mean. To tell you the truth, I can barely keep up with her.”
As Michael stepped aboard, Peter suddenly became aware how meager the boat looked.
“What’s the problem?” Michael asked.
“We’re actually going to sail that thing?”
Michael had started busily coiling lines and setting them in the bottom of the hull. “Why’d you think I brought you out here? Quit your worrying and get in.”
Peter cautiously lowered himself into the cockpit. The hull moved strangely under him, responding to his weight with a sluggish shift. He gripped the rail, willing the boat to stay still. “And you actually know how to do this.”
His friend laughed under his breath. “Don’t be such a baby. Help me raise the sail.”
Michael quickly ran through the basics: sail, rudder, tiller, mainsheet. He cast off the line, scrambled aft to the tiller, did something to make the sail abruptly fill with air, and suddenly they were off and running, streaming away from the dock with astonishing speed.
“So what do you think?”
Peter nervously eyed the receding shoreline. “I’m getting used to it.”
“Here’s a thought,” Michael offered. “For the first time in your life, you’re in a place where a viral can’t kill you.”
“I hadn’t considered that.”
“For the next couple of hours, you, my friend, are out of a job.”
They tacked across the bay. As they moved into deeper water, the color changed from a mossy green to a rich blue-black, the sunlight ricocheting off the irregularities of its surface. Under the tightness of the sail, the boat possessed a more solid feel, and Peter began to relax, though not completely. Michael seemed to know what he was doing, but the ocean was still the ocean.
“How far out have you taken this thing?”
Michael looked ahead, squinting into the light. “Hard to say. Five miles anyway.”
“What about the barrier?”
It was generally held that in the early days of the epidemic, the nations of the world had banded together to enforce a quarantine of the North American continent, laying mines all along the coastlines and bombing any vessels that attempted to leave shore.
“If it’s out there, I haven’t found it yet.” Michael shrugged. “Part of me thinks it’s all bullshit, you want to know the truth.”
Peter eyed his friend cautiously. “You’re not looking for it, are you?”
Michael didn’t answer, his face telling Peter that he had hit the mark.
“That’s insane.”
“So is doing what you do. And even if the barrier exists, how many mines could still be floating around out there? A hundred years in the ocean would eat just about anything. And all the debris would have set them off by now, anyway.”
“It’s still reckless. You could blow yourself to bits.”
“Maybe. And maybe tomorrow one of those cooking towers will launch me into outer space. The standards for personal safety around these parts are pretty low.” He shrugged. “But that’s beside the point. I don’t think the damn thing was ever there to begin with. The whole coast? If you include Mexico and Canada, that’s almost two hundred and fifty thousand miles. Impossible.”
“What if you’re wrong?”
“Then someday I may, as you say, blow myself to bits.”
Peter let the matter drop. A lot had changed, but Michael was still Michael, a man of insatiable curiosity. They were moving through the inlet into open water; the breeze had picked up, casting jeweled waves over the bow. Something in his stomach dropped. It wasn’t just the lurching of the boat. So much water, everywhere.
“Maybe just this once you could keep us close to land.”
Michael adjusted the sail, stiffening his grip on the tiller. “I’m telling you, it’s a whole other deal out there, Peter. I can’t even explain it. It’s like all the bad stuff just drops away. You really should see it for yourself.”
“I should be getting back. Let’s save it for another time.”
Michael glanced at him and laughed. “Sure,” he said. “Another time.”
32
Alicia made her way northward, into the wide-open countryside. The Texas Panhandle: a landscape of limitless flatness like a great becalmed sea, wind drifting over the tips of the prairie grasses, the sky immense above her in its autumnal blueness, the encircling horizon broken only by the occasional creekside stand of cottonwoods or pecans or long-armed willows, their melancholy fronds bowing in submission as she passed. The days were warm but at night the temperature plunged, weighing the grass with dew. Using fuel from caches spread along her route, she’d complete the journey in four days.
She arrived at the Kearney garrison on the morning of November 6. It was