James Axler – Watersleep

“I can’t see a damned thing,” Ryan muttered, glancing over the chrome-plated controls.

“Nothing to see,” J.B. replied from beside him.

“I’ve never liked boats,” Ryan admitted, squinting as another flash of lightning lit up the sky. “I’d rather swim to the Carolinas than try and sail around in this mess.”

“You first,” J.B. told him.

“At least the rain’s clean. Glad this isn’t a chem storm. We’d be screwed facedown to the boards with our asses in the air then.”

“Ain’t that the truth,” J.B. replied. Both men had driven through enough of those hellish nuclear-spawned aberrations of nature to know their dangers.

“Boat not take much this,” Jak yelled over the din of the storm. His red eyes were shining eerily in the glow of the flickering electric lamps of the yacht’s bridge as he stood in the doorway across from Ryan, his wet mane of white hair hanging limply around his skull like sodden tendrils.

Ryan glanced away from the windows of the craft and over at the teenager. Ryan couldn’t help but no­tice that while he was struggling to keep his footing, Jak was effortlessly standing and compensating for the roll of the deck.

“Boat’ll do fine, Jak. We’ve just got to hang on until this is over. How are things below?” he asked as the deck rose and fell below his booted feet.

Jak’s ruby eyes revealed a faint glimmer of amuse­ment. “Fine. Doc’s seasick.”

“No surprise there. Doc’s usually the one who pukes whenever we make a jump,” J.B. replied.

“Tell everybody to hang on. There’s not much else I can do but try and keep the wheel steady until we ride this thing out,” Ryan said.

At the moment, Ryan thought that the nightmares generated by a jump were more appealing than the wild ride the companions were enduring. And then, almost involuntarily, his mind turned back to the peaceful scene of a few hours earlier.

AFTER THEY LEFT the marina, the rest of the night had passed without incident. Morning brought up a deep orange jewel from the horizon, as if the ball of the sun had been plucked from the waters of the ocean. The course had been set by utilizing J.B.’s minisextant, some trigonometric tables left in the crumbling manual for a malfunctioning on-board nav comp and some worn and taped but still intact charts. Ryan was glad for J.B.’s knowledge. They would have been forced to set out blindly in a generally northward di­rection otherwise.

The cruiser was making way northward, with the destination of North Carolina’s Outer Banks as a stop­ping point.

For all of the talk of a warhead, there were no weapons on board beyond what the group had carried on. A box of ammunition for Boyd’s 9 mm Heckler & Koch P-7 semiauto pistol was found on a table, but the blaster had fallen into the water with its owner when Mildred chilled him. Dean had claimed Bow­man’s Italian Franchi SPAS-12 shotgun and stuck it under one of the boat’s bunks for safekeeping.

The galley of the craft was the only amenity lack­ing on the tidy Patch. Empty packages and peelings in a trash can hinted of the previous existence of canned and fresh foodstuffs such as tinned meats, ap­ples and peaches. Now most of the cabinets were bare except for staple rations of stale wheat crackers, a plastic bag of jerky and part of a case of twelve-ounce tins of water. Ryan’s long arm had swept the back of the cabinets and come up with a glass container of green beans.

“We can thank that pig Bowman for all of this or the lack of,” Mildred said. “He didn’t look like he’d been missing any meals.”

Doc had pondered doing some fishing, but instead spent most of the trip on his back, exhausted from the trek across Florida and nauseated from the ship. An informal series of watches had been set, with some of the group sleeping during the day and others at nightfall.

The sunset was as strikingly beautiful as the sun had been when rising. As a rule, sunsets were always spectacular in Deathlands due to the pollutants and the chemicals and, to some degree, the radiation still hovering in the upper atmosphere.