Forgotten Fears (14 page)

We are on our way. For a while, I wasn’t sure I would be able to even step onto the boat, but somehow I did it. It has started to rain, and although we are all cramped together here in the galley (no food of course!) nobody is saying much. I think we are all just trying to deal with what we are about to do in our own special way. The boat is a 90 foot crabber. It has seen better days, but is still seaworthy. Not many boats survived after the impact, so to find one still useable was something of a miracle. A minor victory in our hellish life, and the reason why we have set up camp by the water. Like our ancestors, we live near our food source, although this is quite unlike anything our ancestors had to deal with.  The gentle rise and fall of the bow is making me sleepy, and I might even think I could get a couple of hours sleep if not for the nervous excitement of our situation. My stomach feels like a tight ball, and the nerves are really starting to kick in as the safety of land gets lost in the ash filled sleety haze.

The kid, Toby, looks terrified. He seems to have left his usual bravado on the shore, and he looks every bit the frightened child that he is. Hell, I can’t blame him. We are all scared, apart from Stan maybe.  He’s maybe in his forties, his hair long and silver, just like his beard. It’s his eyes that concern me though. There is a little bit of craziness in them. A little glint of something not quite right. He’s our only fisherman though, and the only one experienced in hunting these things consistently. This, incidentally, is my second fishing trip. The first one was a few weeks ago. We managed to catch fifteen footer. It looked like an overgrown, deformed eel. A second head had started to grow out of its face. We fought for hours to wrestle it on board and kill it. It writhed and thrashed on the deck, and I still don’t know how we managed to kill it without anyone getting injured. Oh, I should mention something else too. My hair is starting to fall out. I’m pretty sure that means I definitely have radiation sickness. It shouldn’t be a surprise, not really, but it’s still a shock. I think I’m going to go stretch my legs out on deck. Maybe I’ll try to talk to the kid and see if I can get him to relax a little. God knows, he looks like he needs it.

Benson thought he saw one of them breach the surface. We stopped the boat and stared out into the water. It was eerie, an absolute flat calm. The silence was thick and we were grateful for the wind which rocked the boat as it drifted on the tide. We stared at the water for a while, half hoping that it was what we were looking for, half not. Something spooked the old man alright. You can see it in his eyes.  As usual, only Stan seems unafraid. We might have stood there all day had he not started the engines again and set off on our way. We seem to be further out than usual. I asked Stan where we were headed and he mumbled something about deeper waters. That scares me. We all know that the deeper the water, the bigger these things are. Some people claim they grow to hundreds of feet in length. Some side effect of whatever the asteroid leaked into the water. Nobody I know has ever seen one that big. Stan said he saw fifty footer once, and that for me is plenty big enough. I did see a guy with a tooth once though. He claimed he cut it from a carcass somewhere near the coast (which by the way, if we were going by the pre asteroid map would be a good few miles inland). The guy seemed a little off, but as true as I sit here he had it. At the time I was traveling alone, and because I was curious, and asked him if I could see it. He took off his backpack and laid it on the floor, then untied the straps. The tooth was in several pieces in his bag.  He said he had to break it to fit it all in. He laid it out on the floor there in the ash and pushed the pieces together like some kind of sick jigsaw puzzle. When he put it all together, there were no words that seemed right. All we could do was look at it. It was around three feet long, and around two and a half at its thickest point. The sides were smooth, but the guy said they had been serrated before he sanded them back to stop them cutting his bag open. I asked him how big the carcass was that it came from, and he gave me this look. To this day I still don’t know quite what that expression was.

Admiration.

Disbelief.

Fear.

Maybe a bit of all three.  I pushed him again for an answer but he just shook his head and told me I wouldn’t believe him if he told me. That I didn’t like, as most people would be keen to share such a spectacular story. Not this guy though.  He packed away his tooth and asked him if he wanted to join me. He asked where I was heading and I told him towards the coast. He shook his head and told me I was crazy to be going anywhere near the water.  Without another word he threw his bag over his shoulder and walked away, heading inland. He never looked back, not once. I do sometimes wonder what happened to him. I wonder what he would think if he could see me now, in a boat heading further north than we have ever been before. We all know they are out there, those creatures. Down in the darkest, deepest depths. We can only hope that we can catch a smaller one and get back before they notice.

By the way, I tried talking to the kid, but whenever I try to get through to him he throws his guard up. It’s almost like if he doesn’t admit that he is scared, he won’t come to any harm. That’s not a bad outlook to have I suppose, but the downside is it will hit him really hard when we finally make contact. One thing I should point out which might be a sore subject when you come to read this. Just know that (hopefully) the world is a much better and less desperate time for you than it is for us now.  Maybe for you, bait shops exist, as do other things to lure in our predators. For us, we have no such luxury, so we have to make use of what we have.

The key is to find a body that still has plenty of meat on them. They don’t seem to mind so much about the rot, as long as they are meaty. I know they were once people, but this isn’t a time where we can afford to be picky. Besides, we have to do something to draw them to us. Anyway, you can save your judgement. We do what we have to in order to survive. End of story.

God, I’m hungry. That’s the plus side of food being so scarce. We can’t afford to be picky. Believe me, I have wondered on more than once occasion if we are doing more harm than good by eating stuff that swims in these polluted seas, but then I also remind myself that we don’t really have much of a choice. It’s like the way a bear might chew through its own paw to escape a trap. Sometimes, you just have to do whatever you have to in order to survive. We are definitely going further out than usual. I hope Stan knows what he’s doing.