To Sail a Darkling Sea

“I think that’s all we can handle for now,” Sophia said from the bridge. “Certainly all Rusty can handle.”

Rusty had slipped on one of the big fish covering the deck and was now sprawled out in the middle of fish goo and blood. When the fish were hooked it caused them to bleed. Between their thrashing and being thrown through the air, the transom deck as well as the bridge bulkhead were covered in spots of blood. So were all three of the fishermen covered. Even Sophia up in the flying bridge had some spots of blood on her.

“Might as well get to dicing,” Paula said, giving Rusty a hand up. “Patrick, knives.”

“Sorry about that,” Rusty said. He was looking sort of gray.

“It does take it out of you,” Paula said. “It’s all in the back. The first time Patrick and I tried it alone we could only get about half the small ones. The rest were just too big. Having you as a third was a real help.”

“I should have been more,” Rusty said, shrugging. “Just ain’t got my strength back.”

“Some fresh sashimi will help with that,” Paula said, grinning.

“What are these?” Rusty asked.

“Big eye tuna,” Sophia said, pointing to the eyes. She’d left the helm and slid down the ladder to the transom deck. “They’re generally a deep fish. They spend most of their time at more than twenty fathoms. But they come up to the surface to warm up and if there happens to be bait they’ll get on it. Good size ones, too. This will feed the flotilla for a few days.”

“What’s next?” Rusty asked.

“We’ll cut off the heads, gut them then throw them in the cooler,” Sophia said. “We’ll keep the heads and guts for chum for the next time. Those go in the freezer.”

“Not a freezer?” Rusty asked.

“You need to flash freeze fish to keep it tasting good and the right texture,” Sophia said. “We don’t have a flash freezer. The Large does, but most of this will be used up in a few days by us and the rest of the flotilla. Cooler’s good enough.”

“Knives,” Patrick said, opening up a box filled with fillet knives and sharpeners.

“Now to the really bloody part,” Sophia said, smiling. “And they talk about Faith getting covered in blood… ”

* * *

“Respirators,” Rusty said, holding up a box.

“Too bad they didn’t use them,” Paula said, taking the box and looking at the manufacturer. “Some European brand. I don’t think they’ll work on ours.”

Which was a pity, since they’d about used up all their filters. Doing this job without respirators made it damned near not worth it. And this boat wasn’t even particularly bad. There were only two people onboard. From the pictures they’d found, husband and trophy wife. The trophy wife had been on the back deck, nude. Probably zombied. The husband had been in secondary cabin, ditto. Guessing, the wife had gone first, the husband had locked himself in a cabin then turned.

It must have been early on in going to sea because by the time the team boarded, the wife was a clean- picked skeleton from seabirds and the husband was a mummy.

Despite not having useable respirators, the 70-foot sailboat was, otherwise, chock full of goodies. How people loaded to flee a plague was, in many ways, idiosyncratic. They’d salvaged one boat that was full of books. And they’d loaded as many as they could, since books were the main source of entertainment these days. Books could be traded for other stuff.

There were a few consistencies, though. Boats with women onboard loaded lots of toilet paper. Sometimes much or all of it had been used up by the time the crew died but generally not. They also loaded lots of feminine hygiene products. This one had both. They’d found one boat that must have been owned by a restauranteur or a chef. It was positively packed with spices as well as various tasty goodies.

But there were several consistent salvage materials. Just about every boat had loads, boatloads, of alcohol, jewelry and, often, fine cigars. It was, like, the first thing most people packed. They’d grab their jewelry and booze and smokes if they had them. Then there was the fact that they tended to drink the cheap stuff first.

So when they boarded a boat, they almost always found some really nice jewelry and high-quality booze. The kind of people who could afford yachts tended to have both.

“Lots of halfsies,” Paula said, looking over the bar in the saloon.

“Mix and match,” Rusty said.

To conserve space, they tended to combine partially full bottles. They tried to make sure it was the same “type,” bourbon with bourbon, scotch with scotch. But mistakes happened. Gin and vodka was okay. Rum and scotch not so much.

“There is a god somewhere that is angry because of combining stuff like Cutty Sark with fifty-year-old Laphroaig,” Paula said. “We are one day going to run afoul of him and he will raise a great storm to punish us.”

“What is… Famous Grouse?” Rusty said.

“Scotch,” Paula said, hefting a box of pasta onto the deck.

“Got a case of that,” Rusty said. “Now if I could just find some shoes… ”

They’d turned up a set of max sized galoshes on a boat but so far the security specialist didn’t have any real shoes. Or pants that fit. His jeans fit around his narrowed waist but stopped mid-calf and were a bit tight in the crotch. Not that Paula minded the latter.

“We could strap a couple of inflatables to them,” Paula said.

“Very funny… ”

* * *

“And we’re clear,” Sophia said. “There’s a ship to the southeast the Last At Sea spotted. Said there were some infecteds on deck so they banked off. We’re to check it to see if it’s worth sending a salvage and recovery crew.”

“I’ll get my gear ready,” Rusty said. “I hope I don’t have to do one of those boardings like Faith did.”

“Eh, I’ll just pot ’em off with what my sister would call a Barbie gun… ”

* * *

“What is this thing, a ferry?” Paula asked, fingers in her ears.

The vessel named Pit Stop was a bit over a hundred feet long with a large bridge and presumably crew area forward and a low-set rear deck that could clearly be opened up at the back. The back deck had a vintage car, an inflatable and four pallets of stores piled on it. It sort of looked like a ferry. The difference was, it was also rather thin and lean looking. The design was actually vaguely similar to the cutter they’d cleared.

“No clue,” Sophia said. “But if you’d give me a minute, this isn’t as easy as it looks.”

Sophia was laid out on the flying bridge with ear-muffs on and an accurized M4 with a Leupold 9x scope propped up on a cushion. She’d wrapped the strap around her arm and was carefully preparing her shots.

Sophia was more than prepared to give her sister props for close-quarters zombie fighting. Faith was a brawler, always had been. When they went to tactical ranges, Faith regularly beat her scores.

When they went to target ranges, Faith went home pouting. Sophia had been planning on trying out for the Olympic shooting team when she got a little older.

Faith was a brawler. Sophia was a sniper.

The problem was catenary, the relative motion of two vessels bouncing up and down and side to side on the ocean. It meant your target was always moving all over the damned place. Which just meant that you waited for the right moment to take the shot. If you tried to follow the target, you ended up chasing it all over hell and gone. The US Navy SEALs might have figured out a way to chase the target. Sophia had time. She waited.

* * *

There was a crack and Paula flinched as one of the infected dropped with an almost unnoticeable hole in his forehead and the back blown out of his head.

“Damn,” the mate said.

“Come to Seawolf,” Sophia whispered. “Be good little zombies. Yuck… they do eat brains… ”

* * *

“That’s why so many survived,” Sophia said.