Predators

"You belonged to someone else, Ben, but I feel lucky, I finally found you."

"Lucky?"

She nodded her head. "Yup. You know, I never fell in love. I was too busy studying all the ways love goes bad, and why people do terrible things in the name of love -- but then there was you. You came out of nowhere and for the first time in my life I know what love was."

"What was it, for you?"

"I don't know, but I've been thinking about that for a while. Peace maybe? I looked at you once and I knew if I could just rest in your arms that everything would be okay. And that none of this would have happened. Isn't that awful? How one person's silly, shallow life ended up being contributing to the end of things?"

"We all contributed, in our way. Our apathy, our reaching out for easy answers. Our lack of compassion, empathy. It's not anyone's fault, Anne. It's just who we are, were. We're predators, all of us. And then there were too many." It was difficult, but he slid over on the stretcher and made room for her, then opened his arms. "Lay with me now, would you?"

And she slid onto the stretcher, let him put his arms around her, and she lay facing him -- looking eye to eye, soul to soul. He was searching for something, she thought, some way to make room in his heart for her, and he kissed her once again, then she felt him ease away.

She held him close, talked and talked about all the things they'd do once they were together again, and by the time she stopped talking he was still and cool. Still, she couldn't let go, and in time she felt gentle, prying arms, soothing, caring voices, and as she watched them take his body away she felt, for the first time in her life, something like loss.

Coda

I'd come to think I'd had it with sailing by the time the three of us sailed into San Francisco Bay. The routines of long-distance sailing were already getting stale and tiresome, the watch-keeping and constant motion, and the perpetual uncertainty about what lurked unseen in the night wore on me constantly. Still, crawling through the shrubbery, our 'escape' from Lajes had come as an epiphany, a rebirth, of sorts. When we saw that marina I think we were each filled with an endless elation: escape was at hand, and the sea would deliver us from certain death.

We found a decent boat, Clytemnestra, an almost brand-new Nauticat 371, that had just been provisioned, her tanks filled, and we found her owner down below, clutching her chest, diaphoretic, her eyes full of panic. Tate and I cut her loose after I got the engine running, and I steered out of the marina and while Liz and Sephie rolled out the sails. We sailed due south for weeks, running from the wind, from the fallout. Persephone's skilled hands coaxed life back into the owner, who we discovered was a physician from London. She was out to see the world after her husband passed, alone, grieving, and we found our way to the Cape Verde Islands three weeks later, after GPS signals miraculously reappeared. We took on water, managed to get some fuel, and continued sailing south.

A new routine developed on Clytemnestra, a routine based on washing her decks with sea water every two hours. Blackened dust fell on everything constantly, and the evil stuff got into every nook and cranny, especially down below. We assumed everything that fell on the decks was radioactive so, if we failed to keep her decks fresh, our risk would only increase. Yet we noticed a change soon enough, something rather uplifting within a few weeks. The further south we sailed, the less fallout we accumulated on deck. At Cape Verde we took Clytemnestra's sails down and doused them in the sea, aired them on the beach, then Tate and I shook them out before we put them up again. We put out to sea after that, aiming to get as far south as we could before winter set in.

Jill Armstrong was a sort of minor revelation, a patient, thoughtful scientist. And, of course, in the end Tate fell in love with her. There coming together seemed pre-ordained in some weird way. The patient, thoughtful scientist and the quiet, observant detective, like two remote vestiges of an old way of life, seeking comfort now, and a way forward.

Persephone, being the sort of earth-mother type that blesses all love, made room for Jill in her heart, while Liz just seemed to enjoy the company of another articulate women. Who knows, maybe we would learn this time, learn to value women as equals, learn to care for them as we care for ourselves. Anyway, we arrived at Port Stanley, in the Falkland Islands, just as winter was coming on. Being crewed by a nurse and a physician, and a Londoner at that, saw us welcomed with open arms, and the girls and I looked at one another, knew we were home now, that our journey was at an end. Not quite the voyage we set out to make, but there you go.

There has been almost zero radiation this far south, and both the soil and water are clear of the devilish stuff, for now, anyway. There was little news about the north after the internet collapsed, only initial reports that loss of life had been extreme. The islanders didn't really know what happened, or why, and really, neither did we. Rutherford did, and maybe even Acheson did too. It was enough, in the end, to realize that man had taken a few wrong turns along the way, and that now survival would take precedence, above everything else, and perhaps war would be at an end.

Or perhaps not. I tend to doubt we'll ever learn from our mistakes, but I could be wrong.

We moved into a commune of sorts, an agricultural commune at that, and we settled in for the long night as the first snows of winter fell, and we went to sleep, an easy, deep sleep, and we were soon dreaming of the Spring.

Yet I thought about Acheson a lot those first days here. The pilot in command, so sure of himself, so sure of his destiny, and I wonder what became of him. He was the best of us, I thought once. Who knows. Maybe he was.

I think of him taking that Rutherford woman into the toilet that day, the walls banging away, the muted moans and desperate pleas. So many contradictions, so many unintended consequences wrapped up in that moment. I wonder, was it lust, masquerading as love? Or had love really come for them?

Liz still has a few little blue pills in her case, but now I wonder, too, what happens when they're gone? It seems, one way or another, we turned our back on all that when we turned away from the gifts, and the curses, science bestowed. Things, little magic things people in their ignorance took for granted. Driving to church, in a car? Can you imagine, really, what that means? The hypocrisy, the sheer hubris? A man my age with two gorgeous women? Can you imagine what will happen when the little blue pills are gone?

And I think that scares me more than anything else, you know?

© 2009-2017 Adrian Leverkühn | abw

All persons and incidents developed in this work of fiction simply do not exist and have not happened, nor are any characters in this story meant to represent any current or former members of the military, the DPD, the NSA or FBI, nor, of course, any employee of American Airlines. As always, thanks for reading along.