Long Voyage Back (16 page)

Captain 01ly, tears dampening both cheeks, turned to look at Neil and Lisa and Jeanne who had been watching the separation from the wheelhouse. After several seconds delay he snorted: `. . You got breakfast ready yet, lady? I gotta get some eggs and coffee aboard my belly before I swamp us again with my dribble. Got any that whisky left there, Cap'n? I'm eighteen.'

The three stared at him.

`Nine o'clock in the morning and I ain't even pissed yet,' he went on. 'You got a john aboard this boat or can I pee off the side or use a bucket like real sailors do?'

Òff the aft deck is fine,' Neil answered.

`Would you like some bacon and eggs?' Jeanne asked.

"Course I'd like bacon and eggs,' Captain 01ly said as he stepped up out of the cockpit to get to the aft deck. 'And toast and juice and potatoes and anything else you got cooking. A dying, orphaned man got to make the most of his last days. Least he can do is eat like a pig.' Turning his back to the ladies, who went below to prepare breakfast, Captain 011y pissed with dignity off the aft deck.

20

It was thirty minutes later, after they had all finished eating breakfast and begun sailing down the Bay that Neil, on his way forward to check the genoa, placed one foot on to the little step built into the cabin wall for climbing forward, and stopped. He stared at the cockpit deck. He felt horror. A thin, barely visible layer of something lay on the cockpit floor. He bent over and ran an index finger a few inches along the deck and looked at it: a grey smudge. He looked up at the sky above him. A thin haze marred the blue summer sky. He went quickly to the opposite cockpit: the same thin layer of ash lay among the fishing gear and other stuff from the Lucy Mae.

He felt trapped. To the south lay a thick cloud over Norfolk; to the northwest the closer, more diffuse grey mass from the blast over Washington. And on the decks at his feet the first radioactive fallout.

`Frank!' he shouted.

Still bleary-eyed from weariness, Frank left the wheelhouse to come to Neil.

`We've got fallout on deck,' Neil told him in a quiet voice. Frank looked down, reached an index finger to examine the ash, and then looked back at Neil. Èverybody should go below,' he said. 'I'll wash the fucking stuff off the decks.'

Frank and Neil sent everyone below into the main cabin, ordering them to shut all windows and portholes and check for ash, wiping clean and throwing overboard any they found. Since every thickness of material between them and the radioactive fallout would give some small additional protection, Skippy was put on the floor underneath the dinette table and a jury-rigged piece of plywood used as a

wall to create a cave. The table was covered with blankets and sleeping bags from the forepeak. Jeanne ordered Lisa to crawl under it too. Olly suggested Jeanne make a space next to the ,daggerboard well and beneath the cross beam for greater protection. Conrad Macklin went into the forepeak and covered himself with bagged sails. On deck Frank began washing down the boat with buckets of sea water and a longhandled brush. Neil disappeared for a while and then emerged wearing full foul-weather gear including rubber boots and the hood tied tightly around his face as if he were about to go out in a gale. He handed a full set to Frank and took over the washing down of the boat while Frank put on his gear. Jim had checked the genoa and when he came aft Frank ordered him below with the others. He and Neil would stay on deck. As they set sail down the Chesapeake for the Atlantic a low-level dread hung over all of them in the main cabin. They talked in low voices as if at a wake. On the horizon to both north and south lay the ugly grey cloud masses seeming to creep up the sky to kill them. One was chasing down from the north and they were sailing south into the one over Norfolk. There was no escape.

When Vagabond sailed past Tangier Village Neil looked dully at the wreckage. Two large fishing trawlers lay on their sides among three houses tilted crazily, as if all five were some child's toys carelessly cast aside. One of the buildings must have been the bar they had stopped at the night it all began, but even through his binoculars he couldn't tell which building it was. He saw no sign of life.

To the east the shore was too distant to determine what had happened, but as Vagabond sailed out into the centre of the Chesapeake, Frank reported the capsized hulk of some motor yacht a quarter of a mile to starboard. Here also other floating vessels became visible, a boat sailing south like Vagabond and two other boats emerging into sight from the direction of Norfolk. With a sense of foreboding Neil realized that on the previous day the Bay had been crowded with boats, twenty-five or thirty being visible when he'd been searching for the sight of the stolen Vagabond. Not many ships had survived the explosion and tidal wave.

It was Frank who spotted the first corpse: a limp wet lump of clothing floating face down less than fifty feet from Vagabond's course. Frank's first instinct was to alter course to retrieve the body, but then he quickly realized that the last thing they needed aboard was a corpse. There would be more.

The two ships coming towards them remained close to the western shore and soon disappeared past them heading up the Chesapeake to God-knew-where. That they had survived at all was a surprise. The boat on the same course as Vagabond disappeared into a cove or river on the western shore. By late morning they seemed to be all alone on the vast expanse of the Bay.

The fallout still fell. With a sense of dread and impotent anger Neil noted that every half hour enough would accumulate in areas he hadn't brushed down to be visible. He and Frank alternated doing the cleaning work, both of them getting overheated and exhausted in their stilling foul-weather gear on the increasingly hot day. His face dripping with sweat, one of them would plod over the entire length and breadth of the boat with a big plastic bucket and the long-handled brush, dipping the bucket into the bay, pouring it across a deck area, then rapidly brushing, brushing, brushing to push everything back into the water, where it sank. When finished he would stumble back to the other man, at the helm, and, without a break, the other would take up the exhausting work. At eleven-thirty Frank collapsed on the foredeck. Neil rushed forward to him and dragged him back, loosening his foul-weather gear. He hoped it was only heat exhaustion and carried Frank below where he could be undressed and cooled off. 01ly took Frank's place, wearing his own foul-weather

clothing. Macklin was ordered to take a turn next.

Forty minutes later Frank reappeared on deck, dressed again in full gear and ordered Neil and Macklin to go below, saying that if they rotated four men none of them would get overheated again. Olly came up again to share the topside burden. Down in the main cabin Neil was struck by the stuffy, closed heat and by the silence. Wet towels lay draped over the galley shelves where they'd been used to cool down Frank. Lisa and Skippy were squeezed into the jury-rigged `doghouse' under the dinette table, Jim seated back against the galley cabinets with a styrofoam cooler and settee cushion on his lap, Jeanne huddled beside the daggerboard well with a settee cushion covering most of her. Their efforts at protection from radiation were pitiful. Neil stripped off his foul-weather stuff and wiped himself down with one of the wet towels. Macklin crawled forward into the forepeak cabin.

`Mommy says the rain has radioactive germs in it,' Skippy said, breaking the silence and peeking his head out of his cave. `Did you see them?'

Òne or two,' Neil answered. 'I kicked them overboard.' `Mommy says you're washing them overboard,' Skippy corrected.

`She's right.'

Lisa also peered out. 'Is it still falling?' she asked.

À little bit probably,' Neil answered. Tut we're keeping the boat so clean you can't tell.'

He knew better, of course. The stuff was still falling, although even Neil thought at a slightly slower rate, and though they were a lot better off here than on land, they were still being exposed, especially those who had to work on deck. Jeanne crawled out from her hideaway.

`You should get under the crossbeam,' she said. 'You've been exposed already much more than we have.'

He glanced at the space, then at her. He wanted to lie down and wanted to feel better protected.

`Can we both squeeze in there?' he asked, frowning. `No,' she said. 'But you go ahead.'

He hesitated, but the thought of being able to lie down won out over gallantry; he realized how exhausted he must be. He stepped over Jim's legs, held Jeanne briefly as he passed her and then crawled into her space. She covered him with her cushion and sat down beside Jim. Vagabond sailed on. Below, no one spoke.

It was at about two o'clock, having sailed twenty-four miles down the Bay and to within forty miles of Norfolk that they came upon the floating hulk of a charter fishing vessel and its survivors. There had been no measurable fallout since Neil had gone below about an hour and a half before, so Frank had let 01ly remain on duty with him rather than bring Neil up again. But when he saw the derelict he called down for Neil. Frank had altered course when he saw the survivors waving -frantically at him and with a gloomy, doomed expression he now ordered Neil and Olly to prepare to pick them up. The hulk lay low in the water, its aft deck crowded with fifteen to twenty people - men, women, and children - a seemingly random collection of those who had escaped the disasters of somewhere to motor into the disaster of the explosion over Norfolk. A large man with a blond beard emerged from the crowd to stand on the cabin roof and shout that they'd been swamped by a tidal wave, and, with flooded batteries, were helpless. The two vessels rolled and pitched awkwardly in the swells, and when at last rafted side by side, their decks sometimes slammed together with a sickening crunch. Frank surveyed the packed near side of the-yacht, the dazed and anxious faces, all looking exhausted, many sick, some people with burned faces and singed hair, two or three women holding children, men elbowing their way in front of them, and he felt the same sense of despair he'd felt when Neil showed him the ash on the deck: he was trapped and being overwhelmed.

`We're headed out into the Atlantic,' he shouted to those crowding together to board Vagabond. 'We can put you ashore at Cape Henry or take you to sea.'

Frank saw that most of the fatigued and frightened faces looked at him without comprehension. A ship had come to rescue them; if he'd announced he was sailing to Hell they still would have boarded.

`Bring all your food!' Neil shouted, but no one seemed to pay attention. The men began to clamber over Vagabond's coaming like pirates boarding a ship they planned to plunder. Jim and Neil alone tried to help the women and children and two elderly men dressed only in bathrobes; most of the young male refugees seemed more concerned with their suitcases or knapsacks.

A scream broke from the confusion and a pale young blonde woman was soon led sobbing into the wheelhouse, her right hand bloody, apparently crushed between the two boats. Neil called down to Jeanne and told her to get Macklin and the ship's first aid kit, and he had the woman seated on a wheelhouse settee. Between sobs the woman kept calling for her cat and seemed as disturbed by its not being present as by her mangled fingers.

The big man with the bushy beard was the only man helping people to escape from the foundering Fishkiller, and when Frank yelled again to bring all their food and water he ducked down into the ship's cabin and soon began passing cartons of food across to Jim. A strange dog snarled at Jeanne when she brought up the first aid kit and Neil had an impulse to throw the stupid beast into the sea. Macklin followed, wearing a raincoat. Neil could hear someone retching loudly off the aft deck and smelled vomit. As Macklin bent to examine the woman's hand, two men

began scuffling behind him and one fell against Neil, knocking him into the seated woman, who screamed in pain. The two men, arms around each other in a violent wrestle for control of some object, reeled against a young couple and child seated on the opposite settee and then bounced off them on to the wheelhouse floor. Macklin jumped up quickly and grabbed them both by their hair, and, yanking, shouted at them to let go.

In another half minute he and Neil had them separated and quiet. It took almost fifteen minutes before the sixteen survivors and skimpy food supplies of Fishkiller had been transferred to Vagabond. At last the two ships separated, Vagabond's genoa ballooning out to port with a flutter and a loud pop, and the derelict wallowing in the swells behind her.

The new passengers were scattered in listless confusion over the two cockpits, wheelhouse and main cabin. Dressed in suits, slacks, jeans, bathrobes, and bathing suits were two elderly men, five women, three children, one of them an infant, and six ablebodied men. Neil was aware of at least one dog and cat aboard, but in the chaos it seemed like a dozen. Suitcases, knapsacks, and shopping bags were also scattered about. After Vagabond had been sailing on southwards towards the mouth of the Chesapeake for several minutes, the big man with the beard who seemed to have been their leader came up to Frank, who was at the helm. He had removed his foul-weather jacket and boots but still wore the red plastic trousers.

`My name's Tony Mariano,' he announced loudly. 'Where the hell are you heading?' He was dressed in blue jeans and a silk shirt and fancy leather loafers. He was a powerfully built man in his late twenties and he loomed at least a couple of inches over Frank.

`We're headed out to sea,' Frank replied.

`You're not taking us past Norfolk, are you?' the man persisted. 'That's right into the fallout.'

`That's our plan,' Frank replied uncertainly.

As he watched Macklin work on the woman's crushed fingers Neil was aware that two couples in the wheelhouse were listening intently to the conversation; even the woman he was treating seemed to forget her pain for the moment.

`The law of the sea,' Frank went on in a tense voice to Tony, 'says that anyone rescuing shipwrecked survivors can either continue on to his scheduled next port, or land them at the nearest point they find convenient. We . .