Chapter Fifteen #3
“The next awful thing. Something trying to kill us.”
I can see the solemn reminder in his eyes, the pain he still feels in his scarred flesh, and he twines his fingers through mine, turning his gaze back to the sea.
They arrive like a parade.
Boats in the distance.
Panic swells inside me. Hundreds of them, mostly sailboats, and I know this can’t be good. My fingers press against the windowpane, my breath steaming the glass.
“Some of them are burning,” Clay says.
I notice the thin trails of smoke rising up from several of the ships. “Why would they be burning?”
We stay inside, the rifle beside the front door. The two handguns, left behind by the men who we killed, rest on the kitchen counter, loaded.
But we know, if the people on those boats come ashore, we will be outnumbered. We will be at their mercy.
We wait for the sun to set before we step outside, walking down to the shore, scanning the ships. Most are dark, not even a hint of light. But a few glow with the unmistakable shroud of fire—fuel or wood hulls burning. We are quiet, listening, but there is no sound.
No voices.
Nothing in the dark.
“I think they’re abandoned,” Clay says. “Some are tipped on their sides, slowly sinking.”
It doesn’t make sense. Why would a few hundred ships be abandoned?
“I don’t like it,” I reply.
“Nae.”
It takes two days for the ships to drift by us, the silence of them eerie—like forgotten relics. But on the third day, when most have slipped beyond the horizon, one bumps up against our far shore.
A white catamaran, its pale blue sail flapping from the mast—torn, like shreds of paper—with a rope whipping wildly around it.
This side of the island is rocky and steep, the shore below nearly impossible to reach, but Clay strips off his shirt, stepping out of his pants, then kisses me on the lips. “I’ll be right back.”
“Wait!”
He stops, turns around. “There might be food,” he answers, seeing the fear in my eyes. “And we need more firewood.” He winks at me, as if it were no big deal. As if death weren’t always clawing at our door. “I’ll be careful, promise.”
It’s been days and we haven’t seen anyone on the other ships.
Maybe they’re truly empty. I nod, crack an encouraging smile, and watch him scramble down the rocks, his body favoring his right side, legs stiff, but his strong arms propelling him forward until he reaches the water.
The catamaran is heaving up over the rocks with each swell, and Clay has to time the waves, waiting for them to recede before he leaps onto the side of the boat, winces, then climbs over a metal wire that serves as a railing along the outer perimeter of the boat.
He touches his side with his palm—the place where the bullet is still lodged—then waves back at me so I know he’s safe, before striding toward the rear of the craft.
I’ve never been aboard a catamaran, but I’ve seen them in photographs, movies, and this one looks different. The angle is sleeker, shaped to a narrow point at the front. Streamlined and unfamiliar. A reminder of all the years of innovation that have passed in the real world since I left.
At the back of the boat, Clay walks past the large wheel, then glances up at me one last time, before stepping into a doorway, into the interior of the boat—and I lose sight of him.
If there’s anyone inside, they will think he’s an intruder, a thief. And I don’t know how strong he’d be in a fight. He’s hardly eaten in days, his wound still aching.
My gaze flicks to the slope below, calculating if I could make the climb. But the rocks are slick and oversized—much too big for me to navigate on my own. If I fell, scraped open a knee, or worse, broke a bone, I’d be creating more problems where currently there are none. So I stay put.
“Clay!” I call when too much time has passed. But I doubt he can hear me over the wind and the pummeling waves.
At last, he appears at the opening into the boat. In his arms, he’s carrying something, and he tosses it unceremoniously over the side onto the rocks.
I squint. It’s a chair—a wooden folding chair.
A moment later, he emerges with two more. And then another. Four in total, lying in a heap on the rocks.
He disappears into the ship again, this time emerging with an armload of books, and something I can’t make out.
The sound rises up with the wind: the ship scraping back violently against the rocks. It’s being pulled out to sea once again.
Clay hears it too—likely feels it—and he scrambles over the side of the boat, dropping several books into the water, but manages to keep ahold of most of them.
I watch as he climbs back up the rocks, and when he reaches me, he drops the books and a burlap bag at my feet. “They’ll be good for burning,” he says.
“We can’t burn these,” I reply, kneeling down to touch the spines of each book.
“It gets cold enough, or there’s no fire to make yer morning tea, I suspect ye’ll be begging me to burn them.”
I shoot him a look, but he only smiles back before turning to scramble down the rocks to retrieve the chairs.
I reach for the bag, pulling it open. Inside, I find rice—translucent, a good half pound of it. I let out a breath, relieved. It’s enough to last us a few days. I sort through the books, but none of them are titles—or authors—I recognize. Most are nonfiction, books on sailing and navigation.
Clay emerges from the rocks, dropping two of the wooden chairs onto the grass—breathing heavy, wiping at his forehead.
“Find anything worth reading?” he asks. “Or should we sacrifice them to the stove?”
“I don’t know,” I answer, distracted, when I see the corner of something sticking out from one of the books. I shimmy it free and I know instantly what it is.
I unfold its creased corners, spreading the map open on my lap.
It depicts the whole world.
And everything I once knew is broken.
We lay the map flat across the kitchen table.
It’s an odd discovery—in my time, paper maps had become nearly obsolete. The use of cell phones and GPS was ubiquitous. But this map reveals an unfamiliar landscape. Alien and unsettling. The continents are like no place I’ve ever stood before.
“The sea has taken the land,” Clay comments, leaning over the map, a palm resting at the corner.
“It’s nearly all ocean.”
“Aye. An’ a lot of it.”
None of the features look familiar—there is no remnant, no shape that mimics what I remember from geography class.
It’s been broken apart into smaller, scattered fragments of land.
Only a handful of larger landmasses remain, while the rest aren’t much larger than my thumb against the map.
It’s a world made of islands. The handwritten names of each atoll are unfamiliar yet echo some faint memory of their former identity.
Where Europe once stretched from the Atlantic to the North Sea, scattered clots of land are now marked Gaelen Reach, Nordhavn, and Rhinemark.
Africa is the Riftlands and Capa Noor. Asia is broken by indistinct tributaries, its fragments labeled Ulan, Isle of Varka, the Kulan Expanse, and farther south, names like the Ten Thousand Strands, Haekoro Drift, the Shattered Han.
And Antarctica, shaded green—no longer a region of ice—is inked with a single word: Crya.
Even the oceans have been retitled. The Atlantic is now Old Atlantic. What I think was once the Indian Ocean is marked Indari Waters, with smaller letters beneath that read: Sea of the Old Sun. And the Pacific—perhaps most haunting of all—is now called simply: the Vast Quiet.