And so the days passed, and still the Ocean appeared as endless as ever.
Eight days after Shades’ grim estimate, Max held the helm, keeping their general direction steady while gunning the Maximum’s engines for all they were worth, riding the whitecaps with a desperate abandon. Somewhere at the intersection of speed, direction and fuel economy, having put aside the sails for now. Their harrowing chase back in Bodeen having still left them with a mostly full tank, now the only fuel left for any of them to run on.
Having eaten what little was left of their food for breakfast yesterday.
While Max scanned the horizon up ahead, Shades and Justin watched to port and starboard, respectively, from the upper deck’s rear lounge seat. Three sets of eyes peeled for any sign of anything out there. In the bucket seat next to Max, Ma’Quiver sat resting, awaiting his next turn. Bandit lay sprawled out on the port side of the L-shaped lounge seat, more lethargic than ever.
By now, none of them had had the energy to train in the last three days. Over the last two weeks alone, they had attempted to supplement their dwindling food supply by setting up the fishing nets and equipment they originally found onboard when they first acquired the ship, but to no avail; the fish-finder always came up negative, and as far as the depthfinder was concerned, the seas they sailed may as well be bottomless. Though they still had functioning water filtration, they wondered how long that would hold out, drinking more and more water just to fill their bellies with something. But whether due to lack of fish or lack of skill, the only catch they ever made was when Shades helped Justin reel in what turned out to be a waterlogged bag of plastic bottles.
Unfortunately, none of them contained anything, drinkable or otherwise.
They had spent the last few days discussing a very short, very bleak, list of options, most of which amounted to elaborate forms of suicide, leaving themselves to the mercy of chance out here. Ransacked each other’s private food stashes to find they had already exhausted their own reserves of anything edible days ago. With the horrifying specter of cannibalism looming over their collective shoulder, a foul name just daring to be spoken, they decided on one last desperate course of action, the only one that entailed them taking some aspect of their fate into their own hands. Firing up the engines, they decided to gamble their lives on picking a direction and going full speed as long as their fuel supply held out.
Yet as the hours dragged on past noon, their fuel gauge began to dwindle, and with it, their hopes.
“Did we really just eat our last meal yesterday?…” Shades mumbled, the first to speak in at least a couple hours. That horizon taunted him with a thousand and one possible destinations out there. Somewhere. “Or are we going to be hosting a Donner Party by next week?…”
Ma’Quiver shook his head, as if reading between the lines of Shades’ other-dimensional reference.
“What’s that?” Justin demanded. “Do they got anything good to eat?”
“Justin, it’s not the kind of party I would want any of us to ever have to attend,” Shades replied with a grin grim enough for the gallows, silently cursing his own morbid sense of humor. Though he ordinarily had no trouble with seasickness anymore, the combination of gnawing hunger and rough seas was giving him trouble, and the thought of any of them eating each other to survive wasn’t helping. “Would we really do that…”
“I thought I was used to going hungry all the time…” Justin groaned, thinking back to his years as a streetrat back in the Triangle State.
“I haven’t been this hungry since that flood back in Paradise…” Even as he spoke, Max refused to take his eyes off the skyline like a hawk.
“When I was trapped in those ruins underneath Alta, the only thing worse than not being able to walk was that I didn’t get to eat or drink anything for over three days,” Ma’Quiver mused. “If felt like such a long time down there, with no way to tell time. Then I slept for four days, and when I woke up, I was so hungry I ate everything the relief workers could scrape together for me.”
“It’s like when I first wound up in that damn mall…” For Shades, all that was missing was the tantalizing aroma of the food court to taunt him with its All You Can’t Afford To Eat Buffet. “Surrounded by food, and not a dime to my name…”
“And now,” Justin muttered, remembering their “winnings” from Nikopolas Arena, bitter irony drooling from every syllable, “I’ve got enough money to buy out a restaurant, and not a scrap of food anywhere.”
“True,” Shades nodded, “you can’t eat money.”
“You can’t eat platitudes, either,” Justin retorted.
“Point taken,” Shades conceded, “but I’d still take food over money right about now.”
“Better than having neither,” Justin shot back.
“How so?” Shades intoned.
“Because when we finally do find food,” Justin told him, “we’ll be able to have as much as we want!”
“That’s if we find anything…” Shades reminded him.
“Will you two please…” Max wondered where either of them found the energy to even run their mouths at this point.
“Hey guys!” Ma’Quiver cut in, pointing off about two o’clock, “Do you see anything over there?”
All three of them turned in the direction he was pointing, seeing an almost indistinguishable speck out there on the horizon, even Bandit snapping out of his despondent napping. Thinking quickly, Shades snatched up the binoculars for a closer look. Seeing that his friends were on to something, Max veered in that direction.
“It’s gotta be an island,” Shades breathed, contrasting its size versus apparent distance, and hoping that wishful thinking wasn’t too much of a bias.
“We’re saved!” Justin crowed. “Keep it up, Max!”
Just about then, the Maximum finally ran out of gas.
Even as the ship’s momentum fell off, they all looked amongst themselves in abject horror as their last lingering hope hung just out of reach, Bandit glancing back and forth between his human companions in feline consternation.
“You gotta be shittin’ me…” Justin lowered his binoculars in desperation and disgust. “You fuckin’ gotta be shittin’ me…”
“We’re not dead in the water yet,” Ma’Quiver declared, hopping up and moving toward the mast. “We still have sails, and we still have strength. Max, keep us steady, Justin, help me set the sails.”
“Right,” Max nodded, quickly embracing his new friend’s determination in a rush of adrenaline.
As Justin dragged himself up to help Ma’Quiver, Shades resumed his observation. In the short distance they had gained, he could see that the object was indeed too massive to be a ship, even at this range resolving itself into some sort of land mass. Unfortunately, they were still too far away to hazard a guess at its approximate size, let alone distinguish any of its features.
Try as they might, though, they quickly discovered that the winds had shifted against them, and much to their dismay, they found themselves being pushed backwards. Thinking fast frantically, they decided to try tacking, beating back and forth in an attempt to build up upwind momentum. Unfortunately, Ma’Quiver, in his travels with other ships’ crews, was the only one with much prior experience plying such maneuvers, making for another desperate gamble, this time on skills they were trying to learn even as they used them. All the while, Shades watched that distant dot, determined not to let it out of his sight for even a second as he guided the others to stay on course.
At first it seemed to be working, and they managed to draw a little closer, close enough for Shades to spot patches of green, enough to get their hopes up, but after a little while they reached a point where they could make no further headway, what little wind they had to work with falling off, and when Shades began to lose what few details he could pick out thus far, it became abundantly clear they were losing ground in spite of themselves.
“I think we might be up against the tide, or some strong current,” Ma’Quiver remarked, sharing his companions’ growing dismay. “Unless the wind changes soon…”
“We’re screwed,” Shades finished, his somber tone matched by his stern expression.
Bandit almost seemed to fall in his seat than sit.
“What now?” Justin pounded his fist against the cabin wall. “Do we jump ship and swim for it?”
“Maybe we should use the life raft…” Max thought aloud. “Paddling together would make us move more against it.”
“And taking turns would let us rest, unlike the risk of drowning if we swim,” Shades cautioned, “as none of us are at a hundred percent right now.” Then quickly added, “But wouldn’t that mean losing the ship?”
“You’ve got a point,” Ma’Quiver admitted. “Odds are, the ship’s just gonna keep drifting away, and the water’s still too deep for us to anchor here.”
“We’re running out of time,” Justin noted, for the sun was leaning toward late afternoon. Looking around, he could tell his objection to ditching their hard-won ship was quite mutual.
“And once it’s dark out,” Shades pointed out, “we won’t be able to see the island anymore. Not unless somebody left the light on for us.”
“Maybe we could signal them,” Max proposed.
“If there’s anybody there,” Justin conditioned.
“Only one way to find out…” Ma’Quiver mused.
“Say Justin,” Shades asked, “you picked up some more flash bolts back in Bodeen, right?”
“Why don’t we use the flares?” Justin demanded, trying not to dwell on how much those crooked Bodeen weapons merchants charged for every bolt.
“It’s broad daylight,” Shades explained, “and we need range. We’re not getting any closer to that island, so we should probably save the flares for passing ships, or for after dark, just in case.”
“The bolts, or the ship…” Justin stood there for a long moment in indecision before scrambling down to the cabin, returning a moment later with his crossbow.
“We should probably fire them about ten minutes apart,” Ma’Quiver suggested, wanting to strike a balance between the need to give anyone over there time to respond, and the time slipping through their fingers. “Aim as high and far as you can.”
And so Justin did. He already knew from terrestrial target practice that his shots wouldn’t reach anywhere near the island itself, and Shades hadn’t spotted any ships nearby, he just hoped he could get it close enough for anyone on that side of the island to see it. Seeing as how the wind was against them, he settled for as much height as he thought he could get away with without it blowing back at them, then fired.
He was as disappointed as everyone else his shot fell short of even their most conservative estimates, but at least stalling on the wind kept it airborne long enough to go off at a reasonable height.
From there, it became a waiting game. Shades continued to keep an eye on the island, while Max and Ma’Quiver did their best to keep from losing any further ground against the current. On Shades’ advice, Justin tuned the ship’s radio while he waited to take his next shot, scanning up and down the dial for any sign of communications activity, yet the airwaves remained silent, the static a counterpoint to the waves lapping against the hull and the wind in their ears.
At last, ten tense minutes finally passed, and Justin again took aim at the island, timing this one against the gusts of wind and managing to make the flash go a little higher and farther than the first.
And again with the waiting game, another ten minutes of time stretching out like taffy, each of them feeling that the island was slowly creeping away from them in spite of their efforts.
At ten minutes in, Justin fired another shot, this one not making it quite as high, the sun setting behind them like sand in an hourglass.
As Shades struggled to keep the shrinking island in sight, he spotted a flicker of light out there.
“Justin! Quick! The signal mirror!” he snapped, realizing, even as he spoke, that he was the first to break their stern silence in all this time. “I saw a light! I think somebody’s over there!”
A moment later, quick to latch on to anything more productive than tuning radio silence, Justin was attempting to figure out how to reflect the light of a sun that was almost behind them, hoping something would get across.
Yet by the fourth time Justin fired, Shades still hadn’t verified any response, so he went back and forth between the radio, increasingly certain it was pointless, and the mirror, worrying that any flicker of light he managed to produce would not even show against the sun behind them.
After nearly an hour of this, Justin was down to his last flash bolt.
“This is it…” he muttered, taking aim.
“Ship’s compass?” Shades inquired, still grasping for ideas, mentally taking stock of everything onboard, and how it might be used as a distress signal.
“No good,” Max told him, for the needle was drifting, as it was wont to in most regions here.
“If only we had something that made a lot of smoke…” Ma’Quiver thought aloud.
“Or road flares…” Shades scratched another item they didn’t have off his list, then Ma’Quiver’s words sank in. “Wait a minute! Justin, do you have any smoke bolts left?”
“Three,” he informed him. “Shall I waste those, as well?”
“If it gets us rescued,” Max told him, “it would hardly be a waste.”
“Fine.” Justin aimed at the lower deck, firing into a corner, letting one finish smoking before firing the next in a desperate bid to keep it going as long as possible.
And once again, the wind worked against them, blowing the smoke away from the island, dragging the thin, ragged plume out lower than it might otherwise have risen.
“Once it gets dark,” Shades warned them, “we won’t be able to see the island anymore. We may have no choice but to abandon the Maximum in exchange for our lives.”
“Dammit!” Justin pounded the radio unit. Tuning up and down the dial, he started shouting, “Come in! Somebody! Anybody! We need help out here!”
Finally slumping in his seat in abject disgust.
“Guys!” Shades told them, “We’re not completely out of luck just yet. I can see lights on the island!”
“Surely that means there’re people.” Ma’Quiver sounded more hopeful.
“Then why the hell aren’t they helping us!?” Justin demanded, again twiddling with the radio knob for emphasis. “Nobody’s listening!”
“Well maybe they don’t—” Shades began.
—have any radios… he finished in his head as they all went silent, certain they just heard a voice for a second. Even Justin stopped, slowly dialing back until, sure enough:
“—come in! Please respond!” an old man’s voice broke on the speaker. “Unknown vessel, this is the Castaway Fisher Monkey Business. We are coming to investigate a distress signal. If yer radio is still working, please respond!
“…Dammit, I told ’em I’m retired, so why’d I get picked for this shit?…”
“This is the Maximum,” Justin responded. “We’ve been stranded out here all day. We’re out of fuel, out of food, and the wind’s against us. You gotta help us!”
“Maximum, copy,” the voice replied. “So there is someone out there… Hold on, I’ve spotted yer ship, and I’m on my way.”
“It’s true!” Shades crowed, spotting a shape approaching that was quickly resolving itself into another vessel. “There’s a ship coming!”
“We’re over here!” Justin cried, firing one of his double-barrel power pistols into the air.
“Damn!” that voice replied, “You people are way out! I can’t believe I’m doing this…”
By now, the other ship was drawing close enough to be seen readily without binoculars, and Justin started jumping and waving his arms frantically. Though the others doubted it was necessary at this range, Max and Ma’Quiver started waving, too, the latter firing up his laser sword for greater visibility. Once the ship got close, they settled down, except for Justin.
Now they could see that it was indeed a modest fishing boat, sails folded, motor chugging as it slowed to a stop alongside the Maximum, and a figure stepped out of the cabin.
“Oy! Do ya know how close y’are to the edge!?” demanded an old man dressed in Bermuda shorts and a Hawai’ian shirt, most of his deeply tanned and lined skin adorned with a patchwork of many faded tattoos. Wiry limbs, and that juxtaposition of round belly and relief ribcage that only old men seemed to develop. Gold earring, missing teeth, cracking a reckless grin that, accompanied by the gleam in his remaining eye (the other covered by an eye patch even Shades didn’t doubt the authenticity of), could make almost anyone question their rescuer’s sanity for a moment. “If we stay in these currents, I’ll be joinin’ ya on yer way to the bottom!”
“Then would it be too much to ask for you tow us over to yonder island?” Ma’Quiver requested.
“We would be in your debt,” Max added.
“Damn skippy, ya will!” the old man laughed. “Ya know what fuel is worth our here?”
“We have money,” Justin informed him tersely. “It’s fuel we’re out of! And food.”
“We’d be more than happy to discuss payment once we’re safely ashore,” Shades negotiated.
“And who might ya be, that I should trust ya like that?” he countered. Downwind, his breath smelled faintly of rum.
“Just passing travelers,” Max assured him. After they took a moment to hastily introduce themselves, he asked, “And what might your name be?”
“In these parts, they call me Rude Bones,” he replied. “But if ya really want to save yer ship, we gotta move it. I don’t even know if me ship can handle somethin’ this big.”
“We’d rather not abandon her,” Shades told him, “so let’s at least try.”
Author's Chapter Notes:
dire straights
