That night, I had a dream. I had fallen asleep on the deck of my little boat, despite the cold. I couldn’t look away from the sky, and exhaustion eventually claimed me. I dreamt that I was growing. Not like a giant, but more like a bacteria, or a mold, or a fungus. Perfect for someone like me. If this world was an orange, I was the penicillin growing into it. Splitting. Multiplying until I filled all of existence. Spreading out to fill the gaps where humanity had been. It was disgusting, but I couldn’t stop. I wanted to stop. But it was my nature. The inner corrosive core of my being corrupts everything around me until it is either part of me or turned to ruin.
By the time night fell in my dream, I thought I had covered the entire earth, and that was the end of it. But when I looked into the night sky, nothing but more of me looked back. Countless. Infinite. A sickening universe of my own filth staring at me.
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Lily woke with a shout, and immediately knew she’d made a huge mistake by falling asleep on the deck of the boat. She was lucky she hadn’t fallen overboard, but more importantly right now, she was cold. So cold. Her bones ached down to the marrow. She couldn’t feel her limbs past a certain point, and where she could feel was throbbing. When she tried to move, she felt like her body was made of lead. She opened her mouth to shout, but didn’t have the energy.
Slowly, carefully, she managed to crawl back over to the door to the cabin. Opening it was difficult. Her hands didn’t want to close and grasp. But, using both of them together she got the door open and got inside. She tumbled down the few steps inside that led down into the main area, but it was only three so she didn’t think she was injured. More importantly, she couldn’t FEEL if she was.
“Oh god. Oh god. S-so cold.” She desperately looked around. What could she do? Hot water in the bath? She didn’t think she could. She couldn’t stand up, and could barely get around on the floor. Thankfully it was much warmer here. Then she remembered the bed. She clawed her way into the little bedroom, and tried to get up on the bed. But it was too hard. She couldn’t get her whole body up that high. So, she pulled all the bedding off of it. Having maybe her first coherent thought of the day, she realized her clothes were wet from the sea breeze and pulled them off. It was agony. The warm air of the cabin was bringing back some small amount of warmth to her skin and it was like someone was peeling it off. The pain receptors from her elbows and knees down felt like they were all going off.
She pulled the blankets around her tightly, and shivered uncontrollably. “Please warm up. Please warm up. Oh god I shouldn’t have fallen asleep…”
For a few minutes, she just lay in a ball, trying not to cry out from the pain while feeling slowly returned. “G-good job L-lily. Get to s-safety and immediately nearly off y-yourself.” Her stupid teeth wouldn’t stop chattering. It felt like her body wasn’t warming up from the blankets! But she knew that was in her head.
It would probably take a while though. She had some experience with sleeping outdoors, and knew that if your core temperature was cold it was difficult to bring it back up. But, staying warm and dry was all she could really do. When she had any amount of her brain back she looked around the room carefully. There! A thermostat! It was up on the wall. But if she could get onto the bed she could probably reach it from there. So, she made another attempt. This time, her legs worked a little better. It was agony though! She was pretty sure it would be less painful if she’d just lost the damn legs.
But, she had to keep going. So she did. She pushed herself up onto the bed, then reached back down to grab the blankets. Wrapping herself back up, she turned her attention to the thermostat. She could reach it! It was set to 70 degrees, so she turned it up to 80. Too much hotter and she wasn’t sure she could take the pain of everything warming at once. The room temperature would take a while to come up as it was. So, she wrapped herself up as best she could, and tried not to cry.
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At some point, pain and exhaustion had taken enough energy from Lily that she had fallen asleep. She awoke a few hours later with a start. Her first thought was that she was so thankful she woke up alive. Her second thought was how she wished she was dead. She felt awful. There was still some stinging pain in her skin over most of her body, but even more than that she had deep aches all over. Her muscles were beyond tired. She felt like she was a puppet and someone had cut her strings. She could hardly move, and when she did it hurt. Badly.
She let out a groan and spoke to her ceiling. “But, I didn’t die. That’s something, right?” The ceiling refrained from answering. “Fine. Be that way.”
She took a nice deep breath, coughed, eventually got control of it and sat up. There was a window, and light was shining across the bed. “Well, first things first. Let’s check the damage…”
She examined herself as best she could with no mirrors or help. Her hands and feet were still a bit red, and painful to the touch. But, she didn’t see any blackness, which is what she thought frostbite looked like from TV. That was a good sign. The gash on her knee was still not pleasant, but it was superficial damage that was healing. There was a bruise running across her knee even where the flesh wasn’t damaged. She made a note to clean that off as best she could and watch for infection. All in all, not too bad. She was going to be down for the count for a few days, but she had survived. Now she just had to figure out how to keep doing that without being able to really use her body.
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Taking a minute to breathe, she looked out the window. “Huh, that’s strange…” There was only open ocean. “Must be on the other side…” She wanted to get a look at Santa Del Mar from a distance and check whether the fires were still raging. She carefully got up, finding she could stand now if she really tried. It just wasn’t pleasant. She kept her blankets wrapped around her body. Absolutely taking no risks with the temperature today. Then she found her way to the captain’s chair and sat down with the blankets cocooning her.
She could only see the open ocean. “M-maybe from the back of the ship?” She turned on the engine and let the cameras turn on showing her the rear view. Open. Ocean. A paranoid thought crossed her mind. First the people, then the stars, had the land disappeared now too? No. No no no. That was dumb. But she had put the anchor down, so how was she out to sea?
Well, okay. That wasn’t even the most important part right now. How was she going to find her way back?
She watched the waves out the window and tried to make her brain work. She felt so exhausted. A part of her wanted to just lie back down and figure it out when she woke up again. But, another more urgent part refused. Okay, so. She needed to return to shore. She looked at the fuel gauge. It was still nearly full. That was promising!
Deep breaths. Deep breaths. How could she find her way back? Well, she knew what direction it was. If she had drifted out to sea, she had gone more west than anything else. So, land should be east, right? Even if it wasn’t the same spot on the shore, she could get to land if she just went east.
That put her mind at ease a little. Okay. East then. First things first though. She had to go above and figure out what went wrong with the anchor. At least pull it up so it wouldn’t snag on anything while she was moving. She really, really did not want to. Her body was at its limit, even having gotten some sleep. But, she made herself do it. She shed her blankets, realized she was naked underneath, cursed for a minute while she found her suitcase and opened it and… She didn’t pack any clothes.
“Wait, really? No, that has to be a mistake… What kind of an idiot forgets to pack clothes!? Ugh! Stupid stupid stupid stupid!” She reluctantly put on her still slightly damp clothes. It’s only for a few minutes, right? Then she made her way above. She took a second to look all the way around and confirm that there was no land in sight. There was none. Lovely.
Then headed to the front of the boat and took a look at the anchor. It didn’t seem to have changed at all from last night. She experimentally lowered it a little to see if the chain would go slack. It did not. That more or less confirmed her suspicions. She must not have anchored it properly? Because it wasn’t touching the bottom now…
So, she pulled it all the way back up. It took a few minutes. Fortunately, it was not a cold day. The chill of the night had faded, and while the wind wasn’t comfortable especially on her damp clothes, she could withstand a short time of this. When she finished, she walked carefully back below deck, making sure not to risk being wobbly near the railings as best she could. She got undressed, and wrapped herself back up in her blanket nest before sitting back down at the captain’s chair.
“Okay. This probably isn't too bad. One of my less life threatening mistakes over the last 24 hours. I just need to keep calm. East. How do I go east?”
She took a look over the boat console. Weird lever throttle, a wheel, speedometer, fuel tank, two screens that were off, four screens that showed views from outside the ship, a… radio(?), a few black boxes she didn’t recognize and… That was it. She was really hoping for a compass. Just one of those old timer plastic orb ones or something would be enough. But there was nothing.
“Huh. Well. What about these black screens then…?” she reached over and felt around until she found a power button, and pressed it. It came to life immediately! At a password screen. She could feel a scream of frustration rising in her chest, but she forced herself to take a deep breath instead. As she did, she examined the screen closely. At the top right it showed the time, 12:36 PM, and an N. “Wait. Lemme try…”
She turned on the throttle slightly, and turned the boat to the right. After a few seconds, the N turned into NE. She let out a half scream half cheer in pure ecstatic joy. She was so relieved she could feel some tears forming in the corners of her eyes. But she blinked them away. She continued turning the boat until the NE said E, and then let go of the wheel and made sure it didn’t change too quickly. She turned the throttle slightly forward until it hit about ten… something. That was not MPH. But it felt roughly the same. “Okay. That seems like a nice and safe speed. I won’t hurry. I’ll go nice and slow. We’ll get there eventually.”
So she turned her attention to the rest of the console while the boat continued forward. She found the power for the other black screen and turned it on. This one she couldn’t decipher very easily. It had a shifting pattern of colors, and a number on it. But the number definitely wasn’t speed or anything else she recognized. So she decided to sit and stare at it for a little while. After five minutes, she still wasn't totally sure. The number was going down on average. But not linearly. Maybe it was sensing how far she was from land somehow? Was that possible? She shrugged and decided to give up for now. Her stomach growled loudly. It had been a long time since she’d eaten anything… She’d snacked a little while shopping yesterday, but that had been it.
She carefully turned the throttle down to 0. Lily was pretty sure that the boat wouldn’t crash or capsize or whatever if she went to the kitchen for a sec to grab some food, but she was taking absolutely no stupid risks. She could just start it again when she got back. Finding her way to the kitchen, she grabbed herself some fruit, poptarts, an energy drink, and a bag of chips. It was not a healthy breakfast. She didn’t care. She just needed to eat, and sugary crap food was the order of the morning.
She also grabbed one of the laptops as she headed back to the captain’s chair, and the next blu-ray of Friends. Making her way back, she bundled up on the chair again. She was STILL sorta cold. Putting the boat back to speed and a pop tart in her mouth she opened up the laptop and began some set up.