For Those In Peril (Book 1): For Those In Peril On The Sea (11 page)

‘I watched as clawing hands pulled at Mark in a desperate attempt to reach the screaming child — my child — and then they were gone.’ Matt’s voice wavered.

‘I stood rooted to the spot, not knowing what to do. Someone bumped into me and it brought me back to my senses. The mass of people were now almost on me and ahead of me the way was blocked by cars and others trying to flee. I turned and instead of running with them, I clambered onto the nearest car. This gave me enough height that I could leap onto the chain-link fence separating the dock from the water. I climbed upwards just as the rampaging crowd reached me. I felt some of them trying to grab me as they passed, but somehow I made it to the top without any of them getting me, and I flung myself into the water thirty feet below. Once I surfaced, I swam to a dinghy that was tied up to one of the metal ladders that stretched from the water up to the quayside.

‘I huddled there, shaking and crying, reliving what had just happened over and over again. I’d lost everyone I cared about and I just couldn’t accept it, not the way it had happened. I waited for someone to come and rescue me, for the nightmare to end, but it didn’t. All around I could hear the terrified screams of people being attacked. Around midnight, I heard the first explosion and saw the flames starting to reach up into the air. By morning, Miami was hidden by smoke.

‘I didn’t know what to do, but I knew I had to find some way out. I untied the dinghy and started the little outboard engine. I motored around until I found a small sail boat that was well-equipped and that had the keys on it. I started it up and headed out to sea. As I left, I looked over my shoulder at the burning city, and I knew Miami was finished.

‘Once I was far enough out, I started to wonder what I should do, where I should go. I still didn’t really know what had happened, or why the crowd from the ferry had started attacking everyone. I turned on the FM radio to get some news. Eventually, I found a station that was still broadcasting and listened with disbelief. The official line was that a riot had broken out in Miami and that the National Guard had been sent in to restore order; that there was nothing to worry about. Unofficially, everyone was panicking. You could hear it in the voices of the reporters, the politicians, the soldiers … of anyone they spoke to. Contact had been lost with Cuba, the Bahamas, Puerto Rico, Jamaica and the rest the West Indies. There were reports of riots and attacks in Mexico and in Canada. In the US, the trouble was spreading from the inner cities, and outbreaks of violence were flaring up in Key West, Fort Lauderdale and Tampa.

‘I sat listening to the radio all that day, and the night that followed, drifting with the tides and the currents. I kept expecting things to get better, but they didn’t, they just got worse. By the next morning, people were beginning to talk about the disease, what they were calling the “Haitian rabies virus”, and how it could be causing people to attack each other for no apparent reason. And they were wondering how it could be spreading so fast. By the next evening, the answer was apparent; it was passing from person to person.

‘The disease overwhelmed most people pretty much instantly, and they turned on anyone and everyone around them. There were reports of children savaging their grandparents, of parents attacking their kids. Yet, this wasn’t true for everyone, and some managed to fight off the virus for minutes, hours, even a whole day in
a few cases. Though they were infected, they could seem quite normal but, in the end, they too would turn, attacking and infecting others. This led to outbreaks flaring up all over the place, as people fled Miami by any means possible. By the time the authorities realised this and tried to quarantine Florida, there were already reports of mass outbreaks in every major urban area on the eastern seaboard, and along the Gulf coast. The government, the hospitals, the police, the army, none of them could cope, and everything just fell apart. By the next morning, there were reports of outbreaks all over the world, in London, Hong Kong, Rio.’

I glanced at CJ, trying to gauge how she’d taken the mention of London. I saw her eyes glisten and for a moment I thought she was going to cry, but she managed to keep her composure.

‘People fleeing from the US had carried the disease across the world, thanks to the wonders of modern air travel. Then the radio station I was listening to stopped. I found another one, but it stopped too after a few hours. By the end of the third day, the last station went quiet and all I could pick up was static.

‘I still didn’t know what to do. I’d lost everyone I loved, everyone I cared about and I was stuck on a small boat in the middle of the ocean, just drifting around. Whoever had owned the boat before I took it had kept it very well-stocked with liquor, so that night I opened a bottle of whisky and crawled inside, hoping I’d never wake up. But I did wake up. At first, I just felt sick and couldn’t work out why. Then I remembered getting very, very drunk. Then I remembered why I’d got so drunk. I pulled my knees up to my chest and cried for hours, rocking back and forward on the bunk where I’d slept. I didn’t stop until I heard someone calling out. I stumbled up ont
o the deck and saw other sail boats around me. A man on the closest one was calling to me and telling me to turn my VHF radio to channel sixteen. I did so and for the first time in four days I spoke to someone.

‘The man told me they were heading east to the Bahamas. He figured they’d be able to find somewhere safe to hole up amongst the islands. I was welcome to go along with them, the more the merrier as far as he was concerned. I didn’t know what else to do, so I went along with them. I’d sailed in my younger days and as I looked around it started coming back to me.

‘We’d crossed the Gulf Stream by the next morning and were on to Little Bahama Bank. The day was near-perfect, the type you dreamed about; blue skies, not a cloud on the horizon. A gentle breeze pushed us along, our little gathering of boats spread out over several miles of sea. There were even dolphins bow-riding the boats and travelling along with us. Some were so close I could hear them whistling and see the spots on their backs. It all looked so normal, yet it felt so wrong. I kept thinking how could the world go on pretending nothing had happened when everyone I cared about was dead?

‘That night I got separated from the others. My batteries had gone flat from listening to the radio for all that time without running the engine to recharge them, so I couldn’t call them up. I had no charts or anything, so I couldn’t hope to follow them. That was when I pulled in here and I’ve been waiting to see if they’ll come back ever since. I don’t think they will. It’s been over a week now, maybe longer. I’m not too sure really. I’ve kind of lost track of time. I’ve been living off canned food that was already on the boat, but I ran out of that yesterday. I’d just decided what I was going to do when you guys turned up.’

Matt looked longingly at the whisky bottle. I gave him another shot.

‘Do you know where they were heading?’ I looked over at Matt, his eyes were starting to glaze over.

‘I don’t know. I think someone said something about a lighthouse, somewhere soush of here ...’ Matt’s speech was starting to slur and I could tell he was drifting off again. A few seconds later, and I could see he was back on the dock, reliving the last moments with his family over and over again.

We left Matt with his memories and the bottle of whisky, and went inside.

‘What do you think?’ Jon was talking in a low voice so Matt wouldn’t hear him.

‘He didn’t really tell us anything we didn’t already know.’ I’d hoped Matt might have known something that could provide a glimmer of hope, but all he’d done was confirm just how bad the situation was.

‘At least we know there are other survivors out there,’ Mike piped up.

‘I wish Matt knew where they were heading. We really need to find them. I’m not too sure how long we can last if we can’t find other people.’ By the time I realised what I’d said, it was too late.

The others looked shocked. I’d been thinking this for a while
but it was the first time I’d said it out loud.

‘What d’you mean?’ CJ was staring at me, her eyes wide open.

‘Nothing, it was just a slip of the tongue.’

‘No it wasn’t,’ CJ snapped angrily. ‘What did you mean?’

I thought about being honest, but then I figured it would be better for them not to know the conclusion I’d come to about our long-term survival. ‘All I meant was that I think our chances would be better if there were more of us.’

CJ glared at me and I could tell she knew I was lying. ‘We’d better find them then, hadn’t we?’

‘How?’ I didn’t like being negative, but I also felt it was important to be realistic. ‘It’s a big ocean out there. We’d have to be very lucky to run into them by chance, and we don’t know where they were going.’

‘There can’t be that many lighthouses around here, can there?’

‘What?’

‘Matt said they were heading for somewhere with a lighthouse.’ CJ
glanced round at the rest of us. ‘Lighthouses aren’t that common, are they? There can’t be that many around here.’

‘That’s a good point.’ Maybe this was the glimmer I’d been looking for. I pulled out the chart Bill had annotated previously and spread it before us. Together we
pored over it, just as we’d done when we were anchored off Miami.

‘There’s a lighthouse,’ Jimmy pointed to the southern end of Great Abaco.

‘That’s Hole-in-the-Wall. There’s no one there, not anymore,’ Jon quickly answered.

‘How d’you know?’ Jimmy seemed indignant.

‘Trust me. We know.’ Jon looked at the chart more closely. ‘Anyway, they wouldn’t have been heading there. There’s no safe anchorage.’

‘What about there?’ This time Jimmy pointed to where another lighthouse was marked on the chart. It was at the north end of an island called Elbow Cay, about sixty miles to our south-east.

I considered its position. Elbow Cay was part of a chain of islands separated from the main island by a shallow, sheltered sea. It seemed a much more likely destination for the other survivors.

‘That’s a definite possibility.’ I looked around. ‘Can anyone see any others?’

We searched the chart for another ten minutes but these were the only lighthouses we could find that were even close to our current position. If Matt was right, that the others were heading for somewhere with a lighthouse, it had to be Elbow Cay.

‘Hey,’ CJ was
closely examining the chart, ‘have you seen what it’s called?

‘No, what?’

‘It’s called Hope Town. That’s gotta be a good sign.’

‘Yeah, right. Like you can always judge a place by its name.’

I looked up. CJ was staring at Jon and I could see they were about to have a go at each other again. I felt I needed to diffuse the situation.

‘Given the distance, we could be there in a couple of days. What do you think? Should we go check it out?’

‘Yes.’

‘Yeah.’

‘I guess.’ Mike seemed less keen than Jon and CJ, and Jimmy just shrugged, but neither of them objected. The decision was made; we were finally heading towards somewhere rather than running away. It gave us a sense of purpose, something we badly needed, especially after losing Bill.

***

The next morning I rose early. The whisky bottle on the cockpit table was empty and Matt was gone. I looked across to his boat, expecting the rubber dinghy to be tied up alongside it, but it wasn’t there. I scanned the horizon with the binocular, a sense of unease growing in the pit of my stomach. In making Matt relive the nightmare he’d been through, had I pushed him too far? Eventually, I found his dinghy pulled up on the beach. Beside it was a patch of darkly-stained and churned-up sand. There was no one in sight and even Bob was gone. I figured the guilt of surviving when everyone else he cared about had died had finally got to Matt, and he’d worked up the courage to end it all.

I should have been shocked, but I wasn’t. I knew how he felt because I felt the same way. I’d been the first one to suggest going over the side when we were stuck on the sandbank, but it had been Bill who had gone, and it was Bill who’d died. Something as small and insignificant as stepping on a shard of broken crockery had saved my life. It seemed so arbitrary. There seemed no rhyme nor reason as to who survived in this new world and who didn’t; it was just blind luck. It wasn’t the way I’d have chosen to go, but I could understand why Matt had done it. If it hadn’t been for the others, I’d probably have done something similar. The only reason I kept going was because I’d promised Bill I’d help him look after them; that I knew they’d stand even less of a chance without me. Matt had had no one, but at least I had the others. It was then I realised I needed them as much as they needed me.

As I looked out at the beach I came to a decision. I pulled up the anchor and set the sails. We were a good ten miles south by the time the others were up. When they asked about Matt I said I’d told him where we were heading and how to get there, and that he would follow later when he was ready.

There was no need for them to know the truth.

  Chapter Seven 

The winds were light and blowing from the west, creating near perfect sailing conditions, and we made good speed, pushing through the water at about four knots. I took the cruising guide out on deck and flicked lazily through it as I sat in the cockpit. CJ was at the helm while Jon busied himself with some fishing lines, getting ready to trail them out behind us. He’d brought the gear on board in South Africa but had never got round to using it during the crossing. Now it would hopefully provide us with plenty of fish; something that would become our main source of food. Mike and Jimmy sat up front, one on each bow, dangling their legs over the side. As the catamaran cut through the water, the bows rose and fell, dipping their feet into the refreshingly cool waters.

From the guide, I saw the only major test between us and Hope Town, at least from a sailing point of view, was Whale Cay Passage. There, our southward journey would be blocked by shallows and we’d have no choice but to
head out into the open waters to the east of the island. The channel we’d pass through was notorious for treacherous sea conditions that could make it impassable when the wind blew from the north-east. If things stayed as they were, we’d be fine, but it could change in the hours before we got there, and even in good weather, we wouldn’t want to try to make it through the passage as the sun was going down.

I looked further north for a suitable place to spend the night.
There was a good-sized island, Green Turtle, which under normal circumstances would have been perfect. Yet, it had been well-settled before the outbreak and I wanted to avoid the possibility of an encounter with any infected. Just to its south was a small, apparently uninhabited island, called No Name Cay. It wasn’t much, but it would offer some shelter, while keeping us clear of places where people once lived, and it would put us within striking distance of Whale Cay Passage for the morning.

We reached No Name Cay an hour before the sun disappeared behind Great Abaco. I nosed the boat as close as I dared, and yelled for Jon to drop the anchor. I took the binoculars and eyed up the pass we would face in the morning. It seemed placid enough … for now at any rate.

Supper was a light affair. Despite fishing all day, Jon had caught nothing. There was some rice left over from the night before and a can of pineapple rings for dessert, but none of us were particularly impressed. Later, as I sat at the chart table, I could hear Mike and Jimmy arguing in the cabin they shared and I knew why. This would be the first night we would go to bed hungry.

To take my mind off my empty stomach, I wandered out onto the deck and sat in the darkness, staring into the night. In the west, a fire burned. I watched it for an hour, the glow on the horizon ebbing and flowing as it blazed and spread, before going to bed. In my cabin I lay on my bunk, mulling over the events of the last week. I could barely believe it had only been a week — seven days — since we’d approached Hole-in-the-Wall, so keen to get ashore, to get a break from each other, ignorant of what had happened to the world.

Eventually, rocked by the boat as it pulled gently at the anchor, I drifted off into a tormented sleep.

In my dreams I was in the water, drowning. I saw Bill standing with his back to the sea on the nearby beach and I tried to call out to him. He turned towards me. As he did, I saw his face was covered in blood, his clothes torn and shredded. He raised his arm to point at me accusingly, as if blaming me for his death. Something kept grabbing at my legs, pulling me under as I tried to stay afloat. Each time I spluttered to the surface, I could see Bill still standing there, pointing. Then he was gone and I was being pulled under for the last time. I could feel my lungs burn as they yearned for air. I tried to swim to the surface, but it just got further and further away. I looked down and saw Bill pulling me towards a group of infected that was beckoning to him from the murky waters far below.

I woke with a start, clawing at my sheets and soaked in sweat. I shuddered as I remembered the dream and how real it had seemed. As I lay there, I realised what had woken me. The boat was no longer riding smoothly in the water. The wind had picked up in th
e night, and it was now bucking and dancing on waves that were battering against the hulls. I grabbed my clothes and ran up on deck. Jon was already there, letting out some extra anchor line, making it less likely it would drag in the strong winds. I helped him secure the line again and we went back to the cockpit.

My dream, my nightmare, was still troubling me and Jon seemed lost in his own thoughts. Eventually he spoke.

‘What d’you make of all this?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean, what d’you think our chances are, out here on our own?’

It was a very direct question and not one I’d expected from Jon.

‘They’d have been better with Bill.’ I only said it to try to avoid answering his question, but I realised immediately it had been the wrong thing to say.

‘Bill’s not here anymore, is he.’ Jon had a pained expression on his face. I could tell he felt responsible for what had happened to Bill. He’d been the one who’d fallen asleep when he should have been keeping a look out.

‘Jon, it wasn’t your fault. It could’ve happened to any of us.’

‘But Bill trusted me. I was the one in charge when we ran aground.’ Jon sounded dejected and I couldn’t help but feel sympathy for him.

After a few minutes he looked up at me again. ‘So d’you think we have a chance?’

‘I’ll be honest with you. I don’t know. We don’t know enough about what we’re up against yet.’ I’d already let what I really thought slip out once by accident, and I thought maybe it was time to tell Jon the truth. ‘If we can find those other people we might make it. If we don’t, I’m not too sure how long we can last, just the five of us.’

Jon was silent for a few minutes before he spoke. ‘Yeah, that’s pretty much what I’ve been thinking too.’

I looked at him, surprised at how well he was dealing with things. He was clearly trying to make a realistic assessment of our chances, and I had to respect him for that. He stood up and walked over
to the back of the boat.

‘So all we have to rely on is what some drunk thought he heard someone saying?’

‘It’s better than nothing.’

As I said this, I wondered if it was true.

***

I woke to find myself still sitting in the cockpit but with a blanket tucked round me. I looked up to see Jon standing in front of me holding out a mug of fresh coffee.

‘Sorry, no tea left, and no milk, not even the powdered stuff, and no sugar. Not much for breakfast either, but there’s this.’ With a flourish he produced a plate from behind his back. A lit candle was stuck to it and alongside this was a single cracker.

Jon smiled at me. ‘Not much of a cake and I know it’s not how you planned to spend it, but happy birthday anyway.’

I counted it out on my fingers and found he was right, it was my birthday; my fortieth birthday. I’d planned to celebrate it in style in Miami, and must have mentioned this to Jon at some point. God knows how he’d remembered. I took the cracker and laughed. In the eight weeks I’d known him, I’d not realised quite what a sense of humour Jon had.

I thought about how old I now was. Forty. Too old to be delivering boats, not that I’d ever be doing that again. I looked back and thought about how little I’d achieved in my life. Nothing much really: No house, no pension, no career, no family. Some people would consider me a failure, my life wasted. Yet, I’d probably outlived most who’d had all those things. The world had changed, the rules had changed, and because of my wasted life, I’d been in a position to survive and they, with their fancy homes, their stock market portfolios and their respectable jobs, had not. True though it was, this thought gave me no satisfaction.

As I sipped my black coffee and ate my cracker, I looked out towards Whale Cay Passage. While it had been placid the night before, it was now filled with rollers stacked one on top of another, and breaking in all directions. I could see now why it was so notorious. I waited for the others to get up and then set out our options.

‘Right, we need to decide what we’re going to do. There’s no way we’re getting through the passage today, it’s just too rough. So we can do one of two things. We can stay here, which is going to be very uncomfortable, or we can head into the lee of Green Turtle. That should give us a bit of shelter, but it’ll mean an earlier start to get through the passage once the weather clears up. What do you think?’ I looked at the others. From their faces, I could see they’d slept as poorly as I had.

‘What are we going to do for food?’ Tired as he was, Jimmy was thinking with his stomach.

‘If we go to Green Turtle, I’m sure we can find somewhere to catch some fish.’ I wasn’t certain of this, but it was the best I could offer.

‘I vote we go there then.’

The others followed Jimmy’s lead so we upped anchor and left. The trip was rough and we had to tack back and forth into the north-east wind. It was four hours before we eased into the shadow of Green Turtle and the seas around us finally calmed.

As we picked our way along the coast looking for somewhere to drop the anchor, I got the feeling we were being followed. It was half an hour before I finally saw a movement on the island. Standing on the crest of a ridge was a lone figure. I picked up the binoculars and examined it. Its clothes were ragged and fluttered around its body. The front of what was left of its t-shirt was stained dark, as was its face. I watched it shuffle over the ridge and disappear from sight. I started looking more carefully along the shoreline. In amongst the scrub, I glimpsed the occasional flash of an arm or a leg, suggesting there were more infected shadowing our movements. We passed a beach and they emerged from cover, a dozen or so shambling figures, sensing our presence. I was sure they couldn’t get through the deep water separating us from the shore but, just in case, I got Jon to steer us further out.

Once we were about 500 feet from the island, the infected seemed to lose track of us and started to move slowly away in all directions. Where they were heading, I couldn’t tell. Soon all but two were gone. The final pair remained at the water’s edge, unmoving, staring after us. Keeping our distance, we paralleled the shore again. The two infected remained where they were as if waiting for us to return.

A mile up the coast, we finally dropped anchor. It was still rough, but not as bad as our last anchorage, and it was as close as I dared go to the island. Once we’d settled in, our thoughts turned to food. Going ashore wasn’t an option, but we needed to find something. Picking up the binoculars, I scanned the waters around us.
I saw something sticking out of the water about 200 yards away. It looked like a metal pole sticking up at an odd angle, and it seemed unlikely someone would have put it there on purpose.

Leaving Jon in charge, I took Jimmy and Mike with me in the dinghy to investigate. I brought my snorkelling gear along just in case. The dinghy bounced around on the choppy waves and progress was slow but we got there eventually. The pole turned out to be the tip of a mast belonging to a sunken sail
boat. From its size, I’d have said it was more of a weekender than a day sailer, and judging by its condition it hadn’t been in the water for long. Some fish shoaled around it, but otherwise it remained free of the marine life that would colonise a boat when it’d been underwater for more than a few months. I tied the dinghy to the mast and donned my snorkelling gear.

‘What are you going to do?’ Jimmy was looking at me curiously.

‘I’m going to see if there’s anything useful on board.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like food.’

‘But it’ll all be ruined.’

‘Not necessarily.’ I knew what Jimmy was thinking, but I had another possibility in mind.

The boat was lying in about twenty feet of water and was close to the limit of my breath-holding capability. Diving down and kicking towards it, I saw there was a gaping wound below the waterline near the bow. I could see a large coral head looming out of the underwater gloom in the distance and I was pretty sure this was what had holed it. The life raft was gone and the cabin was open, so it looked like the crew got off before it sank, but if this had happened after the infection struck they’d have been little better off than if they’d had to swim for it.

I kicked back for the surface and recovered before diving down again. This time I made straight for the cabin and swam inside. I had a fairly good idea where to look and what I was looking for. I pulled at the padding covering the left-hand bench and it floated away revealing a hatch. I just had time to pull it open and grab one of the many cans that were inside before I ran out of oxygen and was forced back to the surface.

I clung to the dinghy as I caught my breath and then tossed the can to Jimmy, ‘I think you’ll find the food inside is fine. There’s loads more of them down there too.’

Jimmy’s eyes lit up. ‘D’you need a hand bringing it up?’

‘No, I’ll manage.’

Half an hour later and I’d removed almost 100 cans from the sunken vessel and brought them back to the surface. The boat had been very well-provisioned for one designed to spend only the occasional weekend at sea, suggesting whatever had befallen it and its crew had happened after everything had gone wrong.