Dead in the Water by Benkei

“Go, go, GO!”

My father ran to the quay, his white hair dishevelled, being chased by a mob of silent people.

We looked up from the boat towards him: “Look out! Behind you, dad!”

Instead of defending himself with his knife, he cut the line and we drifted free. James rammed the bow thruster to maximum and swung the rudder around as the rest of us pushed anyone trying to get on board into the water. While some of them jumped, breaking bones as they landed with dull thuds on the iron deck of the Marie Gallante, I looked back through the chaos at my dad.

I dropped to my knees, yelling in anguish, as teeth sank through his red sailing jacket and his blue jeans. He yelps in pain but with a faint smile on his lips - knowing we’d cast off. And then, rather than being turned into one of them, he lets himself fall into the water to drown.

Then one of them grabs me, I want to scream but I can’t. Fuck.

I wake up. James holds his hand over my mouth, his eyes big. Another nightmare, another scream. I’ve had a lot of those.

“Shhh… she’s coming this way”, he whispers. James used to be big, with a smile larger than life. Now his eyes are dark-rimmed and glum. An unkempt, red-white beard mostly hides a permanent snarl. He’s skinny, dirty and smelly just like me. And “she” is whatever is left of his wife.

Peeepe-peep–swish-thump. A shadow passes over the cabinet. She shuffles into the cabin. We both freeze. White noise erupts in my ears, heart thudding. A headache flares, terrified as I am to make a noise. I notice I’m holding my breath and ever so slowly, I open my mouth and breath out. I move my hand towards the knife next to me. James, painstakingly slow, shakes his head. I leave the knife alone. A replay of each time she passed. I don’t begrudge James his aversion to killing the remaining semblance of his wife. God knows what’s left of mine down below.

Erin, or what’s left of her, shambles in front of the cabinet. Through a crack we see a dirty, bloody tennis shoe dragging across the floor with syncopated. A hushed swish of clothing, followed by a thump as she limps through the bridge. Peeepe-peep–swish-thump. Peeepe-peep–swish-thump. Like Pavlovian dogs that sound now inspires dread, which is only interrupted by the wallowing shift of the ship causing her to tumble. The dead are silent, until a sound triggers them into motion.

We’ve been hiding in this cabinet for weeks, reduced to eating dry noodles with cold water when the rest of the food we could reach ran out. I roll the noodles around endlessly in my mouth to avoid making a sound, until it’s soft enough to swallow. We shit where we sit and use a stained rag to push it in a corner. Thank God the dead can’t smell, or they would’ve found us weeks ago.

She leaves the bridge but my anxiety doesn’t.

“Nightmare?”, whispers James. I nod. He holds his thumb and pinkie outstretched next to his ear, twists his hand in that universal signal. I pick up the black mirror and hold the power button. It switches on, still some percentage left and I quickly swipe to Maps, it takes a minute to pick up the GPS. Water everywhere. I zoom out. "Still East." I give the phone to him. He looks, swipes right, zooms in. He holds up two fingers. Two days left.

We don’t dare to talk so we're left to our own thoughts and fears.

I reflect that it was my wife’s paranoia that saved us. Ever since the war in Ukraine, she had a flight bag ready. Passports, basic necessities, birth certificates - I don’t know what else she packed but we moved the moment things went south. Yoan and Frankie in tow; we got in our car and I called James to ask if he could get us aboard a seagoing vessel. The UK, and probably Europe, was lost by my estimation.

James could but the problem was we had to go to London - densely populated and therefore a problem. He sent me the address. I called my mum and dad second and my mum didn’t want to fight anymore - she wasn’t going to run. We drove past Rita's mum’s house, who lives around the corner, but she wasn’t there. Rita was frantically calling her parents and that’s when the mobile connections dropped out. There was no way to communicate anymore.

I stopped at my parents’ house to discover my dad didn’t just think about fleeing. He dumped several knives, a baseball bat and a couple of two-by-fours in the trunk and got in. Rita and I fought all the way to London. Rita was yelling, the kids were crying in the back and my dad was trying to calm the kids, until I screamed: “Fuck your mum!” as I refused to detour to look for her. The fighting lasted right up until we saw a plane crash into London City Airport, balls of flame exploding to the left of us as it rammed through several parked planes. Then we were all silent driving into the tunnel, staring at the blaze for as long as we could. I clench my fists in frustration, remembering the last safe moment in my life.

I shake my head, trying not to think about the past. But the present is just as bleak and the future isn’t going to be much better. I try to empty my mind and let myself drift off to sleep.

…

"Alright, listen up. There're four bridges between here and the sea. We need to be ready if any more of them try to get on board. Grab some weapons, anything you can hit or push with.", yelled James over the caterwauling kids as he grabbed a two-by-four. Lex, another childhood friend, was taping a knife to a broom handle, making a rudimentary spear.

"What about the kids?", I asked. "They've already seen enough horror, don't you think?" I stroke Yoan's and Frankie's hair, keeping them close. “Rita, you’re the smallest so it makes sense if you stay with them. You won’t be much help out here.”

And with that, Lex’s two daughters and Yoan and Frankie go into a cabin below decks. Rita’s voice lilts, just as it always does when she’s faking her mood but the kids stay muted despite her attempts at cheering them up. I grab the metal baseball bat my dad brought and give it two practice swings. I look out for the first bridge in the distance. We’re not the only boat in the water and from a distance I see people throwing themselves onto a barge. Not much later it veers under an angle against the quay. More souls lost.

Closing my eyes for a moment, I want to give up as I start thinking ahead: How to get out? How long to survive at sea? How to get to a place that’s safe? Is there even such a thing? How to rebuild? But then as I open my eyes at the warning shout from James and the first dead lands in front of me, I swing anyways. The simultaneous squelch and crunch as I connect with her face sickens me. A soft and sweet face, probably a teenager or student. Only greyed out large pupils and discolouration in her whites betraying her infection. That, and the fact she just hurled herself down from the bridge breaking a leg. I push the memory away as my stomach roils again.

We get past those bridges but not without losses. Yu An, Lex’s wife, was pregnant of a third and she gets infected at one of our panicked defences. The stress of everything now causes her to go into early labour. Luckily, Erin is a general practitioner that helps her deliver the baby. We restrain Yu An and bring the baby to Rita and the other kids.

I try to stop them from bringing the baby to the cabin. I try to warn them but they don’t hear me. I scratch at the door, ram it with my baseball bat. Anything to open it but it won’t budge. Finally, the door opens. A black hole into nothing. Then Rita is at my throat like a cheap jump-scare Hollywood movie, trying to bite me as I block her with the bat. I fall on my back, the kids biting my shins, tearing the flesh in bloody clumps from me as I scream.

I shudder awake again. I’m left thinking about the kids. Tears well up in my eyes. I picture Frankie’s goofy smiles, bigger than anyone else’s. I never understood how he could be that exuberant but I smile through welling tears, vicariously experiencing the depth of his unique, quirky happiness. Yoan was always more complicated, more critical and with that incredibly strong sense of justice. She’d stand up for others and fight and scream if she was treated unfairly. Brave and self-assured at such a young age that I couldn’t be prouder. And I’d been with Rita for over 12 years and even if much of married life became normal over time, we’d have our sparkling moments, dancing late evenings when the kids were asleep. Passionate sex that somehow reserved itself for warm holiday evenings in Burgundy. And while losing the kids is like losing a limb: acute, heart-rending pain that comes in starts and shudders, losing that Normal is like no longer being able to breath. It’s a suffocating loss that is constant and somehow more fundamental.

The horror didn’t stop there of course. Only Erin got out of that cabin but she was infected all the same. Shit. After I lost everything, Lex just took up Yu An and walked from board in the middle of the sea. I was so angry; I lost everything because of him. I still want to yell at him, beat him, just… hurt him. I feel that tension rise again, a need to hit out against the wall, scream, anything to let go of all the hurt and anger. And then I realise I can’t because “she” is still there.

James was a captain to us for many trips during the years and he ran a tight ship. “A ship needs order to function well”, he would always say with a theatrical flourish and a smile, “First there’s me, the captain, and after that comes the abyss. Should you ever cross it, you’ll find God but he’ll never deign to speak to any of you heathens. Not much further beyond God you’ll find the first mate. That’s the order in which you will listen on board my ship.” I heard it a million times. So when he decided we wouldn’t kill his wife Erin, I argued against it, but accepted it. His ship, his rules. He said we could hole up and let the currents take us over Scotland to the Caribbean where the islands were most likely to remain free from the infected. We cut the engine, lowered the sails and retreated to the bridge before his wife fully turned.

And here we are. After weeks drifting on the current, we are now two more days away from escaping this ship from hell, that carries every vile terror plaguing my sleep.

On the last day I keep my phone on as long as possible but eventually it winks out without an island nearby. It’s hard for James to project where exactly we will drift too. The wind still has a grip on the ship, potentially blowing us off course but with no way of telling which way it’s blowing he’s simply extrapolating from the direction we’ve been moving. We agree to wait another two hours and then run for it. We will split up, hopefully slowing down any reaction from Erin and then swim to whatever land we can see.

James peers at his watch. Our focus finally banishes all the nightmares of the past weeks. We work our muscles as much as we can in the cramped space and then James raises his fingers, counting down: three, two, one… go!. The cabinet slams open, Erin’s head twists towards the sound but we’re already moving both, bursting out of the side entrance unto the deck. I run and stumble with weak legs on the steel-gray deck, the long way around to the leeway, scanning the horizon for land as I do so. “There!”, I yell, “Land at 7 o’clock!” I see James staring at Erin as she rushes for him but before she reaches him he throws himself over board.

I dive over the railing into the blessedly warm water. The stink of fear and shit washing off me. I realise it’s warm enough to survive a couple of hours. I can’t see James though. “James! James!”, I call out, but I get no answer. Another splash and it's Erin chasing the sound. I'm pretty sure they can't swim but I don't take any chances and shut up. James is strong and he’ll swim to the same island as me. We’ll meet there. The island disappears behind each wave as I start with steady strokes. It’s far away but I can make it. I think.