The Survivors: Book One (35 page)

Bump!

 The boat rocked and her grip tightened.

Bump...Bump!

 More violent this time and there was an awful creak of waterlogged wood that got her up on her knees. Her boat wouldn’t take much more, and she would likely only get one shot. She would have to get closer.

Kendle rose onto her knees near the side of the boat, not feeling the splinters digging into her clothes and skin. Her attention was focused on the shark streamlining her way for another hit, this one likely an attack. It too had heard the water-weakened wood.

She sucked in a breath as the great white came in high on the water, the hunter moving in for its meal.

“Aaaahhh!”

Kendle swung the claw hammer with all her strength, the boat dipping precariously with her violent movement, and she buried the hammer in one of the shark’s cold eyes.

 Blood squirted, and the surprised predator jerked downward, yanking the weapon from her grip. It disappeared beneath the murky waves, tail thrashing against the battered boat. One shot and she had nailed it. Was it enough?

Her eyes searched intently, her heart relaxing a little more with each second that passed. She’d lost her fishing hammer, but kept her life and her boat, and that was a fair trade as far as she was concerned.

Kendle moved back, keeping her eyes on the waves, but after starting to doze off as the adrenaline rush faded. It was gone. Her heart fell. Like her world. She had no idea where she was. The gas had run out a long time ago, and she was alone, at the ocean’s mercy.

Her bluish-gray eyes searched the waves as they swelled and dipped around her, finding nothing but debris and endless water. Forcing herself to ignore the waiting tears, she got out her strings and began to tie a square of net to "fish" with.

“Fifty days and nights,” she muttered, cracked lips aching, skin a constant bruise from the lightest touch. In all that time, she hadn’t seen anyone, not a ship in the distance, not even a plane overhead. Surely, they had found the liner by now, counted bodies, and started a search for survivors. Hadn’t they? Shouldn’t she have at least seen a plane by now, one of those big 747s? They wouldn’t be able to see her, of course, but just knowing she wasn’t alone would be a comfort.

Fingers aching as she tied off the ends, Kendle flexed her hand a couple of times before starting on the next side, making small, tight squares that would trap anything bigger than a marker. She let her mind wander as she worked on it, each piece a different color or type of material. She was almost out of things to drink and was hoping for a bottle of water. Kendle croaked a bitter laugh, thinking of the saying about ‘water everywhere and not a drop to drink’.

“Definitely fits.”

Her throat was raw from trying to scream the shark away, and at that thought, her eyes looked around wildly, searching for a Great White with a hammer in its head and revenge in its heart. Instead, murky waves, the unnatural, vivid green sunset, and the dark layer of clouds now ever-present in the sky, were her only companions.

Below was another world, but it was one she was terrified of now, full of foreign creatures that brushed against her wooden home and stole her breath. Where the hell were the planes, the rescue ships? The land?

“It was a Carnival Cruise Liner, for God sakes!” she blurted in frustrated fear, head turning as if to see the Coast Guard pulling alongside. “Front page news! Wealthy stars go missing, massive search ensues!”

Someone should be looking for all those citizens, all those lifeboats, shouldn’t they? And what was with the ocean? While she was grateful - it had certainly kept her alive so far - she could only worry about an explosion that had been big enough to literally litter an ocean with debris.

Just about anything she could think of was floating in the salty waves -bottles, cans, cups, clothes, jugs. It was like a constantly moving store shelf of surprises (some awful, like the hand she’d pulled up, still inside the leather glove), and she was constantly scanning the water, trying to find more each day than she used. She currently had three weeks worth of food, divided evenly into the corners for balance, but her stomach clenched painfully at the thought of being on the ocean long enough to use it all. Where was the land?

Kendle tied the net to the remaining guardrail on the faded orange and white speedboat with thick knots, finishing as a wave broke over the side and soaked her from head to toe in cold saltwater. Her vision faded a bit, eyes blurring, and she was thrown back in time to the storm that had taken her sister just days after they’d snuck off the doomed cruise ship.

“Hold on!”

“Help me!” the terrified girl screamed again, nails drawing blood from Kendle’s wrist as the weight of the rail that had ripped away pulled her down toward the angry sea, where the rest of their group, also still anchored to the heavy metal, were fighting for every breath they took.

“Dawn!” Their wet fingers slipped, and the screaming teenager was yanked off the boat, as Kendle jerked frantically on the rope around her other wrist, unable to get free to follow.

“Dawn!”

Bam!

Kendle screamed as the speedboat was hit hard from underneath, rising out of the water and tossing against the steering wheel. Stars bursting across her vision, her hands found the wide, wooden spokes just as the craft plunged back down. It slapped up sprays of water and she barely kept herself from flying out, arm wrenching painfully.

Bump, splash...Bump!

The boat rocked violently from the hits, and she held on to the wheel, heart thudding at every creak of waterlogged wood.

Thud...splash!

Her shark was back. She saw the fin, watched it roll over. Her eyes widened when she realized her net was wrapped around its streamlined body. It was trapped. If it dove, she would go under too.

"Move!"
her mind screamed, and she slid closer to the wildly thrashing animal as her fingers went for the net.
‘No time!’
the panic ordered, water sloshing into the shallow boat as the shark tried to roll itself free.
‘Kill it!’

Kendle looked around. How?

The claw hammer was still buried in the shark’s eye, the long handle being pried out by the ropes of her net, and she grabbed the biggest can she had, its label long gone. Kendle hefted it over her head, trying to wait for the right moment.

The Great White suddenly plunged downward, pulling the boat with it and as water began to pour in, she swung, slamming the heavy can down on top of the hammer.

A sound of agony was ripped from the shark. More a vibration than a noise, the cry was one of a fatal wound and Kendle shoved herself back against the side of the boat to rebalance it, shivering. She had just killed her first shark. That was something she hadn’t done before the War, when she couldn’t wait to face nature's challenges.

After a minute, the shark stopped moving, blood leaking out into the softly lapping waves, and she forced herself toward the corpse, her back and shoulder on fire. She ripped the hammer out of the animal’s head, the tearing sound making her gag, but she didn’t stop, swinging the slimy weapon back into the shark’s meaty area.

She ripped out a big chunk, coughing and wrenching. When her thumbnail tore off, she didn’t notice her blood mixing with that of the shark. Kendle wrapped the meat in a towel, then began untying the carcass, not sure if she had taken it to eat or to look at and know the shark was dead. She felt the tears rise again, and didn’t stop them this time.

The boat and the sisters had barely survived the rollover - being right by the stairs had saved them - but after three days of looters, fights, illnesses spreading, and drunken pounding on the door, Kendle had chosen to get off the crippled ship before they were dragged from their staterooms. Others had been - they’d listened in horror - and on the fourth morning after the tidal wave, she and Dawn had crept out to one of the three remaining lifeboats.

There had been five men there already and the girls had gone with them willingly. It had to be better than the rapes and murders on the boat that had started when the Captain admitted he had no idea how to fix the ship and get them home, didn’t even know for sure where they were, then barricaded himself in the wheelhouse.

One day after the seven of them jumped ship, they found the speedboat, its owner looking much like the bodies they’d left on the doomed cruise liner. When its engine started, they’d all been crying, hugging. It hadn’t lasted long. The boat’s radio, compasses, and lights were out, the fuel gone before daylight, and the speed runner had come to a heartbreakingly slow stop with no land in sight.

“Lost two in the first week,” she croaked, hating the sound of her rough voice, but needing to hear it just the same. “Didn’t even know their names.”

The third to go had either fallen in or jumped, and was hit by something Dawn had sworn was the roof of a house. He hadn’t come back up, and the loss hadn’t registered.

There had been little movement or conversation after that. Talking or moving required awareness, and no one wanted that until there was hope to go with it. They had survived by fishing garbage out of the ocean, slowly adjusting to life on a world that was never still.

Kendle had been alone now for 45 days, marking the boat each morning since the storm that had taken her companions. It wasn’t the longest stretch she’d done - that would be her 88 days spent hiking from one end of the Colorado to the other – but it was the first time she was totally without backup. She had no phone, no camera crew with access to the outside world. “On my own for real this time.”

Kendle's skin felt very hot as she turned to look at the chunk of shark meat. “‘Cept for you.”

She laughed again and when it turned to sobs, she rocked herself gently for comfort. She would get through this the same way she had all the other trials. One day at a time.

The sun vanished slowly, leaving eerie, beautiful trails of green and orange that threw strange shadows over the deep, dark waves, and Kendle huddled in the middle while she dozed. She was miserable and heartbroken as the fading light left her with only her sense of hearing and smell, both of which checked in and recorded lapping water and salt, nothing more.

Maybe the land was gone. Maybe that was why she was finding so much of the world in the water. A War? Hell, maybe an asteroid had hit and flooded the earth. If so, she hoped the waters receded soon and set her Ark on a mountain before she went mad. Out here, she was defenseless.

Chapter Nineteen

February 23
^rd
, 2013

Illinois

1

“No, please. No more bodies. There’s not room for them anymore!”

Angela’s words brought Marc instantly awake and he rose up on one elbow to look at her tear-stained cheeks in the dim lantern light. Dog’s golden eyes were also watching her cry in her sleep.

“Angie?”

There was no answer. She was having another nightmare. It wasn’t the first time she had woken him this way and though he hadn’t said anything, it bothered Marc that he couldn’t protect her in her dreams, too. Any small part of him that had been wondering if she was exaggerating, so she could play two ends against the middle, was gone. Their first week together had revealed what she hadn’t told him and he was furious.

How could anyone treat her badly? She had been affectionate…passionate, and he loathed her man for changing that. He’d never felt hate so strongly.

“It’s how he was raised. He didn’t know any other way to deal with someone like me,” Angela answered his thoughts.

Marc jumped and gave her an awkward smile, having to pry his eyes from the long dark curls messed sexily over her shoulder. “You would have made a good Marine,” he stated, not wanting to hear her defend someone who had obviously hurt her so much.

Angela sat up, pulling the thick, flag-covered quilt closer, her eyes roaming over pictures of foreign, seductive landscapes and dark, dirty windows, instead of looking at him. “Not me. I don’t kill. I won’t.”

He frowned at her argumentative tone, wondering if it was the dream or something she had picked up from him.

“You okay?” he asked carefully, relaxing a little when she sounded more like herself, but her face was pale in the orange glow of the propane heater.

“I will be. Rough night.”

Marc grunted. Five or six this week. “Wanna talk about it?”

Angela tried to imagine telling him about her life of rape and assault, and total, unforgiving control. She closed her eyes against the shame and betrayal she thought she’d come to terms with long ago.

“No. How about you tell me something from your life I don’t know. Shouldn't be hard.”

He ignored the tone. “Like what? After the War? Before?”

“Tell me something from our past, the answer to one of the questions we used to ask each other.”

His eyes swung to her pale face at the tone, but his mind was again screaming ambush from the almost resentfully spoken words. “Why?”