TSOD Chapter 1

I was writing my submission for the #200 Challenge and I talked a lot of game about writing and publishing more often, and I figured I better put my money where my mouth was and get to it. So I had the idea to write a novel in serial form, to keep me busy and keep me creating. I knew I needed something I was interested in and would have fun talking about if I wanted to have any hope of staying consistent, so I thought I would play around with some of my favorite things: sailing, survival, and life-as-we-no-it-ending plagues.

I'm not making any promises, but I hope to publish a new chapter every week or two weeks at most. Stay tuned, and I hope you enjoy.

THE SOUND OF DESOLATION

CHAPTER 1

I woke up face down and the rocks and sharp barnacle growths on the rocks were stabbing at my chest and arms through the life jacket and my sun-bleached cotton shirt. The waves were lapping at the backs of my legs and breaking against my thighs and pushing me upwards so that I half-floated long enough to scrape against the shore. The tide must have been rising because the treeline was getting closer. It was windy and every part of me was cold and soaked and although I couldn’t think clearly I thought that I preferred when the waves were over me more than when they weren’t because the water seemed warmer than the wind and if it wasn’t then the pressure of it was at least less lonely. I didn’t spit out any sea like they do in books so I must have floated on my back. My mouth tasted salty but that could have been the creeping tide or the fact that I was crying.

After a while I forced myself onto my feet. Instantly, I swayed and tripped on a stone and fell hard back onto the rough shore. After I caught my breath I felt myself over and twitched and wiggled my toes and fingers and even bent my knees and lifted my legs like I was doing a core workout or something. Besides the dizziness and the aches and the cold I seemed bruised but unscathed. My head throbbed where it had been hit by the boom when the boat lost control and the sail filled with the strong storm wind but my mind seemed lucid and clear so I didn’t know why I couldn’t stand up. Then I realised that it was my first time on solid ground in five years. The thought made me panic and I crawled the two or three feet back to the edge of the surf and fell into it, letting it lift and sway me while I pretended I was lying in my bed on a wavy night. I tried to imagine the sound of the waves against the hull underneath, and the wind singing across the sails and whistling through the rigging above me and separate from me while I was warm under covers. But there was no hull, or sails, or mother at the helm keeping an eye on the night and I knew that I would die on that beach if I didn’t get up and get warm before the sun set completely.

A barnacle cut my hand and left spots of blood where I pushed myself up, but the waves quickly washed them away and it was like I was never there. I still swayed fiercely but that time I was able to keep my feet planted by choosing a spot, a gnarled hole on the trunk of a tree in the treeline, and not taking my eyes off of it. The ground rocked under my feet and the tree danced back and forth like it was tied to the rope in a game of tug-of-war but I didn’t fall again. After a few minutes I felt sturdy enough to try walking. The rocks that weren’t covered in sharp growths were slick with moss and water, and I had to avoid those, which was difficult because I was barefoot so the grippy rocks hurt something awful. But it was better than falling again so I stepped gingerly.

The shoreline was narrow. I was lucky I had washed up where I did, because the rocky area I was on was flanked by dark boulders that turned into low cliffs. I couldn’t tell if I was on an island or the mainland, but I guessed an island because the shore on either side turned inward and I didn’t see it again. I wished I had the charts from our boat. It was still cloudy, heavy dark clouds that were so low they seemed to be catching the tips of the trees and pulling them against their felty coats. It was very windy. I couldn’t make out any other shores in the distance, although because we sailed into inland waters I knew that I wasn’t looking at the open ocean so I was certain I would see them when the visibility was better.

I was walking towards the forest. It looked dense and old and overgrown, and the boughs of the pines were droopy and melancholic. There were a few birch trees that stood out like thin marble pillars but mainly it was thick pine and sharp-looking thickets. It didn’t look welcoming. Still, the sparse grass was a great relief after the rocks. What I really needed was to get out of the wind. I was starting to shiver uncontrollably, and the first drops of a night rain were felt against my cheek. I walked alongside the woods and hoped for an opening, some glimpse of a sheltered place where I could wait out the night. Beside me, inches away from where the wind-eroded soil met the rocky shore, the high tide line left a dirty trail that wound like a magnet for scraps of the sea. Bull kelp, bulbous and long and green, mingled with shells and the discarded husks of crabs. Seaweed gathered on the land-side and bunched together where it dried under the sun to create reddish-orange strips that crunched underfoot. After years on the water it was all as unfamiliar as the swaying trees. I hugged myself and stumbled on and tried not to think of my kid sister and the Vivante sailing into the dark horizon.

I came across a break in the trees, a small spot where the branches were bent to the sides, more like a mouse hole chewed into a big wall than the comfortable clearing I was hoping for. Probably it was a game trail of some sort. I pushed my way into the dense forest. The branches were sharp and caught my face and in my hair but the ground was mercifully mossy against my bare feet. I wished I was wearing shoes but we never wore shoes on the boat and besides I hadn’t thought I would end up on land like this so I wasn’t prepared. It was already night under the canopy of the trees. In the darkness I searched for shelter but I was tired and freezing and not all that picky so when I saw the trunk of a pine that looked relatively smooth and where the boughs were high enough to act as a sort of ceiling I collapsed into it. There was no wind anymore but I could still hear it overhead, and only a few drops of rain reached me. I bunched myself together into a ball with my knees against my chest and shuffled my toes and bore them into the moss so that my feet were somewhat covered. Then I lifted the neck flap of my life jacket so that it acted as a pillow between me and the trunk. I was still crying silently but I soon lapsed into an exhausted, troubled sleep and dreamt of high waves and freezing to death. The last thing I remembered thinking that night was I hope my sister makes it to land and buries our mother under the soil and the small rocks so that the grass would grow over like we promised.

I awoke early the next morning. Horizontal beams of sunlight flitted through the boughs of my tree, so sparse and independent they seemed like solid golden rods that I could reach out and grab. My shirt was still damp, and my pants were covered in soil and needles that had stuck to the wet fabric. I was incredibly cold, and the morning carried a chill that was sharp and cooled me from the inside with every breath. But I hadn’t frozen overnight, so I figured I could survive the temperature.

A lot of thoughts were coursing through my brain that morning. The memory of losing control, the feeling of the boom striking me, the helplessness of dimly watching the boat sail away while I faded into unconsciousness in the cold water. My mother expelling her last breath into the horizon, seconds before we spotted land. Moments that had been playing on repeat all night. But more than anything I thought of the first day, when everybody started dying. Mom loaded us on the Vivante and sailed west, trying to stay as far away from every other boat as possible and praying that the faster powerboats didn’t turn our way. The cities on the shore spewed smoke and panic into the air. We avoided all of it. Then when we got offshore, and the coast faded from view, we stopped seeing anyone. That was five years earlier, when I was twelve years old. I was seventeen that cold morning, and back on land for the first time since, and I didn’t know if any of the people or cities I knew were still alive.

I crawled out of my makeshift shelter and stretched my stiff limbs. It took some hopping and stomping, but I gradually regained feeling in my toes. My hand was healed and my bruises seemed minor. My head still hurt.

Besides my pants and shirt, which were both weathered by a half-decade under the Pacific sun, I had little on me of value. I was still wearing the life jacket, and figured I would keep it on to milk whatever insulation it provided, although it did hamper my movement somewhat. There was a plastic whistle hanging from a string tied to the life jacket which might come in handy, although I couldn’t really imagine how. My biggest asset was a flip-blade pocket knife I kept on me when sailing in heavy weather in case there was an emergency and I needed to cut a line. It hadn’t seen much use so it was still sharp, and the blade was serrated for about three-quarters of an inch near the handle. My thumb skipped against the edges as I gently ran it across the steel.

I put the knife back in my pocket. Even though the sun was gaining height, and the slanted rays were becoming less and less isolated, the dark and dense expanse of the forest still intimidated me. I looked at the towering trunks draped in pale old man’s beard, the crumbling and sponge-soft deadfall littering the underbrush, and the bristles and branches competing for the rare unoccupied space and I wondered how I would find my place in that cold and unfamiliar biome. It made me claustrophobic. So I walked back to the beach to get my bearings.

The grass was wet and dewy from the previous night’s rain. I was still swaying, but the sleep on land, however uncomfortable, seemed to help me get my land legs back. Just before I parted the branches at my mouse hole that led to the shore, my stomach rumbled. I was starting to feel hungry. And I knew that that was the least of my problems; I didn’t know if there was any fresh water nearby.

I emerged out of the woods and back onto the shore. The day was clear, as if yesterday’s weather had been no more than a bad dream. Unlike when I washed up, when the view had been a grey stroke of watercolour, I could now see the shores of nearby islands. There were small landmasses, one like a mountain, so tall and close I was shocked I missed it, and further away there were the faded green and brown bumps that spanned the entire horizon. Those could only have been Vancouver Island or the mainland. I thought they belonged to Vancouver Island. Either way, it reaffirmed my suspicion that I was standing on a small island and not the mainland, because either of the large shorelines would not have been so visible from the shores of the other. So I was somewhere in the middle.

I was glad I wasn’t on the mainland. Five years spent in isolation with my sister and mother had made me timid, if not downright terrified, of the prospect of civilization. Or the remnants of. Or the lack thereof. Or the whatever had taken its place. Plus, there was the looming fear that whatever had done the killing was still around being carried. That’s what kept us out there so long in the first place. I sat down in the grass at the edge of the rocks and listened to the sound of the waves and tried not to think about everything I was looking at and what it was before and what it would never be.

Then my stomach rumbled. So I took a deep breath and wiped my damp sleeve across my face to clear the tears, which didn’t help and left it wetter than before. Then I slapped my face and shook my shoulders and woke myself up and looked around to see what there was to eat now that I was back on land.