Shaun Harbinger - Rain

There was nothing I could do. Mike loaded the flare into the flare gun and went into the cabin, revving the engine and giving the boat full throttle.

Harper realized what was happening and his face turned into a pale mask of horror. “No!” he screamed. “No!”

The noise attracted the zombies on the rocks. They came to the water’s edge, reaching out for the boat speeding towards them.

Elena stood with them. Mike aimed the boat for her.

Lucy’s hands flew to her face and she turned away, unable to watch.

Harper continued screaming, fully aware that he was hurtling to his death.

As Mike got within twenty feet of the rocks, he fired the flare at the deck.

The boat became a fireball.

It hit the rocks and went off like a Molotov cocktail.

The flaming hull split apart on the rocks and flaming gasoline spilled onto the zombies in burning torrents.

The boat exploded.

I didn’t know how many zombies had been destroyed. There must have been twenty at least.

One of them was Elena.

I closed my eyes and felt tears stinging my cheeks.

She and Mike now rested in peace.

Black smoke curled up into the grey sky from the rocks around the lighthouse. The smell of burning flesh filled the air.

Leaving Lucy curled up and sobbing on the aft deck, I climbed to the bridge and started our engines.

We had to get away from this place.

For two days, everything was a blur.

I somehow managed to pilot The Big Easy north, keeping to the deep water well away from the coastline.

Lucy and I barely ate, barely communicated. We lived on board The Big Easy like ghosts. Our existence felt ethereal, illusory. I knew we were in shock. The events since the virus outbreak had finally caught up with us. Our minds needed time to process all we had been through.

Even though I knew we were in shock, there was nothing I could do about it. I couldn’t tell myself to just ‘snap out of it’. My best friend was dead. Nothing would change that cold fact.

The weather closed in and I dropped anchor, leaving the boat bobbing on the waves as the tombstone sky cried down unending tears of rain all around us. The water-smeared windows offered us a view of sea and sky and rain and nothing else, adding to the illusion that none of this was real. Maybe I would wake up from this bad dream and Mike and Elena would still be alive. Maybe I would wake up in the tent in the mountains and none of this would have happened. All a dream. A stupid dream brought on by trying to keep up with Mike, Elena and Lucy as we hiked across the Welsh mountains.

On the third day, I lay on my bed staring at the ceiling. The wind had died down and the boat rocked gently on the water. I didn’t know what time it was but the sky beyond the porthole was black. For the first time since Mike’s death, I felt hungry.

If Lucy and I didn’t take care of ourselves, this boat would become our floating tomb. I thought of Max Prentice lying on his bed in The Hornet, floating somewhere out at sea just like us. Would that be my fate? Lying on this bed forever while The Big Easy sat dead in the water?

Mike wouldn’t want this. He wouldn’t want us to give up.

I had been withdrawn for three days but now I craved human contact. I needed to hear Lucy’s voice, touch her, know she was alive. We were both alive.

Alive.

The apocalypse had happened but we were still alive.

Survivors.

She must have felt the same need for contact because the bedroom door opened and she stood there wearing only her ‘Sail To Your Destiny’ T-shirt. I remembered the time at Doug Latimer’s barbecue when she had stood in front of the refrigerator and taken a swig of beer, her breasts pushing against her black sweater. She looked that good to me right now as she stood in the doorway.

“Can I lie down with you?” she asked.

It felt good just to hear her voice. I nodded and moved back on the bed to give her room to lie with me.

She lay down in front of me, her back pressed against my chest, the curve of her bottom snug against the front of my boxers.

I placed my hand on her waist, feeling the warmth of her skin through the T-shirt. I could see the vein in her neck pulsing with life. She smelled of perspiration and tears. Her long hair caressed my face.

“We’re alive,” I said.

“Yes, we are.”

My hand stroked her hip and she pressed herself back against me.

She was soft and exciting.

I kissed the pulsing vein on her neck and she turned her head so our lips met. After living through the end of the world, after drifting like ghosts for three days, we each desperately needed something that only the other could provide: human touch.

My hand explored the soft flesh of her thigh before moving up under the T-shirt to find the curves of her breasts. She moaned into my mouth as my fingers brushed her nipples.

It was a long night on the gentle waves and all movement, sound and touch merged into a single vivid dream of heat, tightness, sensation, and pleasure.

When I woke up, I could hear music.

Lucy was gone from the bed. We had fallen asleep together sometime in the night and the physical closeness had been like a life raft keeping us sane after all we had experienced. I listened to the music drifting down from the upper deck. “Total Eclipse of the Heart”. An old song written in a different era but it still lifted my spirits. I sang along badly as I got out of bed. Through the porthole, the sky was blue and the clouds were white and unthreatening.

A good day for zombies.

I pushed that thought away and dressed hurriedly. The smell of bacon reached me and made my mouth water. We had found a freezer stocked with meat on the day we first boarded The Big Easy. We had agreed to only use it on special occasions as it was irreplaceable. Lucy had obviously decided that today was a special occasion.

I went up and found her in the kitchen leaning over the frying pan. She had a pan of beans on the stove and bread in the toaster. The smells assailing my nose were incredible.

“Something smells good,” I said as I watched the bacon sizzling in the pan.

She looked over at me and smiled. “We need to keep our strength up if we’re going to find those U.N. ships.”

We hadn’t talked about the rescue mission for the past three days. It had seemed unimportant… distant. Now we were ready to be rescued. It was the only way we were going to have a future that didn’t involve violence and death.

After Bonnie Tyler finished singing, Johnny Drake came on the radio . “Hey to all the survivors out there. Here’s a tune from way back when. The Doors and ‘Strange Days’.” The music filled the room.

After three days of barely existing, the music and the smell of the food and the renewed sense of a goal was almost sensory overload. I sat in the easy chair and let myself become accustomed to this sudden influx of sensation.

The only depressing part of the morning was when the Survivor Reach Out segment came on the radio while we were eating our breakfast. More lost souls looking for their fellow lost souls. I saw a TV program once where the mother of a murder victim whose body was never found had said that not knowing was worse than knowing her son was dead. For these people on the radio, they would probably never know what had happened to their families and that would probably haunt them for the rest of their lives.

After three survivors told their stories and appealed for their relatives to get in contact with the nearest Survivors Camp, Johnny Drake’s mellow voice came back on air. “Let’s remember what we’re surviving for, people. It’s all about family.”

After we had eaten, I went down to the shower and stood beneath the hot spray for fifteen minutes, letting the water roll over every inch of skin. Feeling cleansed, I went to the store room and picked out a new T-shirt. It had no logo, just a drawing of a yacht sailing into the sunset. The nautical folk sure liked their romanticism. I put on jeans and my boots and went up to the bridge while Lucy went below to have her shower.