Chapter 3; Scavengers
The ship is about a fifty yards off, bobbing silently in the crystal waters. Her name ‘Dreamer’ is painted in a beautiful metallic purple that catches the sun and makes the colors dance. Dan thinks he can make out some figures on the deck, still and unmoving for the past five minutes he’s been checking the ship out.
“How’s it look?”
Dan pulls the binoculars from his eyes and hands them over to Jose. “Nobody moving on deck. Probably dead.”
Taking the binoculars, Jose presses them to his face and takes a look at the scene for himself. Half a minute later, he’s nodding as he pulls back and puts them on the table. “Looks like. Those bodies on the deck?” He sounds nervous.
“Don’t worry about it. Just get us over there. We’re not going to last much longer if we don’t find water soon.” Dan doesn’t wait for Jose’s nod before making his way down to the deck where Sally waits, sitting in the shade, a nervous wreck. They’d come across another ship just the day before and it hadn’t been a pretty sight, the entire crew massacred, the ship ransacked.
The waters around
the islands are quickly becoming increasingly dangerous as those in smaller
ships, having never planned to be at sea for longer than a few hours, much less
days, started to run out of water and basic supplies. It isn’t just occasional
native
Dan stops in front of Sally, he puts a hand on her shoulder and she looks up. Her eyes are bloodshot, part from the sun, part from terrified anxiety regarding the ship they’re now slowly approaching. There’s a question somewhere in her eyes, but all Dan manages to come up with is, “We have to have water. Stay here. Jose and I will take care of it,” which doesn’t seem to help her. If anything, it makes the shadow of anguish in her features give way to a flash of irritated frustration.
“Those are people out there on those ships.” She says it with a hard note of bitterness cutting at him through her words. “Have you no shame?”
Dan understands the inclination to step light around the dead, both figuratively and literally, and he understands where she’s coming from, with her respect for tradition and death, but the world’s ended. There’s nothing left, nowhere to go, nobody to help them – definitely not that burning Coast Guard vessel they’d spotted four days ago. “It’s not about shame, Sally. It’s about survival.” He stands up, withdrawing his hand from her shoulder because, honestly, he doesn’t think it’s helping and all it’s doing it keeping him close enough for her to hit him. “It’s just us, and we’ve gotta make it work.”
“Dr. Cove! You ready to get us tied off?” Jose’s voice shouts through the open door of the cabin above, prompting Dan into movement.
After a moment’s hesitation, Dan leaves Sally to jump around to the side of the Singer and scan the deck of the Dreamer. There are half a dozen bodies easily visible on deck now, and even through the sickening graying red of their skin from a combination of death and the sun, he can see the puffiness, the sores, and the welts. They’ve run across enough ships in the past weeks to recognize the signs of infection. Taking a slow breath, he starts to unravel a few feet of rope as Jose lightens up on the throttle and carefully swings them around to bump gently into the side of the other ship. With the ease of practice, Dan has the two ships tied together in seconds.
By the time he looks up, Jose is down from the cabin and making his way over. Together they survey the ship and Jose lets out a low whistle. “Well, that doesn’t look good.”
Dan holds back a wince. “No kidding. If we didn’t need the water so badly, I’d say it wasn’t worth it.”
“So we’re still going to do this?” Jose turns his attention from the other ship to Dan, who nods.
“Just like last time.” They turn and walk to the back of Singer’s deck to gather what they’ll need. The last time they did this they went in wetsuits, using the ocean as well as a few disinfectant powders to wash themselves before coming back on board. It had been too devastating, and spread too quickly for anybody to figure out what it was exactly, and without knowing anything about what they’re dealing with, the risk is huge.
Sally doesn’t move the entire time they prepare. She sits in the shade, knees pulled up to her chest, and watches them with her red eyes until Dan tosses a pair of sunglasses her way. They hit the wall next to her head and then the ground with a clatter, making her jump and turning her hollow stare into a momentary glare. “Put them on before your eyes get anymore sunburned.” She may be next to useless at the moment, and very well might remain that way, but the last thing they need is to have her half blind.
Pulling the zipper up the back of his wetsuit, Dan eyes Jose who’s only a few beats behind him. He picks up an empty plastic water container, shoulders a round of rope, and checks his diving belt.
Dan imagines that walking onto the Dreamer is what it would feel like to walk into a Western ghost town, or finding out you’ve managed to get yourself locked in a cemetery. It’s too still, too quiet, unnaturally so. He’d thought that having done it before it would get easier, and he’s not sure if he’s relieved or guilty to find that it has. In the past few weeks he’s seen enough dead bodies to compete with the number of dead whales and porpoises he’s seen in the past two decades, which is a lot.
With a deep breath, Dan focuses on his goal and steps over the corpses. The one thing he’s learned is to keep from looking at their faces. He can see their bodies, the red sores and blisters on bare arms and legs, but their faces, with their dead eyes and gaping mouths, will brand themselves into his memories, making their last impression on the world by never allowing him to forget them laying their in silent agony.
Jose checks the deck for any hatches similar to what the Singer has, as Dan makes his way bellow deck into the bowels of the ship to check their stocks and the main water supply.
The belly of the
Dreamer is dark, silent except for the lapping of the calm
An arm.
A woman collapsed out of a chair, spilled across the floor, and Dan makes the mistake of passing the beam of his flashlight over her swollen, blistered face. Her dark brown hair is a mess of tangled knots, features pinched in pain, gray eyes open, staring unblinkingly across the room. The light is only on her for a second, but it’s a second too long, and he has to stop. He forces himself to take a series of slow breaths as he counts to five – they don’t have enough time for him to count all the way to ten – and then gives himself a quick shake and starts forward again, trying to focus on the pain in his side and forget the faces of the dead that have already begun to haunt him.
The jackpot he stumbles on in the galley’s supply closet is well worth wading the dead to get to. Fleeing from a dying world, the passengers of the Dreamer had grabbed everything they could, and hadn’t skimped out on emergency water. Well stocked and still organized, it doesn’t take long for Dan to realize they’d planned in advance. They had readied their boat and waited until the last possible moment hoping that things would get better, that it would all pass by like SARS and the Swine Flu. It hadn’t, and they’d waited too long.
Something clatters behind him, and Dan turns, flashing his light over the kitchen. “Jose?” The beam of light lands on an empty can of beans rolling across the floor, and in an instant he’s gone from very pleased to extremely creeped out. Stepping out of the supply closet, he sweeps his too-narrow beam of light over the kitchen again, hairs on the back of his neck prickling.
There’s a flash of movement from the darkness off to the side, but Dan doesn’t even get the chance to get his light on it before he’s met with the hollow cheeked, wide eyed, crazed face of a boy who comes crashing into him, knocking them both to the ground with a heavy thud that knocks the wind out of Dan’s chest and makes his newly bruised side pang. He looses his grip on the flashlight and it goes skittering across the floor, spinning wildly, allowing him only sporadic glances at the horrific ghost of a person on top of him. Murderous shrieks fill the kitchen, deafening Dan as fists pummel down on him. Too stunned to react, it’s all he can do to get his arms up to protect his face.
A powerful pair of human jaws clamp down on his forearm, sinking through the wetsuit and straight into his skin. Dan cries out, partly in pain and partly in surprise as warm blood fills his wetsuit and rushes down his arm. He wrenches his arm away from his attacker whose jaw clamps tighter, fists still beating at Dan who brings his other hand up, bashing his fist against the boy’s head, knocking him away and into the far wall. There’s a heavy crack of skull against wall and the boy howls as Dan scrambles backward, arm aflame with pain, heart pounding in his chest.
He doesn’t get more than a few seconds reprieve before the crazed boy launches himself at Dan once again. In the dim light of the askew flashlight, Dan can see the wash of dark blood dripping down the boy’s lower face, his teeth stained black with it, eyes no longer human as they take Dan in like prey instead of a fellow human being. The boy descends on him, and Dan doesn’t even think. His hand finds the diving knife at his belt with instinctive practice, taking only half a heartbeat to unlatch it from it’s sheath, and as the boy comes down on him, cold hands clamping down on Dan’s throat with an almost inhuman strength, squeezing the life out of him, choking off air, threatening to break his larynx, Dan’s hand thrusts his arm up, sinking the five inch blade into the soft stomach above him.
The crazed creature over him lets out another howling yowl, and yet his hands only tighten around Dan’s throat. Inhuman eyes shimmer with barely felt pain and a horrible rage that makes Dan’s heart go cold. Letting out a choked sob of a gasp, Dan pulls the knife out and stabs the boy again. The hands around his throat finally weaken, and he gasps for breath, struggling viciously, sending his elbow into the boy’s temple, knocking the boy back. Dan clambers back, fingers still clenched around the bloody hilt of his knife. He sits there, shaking, horrified, as the boy gasps and claws at the floor.
Slowly, Dan pushes himself to his feet, feeling like every nerve in his body is on fire, his heart hammering in his throat, and it almost stops completely when the boy, grabbing at his bleeding belly, turns on him again, snarling like a wild dog. It’s inhuman, the way he stumbles to his feet, gnashing his teeth, and makes another run at Dan.
Somewhere, from the depths of his mind, an old college Hapkido course comes flooding back, and Dan steps to the side, grabs one of the boy’s arms, bends it back over his shoulder and smashes him, face first, into the ground. Without even thinking, he brings the knife down and the boy lets out a final scream.
When Jose comes staggering down the ladder from the deck and bursting into the kitchen, the boy is on the ground, face down where Dan landed him, in a pool of his own blood. Dan’s sitting in a previously knocked over kitchen chair, staring at the wall, shaking, making a hard effort not to look at the boy on the ground.
“Dan?” Jose’s voice is a thin, horrified whisper, and it cracks through the room like lightning.
Dan turns his attention to the man who’s stopped in his tracks, taking in the scene before him. “He…” It takes a second, and he has to fight the instinct to look back at what he’s done. He got a good enough look when he was getting up, the boy’s face illuminated in the thin bar of light from the fallen flashlight, to reveal the thin, taunt face of a starving kid who couldn’t have been much older than sixteen. He takes a slow breath, struggling to school his features, but he can’t seem to keep his brows from knitting and his lips from shaking, no matter how tightly he presses them together. “He attacked me,” he gives, finally meeting Jose’s eyes.
The silence in the room is so heavy, so thick, Dan thinks he might collapse under the weight of it, and then Jose nods. “Alright.” He walks forward, and in a heartbeat he’s in front of Dan, letting his hand fall gently over Dan’s fingers that are still gripping the bloody knife like a lifeline. “It’s alright, Dan. You can let go.”
With a shaky breath, Dan nods, but doesn’t let go of the knife. He slides it back into his diving belt, startling himself with the deafening click of the automatic lock of the plastic sheath. Attention on Jose, he takes another shot at speaking. His voice quavers for the first few words, and steadies quickly. “There’s- Uh… there’s a lot in the supply closet. Probably thirty gallons, maybe more. Come on, we should get to it already. Don’t want pirates sneaking up on us while we’re down here.” He starts to get up, but is stopped by Jose’s hand on his shoulder, holding him down in the chair.
“Dan, hold on a second. I don’t think…” They meet each other’s eyes for a long second, and Jose must read something in his face because he takes another deep breath and nods, releasing Dan’s shoulder. “Alright. Sure. Let’s load it up.”
Dan pushes himself to his feet, wincing and letting out a hiss of pain as his bruised chest protests angrily. His arm is a throbbing mess and mostly numb, but they need to get as much water as they can and get away from this ship before anyone spots them. He and Jose have talked about it multiple times, and they’ve been coming to the same sinking conclusion. It’s doubtful they’d get off scott-free from a second pirate raid. Especially not at a time like this.
Jose pauses, hovering over him. “You alright?”
“I’m fine.” Dan waves the other man away from him. “Get out of the way. I need room to actually stand up you know.” Without looking back at the boy, Dan walks over to his fallen flashlight and rescues it, clicking it off and shoving it into his belt. He takes a breath and heads into the supply closet with Jose to salvage what they can.
There are twenty-eight gallons of fresh, unopened water canisters, as well as a bag full of canned foods that they don’t particularly need, but go ahead and take, and ten gallons of fuel that they siphon out of the tank. Dan manages to pull his weight throughout the salvage, but when he finally feels the familiar rock of the Singer under his feet, his knees threaten to go soft on him. He steels himself to detach the Singer from the Dreamer, and follows in Jose’s wake to strip out of his wetsuit.
He wiggles his way out of the top half of the suit without thinking until Sally lets out a scream and he looks down to find watery blood pooling around him, released from the suit and, with a quick check, his still bleeding arm. “Oh my God. Are you alright?” Sally rushes forward, forgetting her lingering anger over Dan and Jose’s precariously gray morality and quickness to steal from the dead.
He lets her grab his arm, twisting it so she can inspect the deep bite into the flesh. Red, irritated, torn and bleeding. She looks up at him and he shrugs. “It’s not a big deal.”
“You need stitches.”
“Who needs what now?” Jose asks as he comes up from putting the first few canisters in their own galley’s supply closet. When he comes round to see what they’re looking at and exactly why Sally’s grabbing Dan, he lets out a low whistle. “You didn’t tell me he bit you.”
Sally’s narrow eyes flicker between the two of them, her fingers tightening around Dan’s arm almost to the point he’s about to tell her to kindly let the fuck go of him. Dan shoots Jose a dark glare of his own that clearly says, “Please shut the hell up,” and pulls at his arm, still in Sally’s tight grip. “You know, I think stitches are a great idea. We have some anti-bacterial stuff anywhere?”
“Did an infected person bite you?” Sally all but jumps off of him, her hands instantly releasing his arm as she takes half a step back, bringing her hands up and looking sick when she sees her palms are stained watery pink. “Oh my God. What were you thinking?”
He’s not quite sure what she’s implying by that, maybe his getting on the ship with them, possibility contaminated, not that he can hold it against her. “He wasn’t infected by anything. Other than being crazy, he was fine.” Arm throbbing painfully and suddenly realizing how much he’s bleeding, Dan clamps his hand over the wound, feeling the squish of warm blood through the tight cracks of his fingers.
“You don’t know that,” Sally throws back, taking another look at her hands and moving off to the back of the ship, stepping down onto the diving platform so she can kneel down and wash them. “You don’t know anything. None of us know anything.”
With a heavy sigh Dan turns his attention on Jose, who’s not only found one of their first aide kits, but broken it out and is already holding an opened bottle of hydrogen peroxide. Dan doesn’t trust the ghost of a sadistic smile that pulls at the edges of the other man’s lips. “You’re really looking forward to pouring that on me, aren’t you?”
Jose chuckles. “Dr. Cove, you may be a great scientist and a relatively funny guy. But you are still some kind of bat shit crazy.”
“You think I’m trouble,” Dan deadpans, taking a breath before he lets go of his arm and holds it out.
“In no small portion.” Jose agrees, and turns the bottle.
Peroxide splashes over Dan’s arm, washing away blood and germs in a wash of soothingly cool liquid. A second later the bitter sting stabs through his arm, only getting worse when Jose tips the bottle back up, cutting off the flow and leaving Dan’s arm to fizz and bubble and bleed. “Holy Jesus freaking Christ on a stick.” Balling his hands into white knuckled fists, Dan grits his teeth and fights the urge to shake his arm. “Holy Mother Mary that hurts.”
“You’re the one who wanted to disinfect it,” Jose retorts, hiding the fact that he’s moved forward again and is once again pouring peroxide over the wound.
Dan pulls his arm from under the wash, face pinching in pain. “Holy Christ!” Jose holds out a hand towel and Dan snatches it up, pressing it against his arm tightly, scowling at the grinning man. “How about you put that down and focus on getting us out of here before something really bad happens?”
From off to the side, Stacy laughs. “Something really bad, oh, that’s a good one, coming from you.”
He shoots her a grim glare that puts a stop to the bitter laughter. “Are you going to stitch me up or what?” She looks like she’s dangerously close to just saying no, and Dan follows up with, “That was rhetorical.”
Before she decided to become a marine biologist, and before she’d decided to ditch that to become a marine behaviorist, Sally originally wanted to be a vet and spent five consecutive summers from high school to college working as a volunteer at veterinary clinics and humane societies. Despite being a volunteer, she’d actually done quite a bit of hands on work, including learning how to stitch up medium to large cuts. Dan learned this three months ago when he’d first met Sally on Dr. Scheppero’s ship, after the good Dr., not as good as himself that is, had cut himself on a reef and apparently got stitched up, good as new, relatively, by said grad student.
Now, Dan’s never had Sally stitch him up before, but he has most definitely gotten his fair share of stitches, and he can say for a known fact, that Sally is not being nearly as gentle as she could, or probably should, be. After the third hard pull of string that makes him wince and grind his teeth together, Dan grabs her wrist, gently stopping her. “Whoa there.” When she looks up, it’s obvious she’s still pissed and upset and a world of other emotions that Dan can only register because of a few years of bad marriage and a year of really bad marriage, but can only just barely make himself actually care about. “Okay, you may be pissed that we grave robbed again, and you may be upset that you don’t know what me getting part of my arm almost ripped off me might mean for you and Jose, but you’ve got to calm down. Jose fell onto a corpse the first time we did this and didlly nothing happened. So if you could just take a breath and not make me bleed with every stitch, I’d really appreciate it.”
They sit there, staring each other down for long heartbeats, before Sally closes her eyes and takes a long breath. “Fine,” she says when she opens her eyes finally and goes back to work with a steadier, slower, and somewhat more gentle hand. She’s halfway done when she finally appears to steel herself the courage and asks, “What happened to the boy? Did you just… leave him there?”
Dan has to take a moment to think, to try to decide the lesser of the two evils, if telling a lie and saying they’d left a crazed boy alone back on that ship would be any less horrifying than the truth. He takes a surprisingly steady breath, “No,” and looks up to catch her questioning eyes, “I killed him.”
They stare at each other for a few more moments, Sally’s features numbly frozen, Dan unable to tell what she’s thinking, and then she turns back to his arm and continues to work.
The silence that remains is tense and unfriendly, even to Dan, making him so uncomfortable he’s compelled to break. “You know I’ll do whatever I have to for us to survive, right?” She doesn’t answer, and he continues. “I’m not going to let anything happen to us. We’re going to live through this.”
At that she stops again, and when he looks up Sally’s staring at him. He’s not sure what her face is telling him, but it doesn’t matter because she puts it to words soon enough. “Have you killed anyone before, Dr. Cove?”
The question throws him off balance, and it takes him a moment to pull himself together enough to shake his head. “No. I haven’t.”
“Then how are you so calm about it? How can you just not care about what you just did?” The tone in her voice is half true question, half sharp interrogation. “How can you treat it like it’s absolutely nothing? How come you seem so calm about all of this? The world’s ended, everybody we know and love is dead, we’re never going to go home, we’re never going to see our parents or friends or another donut shop, and you just don’t care.”
Dan frowns. “Well, that’s not fair. And completely untrue.”
“Well, that’s how it feels. And I’m not sure if I should be creeped out by it, or if I should just think you’re in so much shock you’re in denial. Let me tell you, it’s a big lose-lose choice.” She takes a moment to look up toward the cabin where Jose is steering the ship. “I hear Jose pray at night, for his family and his friends, and everybody else that died.” She turns back on Dan, almost accusing. “But I don’t hear anything from you.”
“Sally, every time I’ve walked on to a ship, I’m aware of the fact that it could be the last thing I do, that there’s a possibility that I won’t be coming back. It’s the same with airplanes, or getting into your car, though people don’t usually think about it.” Sometimes he’d walk onto the deck of the Singer and wondered if he even wanted to come back, if he wouldn’t just be happier living on the ocean, emailing his book drafts to his publisher. Actually being stuck on the water is, actually, an application of one of his biggest life fantasies.
“That still doesn’t explain it. It’s like… none of it’s affected you.” Her words are a soft confession lined with confusion.
“Well trust me, that’s not the case.”
The truth is Sally doesn’t hear anything from him at night because he makes a conscious effort not to be heard. Out here, in the middle of the ocean, nothing else around them, he’s become their leader. Despite Jose’s captaining the ship and Sally having so much theoretical and book knowledge, they both look to him when it comes to making decisions, even if he makes ones they don’t approve of. He’s become their pillar. It’s the role he’s taken on every time in his life he’s walked on to a ship with a student, an assistant, an intern, or a tourist. Pillars do not have nightmares, they do not murmur prayers, they do not wake up in the middle of the night, gasping for breath, and scream into their pillows until they can face the world again and go back to sleep.
“I know there aren’t that many of us here Dr. Cove, but we need to be able to support each other. We need to be able to talk.” She lets the fingers of free hand linger lightly on his arm, drawing his attention. “You can talk to me. If you need to.”
Dan just nods. “Sure thing. Thanks.” He has no plan of taking her up on the
offer, and it doesn’t even cross his mind to make the same offer to her.