A Saltmarsh Survival Story

The outside world was unknown to her, but she could see a glimpse of it through the window in his room. At first glance, deceptively familiar—a barge composed of colorful shipping containers drifted against the white, encroaching sky, where dots of gulls swooped down and up again, pilfering from the brackish waters below. But the Port of Savannah’s modern strangeness was irreconcilable with her childhood memories. Swarms of mechanized dockbots and self-operating gantry cranes thudded and clinked in autonomous synchronicity, flaunting the ghostly obsolescence of their human forebears. The nose-burning adhesive smell of the old paper mill was absent from the salty marsh air. Even her late father's overseer cabin was unrecognizable.

And yet, the cabin was still once his work room, even if there was no place to sit now, even if it was just shelter to a humming cluster of servers, even if the new walls were clinical blue and the floor cold, clean cement. The question was, how much of the cabin's old bones remained?

"Let's find out," Lisbet sing-songed in the unselfconscious way of a person talking to themselves when they know with absolute certainty that there is no one nearby to overhear them.

Lisbet pulled a hammer from her coat pocket and laughed at the absurdity of it. A hammer, in her pocket, for all these miles. Up until this morning, even knowing her own intent, she would've traded it for a Clif bar if she could've. Now she was glad she never had the opportunity.

"If Jessik could see me now," she grunted as she drove the hammer's face into the wall opposite the window, "Lazy, my ass!"

BANG!

"Useless intellect, my ass!"

BANG!

"No skills to survive the apocalypse, my ass!"

CLANK!

"Yes! There you are."

They, whoever they had been—a human crew before the final turning? A team of robots flipping their own local command center?—drywalled right over the cabin's original wood paneling. And there, tucked behind the loose board that used to wriggle under her curious palm, now splintered to smithereens, was her father's metal safe.

"Ha! So much for that x-ray vision, robots. Think you missed a spot."

She twisted the safe's dial in a hopeful sequence of numbers and held her breath until she heard the click of the mechanism unlocking. Her birthday. "Love you, Dad. Always knew I was your favorite."

There, inside the safe, was a glock 19 and a full box of 9MM rounds. She knew he'd stashed it when AI tensions were rising, years before they finally broke. On a long shot, it was still here.

Lisbet was aware that she hallucinated the golden underglow emanating from the edges of the handgun, staged there in the safe like a royal jewel in a museum display case, and also the cinematic trumpets and operatic alto voices chorusing in celebration of her auspicious victory. But the port's overdose of nostalgia had her wanting to believe that the squeeze of her dad's hand on her shoulder and his twangy "Good job, kiddo," had been real.

***

Lisbet's journey back towards the enclave seemed quicker. Even accounting for the weight of the glock and its ammo, her pack was lighter after having eaten through her rations, and her gain at the port had spurred an energetic clarity surrounding her next mission. There was just one stop left to make.

The marsh grass wore the afternoon sun on its browning stalks. A black rail with shimmering blue plumage trotted across the highground, pecking as he went. Lisbet squatted, ankle-deep in the pluff mud, waiting on soggy feet.

It didn't take long for one to appear.

She saw its head first, poking like a bumpy log out of the water not ten feet away. Judging by the size of its skull, that was one big gator.

Lisbet gulped. Her finger trembled on the trigger. The moment froze as she stood, metaphorically, before a fork in her destiny. One path would kill her by alligator mauling. The other would... What, exactly?

I should've just gone for a fucking duck, she thought, finally accepting, perhaps too late, that her grandiose fantasy of hauling and tossing a three hundred pound alligator carcass at Jessik's feet as a proclamation of her usefulness and fortitude was entirely unfeasible even for one of those inhumanly buff bodybuilder types, let alone for a perimenopausal, starving, exhausted woman whose favorite form of pre-apocalyptic exercise was yin yoga, which could summarily be described as a style of practice that involves staying still for as long as possible.

At long last, her flair for the dramatic would have to yield to the inane laws of her own material existence. She'd manage to bring back the gun, and with it, a way of providing for the motley posse of survivors hiding in the upland wilderness from the machines that patrolled the city. Providing for their survival! That was the important thing. Not one-upping their bullying, self-appointed leader.

This moment belonged to her, and to her alone.

Lisbet exhaled and pulled the trigger.