"You there, buddy?"
At first, he thought he was having auditory hallucinations. He stared at the radio as if it were alive—as if the machine itself were talking to him. His lower lip quivered, hidden underneath weeks of mustache growth. If he talked to it, if he spoke to the radio, it would be real, and the pain of not receiving a reply would most certainly destroy him.
"Guy in the lighthouse? You there?"
It was real. He leaped up off the couch and dove at the radio, pulling the receiver to his mouth. His first attempts at speaking were dry rasps, unintelligible. It had been so long since he had heard his own voice, he almost jumped. Rhodri was not the type of person to spend time talking to himself. He cleared his throat and tried it again.
"This is Seaside Lighthouse, over." He waited for a reply, still half sure that he was hearing things.
"Seaside Lighthouse, this is Captain Gary Schwenk of the container ship Gypsy Drifter. I speak for about fifty live human beings who have been at sea for a very long time. What is your status?"
Status? Status? What the fuck was he supposed to say? "I'm alive."
He could hear the smile in the man's voice on the other end of the radio. "That's good. We're glad to hear it."
"Are all your people alive? Over."
"We had some losses. We were taking on freight in Vancouver, B.C. when this all went down. We didn't get out unscathed. Took on more cargo than we were expecting, mostly live, people fleeing on foot. We had a bit of an outbreak, but we were able to get it under control. Lost a lot of people, though. A lot of friends." The captain's voice drifted away on the last part. There was no "over" this time.
Rhodri filled the empty space the only way he knew how. "I'm sorry to hear that. Over."
"It's the past now. Anyway, I wanted to thank you for your fire. You kept us from dashing into some pretty gnarly rocks last night. Over."
Rhodri's eyes filled with tears, but he tried to keep his voice steady. "I'm glad to hear that. I had almost given up. Haven't seen any ships in quite some time. Over."
"Well, we're glad you didn't. Over."
"What's your plan? Over," Rhodri asked.
"Well, that's what we're calling you for. Over."
They talked for a while longer, and when they were done, Rhodri climbed to the top of the lighthouse and looked out at the ship. It was huge. Its deck was half-filled with shipping containers. The captain had said that they were only halfway loaded when they had been forced to flee the docks in Vancouver. The ship was ugly, industrial, its hull faded and aged. Still, it was the most beautiful sight Rhodri had ever seen.
****
Captain Gary Schwenk switched on the ship's internal communications and grabbed the microphone. He hesitated, going over what he was going to say.
They had been at sea for months, waiting for some sort of contact, radioing at every stop to see if there was someone out there that could tell them what was going on.
He thought back to the nightmare at the Vancouver docks. People running every which way in the city. People dying. They had been in the middle of packing a load that would go over to China, hundreds of shipping containers, loaded one by one onto the ship.
His entire crew was scattered about the city, all but Mark Wilde, who lay sick in his bunk. They had orders to be back the next day. The ship would be loaded by then. He didn't begrudge them their release. The crew worked hard to keep the Gypsy Drifter in order. It was an older ship, prone to losing a bolt or two every now and then. If they wanted to come back to their jobs with a hangover and an itch down below, then who was he to complain?
The shipping docks were quiet that day. He was in constant contact with the port authority and the longshoreman that moved the shipping containers.
He watched as the current container being loaded onto the ship jolted to a stop in mid-air. "Hey, what's going on?" he asked over the radio.
"Shut up," the man said. Gary got the impression that he was listening to something else.
He waited for a minute or two, and then he turned to look at the gantry crane where the man no longer sat. He saw the operator climbing down the ladder that led to the paved staging area of the docks.
"Where the fuck are you going?" he asked into the radio, knowing that it was impossible for the man to answer.
He stepped out of the bridge and onto the railing to yell at the man, and that's when he heard a noise in the air. He turned to see where the noise was coming from. A flood of people came running down the street. These were not longshoremen or workers or foremen. These were just ordinary people, some in their pajamas, some in even less, running like mad.
He reached for his cell phone and began texting his people. "Get the fuck back here, right now. Leaving in one hour."
He didn't know what was going on, but he knew it wasn't good. The looks on those people's faces were not normal. They were terrified.
He spoke over the ship's communications and said, "Mark, get your sick ass up here."
For the next hour, Gary and Mark had spent the time telling people that they couldn't come aboard. The crowd of people had rushed through the dock area. Some of them approached his boat and asked for passage. He was not in the business of giving passage, and the company he worked for strictly forbade any non-company personnel on
