For Those In Peril (Book 1): For Those In Peril On The Sea (22 page)

‘Shhh, keep quiet!’

‘But why?’

‘Quiet!’

Mike sensed the urgency in my voice and didn’t ask again. Then again, he didn’t need to. There was a loud bang on the side of the container, then another. The infected had arrived. I hoped I was right about them not being able to work out how to open the door. The banging intensified, becoming almost continuous. Both of the infected were attacking the container, trying to get to the prey they knew was there.

Inside it was dim, but not dark. There were small pinpricks of light here and there where the container had rusted through, enough for us to see each other and to get a sense of the infected moving around outside. I looked at the others. They were stan
ding next to an open box. Mike and Jimmy were petrified, while Jon just stood there, a can held loosely in one hand, his Leatherman in the other. Jon put the can down on a nearby stack of boxes and looked at me, his face just visible in half-light.

‘What do we do now?’

I thought about our situation but I could see no way out. The runabout was only a few feet away but we couldn’t get to it without the infected getting us first. I listened as they continued to hammer on the doors. Frustrated, I picked up a can and flung it into the far corner of the container. It clattered against the metal and the banging stopped. I watched the pinpricks of light darken as the infected moved along the side of the container. I picked up another can and threw it into the same corner. The infected sprinted forward and started banging on the container where the can had struck it, trying to get to whatever was making the noise.

‘If you can keep them there, I could sneak out and get the rifle.’ Jon sounded nervous. ‘It is loaded, isn’t it?’

Jimmy nodded. With no more noise, the infected started to prowl round the container again, the pinpricks of light darkening and then lightening as they moved.

‘It’s pretty risky.’ I glanced at Jon, ‘Are you sure you want to do this?’

‘What choice do we have?’

‘I guess.’ I ran through a number of possible plans, but there was only one that seemed even remotely feasible
. ‘Mike, can you and Jimmy get up there?’ The boys nodded. ‘Take some tins and just bang on the side of the container as hard as you can. Jon, I’ll open the door and you run for it. I’ll shut it behind you, so whatever you do don’t come back. If you can’t get to the boat immediately, just get into the water and swim for it.’

‘Okay.’

Jimmy and Mike scrambled over the cases and once Jon and I were in position they started hammering on the corner of the container. The infected moved away from the door and I took a deep breath. ‘You ready?’

‘As I’ll ever be.’ Jon’s voice quivered slightly. I could tell he was scared but he was doing his best to hide it.

I put my hand on the lever, ready to open it. ‘On the count of three. One, Two, Thre ...’

Before I could get the last word out, something slammed against the door. I looked around. Judging by the shadows, there were still two infected near Jimmy and Mike, meaning this was a new one. Soon, we heard banging in another spot. There was no way Jon would make it to the runabout now. There were just too many of them.

I sat down on a stack of boxes. ‘What the hell were you all doing in here anyway? Why didn’t one of you keep watch?’ I was angry and scared.

‘It’s my fault, Rob.’ Jon sank down onto another pile of boxes and held his head in his hands. ‘We had all this food and I just wanted a taste. So did the others. We couldn’t resist it. There’s just so much of it. D’you know how long it’s been since I
’ve had fruit? I never thought I’d miss it but my body craves it. I find myself dreaming about it. They’re really vivid dreams. I wake up and I can still taste it: peaches, always peaches. I don’t think I ever really ate peaches before, but now I can’t stop dreaming about them.’

I knew what Jon meant. I’d had the same dreams: about plums; about biting into crisp, moist apples; and once, rather strangely, about kiwi fruit, something I don’t think I’d ever eaten in my life. I couldn’t really blame them. It wasn’t really their fault, it was mine. I shouldn’t have followed the footprints. If I hadn’t, the infected would never have known we were here.

I pushed these thoughts from my head and tried to think of another way out, but with all of us trapped in the container, it was hopeless. Our only chance was if someone came looking for us. Yet, we were further south than we should have been and they wouldn’t know where to find us. Jon had a hand-held radio with him, but it wasn’t powerful enough to reach Hope Town. It probably wouldn’t even reach someone standing a few feet away from the container, since its ferrous metal construction would block the signal. We had no way of communicating with anyone, no way of calling for help.

As the afternoon wore on, the infected kept up their assault on the container, never pausing even for a second. As the tide came in, water slowly crept into the container and it started to rock gently backwards and forwards. I glanced at my watch and wondered how high it would reach. I saw the others climb up onto some of the boxes to get away from the incoming sea and I followed suit. I listened to the sound of the infected as their numbers increased again, the sounds of those attacking the container drawing more from throughout Little Harbour.

We looked at each other, not knowing quite what to say.

Finally, Jimmy spoke. ‘We’re not getting out of this are we?’ He looked from me to Jon and back.

I tried to think of something positive to say but nothing came to mind, so I just stared at the ground.  

‘At least we won’t starve to death.’ Jon tried to laugh but couldn’t, the situation was just too serious. Mike put an arm round his brother, pulling him over and rubbing his head.

By high tide, the water was no more than a foot up the side of container. We wouldn’t drown, but it was also proving little hindrance to the infected. They continued hammering on the outside, the container keeping us safe and trapped at the same time. By nightfall, there were probably six or seven outside, enough that I was starting to lose track of them as individuals. They kept up their assault throughout the night. Maybe some left, maybe others arrived.
I couldn’t tell. All I could hear was their furious attacks on the container. In the dark I heard Jimmy weeping and Mike trying to console him. I couldn’t hear what he said, but it seemed to calm Jimmy down and the crying stopped. I tried to get comfortable on the boxes but I couldn’t find the right position.

I thought about the day; how such a simple thing as trying to help a little girl had led to us becoming trapped with no hope of escape. Once again I was struck by how small, seemingly insignificant decisions could have big implications in this new world. I doubted the infected would ever be able to break in, but it wouldn’t matter. As long as they knew we were there, as long as they could sense we were alive, they wouldn’t leave. The sound of the banging on the container, their presence would drive us mad long before the food ran out.

I wondered about the little girl, where she’d come from, what had happened to the people she was with, how she’d come to be here all alone. If we’d only got here a few hours earlier, we might have been able to save her and we might not have become trapped. I pushed these thoughts from my mind and, instead, wondered what the others would make of our failure to return.

Would they think we’d been lost? Or would they presume we’d got caught out by failing light and had anchored up for the night? When we didn’t return the following day, would they send out a search party? Or would they try to raise us on the radio and take our silence as a sign we were gone?

Whatever they thought, I doubted we’d ever get the chance to find out.

  Chapter Sixteen 

Specks of light started piercing the darkness inside the container again, telling us the sun was coming up. I looked round at the others. It was clear that they, like me, hadn’t slept. The infected continued their assault and we could now see them moving around again as their shadows passed across the holes in the container. I decided we needed to do something, to try something. We needed a plan. I tried to think of one but failed. I lay back and looked up at the top of the container. The specks of light there remained undimmed; the infected had been unable to climb on top. I wondered if this might be our salvation. If we could somehow get through the top of the container, maybe one of us could leap far enough into the water to get away from the infected. I doubted it, but the least we could do was give it a go.

I roused the others. ‘I think I might have a plan. It’s not much but it’s something.’

‘What is it?’ Jimmy looked eagerly at me, as did Mike.

‘There’re no infected on the roof. I don’t think they can get up there. If we can somehow make a hole in it, we might be able to escape.’

‘How?’ Jon was sceptical.

‘If we wait till high tide, one of us might be able to jump far enough into the water to get away from them. That’s all we’d need. They could get to the rifle.’

‘That’s your big idea?’ Mike sounded deflated.

I glanced round. ‘Has anyone got a better idea?’ The others remained silent. ‘Okay, I admit it’s not much, but it’s the only plan we’ve got.’

‘Hmm.’ Jon had a look of resignation on his face. ‘I guess so, but let’s eat first.’

He picked up a can and opened it with his Leatherman and offered it to Jimmy.

Jimmy refused to take it. ‘I don’t want peaches anymore.’ The novelty of eating fruit had quickly worn off.

‘You need to eat something,’ Mike urged his brother. Jimmy took the can, but only ate a few mouthfuls before he set it down.

Jon opened a second can for Mike and one for me before opening one for himself. As I ate, I stared up at the top of the container looking for any possible weak spots, but I couldn’t find one.

‘So how are we going to do this?’ Jon looked at me.

‘If we stack some boxes up, we’ll be able to reach the roof and then we can try to break through.’

Jon didn’t reply. Instead, he started shifting boxes around while Mike and Jimmy watched. Once it was ready, I climbed up and added the sound of my banging to the cacophony from the infected. After an hour it was clear that just as the infected couldn’t break in, there was no way we could break out. The metal was too thick. I slumped dejectedly onto a small pile of boxes and we sat there, refusing to even look at each other.

I thought about what the others would be doing in Hope Town. CJ would be beside herself while Jack would be concerned about the loss of more people from his ever-dwindling community, as well as our safety. Some would presume that CJ and Jeff wouldn’t want to stay on the catamaran on their own and would already be eyeing it up as a possible upgrade to their own less salubrious accommodation. It was harsh, but these were difficult times.

Jon was obviously thinking about similar things. ‘I hope CJ isn’t worrying too much.’

After a
few seconds, he looked up at me. ‘You know me and her ...’

Jon’s voice tailed off but I had an inkling of what he’d been about say.

‘I ... I ...’ Jon’s eyes flicked around the container as he struggled to grasp a thought and put it into words. I waited for him to pull it together. ‘I ... I never got to tell her I love her.’

They’d been trying not to make it obvious but I’d noticed how close the two of them had become. It had been building gradually and while I hadn’t been certain until that moment, I’d been sure something had been going on between them. At first, I just noticed that Jon had stopped treating CJ like a little sister, to be belittled and sneered at. Then I noticed he’d stopped calling her Cammy and had started calling her CJ like everyone else. More recently, there had been a few nights when they’d lingered in the cockpit long after the rest of us had turned in. Last week, a couple of days after the hurricane, I’d gone up to check on the anchor line in the night and found them asleep under a blanket, CJ resting her head on Jon’s chest, his arms wrapped round her. It could have been innocent but I’d very much doubted it. I’d slipped back into the cabin and made sure I made enough noise to wake them before going outside again. They were both sitting up, looking a little lost, hair tousled. The blanket had been tucked out of sight.

‘Hey, you two still up? I hope you weren’t sleeping up here. You know it’s not safe to stay outside at night.’

After the hurricane, the number of drifters had increased, with both infected, and debris they could cling to, being swept into the sea by the heavy rains and strong winds. We’d had incidents where several had been brought into the Hope Town anchorage by the flowing tide. One had even made it as far as the deck of a boat before it was spotted and dealt with. This meant that while I could understand Jon and CJ’s need for some space where they could be alone, I wasn’t pleased they’d taken such a risk. Maybe it hadn’t been intentional, maybe they’d simply fallen asleep while talking late into the night, but the infected wouldn’t care. I’d watched them slink back into the cabin and saw Jon tenderly sweep the hair away from CJ’s face and run his hand down her back as she turned to go down to her own bunk. I checked the anchor line and returned to the cabin to find Jon sitting at the table with a glass of water, staring into space, lost in his own little world. I secured the cabin door and retired to my bunk, leaving him to it.

I looked over at Jon now, stuck in the container with me when he’d rather be cuddled up with CJ in Hope Town. He seemed deep in his own thoughts. I gazed over at Mike and Jimmy. Somehow Jimmy had finally fallen asleep but Mike just stared straight ahead, his eyes unfocussed. I sat back and watched the pinpricks of light as they moved slowly across the floor, telling me the sun was moving across the sky; that time was passing.

In a few hours it would be dark again and I wasn’t too sure I could go through another night listening to the sound of the infected as they banged and pulled at the metal. I concentrated on their sounds now. I could hear them snarling and groaning as they moved around, one or other of them occasionally letting out a roar of frustration.

I thought about our situation. One thing was clear; we weren’t getting out of here on our own. If no one came to rescue us, we would die in the container. It was only a matter of when and how. And why would anyone come to rescue us? They knew where we’d gone, and we were the first to venture this far south since everything had changed. Our failure to return would be taken as a sign that the area was unsafe, that it should be made off-limits.

They might venture down months from now, maybe a year, driven here finally by the need for something they couldn’t find anywhere else. What would they find when they did? If they came sooner rather than later, they’d find our boat tied to a container surrounded by infected. They’d figure we couldn’t still be alive inside and they’d move on. If they came later, we’d be dead and the infected would probably have gone, having moved off once they no longer sensed living creatures inside. They might see the container and land, opening the door, seeking something useful and find our bloated, rotting corpses, or maybe even just our skeletons. Either way, we weren’t getting out alive.

Throughout my life I’d often thought about how I would die. In my younger days, I’d wondered if it would be in a drunken fight in some bar, or in a car crash caused by driving too fast and too carelessly. As I’d grown older, I worried about a fire in the night, about carbon monoxide poisoning, about cancer, a heart attack, a stroke … about dying alone in my flat, unnoticed and unmissed. When I was at sea I worried about storms and rogue waves, and even about hitting shipping containers, floating just below the surface, like the one in which I now found myself. I’d never imagined, I could never have imagined, that it would end like this, stuck in a metal box on a remote tropical beach, surrounded by people — or what had once been people — infected with some virus that meant they’d kill us if they could only get their hands on us.

I had a moment of clarity and could see how it would play out. The ever-present noise of the infected trying to get in would eventually get to one of us, to all of us, in hours, days, weeks, or months, if we could hold out that long. From there, it would go one of two ways. We could decide to make a run for it, distracting the infected enough to open the door and see if all of us, or even one of us, could make it far enough into the water before they got to us. If we tried that, I doubted any of us would survive. There were too many of them, and it would be a terrible way to go — to watch each other go — being torn apart by the infected. Even if, by some miracle, we didn’t all die there and then, those of us who survived would probably be injured and would eventually turn, becoming just like them. None of us would want to end up like that.

The other option was that we could decide to end it on our own terms. I looked around the container for something we could use to do the job. I’d cut myself often enough on tin cans to know that they could be razor-sharp. A can could be made into something that would do it. Maybe we wouldn’t have to resort to that and Jon’s Leatherman would be enough. If we decided to take that way out, it would need to be a joint decision. One of us couldn’t just decide to do it on their own, leaving the others stuck in the container with a dead body. It would force them to act, either to go outside and face the infected or to follow suit.

I was suddenly shaken from these thoughts by something, but it took me a
minute to work out what. The constant assault of the infected on the container had decreased, not by a lot, maybe only by one or two, but there were definitely fewer of them. Then there was a pause in the banging I heard what sounded like an engine revving. I only heard it for a second, but I was sure it had been there.

I looked at the others. Jon was bolt upright, as was Mike. Jimmy looked startled, having just woken up, and was wondering what was going on. It was clear I wasn’t the only one who’d heard it.

‘Was that an engine?’ Mike’s eyes flicked from Jon’s face to mine and back again. ‘D’you think someone’s out there?’

‘I think so.’ Jon was on his feet. ‘We need to let them know we’re in here.’

He started banging on the side of the container, yelling at the top of his voice. Mike and Jimmy joined him, as did I. Suddenly there was a loud explosion and something rattled off the side of the container. I could tell from the way it blocked the light coming through the holes that one of the infected was now slumped against it. There was another explosion. This time I saw the metal wall buckle into small pits in an area about a foot in diameter. Another of the infected slumped to the ground. Whoever was out there was using a shotgun, and, with two shots out of two, was using it very effectively. The only person in Hope Town with a shotgun was Jack, but I’d never seen him use it. I had the impression Jack didn’t like guns, and even when it came to dispatching drifters, he preferred to leave it to others. Maybe I’d misjudged him and he was happy to use a gun when he really had to. Another shot rang out, then a fourth, a fifth and a sixth. Then there was silence.

For about a minute nothing happened, then we heard the lever on the door start to move. Once it was fully up, the door was pulled open. A figure stood silhouetted against a light brighter than we’d seen in over twenty-four hours,
a shotgun resting on its shoulder. It seemed smaller than Jack, and more slender.

I wondered who it was;
then Jon spoke.

‘CJ?’
He sounded confused. I looked again, it did seem more like a woman than a man.

‘Jon, you’re alive!’ CJ ran forward and threw her arms around him. Even in the dim light, I could see tears streaming down her face as she hugged him as tightly as she could. He, in turn, hugged her back, just as hard.

I waited for a second before intruding. ‘Right, come on you two, you’ve got plenty of time for that later. We need to get out of here before any more infected turn up.’

That broke the moment. Jon and CJ pulled apart, and Mike and Jimmy scrambled down from the boxes. Together, we burst into the sunlight, shielding our eyes as we did so. Once I became accustomed to the light, I saw Andrew standing off a few feet from the shore in Jack’s runabout. He waved and called out.

‘Hey, good to see you’re still alive.’

‘Glad to be alive, and to finally be free.’ Jon glanced at CJ as he said this.

‘I know the feeling.’ Andrew must have been thinking about the two days he’d spent on the dock at the start of the outbreak.

The tide was further out than when we arrived so our runabout was resting on the sand. I picked up the rifle and between us, CJ and I kept guard while the others manhandled the boat back into the water. Since no more infected turned up, we took the opportunity to load as many boxes as we could into Jack’s runabout. Finally, we were ready to go.

Just as we were about to leave, I thought of the child lying dead further down the beach. ‘Guys, before we go there’s something I need to do.’

‘What?’ Jon had a concerned look on his face.

‘There’s a little girl just down the beach. She’d been staying in the container. The infected got her just before we arrived,’ I could feel something welling up inside me. ‘I want to bury her. We never get to bury anyone anymore and I want to do this for her.’