“Prit,” I said calmly, throwing my arm around his shoulder. “I know you’re telling the truth. If I doubted you, even for a second, I wouldn’t deserve to be your friend. Don’t worry, man. I’ll get you out of this mess.”
“I hope you’re a better lawyer than you are a nurse,” Prit replied sarcastically and raised his left hand, which was minus two fingers.
Thinking back to my pitiful efforts in doctoring his wounds back at that Mercedes dealership brought a thin smile to my lips. That damned Ukrainian and I had been through a lot together. There was no way I’d leave him in the lurch.
“Hey, show me some respect, pal! I’m the best lawyer you can afford!” I joked and gave him a friendly punch on the arm.
Prit shot back with an indecent reference to my mother’s virtue and cracked a smile that tore open his cut lip again, making him wince.
“Well, you have us over a barrel, Ms. Pons. Now, where the hell’s Lucia? And Lucullus?”
Before she could answer, I saw a tall, willowy silhouette in the cabin doorway. She hesitated, afraid to enter. In the light filtering through the porthole, I could make out the freckles on her arms. I’d studied them so many times I could’ve traced a map of them with my eyes closed. She was trying to control a struggling ball of orange fur. With an indignant meow, Lucullus broke free, took four short hops, landed in my lap, and purred contentedly.
Before I could make some wisecrack, Lucia crossed the room and we clutched each other in a long kiss. When we finally came up for air, I got a better look at her. She had a nasty bruise on her left temple and was visibly thinner and paler, but otherwise she was as beautiful as ever. Anger glinted in her tear-filled green eyes.
“Know what they’ve done… those… those…” She was so angry, she could barely speak but I got the message.
I grasped her shoulders and whispered soothing words in her ear. As I did, determination welled up in me. For the first time in months, I was full of energy and that strange strength that had kept me alive as the world fell apart around me.
Captain Pons said we should go ashore at once, but I tuned her out. I was relieved to have almost all my “family” around me. Sister Cecilia’s absence weighed on me, but I was convinced she’d pull through. Given time, we’d work everything out. We’d face whatever lay ahead and everyone else be damned.
With our battered friend propped up between us, Lucia and I emerged from that cabin without a backward glance. We were finally going ashore to face this new world and whatever was left of the human race.
17
We were back on land. Before we left the boat, we were given a huge packet of documents: passports, quarantine certificates, ration cards, transportation passes, and a laminated card that identified Prit and me as “Auxiliary Navy Personnel Class B.” They gave Lucia an orange card, which classified her as “Civilian Resident.” We didn’t know if that was going to be a problem.
I was warned to keep an eye on Lucullus. The few cats that had survived were in “high demand.” I didn’t know what that meant, but it didn’t sound good.
We made the ten-minute trip to port in a small boat that looked to be a hundred years old. Powered by a sputtering two-stroke engine that kept backfiring, it’d been put back into service because that old engine ran on the low-grade diesel that more modern engines couldn’t use. The whole trip, I was afraid we were going straight to the bottom of the bay on a boat that must’ve dated back to Spain’s Africa wars.
Tenerife Port was bustling with hundreds of people, going about their jobs, dressed in clean clothes, undernourished but otherwise healthy. They didn’t look particularly happy, but at least they were calm. They were probably still pinching themselves over surviving the Apocalypse.
The captain of the boat was a witty guy who had a lot to say. According to him, over eight hundred thousand people lived in Tenerife before the pandemic. That number climbed to several million in the early days of the Apocalypse, when wave after wave of refugees from Europe and America reached the islands. Now the population was down to a million and a half.
What the hell happened to that mass of humanity? Where’d they go? If what that guy said was true, there were a helluva lot of missing people.
A guy in uniform was waiting on the dock to check our documents. I was surprised to see flags flying everywhere, as if the survivors had had an attack of patriotism. Even the bus that took us to our new home sported flags, and not just the Spanish flag, but also the one with that strange blue insignia I’d seen flying from the
18
It was a really surprising weekend. I’d vacationed on the Canary Islands several years before and had always wanted to go back. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine coming back under those
At the dock, a sweaty, stressed-out guy in a uniform, who was doing five things at once, checked our documents, gave us a quick handshake and rushed off on urgent business. Prit, Lucia, and I just stood there on the dock, all our luggage at our feet, waiting for the bus. We didn’t know what else to do.
Something made me uneasy and set my nerves on edge. The look on Lucia and Prit’s face told me they felt the same. The Ukrainian licked his lips; his eyes flitted nervously in every direction as he reached for a gun he didn’t have. Lucia rocked back and forth almost imperceptibly as she clutched Lucullus. Even the cat was twitching.
Finally it dawned on me—that crowd of people was making us jumpy. People were dashing here and there, going about their business, bumping into us, barely glancing at our frightened trio. I had to close my eyes to keep from passing out. Noises engulfed us: shouts, snatches of conversation, laughter, a child crying, a horse neighing, the hum of hundreds of mouths talking at once in the background. After a year of tomb-like silence, that multitude was a shock to our nerves.
Lucia pointed something else out: There was no smell of rotting flesh. Thousands of smells floated in the air, some pleasant, some not. We were in a port, after all. But they were human smells.
The strangest part was we had nothing to do. We didn’t have to run away. Not a single Undead was on our tail. For the first time in months, we were absolutely idle.
However, that picture of normality was misleading. Before the Apocalypse, there’d never been a crowd like that on that dock. There were no cars on the road except for a URO, Spain’s version of a Humvee, but there were a lot of draft animals dragging carts made from car chassis. In fact, the “bus” that took us to our new home was actually a cart pulled by two oxen.
They put us up in a former three-star hotel, built in the seventies. For decades it welcomed legions of European tourists, eager for sun and sand. Although clean and neat, the shabby building had seen better days. Even before it was turned into refugee housing, it wasn’t the best hotel on the island. The former reception area was now a communal playroom for the screaming children of the families in the complex. We hadn’t seen many children since very few had survived. And the number of babies and pregnant women overwhelmed us. Half the women looked like they could deliver any day. A primitive survival instinct must compel survivors to reproduce at all costs. I’d read about a similar phenomenon among Holocaust survivors, but I never imagined I’d witness it first-hand.
The residents in that building were classified as Auxiliary Navy Personnel, like Prit and me, and lived there
