Amok: An Anthology of Asia-Pacific Speculative Fiction (36 page)

BOOK: Amok: An Anthology of Asia-Pacific Speculative Fiction

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Goodale had turned to watch the digested debris fill the hopper, and didn’t see Koo come up alongside the scoop. She dropped one anchor, grabbed the other with both hands, and heaved it into the screw. She picked up the second anchor and repeated the motion, then backed away quickly.

A second later, an ear-piercing screech filled the air. I clapped my hands to my ears as the rear end of the harvester raised slightly, like a bee sucking pollen, then crashed back to the sea. Smoke poured from the engine compartment under the bridge. Goodale stared in disbelief for a moment before killing the engines.

I grabbed Koo in my arms and lifted her off the ground. Straining to find words strong enough to indicate my awe, I said, “God, I love you!”

She hugged me back, but her teeth were chattering too hard to speak.

That night, as I tried to make hot soup out of a can of army rations that might have been dog food, she explained that a section had broken from the leading edge of the screw thread weeks before, leaving a gap they’d intended to repair while in dry dock over the winter. She estimated the damage caused by carefully dropping the anchors into that gap would take months to repair.

Those were the worst months of my life. At first, Koo discounted her sniffles as a cold that would soon pass. However, the weather turned piercingly cold, with a persistent arctic wind and fog, so the damp was unavoidable. At first, I spent my daylight hours filling the bite the harvester had taken out of the island. On the horizon, I could occasionally see the star-like lights of welding torches as Goodale and his people worked to repair the harvester.

When Koo began hacking up yellow sputum, I put aside my work and huddled with her under a thick pile of rugs, sail cloth and awnings, creating our own body-heat sweat lodge. We passed the long nights in intimate conversation. I’d always believed that inside each of us are a few ugly rooms best left unexplored, but I opened mine for her, and she didn’t flinch. The memories she was most reluctant to reveal, I found touching.

When she began coughing blood, I did the only thing I could. I paddled out to the cargo ship.

The crew watched from the railing as I approached a steel cliff two stories high.

Goodale let me bob there for a couple of hours, futilely hailing the ship, before finally deigning to appear.

When his head appeared over the rail, I said, “I want to make a trade.”

He spat, but the wind took it well clear of my boat. “What do you want?”

“I want antibiotics. Koo is really sick.”

“In return for what?”

“The island.” My kingdom for a horse.

He rubbed his chin. “But it’s not your island to trade, kid.”

“Whatever. I won’t stand in your way, as long as you leave enough land for us to live on until we can be rescued.”

“Nope,” he said.

“What do you want?” I said. “Anything.”

He smiled. “You got nothing to bargain with, kid. I’m going to get the island whether you like it or not.”

I bit back my anger, on Koo’s account. “You can’t just let her die.”

“Is that right? You’re the one to tell me what I can and can’t do?” He shook his head. “Company medicines aren’t for traitors.” He pointed toward the horizon. “You best get home. Looks to me like a gale’s coming.”

I sewed Koo in a cocoon of Tyvek, which claims to be highly water resistant. I weighed her down with a hundred pounds of anchors. Five thousand feet to the sea floor. From there, she’d never be able to witness the destruction of her adopted homeland.

I spent the second half of the winter lying in the shack, too dispirited to even build a fire most of the time. Occasionally, I’d screw up enough initiative to dress and walk down to the Bay of Boxes and watch Mr Pepsodent swim back and forth. I wondered how long it would take him to devour me.

The harvester repairs were completed just in time for the first overcast, calm day, a harbinger of the spring climbing the latitudes toward us. I was gumming something cloyingly sweet and brown. The packaging, in Chinese, featured a grinning family, but it wasn’t bringing me any joy.

I heard the diesels start up a quarter of a mile away, followed quickly by the smell of exhaust. The wind was out of the east.

I threw off my rugs and stood, my joints creaking from the effort. In the moment of clarity that accompanies a sea change, I saw my shack through a stranger’s eyes: a hovel of junk, the type of mean existence that presages life at the end of human history.

I found scissors and trimmed my beard as much as possible, then shaved off the rest. I cut my bangs so they didn’t hang over my eyes, brushed my teeth, cleaned out my ears. Took a teeth-chattering sponge bath. Ripped open a plastic bag containing a white captain’s uniform from a Norwegian Cruise Line ship. The harvester was closing quickly.

I saluted the shack, then descended Mount Détritus. Goodale was headed toward Koo’s Cove, but I was able to beat him there, even walking at a funeral pace. I grabbed a plastic deck chair along the way. When I reached the shore, I took a seat, facing the harvester.

Goodale was smoking again. He looked calm, almost bored, altering his course slightly so that I was dead-centre in his path.

I turned to look over my kingdom. Where Goodale saw billions of dollars in plastics and other recyclables, I saw the only real home I’d ever known. The Christmas tree of aluminium foil that Koo and I had erected. The basketball court, fishing net hung from a hoop that once held a wooden barrel together. The Air Mail mailbox I’d fixed to the top of a mast high in the air above my shack.

Until that moment, I never truly understood why my parents had been willing to die for their country.

Mr Pepsodent, prescient, appeared, swimming laps along the shore. Goodale was now so close I could see the gravy stain on his lapel. He obviously had no intention of stopping. I closed my eyes and thought of Koo.

Then the engine sound changed pitch. I opened my eyes to an amazing sight—the harvester rising from the sea. Goodale clung to the ship’s wheel as it rose higher, higher, until I could see that it was being carried on the broad white jaws of a pair of humpback whales. At apogee, the whales flicked their heads in unison, tossing the harvester free. It flipped once before smashing into the water, upside down. Immediately, more whales came flying across the surface of the sea, smashing into the harvester with their jaws. A huge hole appeared in the hull and water began to pour in. Again, the harvester was lifted, and this time, as it went flying, Goodale, with a death grip on a life preserver, was tossed free. He landed twenty yards clear of the wreck, which the whales continued to pound.

Goodale looked my way, terror and pleading in his eyes, and began frantically swimming toward Flotsamland.

Mr Pepsodent met him halfway there.

Fair Share Gaea returned two weeks later, just as I’d finished constructing Harvester Harbour from Goodale’s wreckage. They came by ship, this time, a small cruise ship, and not alone.

Pamela came ashore first.

“You made it,” she said, relieved, and gave me a hug.

“I hope you have good news about our sovereignty,” I said. “We have our first martyr.” I told her what had happened in her absence.

She put her arm around me in sympathy, then pointed to the ship. The railing was crowded with people. “I’m afraid I have some bad news, Harry. The courts nullified the contract with Midas last Monday, and boy, did we celebrate. We didn’t know that the UN had already promised the island away.”

My eyes were watering in the ocean wind.

She nodded toward the onlookers. “The NPC took these people’s island away to build a wave power collector farm. They demanded another island as compensation, so Flotsamland is what they were given. Some deal, huh?”

I guess the Cherokee wouldn’t have been surprised.

“Still,” she said, “it’s not all bad news. You’ve done your job, Harry. You get to go home.”

So I abdicated the throne, and followed her back to the cruise ship. Later, as we sailed away, I realised that Pam was wrong about one thing.

I wasn’t returning home. I was leaving it.

About Tom Barlow

Tom Barlow is an Ohio, USA writer. He is the author of the science fiction novel
I’ll Meet You Yesterday
, and his work has been featured in anthologies including
Best American Mystery Stories 2013
,
Hard-Boiled Horror
,
Best of Crossed Genres #2
,
Battlespace, and Desolate Places
, as well as many magazines including
The Intergalactic Medicine Show
,
Digital Science Fiction
,
Coyote Wild,
and
Encounters
.