The Boat (2 page)

Maggie mostly liked everyone aboard the ‘ThreeBees’, as everyone called it for shorthand.
Barbra’s Bay Breeze
, along with being a general mouthful, was also a bit of a tongue-twister. Say it ten times fast, dare ya.

Maggie smiled, but it was faint and brief. Joe used to make up inane tongue twisters and try and make Maggie say them. Brown bloody brook, or bracket biscuit basket, or laying larger lager. Silly things for silly times. It had even got on her nerves after a while. What she wouldn’t give to have those times back now, though. To have Joe back.

A small, warm hand slipped into hers and she looked down to see Babygirl standing next to her. Baby clutched a stuffed rabbit in her free hand and gazed up at Maggie with anxious blue eyes. Maggie had noticed that Baby oftentimes seemed to pick up on other people’s feelings. Was it because she was a naturally sensitive child or just scared and watchful? Or was it all those things?

Maggie had found Baby during her trek to the shore. Baby had been thin as a shadow and when asked her name had only been able to whisper the generic but somehow fitting ‘Babygirl’. She looked maybe six or seven, but had mentally regressed during her trial on land. Maggie was as amazed as ever that this little one had survived…not many children had. Too vulnerable.

She smiled at Babygirl and squeezed her hand. Baby smiled back. Her hair was angelically white blonde, but thin, and her skin had an almost translucent look to it. She was a beautiful child, but it was a fleeting beauty, Maggie knew. When Babygirl reached her late teens or early twenties, that thin hair would only look ragged and her fragile skin would show every bad gene that was just waiting to morph this pretty child into a prematurely aging, white trash stereotype.

But maybe there weren’t any more stereotypes
, Maggie thought.
Maybe we can at least put those to rest with all the legitimately dead back on land.
Then she shook her head. All the old, bad stuff was probably just as active as those shuffling corpses out there. Just waiting for their time to come around again. Maggie shivered.

“Miss Maggie!” Randy said and tossed her the rope, making her jump.

Line
, she corrected herself,
it’s called a line, not a rope
, and she tied it to one of the cleats at the back of the boat (
prow? no…port? Oh, the hell with it
). She reached a hand down to Randy.

“Permission to come aboard?” he said and snapped a salute at her. Maggie laughed but she didn’t meet his eyes. Couldn’t. She was pretty close to tears, she realized, somehow brought on by Randy’s good-natured foolishness. Randy continued to stand at rigid attention, grinning and oblivious.

But Bonnie noticed.

“Randy,
please
just get on the boat so I can get out of this torture device.” She shot Maggie a sympathetic glance and Maggie’s smile deepened past polite, warming her face. 

Bonnie put her hands out for Maggie and Randy to pull her aboard. She squeaked a little as they heaved her up onto the teak deck. “We saw a snake,” Bonnie said in tones you would normally reserve for statements like ‘it’s malignant’ or ‘the puppy died’. She shook her head as Maggie tutted and rubbed a comforting circle on her back. “It was huge. A monster! Almost as big as
you
, Babygirl!”

Baby’s eyes went wide as she clutched her rabbit tighter under her chin and grimaced with fear–but she was only play-acting, drawn in by Bonnie’s theatrical tone.

“Jesus, Bonnie,” Randy said and bent to re-tie the line, huffing a bit over his watermelon of a stomach. “That snake was no bigger than a handful and you know it. Don’t scare Babygirl. She’ll never come fishing with me if you do that.” Randy winked at Baby and she smiled shyly, tucking herself more firmly behind Maggie.

“There was a sinker on the line, too,” Bonnie said, her tone casual. “I didn’t think we were close enough to the shoreline to catch one of those nasty things.” She shrugged and began to pick at the catches holding her life vest on. Her fingernails were still nicely shaped, if shorter than she’d ever worn them as an adult.
No acrylics on the ThreeBees
, she thought and sighed to herself. At least she had a little bottle of polish tucked away back in her room. Being stuck in this situation was no reason not to look as nice as possible, was it? Although she was starting to get tired of ‘Autumn Shimmer’ after two months of nothing but. Especially since it wasn’t Autumn and wouldn’t be for a couple of months.

Maggie had stiffened at Bonnie’s words and she turned to address Randy. “No trouble? With the sinker?”

Randy shook his head and smiled. “No. Not really. It left a few fingers in the rowboat, but other than that…no problems.”

“Fingers? In the rowboat?” Baby grabbed Maggie’s hand again, even tighter.

Randy leaned over and smiled into Baby’s face. “Yes, but don’t you worry, Babygirl. Fingers can’t hurtcha’!” He wiggled his in her direction in a tickling motion. She giggled but then looked to Maggie for confirmation.

“Well, we don’t really know for sure, though. We should probably get them out of there,” Maggie said. She was a lot more cautious than Randy and Bonnie. She’d seen more in the days right after the beginning of the end; been out in it longer as she’d made her way shoreward.

Randy and Bonnie were residents of a town right near here, Cape May? Was that where they said they’d come from? They’d had an easier time of it. When everything had fallen apart, they’d simply taken to the water like anyone else with a boat. People noticed very quickly that whatever else the walking dead could do, they couldn’t swim. It wasn’t long before people started referring to them as sinkers or chum.

Maggie and Joe had lived in New Jersey, too, but quite a bit further inland, almost to Philadelphia in a town known for its small, friendly neighborhoods. She and Joe had had a Cape Cod on a quarter acre yard and had lived on their street for thirteen years.

~ ~ ~

The Tuesday that it really broke–June 7
–Joe never made it home from his job in the city. She still couldn’t think about it without a heavy knot forming in her stomach.

He called from his cell and Maggie had already been home, standing in the kitchen, still in her scrubs; she wasn’t due back in to the hospital again for the next two days. She was exhausted from her last shift as an ER nurse. There had been so many people who came in with the flu…it had been like some kind of crazy, overnight epidemic…that her original shift had been extended by four hours.

She had the television on the counter turned to a local news station. Joe’s voice was broken up because he was on the train. Part of his ride–before the bridge–was underground. He said not to worry and he’d see her soon and to lock up.

He said he loved her.

As Maggie listened to his voice, the television was showing Philadelphia. So many people in the streets. They seemed to be pouring from every building in a human flood. The camera must have been right outside the news station and it was directed up Broad, a main thoroughfare. There was no word in Maggie’s vocabulary for what she was seeing. Chaos, anarchy, pandemonium…none of these words were big enough–bad enough–to describe what was happening. People were being hit by cars, by city busses, by cabs. They were knocking into each other, falling, screaming, crying, and in some cases, fighting.

As she watched, one man–a young man, maybe a student–was hit by a car and knocked to the side of the road. As he struggled to stand, more people ran past, kicking him or running right over his hands, arms and head as he struggled. Then a car ran over his mid-section and he stopped struggling. He was tiny and blurry; a blurred mass of denim and blood and books. Maggie stared, horrified, her mouth hanging open as she listened to Joe’s chopped up voice. She nodded as if he could see her and stepped closer to the television. The young man lay still as death. Did she really just watch that kid die? On television? Her mind danced and feinted, trying for a less unsavory explanation…but there was none. “Joe,” she said, her voice a shocked rasp. “Joe, I just saw…I just saw a guy, a boy, get…”

The blurry corpse twitched. Maggie stepped back sharply, her heart leaping painfully. Had that kid…? Had he
moved
? “Joe, you won’t believe this but…”

Joe’s voice went on and on. He couldn’t hear her, she realized. She could hear him, but he couldn’t hear her. “Joe?” she said, her voice tiny, a little girl’s voice.

The young man moved again and she felt a shift of hope like warm water in her head but then that warmth was washed away by icy shock…the young man was dragging himself up onto the sidewalk. But only half of himself. Only his front half. From mid-chest down, he’d been severed. She could just make out the twin lumps of his lungs dragging behind him…hanging on by threads.

The running people on the sidewalk dodged away from him as instinctively as sheep will turn from a dog. Or a coyote. He grabbed at each flying pair of legs. “Joe, this kid, he’s not dead, he’s not dead he’s oh god what is he what’s happening…?”

On some level she realized she wasn’t making any sense and she closed her mouth. She was scaring herself. Joe told her to keep the doors locked. Don’t go outside. He loved her. “Maggie? Maggie can        me? Ma         I love you can          wrong with the train but      Maggie?”

A lady fell down, right in front of the young man. Had she been pushed? Maggie thought so, yes. The young man grabbed at the lady, grabbed her hair and pulled himself up onto her. Her arms flailed and she must have been screaming, of course she was, but there was no sound from the television. The young man was…he was…Maggie slid to the floor, her back against the kitchen cabinets, until the television was above her, the picture distorted by the angle. She said, “Joe please god please come home Joe come home please.” Her voice was high and thin. She couldn’t tell if she was hearing herself from outside or inside. She didn’t care.

That young man was eating that lady. Eating her face. Tearing great hunks from her throat. Then the camera must have been hit because the scene seemed to float through the air, revolving, toppling. Maggie experienced a strong sense of vertigo as the camera fell.

“Maggie? I lov           me?     Can–” Joe’s voice cut off all at once and Maggie vomited between her legs onto the kitchen floor.

~ ~ ~

Maggie sent Babygirl along with Randy and Bonnie and then stepped down into the little rowboat. ThreeBees had two rowboats tied to the back of it plus two jet skis tied up alongside. From her vantage point on the rowboat, Maggie looked back at the ThreeBees. It had once been something pretty special, Maggie surmised, someone’s Shangri-la.
Barbra’s Bay Breeze
was painted in gold across her back end in boasting, fancy script.

Now, after two months of serious habitation, it was looking much worse for wear. The boats and jet skis tied up around it gave the formerly sleek vessel a doddering, mother hen look. It (
she
, Maggie corrected herself,
she
) was a sixty-foot cabin cruiser, a weekender yacht for someone of moderate wealth. Three bedrooms and a bathroom (
head, Maggie, it’s called a head,
she thought and another ghost of a smile crossed her lips…what Joe would have said about that!). The second level, the level she was looking at, consisted of the back deck, side decks, and front deck; and inside, a big salon and a galley. The cockpit was one deck up…the staterooms one deck below.

There were nine people living on it now. Randy and Bonnie, herself, Babygirl (she and Babygirl shared a bedroom), Jade and Singer, a brother and sister from New York in their mid-twenties who’d been staying with family in Sea Isle. Mrs. Allen, who had to be at least eighty, and Denny and Brian, roommates from Stockton State who’d managed to find their way to the coast. Just as Maggie had done. The young men bedded down in the salon and Jade and Mrs. Allen shared the remaining bedroom.

Clothing hung from a line draped across the entryway from the salon to the back deck, drying in the wind.
Classy
, Maggie thought to herself,
very, very classy. Bet the former owners never thought to dry their underthings on a line this way as they cruised from port to port
. But of course, they had to conserve resources. Most important thing out here: resources. Her eyes slid with unconscious resentment to
Flyboy
, floating serenely out on the waves about a half-mile away.

Flyboy
was a yacht, too, but Maggie surmised that the owners of
Barbra’s Bay Breeze
would have gazed upon
Flyboy
with envy so deep that it would almost have been a physical itch.
Flyboy
was a super yacht: somewhere just over two hundred feet, Maggie would guess, eight guest rooms, six crew’s quarters, two salons, three heads, six decks–four above the water, two below, two galleys, a crew’s mess, a gym, a media room, an elevator (which wasn’t put to use), a grand circular staircase, a garage that held a runabout and jet skis or even a car…everything the seafaring billionaire would need to be comfortable.

Talk about needing resources
, Maggie thought
, what got used on that sucker in just one week could run the ThreeBees for a year!

But
Flyboy
also held over eighty people right now. Maggie had been on it last about a week ago for the general assembly. The formerly elegant appointments on
Flyboy
were looking even worse for wear than their own little ThreeBees. Cabinets had been chipped and countertops stained. Hand stitched leather upholstery had been snagged and gouged. Gym equipment had long since been heaved overboard to make room for beds. The luxurious owner’s quarters had been occupied by at least ten people camped out in nests of blankets and even couch cushions filched from the once glamorous salons–what once had been the private domain of some rich oil executive was now actually the least desirable area on the boat–kind of a cattle pen of humanity. The floors were dull and dirty. If the former owners could see
Flyboy
now, they’d probably faint dead away in a blue-blooded swoon.