Remember how I mentioned parasites that cause the smiler sickness can survive in any bodily fluid except urine? We learned by accident, when dumping chamber pots over the side, that urine burns the living stew of a biomass as effectively as an open flame.
A disease is trying to take over the world, and our only weapons against it are piss and fire, although Dr. Anders is still at work on a more practical solution. She suspects that, while stews can travel the seas in search of land, prolonged exposure to salt water actually sickens them somehow.
In the meantime we have the open sea ahead of us.
Ben, Renfield, Randall and the Eriksons are teaching every one of us how to be sailors, even the youngest children. Sissy scolds me when I mess up. She may be only eight years old, but she really knows how to dress somebody down. Whoever her parents were, they taught her well.
Up on deck I will be able to see the lights of the Deliverance to port, our new boat, the Steward, to starboard, and the Eriksons in the Golden Wake behind us.
If I’m lucky I’ll be able to see a light from Randall in the Liberty, far ahead. He likes to lead the way.
We are headed due south, searching for a remote and fertile island we can call home.
Perhaps you will read this there one day, a month or a year from now, in relative comfort and safety. I hope so. I dearly hope so.
Goodnight.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jack X. McCallum is a co-founder of Dark Red Press who has lived and worked in and near San Francisco for more than twenty years. After being under the two-story sprawl of Pier 39 in a motorboat during low tide many years ago and hoping no one would use that dark, claustrophobia-inducing location as a setting in a movie or novel before he could, he was relieved to finally find a place for it here.
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Copyright
Copyright © 2012 by CL Stegall, Brian Fatah Steele, John J. Smith, Jack X. McCallum
Cover Design by CL Stegall
All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
Edited by C.L. Stegall
Visit us online at www.DarkRedPress.com
Printed in the United States of America
Kindle First Edition: March 2012
First Printing: March 2012