The End Has Come (41 page)

“Just loadin’ up my boat!” The man smiles and tosses the bag onto the back of the
Southern Cross.
“I know you’re probably worried and all, but no need to be stealin’ a man’s boat.” The man reaches for another bag, but stops as Don walks forward.

Don knows at that moment that the world has irrevocably changed. There is no room for debate or weakness. He has a way out for him and his son, and there is no room for discussion, explanation, or negotiation. The stranger holds up his hands. Before he can say anything else, Don swings the stock of the rifle around and slams it into the side of the man’s face.

He stumbles backward, his hands against his head, a stream of red flowing through the fingers of his left hand. He screams, hysterical and shrill, “You fucker! This is my boat! I found it!” He steadies and lowers his hands. He has a gash across the left side of his forehead, but his eyes are clear.

“Take one step, and you’re dead.” Don points the rifle at the man’s chest again. The man moans but doesn’t move. “Is anyone on the boat?”

“No. I’m waiting on my family.” The response is slow and grim.

“Grab your stuff and get out.”

“C’mon, man. I have kids. Maybe we can both take the boat. The owner ain’t even here.”

“I’m
the owner,” Don replies, not that it matters. The world has changed. Motioning with the barrel of the rifle toward the boat, he repeats, “Get your stuff.”

The man gathers up his bags from the boat and tosses them with the others on the dock. They appear to contain clothing. Don tries not to think about how big the man’s family is.
Not my problem.

After the man clears out, Don and Zack finish loading up the boat. He had hoped to take another trip out to stock up on supplies, but in light of what had just happened, he decides to just head for the open seas after they stow what they have.

The sailboat isn’t huge, but it is comfortable, with a single cabin big enough for two. There are two large padded benches that could act as beds, and a storage area in the hull below.

Don starts to organize things — boxes of food, bottles of water, suitcases, and bags of recently bought supplies. He opens the wooden hatch that leads to the storage area below decks and grabs a plastic container full of painkillers, antacids, bandages, and a desalination kit — all still inside their grocery bags. He takes a step when he hears a shout from behind the boat.

Putting the crate down, Don grabs the rifle leaning against the door frame and walks out. Zack has his hands up. There are two men, their attention focused on Zack. One has a pistol pointed at him.

“Just get going, kid. There’s no reason for you to get hurt.” The man nods over his shoulder up the cement walkway to the parking lot. “Just walk away.” Both look like normal middle-aged men — jeans, tennis shoes, a polo shirt, one has glasses, the other is balding. The only thing out of place is the pistol.

Don puts the rifle to his shoulder and aims at the man with the gun. He is the shorter one and is wearing what looks like surgical scrubs. On another day he’d just be some guy checking on his boat on his way to the hospital, but on this day he is like everyone else, desperate. And he has a gun aimed at Don’s son.

The world has changed. Now there are no options. No negotiations. No discussions to be had.

The sun is high in the sky. The sea is calm. The boat barely moves. Don pulls the trigger. The rest is nothing but image and sound. A spray of red. A shout. Zack stumbling toward the boat. Released ropes. Shouts. Zack taking the rifle from Don and holding it steady as he points it toward the crowd gathering on the slip. The slapping sound of ropes and sails. White filling the sky. Steady movement out into a chaotic bay full of sails and froth and boats avoiding collisions only because they are all heading in one direction — the open sea.

• • • •

It’s Don’s junior year in college, and the nameless girls in the dream have become a single girl, a classmate named Kiko, and she sways on the deck in a black bikini to the smooth sound of Latin jazz, her hands twisting above her head and reaching toward the sun. Don watches, a beer in one hand. The sky is a pale blue with streaks of white clouds.

The girl would fade from Don’s dream, replaced by someone new, but everything else would remain: The yacht, the open sea, the sun, and the sound of mellow guitar chords matching the flowing sails and the gentle rocking of the boat.

• • • •

“
Oh my God, Dad. Do we have to hear more jazz?”

The music draws Zack from staring at his phone. For once Don is thankful for annoying his son. Zack had called his girlfriend before the ship had left cell phone range, and as her voice faded, he was left just staring at the screen.

“I like it.” Don elbows his son, hoping to draw his attention from the dead man lying in his own blood on the dock, his girlfriend’s final words, and the uncertainty of a future they haven’t even started to grasp. “Come to think of it, I just put it on repeat.”

“Argh. It’s like from the dark ages.”

Don smiles and thinks of bare feet dancing across a gleaming deck. He glances at Zack, whose lips are set in a thin line as he stares into the distance, the phone hanging from his hand.

“You’re right. We should listen to your music. What do you want to hear?”

Zack turns to him and shakes his head. “I’m just kidding, Dad. You know I don’t care about music.”

Don wonders if Zack cares about anything. He was apathetic when he was at home with his girlfriend, surrounded by friends. Here on the boat it seems to be even worse.

“Maybe we should start playing Salsa or music like that,” Don says. “I was thinking we could eventually dock in Rio. You could go dancing with some Brazilian girls.” He smiles, hoping it doesn’t seem forced.

Zack looks at his phone and then shakes his head. “Play whatever you like, Dad.”

“Well, if Salsa dancing isn’t your thing, what else would you like to do when we get back to civilization? Where would you like to live? That kind of thing.” When Zack doesn’t reply, Don adds, “It’s good to think about the future.”

“I’ll think about it when I have one.” Zack turns away and looks toward the horizon, the sun is bright, and the sky is blue.

• • • •

They are South of the Sargasso Sea and approaching Barbados, searching for better fishing. The trouble is that after the asteroid impact, South American countries had set up heavily armed coast guards to keep undocumented refugees out. The orders were shoot to kill, and the only thing that saved Don on a few occasions was that the patrol boats were relatively small and stayed near the coast. He and Zack had been fired upon several times, and each time Don turned back out to the Atlantic and pursuit ended quickly.

Zack grabs the binoculars from the shelf under the dash and pulls them up to his eyes. His finger adjusts the focus. “Trouble.”

Don takes the binoculars from his son, and focuses on the horizon. It’s a small boat approaching fast. “Shit.” Don doesn’t need a closer look to know that it’s a performance speedboat. The rich kids in the fast boats were the worst. Heavily armed, they weren’t guarding the coast so much as hunting Americans. “What’s it doing this far out?” Don mutters as he hands the binoculars to Zack and adjusts the tack for them to sail dead East and back out to open ocean. “Speedboat,” Zack notes from behind the binoculars, “Two or three on board. Hard to tell with them bouncing over the waves.”

Don nods. “Reef the sails. We can’t outrun them, so I’ll have to scare them.”

“Why don’t I close haul, and beat us East?”

“No. We can’t outrun them. Just keep her steady.”

Zack slams his fist on his thigh. “If we make progress they may just leave. If we just float here we’re sitting ducks!” Before Don can reply, he adds, “Wait, you don’t think I can beat this, do you?”

Don stands up, and pauses before replying. He had been waiting weeks for his son to express any hope, and here it is, only expressed through desperation. He grabs Zack’s arm. “Listen. I
know
you can sail this boat, but I need us to appear like we’re not afraid. So just keep us steady. If it doesn’t work, you’ll know, and I trust you that you can beat us East.”

Zack nods, lips pursed. Don grabs the rifle and heads out to the stern.

The wind is strong, and the sea is choppy, but soon the boat is floating in relative calm. Zack is doing a good job working the sail. Supporting himself against the transom, Don lifts the rifle and hopes that the rich kids don’t expect them to be armed. Surprise is what he needs.

The yacht crests a wave, and the pursuing boat is much closer than he had expected.
Damn, that’s a fast boat.
There are three young men sitting behind a glass windshield. The boat drops over a crest, and Don thinks he can see weapons in the hands of two of them.

Wrapping the sling around his forearm, Don lifts the rifle and waits for a clear shot. He is good with a rifle, having spent nearly every summer hunting in South Texas with his grandfather. He is fairly certain he could take out at least one of the men before they consider the sailboat a threat.

Another crest, and he has his shot. The young men are close enough together that hitting one of them was possible even if his aim was off to the left or right.

Sudden inspiration hits, and Don fires to the right of the three men, shattering the windshield but not hitting anyone. Hitting the wide windshield is not only an easier shot, he hopes that the reality of shattered glass in their faces from an armed opponent would scare them without inciting any desire for revenge, the kind of revenge that would burn if he had killed one of them.

Don peers down the barrel, thankful for his Marksmanship merit badge. He looks for the boat. It takes a moment, and there it is. It breaks starboard and turns away from them.

Don stands, slings the rifle over his shoulder, and yells back to the cabin. “Time to close haul, Zack!”

As he steps down into the cabin, Zack asks, “Did you shoot one? They peeled off and turned away.”

Collapsing onto the padded bench, Don lets out a deep breath and lets his son work the controls. “Don’t let up. You’re doing good. We need to get out of here.”

Zack glances over his shoulder at his dad. “So you killed one?” His voice is shaky, and Don fears it’s from excitement.

“No,” he says. “Enough people have died already.”

• • • •

Don is thirty-five. There are no longer bikini-clad women dancing in his dream. He had married and divorced Maria by then. He doesn’t know what went wrong, but it doesn’t matter — his dream has no room for the instability of relationships.

He traded the sway of tanned bodies on the beach for the gentle rocking of the
Southern Cross
, moored in a virgin bay, white sand nearly surrounding the boat. The water is so clear he can see manta rays gliding along the seabed.

With age comes comfortable familiarity. The following no longer changes: He gets up early and watches the Milky Way slowly fade from the sky as he sits at the bow of the boat. The sun climbs slowly in the distance, spreading a glittering carpet of diamonds across the caps of tiny waves. His son is there, asleep below.

Don closes his eyes and smells the salt water and listens as jazz music harmonizes with the sound of gulls, canvas sails, and lapping waves.

• • • •

The Milky Way is gone, buried under a shroud of gray ash. Still, Don spends each morning on the deck of the
Southern Cross
hoping to catch the sunrise. He glances at his watch. Daybreak was thirty minutes earlier, and the horizon is charcoal rather than black. He squints, but there is no sun. The only difference between day and night is the shade of the oppressive gray draped from horizon to horizon. Shards of black glass surround the boat, an angry sea that hasn’t been calm or blue in months. He rubs his face with his right hand and stands up, bracing himself against chaotic waves. He heads below deck to wake up Zack. It’s another day. One no brighter, no clearer, no better than the one before.

• • • •

The first storm comes when the asteroid hits. It’s as if the Earth shudders in pain. As the harsh winds blow and the seas thrash, Don is convinced that the yacht will be dashed to pieces. But after hours of being hurled up, down, and sideways, the seas quiet, and he and Zack nurse their cuts and bruises and take stock of the damage.

The winds blew out the windows, which they repair with plywood pried up from the bilge flooring, and Don repairs the jib without much difficulty. The biggest loss was their rainwater-catching basin, which was ripped free and blown out to sea. They replace it with one of their plastic storage bins.

They are better prepared for the next few storms, but the two of them emerge from each one injured and bruised, the boat battered. The worst is when Don dislocates his shoulder. He does his best not to scare Zack, but he is wracked with pain for hours after a loose flogging line rips his arm out of its socket, with each crashing wave grinding his dislocated arm against the surrounding bone.

After the seas calm, Zack takes charge with a sense of purpose that Don has only seen in glimpses between long periods of depression and quiet. He sets his foot on Don’s ribs and pulls hard on his father’s arm. Don’s scream ends with a loud pop and then silence.

Don has spent so much energy keeping Zack positive that his own oppressive depression, seeping into his consciousness little by little, surprises and overwhelms him as they face yet another storm.

The timing of the growing storm couldn’t be worse. He and Zack are weak from lack of food. They’ve drifted South again searching for fish, but the ocean water is thick with the ever-present dirt and ash that falls from the sky, an obscene black snow that poisons everything.

Don is thinking that the fish have finally learned that there is nothing of value near the surface.
Maybe the time is right to try a landing. Certainly the government of Brazil or Guyana would not turn them away so long after the impact?
But first he has to survive the storm.

It’s the worst yet, a gale or maybe even a full-blown hurricane. Don tries to steer the ship by hand, but quickly gives up as the thrashing waves and raging winds are coming from every direction. Zack stumbles into him, and Don is surprised not to see terror in his son’s eyes. They are grim, but it is a grimness borne of resolve, not powerlessness.