’s gone. For all he knows, the whole island is gone.”

  Ellie’s mouth went dry as she stood with her mouth wide open. “Why would he think that? Surely people would have gotten to high ground?”

  Tom shook his head. “He said the sea kept rising and kept rising until everything was water. He saw people in the water, and helped as many as he could, but I reckon he was in shock. He’s lost his entire family, Ellie. Except for his son. His home is gone.”

  “But…but where is he going?”

  “He’s got some vague idea they’ll make it to Florida.”

  Ellie took off her sunglasses and wiped the back of her hand across her face. “They don’t stand a chance.”

  “I think he knows that.”

  “I’m going to break out the electronics,” she said, looking at Patrick, before heading for the safe in her cabin. “Tom, see if you can raise the Cuban Coast Guard.”

  “I can’t believe this is happening,” Patrick said, handing her the key and watching as she opened the safe. “If what he says is true, millions might have died. It makes Fukushima look like a minor ripple.”

  Ellie nodded. “Yeah, and you can bet it isn’t limited to Cuba. Any tsunami capable of doing what this Juan says is also going to hit the Florida coast.”

  “Jesus Ch—”

  “And most of Florida is only just above sea level.” She emptied the safe, handing Patrick his and Jodi’s electronics as he stared at her wide-eyed.

  She activated her cellphone. “Dammit. No signal.”

  “What did you expect? We’re out in the middle of the ocean.”

  Cursing, she ran past Patrick and up the ladder to the main cockpit where Tom was hunched over the radio. She didn’t speak Spanish, but she recognized the desperation in his voice.

  “Anything?”

  “No. I’ve tried all frequencies.”

  “Get on the satellite phone.”

  “Ellie!” It was Jodi, calling from somewhere below them. “They’re coming!”

  Ellie sprinted out of the cockpit and onto the fly deck. Jodi was gesturing at a dozen or so boats that were within fifty feet of Kujira.

  Thump.

  Then she saw it. The hull of a small yacht had collided with the starboard bow and someone was grasping at a rope, trying to tie the two boats together. “Tom! Follow me!”

  Ellie went through every curse word in her extensive vocabulary as she slid down the two sets of ladders and exploded out onto the bow just as a large man with what looked like a machete got to his feet. It was then that she realized she’d left her gun at the helm.

  “Jodi!” she called out. But she was too late. As another man followed, the first leaped at Jodi and grabbed her before she could get away.

  “You take us!” he yelled in a thick Spanish accent. “You take us to America or the girl, she gets it.”

  Again, Ellie felt as though she was an actor in a movie. An actor who hadn’t read the script.

  “Just let her go and we’ll talk,” Ellie said.

  The man’s long hair flicked back and forth. “No. We stay or I hurt her.”

  Beyond him, Ellie could see at least five people hauling themselves on board.

  “How
many of you are there?”

  “Doce. And you will take us all.”

  “Twelve? We haven’t got room.”

  “You will take us all, or I cut her throat. Now!”

  An unfamiliar voice called out, “Put the weapon down.”

  To her left, she saw a revolver held double handed emerge from behind a bulkhead pointing directly at the man holding Jodi hostage. The arms moved forward, and Patrick Reid emerged.

  “You have five seconds to comply.”

  The polite, somewhat hesitant Englishman had been replaced by a confident gun user with an American accent.

  “Five…four…”

  The knife at Jodi’s throat vibrated, and she squealed as she felt the cold metal against her flesh.

  “I kill her! I kill her!”

  “Put your weapon down. Three…”

  “I KILL HER!”

  “No!” Jodi squealed as Reid moved relentlessly forward, the revolver pointing between the eyes of the hostage taker.

  “Two…”

  The man shook, and Ellie could see the blade moving up and down as Jodi squirmed.

  “One…”

  “NO!!” He dropped the knife, and with a yell Jodi scrambled out of his grasp.

  In a calm but commanding voice, Reid said, “Get back on your boat and keep your distance.”

  “But… Mr.… Please… We have nowhere to go…”

  “Get back on your boat or I’ll send you straight to hell.”

  She thought for a moment that Patrick had crossed the line between acting and hamming it up, but the would-be pirate raised his hands and shooed the others back into the boat before following them out of sight and casting off the line.

  “Now,” Reid said, turning to Ellie, “I suggest we move the boat away from the other boats or we might find ourselves overwhelmed.”