After Bonnie Tyler finished singing, Johnny Drake came on the radio . “Hey to all the survivors out there. Here’s a tune from way back when. The Doors and ‘Strange Days’.” The music filled the room.
After three days of barely existing, the music and the smell of the food and the renewed sense of a goal was almost sensory overload. I sat in the easy chair and let myself become accustomed to this sudden influx of sensation.
The only depressing part of the morning was when the Survivor Reach Out segment came on the radio while we were eating our breakfast. More lost souls looking for their fellow lost souls. I saw a TV program once where the mother of a murder victim whose body was never found had said that not knowing was worse than knowing her son was dead. For these people on the radio, they would probably never know what had happened to their families and that would probably haunt them for the rest of their lives.
After three survivors told their stories and appealed for their relatives to get in contact with the nearest Survivors Camp, Johnny Drake’s mellow voice came back on air. “Let’s remember what we’re surviving for, people. It’s all about family.”
After we had eaten, I went down to the shower and stood beneath the hot spray for fifteen minutes, letting the water roll over every inch of skin. Feeling cleansed, I went to the store room and picked out a new T-shirt. It had no logo, just a drawing of a yacht sailing into the sunset. The nautical folk sure liked their romanticism. I put on jeans and my boots and went up to the bridge while Lucy went below to have her shower.
The day was warm. In the distance, gulls cried. The sea undulated rhythmically as if it were breathing. The entire world seemed alive. We were alive.
I started the engine and pulled up the anchor before turning The Big Easy north and giving her a little throttle. We sailed through the calm water easily.
Maybe later I would get the fishing rods from below and try fishing for our dinner. We had plenty of food all around us. All we had to do was catch it.
Half an hour later, Lucy appeared on deck wearing jeans and a black sweater. I wondered if it was the sweater she had been wearing at Doug Latimer’s barbecue. She had washed her hair and it trailed damply over her shoulders. She placed the radio on the deck and waved up at me before taking a seat in the sun. I waved back. The sound of a Snow Patrol song drifted out of the radio.
For the first time in a long while, I felt like things might actually turn out OK. I wondered about the logistics of the rescue mission being mounted by the U.N. There was no way they could take all the survivors out of Britain in a single ship. If that was the case, the virus had hit harder than I thought possible. It was more likely that each Survivors Camp would go to the rendezvous point in turn as different ships arrived to take them to safety. The operation could take months. We had been worrying that we might miss the rescue as if it were a single event. Now that I thought about it, that was a ridiculous notion. There would be plenty of ships, coming and going over a span of weeks. We would be able to get on board one of them even if it meant going to a Survivors Camp for a week to be quarantined. That idea left a sour taste in my mouth but if it meant being rescued and starting a new life away from all of this, it was worth it.
We spent two weeks drifting off the coast of Scotland.
I managed to refuel The Big Easy at a deserted marina on the coast. The operation was carried out during heavy rain to protect us from zombies but even so, Lucy stood guard with the Colt while I figured out how to fill the tanks. We didn’t run into any trouble and we avoided the temptation to search the marine store there. We simply refuelled and left.
I found a hard-covered notebook in one of the cupboards and I spent most evenings writing the story of our survival from the time I felt like I was dying in the Welsh mountains to the present day. It was hard to write about Mike and Elena now that they were dead but the experience helped me deal with some of the grief I had been holding inside.
We listened to the radio every day hoping that Johnny Drake might mention the rescue mission but he never did. The Reach Out appeals didn’t mention it either. Nobody said, “We’re going to the rescue boats.” They just asked their relatives to contact the army or the nearest Survivors Camp. Despite the sadness we felt every time the Reach Out was broadcast, the music that played in between those broadcasts was a constant companion and made us feel like we were still part of the world.
No ships arrived in Scotland as far as we could tell. I spent hours on the bridge scanning the sea with the high-powered binoculars. A few times I saw smaller boats like our own in the distance but I didn’t hail them or approach them. The memories of The Hornet meant I wouldn’t be boarding any strange vessels unless it was an emergency.
I searched the radio frequencies for transmissions from American ships but all I got was dead air.
Lucy spent the days reading paperbacks from the bookshelves and keeping stock of our food supplies. She also fished off the back of the boat. She wrote in her own journal in the evenings but I had no idea what she put in there.
We spent the nights entwined together in the bed.
I started to wonder if the rescue was ever going to happen.
I even wondered if I wanted it to.
We were surviving well and we were independent of any military control. I wasn’t sure I wanted to give that up. Out here, we were in control of our lives. If we became part of a U.N. rescue mission, we would become refugees. Our future might be safe but at what cost to our freedom?
I distrusted authority. I always had. The thought of putting my life in their hands made something deep inside me rebel.
As far as post-apocalypse life went, ours was pretty good. I was sure there were plenty of people on the mainland fighting to survive a living hell. What would they give to be out here at sea on a comfortable boat, eating fresh fish and not worrying about zombies? Were we really going to give all that up?
The answer came one afternoon when I was looking through the binoculars and I spotted a luxury yacht in the distance. It wasn’t the first time I had seen a boat through the high-powered lenses but something about this boat was different.
She was flying the stars and stripes.
twenty seven
I called down to Lucy. She was sitting on the aft deck reading in the sun.
“There’s an American boat over there.” I pointed at the speck in the distance.
She shielded her eyes from the sun and peered across the water. “I don’t see it.”
“It’s some way off. Should we go over there?”
“What for?”
“If the crew are American, they might know something about the rescue mission.”
She shrugged. “I guess so.”
I hadn’t spoken to Lucy about my reluctance at getting rescued but it seemed to me that she was having similar thoughts. “We don’t have to go,” I said.
“No, we’ll check it out. But we have to be careful, OK?”
I grabbed the baseball bat I kept on the bridge and shook it in the air. “No fear. Me mighty warrior.”
She rolled her eyes. “I’ll get the gun.”
I grinned and gunned the engines, turning The Big Easy around so she pointed directly at the American yacht.
Her name was Solstice and she looked like she was worth a million dollars. Sitting proud and sleek on the ocean, she had an aft deck, a foredeck and an upper deck as well as a deck just above water level for swimming and diving. Her hull was dotted with portholes but her upper windows were made of tinted curved glass, running almost the entire length of the cabin. A table and chairs were set out on the aft deck.
I couldn’t see any life on board. No movement.