“For real? Before the ships?” Gabby looked surprised.
Bay shook her head. “No. Your type. You think you’re the first one to wash ashore? To step away from that approximation of life? You’re just the first one who made it alive.”
“If you don’t like the ships, why did you call them to come get me?” Gabby paused. “Or you didn’t. You just wanted me to leave. Why?”
“I can barely feed myself. And you aren’t the type to be satisfied with that life anyhow. Might as well leave now as later.”
“Except I’m probably going to die of this fever because I walked all night in the cold, you psychopath.”
Bay shrugged. “That was your choice.”
They walked in silence for a while. The rock star was either contemplating her choices or too sick to talk.
“Why?” Bay asked, taking pity.
Gabby whipped her head around. “Why what?”
“Why did you sign up for the ship?”
“It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
“Sounds like an epitaph fitting for half the people in this world.”
Gabby gave a half smile, then continued. “New York was a mess, and the Gulf states had just tried to secede. The bookers for the Hollywood Line made a persuasive argument for a glamorous life at sea. Everything was so well planned, too. They bought entire island nations to provide food and fuel.”
“I’m sure the island nations appreciated that,” said Bay.
The other woman gave a wry smile. “I know, right? Fucked up. But they offered good money, and it was obvious no bands would be touring the country for a while.
“At first it was just like any other tour. We played our own stuff. There were women to sleep with, drugs if we wanted them, restaurants and clubs and gyms. All the good parts of touring without the actual travel part. Sleeping in the same bed every night, even if it was still a bunk with my band, like on the bus. But then it didn’t stop, and then they started making us take requests, and it started closing in, you know? If there was somebody you wanted to avoid, you couldn’t. It was hard to find anyplace to be alone to write or think.
“Then the internet went off completely. We didn’t get news from land at all, even when we docked on the islands. They stopped letting us off when we docked. Management said things had gotten real bad here, that there was for real nothing to come back to anymore. The passengers all walked around like they didn’t care, like a closed system, and the world was so fucking far away. How was I supposed to write anything when the world was so far away? The entire world might’ve drowned, and we’d just float around oblivious until we ran out of something that wasn’t even important to begin with. Somebody would freak out because there was no more mascara or ecstasy or rosemary, and then all those beautiful people would turn on each other.”
“So that’s why you jumped?”
Gabby rubbed her head. “Sort of. I guess that also seemed like a good idea at the time.”
“What about now?”
“I could’ve done with a massage when I woke up today, but I’m still alive.”
Bay snorted. “You wouldn’t have lasted two seconds in a massage with that sunburn.”
Gabby looked down at her forearms and winced.
They walked. Gabby was sweating, her eyes bright. Bay slowed her own pace, in an effort to slow the other woman down. “Where are you hurrying to, now that I’ve told you there’s nobody coming after you?”
“You said there was a city out here somewhere. I want to get there before I have to sleep another night on this road. And before I starve.”
Bay reached into a jacket pocket. She pulled out a protein bar and offered it to Gabby.
“Where’d you get that? It looks like the ones I ate in the lifeboat.”
“It is.”
Gabby groaned. “I didn’t have to starve those last two days? I could’ve sworn I looked every place.”
“You missed a stash inside the radio console.”
“Huh.”
They kept walking, footsteps punctuated by Gabby’s ragged breath.
“We used to drive out here to picnic on the cliff when my wife and I first got married,” Bay said. “There were always turtles trying to cross. We would stop and help them, because there were teenagers around who thought driving over them was a sport. Now if I saw a turtle I’d probably have to think about eating it.”
“I’ve never eaten a turtle.”
“Me neither. Haven’t seen one in years.”
Gabby stopped. “You know, I have no clue when I last saw a turtle. At a zoo? No clue at all. I wonder if they’re gone. Funny how you don’t realize the last time you see something is going to be the last time.”
Bay didn’t say anything.
The rock star held Deb’s guitar up to her chest, started picking out a repetitive tune as she walked. Same lick over and over, like it was keeping her going, driving her feet. “So when you said you traded things like aluminum foil and people, you were lying to me, right? You don’t trade anything.”
Bay shook her head. “Nobody to trade with.”
“So, you’ve been here all alone? You said something about your wife.”
Bay kicked a stone down the road in front of her, kicked it again when she caught up with it.
The rock star handed her the guitar and dropped to the ground. She took off her left shoe, then peeled the sock off. A huge blister was rising on her big toe. “Fuck.”
Bay sighed. “You can use some of the stuffing from your vest to build some space around it.”
Gabby bent to pick a seam.
“No need. There’s a tear in the back. Anyhow, maybe it’s time to stop for the night.”
“Sorry. I saw the tear when you first gave me the vest, but I forgot about it. How far have we traveled?”
“Hard to say. We’re still on the park road.”
“Park road?”
“This is a protected wilderness area. Or it was. Once we hit asphalt, we’re halfway there. Then a little farther to a junction. Left at the T used to be vacation homes, but a hurricane took them twenty years ago. Right takes you to the city.”
Gabby groaned. She squinted at the setting sun. “Not even halfway.”
“But you’re still alive, and you’re complaining about a blister, not the cough or the sunburn.”
“I didn’t complain.”
“I don’t see you walking any farther, either.” Bay dropped her knapsack and untied a sleeping bag from the bottom.
“I don’t suppose you have two?”
Bay gave Gabby her most withering look. What kind of fool set out on this walk sick and unprepared? Then again, she had been the one who had driven the woman out, too afraid to interact with an actual person instead of the ghosts in her head.
“We’ll both fit,” she said. “Body heat’ll keep us warm, too.”
It was warmer than if they hadn’t shared, lying back to back squeezed into the sleeping bag. Not as warm as home, if she hadn’t set out to follow. The cold still seeped into her. Bay felt every inch of her left side, as if the bones themselves were in contact with the ground. Aware, too, of her back against the other woman, of the fact that she couldn’t remember the last time she had come in physical contact with a living person. The heat of Gabby’s fever burned through the layers of clothing, but she still shivered.
“Why are you living out there all alone?” Gabby asked.
Bay considered pretending she was asleep, but then she wanted to answer. “I said already we used to picnic out here, my wife and I. We always said this was where we’d spend our old age. I’d get a job as a ranger, we’d live out our days in the ranger’s cabin. I pictured having electricity, mind.”
She paused. She felt the tension in the other woman’s back as she suppressed a cough. “Debra was in California on a business trip when everything started going bad at a faster rate than it’d been going bad before. We never even found out what it was that messed up the electronics. Things just stopped working. We’d been living in a high-rise. I couldn’t stay in our building with no heat or water, but we couldn’t contact each other, and I wanted to be someplace Debra would find me. So when I didn’t hear from her for three months, I packed what I thought I might need into some kid’s wagon I found in the lobby and started walking. I knew she’d know to find me out here if she could.”