"Will! Get up." Dad shakes me awake.
"Is it morning yet?" I mumble before realizing my mistake. "I mean night. Whatever. Just ten more minutes, okay?"
"It's not okay, son," he says, continuing to nudge me up. "Nelly and Jed are gone."
My eyes pop open. "What?"
Dad looks haggard from exhaustion and worry, dark circles rimming his usually cheerful eyes. "Did she say anything to you earlier? Or was there a reason you can think of that they'd just leave us?"
Other than me trying to kiss her and then getting upset that she rejected me? Nawwww.
"Uhm, no," I say as I slowly rise. My shoulder still hurts—actually it's worse than yesterday—but funny enough, I'm actually getting more used to the pain.
"I'm sure there's been some kind of mistake—"
"The van's not there," Ellen interrupts as she walks in. A backpack draped over her shoulder carries our meager belongings. If Nelly and Jed are truly gone, then that's all we have left and we are completely screwed. But she wouldn't do that to us. Would she?
Dad and Ellen help me outside and we stand in the dark entryway looking at the empty parking lot out front. There's a light drizzle and the cloudy sky obscures any hint of the moon. None of us speak and frankly, I'm not surprised. We had several contingency plans, but being ditched without a ride wasn't one of them. I'm about to break the silence and ask 'what now' when a dark shape rounds the building and stops in front of us.
"Get in, guys. My dad's not going to rescue himself," Nelly says cheerfully out the passenger window.
"What the fuck?" Ellen blurts out. "Where have you been?"
Nelly looks genuinely surprised. "What? We took a quick spin around the block to make sure the van was all set and we weren't going to have a wheel pop off or anything. Thought we'd let you sleep a few extra minutes, but whatever. Now, are you coming or what?"
We pile back in and get on the road again. The windscreen is hazy from the rain, but Jed only turns on the wipers when it gets really bad. Since we're running on solar and don't know how long it'll be overcast, we have to conserve as much battery power as possible.
There's plenty of water, but the dry berries, nuts, and grain bars that we've been eating are quickly running out. We can always boil water for the oats we brought, but that's a last resort. Setting a fire risks being seen by rovers, the smoke a dead giveaway for miles around.
After tasting fresh tomatoes, strawberries and oranges grown in and around O-Town, I never thought I'd miss the kelp we frequently had on Vanguard, but here we are. That distinct salty tone mixed with an earthy sweetness makes me long for home. A home I may never see again, especially if we fail to find the real Dr. Scott.
It took me a while to admit it even to myself, but I have ulterior motives to locating Nelly's dad. Sure, we owe it to the man seeing as though my own father assumed his identity for over two decades and took his family's place on Vanguard. But Dr. Scott also went looking for the precious nuclear fuel that can continuously power our only means of long-range transportation. Being able to use the ferry without it relying on Vanguard's core energy source to re-charge would mean that it could make multiple round-trips between Florida and Canada, the place that Casey Chan has identified as radiation-free. Success would mean saving not only the people of O-Town, but also Vanguard. It's a perfect plan, but we're already almost halfway into our time limit and we haven't even reached the power plant, much less found Darren Scott.
"You okay, Will?" asks Dad, tapping me on the shoulder. Unlike yesterday, I'm sitting in the middle row and he's taken the back seat.
I nod. "Yeah. Just feeling a little anxious," I say, knowing it's no use to hide my apprehension at failing and thereby dooming everyone on the undersea base to never seeing the surface again.
Dad rummages around his pockets and then hands me something. "Here. Take this."
I haven't seen a capsule like the one in my palm now in weeks, but after taking one daily since age five, I'd recognize it anywhere. "A vitamin supplement? How do you have this?"
He lets out a dry laugh. "I've stopped taking them years ago, building up a little stockpile for just in case," he says.
Having been listening to our conversation, Ellen butts in. "Just in case? Just in case for what?"
Dad clears his throat. "Just in case I needed to take the edge off when I chose to, instead of when they did," he says, cryptically.
"They who?" Ellen asks.
"Lamer, Kiefer, and even Christiansen before them. Basically anyone who's been in charge on Vanguard."
"I'm sorry, but are you saying that your leadership drugged people against their knowledge with anti-anxiety meds to make them . . . what? Behave?" asks Nelly from the driver's seat, looking back at us through the rear-view mirror.
I'm hoping that Dad will say that she has it all wrong, but he basically just shrugs. "Yeah, more or less. I mean, if by behave you really mean become complaisant or apathetic," he says.
Holy crap! This is huge. I've always assumed that everyone on the base had been in ideological agreement, that they were just good citizens, and they willingly followed our extremely structured life. But just like a bunch of other things, that had been a lie. Worse, actually. Because it was it was forced on us. And my dad knew it.
"That's messed up," Jed says, unknowingly agreeing with me.
For the rest of the way, we sit in silence as the rain continues to tap tap tap on the car. Thankfully there are no more roadblocks, no roving gangs, and no other surprises. That is, until Nelly brings the van to a sudden standstill as the road in front of us just ends.
"What's wrong?" Dad asks, looking ahead like the rest of us.
Instead of answering, the girl I've always known to be cool and levelheaded slams her palms on the steering wheel and screams.
"Dammit, dammit, dammit," Nelly yells before resting her forehead against the wheel.
"Bad news?" I mutter, trying to break the tension.
"The power plant is on a long, thin strip of land accessible only by three bridges," Jed says, pointing out toward the water. Past the hazy surface, we can just make out the barrier island. Between us and it, there's the remnants of a few pillars, evidence of what used to be one of those bridges.
"Ah," I say. "Well, then we'll just have to find the other two."
Continuing to drive further south, we waste another hour only to get the same results.
"I should have expected this," says Dad when we confirm that there's no way to get on the island by car. "Of course the military would make it as hard as possible to reach the nuclear reactor as soon as they declared a global catastrophe. Or right before then, actually."
"You think the military blew the bridges up?" Ellen asks, nervously playing with the strap of her backpack.
Dad nods. "Absolutely. The government has plans for everything like this. There's no way they'd let such critical infrastructure remain unsecured."
"If Dr. Scott made it over there, then so can we," Jed says and it takes me a minute to realize that he's talking about Nelly's dad and not mine. "The inlet is, what? A mile wide? We just need a boat. And this is Florida. There were more boats here twenty years ago than people, I'm willing to bet."
The plan is solid, and frankly, it's the only one we have. So we begin to drive up the coast again toward the point directly across from the two, distinct cylinders of the Port St. Lucie nuclear power station, all the while scouring the area for a usable vessel. There's talk of transferring the van's batteries into a speedboat, but all of the ones we find are either dry-docked in inaccessible showrooms or rotting in marinas. Every sailing yacht we come across has broken masts, twisted keels or frayed sails and it becomes more apparent than ever that more than two decades of neglect and radiation exposure is going to leave us with very few—if any—options.
"I'd settle for a rowboat at this point if it would mean making some progress," says Nelly before she kicks the hull of a moored catamaran that would be ideal were the remnants of a fishing boat not laying across its deck.
"Do you know how long it would take to row across a mile of water?" asks Ellen, in what is probably the first thing she's said to the other girl in days.
It turns out to be a really bad decision because Nelly pivots to her with fire in her eyes. If looks could kill . . . well, you know.
"At least we'd be doing SOMETHING!" yells Nelly, lunging at my sister, but Jed holds her back.
"All right, all right. We get it. But we can't lose our cool," he says with increasing calm as he tries to get her to deescalate. "Maybe we're not going about this—"
"I got it! I found a ship!" Dad interrupts, yelling as he runs toward us from down the pier. In our search of this harbor, I didn't even notice him disappear. Once he's gotten our attention, he stops and motions for us to go to him, instead. "Come on! You have to see this."
The 'this' turns out to be located in the Sewall's Point Pirate Museum, a kitschy establishment on the far end of the harbor. Its entrance, topped by a ubiquitous skull and crossed scabbard sign, is right off the boardwalk next to what used to be ice cream and souvenir shops. I briefly imagine what an afternoon here would have been like in its heyday, but I don't have much time for daydreaming as Dad leads us into the building.
Inside is dark, but we ignore the exhibits of mannequins in stockades and maps showing trade routes in lieu of heading straight for the exit. I'm beginning to wonder why we even needed to come through the whole thing when Dad opens a door marked 'Staff Only' and I get my answer.
"It's . . . it's a whole ass pirate ship," Jed blurts out what we all must have been thinking.
From beside the two-masted galleon dangling on tethers inits own hangar, Dad grins like a kid. "Yeah it is ," he says, eyes sparkling.