Barren Fields (20 page)

Jeremiah gives one last look filled with anger and frustration, and then all expression fades as his face goes blank. He turns and walks off angry that his brother can’t see the truth of what is happening. His sister Mariah died at the store the day she was bitten, and whatever is in her body now, isn’t the soul she was born with. No one is immune, bitten people are either possessed by lower demons and attack, or are possessed by higher demons to confuse the survivors and draw them away from the Lord. If this wasn’t the case then he wouldn’t have killed his wife and daughter. If there were really immune people then he could have let them live, but there is no immunity, only possession. He knew the moment after they were all attacked, killing them was exactly what he had to do.

I need to talk to my people about this,
Jeremiah thinks to himself, and walks around the ranch gathering those that believe in things the way he does, to have his own meeting about the morning rescue operation.

Chapter 17

Standing Room Only

Pacific Ocean.

Keith and Frank take the sailboat out, away from land. Each man is silent and in his own tortured world. Light clouds drift by high up in the soft blue sky. The hull running against the water sounds like the hushed roar of a waterfall, randomly interrupted by the slapping of a wave.

“George is still unconscious,” Keith says from the bow.

“I don’t know what’s going on with Jack. Come here and take a look at his eyes. He’s just staring out, and they look strange, all glossed over. Do you think he’s in shock? You said he shot Ellen. Maybe doing that put him over the edge.”

“I don’t think it’s shock, Frank. I think he’s dying. His eyes look like death.”

*

The sails are lowered and the boat is drifting. Keith and Frank say their respects to Carl and Ellen before lowering them over the side. The remaining few hours of daylight are spent hauling buckets of water out of the ocean and scrubbing the blood from the deck.

That night they have a fitful sleep complete with twisted versions of the gun battle and the infected arriving, this time without anyone escaping alive.

George woke up in the middle of the night long enough to scream and vomit. They aren’t sure if his regurgitation was caused by radiation sickness or the concussion he received from the blow to his head. Whatever the cause, he has a rough couple of days ahead of him.

Frank wakes up and opens his eyes to the brightening morning sky. He looks over and then back to see Keith standing at the wheel and looking at the instruments.

“You don’t look so good. Did you get any sleep?”

“No not much,” he says in a distant voice still staring at the instrument panel.

“What’s wrong?”

“The GPS is out. It might be because of where we are, but more likely, the satellites are starting to drop out of their orbits without ground based corrections. We still have the compass, but without the coordinates and our drifting through the night I can’t tell exactly where we are.”

“Let’s head east, back to the mainland. Either we’ll get a signal or we can figure out where we are based on what we see on land.”

“Yeah, that’s fine. It’s just bothering me.”

“What, the GPS?”

“No. Well, yes. That and everything else. I’ve been up for the last hour thinking about where we were and what we’ve lost. I don’t mean us specifically, I mean the human race. We had seven billion people on the planet a month ago. How many do you think are left?”

Frank doesn’t answer, and Keith didn’t expect him to. He just frowns a bit and shakes his head.

“Have you checked on George and Jack yet?”

“No. I didn’t want to go in there until you were awake. I don’t expect Jack to still be alive, and I don’t want to be the one to find him otherwise.”

*

“George is awake,” Frank calls out.

Keith lowers the sails and heads below.

“I feel like a mule kicked me in the face. Can you get me some aspirin?”

Frank hands him a bottle of pills and a cup of water.

“Don’t drink too fast. You don’t want that coming back up on you. Or on us, for that matter.”

George swallows the pills and holds his hands to his head before asking, “What happened with those guys that tried to rob us?”

Keith and Frank exchanged glances. Frank shakes his head and points at Keith.

“They’re all gone. The thieves and the others.”

Frank brings his hands down and slowly looks around the cabin before returning his gaze to Keith.

“They shot Thomas and Carl first. Ellen died during the shootout while killing the attackers. Jack died last night from the radiation poisoning. We buried him at sea an hour ago.”

“Just the three of us then?”

The two nod in reply, and the group shares a moment of thoughtful silence.

“We were moving when I woke up. Is there a destination we’re headed now?”

“The GPS is out so we’re heading back to the coast to get our bearings. After that we will head north and travel as far as possible before the ocean is too rough for us to continue. Then we either go to the mainland to be killed, stay in the Pacific where we can sink and drown, or find a small unpopulated island to spend the rest of the winter. My vote is go to the mainland and hang out with the locals.”

“I’ll vote against that choice, if you don’t mind. I’d like to stay down here and think about what you just said. Let me know when you see land.”

*

“George, the GPS popped back on for a while. We’re right here on the map and heading toward San Diego.”

“What do you think we should do?”

“I want to stop there and visit the zoo, of course. What do you mean what should we do? Head north, avoid any large islands, boats on the water, or shorelines.”

“I know there is a certain danger involved, but I would like to get closer to the coast. I want to see if it is as bad as we imagine, but also think it will be safer for us. We should stay along the coast in case the GPS goes out completely.”

“We still have the compass, but I get what you’re saying. It’s always safer if we know where we are.”

*

Over the next eight days the trio sailed north. From San Diego to Santa Barbara all along the coast there is nothing but people visible on the shore. Two hundred miles of shoreline filled shoulder to shoulder and as far back as the eye could see, nothing but infected bodies standing and crying out to the ocean.

“We were approached three times by other boats and what did we do? We shot at them as soon as they headed in our direction,” Keith says to the others.

“You shot at them too. Are you saying we should have done something differently, maybe let them get closer and ask if they were friends?” George snaps back.

“No, that’s not what I mean. The people on board those boats could have been friendly but this isn’t the kind of world where we can take those chances anymore. We did the right thing. Friendly or not, there are only so many supplies on board. We don’t have a set destination to wait out the winter or a certain time frame where we think we can get to Oregon. We need to figure out what we’re going to do.”

“I agree,” Frank says looking at George. “Going along the coast to see what was happening was a good idea, but we can’t keep doing that. Eventually a boat that we shoot at to scare away will keep coming. And no matter how much you want it to happen, no section of coast is going to open up for us to park the sailboat and go out for a stroll. Those infected people are everywhere.”

“I guess I was hoping to make it onto the mainland somewhere.”

“It isn’t going to happen. The entire coast is a death sentence and the more time that passes the fewer resources other survivors on ships will have. People will get desperate and not care if we shoot at them, like Frank said. They might even try to ram us and sink us both in desperation. We still have bullets so they’ll figure we still have food as well.”

“I’m hoping you two have an idea where to go then, because I have no clue.”

Frank just shakes his head, and says, “I was going along with Keith but don’t have any ideas. Staying on the water by the coast will get us killed sooner than later.”

“I think we have two options. The first one I don’t like and give my
no
vote to right now. Oil rigs. We passed seven outside of Santa Barbara already, and I bet there’s more along the coast. We could try for them, but I bet anyone on the water has tried them or is already there. They could also be filled with infected people like the islands.”

“My second idea is outside of San Francisco. There is this little spot of an island on the nautical map. I checked in Carl and Ellen’s maps for San Francisco, and it’s called the
Farallon Islands
. It’s closer to the mainland than all of the other places, twenty miles, but it’s small and listed as a wildlife refuge. No one lives there.”

“How are we going to survive the winter on an empty island?”

“It isn’t empty. It has two houses or buildings. No one lives there permanently, look at this brochure I found. They must have gone there at some point or wanted to. I’m thinking the water up there has been rough for the last month, so many people might not have thought to head there.”

“Or it could be covered with infected as well.”

“That’s fine too, because it’s a small island where we can probably see from side to side. If the infected are there, we can kill them all and still go ashore. Once we’re on the island, we can defend it from any boats that crash there with infected on board.”

“And if there are people on the island already?”

They all look at each other entertaining the possibility of someone rejecting their ability to land.

“We deal with that when we have to and based on how they react to us.”

“You seem pretty enthusiastic about this, Keith. I’ll agree with you on the oil rigs. I don’t want to try sailing up to one. It would be too easy to be shot from up above. What about you, Frank?”

“I say we go for the island. I want to get off the boat and sort through things on dry land.”

“Okay. I’ll go along as well. Let’s head to the Farallon Islands.”

*

“Maybe we should try for Hawaii after all,” Keith says mockingly after their arrival to Farallon.

They circled the main island with tremendous effort due to the large ocean swells and found no dock or berthing point. The island’s shore is a rocky mess that will tear apart the sailboat if they try getting close. It is covered with birds, seals, and many infected people who are scattered around attempting to catch and eat anything that moves.

“I think this will work,” Frank says with mock confidence.

“I know you were joking, Frank, but I do think we can make it here. The land isn’t packed with the infected, and they are too distracted to bunch up at one point or on the shore. They haven’t even noticed us with all of the other boats anchored around the island, so we could go ashore in the dinghy and start killing them one by one.”

“It looked to me that all the anchored boats have been here a while and no one seems to be on them, so no prior claims to the land. And the biggest positive is the boats themselves. If something happens to the sailboat over the winter there will be at least one or two other boats out there to choose from come spring. If they all wash away then the island with probably wash away with them.”

*

Three days, one hundred and eighty six rounds, and fifteen dinghy rides later, the men are satisfied the island is clear of the infected. It will take several more days to transport all of the supplies onto the island and up to the researchers’ buildings.

George is feeling nauseous again so they are leaving him on shore to guard the supplies. It seems seals are curious creatures and will gladly climb on top of any boxes people leave on the shore. Luckily it isn’t December yet. Elephant seals are supposed to arrive then and there is no way to make an elephant seal move off of a spot it chooses to lie on.

*

Scavenging trips were made to each of the boats anchored off the island over the following two weeks. Various supplies were found, from guns, to food, to medicine. Nothing which they didn’t already have but they appreciated finding it anyway. The real boon came from two different sailboats. They were both older craft, one was larger than Carl’s boat and the second about the same size, but both were definitely older and had seen a lot of sailing. There were Ham radios in each of them. Those would come in handy in the spring when they were able to get off the island. 

A treasure trove of board games, cards, and music was found the first night in one of the buildings. The three of them spent each night playing chess, checkers, and poker while turning through the channels of the Ham radio trying to find someone to listen to.

Turns were taken for cooking meals, they did laundry and dishes together, and they each had a generally good time. It was like being on an extended vacation in a cabin by the ocean.

Every morning the trio would walk around the island and check for newly arrived boats, parked or crashed, and any infected they may have brought with them. They never found a new arrival. If anyone made it out of San Francisco, they made it out early and went south if they were on the water. The waves really do get bad out here during storms.

The three managed quite well together until this morning. George died in his sleep.

He hid his increasing pain and sickness from them well. They had no clue he was dealing with anything other than occasional bouts of cabin fever. Frank and Keith were waiting for him to come down for breakfast and discovered his stash of empty pain medicine bottles. Things they collected at Cedros Island. He wasn’t the type to abuse them and they didn’t suspect an overdose, but with so many bottles, they couldn’t be certain of anything.

The truth arrived when they moved his body and discovered his notebook. He must have found it among one of the scientist’s things because there were notes about the wildlife on half of the pages. If the name
George
wasn’t scribbled on the front, they would have stopped looking at it after the third page describing the actions of the Tufted Puffin.