The idea had taken hold instantly and a vague memory rushed in. Columbus’s smallest ship, the Nina, was less than fifty feet long and it had crossed the entire Atlantic Ocean. Many new recreational sailboats are over well thirty feet, probably most of them. At thirty feet, they are more than able to cross oceans, not that I wanted to attempt that. But that size could, even with me at the helm—yes, I was already thinking in seaman-talk—we could sail out of Puget Sound and into the Pacific where we’d be out of sight of land and the eyes of others. Nobody remaining on land could see us or come kill us.
If a primitive fifty-foot wooden ship built before 1500 could sail across the Atlantic, a modern fiberglass hull with 500 years of improvements could surpass its performance. Somewhere, I’d heard or read that modern sailboats, if properly secured for hard weather, were like corks. They couldn’t sink. The lead in the bottom fin, or whatever it was called, made them self-righting. They might lose their masts but seldom sank.
I couldn’t think of a safer place to be.
So, that left us with a few minor details to resolve. We needed food and weapons to travel and locate a suitable sailboat to steal. To do that, we had to move through what we’d call hostile territory on land for at least fifty miles, avoiding hordes of well-armed scavengers, and finally locate a boat. Then we had to take it from that place to the northernmost part of Puget Sound, almost to the Canadian border—and maybe beyond.
I explained all that to Sue. The problems sounded impossible to achieve as I laid each one out, the objective and the reasons to attempt it, along with the hurdles.
“How long does it take to walk fifty miles?” she asked.
“At least fifty miles, maybe twice that if we avoid population centers.”
“How long?” she asked again as if the answer went unheard.
“Before the pandemic flu, a good hiker on the side of a road could do it in a day. Two at most.”
“But not now, and you are not a good hiker. So, don’t tell me how it used to be, tell me for today.”
I considered and talked as I thought. “Excluding gathering food and weapons as we go, and unexpected encounters that will delay us, we could probably stay in forested areas as we moved and maybe go five miles a day if we don’t run into others who are hiding out in those forest like we are doing. Ten to twenty days. Minimum.”
“But we’ll encounter others who are unfriendly?”
“They probably have their own tripwires and alarms, as well as lookouts. Maybe dogs, so add a few more days and a lot of danger.”
“We might slip past. I think I have some Indian blood in me.”
“I don’t. And we might end up dinner for a hungry group of flesh-eaters or packs of starving dogs gone wild.”
“We’ll shoot them.”
“Which will bring all the rest of the starving creatures on two feet running to get their share of the dead. The noise will bring the worst of humans our way as it did for those three today.”
She scowled. “So, my boat is a bad idea.”
“No! It’s a wonderful idea. The sailboat, I mean. We just have to figure out how to make it work.”
“Really?” Her brilliant smile could have provided the light for the tunnel we sat in.
We talked the afternoon and evening away as if we were actually going to do it. I knew where there were sailboats. They were in a city called Everett, at the yacht basin. I’d been there a few times with my parents and once we’d eaten in a restaurant overlooking the boats. There were hundreds and hundreds moored at floating docks.
So, that became our destination for the sake of discussion. Getting safely through a city of a hundred thousand residents, or more realistically, the survivors of that hundred-thousand, became our largest problem. Reaching that city to begin the dangerous trek through it was the second problem. The fact neither of us knew anything about sailing—if we actually reached a boat—was not even discussed.
With both of us throwing out ideas, most of which had no possibility of succeeding, we eventually decided there were the two critical areas to resolve before anything else. Lesser problems could be worked out only after those two. Travel from the mountains near Darrington to Everett, and then travel through a city full of dangerous, hungry scavengers, packs of rats, wild dogs, illness from the flu, and a dozen other diseases since sanitation had ceased. Even worse than all those were the unknowns.
It is impossible to evade what you don’t know. The unknowns in the city far outweighed the knowns. However, that didn’t mean we give up.
We didn’t need to stockpile food before reaching the boat. If nothing else, we could go hungry for a while, and maybe even catch a fish or crab. But more likely, there was at least a limited amount of food already stored on each sailboat. Carrying extra weight while traveling would only slow us down, and if there was one certainty, it was that I didn’t want to remain in Everett any longer than required.
So, we tried deciding how we could cross more than fifty miles of rural terrain and suburbia while remaining alive. The second step would be to enter a city full of unknown dangers and eventually reach the waterfront. I fell asleep with those things on my mind, believing them impossible to resolve, but perhaps we would either find a way or adjust our plans.
At least we now had a goal, thanks to Sue. We just had to figure out how to implement it instead of looking forward to months of sneaking around the tunnel and nearby mountains hoping we were never spotted and that we could locate enough food to stay alive.
I woke with images of manned balloons floating in my head, like those that I saw floating over Arlington one time when there was a balloon festival. They were colorful, some created to look like cartoon characters, and all carried a basket below with smiling, happy people. In the dream, the two of us flew right over the problems on the ground.
Right, like that would happen. Where would we get a manned balloon and how did we make it go where we wanted when who knows what direction the wind would blow? Maybe we just needed to steal a plane and learn to fly at the same time, and then go over the top of the dangers. Like I could fly a plane. I could hardly drive a car. Sue couldn’t do that much. I forced my mind to be realistic.
We needed a map. That was obvious, but that small detail had escaped our attention the evening before. I knew in general terms where Everett was. I had never driven there by myself, and there wasn’t GPS on my phone to guide me. On the positive side, north of Everett was spread a lot of rural areas. It might be possible to travel on foot in the forests and avoid fighting our way through. We could move silently. Maybe.
I considered recruiting more people to help stand watches at night and protect us during the day, and quickly rejected the idea. While they might join us initially, and perhaps even help, they would want to sail north with us and there was nobody I trusted to be awake while I slept except for Sue. Besides, more people meant more compromised decisions and more mouths to feed.
I went back to sleep, only to wake again with the determination to search a nearby house or two for a map. A few days after I’d left my car on the road, it had been burned to a rusted, blackened hulk. All that remained was an outline of the chassis. However, even deserted cars might have a map or two in the glovebox. I congratulated myself for thinking of that one and went back to sleep. It was step one to solving problem number one. There were plenty of deserted cars. And plenty of additional problems to solve.
Sue woke me a short while later with a blood-chilling scream. I left the sleeping bag we shared like a piece of popcorn popping in a hot pan, my twenty-two in my hand, ready to shoot anything that moved. There was nothing in the tunnel. No intruders, no wolves, nothing.