After The World Drowned

The air smells like hot metal, salt, and garbage.

It’s no wonder, really.

We’ve been sailing around skyscrapers and bodies for three days.

We’re freezing. Not the shivering, teeth chattering kind of cold though. It’s the down-to-your-bones cold. We only move because we must.

The screaming and sputtering stopped about two days ago, but I can still hear them: My drunk-off-his-ass father swearing at me to pull him to safety, and my mother falling behind.

I wish I could have saved her.

Virginia says it’s their fault. Well, theirs and the other olders.

I’m glad I saved Virginia. Her kisses are too sweet to spend the rest of my life without.

We’ve been sailing towards Mt. Hood for about a hundred miles. Well, it used to be a mountain. You’d never know it, now.

“Ouch!” Virginia yelps behind me and pulls her hand sharply from the water. “Cut my fucking hand!”

I tug my shirt off and wrap it around her fresh gash. For everything wonderful about her, she’s kinda lost her common sense since the tsunami and earthquake struck. I understand, though. She loved her family and they loved her. Now, they were somewhere below us.

“I’ve got you, Love.” I kiss her wrist.

Her crinkled face relaxes, and she leans towards me. “What would I do without you?”

“Bleed to death.”

She snorts and kisses my cheek. “I know I shouldn’t have, but I thought I saw something in the water.”

“What kind of something?”

She bites her lip and holds her hand. “One of the lockets.”

My heart leaps and I spin around to where she’d cut herself. “WHERE?”

“Just by the tip over there. You see the pole next to that clump of plastic? It was dangling just below.”

Extending my body--and trying not to draw attention to us--I narrow my eyes and skim the surface of the water ever so delicately. With everything in there now, the last thing I needed to be was stupid. I held my breath and kept my gaze determined to find what Virginia had seen.

If it was a locket, we were both saved. My own was tucked and tied around my bra strap. I’d found it before finding Virginia, but she hadn’t been as lucky.

I can’t leave her behind. I need her.

“There!” I shoot my hand into the water like a bullet, clutch the gold chain, and yank it from the water with a shout of jubilee. “We’re gonna make it!” I squeal as I spin around with the heart-shaped locket pressed firmly against my palm. “Love?”

Silence.

My heart drops to my stomach as I sprint to where I left her. Through the huddles of glum people just waiting to die and the random animals rescued along the way, my shouts get louder and louder. Some people had resorted to pushing others overboard to help their chances of survival. If they’d pushed her over, I’d go, too. “Virginia?! VIRGINIA?!”

“Stop your screaming, it’s exhausting.”

I freeze. No. It’s not possible. He drowned. I saw him go under. I-- “Give me that locket, Georgia, or I’ll slit her throat.”

I look over my shoulder as the necklace starts to burn in my hand. That crotchety old man, the one that everyone hated, the one who led the olders to our doom, was holding my heart by her hair with one hand and a jagged piece of metal with his other.

I loathed him. We all did. His watery, snake-like eyes. His pudgy, red blotchy face. His sneer. The way he spoke. The way he acted. “Hello Ark.”

He spits something green from his mouth and hobbles forward as Virginia lets out a small whimper. “I don’t have time for pleasantries. Give me the damn necklace.”

“Let her go, first.”

His eyes narrowed to slits, “You don’t trust me?”

“Maybe if we weren’t standing on a dead family’s ship, and our whole world wasn’t beneath us because of you, I would.” I take a careful step forward. “Let her go, and the locket is yours.”

He studies my eyes as his grip on her hair tightens, but I try not to let my horror show. He can’t know how much power he has over me right now just from holding Virginia. I’d give him my locket, too, to let her go. But he can’t know that.

“Show it to me.” He hisses.

I close my mouth and pinch my tongue with my teeth as I show the locket that had already scorched a heart-shape burn into my hand. I watch his eyes glimmer with joy and satisfaction. “You’ve got yourself a deal.”

I exhale slowly as he throws Virginia like a rag doll twenty feet from me. I’ll kill him for that once we get to the peak. But for right now, I just need him gone.

I hold it out. “Your survival,” I croak.

He limps toward me, and I hear his lungs are on their last lap. There’s no way he’s going to survive the journey to even get to the peak. I won’t even need to kill him. “I thank you kindly, Georgia. If you find another, do let me know.”

“What do you need another for?” Virginia snaps as she joins me. Her fists are clenched, and her brown eyes are on fire. “You murdered my parents for theirs!”

Ark laughs and turns away. “Supply and demand, Vickie dear. If you’d like to buy it back,” he looks over his shoulder, “I’m sure we can come to some... understanding.”

Virginia lunges at him with a roar. “Just fuck off!” I grab her by the waist and hold on tight. Yeah Ark’s lungs are lousy, but his henchmen’s aren’t. “There’s a hundred other souls on this fucking boat! Leave us be!”

He clicks his tongue and looks at me, “Well, there’s only a little while more to Mt. Hood, ladies. It would be such a shame to see two pretty ladies like you at the bottom of the ocean.”

He leaves us be, but his words remain like a virus. That had been the first locket we’d seen in three days. The government had announced after the flood that they had figured out a way for us to leave this planet, but not everyone could come. They only allotted twenty lockets per state and flew them over us with their shiny helicopters as millions of us were drowning.

This was their way of pulling some of us out. Less than two-thousand Americans would survive. They told us that was better than what the other countries were offering their citizens...but that didn’t make much of a difference to hear as I watched my mom get lost in the waves.

It’s some sick scavenger hunt for them to watch from above.

Virginia turns slowly in my arms and rests her forehead against mine. “He’s right.” she says quietly. “If we were to find another, he’d just pull that same stunt.”

I hold her face as her eyes drain of any kind of hope and kiss her softly. “I’m not giving up. We’ve come too far to lose each other.”

She smiles. “Twelve years, six months, and eight days.”

“That’s right.” I grin and kiss her again. “And every day is better than the last.”

“Ladies and Gentlemen, I have four lockets in my possession that I will be pleased to part with for the right price.” Ark droned from the speakers.

“WE DON’T HAVE MONEY, YOU GREEDY BASTARD!” A man shouted from the other side of the ship.

“Ah, well.” Ark chuckled. “There are more valuable things than money, good sir. I see your wife is in good health.”

“He’s got balls the size of Texas.” I mutter against Virginia’s cheek. “What a jerk.”

We waited for screaming to erupt, or any violent noise of the man retaliating against Ark’s words, but there was none.

Our hearts dropped deeper as Ark’s freshly chipper voice came over the speaker not even fifteen minutes later. “Two lockets left, Ladies and Gentlemen, and we are twenty miles from Mt. Hood.”

“That’s not long enough to find another one.” Virginia whispers to me as she rests her head on her shoulder. “Maybe I could--”

“Absolutely not!” I shake my head. “You are not giving anything to that sicko!”

She sighs softly. “I want to live until we’re old and grey together, Georgia...if that’s what it takes, then I’ll do it.”

I pull away sharply, ready to glare at her, but soften as tears stream down her cheek. “We will find a different way.”

“And the lockets are gone, Ladies and Gentlemen.”

Hours passed, and our numbers dwindled from a hundred to twenty before the sun set. Some jumped. Some hit their heads intentionally against something sharp. Six of the locket holders were murdered. Including the husband of the wife that had offered herself to Ark as payment.

“They’ve lost their fucking minds.” Virginia whispers as we hid ourselves down below. It was lucky I hadn’t made it known that I had a locket, but the sight of such sickness and violence after everything else that had happened was just too much.

“It’s Darwin’s Theory on acid.” I frown as I clutch her hand.

“I wonder why the necklace burned you.” she whispers.

“Yeah, I was thinking that, too. Mine hasn’t hurt at all.”

“Do you think maybe the one we found was a fake?”

My heart flipped. “Or maybe mine is a fake?”

“I doubt that.” she shook her head as we sat down by a crate of bananas. “You said you caught it as it was dropped from the helicopter.”

“I wouldn’t put it past them to be dicks about fake lockets after letting this happen.”

“Hmmm.” Virginia yawned. “Well, if this is our last hour together, I’d much rather spend it down here with you than up there scrounging for scraps and dodging bullets.”

“I’m not going without you.”

“You bet your ass you are.”

“No.” I snap. “What would I be with--”

Her hand clamps over mine and she squeals like a four-year-old on Christmas morning. “Oh my God!” She whispers. “Don’t make a sound.”

“You’re the one--”

She slaps my thigh gently and crawls slowly to the corner of the room. “I can’t believe it.”

Delicately, she lowers to her belly and slides her hand under an apple crate before bringing it out slowly. She turns her head to me, tears streaming down her face and a smile wider than it was when I asked her to marry me all those years ago. “We’re gonna make it.” She mouths.

She yanks the locket chain out with a swift motion and examines the heart in her hand briefly before tying it at the bottom of her bra strap.

I fling myself at her and kiss her passionately. “I’ve never been so happy over a piece of jewelry in all my life!” It was our salvation. Our survival. Our ticket to a new life, wherever we were going.

The ship clanged and clattered to a stop before loud booms and screams erupted above us. We had arrived at the peak but coming out could cost us our lives if we weren’t careful.

We walked casually back up to the main deck and vomited from the smell of blood and flesh before we even made it ten feet. Ark was in pieces around other victims, a look of shock frozen on his face.

“Do you have lockets, ma’ams?” A gruff soldier asks us as we step gingerly around the fallen.

“Yes sir.”

“No need to whisper, ma’ams. We took care of the people who didn’t have lockets.”

“Damn.” Virginia mutters as we unravel the lockets from our bras and extend them to him with our arms linked.

He examined them carefully, “You’re lucky. Some of them got pretty damaged from all the shit floating in the water.” He smiled and stepped aside. “Welcome aboard Mayflower 2030, ma’ams.”