James Axler – Gaia’s Demise

“Obsession,” Krysty read off the submerged ship. “Nice name.”

As they passed by, Doc reached out with his ebony stick and tapped the propellers. The blades turned without hindrance and spun merrily.

“The engine is gone,” Ryan said, frowning. “She’s been looted.”

Jak grabbed a barge pole and thrust it downward, meeting no resistance. “Clear water,” he announced.

“Must be floating freely.”

Mildred frowned. “Lord, I hope so.”

More and more wreckage filled the waters beneath them until it seemed as if they were sailing over a submerged junkyard of smashed, rotting, vessels.

“Ten o’clock,” Ryan warned, pointing at the horizon, one arm on the helm.

A smudge on the horizon grew steadily in size until they could see that the dark mass was a pile of wreckage, rising from the water like an island. An oil tanker lay among a pile of destroyers, gunboats, battleships, aircraft carriers, boats and seagoing vessels of every kind, all jammed together.

“Tumble down?” Jak asked.

Blinking from the windblown spray on his face, Ryan agreed. When skydark raped the world, debris from the nuked cities rained across the continent. The Manhattan blast threw cars and buses across the greater tristate area, the vehicles blown off bridges and shotgunning out of tunnels to fly for a hundred miles from the concussion of the nukes. Houses had been found on mountaintops, toilet seats in the middle of a desert and once Ryan found an intact bridge spanning a grassy field in the middle of nowhere. Anything close to an atomic blast was vaporized, but the objects farther away were melted and sprayed outward, then smashed apart and sent flying, and after that, merely airborne.

“The debris must have been drawn here by the current,” Ryan guessed. “Then one ship got caught on a sandbar or mebbe it got entangled with another sunken ship. A second was caught, and so on until there was an island.”

“Or maybe it was an oil rig,” Mildred said. “But I honestly don’t recall if there was any deep-sea drilling going on offshore of North Carolina.”

“Want to stop by and see if it’s inhabited?” J.B. asked, adjusting his glasses. “Might have some wags we could trade for, salvage.”

Ryan frowned. “Pointless to try. Even if we found a wag, how the hell would we get it to the shore? Best keep traveling.”

“Besides,” Krysty added, placing a hand on her blaster and loosening it in the holster, “after that bastard Poseidon, I don’t trust sailors much.”

“Amen to that,” Mildred added grimly.

RISING FROM HIS CHAIR, the old man shuffled across the bridge of the predark battleship in bare feet, his single garment of stitched canvas highly decorated with embroidery patterns and service medals from a hundred nations.

Slanted windows fronted three sides of the room, affording a panoramic view of the river basin. On a clear day, green haze could be seen from the distant shore, but everywhere else the blue waters of the basin ruled supreme.

The bridge was a half circle of electronic equipment as dead as the previous owners of the vessel. Radar screens were dark and lifeless, radios silent as the deep waters themselves. Near the stairwell, a stove made from an oil drum radiated heat. On top of the stove was a sterling-silver punch bowl full of simmering fish stew, the tiny heads bobbing about staring at nothing amid the long strands of kelp and diced turtle eggs.

Crumbling some dried mold into the stew, the commodore used a spoon carved from a lifeboat to take a taste, then added a bit more. The stores in the holds of the ships that comprised the island were finally running low after so many decades, but that didn’t matter anymore, as all of his people would soon be dead.

The thought saddened him, and the whitehair walked to the southern window to gaze out upon the featureless vista of his watery domain. The commodore sighed. The crew of the Navy had lived here since skydark. Sometimes they sent expeditions to the shores for food or tools, but the crew always came back. There didn’t seem to be any other living beings in the world. They found ruins, but no people. Just twisted, shambling mockeries of people, mindless creatures who wantonly killed with their clawed hands and howled at the sight of fire. Sometimes a hellhound was found, but thankfully those were rare. And very deadly.