Was anyone still alive? Cam had turned the radio on in the car for a bit but every station hissed with dead air "You got him?" Cam asked, referring to the baby.
She nodded yes and started pedaling.
Together, they rode further out into the desert that was once the Pacific Ocean. Riding the bike in the sand was not easy, and it made her muscles flare with exertion. She held Cobe in one arm and maneuvered with the other. Fortunately, the slope of the ground fell downward in their direction and for the most part she just had to steer. Sometimes the sand got real thick and she had to walk the bike through it. She tried to stay on top of all the dead fish and dry seaweed as much as possible. It was like riding on a bad cobblestone road.
The baby bounced and jostled in her arm as she pedaled, his head flopping about whenever she hit a dip or small hill. More than once Cam asked if he could hold the baby. She told him no.
Something large loomed on the horizon. She asked Cam what it was but he said he didn't know. "Might be an oil tanker," he said after a while, "or a cruise ship of some kind."
It was a while before they passed the first sail boat, the Lucky Lady. It sat lopsided in the sand, its sail pointed up at an angle toward the sinking sun, four corpses lying on the sand around it. Their faces were mummified. "They probably drank the seawater," Cam said.
She would drink it too if they happened on to any-which was the plan.
As the slope continued to lead them down, her ears began to pop, and the headache that had begun so long ago seemed to drive nails into her nerves. Time stopped having meaning, and she kept count of their journey by measuring the weirdness of the dead, dry fish that littered the ground. There were thousands of them. No, millions.
"Shark," Cam said at one point.
A scream escaped her mouth before she realized she was making it. The shark lay on its side, its mouth ringed with the kind of fangs she thought only existed in nightmares. It was so goddamn huge.
"Can't believe I used to surf with that thing in the water."
"Is it dead?"
Cam got off his bike, walked over to the large creature and put a hand against its torpedo-shaped body, right above the dorsal fin. "Dry as paper," he said. From the backpack he took a small screwdriver he'd found in the car's trunk and jammed it into the beast's side, cut out a chunk of flesh. He smelled it first, then deciding it was ok, he ate it. "S'like eating Ritz crackers. You want any?"
Was he nuts? Eat that thing? It was grotesque. She still couldn't get over how huge it was, at least 25 feet judging on how it measured up next to Cam. Blood stained its teeth and the white skin under its snout.
He spit the rest out, perhaps realizing it wasn't so good after all, and they continued their descent.
The fish got weirder, larger, more grotesque, with odd shapes and huge bulging eyes. They passed some dolphins, a graveyard of hammerhead sharks, and the largest whale she'd ever seen. Cam said it was a humpback.
All of them were dead.
For a little while she even forgot about the lifeless from in her arms, but when the baby's eyes fluttered she leapt off the bike and cried out. Cam was beside her in an instant.
"What? What's wrong?"
"Cobe's eyes! Look!"
The baby's eyes fluttered open and closed a few times, rapidly, involuntarily, and finally came to rest half open. His eyeballs rolled back in his head, his irises disappearing under the lids. His little mouth, cracked and dry, fell open. His head, its fontanel sunken in like a bowl, convulsed a few times while his legs kicked.
Then Cobe went silent.
And in Becky's mind, everything followed suit.
CHAPTER 22.
The breeze blew over the sand, over the dead sea creatures and over the three figures crouched low on the sea floor. A ghostly howl seemed to rise in pitch for several minutes, carrying sand and salt through the air like confetti raining down on the saddest party ever thrown. The wail that accompanied it began slowly, emanating from some place deep and guttural, rising to a crescendo that shook the soul of earth.
A supreme numbness washed over Cam as he reached out and closed his little boy's eyes forever. Every ounce of his being wanted to look skyward and curse God, but he held back, concerned for the woman that was burying her head into the baby's dead body. His wife.
It took a while before Becky looked up again, her face red and thin, her eyes hollow and tinged with yellow.
"Becky," he said, touching her shoulder. "Becky, he's gone."
"No he's not!" she screamed.
"He is. And we can't stay here, we have to keep going."
"To what," she screamed. "To where? There's nothing Cam, there's no water left."
"Yes there is. There has to be. There was the day before we left so some of the ocean has to still be here. We haven't gone deep enough."
Her emotions switched from anger to defeat, and she began to rock back and forth. "Don't want to go," she said. "Just leave me with my baby. Not going."
"We could...maybe we should..." He was going to suggest they bury Cobe but couldn't bring himself to actually say it. Instead, he relied on just nodding toward the baby, hoping she'd understand him.
"No," she said. "He's my baby. He stays with me."
The reality of the moment began to settle in as he looked at his dead son's face. Dead. Gone. Forever. He was suddenly overcome with sobs, though not a single tear fell from his eyes. He choked on his grief, then forced himself to be strong again. "We can't take him," he said.
"He's my baby," Becky said. "I'm not leaving him."
There was no arguing with her, that much he could see. She was somewhere inside her own mind, someplace happier than where they actually were. It broke his heart, but if they planned on living they had to get to water soon.
"Please, Becky,"
"Fuck you, Cam! Don't you touch my baby!"
He threw his hands in the air, backed off a bit. "Okay, Beck. Okay, you hold Cobe. But we have to ride. Can you ride?"
"I don't want to."
Taking a risk, he put his arms around her and hugged her close, noting how skinny she felt. Even though the bathrobe, her knobby bones jutted into his own.
She didn't back off like normal, didn't scream or yell or insult him. What she did was lay her head on his shoulder for a minute and say, "I'm thirsty. How much farther is it?"
"Close, Beck, I'm telling you we have to be close. But we have to hurry. Are you going to come now?"
Her moods were on some kind of shuffle program, because she stood up and got back on the bike, said, "Let's go."
"Are you taking Cobe?"
"Yes. And don't you try to take him, okay. Let's just get some water. Maybe he'll feel better if we get him some water."
Cam let the comment fade out into the empty seabed, got on his bike, and started to pedal down the slope before them.
He looked back once to make sure Becky was still following. She stared off into space as she rode, the baby hanging unnaturally in her arm.
They passed another whale, some large fish with big noses, and saw another ocean liner in the distance, sticking out of the ground like a monolith. Occasionally, crabs skittered over the dead creatures, yanking off the dried flesh and doing their best to eat it. There was plenty to go around, that was for sure. All that bullshit he'd heard about people fishing the oceans dry was a crock; there were more dead things lying on the ground now than if every fish market in the world piled their stock together. Many of the fish were so big they could feed small nations. At one point, Cam's bike tire rolled over an octopus and tangled it up in the spokes. Thankfully, the tentacles were brittle enough that they snapped off after a few rotations.
Eventually, he smelled the water.
The salty scent was an uppercut to his fuzzy head, and he cried out to Becky, who seemed uninterested in anything except looking at the tiny body pressed against her breasts.
"Water, Becky. I told you!"
No reply.
He used his feet to push the bike along as fast as he could, checking back once or twice to make sure she was following. It was twenty minutes before they came upon the chasm that cut through the sea floor. The gigantic fissure in the earth's crust hid a bottom that was shimmering.
Water.
CHAPTER 23.
It took the better part of the night to get down to the bottom of the chasm, mostly because they had to keep stopping for Becky to deal with Cobe. She too, at least, seemed urged on by the smell of water. Thankfully they'd hit the giant crack at a point where it sloped up to meet the sea floor, so the climb down was maybe only three stories. Still, it was fairly steep.
When they reached the bottom, they found themselves standing in water up to their ankles. It felt too good to believe, and Cam had to fight the urge to just slurp it up.
"We have to hurry," he said. "It's already disappearing. I can see it going down."
Nearby, Becky swayed in the hot night air, her body so emaciated she looked like a reedy piece of seaweed in an underwater diorama. "Peel some meat off that fish over there," Cam said, pointing to what looked like some kind of angler fish still flapping on a small rise of dirt. It was good to see the animal alive.
Becky stomped it dead with her foot and clawed a chunk of meat off its back, dark blood running down her fingers.
"Eat it," Cam told her.
She ate, which, really, was a testament to their destitution, because Becky was a pretty picky eater most of the time. She wolfed it down, tore another piece off and ate that one as well. The whole time she tore at the fish, she held the dead baby in her arms.
"Whoa, save me some."
"Here." She gave him a piece and he wolfed it down. It was still moist, though much of it tasted like salt water and that was something they needed to avoid.
Laying the dead branches from the backpack on an area jutting out from the chasm wall, Cam lit a small fire, jury-rigged a make-shift oven range over it with some rocks, and put a pot of seawater on it.
"Moment of truth. How smart was Jack?" He scooped the seawater up into the jar, set the jar in the pot, and put the lid over the whole thing.
"What's that gonna do?" Becky asked.
She looked at Cobe and cooed to him, and Cam knew for sure she was someplace else, someplace where the baby was giggling and watching Sesame Street.
"It's what Jack knew. What Scott knew. It's goddamn third grade education. Condensation. You boil any liquid and put a cover on it, the steam sticks to the lid. It leaves the salt behind. Same way you get mold in a bathroom. The steam rises, leaves water droplets on the ceiling. At least I hope."
The next two minutes were the longest two minutes in the existence of Cameron's life. When he took the lid off the pot, the moonlight illuminated beads of water like tiny diamonds. He tilted the lid and let it pool in the thin rim.
Cam licked it.
Water. Fresh, drinkable, water.
"Hurry," he told Becky, and she staggered forward and licked the lid as well. Her eyes rolled back in her head and she tasted the sweet, salt-free liquid.
"Give some to Cobe," she said. "He needs some."
"Becky..."
"C'mon. Don't waste it."
An extreme pathos cut through him as he wet his finger with the water and rubbed it across his dead son's cracked, dry lips. Of course, the baby didn't move, but Becky didn't seem to mind. She merely smiled at the boy's blue face and hugged him close, said, "That's my boy. Everything's going to be all right."
Fighting back tears that probably wouldn't form anyway, Cam scooped up another jar of water and turned the satellite radio on.
It was silent.
LAST DAYS.
CHAPTER 24.
By morning, the sun was back out fully recharged, the air a blanket of invisible flame that tore through their skin and gave rise to white blisters and red welts.
The water was gone. All of it. Poof. Like that. They'd drunk (or licked, to be more precise) what they could throughout the night, trying to beat the rapidity of its disappearance, but the water faded before their eyes. Now, the sea floor was littered with seaweed, dead fish and crustaceans (all dry as bone) and a whole lot of salt that stung their open sores.
Cam lay on his back, staring up at the blue sky, ignoring the pain of the salt on his exposed skin, listening to his wife breathing slowly next to him. The baby, its skin a light gray hue, lay on top of her chest, rising and falling on her body as her lungs fought for oxygen.
He could not bring himself to look at the boy's face.
There were so many things he wanted to ask the sky, but could not find the strength. Mostly just...Why? Why Earth? Why the people? What had they done wrong? Was it God's choice? Had science had something to do with it all?
Why now, when he'd seen the error of his ways, when he knew, more than anything, that he wanted to do right by his son?
Why?