Jeremy Robinson - SecondWorld

After two deep breaths, he tasted the vomit. He wondered hazily if he had thrown up without knowing it, but decided he hadn’t. The vomit belonged to whoever had used this regulator before him. A fierce wave of nausea swept through his body and he closed his eyes, forcing himself to fight it down. The taste in his mouth was horrible and sickening, but the life-giving air was delightful.

After waiting a full minute for his body and mind to return to normal, he opened his eyes. He found himself lying on his back staring at the ceiling. He could have sworn he had been lying on his stomach—most likely his oxygen-deprived senses were all twisted about.

He wasn’t lying on the floor, he finally realized. He was lying on top of something.

He turned to the side.

Oh, God. Not something.

Someone.

He sat up fast and jumped to his feet. The regulator popped out of his mouth, weighed down by the heavy oxygen tank on the floor. Miller held his breath as he looked at the body.

It was a woman. Dressed in a yellow bikini with red polka dots. In life she would have been beautiful. Stunning. In death, surrounded by a pool of dried vomit, the graying corpse was hideous—the woman’s mouth was frozen open in a gaping scream where the regulator had once been.

Miller knelt down next to her and picked up the oxygen tank. He placed the regulator in his mouth again, took one long drag, and removed it again. The sight of the dead woman combined with the flavor of vomit was more than he could handle at the moment. The door to the head lay open behind the body. He stepped over it, and in, yanking on the tap. The water flowed and he swiftly rinsed off the regulator, then popped it back in his mouth.

He held the tank by his side and stepped back into the hallway, eyes locked on the copious amount of vomit.

This woman didn’t asphyxiate, he thought. She still had plenty of air left in the tank. So what killed her?

He decided it was a question better answered later, or not at all, and set about searching the rest of the sailboat. He moved quickly through the small hallway and opened the first cabin. A man lay splayed over the bed, tanned, muscular arms flung wide, like Jesus on the cross. His eyes stared at the ceiling and his mouth, wide open, was full of his own vomit. He’d drowned in it. The bedsheet, caked in the sour bile, stuck to the man’s head.

Here too was an oxygen tank. Nearly full. Miller picked it up and headed for the second cabin. The wooden door opened smoothly and the afternoon light poured through the portal onto a stack of oxygen tanks. Six in all. Despite the gruesome surroundings, Miller smiled.

He quickly checked the tanks. All were full.

He shook his head. Well, now I know who drained the way station.

How many trips had they made back and forth? How long had they been here? And what had killed them?

Ignoring the questions that would normally have been important to him, he turned his attention back to the six tanks lying on the bed and the two in his hands.

Each tank held three thousand psi of air, which, at a sixty-foot depth, would last him about an hour. Here, in the open air, each tank would give him about two hours, maybe more if he could control his breathing. He had eight tanks.

Sixteen hours.

That was a great improvement from the sixteen seconds he had left to live upon boarding the vessel, but he was still nine miles from Key Largo. He couldn’t waste any time.

He stepped into the hallway and over the woman, taking the stairs back out to the deck. He shuffled through six inches of the rose-colored flakes and sat at the helm. He looked over the controls. Everything was automated. He tried starting the boat. The engine wheezed and failed. He tried twice more without any luck. He couldn’t get it to start. Then it hit him.

Oxygen.

Without oxygen there would be no combustion, which meant that any gas-fueled engines wouldn’t work. Or generators, for that matter. He wouldn’t even be able to start a damn campfire.

Miller glanced over at the furled sails. When he’d first seen the ship from the life support buoy he’d thought there was no wind to move the ship, but the sails had simply not been engaged.

He wiped dust away from the helm’s console. The ship’s batteries appeared to be working, which was one bright spot in an otherwise hellish day. The console buttons glowed dully in the afternoon sunlight. A button labeled ANCHOR was lit up. He pressed it and heard a winch start to run. The couple had dropped anchor right over the way station. The two sails were labeled as well: MAINSAIL and SPINNAKER. He hit both buttons.

Gears turned and winches spun. The sails unfurled and raised high on the mast. Before the sails had finished rising, the wind caught them with a whump . The boom swung around and snapped to a stop. The sloop lurched forward and accelerated.

Miller took the wheel and directed the ship toward the tiny sliver of land in the distance.

The boat slid through the calm waters of Port Largo, a man-made river lined with docks and slips that gave the owners access to their waterfront homes. Several tributaries reached out from either side, extending the water’s reach. It was like a street, really.

A dead street.

The only things moving were the palm leaves bending in the breeze and billowing clouds of red kicked up by the occasional gust of wind. The trees and large parts of several homes had been swept clean of the dust, which had gathered like snowdrifts against other homes.

Miller looked at the sky. The storm, if that’s what it was, showed no signs of ending. Clouds of flakes fluttered down, spinning in the wind like great schools of fish.

Having made the nine-mile sail in just over an hour, he wasn’t in a panicked rush, but with only fifteen hours of air remaining he needed to find more soon and then work out some kind of plan. Key Largo was a beginning, but he needed to reach a city—Miami for starters—where he hoped to find more air and survivors.

He remembered leaving from Port Largo only a week before. It had been a beautiful day. Dark cumulus clouds and high humidity foretold a coming thunderstorm. He’d flirted, for what felt like the first time in a long time, with the caretaker of Aquarius, a pretty blonde whose name he’d forgotten.

He pulled the sloop into the slip closest to the main street, Ocean Bay Drive. He tied the boat off and hopped onto the dock wearing an air tank on his back. He lugged along a second tank, just in case.

His first stop was the scuba shop. Dave’s Scuba. He’d visited the seaside store briefly before heading out to Aquarius. Most of the tanks in the shop would likely be empty, but Dave also rented tanks to vacationers who wouldn’t want to wait for one to be filled. Hopefully there would be some full ones left. Without breathable air in the atmosphere, the shop’s compressor would do him little good.

He entered the store and found it free of the pink dust he’d shuffled through to get there. The place looked untouched, as though frozen in time. Wet suits hung on racks. Key Largo T-shirts dangled from the ceiling. Scuba tanks of all sizes lined the walls.

Then he saw a shoe.

He stepped around a rack of swim trunks and found a bare leg. The rest of the body was hidden behind the checkout counter. He peeked over the top. Despite the regulator covering the lower half of the man’s face, Miller recognized him as the owner, Dave. His balding, slicked-back, long hair was hard to forget, or mistake.

The vomit surrounding his head was familiar. Dave, like the two people on the sloop, had not suffocated. They had plenty of breathable air when they died. Something else had killed them.