James Axler - Homeward Bound

It didn't just ease; it dropped away completely, leaving them bobbing, becalmed, riding a sequence of sullen, swelling waves.

The sun came up like burnished copper from a sky that showed red-purple from corner to corner. Ryan dipped a finger into the water, then spit the liquid out in disgust. The spun-glass clarity of the Hudson upriver was gone. There was the taste of salt, and iron, flat on the tongue. A bitter nitrate and oil flavored the water.

And they were beginning to see things on the water around the raft. Jak Lauren was the first to notice anything, spotting a jellyfish, its skin a leprous yellow spotted with green patches. Its tentacles trailed behind it for better than a hundred yards. Ryan shouted a warning to the albino boy not to touch the creature as it wallowed near them.

"Heard of a man out in the California lagoons who saw a trailing firefish like that. He touched it and died double-crazed. They said 'fore he bought the farm he started't'bite off his own fingers from the pain."

Almost immediately after that they all clung to the raft as something immeasurably vast moved sinuously under them, just scraping the bottom of the logs with the top of its spine. Lori stuck her head over the side, trying to see what it had been, but the deeps had swallowed it.

They had heard gulls, shrieking and crying, all the way from Manhattan Island, sounding like demented souls condemned to fly the skies for eternity. Now the birds started to come closer, gathering above the raft, beginning to swoop toward the six friends.

It was Lori Quint who noticed them first. "The birds is coming," she cried.

Doc glanced at her, as though he were about to correct her grammar, as he sometimes did. But she shouted again, "The birds is coming." His face wrinkled, as though he were trying to recall something half-forgotten, but he shook his head and let it pass.

The threatening gulls had fifteen-foot wingspans and nine-inch beaks like hooked brass. But Jak pulled out his trusty .357 and blasted off at them. The boom of the handgun was flat and menacing in the open sea and loud enough to scare the birds away. One of their number was left behind, flapping its broken wing, bleeding, in the water fifty yards off. As the six watched its death throes, something came up from beneath it, with jaws as big as a dragline excavator, and sucked the gull down.

Krysty stood up, mopping sweat from her forehead. "Gaia! I'm starting to stink like a Texas gaudy whore at three in the morning. Gotta face it, Ryan, we're stuck here. We have to start paddling this clumsy mother to that beach."

She shaded her eyes with her hand, irritably pushing back the long hair that seemed to want to press against her face. Far ahead, just a blur on the horizon, her keen sight could make out something strange. It looked as if the land were creeping in, almost meeting in the middle. She couldn't make out whether there was a gap there or not. Krysty called to Doc, drawing his attention to it.

"Should be the plainest of sailing out yonder. Nothing beyond the Narrows. If there'd been an offshore wind, I feared a little that we might be carried the whole way to France."

By now they were all standing together in the center of the raft. During the time they'd been on their makeshift craft, they'd all learned caution, finding that a sudden movement to one side or the other would make it appallingly unstable.

"Lift me, lover," Krysty said.

"What? Why do?.. Ah, I get it. Give you height to look ahead."

"Right. Bend down."

Ryan stooped, dipping his head. Krysty, helped by J.B., swung a leg over his back and settled herself astride his neck, tightening her thighs. She tucked her legs under his arms, locking her boots in the middle of his back.

"Now," she said.

Though the girl weighed in at a muscular 150 pounds, Ryan lifted her in the air without any noticeable effort. He steadied her with his hands on her legs and balanced himself against the pitching of the raft.

"Try and... Yeah, that's..." Krysty then fell silent. Eventually she tapped Ryan on the head as a sign to let her down again.

"What d'you see?" he asked her.

There was a worried expression on the girl's face. "Not good, friends," she said. "Looks like there's been some bastard great upheaval that's blocked off most the water. Brought up the floor of the ocean, back in the long winter. This isn't open sea no more, Doc."

"What? You mean it's a kind of lake? No way past for us?"

"Can't see it. Look at the water around us now. It hardly moves and has a kind of skin on top, like a sort of scum."

It was true.

Though the sea still rocked with an oily swell, they had totally lost any feeling of forward momentum. They were becalmed.

Krysty was singing quietly to herself, her pure voice the only sound in the stillness.

"A maid again, I ne'er will be, Till peaches grow on a cherry tree."

Doc smiled across at her. "I haven't heard that tune in... I guess a coupla hundred years. There's a damned odd thought. It's lovely. You learn that from your kin back in... What was the ville called?"

"Harmony. Herb Lanning the blacksmith knew lots of real old songs. Way prechill. It was his son, Carl, who plucked my cherry. That's when I learned the words."

"Must have been a real good ville."

Krysty smiled at the old man. "Yeah, it was. But all things change. That was why we... why we were moving on."

"Your ville a good place, lover?" she asked Ryan.

"Seemed so, then. Until I saw the skull that was hid under the smiles."

"Life's a deal of hard traveling," J.B. said sagely, surprising everyone. Homespun philosophy wasn't normally what you heard from the Armorer.

Jak and Lori were working with the stern steering oar, slowly propelling the raft toward the western shore, now only a couple of miles away. It was backbreaking, soul-destroying work, and they'd found from painful experience that it could only be done in pairs. Any more and chaos followed with everyone knocking and pushing into everyone else.

It took them close to four hours to move roughly half the distance they needed to reach the land.

The waters around them had gotten more and more polluted. Dead fish and birds hung suspended, rotting and half-eaten, bones coated with a yellow grease. An hour back they'd poled past the corpse of a massive shark — a great white, at least fifty feet from porcine snout to the mangled tip of its tail. It hadn't been dead long, and its flat little eye still rolled incuriously toward the rich violet sky.

"Jaws," Doc muttered, enigmatic as ever.

The beach, sand dunes rolling back toward a line of low scrub, was now less than a half mile off. The sun had sunk well behind the hazy bulk of the land. In the last quarter mile they'd finally broken clear of the stickiest of the watery dreck, but the bitter labor had taken its toll.

Doc Tanner had collapsed, muttering feverishly about painted ships and painted oceans. Lori had fainted fifteen minutes later, slumping on the timbers, banging her head again. Despite her reserves of mutie strength, Krysty had given up, sitting down in a heap, her face white and drained. "Sorry, folks," she said, hoarse with exhaustion. "I've paid all I can find. Got no more. Sorry."

It had been left to Jak Lauren, with seemingly bottomless reserves of stamina in his slight body, J.B. and Ryan, to keep working on the clumsy steering paddle. Heaving it backward and forward, each stroke making the muscles of shoulder and spine scream in protest. Each stroke pushed the raft a scant couple of feet nearer to land.

Now the worst was over. Lori, Doc and Krysty had recovered a little, relishing the cooler breeze coming off the beach. Jak and the Armorer were at the oar.

Krysty smiled weakly at Ryan as they sat together. "I felt awful about stopping."