The boat drifted off-course a bit. Robby corrected it, looked at the GPS, and then pegged the throttle. He swallowed hard, and willed himself to not throw up again. Every few seconds he took his eyes off the horizon and looked down to fiddle with the chart. He wanted to be sure he had a clear shot—the coast of Maine has so many islands and channels even a local could get turned around, and Robby barely ever traveled by boat, let alone navigated.
He only glanced back twice to check the progress of the tornados. Part of him wished he’d somehow see his mom back there, and another part feared she’d be there, hovering just over the transom, beckoning for him to join her. He tried to work the problem; tried to figure out what had motivated her to leave the cabin and step up to be taken.
“MOM?” ROBBY CALLED out into the whiteness. All he could see was white. He woke up on the deck of the boat, shivering in the cold, damp air and surrounded by dull, thick white on all sides. Robby hugged his arms around himself and his jacket crackled with ice.
“Mom?” he yelled again. “I’m here. Where are you?”
Robby stopped breathing and just listened. He couldn’t hear anything except the lapping of the ocean against the side of the boat. Logic started to return to his sleepy brain. When he woke up to the white fog, he thought he’d finally been taken. He thought he’d been plucked into the sky. Now, as he considered the rocking of the boat and the sound of the ocean, he realized he was still on Earth and his mom, dad, and all his friends were gone.
He dropped to his hands and knees and crawled until he found the side of the boat. From there, he guessed the direction and found himself back at the cabin of Carl Deemer’s boat. He let himself in. All the instruments were dark; nothing on the boat worked at all. He couldn’t get the engine started or even see anything out the windows except the white fog.
The motion of the boat finally overcame Robby and he started to retch again. His back arched and it felt like his esophagus was collapsing in on itself, trying to vomit up stomach contents that weren’t there. Robby shook and gagged and collapsed to the floor of the cabin.
His gags turned to sobs. Robby balled up his gloved hands and cried into them. He cried for his mom and dad, and Jim, who always stuck by Robby. Jim even changed schools when Robby did, just so they could still eat lunch together everyday. Robby cried for Brandon, and Ms. Norton. He even cried for Paulie, who’d been plucked from the Earth while still holding on to Robby’s jacket. If his dad hadn’t held on so well, Robby would have sailed right off with Paulie and he never would have needed to deal with everything all by himself.
Robby hugged his knees to his chest and curled up into a ball.
Robby cried for the puppy he was supposed to get next summer when Bill Carver would finally breed his pretty black lab again. He was going to name the puppy Buster and teach him how to do all kinds of tricks. The tears and snot turned cold on his sleeves and Robby pulled his hood further down over his head.
The boat drifted, the waves lapped at the hull, and Robby cried.
Robby hitched in shallow breaths into his heavy lungs and eventually he dozed.
The second time Robby woke up on the boat it was from hunger. He glanced up at the windows—everything was still white outside the cabin—and slid over to the backpack his mom packed with leftovers. He took off his gloves to peel apart a turkey sandwich. He thought he could handle the mayo-smeared bread, but the turkey seemed too daunting. His stomach clenched and twisted around the bread, so he chased it with water until it settled down. Both the bread and the water were ice-cold. They felt good going down—chilling, but pleasantly shocking.
He stood up slowly, slightly swaying on his feet, and steadied himself on the console. A garbage bag with spit and vomit sat on the floor a few feet away. Robby looked out the window and waited for his nausea to return. He knew it was just a matter of time—the boat still swayed and bobbed, and he couldn’t lock his eyes on the horizon. He figured his meal of bread and water wouldn’t stay down long.
The fog looked like it might be thinning. He wasn’t sure until he looked out the back windows. He could now see the stern of the boat, where as before he barely make out the deck. Back at the console, all the instruments still sat dead. He flicked switches and turned dials, but nothing responded. The only thing moving was an old gimbaled compass. It rocked gently with the movement of the boat, and the needle spun like the second hand of a clock.
The fog brought a heavy cold—the moisture seemed to penetrate his clothes and go right to his bones. When Robby was a little kid, his parents took him down to Washington DC in January. The cold down there felt like this. Even though the temperatures in Maine dipped well below zero, it was a surface cold. All you needed to do was brush off your clothes and stand next to a fire for a minute, and you could warm back up. Cold with humidity felt much worse. Now, with the engine dead and the meager heater dead with it, the cabin felt like a cold, clammy tomb.
Robby let himself out onto the deck. It was even colder outside, but moving around felt good. Robby put his gloves back on and carefully made his way around the boat. He looked for any way to propel the boat—an oar, or even a long plank—but he realized he didn’t even have a way to figure out which way was west.
At the side of the cabin, Robby found a handle and a bar mounted as a handhold. He grabbed it with both hands and stepped gingerly up onto the rail of the boat, where the lip was covered in a no-skid surface so you could climb to the bow. He worked his way, keeping his belly pressed tight to the outside of the cabin. The gentle swaying of the boat seemed amplified once he was clinging to the side. On the bow he found a gaff—a long hook with a stick—and a square hatch which led to the ship’s hold.
He sat down on the hatch and looked out into the fog. He shoved up his sleeve. His watch stopped at twelve twenty-one. The date said it was still the twenty-fifth. Robby wasn’t certain how long he’d spent asleep before he woke up in the fog. In fact, he didn’t even know why he had fallen asleep in the first place.
Right after his mom disappeared, Robby moved to what he felt was a safe distance off the coast. He held the boat about two miles west of shore and navigated south and west. The last thing he remembered before the fog was deciding to swing the boat wide around a bunch of islands which showed up on the GPS. He didn’t know if the disappearances of his friends and family were related to proximity to land, but he hadn’t seen anyone disappear in the open water, so he figured he would test that theory.
Now, adrift in the fog, he didn’t know if he was out to sea or a hundred yards from the rocky coast.
He took a mental inventory of his supplies. His mom packed enough food to last several people a couple of days. Now he was alone and he could probably ration it out to more than a week if he needed to. Of course, he’d be lucky to keep anything down, but at least his hasty meal of bread and water were still sitting pretty well.
On his way around the other side of the cabin, Robby’s glove slipped on the bar and his foot skidded off the rail. He dangled for a precarious second before getting his footing back. He bit down on his glove and tore it from his hand. The bar was almost painfully cold to touch, but he figured it was warmer than the water below.
Back in the cabin, he sat on the bench and tried a piece of the turkey from the dismantled sandwich. It tasted good, and felt fine going down. It seemed like as long as he just let himself sway with the boat and didn’t try to fight it, he felt okay.