Vanguard | Post-Apocalyptic YA

Part 35: Bugging Out

Satisfied that my charge is at least still alive for now, I stand. The deck under my feet rocks back and forth as seawater sloshes around my ankles. With my top half now exposed, the wind whips into my hair and whistles in my ears.

The feeling of being on open water in such weather is nothing less than terrifying. No wonder sailors of yester-year respected the sea so highly.

"What's our position?" I shout to Jed as he continues to struggle keeping the ship's wheel steady against the heavy waves.

"No idea!" he yells back before looking up at the cloud-covered sky. "Without the stars, we're pretty much sailing blind."

Oof. That is not what I wanted to hear, but there's nothing I can do about it. My Skipper was equipped with radar and various gadgets for telemetry, so I'm the last person to give advice about navigating without technology. I'm just hoping that keeping our original course due north and hugging the coast as much as possible will eventually get us to our destination. Because if we miss a safe port and are caught without shelter after dawn, we're all toast.

As I try not to think about both the immediate and the lingering pain of radiation burn from that incident at the strawberry farm, I focus my sights on the cresting waves. The white caps froth under the periodic strikes of lightning as the ship bobs up and down in parallel, creating an almost hypnotic effect. Behind me, Dad and Ellen continue to scoop water off the deck, Nelly adjusts the sails to Jed's instructions, and Dr. Scott hugs his knees to his chest.

Another streak of lightning flashes across the sky in a mix of white and purple, followed by a thunder clap. I flinch, feeling the sound in my chest even more than I hear it in my ears. When I open my eyes, there's something in the water that wasn't there before.

I blink rapidly, sure that I'm imagining things. But even through my wet lashes, I can see that the scene has changed.

About fifty feet off the starboard side, the surface is dark and sleek, a calm patch amongst the chaos. At first I suspect a whale or a large shark, but there's no telltale fin or the expected movement. In fact, there's nothing organic about it at all, and once more I question whether I really even saw anything when a dip between two waves reveals a riveted porthole.

"A sub! There's a su-submarine out there," I stutter over the storm, shaking as much from astonishment as from the cold.

Nelly's at my side first. "Where? How can you tell?"

I point to where the metal hull had surfaced, but now it's nothing but ocean.

"There, but it must have gone back down," I say, wishing I had alerted the others more quickly.

"Are you sure? Lot of debris out here. Or even a stray mine," Jed yells. "And if it was one of those, you better not confuse it for something else."

His continued lack of faith in me is really getting on my nerves. "I know what I saw!"

"Could it have been a Skipper?" asks Ellen as she leans against the mast to catch her breath.

I shake my head. "Not a chance. And before you ask, it wasn't a ferry, either."

"Then what was it?" Jed asks. "Because there's no way in hell it was another submarine."

I'm scanning the sea again to prove him wrong, but all I see are waves. "Oh yeah? Why not?"

Dad puts a hand on my back. "Given the size of the oceans compared to the number of submarines that were already decades old before the climate catastrophe, the odds of having one not only still seaworthy, but also suddenly show up here would be almost impossible."

"So would us meeting people who lived underwater for two decades, yet here we are," Nelly says before giving me a nod. "I believe you, Will."

Suddenly all of the stress from the last few days catches up with me and I have to choke back a sob at her support. "Thanks, Nells."

Still, I wish I had solid proof of what I saw, but I find nothing else unusual in the water for the rest of the way, no matter how hard I look. By sheer dumb luck, however, Jed does get us back to Port Canaveral before Bradford takes the ferry on its last one-way trip up north. That in itself is a small miracle and one that couldn't come fast enough.

"We've found Darren Scott, but he needs medical care right away," dad yells to the men frantically waving us away from the dock as our ship attempts to pull in behind the ferry. I see some familiar faces of O-towners like Casey and Baker running around still loading boxes into it, which means that the governor wasn't bluffing. He was going to send a contingent to his supposed safe-zone even if we didn't get back in time. But now that we're clearly back, I don't understand the urgency.

"You can't leave this thing here," declares one of the men that Jed used to go on scavenger missions on with as he points to our waterlogged ship.

Jumping onto solid ground as soon as we're close enough, dad wraps a mooring line around a pole. "Are you deaf, son? Go find a doctor! And tell the governor he can't take the ferry just yet."

"I'm right here, so you can tell me yourself," booms Bradford as he emerges from the shadow of the terminal building after hearing at least the end of the conversation. "Why should we hold off? I didn't have much faith, but don't tell me you got the fuel source as promised, now did you?" he asks with a smile.

I cringe. Now this is awkward. We, in fact, did not get the nuclear material he was waiting on. But I hope Dad has a delicate way of disappointing the man in charge.

"Well, no. We didn't get it, but--" 

"Then that's all I need to hear," Bradford cuts him off as his expression turns from satisfied to furious in half a second. "All of you ladies get out of that floating pile of junk. And Jed, you move it out of the way in the next three minutes or the ferry will go right through it with you on board."

I'm still mentally trying to decide whether the governor just referred to me as a lady along with Nelly and Ellen, when Dad does the impossible and puts his hand on the governor's shoulder.

"Now you wait here just a second," he says, possibly hyped up on adrenaline or a lack of sleep because confrontation has never been part of his usual repertoire.

The statement takes even Bradford by surprise and he looks on silently with a shocked expression, waiting for the rest.

"We may have failed in this one attempt to secure more fuel for the ferry, but what makes you think that it's a better idea to take it on a surefire one-way trip with no chance of coming back than to wait a bit longer for us to try something else that could save everyone, both here and down in Vanguard?" Dad asks.

By the deep breath that Bradford takes in order to suppress his no doubt bubbling anger, I'm pretty sure he's going to deck Dad first and answer later, but I'm mistaken.

"Because," Bradford says, more measured than I've ever heard him. "We don't have the luxury of time on our side, Dr. Jacobson. You see, right at this very moment, Vanguard is under attack. And there's nothing I can do to stop that. But if we don't get this ferry out of here soon, they'll come for us next and we'll also lose it. Once that happens, you can forget about saving anyone, much less everyone. Now kindly move your ship so we can at least save part of humanity."