Burnt Sea: A Seabound Prequel (Seabound Chronicles Book 0) (25 page)

Chapter 22—Burnt Sea

Judith

Sound.

Heat.

Pain.

Fury.

The explosion freed Judith’s legs and hurled her into the sea. She
dove.

Judith swam deep beneath the water until her lungs felt like they would
rip through her chest. She had no sensation of up or down. She only knew she
had to get far away from the burning oil slick as fast as she could.

All was blackness around her.

Her head broke the surface. She gulped in the acrid smoke that was
sweeping across the water from the blaze. Still close enough to feel the heat.
She saw a flash of angel white that she prayed was the
Catalina
and dove beneath the water again.

The next time she emerged, Judith felt oil on her face. She scrubbed at
it but couldn’t remove the slick from her skin. Flames raced across the top of
the water toward her.

She dove.

The third time Judith rose to fill her lungs, she was in a patch of
clean water. The speedboat had reached the
Catalina
.
It rose slowly toward the deck. Simon would be helping Esther aboard now.
Judith felt a twist of something in her stomach worse than the pain in her
lungs. She swam along the surface. She felt like she was pulling the
Catalina
closer to her, drinking in the
distance with each gasp.

Then the
Catalina
started to
move.

Chapter 23—
Seabound

Simon

Esther struggled and squirmed
in
Simon’s arms, trying to see what was happening behind them, but he held her
close. If he could open up his chest and put her inside, he would have. He’d
lost Nina. He’d lost Naomi. He would never lose Esther.

The sea burned. Smoke from the flaming oil nearly obscured the skyscrapers.
Simon could no longer see the PLA boat. He couldn’t see Judith either. And what
about Michael? Simon didn’t think he’d been in the boat. He could only save
Esther. He didn’t have a choice.

He said it to himself over and over again. He didn’t have a choice.

The
Catalina
loomed above
them. Pieter helped Reggie attach the speedboat to the winch. They lifted into
the air. Forty feet up, hands reached across to pull them aboard.

“Daddy, put me down,” Esther said.

She struggled, but he kept her in his arms.

“Esther, you’re in big trouble,” he said. “You will go straight to the
cabin and wait for me.”

“Where’s Judy?” Esther said, crying now. “And who shot Michael? Is he
going to be okay? Why did they do that?”

Simon looked to Kim for confirmation, his lungs squeezing a little
tighter. She was trembling, barely coherent, but she nodded.

“I don’t know why,” Simon said to his daughter.

“Can we go back and get Judy?”

“It’s too dangerous with the fire.”

“We have to!” Esther shouted, pounding her small fists against Simon’s
shoulder. “You can’t leave her behind like you left Mommy and
Namie
.”

Simon set her down quickly and stared into her eyes.

“Is that what you think? There’s no way we could save them. We didn’t
have a choice.”

“We got a choice to save Judy, don’t we?” Esther said, glaring
defiantly at him.

Without answering, Simon pushed Esther into the waiting arms of
Penelope, who’d come to meet them. He ordered the men to lower the speedboat
again.

“We’re already moving,” Reggie said. “Captain must have decided we
waited long enough.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Simon said. “We’ll catch up.”

Esther was right. They did have a choice.

Judith

Judith
lost all sense of time as she swam. Logically, she should be saving her
strength, turning around, swimming for shore. But the
Catalina
was where she belonged. She would get back to it if it
took everything she had left.

She was clear of the burning oil now. She wiped the salt water out of
her eyes and checked her progress. The speedboat was coming toward her. For one
wild moment she was sure it was Michael coming to save her. That was the boat
that had brought him to her. Then it was pulling up alongside her, and Simon
was reaching out a hand.

She stared at him for a moment, the sour taste of betrayal in her
mouth. He’d left her. He’d chosen Esther. She wasn’t his daughter.

Simon must have taken her hesitation as an indication of shock. He
leaned over and pulled her into the boat. She came to her senses and helped,
just managing to scramble over the gunwale. She landed hard on the seat. Cuts
from the explosion covered her body. Bruises were already forming, ugly and
dark, on her legs.

Simon was talking, saying something along the lines of
you’ll be okay thought you were dead so glad
to see you’re all right sorry about Michael.

Judith remained silent as they returned to the
Catalina
and were hoisted back on board. Maybe she
was
in shock. People came to help,
wrapped them in blankets, summoned food and water. Judith looked around at the
familiar faces, the deck,
the
lifeboat bays. She was exhausted.
Manny knelt beside her, placed something soft under her head.

She let the world around her fade to black.

Simon

Simon
lost track of Judith as people came to help her away. He wanted to speak to
her, to explain. There was something in the way she had looked at him when he
found her swimming toward the ship. Something cold, a little dead even. She
must be in shock after what she’d just endured.

Simon returned to the bridge, where he found Kim sitting on the floor.
Ren
handed her a drink of water, and she explained what
they’d learned about China’s response to the disaster and impending famine.
They wouldn’t find a haven here.

The land had rejected them again.

Captain
Martinelli
had the helm. He didn’t
look at Simon and the others. He sailed them away from the burning harbor,
humming slightly.

“How much fuel do we have left?” Simon asked.

“Not much,”
Ren
said.

“Be specific.”

“We can get far enough away from the coast that a storm surge won’t
throw us back on land. That’s about it.”

“Let’s do it,” Simon said.

“Excuse me, Simon,” Captain
Martinelli
began.
“I’m the one giving
ord
— ”

“Not anymore. Get us away from the coast, then cut the engines.”

The captain shrugged and obeyed.

“Get everyone together,” Simon said. “The whole community. It’s time we
made a decision.”

Chapter 24—Later

Simon

Simon sat at the
bar in the Mermaid Lounge.
He liked working here. The wide windows provided a decent view of the sea, but
it tended to be less crowded than the Atlantis Dining Hall. The sky outside
swirled dark and purple.

Simon was writing in a blank notebook he’d taken from the bookshop. The
sea was still for once, and a light wind coming through a broken window ruffled
the paper as he scribbled page after page. He’d assign someone to fix the
window soon, but in the meantime he enjoyed the sea breeze.

He was putting the finishing touches on an extensive plan allotting
duties on a rotating basis. It included rationed break time, meal shifts, deck
time to make sure everyone got enough Vitamin D, and even who would be on call
if a storm came up. It also officially set up a council to make decisions for
the ship. Every adult would participate on a rotating basis. The plan was far
more detailed than the one they had developed on the journey from Guam, but it
followed the same principles. Crucially, it completed the blurring of the divisions
between former crew, passengers, and runners. They were all equal now.

After their disastrous attempt to seek refuge in China, they had
decided to stay on the
Catalina
for a
while. They would drift. They would wait out the troubles. They’d salvaged a
fair amount of food as they drifted along somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. They
were learning to mine the sea for sustenance: fishing, skimming seaweed,
dredging
up shellfish whenever they drifted into shallow
waters. They would be nearly self-sustaining, at least until the world calmed
down.

It might be for a few months or even a few years, but they’d learn to
take care of themselves. Until the skies cleared and they were able to communicate
with people on land, they couldn’t keep wasting fuel by sailing where they
wouldn’t be allowed to stay.

Frank found Simon in the Mermaid Lounge. He wound his way through the
tables and the bits of salvage stored in piles around the room.

“Simon, do you have a minute?” he asked.

“Sure, Frank,” Simon said, putting down his pen. “How are you?”

“As good as can be expected.” Frank scratched a finger through his
walrus mustache.

“Weren’t you on salvage duty this morning?” Simon asked.

They had come across a current of flotsam, and they’d been working all
morning to pull up anything they might be able to use somewhere on the ship.
They had begun stockpiling any raw materials that might be valuable. Who knew
what the world’s economy would be like next time they connected with other
survivors?

“That’s what I want to talk to you about,” Frank said. “I picked up a
few things that might be useful. I might try building a reverse-osmosis system
. . . for desalinating water.”

“Doesn’t the ship already have a water system?” Simon asked.

“It does, but it’s an evaporation system. It uses the energy from the
engines to evaporate the salt out of the water while we’re moving. The ship
uses up water reserves whenever we’re not actually sailing anywhere.”

“So we’re using up our water supply now that we’re not running the
engines?”

“At the moment, yes,” Frank said. “Since we don’t know how long we’re
going to be here, I figured I’d start working on a new system.”

“You don’t need my permission, Frank,” Simon said. “It sounds like a
great idea.”

“To be honest, I was hoping you’d tell me not to, because you have a
plan to get us back to land
soonish
,” Frank said.

“I wish I did. Anything you can do to make our lives here more
sustainable would be great. We need to wait this out.”

Simon believed the situation on land would only get worse. As the
famines set in, more people would die. They would fight each other for the remaining
scraps of food. They would despair. At least on the ship they were safe. They had
a small number of people who could take care of each other, and they had the
entire sea at their disposal.

“Roger that,” Frank said. “I’ll get to work then!”

There was a light in Frank’s eye as he turned to go. Everyone needed
something to do, something that gave
them
purpose. If
they were going to stay on the ship for a while, they’d have to stay busy to
survive.

And one day the land would welcome them back.

Judith

Judith
and Manny sorted through salvage. They were on suitcase duty on the lido deck.
It was amazing how well suitcases floated. They were usually full of strange
and useful things that could be cleaned and dispersed among the people of the
Catalina
.

“That’s the last of it,” Judith said, tossing a pair of children’s
T-shirts onto a pile. “Would you mind taking these down to Constance in the
plaza? I’m going to keep working on the socks.”

There were always spare socks. They matched them up as well as they
could, relying on size even when the colors didn’t go together. The other
clothes would go down to Constance Gordon, who was a seamstress by trade. She
had set up a shop in the plaza, where she could mend and sort clothes while baby
Cally
gurgled away on a pile of fabric beside her.

“No problem,” Manny said. He wrapped his arms around the T-shirt pile
and lifted it, his face disappearing behind the folds.

Judith spotted a familiar blue shade in the stack.

“Hang on a sec.” She reached forward, not wanting to stand as her legs
were still healing, and pulled the T-shirt from the middle of the pile. It was
damp, but the screen print of Thomas the Tank Engine was still intact. “Okay,
go ahead.”

“I will come back for more soon,” Manny said. “And then maybe we go for
some dinner. I can help you walk.”

“Sure, thanks,” Judith mumbled, staring at the Thomas T-shirt in her
hands.

Manny turned and tottered toward the door, the clothes piled higher
than his dark curly hair. Where most people on the ship deferred to Simon,
Manny took his cues from Judith. She had become his lodestar. For her part, she
liked having an ally.

She tried hard to think of Manny as her supporter, not her friend. She
had lost too many friends. Nora. Michael. She had made the mistake of becoming
too attached. They had bonded through the brief, intense trauma of the
disaster, but their deaths hurt her far too much. She would guard her heart in
the future. She had already set up a barrier between herself and
Ren
by refusing to talk about Nora.

Judith had been betrayed.
By the land.
By the navy.
By all the people who had
refused to help them.
By all the people she had put her faith in.

And by Simon.

Things would never be the same between Judith and Simon. She wouldn’t
let on how she felt, of course. Simon was very popular right now. But she would
be a little colder, a little more distant. She’d begin gathering people who
resented how much power Simon had accumulated, how much control he now had over
what happened on the ship. She’d build up her own supporters, and she’d use
Simon’s precious rotating council system to do it. She had plenty of time.

Judith crumpled the Thomas T-shirt in her thin hands.

Eventually, she’d make her move.

*****

Find
out what happens to Judith, Simon, Esther, and the Catalina in the action-packed
post-apocalyptic trilogy: The
Seabound
Chronicles
.

The adventure
continues in . . .

Seabound

When an
apocalyptic catastrophe decimates the land, a lucky few escape to sea. 1,003
survivors make their home on a
souped
-up cruise ship
called the Catalina. After sixteen years, the strain begins to show in a
floating world of distrust and shifting allegiances.

A young mechanic
named Esther wants to prove
herself
, but she tends to
bash things up in the name of progress. When disaster strikes the water system
on Esther’s watch, she’ll risk everything to fix her mistake.

But is Esther
ready for the dangers she’ll face on the post-apocalyptic ocean? Can she save
her friends about the Catalina before it’s too late?

Read
Seabound
now!

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