For Those In Peril (Book 1): For Those In Peril On The Sea (6 page)

‘Okay, we need to work out what we’re going to do next; where we’re going to go. We’re currently here,’ Bill made a small cross on the chart with the pencil he was now holding. ‘You guys came from up here, right?’ He pointed to the chart and Mike nodded. Bill made another cross on the chart there.

‘Given what we saw in Miami and how widespread this thing seems to be, we’ll probably want to avoid anywhere that has …’ Bill stopped and corrected himself, ‘… that
had
a large population. There will be too many people with the infection there, and too great a risk we’ll get attacked or get infected. That rules out most of Florida — at least the bits we can easily reach by sea — Freeport, Nassau, and probably most of Cuba. Haiti’s where it all started, so that’s out of the question.’ Bill circled each of these areas as he said their name and then put a cross through them. ‘It’s probably not worth going further north. We’ll run into the same problem in Georgia, North Carolina and so on.’ Bill drew a line across the top of the chart. ‘Where does that leave us?’

We pored over the chart. There were really only two possibilities left: the Bahamas to the east and the Florida Keys to the south. Everywhere else would be too heavily populated or too far away for us to get to, given the condition our boat was in.

‘What about the Keys?’ Jon pointed to the small chain of islands that clung to the southern tip of Florida.

‘I’m not too sure. There’s a road all the way down to Key West and there’s a lot of people down there too. I think we really need to be looking for somewhere more remote, somewhere with less people, but still somewhere we might find others like us.’ Bill scratched his head with the end of his pencil and
we turned our attention back to the chart.

‘What about here?’ CJ pointed to a string of small islands that skirted the eastern edge of Little Bahama Bank, almost 200 miles to our east. ‘There can’t have been a lot of people there, can there?’

‘When I was working in the Caribbean, we never came this far north, so I’m not really familiar with that part of the world. Anyone else?’ Bill looked round. From the look on their faces, I could tell CJ and Jon knew as little about these waters as I did.

‘That’s the Abacos. I think there’s one main town … about there.’ Mike leaned forward and pointed about half-way down a large island. I could see Hole-in-the-Wall lighthouse marked at its southern end. I’d not even noticed the many small islands that lay to our north when we’d plotted our course towards the lighthouse a few days earlier. That was when we still thought Miami would be our final destination; before we found out everything had changed.

Mike carried on. ‘There may be little settlements on some of the small islands, but there’s not a lot of people living on them. It’s popular with boaters though. Lots of people go over there from Florida, to spend a few weeks cruising around. Uncle Randy used to go over there each summer, and charter a boat for his family. Dad always promised we’d do it one day ...’ Mike’s voice tailed off as he realised this was one of many plans he’d never get to fulfil. Bill put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed.

‘Right!’ Bill sounded much more confident now. ‘It sounds like the Abacos will be our best chance, both of avoiding people with the infection and of finding others like us … other survivors. What do the rest of you think?’ I nodded in agreement, not because I necessarily thought he was right, but because I was well out of my depth and I was glad someone else was taking charge. Jon and CJ nodded too, presumably for the same reason.

‘Do you think I’ll be able to phone home from there?’ CJ glanced at Bill, but he turned away.

‘CJ, I don’t think that’s going to be possible.’
Jon sounded empty and I could see the enormity of the situation was starting to sink in. ‘I don’t think any of us will ever be phoning home again.’

‘But how am I going to let my family know I’m okay? They’ll be worried about me. I can’t leave it until I get home. That mightn’t be for days.’ CJ still seemed to think things were better elsewhere, yet from what the boys had told us and from what we’d seen, I doubted that was the case.

‘CJ, I don’t think you’ll be going home any time soon. I don’t think any of us will.’ I didn’t want to be the one to do it, but I felt it was important CJ understood just how bad things were. ‘I don’t think any of us will ever be going home.’

CJ stared at me. ‘What d’you mean?’

‘CJ, you heard what might Mike said.’ I hated doing this to her, but I had to make her understand, ‘This isn’t just some local outbreak, this isn’t just about Miami. This thing is global; it’s all over the world. Everything’s changed. This just isn’t the same world any more. Everything we’ve ever known is gone and, by the sounds of it, most of the people are gone too. All we can do is try to survive.’

CJ crumbled as the realisation of just how bad things had become hit her like a tsunami. She tried desperately to fight it. ‘Bill, tell Rob he’s wrong.’ CJ was looking at him imploringly.

‘I can’t.’ Bill’s eyes dropped to the floor as he said it.

‘Jon?’

Jon shifted uncomfortably and mumbled, ‘Sorry CJ.’

CJ looked at Mike and Jimmy. They both did their best to avoid catching her eye. Finally, the reality of it all won out and CJ slid to the deck. She sat there, her head in her hands, sobbing uncontrollably. A look passed among Jon, Mike and Jimmy, but before any of them could say anything, Bill stepped forward and held out his hand toward her. ‘CJ?’

CJ looked up and wiped her eyes before grabbing Bill’s hand and pulling herself back to her feet. She disappeared into the cabin and Bill followed.

Once they were gone, Jon spoke. ‘What are we going to do with her? We can’t afford to carry any deadwood, not now all this has happened. It’s going to be difficult enough to survive as it is.’ His earlier solidarity with CJ had clearly evaporated.

‘Jon, don’t talk about her like that. She’ll cope.’ I was angry at him for writing her off so soon, but I had my doubts too, and I hoped it sounded more believable to him than it did to me. One thing I was sure Jon was right about though, we wouldn’t be able to carry anyone who couldn’t pull their own weight, not for long at any rate, and I had no idea how long this situation would last.

Bill came back a few minutes later. ‘I’ve given her something to help her sleep.’
He sat down at the table. ’She’ll be fine once she’s got some rest.’

‘What if she’s not?’ Jon was looking at Bill questioningly.

‘Don’t go jumping the gun. She’s tougher than she looks.’ Bill had known CJ longer than either Jon or me, so he was in a better position to judge this, but from all I’d seen so far I wasn’t so sure he was right.

  Chapter Four 

The Gulf Stream had been calm when we’d crossed it the first time but, as we headed in the opposite direction, it was as if we were crossing a different ocean. It bucked and swayed beneath us as the wind blew a steady twenty knots against the current, piling the sea into steep waves that battered our hulls, and it took eighteen hours to reach the relative safety of Little Bahama Bank. Once there, we dropped anchor in the shallow sandy waters and I checked in on CJ. I didn’t know what Bill had given her but, whatever it was, it must have been good. She was sound asleep and, even though it had been a rough crossing, it looked like she’d slept through the entire trip.

Exhausted, I went through to my cabin and crawled into my bunk. Within seconds, I dropped into a fitful sleep fractured by recollections of the previously unimaginable images I’d seen in the last few days. I woke twice in the night. The first time I heard someone pacing around the cockpit, while on the next, I heard Mike screaming in his sleep. Jimmy was trying to rouse him, reassuring him that he was okay and that he was safe.

Just before daybreak, even the vestiges of sleep deserted me, and I left my bunk no more rested than when I’d climbed in. I made my way up to the cabin and through to
the cockpit, where I found Bill. He was either already up or, more likely, had been up there all night.

‘Hey.’ I tried to smile at him, but couldn’t.

‘Hey.’

We sat there
in silence watching the sun come up. It was amazing: the cloudless sky was still a deep midnight blue to the west, while the sun was just starting to peak over the horizon in the east. The wind had dropped and the shallow, crystal-clear sea was as flat as a millpond. It was one of the most beautiful sights I’d ever seen but I was in no state to appreciate it.

After a few minutes, Bill
spoke. ‘So what d’you think about all this?’ He didn’t look round. He just carried on staring out towards the horizon.

‘If things are really as bad as they seem, I think we’re well and truly screwed.’ I regretted saying it as soon as the words were out of my mouth. Until then, I’d felt that if
I could just have kept it locked inside I might have been able to ignore it, to somehow prevent it from being real. Now I had to face the truth.

‘I know things are bad, very bad, but I was just thinking, there’s a lot worse places we could be.’ Bill finally turned towards me.

‘What d’you mean? We’re stuck out here on this goddamn boat. If we try and set foot on shore, we’ll get ripped to shreds by people driven mad by some virus that was cooked up in a biotech lab. And even if they don’t kill us, we’ll get infected and become just like them.’ I wasn’t feeling in the most optimistic of moods and I took it out on Bill.

He remained calm. ‘Think about it. Yeah, going ashore might be difficult, but we can travel around with relative impunity in comparison to those stuck on land, assuming there’s any one left who isn’t infected. We can get food out of the sea; not everything, but enough to keep us from going hungry, and a boat is pretty much a self-sustaining system, especially this one. It’s got all the mod-cons. And with sails, it’s not like we need to worry too much about having to find fuel to move around.’

Bill had a point, but I felt he was ignoring one crucial element. ‘Yeah, but have you forgotten that none of the electrics work? Nor do the engines. Our rigging is half-shot and our sails are barely holding together.’ I was angry at Bill, at his failure to grasp just how bad the situation was.

‘I think most of it’s fixable. We couldn’t sort it when we were out on the ocean, but now we’re somewhere we can anchor up. All we need is the time and if there’s one thing I think we’re going to have a lot of it’s time. I say once everyone’s awake, we see what we can get working. Anything that’s beyond repair, we can cannibalise for spare parts.’
Bill looked out towards the horizon again, ‘Given what’s happened, I’d much rather be on a boat at sea than holed up on land, cowering in my house, or in some suburban shopping mall, waiting for the food to run out or the infected to break down the doors.’

By the time the others were up, I’d been mulling over what Bill had said for some time, and I’d come to realise he was right. There was food in the sea and if we could get the electrical system sorted, we could use the reverse osmosis machine to make as much fresh water as we needed. While we couldn’t live on shore, there was no reason we couldn’t go there to look for supplies every now and then, as long as we were careful.

As Bill outlined his plan to the others, I sat back and watched to see how they’d take it. While Jon, Mike and Jimmy still looked tired and run down, as Bill had predicted, a good, long sleep seemed to have been just what CJ needed. Jon seemed pretty keen on Bill’s plan and he, like me, seemed to appreciate the fact that it gave us something to work towards. CJ was happy to go along with it, not because she necessarily thought it was
a good idea, but rather because the work would help keep her from thinking too much about what had happened. Mike and Jimmy were more reticent, but then again they’d been living with this for longer than the rest of us. They’d also been ashore and had dealt with the infected first-hand; they knew more about what we were up against.

We spent the morning inventorying everything on the boat, separating out the things that looked repairable from those that were clearly not. The good news was that much of it was salvageable. By the end of the day, Bill had even managed to get one of the engines to turn over. Although it still wouldn’t run, it was a start. Jon and Mike spent the last couple of hours of daylight spear-fishing and came back with a couple of groupers and some lobsters, so there was plenty for supper. We even broke out a bottle of wine to go with it.

By nine o’clock, I was pleasantly full of food. I was also surprisingly drunk given how little wine I’d had, but then again I’d not had any alcohol since leaving South Africa. In my rather inebriated state, I looked round the table at those I’d been thrown together with and I thought about how they were dealing with the situation. CJ still seemed to be taking it worst, and had teetered on the edge several times during the day. I’d seen it suddenly well up from deep within her, like a bubble trying to escape. When this happened, her eyes would start to brim with tears and her breath would stutter. She was no doubt thinking about her family and friends back in England, wondering if they’d survived or not, and, if they
were
alive, if they remained uninfected. It was the uncertainty that seemed to get to her most; the fact she couldn’t find out what had happened to them, or let them know what had happened to her. It was as if she didn’t know whether she should be grieving for them or not, or even how she should feel. Yet each time it seemed like she was just about to lose it completely, she managed to pull herself back from the brink, focussing on the work at hand until it passed.

Jon was trying his best to make it seem like he was taking everything in his stride, but I could see it was an act. Earlier in the day, when he’d thought no one was looking, I’d seen him wiping tears from his eyes. Another time, I’d seen a blankness spread across his face as his thoughts wandered off and he started to dwell on what had happened to the world. He was estranged from his family but he still worried about them; still wondered about what had happened to them. When he’d caught himself doing this, he’d shaken himself out of it, pushing the thoughts from his mind and had gone back to work.

I shifted my attention to Mike and Jimmy. They were just children, yet they’d survived when most others had not. This meant they’d already become hardened to the new world, that they’d already found a way to cope with it. Maybe it helped that they still had each other and that, bad as it was, they knew with some certainty what had happened to their family. Maybe it was just that they were young and so better able to deal with whatever the world threw at them.

Bill seemed to be coping better than the rest of us, but then again he was probably the best placed to do so. He had no family as such, and his nomadic life meant he had few true friends to worry about. He was adaptable by nature and had a lifetime of experience dealing with unexpected, difficult and dangerous situations. This wasn’t to say he was unaffected by it all, he was as shocked, scared and uncertain as the rest of us, but he knew better how to deal with it. Given my assessment of the others, I was just drunk enough to be overconfident, to think that, as a group and with Bill in charge, we might just be able to cope with this new world. If we all worked together, we might actually be able to survive, despite everything that had happened.

By ten o’clock, the others had sloped off to their bunks, but I could feel the effects of the wine starting to wear off and I wasn’t ready for sleep quite yet. I sneaked out to the cockpit where I lay back, staring up at the stars. I had a joint I’d been saving to smoke at the end of the voyage, and I figured I might as well
have it there and then. Within a few minutes I was well and truly stoned, my mind wandering off into the darkness.

As I relaxed, the thoughts I’d been doing my best to keep buried for the last couple of days finally surfaced. I wondered about the world I’d suddenly found myself in, about what had happened to people I’d once known: to my brother, his wife, their kids, my friends, people who I’d gone to school with, and who I hadn’t thought about in years. Their faces drifted through my mind, frozen at the point I’d last seen them. Long-forgotten memories bubbled up in my head. If things were as bad as they seemed, I doubted any of them would’ve survived. As I drifted off to sleep, I remember thinking it was only by chance I’d survived when they hadn’t. If we’d not run into the storm, if I’d not had to put into Cape Town for repairs, if the world’s economy hadn’t collapsed leading to my redundancy, if I’d stayed in Scotland rather than following my dreams, I would probably be dead, or infected, just like them.

***

I woke around one in the morning, and lay there with my eyes closed, listening to the sounds of the sea. I could hear the main halyard slapping against the mast and wavelets washing against the side of the boat. The anchor line creaked quietly as the boat pulled gently this way and that. Somewhere off in the distance I could hear the rasping breathes of a dolphin swimming in the inky waters. I concentrated on this sound, listening to it getting closer and closer, wishing I had the energy to get up and look for it, it seemed so close.

Then something bumped against the front of the boat and the breathing grew quicker and louder. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but for some reason it no longer sounded like a dolphin, it sounded more sinister. I sat up and looked around but couldn’t see anything. I heard the bumping noise again and peered over the side, straining my eyes to see what it was. There, just visible in the darkness, bobbing gently alongside the right-hand bow, was a life raft. I stared at it for a second, wondering where it had come from, then something stirred within it.

I crept as quietly as possible into the cabin.

“Bill, Bill,” I hissed down the companionway that led to the bunks in the left-hand hull.

A sleepy and disgruntled Bill replied with a shout of ’What?’

‘Get up here now. I think we’ve got trouble.’

I saw the flare gun lying in an open drawer beneath the chart table. I grabbed it, a couple of flare cartridges and then the hand-held spotlight from its peg by the cabin door before running back outside. I loaded the first cartridge, snapping the gun shut before leaning over the guard rail as close to the back of the boat as possible. In the time I’d been gone, the life raft had floated half-way along the boat and was drifting slowly towards where I stood at the stern. As I shone the spotlight onto it, the raft exploded into life. 

I jumped, stumbling over one of the cleats and losing my balance. As I landed heavily on the deck, the spotlight slipped from my hand. It clattered against the table and went out. I lay there with my heart racing, listening to the infected as they tried desperately to get on board. I did my best to regain my composure and felt around in the darkness for the spotlight. When I found it, I clicked the switch but nothing happened. I banged it against my hand and clicked the switch again. This time it came on. I leant over the guard rail once more and refocused the light on the raft. It revealed two figures scrabbling frantically at the side of the boat.

Both were men but somehow neither of them looked quite human. One was thin and wiry, clothes torn, covered in dried blood. The other was stockier, but equally dishevelled. Wet hair clung to their skulls and their eyes burned with anger. They snarled and snapped, incensed that they could see me, but not get to me. Their hands clawed at the boat until their fingers bled, leaving red streaks down the white sides, but they didn’t stop. A sense of panic gripped me as I struggled to think of what to do.

Then I remembered the flare gun and a plan emerged. If I could puncture the inflatable raft, it would sink, taking the infected with it. I levelled it and pulled the trigger. The red flare shot through the night and buried itself deep into the stocky man’s body. I could smell his flesh blistering yet he showed no sign of pain. Instead, the force of the impact caused him to stumble backwards and fall over the side. He flailed for a second, churning up the water, before sinking from sight.

I scrabbled to load
a new flare, my hands shaking at the thought of what would happen if the other man made it onto the boat. With disbelief, I felt the cartridge slip from my fingers and fall onto the deck. Before I could pick it up, it rolled into the scuppers and disappeared from sight. A small splash told me it had dropped into the water.