Sanjit had seen some of the parties. Lights strewn everywhere, all kinds of famous people in fancy clothes drinking and eating and laughing too loud while the kids were kept in their rooms, occasionally hauled out to say good evening and listen to people talk about how great it was that their parents had been so generous, rescuing “these kids.”
Sanjit had never considered himself rescued.
There was still a lot of food left. But the diesel fuel that ran the generator was running out despite all their efforts to conserve.
And now there was Bowie. Sanjit could usually manage to sidestep responsibility. But he couldn’t let Bowie die.
There were only two ways on or off the island. By small boat-and they had no boat. Or helicopter. And that they had. Sort of.
The time had come to seriously examine the most impossible option.
Sanjit and Virtue found rope in the groundskeeper’s shed. Sanjit anchored one end of the rope around the not-very-secure trunk of a sapling. He hurled the other end out into the void.
“Probably pull the tree down on our heads, huh?” He laughed.
Sanjit and Virtue went down. The rest were told to stay put, stay away from the cliff, and wait.
Twice Sanjit lost his footing and slid down on his butt till he managed to stop by digging his heel into a shrub or rock outcropping. The rope ended up being no use at all for the descent. It lay off to the right of the path, far out of reach.
The boat, the Fly Boy Two, was still there, battered, rusting, algae sliming around the waterline. It wallowed in the gentle swell, its bow seemingly hanging on for dear life to the rocks it had hit months earlier.
“How do we get onto the boat?” Virtue asked when they had reached the bottom.
“That’s a really good question, Choo.”
“I thought you were invincible, Sanjit.”
“Invincible, not fearless,” Sanjit said.
Virtue made his wry smile. “If we climb up on that rock, we can maybe grab the guardrail on the bow and pull ourselves up.”
From down here the boat was far larger. And the gentle motion that rocked the crumpled bow back and forth looked a lot more dangerous.
“Okay, little brother, I’m going to do this, okay?” Sanjit said.
“I’m a better climber than you are.”
Sanjit put his hand on his shoulder. “Choo, my brother, there aren’t going to be a lot of times when I’m brave and self-sacrificing. Enjoy this one. It may be the last you ever see.”
To forestall further argument Sanjit climbed up onto the rock spur and made his way carefully, cautiously, to the end, sneakers slipping on rock coated with algae and salt spray. He leaned with one hand against the white hull. He was at eye level with the deck.
He grabbed the frail-looking stainless-steel rail with both hands and pulled himself up until his elbows were at ninety-degree angles. The danger zone was just below him and if he let go, he’d be lucky to survive with just a crushed foot.
His scramble aboard the boat wasn’t pretty, but he made it with only a scraped elbow and a bruised thigh. He lay panting, facedown on the teak deck for a few seconds.
“Do you see anything?” Virtue called up.
“I saw my life flashing before my eyes, does that count?”
Sanjit stood up, bending his knees to roll with the boat. No sound of human activity. No sign of anyone. Not exactly a surprise, but in some dark corner of his mind, Sanjit had almost expected to see bodies.
He placed his hands on the rails, looked down at Virtue’s anxious face, and said, “Ahoy there, matey.”
“Go look around,” Virtue said.
“That’s ‘Go look around, Captain,’ to you.”
Sanjit strolled with false nonchalance to the first door he found. He’d been on the yacht twice before, back when Todd and Jennifer were still around, so he knew the layout.
It was the same eerie feeling he’d had that first day of the big disappearance: he was going into places he didn’t belong, and there was no one to stop him.
Silence. Except for the groan of the hull.
Creepy. A ghost ship. Like something out of Pirates of the Caribbean. But very posh. Very nice crystal glasses. Little statues stuck in alcoves. Framed movie posters. Photos of Todd and Jennifer with some kind of famous old actor.
“Hello?” he called, and instantly felt like an idiot.
He went back to the bow. “No one home, Choo.”
“It’s been months,” Virtue said. “What did you think? They were all down here playing cards and eating potato chips?”
Sanjit found a ladder and hung it over the side. “Come aboard,” he said.
Virtue climbed up carefully and instantly Sanjit felt a little better. Shielding his eyes he could see Peace up at the top of the cliff, looking down anxiously. He waved to show everything was okay.
“So, I don’t suppose you’ve found a manual for the helicopter lying around?”
“Helicopters for Dummies?” Sanjit joked. “No. Not exactly.”
“We should look.”
“Yeah. That would be great,” Sanjit said, momentarily losing his jaunty sense of humor as he looked up at Peace on the cliff. “Because just between you and me, Choo, the idea of trying to fly a helicopter up out of here scares the pee out of me.”
Six rowboats set out from the marina under bright stars. Three kids in each boat. Two pulling oars, one at the tiller. The oars stirred phosphorescence with each stroke.
Quinn’s fleet. Quinn’s armada. The Mighty Quinn Navy.
Quinn didn’t have to take a turn at the oars; after all, he was the boss of the whole fishing operation, but he found he kind of liked it.
They used to just motor out and drop their lines and trail their nets. But gasoline, like everything else in the FAYZ, was in short supply. They had a few hundred gallons of marine fuel left at the marina. That would have to be saved for emergencies, not for daily work like fishing.
So it was oars and sore backs. A long, long day that started long before dawn. It took an hour to get everything ready in the morning, the nets stowed after they’d been dried, the bait, hooks, lines, poles, the boats themselves, the day’s food supply, water, life jackets. Then it took another hour of working the oars to get out far enough.
Six boats, three armed with poles and lines, and three dragging nets. They took turns because everyone hated the nets. It was more rowing, dragging the nets back and forth slowly across the water. Then hauling the nets up into the boat and picking fish and crabs and assorted debris out of the cords. Hard work.
Later, in the afternoon, a second batch of boats would go out to fish mostly for the blue water bats. The water bats were a mutated species that lived in caves during the night and flew out into the water during daylight. The only use for the bats was to feed the zekes, the killer worms that lived in the vegetable fields. The bats were the tribute kids paid the zekes. The economy of Perdido Beach was doubly dependent on Quinn’s efforts.
Today Quinn was with a net boat. He’d let himself go for a long time, getting more and more out of shape in the first months after FAYZ fall. Now he was kind of enjoying the fact that his legs and arms, shoulders, and back were getting stronger. It helped, of course, that he had a better supply of protein than most people.
Quinn worked a long morning, him and Big Goof and Katrina, the three of them having a pretty good day of it. They hauled up a number of small fish and one huge one.
“I thought for sure that was the net being snagged,” Big Goof said. He stared happily at the almost-five-foot-long fish in the bottom of the boat. “I believe that’s the biggest fish we ever landed.”
“I think it’s a tuna,” Katrina opined.
None of them really knew what some of the fish were. They were either edible or not, either had a lot of bones or didn’t. This fish, slowly gasping his last, looked very edible.