Flotilla
Authors: Daniel Haight
Flotilla
By Daniel Haight
Copyright (c) 2011 Daniel R. Haight
This is a work of fiction. Names, character, places and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
FLOTILLA
ISBN-13: 978-0-615-56254-4
Cover Image: (c) Jeff Dickerson - Dickerson Photography, Orangevale, CA
[email protected]
Dedications
This book is dedicated to a group of very special people:
To N.L and T.T.L.
- This is for you.
To the Lavender Hill Mob (R.H., J.A and P.T.)
- Thank you for cheering me on.
Acknowledgements
I also want to take a moment to thank some people who were influential to taking Flotilla from project to product:
Joe Quirk
- From our first conversation two years ago until now, you've always been an unflagging supporter to a first-time novelist. Thank you for your kindness and your help.
Allen Steele
- I picked up Orbital Decay over twenty years ago when I was in junior high school. I never imagined that I would be approaching you for help in getting published or that you would be so helpful. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart and a little to the left ... this is truly humbling and awesome.
Amity Westcott
- my un-official editor who did more than any official editor ever could.
The Creative Convention forum at Somethingawful.com -
Their advice and feedback were vital at different stages of this novel and always managed to tell me what I needed to hear - even if it wasn't what I wanted to hear. Thanks, guys.
Contents
Prologue - Is This Thing On? -
5
Chapter Two - Gardens and Guns -
18
Chapter Three - Career Opportunities -
35
Chapter Four - Main Street and The Big Fourth -
49
Chapter Five - Steeplechase
-
60
Chapter Six - The Ensenada Run
-
75
Chapter Seven - The Boys of Summer -
84
Chapter Nine - The Welcome Mat -
110
Chapter Ten - The Brief and Unsuccessful Voyage of the Cooger & Dark
-
120
Chapter Eleven - A Cane-Sugar Coke and the Trash Man
-
127
Chapter Twelve - T-Minus 30
-
140
Chapter Thirteen - The Meltdown -
150
Chapter Fourteen - The Draft
-
160
Chapter Fifteen - The Phoenix Patrol -
171
Chapter Sixteen - "We Gotta Go"
-
182
Chapter Seventeen - Into the Storm -
196
I don't know how much longer I have to live.
This speech-to-text thing gives me something to talk to and I don't feel like dictating a will. Can you do me a favor? If you happen to find this, will you please contact Rick Westfield or Theresa Bowman and tell them what's happened to us? I have no idea where they are. Theresa is my mom and she lives in West Covina so I'm hoping that if there's any central evacuation place for Los Angeles that you can find her there. Rick Westfield is my Dad, he was taken ashore and we're trying to find him now.
Me and my sister Madison are on board this old yacht. It's called the Horner C. It's my Dad's boat and it's a beast. I spent a lot of time swabbing decks but I've never driven (sailed?) it before. I've been at sea for over six months but I have almost zero experience at how things work when the boat is under power.
My name is Jim, by the way.
It's about 2230 right now, 10:30 to everyone besides us. The weather is pretty bad but I'm not complaining - if it wasn't for this storm Madison and I would have been grease spots on a deck somewhere. I'm hoping that the boat can handle it but we're getting water under the door to the bridge and the wind is blowing us like a kite all over the place. I can't hold my course to more than 2 or 3 degrees ... that might be the wind or the fact that this old tub hasn't moved in the last 10 years. I'm trying to watch our GPS, the black night outside our windshield and Madison all at once. She's asleep at the map table next to me ... I'm afraid she'll slide off the chair and crack her forehead on something.
I don't know how else to say it so I'll say it: the world has come to an end.
At first we heard the news that it was a virus of some kind. That was bad enough. Then more news started rolling in ... there were coordinated attacks in several major cities. It just kept getting worse and worse.
We watched it all happen: riots in the Bay Area, Phoenix and St. Louis. There was a bug that was killing people in Baltimore and here in LA. Dirty bombs were set off in Reno, Plano and Vicksburg. Everyone on the Colony had family in one of those places and we were all riveted to the feed hoping to hear something, hoping they were okay. Hope started to dwindle when we caught the reports of the shootings. People outside the infected zones were killing people because they might have been sick. Nobody bothered to check first, though ... they just started shooting.
We personally were out of danger, as in 'not about to die of the plague or nuclear contamination', but we had other problems. The place where we lived until very recently, Pacific Fisheries Colony D, is ... well ... strange. Because it's strange, the problems you experienced there were strange. It's a long story but the only thing you need to know right now is that it is my home and it's the most dangerous place on earth.
Sorry, not 'is' ... was. I have to get used to talking about Colony in the past tense now. Half an hour ago, the Navy came along and sunk it to the bottom of the ocean.
Anyway, my dad got himself in the middle of something that I still don't know the half of. They took him away. He went ashore with everyone else looking for 'survivors' but that's a load of crap. It was pure suicide ... they didn't give him a choice. Dad gave us a hug and said: "If you don't hear from me in a day, send a message to your mom. If you don't hear from me in four, take the boat, the docks and anyone else you can and go north. Find a place called Puget Sound and look for a small island to hang out. You can stay for a while. I'll find you there and we will be together again."
That was four days ago. Now he's gone and some drug pirates tried to kill us. Like I said, it's a long story.
Two days later after Dad left, we were leaving messages for Mom that we never got a response to. We dodged the pirates and some really scummy people Dad screwed over. Two days after that, I cut the boat loose and we were headed out to sea - just ahead of the Navy. We got out of there just by the skin of our teeth and that's no lie.
I'm not saying things were great out on the Colony but at least nobody was trying to kill me. Not until four days ago. This app posts all my speech-to-text stuff to a blog page. Hopefully someone will find it. I'll post our coordinates as we go and if you haven't seen a post from us in more than 24 hours, will you call the Coast Guard, assuming we still have one?
Our coordinates on the Colony were
33deg24'9.37"N 120deg13'2.10"W
- if you are sending a rescue party, start looking for us here.
"You're really never going to give me an answer, are you?" she said. We were eating breakfast at a Denny's off the 110 in San Pedro. The boat would meet us in the Port of Los Angeles on some dock that Pacific Fisheries used as a point of embarkation for Colony visits.
So let's talk about how we get from there to here. When I first came to the Colony, it wasn't under happy circumstances. Sure, I wanted to visit my Dad out on the Colony and see its weirdness for myself but not like this. I was forcibly admitted to a 21-day session at a drug and alcohol treatment center. I got there because it was the third time I had been arrested for underage drinking and the first time that I was violating the terms of my probation by getting drunk. I wasn't even supposed to be out of the house - I was still grounded from getting probation two months ago.
They had to admit me for borderline alcohol poisoning. I passed out at the party and woke up handcuffed to a gurney while some RN the size of a fullback rammed an IV into my veins. Not my proudest moment.
