Barren Waters, A Post-Apocalyptic Tale of Survival
Chapter 25

Not I, nor anyone else can travel that road for you.

You must travel it by yourself.

It is not far. It is within reach.

Perhaps you have been on it since you were born, and did not know.

Perhaps it is everywhere—on water and land.

―Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

Chapter 25

Present Day

December 16th, 2176

San Diego, California

The San Diego hills rose majestically in front of them, but simultaneously wreaked havoc on their thighs. As the first rays of sun were streaking across the morning sky, they finally reached the city limits and yelled out a warrior’s cry. They were exhausted, though, Jeremy in particular. In the days that followed the expiration of her disk, Sam had weakened considerably. The intensity of the physical exertion, coupled with a poor diet and lack of proper sleep, had been too much for her battered body to handle. The night before, in a frightful moment, Jeremy had watched her attempt to pedal forward, and fail. She had wobbled on her bike precariously, and then slumped across the handlebars in defeat. The end. Seth had stifled a scream, while Jeremy dashed to her side, panicked and frenzied.

“Seth,” he’d called out, his voice shrill, “I need help. Pull yourself together.” Shrugging the heavy pack from his shoulders, he’d quietly passed it to the frightened young boy. “You’ll have to take this, while I carry her. I’m sorry, Seth. It’s too heavy for you. You’ll just have to make do somehow.” Seth had accepted the burden wordlessly.

Lifting Sam’s body into his arms, Jeremy had let her bike fall to the ground with a clatter. It was useless to him now, but he’d whispered his thanks. Like a rose on a grave, he’d left it where it lay. It had done its job dutifully.

He’d propped Sam against his chest, while Seth splayed her legs across his bike’s handlebars, and they’d ridden like that for the last fifty miles. Seth had accepted the weight of both packs, and though he hadn’t complained, Jeremy knew he was struggling. The remaining distance was an uphill climb, both backbreaking and murderous to their legs. He couldn’t imagine how Seth was getting through it. Jeremy’s own legs burned from the effort. His eyes were bloodshot and swollen. He clenched his teeth against his many discomforts: the hard edge of the bicycle seat, pressing painfully into his groin, his trembling arms that he had to keep taut, the unbearable thirst he wasn’t able to quench, the bottle of water that was just out of reach, strapped to the underside of the frame. He wouldn’t allow himself to stop and drink, wouldn’t sacrifice a moment of precious time.

They’d ridden all night, wordlessly, until dawn, saving their breath for the last few miles. Sam was somewhat lucid at times, though for most of the journey she wasn’t. She remained in a deep and immersive sleep. That was the lie Jeremy told himself, at least, for he wouldn’t allow himself to face the truth, that she walked the fine line between sleep and coma.

He’d braced her arm between her belly and his, in a way that showcased the numbers at her wrist, and as night progressed, he watched her numbers rise. Her sugars were unacceptably high. Though he and Susan had never been sure, they’d suspected her of suffering the worst kind of diabetes. While the bodies of some produced small amounts of insulin, Sam’s didn’t seem to make any, and only two days prior, much to Jeremy’s dismay, her body had fallen into diabetic ketoacidosis, which meant the pills were useless to them now. After ingesting them, her sugars would fall, but the dosage required to accomplish such a task would empty their bottle in less than a day. As such, he and Seth didn’t rest or stop, didn’t speak or complain, only focused and pedaled, alone in their private visions of hell.

Jeremy tried his best to keep Sam alert, by engaging her in mindless conversations, and by keeping the wind in her face and hair. He didn’t allow her to eat anything, either, a desperate measure that felt cruel and inhumane. It was a trick his father had mentioned years ago, something to be used in critical situations. Maybe it had helped, Jeremy wondered privately, though it only seemed to weaken her further.

“Ten more miles to the ocean, Pike,” he said softly, trying to liven her spirits. “Can you believe we actually made it? When we get there, what do you expect to see?”

Sometimes she’d answer by grunting acknowledgment, or with a fluttering of fingers against his wrist. When she didn’t, he took comfort in her rhythmic breathing, which at times was the only thing that proved she still lived.

Seth struggled behind him stoically, and though they stopped once for water and a small bite of food, each idle moment felt like an acceptance of defeat. Neither of them could stay still for too long.

As night slowly progressed into day, she became less responsive in his lap. “See Pike?” he begged of her. “I wasn’t wrong. It wasn’t wrong to attempt this journey. The things we could have done didn’t matter after all, because everything that happened would have happened anyway. The pills,” he muttered maniacally. “They don’t work anymore. Searching for more wouldn’t have helped. Don’t you see? So we need to forgive ourselves. No.” He shook his head. “You need to forgive me, for doing this to you, for taking you so far from your home and life, for gambling on nothing but faith. But,” he countered, “Peter’s leg happened because the pills didn’t work, so maybe I hastened what would have happened anyway. The leg, I mean. Peter’s leg was a sign, a sign that somehow I missed. I should have tried harder to understand it. I just didn’t see the truth fast enough. And when I finally did, I didn’t listen to my gut. I should have listened and acted instead of hesitating, instead of allowing us to sit in that house for months. We should have left sooner, and that’s on me. For if we had, we’d be there by now.” He blinked back tears and firmed his chin. “It’s my fault, Sam, and I can’t forgive myself. If I had acted sooner, you’d be safe by now. If I hadn’t hesitated—like Grandpa used to say—we’d have our home by the sea. We’d have trees and gardens, rain catchers along the roof.” A sob suddenly tore from his chest. “Stay with me, Sam, just a little bit longer. Do it for me, for Seth, and for Mom.”

The sky was brightening into a kaleidoscope of purples when they finally crossed into the city of San Diego. Streaks of amethyst knifed through the blackness. Lilac brightened deep pockets of eggplant. Casting a glance at Seth over his shoulder, Jeremy picked up speed.

“Seth?” he called out, glancing quickly at the boy, whose cheeks were red and puffing with air. “We’re almost there, son. Suck it up.”

When Seth raised his face, Jeremy’s breath caught in his throat. There were tears glistening in the boy’s brown eyes. “Sam?” he asked breathlessly, the word cut short by a gut wrenching sob.

Jeremy couldn’t muster a reply. Returning his gaze to the road ahead, he bore down with a strength he hadn’t thought he possessed, and when the ocean materialized, he let loose a low howl. “Sam,” he screamed, shifting her slightly in his lap. “Open your eyes. We made it! We’re here!”

Her eyes fluttered opened and her mouth twitched, the corners lifting into a thin smile. “We made it?” she questioned him faintly.

“We did! Look,” he said as she tried to raise her head.

“It’s beautiful,” she murmured. “Like diamonds on silk.”

Once she had seen the water, her head fell back, her eyes slipping closed as she fell into sleep. Like a frail doll she was, her eyelashes splayed across delicate cheeks. “You did it, Dad,” she mumbled to him softly, the words so faint he had to lower his chin just to catch them. “You got us here. We have to tell Mom. We have to take her down to the beach.”

Her words were slurred and nonsensical. Jeremy fought to keep his voice from shaking. “Of course we will, honey. We’ll go get Mom. We’ll get her and have ourselves a picnic by the sea.”

She smiled at that and Jeremy’s heart skipped a beat. Banking left, he steered onto Sunset Cliffs Road, his bike skidding dangerously on patches of sand. The ocean was breathtaking and vast. It was a beauty he’d long thought gone from this world. Waves blanketed the shoreline in refreshing salt sprays. The sea was a glittering quilt of winking stars and sparkling gemstones. It was like diamonds, he said to himself. As usual, Sam was right. Though the waves were lifeless and the water empty, the sight of it lifted his spirits nonetheless. In that radiant moment, there was only one thing he could have found more beautiful than the ocean itself: the tall glass building in the distance, beckoning him, shimmering at the edge of the cliff like a beacon.

Bigeye Pharmaceuticals. They’d made it at last.

It was a contemporary building of steel framing and glass. Glass—not reflective like the pink-and-gold of a Las Vegas Casino—but clear and limpid, transparent on every side. It was a lighthouse to Jeremy, a flare in the dark, shining bright beneath a slowly rising sun.

He sped toward it breathlessly, the sounds of Seth’s spinning tires close at his heels. Pulling his bike to the edge of the lawn, he whisked Sam into his arms and ran. He needed to check her vitals first, to gauge how much time she had left. She’d made it this far, he counseled himself. “Please,” he prayed aloud. “Hang with me, Sam. Stay with me a little bit longer.”

Her head lolled against his shoulder before falling dangerously limp across his arm. No, he thought, crazed. Stay with me. If she fell into a coma, he might never get her back. He couldn’t allow that happen. Lowering her to the grass, a sob tore from his throat, as he searched her pockets for the near-empty bottle. Seth dropped silently to his knees beside him, tears streaming down his face and onto his shirt. Jeremy saw him reach for her hand and draw it close. The bottle was stuffed into a pocket of her khakis, and when he removed the cap, his heart skipped a beat. There was only a handful left, little more. He pushed them past her lips, but she wouldn’t swallow them. She was too far-gone, not lucid anymore. They fell from her lips and rolled onto the grass.

Jeremy’s panic swelled. “No,” he whispered. He could bring her back from this. This couldn’t be it. This wasn’t the end. They’d come so far and been through so much to fail five feet from the door. He wouldn’t allow it. He shoved the bitter pills into his mouth and did his best to emulsify them, before pushing the paste into her mouth. He coated the insides of her cheeks and her tongue. “Just a little bit longer,” he begged of her. “Please. You can’t leave me. Don’t do this to me.”

He poured what little water he had into her mouth. If he could just get the medicine into her bloodstream, she just might make it, though barely. Scooping her up, he sped for the doors, his mind beginning to wander as he ran, back to that very first morning, back home, to their trip to the burnt-out hospital. It was the morning his father had murdered two men, and he remembered it with crystalline brilliance. What question had he asked Liam? Oh yes. That’s right. “How long can you survive on half a dose of pills?” Though his father hadn’t responded, the answer had revealed itself soon enough.

Sixteen months.

Liam had died in sixteen months. He was an older man by that time, of course, and his age coupled with the poor medication had destroyed his body in sixteen months. His death had been slow and agonizing. He hadn’t lost a leg or suffered a gangrenous wound, not in the ways Peter had. His pain and atrophy had hidden themselves in places his family couldn’t see. His deterioration was internal and private—which was exactly the way he had wanted it to be. It allowed him to simulate health a long while, to keep up appearances and suffer alone. Jeremy could only surmise that by then Liam had discovered the truth about the pills: they were weak, and with time, would continue to spoil. He must have determined how ineffective they were, for he decreased his dosage significantly, and in secret. The human mind makes extraordinary leaps. It tethers together strange pieces of truth to form false conclusions and faulty deductions. Then it acts on those conclusions with tenacity and vigor. By taking more of the pills for himself, Liam believed he was killing his granddaughter. That was the conclusion that ultimately killed him. It was madness, twisted. To Liam, it was love.

Toward the end, he lost weight quickly, and once his pain became too great, he simply allowed the inevitable to happen. But Jeremy also remembered that he was happy. The closer he inched toward death, the more content and untroubled he became, it seemed. What he did for Sam had been a personal choice, and it was one he had made willingly, a sacrifice. He was alive when Sam first learned to read. He loved spending quiet evenings beside the hearth, watching her lips make sense of the letters.

Sacrifices beget other sacrifices. Acts of love are links in a never-ending chain. Jeremy and Susan owed Liam so much. It was his sacrifice that finally forced them outside. He was the impetus that drove them from the cabin to search for the alternatives that led to the disks. It had been his blessings, his selfless gifts that ultimately saved her life.

But what would become of that sacrifice now? Jeremy cast his eyes about the ground. The large double doors were locked and chained. Inclining his head toward a stone on the ground, he nodded at Seth. “There. Pick it up. Throw it against the glass. Hard. Do it now.”

Seth complied with a scramble. He picked up the stone and backed several paces, reared back his arm, and loosed it with a snap. With a sharp clatter, stone crashed through glass, the sound a sharp contract to the waves against the cliffs. Jeremy widened the hole with a kick, and the two of them pushed through the opening awkwardly.

“Where?” Jeremy screamed as he spun in endless circles. “Where do we start?”

They ran to the reception area first, and stopped, for had Jeremy not been holding Sam, the sight would have felled him to his knees. Beside the front desk, a billboard stood, the twenty-foot image of a beautiful woman, posing in a white bathing suit, her hair blown back by the wind. The advertisement was old, faded, and blanched, but the familiar green glow at her belly was clear. Jeremy nearly lost himself. A seed of happiness sprouted in his belly, the feeling so intense he could barely hold it in. He’d been right all along. He’d gambled and won.

Seth saw it too and spun wildly around the room. “But where?” he moaned. “Where are they?”

Jeremy set Sam down on the reception case glass and pressed two fingers to her throat. He stilled, holding his breath as he listened. Her pulse was faint and fluttering, but there, and though her breathing was ragged and shallow, she breathed. She lived. She hadn’t left him yet. There was time. For where life still existed, a fight could be waged. Jeremy stood and peered around the room.

“Where?” Seth said. He was sobbing now. “Carp, what do we do? Where are they? This place is too big. We’ll never replace them.”

Jeremy wiped the tears from his eyes and peered around. There was a set of double doors behind the reception platform, which he sprinted toward, Seth close at his heels, their footfalls echoing in the empty room. The doors concealed two long hallways. Seth banked left, and Jeremy, right.

Some of the doors were open, some locked, and Jeremy searched each room with trembling hands. This was the end of the line, his final move. His plan would succeed in this building or it would fail. He would save his little girl, or he would lose everything. His thoughts were jagged and sharp behind his eyes, his memories bright and electric. There was Susan and the morning of Sam’s birth. Jeremy’s mother had been so calm that day. She was Jeremy’s rock. He’d never forgotten her strength. As everything else in the Colt household, Sam’s birth had been a family affair. They’d staged a tub of water in the baby’s room, an old kiddie pool with plastic sides and a bright blue bottom. He remembered his father pacing the halls outside, and Susan’s fear of the burgeoning pain. She’d clutched his fingers with an iron grip, and he’d continued to say the wrong things. “Women have been doing this for thousands of years, Suse. For thousands of years—and without epidurals.”

“Not this woman!” she’d screamed, her face red. “This woman needs the drugs! Now!”

He remembered that day so fondly. Susan had always been strong in Jeremy’s eyes, and true to form, she hadn’t wavered in this. People always say the birth of a child is life’s greatest gift, and after experiencing it firsthand, Jeremy knew it to be true. He would never forget his daughter’s birth. It brought his family closer together. With quiet assurances and a gentle touch, Olivia tended mother and baby with skill—or the intuition only a woman possesses. She’d seemed to know all the right things to do, though later she confessed that her confidence was an act. She’d laughed through tears and shrugged her shoulders. “A woman’s body will do what it’s supposed to do. All I did was cheer her along.”

Jeremy thought of that beautiful day, and of all the days that had followed since then, of the things his family had endured along the way: the planning and secrets, the wins and losses, the countless tears and sacrifices. There had been Liam’s death, and then there was Susan’s, and it had all led up to this moment—Sam’s moment. Nothing would matter if he lost her now. He couldn’t face that, couldn’t bear it, couldn’t live. He couldn’t lose them both in the span of one year.

His body thrummed with nervous energy, and as he searched one empty room after the next, a sob tore from his throat. He thought of the sparkling sea outside, just below the cliffs on the bluff. He imagined its shimmering surface, like diamonds, and the silence of its depths below. He pictured the miles of empty water, turquoise slowly fading to black. Nothing existed in that void. Nothing lived. It was a bathtub full of water, and a graveyard of bones.

He imagined the smooth ocean floor with its majestic hills and valleys, and the jutting whalebones in castles atop the sand. He thought of the millions of fallen shark teeth and the bits of trash, peppering in the sand. Plastic entombed with precious bones. It wasn’t right. It didn’t belong down there. But maybe, he thought for a moment, I do. For if I lose Sam, I lose everything. Perhaps I should join the old bones, just die. The thought, though macabre, held a certain appeal, for if she died, he couldn’t go on. He would replace a small boat and oars, he promised himself, and row past the breakers, beyond the shoreline. He’d cast himself over the side of the boat and sink to the bottom, join the silence of the dead. Perhaps his bones would settle with the teeth, and be captured in a sandy tomb. It was fitting really. It was where he belonged. He’d done monstrous things to get them here, and after all was said and done, it may have been for nothing. She might die anyway, and it wouldn’t have mattered. He belonged in the depths of those barren waters.

He shook the thoughts from his head and focused, sprinting from the last empty room in the hall, catching sight of a set of double doors at the end. Entrance to these required a thumb or palm print, pressed against a rectangular scanner. He cursed. Slapping it in anger, he cried out a howl and flung himself against the solid doors. How was this happening? After all this shit? How was any of this possible?

Startled by the sound of Seth’s running feet, he turned, his hopes suddenly dashed in an instant. Seth stopped short, his empty hands held high. It was as if he had wilted or sunk into himself. Tears were streaming down his cheeks. Jeremy whirled in anger, slamming his shoulder against the impenetrable fortress, certain the disks were inside it. It only made sense that they would be, of course, for this was the elusive vault of treasure—his treasure—the treasure that always seemed just out of reach. He howled with rage, hurled his body against the door.

“Wait!” Seth screamed. “The counter!”

“The what?” Jeremy turned and growled. “What counter? What are you talking about, Seth?”

“The counter! You laid her across the counter out front, but there was something beneath the glass.”

Jeremy froze.

The unconscious mind works in baffling and mysterious ways. People see thousands of images in a day—hundreds of thousands, yet often don’t process the images until later. The concept is the scientific theory of dreams. Dreaming, scientists believe, is the mind’s attempt to organize images. And so, Jeremy’s mind organized. It replayed the images like a movie: their entrance into the structure, both wild and chaotic, the beautiful figure of the cardboard woman, the pallid tone of Sam’s sunken cheeks, the dustiness of the counter where he’d lowered and left her body, the oblong cylinder, just inside the glass, resting on sapphire velvet.

He drew a breath.

Dear God! It had been there. He just hadn’t seen it.

Racing back to the reception area, he pushed through the doors and ran to her. She was breathing, though barely. He gently lifted her up. And when he saw the case, he wept openly. Setting her down, he turned toward Seth, who pressed a stone into his palm and slowly backed away. With a nod, Jeremy slammed the stone into the glass, battering it until it finally broke. He lifted the applicator from its cushiony bed, and kneeling beside her, lifted the corner of her shirt. The applicator clicked into place with a satisfying snap, and as he pressed the plunger, he held his breath. Seth’s hand found his as the numbers began to rise.