The marina wasn’t quite what Dodger had expected for some reason. It was a long hike from the pier, made even longer by having to constantly stop to make sure the next 20 meters were safe to travel. They probably could have travelled along the beach and been there in about an hour, but the beach offered no cover from prowling monsters and bandits.
Not that they’d seen any bandits lately. Dodger hadn’t even been completely positive there were any people left in the city until she ran into Mark and Dave. But that didn’t make her feel any safer about it. If Mark and Dave had been hiding out without being seen for so long, then other people must have been doing the same.
The sun was high in the sky when they finally left the divided road that gave all the old high rise hotels an excellent view of the boats in the marina. Dodger hadn’t quite realised that they weren’t going to stay in one of those, high above the city, until they started heading into the marina itself. And suddenly, she was glad they weren’t staying in one of the hotels. Climbing up to the 20th floor without a working elevator, and each with their full packs would not have been fun.
Along the water, Dodger’s pace slowed to look at the boats. This had been here her entire life, and the first time she was seeing it was now. Most of the boats were still floating, but some had definitely seen better days. Some of the lighter ones had been smashed against their moorings during rare storms, and were little more than wreckage at this point, half-submerged in the water. She thought that’s where the guys were leading her. Maybe they’d each get their own sailboat or something.
But that wasn’t the plan. They weren’t going to get their own sailboats, and Dodger knew this as soon as she saw the towering monstrosity at the end of the basin.
“What in the heck is that?” Dodger asked, not quite sure if she fully understood what she was looking at. Three decks, dozens of portholes, and only a little worse for wear after all the abuse and neglect it had suffered since all the people taking care of it died.
“That is the Sea Floozy,” Dave said, picking up his pace toward the massively large boat. Mark trotted after him, leaving Dodger momentarily stunned at what they were showing her. Finally, she realised she’d stopped completely and jogged to catch up. The boat was so big that Dodger couldn’t see a way onto until they got right behind it. There were stairs at the back, but they’d been blocked off with a bunch of corrugated tin. From the looks of it, the wall wasn’t meant so much to keep people off, but to make it easier to tell if someone had got on. But it was too difficult to get to from the dock. They’d managed to get the boat far enough away from it that even without their impromptu wall, you’d have to really jump to make it. Instead, they’d rigged an aluminium fire ladder to the side - the sort people used to keep in their bedrooms on upper floors. It was still several feet out from the dock, but Mark and Dave had been here and done this many times before. They both put their bags on the ground and Mark took his machete off his belt, handing it over. Then he grabbed onto the back of Dave’s belt, and Dave - being smaller and lighter - leaned out over the water, using the machete to coax the ladder toward his fingers. As soon as he grabbed it, Mark pulled him back so they were both on steady footing.
“I’ll go check it out,” he said, hooking the machete to his own belt and put his pack back on before climbing up the ladder. Mark kept a hold on the bottom so they didn’t lose it, and watched Dave quickly climb up and over the side, and quickly out of view.
Dodger didn’t say a word the entire time. She listened for any sound she could hear that would suggest Dave had found something he didn’t want to find. He was up there for what seemed like hours, completely silent and totally out of their sight while he swept every deck and cabin to make sure there were no nasty surprises. Finally, he appeared on one of the upper decks and waved his hand to beckon the other two up.
“Here,” Mark said, stepping aside to let Dodger go first. She looked up at the ladder and took a deep breath. She’d never climbed anything like this, so she made sure her bag was snug around her and wouldn’t swing out and get in the way or anything before she stepped up to the ladder. The metal was surprisingly cool for having been outside all day. But the boat cast an enormous shadow, and the spray from the main channel probably kept everything a little cooler.
“Just… climb up?” she asked, unsure of this whole thing.
“Yeah. Have you done something like this before?” Mark asked, suddenly sounding cautious.
Dodger shook her head. “Nope,” she said. It was terrifying. A huge climb that seemed a hundred miles tall.
“It’s going to wiggle a little, so hold on. Don’t reach for the next rung until you know where your feet are,” Mark explained, trying to hold the ladder as slack as possible without losing it or making it impossible for Dodger to get onto the terrifying thing.
With another deep breath, she grabbed onto a rung right around face-level, and found a place for her feet. The ladder did wiggle a little, but not as much as she expected it to. The chain links were encased in aluminium pipes, making it stiff and rigid so it didn’t flop about, and the rungs were flat and heavily textured, so even with the spray from the channel, she didn’t feel like she was likely to slip off. The only challenge was going to be to actually convince her body to climb up the ladder. She stepped up first, getting one foot up, and then reaching up with one of her hands. It was less like climbing one of those awful rope ladders in school, and more like getting up to see what had been accumulating at the top of the fridge this way. Her legs did all of the work, while her arms just kept her balanced. Below, she could feel Mark trying to keep the ladder steady for her, and before she realised it, she was at the hard part: getting off the ladder, and onto the deck. She looked up to figure it out, and was almost startled to see Dave waiting for her.
“Almost there,” he said encouragingly. Without warning, he grabbed her by the arm to pull her up. That did startle her, but she choked it down, knowing that if she jumped even a little bit, she’d fall into the water. Or worse, she’d fall onto the dock.
“Thanks,” she said stiffly as Dave helped pull her to her feet. As soon as she was off, she heard the ladder jingle and jangle roughly. She looked down to see Mark managing to put his pack back on without losing the ladder, and then jump onto the thing like he’d done this a hundred times before.
Which he probably had. Dodger quickly got out of the way so he’d be able to step off the ladder without having to fight for space. Once he was up, he pulled the ladder with him, piling it onto the faded and peeling deck.
“You’re not afraid this thing’s gonna sink?” she asked, looking around the monster of a boat.
Dave shook his head confidently. “Nah. It seemed pretty new when we came here the first time. And how often do these things leave the water, really?”
Dodger shrugged. She genuinely didn’t know. “Well, show me around!” she said, eager to see what obscenely rich people used to do with their money.
They all left their bags near the ladder in the shade as Dave led the party inside to some sort of lounge. Even now, after being abandoned for years, it looked nicer than some of the houses she’d been squatting in. Soft carpets and rich woodwork, with several massive flat screen TVs hanging from the walls. The boat had a big, spiral staircase, fancy LED lighting, and more technology than a gaming convention crammed into it.
“Did people live on this, or what?” she asked as Dave showed her the (mostly useless) galley.
“It might have been for charter. We’re not sure,” he said. “There are like, six cabins on this thing.”
“Holy crap.” Dodger couldn’t even imagine what something like this would cost to even rent. “Why don’t you guys stay here all the time? I would.”
“You’ll get sick of it. Trust me.” Dave showed her a few of the cabins, with their enormous beds and big TVs. Dodger hadn’t been so sad for a lack of power in a very long time.
“But it does have one perk. We’ll show you that tonight though,” he said with a sly smile. Dodger wasn’t sure how she felt about that look on his face.
“Okay…”
“You gonna be okay here on your own?” Dave asked as they walked out to rejoin Mark in the lounge. “If you can get some of the stuff we stored below out and set up, we can go see what we can find around the harbour.”
Dodger nodded. She hadn’t been away from men in far too long, and a little time away from them sounded kind of like the best. “Yeah, sure. Go for it.”
They found Mark stretched out on one of the sofas, playing with a nail puzzle that had been left on one of the tables.
“Find your room yet?” he asked, barely looking up.
“Yeah, I like that blue one,” Dodger said, taking the opportunity to sit down for a moment.
Mark gave her a thumbs up and went back to fiddling with his puzzle for a few moments longer before he got back to his feet. “Ready to go?” he asked, reaching out for his machete again. Dave handed it over.
“Yep. Get your stuff.”
Dodger watched as they both headed outside to dig through their bags. She hadn’t seen them pack when they were getting ready to leave, so she wasn’t really sure what they needed. Dave took his bow and his quiver of arrows off his bag, which she expected. Mark grabbed a can of spray paint and stuffed it into a smaller bag, which she didn’t expect. Then they kicked the ladder back down the side of the boat, and were gone.
She spent the first ten minutes just being alone and listening to the silence. She missed the silence. She didn’t miss the danger of being alone. But this wasn’t quite alone. Mark and Dave were there, even if they were off scavenging for supplies they couldn’t carry with them. They were just… somewhere else.
When Dodger got up, she thought about pulling the ladder up, but decided they would have told her to do so if that’s what they wanted. So instead, she headed down below decks to find the stuff Dave was talking about. She wasn’t quite sure what he’d meant, until she saw it. She wasn’t sure where Dave wanted it, so she brought it all to the main deck, out of the way but easily accessible. They had their own distillery system that looked a lot like the one they used on the beach, except smaller. The scorched bottom of the stock pot suggested they used a fire somewhere to make it work. Logically, she assumed the fire probably came from one of several grills they’d collected and managed to get up here somehow, so she arranged the set up next to them. She wasn’t sure what they burned to make fire, but assumed they knew what they were doing. For a moment, she thought about getting some water out of the marina somehow, but with the amount of decaying boats sitting there, salt probably wasn’t the only danger.
They also had some fishing rods big enough to go with their enormous boat, and a few tackle boxes. Dodger brought those up as well, and having no idea how to begin to set them up, set them carefully aside behind one of the sofas inside, not wanting to risk breaking them. They were probably stronger than they looked, since she’d seen Mark reel in actual sharks with the rods they kept at the pier, but they only had three, and she wasn’t sure if they’d find others in working order if they needed to. After doing some digging, she found several dozen bags of charcoal, and some stacks of wood that probably served the same purpose. She brought up one of the bags, and enough firewood to get by for a few days before they needed more. By the time she was done, she decided to go exploring the yacht some more. She made her way to the back, where the stairs were, and took a look at the system the boys had rigged up. Their wall was mostly held together with bungee cords, and on the ground along the wall they had a long piece of heavy plywood that probably served as a gangplank for getting supplies onto the boat easier. Deciding to leave that up to the boys, she headed back in to peek into all of the rooms. One of them had a shelf full of books - something Dodger hadn’t been able to enjoy in years. She carefully read over all of the titles, eventually settling on something short and seemingly easy to follow. Though most of the books on the shelf fit into that category, which made sense if the boat were chartering rich tourists to Mexico.
She took her book, and after fetching her bag back up from outside, headed to the room she’d claimed for herself. The bed was unbelievably soft, and the light coming in was perfect to read by. She was pretty sure she actually dozed off at one point, and was startled awake at the sound of something slamming against the side of the boat. She was about to grab her bat and get up, but was stopped when Mark shouted their presence. It took her a while to calm down again while the boys banged on all sorts of stuff and made an endless amount of noise. She wondered what they could possibly be up to out there, but the bed was far too comfortable for her to want to get up. Finally, it stopped, and she returned her attention to her book. The light was starting to fade, but as long as it was bright enough to see the words, she was going to keep going.
Dodger could hear the boys come back inside, talking loudly, though she couldn’t understand what they were saying. With them inside and moving around, it seemed like the boat was almost vibrating all of a sudden, but she pushed that aside, convincing herself it was normal, and that the boat wasn’t about to suddenly sink into the bottom of the marina.
And then the lights out in the hall came on. It was the very last thing in the world she’d expected and it made her jump and yelp from the suddenness of it. She could hear Dave laughing somewhere, and a few moments later, saw his stupid, curly hair outlined against the bright light out in the hall.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Yeah, I’m fine!” Dodger said, not really feeling fine. She wasn’t even sure this was real. “Warn me next time. Oh my god.”
Dave laughed some more and nodded out toward the lounge. “Come on. We’ve got dinner.”
Dodger cautiously got up to follow him out to the deck where she’d got everything set up. Mark was down on the dock, stripping and gutting a seagull under the warm lights, and Dave quickly got to work setting up one of the grills so they could cook it. All Dodger could do was stand in disbelief.
“You turned the lights on,” she said, still struggling to catch up to that fact.
“One night only,” Mark said while he worked. “First night, we turn on the lights and watch a movie.”
“The TV doesn’t work?” Dodger said, trying her best to keep up.
“No, but there’s like, a thousand DVDs on a shelf behind the TV.”
Dodger blinked, slowly getting there. Then she turned around to go back into the lounge to see what Mark was even talking about. She looked at the TV, and the wall it was mounted on, and after a bit of poking and prodding, she found that the entire wall was on a sort of hinge. The wall folded out, revealing a hidden closet that was wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling full of DVDs.
“Technically it’s my turn to pick,” Dave said, suddenly behind her. “But you can have this one.”
“Thanks,” Dodger said slowly, having to remember what this sort of situation even meant.
They were on a boat. With electricity. And they were about to have seagull for dinner and watch a movie together.
“How’d you turn the lights on?” she asked, turning around just in time to catch Dave before he left again.
He pointed out toward all the other boats. “Four thousand other boats, most of them with fuel in their tanks.”
“Oh.” It sounded obvious when he said it like that. She followed him back outside and only then saw what was in the bag Mark took with him. They had some sort of hand pump on a hose and two five-gallon water bottles. She didn’t think that was enough to fill the tank on a monster like this one, but if they only ran the lights one night, and made a habit of filling up the bottles during the rest of their stay, they probably kept a decent amount of fuel in the tank.
There were two ways to survive in the wild: the sheer, dumb luck she tended to rely on, and strict routine and planning. She was really starting to like the strict routine over the dumb luck. She needed to start to learn some of this stuff, instead of relying on scavenging alone to pull her weight.
“Do you guys need any help?” she asked.
Dave grilled up the bird, and dished it up on actual plates from the galley while Mark helped Dodger find a movie and get it working. With dinner in front of them and the DVD ready to go, the boys both got comfortable on the sofa. But it seemed a little too comfortable and familiar, so Dodger distanced herself from both of them and sat down in a chair instead. The movie they watched was something foul and funny, where despite all his character flaws, the guy still got the girl at the end. It had been a long time since anything had felt this normal. Dodger still wasn’t sure it was real.
By the time the movie was over, Mark had fallen asleep, and Dodger felt like she was getting there. While Dave collected everyone’s dishes, she got up and headed back to her room, unapologetically closing and locking the door between her and the boys. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust them now. She’d been with them for long enough to know that she could trust them. But having that barrier between her and them just gave her one less thing to worry and stress out about, whether consciously or subconsciously. Even now, when things felt too close, Dodger was acutely aware of how easily either of them could overpower her. It wasn’t an easy fact to forget.
She’d done laundry a week before, and pulled a clean set of clothes out of her bag. By now, even though they’d feel clean, everything would smell enough like something else to hopefully mask her smell. And being locked up on an actual fricking boat seemed like it would be safe to change before she went to bed. It seemed like an awfully big shame to climb into bed in grimy, nasty clothes. It was a luxury she was rarely afforded, and as soon as she was between the sheets, she fell asleep.
Sunlight through the windows woke her up bright and early. For the first time in months, she felt like she actually slept with both eyes, and took only a few minutes to get out of bed.
She decided right then and there that she was going to ask Dave to teach her how to fish. Or Mark. Whichever one she found first. She was surprised when neither of them were out in the lounge, or outside, or down in the galley. As she wandered through the halls, she realised that the boat wasn’t vibrating like it had been the night before when she went to bed. Whatever made the electricity work was apparently off again. She was going to ask about that as well.
Dodger opened the door to one of the cabins and found it empty. The next one she opened was empty as well, which meant she was bound to find one of them pretty soon. Unless they’d both left the boat and didn’t wake her up in the process. But everything out on the deck had been pulled up and secured, and they couldn’t have done that if they’d left.
She opened the next door just a crack, and peered inside. Mark was sprawled out on his stomach, still asleep, snoring loudly.
Except, Mark didn’t usually snore. Before she could stop herself, Dodger pushed the door open just enough to see both of them tangled up under a single blanket. It took her a few embarrassing moments before she shut the door as quietly as she could and took a big step back. They often slept crowded together at the lifeguard shack, but there wasn’t much space there. She’d never once thought about it. But there were five cabins, after Dodger had picked hers. Mark and Dave didn’t have a reason to share—
Oh. Oh.
Somewhat panicked, and not sure what to do, Dodger quickly and quietly went outside. She wasn’t sure if she was supposed to have seen that, or if she was supposed to have assumed already. She waited until she was out on the deck, and had the door closed behind her before laughing to herself and the awkwardness of the whole thing.
Awkwardness was another one of those things she’d thought had gone away forever. Apparently not, because she’d somehow managed to make everything as awkward as humanly possible without even trying. She got as much of it out of her system as she could, and then realised that now she really had no idea what she was supposed to do. But she still wanted to learn how to fish, and it couldn’t be that difficult, could it? Mark managed to do it, and he still put his shoes on the wrong feet sometimes. She went back inside and grabbed all of the gear she’d brought up the night before, and took it all back outside with her. How hard could it be to put a hook on the line and make a fish try to eat it?
Very hard, it turned out. Twice, she got the hook caught in her hair when she tried to throw it out to the water. Once she caught another boat. Now she had the hook in the water, but it wasn’t doing anything. Usually when the boys did their fishing, they’d have all of their rods cast out at the same time, but Dodger didn’t feel confident enough to do that without getting them all tangled up, but she thought for sure something should have happened by now.
“What are you doing?”
Dodger jumped at the sudden voice behind her, and turned to see Mark staring at the fishing pole like he was trying to solve a math equation. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, which wasn’t unusual, but suddenly Dodger wasn’t really sure where to look for some reason.
“I’m fishing,” Dodger said.
“Can I?” Mark asked, pointing at the pole.
Dodger shrugged. “Yeah, I think I’m doing something wrong,” she said, handing the pole over.
Mark slowly reeled it in, looking even more concerned. If he could tell just by doing that that she’d done something wrong, she must have found some brand new way to mess up. When he pulled the hook out of the water, he nodded and reached for it. Dodger had picked one that looked like a small, silver fish. It had several joints, and big plastic fins, which made it look fairly realistic, if you ignored the massive three-pronged hooks coming off it in several places.
“Ah. That’s a trolling lure,” Mark said, crouching down at the tackle box and pulling out a little pair of cutters. He snipped the lure off and tossed it back into the box, right where Dodger had originally found it, and slid the shelves in the box around until he found something else. “You use that when you’re pulling it behind your boat. But we’re not going anywhere.”
“Oh.” Dodger wasn’t sure why she felt dumb for not knowing that. It wasn’t like she had any reason to have that information. It’s why she wanted help.
“Normally, we’d want bait. But we don’t have any of that.” He looked out at the calm harbour water, and pulled something out of the tackle box. “Let’s try a spinner today.”
He sat down so she could see what he was doing, and she leaned in to watch. He tied a complicated-looking knot to get the lure on the end of the line, where Dodger had just tied as many knots as possible when she’d tried it.
“We’re gonna add a little bit of weight to it,” he said, taking a little, round ball of metal and clamping it onto the line about six feet above the lure.”
“Is that so it sinks?” Dodger asked.
“Yeah, but we don’t want it to. We just want it to be easier to cast out.” So he picked up a red and white plastic ball, and clamped that onto the line about a foot above the metal ball he’d clamped on. “The current will make this thing spin and look like food, and that’ll keep it close to the surface,” Mark said, pointing at the lure and the bobber respectively.
He stood up and pointed out toward the main channel. “We want it to land out there, so we don’t get tangled on the boats,” he said. And then he effortlessly cast the lure off toward the main channel, landing it about 50 feet away from them. There were these things that Dodger had thought were cupholders along the wall, but Mark dropped the rod into one of them and sat down in one of the chairs. Suddenly, he looked like the sort of person who took four cups of coffee to get out of bed, before everything changed.
“What are you waiting for?” he said suddenly, pointing at the other rods on the floor. “Get the next one going.”
Dodger jumped, realising that they didn’t really have time to do this one line at a time, since the seagull had been completely eaten the night before. She grabbed another rod and started digging through the tackle box for another lure that looked like the one Mark had used.
Not that they’d seen any bandits lately. Dodger hadn’t even been completely positive there were any people left in the city until she ran into Mark and Dave. But that didn’t make her feel any safer about it. If Mark and Dave had been hiding out without being seen for so long, then other people must have been doing the same.
The sun was high in the sky when they finally left the divided road that gave all the old high rise hotels an excellent view of the boats in the marina. Dodger hadn’t quite realised that they weren’t going to stay in one of those, high above the city, until they started heading into the marina itself. And suddenly, she was glad they weren’t staying in one of the hotels. Climbing up to the 20th floor without a working elevator, and each with their full packs would not have been fun.
Along the water, Dodger’s pace slowed to look at the boats. This had been here her entire life, and the first time she was seeing it was now. Most of the boats were still floating, but some had definitely seen better days. Some of the lighter ones had been smashed against their moorings during rare storms, and were little more than wreckage at this point, half-submerged in the water. She thought that’s where the guys were leading her. Maybe they’d each get their own sailboat or something.
But that wasn’t the plan. They weren’t going to get their own sailboats, and Dodger knew this as soon as she saw the towering monstrosity at the end of the basin.
“What in the heck is that?” Dodger asked, not quite sure if she fully understood what she was looking at. Three decks, dozens of portholes, and only a little worse for wear after all the abuse and neglect it had suffered since all the people taking care of it died.
“That is the Sea Floozy,” Dave said, picking up his pace toward the massively large boat. Mark trotted after him, leaving Dodger momentarily stunned at what they were showing her. Finally, she realised she’d stopped completely and jogged to catch up. The boat was so big that Dodger couldn’t see a way onto until they got right behind it. There were stairs at the back, but they’d been blocked off with a bunch of corrugated tin. From the looks of it, the wall wasn’t meant so much to keep people off, but to make it easier to tell if someone had got on. But it was too difficult to get to from the dock. They’d managed to get the boat far enough away from it that even without their impromptu wall, you’d have to really jump to make it. Instead, they’d rigged an aluminium fire ladder to the side - the sort people used to keep in their bedrooms on upper floors. It was still several feet out from the dock, but Mark and Dave had been here and done this many times before. They both put their bags on the ground and Mark took his machete off his belt, handing it over. Then he grabbed onto the back of Dave’s belt, and Dave - being smaller and lighter - leaned out over the water, using the machete to coax the ladder toward his fingers. As soon as he grabbed it, Mark pulled him back so they were both on steady footing.
“I’ll go check it out,” he said, hooking the machete to his own belt and put his pack back on before climbing up the ladder. Mark kept a hold on the bottom so they didn’t lose it, and watched Dave quickly climb up and over the side, and quickly out of view.
Dodger didn’t say a word the entire time. She listened for any sound she could hear that would suggest Dave had found something he didn’t want to find. He was up there for what seemed like hours, completely silent and totally out of their sight while he swept every deck and cabin to make sure there were no nasty surprises. Finally, he appeared on one of the upper decks and waved his hand to beckon the other two up.
“Here,” Mark said, stepping aside to let Dodger go first. She looked up at the ladder and took a deep breath. She’d never climbed anything like this, so she made sure her bag was snug around her and wouldn’t swing out and get in the way or anything before she stepped up to the ladder. The metal was surprisingly cool for having been outside all day. But the boat cast an enormous shadow, and the spray from the main channel probably kept everything a little cooler.
“Just… climb up?” she asked, unsure of this whole thing.
“Yeah. Have you done something like this before?” Mark asked, suddenly sounding cautious.
Dodger shook her head. “Nope,” she said. It was terrifying. A huge climb that seemed a hundred miles tall.
“It’s going to wiggle a little, so hold on. Don’t reach for the next rung until you know where your feet are,” Mark explained, trying to hold the ladder as slack as possible without losing it or making it impossible for Dodger to get onto the terrifying thing.
With another deep breath, she grabbed onto a rung right around face-level, and found a place for her feet. The ladder did wiggle a little, but not as much as she expected it to. The chain links were encased in aluminium pipes, making it stiff and rigid so it didn’t flop about, and the rungs were flat and heavily textured, so even with the spray from the channel, she didn’t feel like she was likely to slip off. The only challenge was going to be to actually convince her body to climb up the ladder. She stepped up first, getting one foot up, and then reaching up with one of her hands. It was less like climbing one of those awful rope ladders in school, and more like getting up to see what had been accumulating at the top of the fridge this way. Her legs did all of the work, while her arms just kept her balanced. Below, she could feel Mark trying to keep the ladder steady for her, and before she realised it, she was at the hard part: getting off the ladder, and onto the deck. She looked up to figure it out, and was almost startled to see Dave waiting for her.
“Almost there,” he said encouragingly. Without warning, he grabbed her by the arm to pull her up. That did startle her, but she choked it down, knowing that if she jumped even a little bit, she’d fall into the water. Or worse, she’d fall onto the dock.
“Thanks,” she said stiffly as Dave helped pull her to her feet. As soon as she was off, she heard the ladder jingle and jangle roughly. She looked down to see Mark managing to put his pack back on without losing the ladder, and then jump onto the thing like he’d done this a hundred times before.
Which he probably had. Dodger quickly got out of the way so he’d be able to step off the ladder without having to fight for space. Once he was up, he pulled the ladder with him, piling it onto the faded and peeling deck.
“You’re not afraid this thing’s gonna sink?” she asked, looking around the monster of a boat.
Dave shook his head confidently. “Nah. It seemed pretty new when we came here the first time. And how often do these things leave the water, really?”
Dodger shrugged. She genuinely didn’t know. “Well, show me around!” she said, eager to see what obscenely rich people used to do with their money.
They all left their bags near the ladder in the shade as Dave led the party inside to some sort of lounge. Even now, after being abandoned for years, it looked nicer than some of the houses she’d been squatting in. Soft carpets and rich woodwork, with several massive flat screen TVs hanging from the walls. The boat had a big, spiral staircase, fancy LED lighting, and more technology than a gaming convention crammed into it.
“Did people live on this, or what?” she asked as Dave showed her the (mostly useless) galley.
“It might have been for charter. We’re not sure,” he said. “There are like, six cabins on this thing.”
“Holy crap.” Dodger couldn’t even imagine what something like this would cost to even rent. “Why don’t you guys stay here all the time? I would.”
“You’ll get sick of it. Trust me.” Dave showed her a few of the cabins, with their enormous beds and big TVs. Dodger hadn’t been so sad for a lack of power in a very long time.
“But it does have one perk. We’ll show you that tonight though,” he said with a sly smile. Dodger wasn’t sure how she felt about that look on his face.
“Okay…”
“You gonna be okay here on your own?” Dave asked as they walked out to rejoin Mark in the lounge. “If you can get some of the stuff we stored below out and set up, we can go see what we can find around the harbour.”
Dodger nodded. She hadn’t been away from men in far too long, and a little time away from them sounded kind of like the best. “Yeah, sure. Go for it.”
They found Mark stretched out on one of the sofas, playing with a nail puzzle that had been left on one of the tables.
“Find your room yet?” he asked, barely looking up.
“Yeah, I like that blue one,” Dodger said, taking the opportunity to sit down for a moment.
Mark gave her a thumbs up and went back to fiddling with his puzzle for a few moments longer before he got back to his feet. “Ready to go?” he asked, reaching out for his machete again. Dave handed it over.
“Yep. Get your stuff.”
Dodger watched as they both headed outside to dig through their bags. She hadn’t seen them pack when they were getting ready to leave, so she wasn’t really sure what they needed. Dave took his bow and his quiver of arrows off his bag, which she expected. Mark grabbed a can of spray paint and stuffed it into a smaller bag, which she didn’t expect. Then they kicked the ladder back down the side of the boat, and were gone.
She spent the first ten minutes just being alone and listening to the silence. She missed the silence. She didn’t miss the danger of being alone. But this wasn’t quite alone. Mark and Dave were there, even if they were off scavenging for supplies they couldn’t carry with them. They were just… somewhere else.
When Dodger got up, she thought about pulling the ladder up, but decided they would have told her to do so if that’s what they wanted. So instead, she headed down below decks to find the stuff Dave was talking about. She wasn’t quite sure what he’d meant, until she saw it. She wasn’t sure where Dave wanted it, so she brought it all to the main deck, out of the way but easily accessible. They had their own distillery system that looked a lot like the one they used on the beach, except smaller. The scorched bottom of the stock pot suggested they used a fire somewhere to make it work. Logically, she assumed the fire probably came from one of several grills they’d collected and managed to get up here somehow, so she arranged the set up next to them. She wasn’t sure what they burned to make fire, but assumed they knew what they were doing. For a moment, she thought about getting some water out of the marina somehow, but with the amount of decaying boats sitting there, salt probably wasn’t the only danger.
They also had some fishing rods big enough to go with their enormous boat, and a few tackle boxes. Dodger brought those up as well, and having no idea how to begin to set them up, set them carefully aside behind one of the sofas inside, not wanting to risk breaking them. They were probably stronger than they looked, since she’d seen Mark reel in actual sharks with the rods they kept at the pier, but they only had three, and she wasn’t sure if they’d find others in working order if they needed to. After doing some digging, she found several dozen bags of charcoal, and some stacks of wood that probably served the same purpose. She brought up one of the bags, and enough firewood to get by for a few days before they needed more. By the time she was done, she decided to go exploring the yacht some more. She made her way to the back, where the stairs were, and took a look at the system the boys had rigged up. Their wall was mostly held together with bungee cords, and on the ground along the wall they had a long piece of heavy plywood that probably served as a gangplank for getting supplies onto the boat easier. Deciding to leave that up to the boys, she headed back in to peek into all of the rooms. One of them had a shelf full of books - something Dodger hadn’t been able to enjoy in years. She carefully read over all of the titles, eventually settling on something short and seemingly easy to follow. Though most of the books on the shelf fit into that category, which made sense if the boat were chartering rich tourists to Mexico.
She took her book, and after fetching her bag back up from outside, headed to the room she’d claimed for herself. The bed was unbelievably soft, and the light coming in was perfect to read by. She was pretty sure she actually dozed off at one point, and was startled awake at the sound of something slamming against the side of the boat. She was about to grab her bat and get up, but was stopped when Mark shouted their presence. It took her a while to calm down again while the boys banged on all sorts of stuff and made an endless amount of noise. She wondered what they could possibly be up to out there, but the bed was far too comfortable for her to want to get up. Finally, it stopped, and she returned her attention to her book. The light was starting to fade, but as long as it was bright enough to see the words, she was going to keep going.
Dodger could hear the boys come back inside, talking loudly, though she couldn’t understand what they were saying. With them inside and moving around, it seemed like the boat was almost vibrating all of a sudden, but she pushed that aside, convincing herself it was normal, and that the boat wasn’t about to suddenly sink into the bottom of the marina.
And then the lights out in the hall came on. It was the very last thing in the world she’d expected and it made her jump and yelp from the suddenness of it. She could hear Dave laughing somewhere, and a few moments later, saw his stupid, curly hair outlined against the bright light out in the hall.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Yeah, I’m fine!” Dodger said, not really feeling fine. She wasn’t even sure this was real. “Warn me next time. Oh my god.”
Dave laughed some more and nodded out toward the lounge. “Come on. We’ve got dinner.”
Dodger cautiously got up to follow him out to the deck where she’d got everything set up. Mark was down on the dock, stripping and gutting a seagull under the warm lights, and Dave quickly got to work setting up one of the grills so they could cook it. All Dodger could do was stand in disbelief.
“You turned the lights on,” she said, still struggling to catch up to that fact.
“One night only,” Mark said while he worked. “First night, we turn on the lights and watch a movie.”
“The TV doesn’t work?” Dodger said, trying her best to keep up.
“No, but there’s like, a thousand DVDs on a shelf behind the TV.”
Dodger blinked, slowly getting there. Then she turned around to go back into the lounge to see what Mark was even talking about. She looked at the TV, and the wall it was mounted on, and after a bit of poking and prodding, she found that the entire wall was on a sort of hinge. The wall folded out, revealing a hidden closet that was wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling full of DVDs.
“Technically it’s my turn to pick,” Dave said, suddenly behind her. “But you can have this one.”
“Thanks,” Dodger said slowly, having to remember what this sort of situation even meant.
They were on a boat. With electricity. And they were about to have seagull for dinner and watch a movie together.
“How’d you turn the lights on?” she asked, turning around just in time to catch Dave before he left again.
He pointed out toward all the other boats. “Four thousand other boats, most of them with fuel in their tanks.”
“Oh.” It sounded obvious when he said it like that. She followed him back outside and only then saw what was in the bag Mark took with him. They had some sort of hand pump on a hose and two five-gallon water bottles. She didn’t think that was enough to fill the tank on a monster like this one, but if they only ran the lights one night, and made a habit of filling up the bottles during the rest of their stay, they probably kept a decent amount of fuel in the tank.
There were two ways to survive in the wild: the sheer, dumb luck she tended to rely on, and strict routine and planning. She was really starting to like the strict routine over the dumb luck. She needed to start to learn some of this stuff, instead of relying on scavenging alone to pull her weight.
“Do you guys need any help?” she asked.
Dave grilled up the bird, and dished it up on actual plates from the galley while Mark helped Dodger find a movie and get it working. With dinner in front of them and the DVD ready to go, the boys both got comfortable on the sofa. But it seemed a little too comfortable and familiar, so Dodger distanced herself from both of them and sat down in a chair instead. The movie they watched was something foul and funny, where despite all his character flaws, the guy still got the girl at the end. It had been a long time since anything had felt this normal. Dodger still wasn’t sure it was real.
By the time the movie was over, Mark had fallen asleep, and Dodger felt like she was getting there. While Dave collected everyone’s dishes, she got up and headed back to her room, unapologetically closing and locking the door between her and the boys. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust them now. She’d been with them for long enough to know that she could trust them. But having that barrier between her and them just gave her one less thing to worry and stress out about, whether consciously or subconsciously. Even now, when things felt too close, Dodger was acutely aware of how easily either of them could overpower her. It wasn’t an easy fact to forget.
She’d done laundry a week before, and pulled a clean set of clothes out of her bag. By now, even though they’d feel clean, everything would smell enough like something else to hopefully mask her smell. And being locked up on an actual fricking boat seemed like it would be safe to change before she went to bed. It seemed like an awfully big shame to climb into bed in grimy, nasty clothes. It was a luxury she was rarely afforded, and as soon as she was between the sheets, she fell asleep.
Sunlight through the windows woke her up bright and early. For the first time in months, she felt like she actually slept with both eyes, and took only a few minutes to get out of bed.
She decided right then and there that she was going to ask Dave to teach her how to fish. Or Mark. Whichever one she found first. She was surprised when neither of them were out in the lounge, or outside, or down in the galley. As she wandered through the halls, she realised that the boat wasn’t vibrating like it had been the night before when she went to bed. Whatever made the electricity work was apparently off again. She was going to ask about that as well.
Dodger opened the door to one of the cabins and found it empty. The next one she opened was empty as well, which meant she was bound to find one of them pretty soon. Unless they’d both left the boat and didn’t wake her up in the process. But everything out on the deck had been pulled up and secured, and they couldn’t have done that if they’d left.
She opened the next door just a crack, and peered inside. Mark was sprawled out on his stomach, still asleep, snoring loudly.
Except, Mark didn’t usually snore. Before she could stop herself, Dodger pushed the door open just enough to see both of them tangled up under a single blanket. It took her a few embarrassing moments before she shut the door as quietly as she could and took a big step back. They often slept crowded together at the lifeguard shack, but there wasn’t much space there. She’d never once thought about it. But there were five cabins, after Dodger had picked hers. Mark and Dave didn’t have a reason to share—
Oh. Oh.
Somewhat panicked, and not sure what to do, Dodger quickly and quietly went outside. She wasn’t sure if she was supposed to have seen that, or if she was supposed to have assumed already. She waited until she was out on the deck, and had the door closed behind her before laughing to herself and the awkwardness of the whole thing.
Awkwardness was another one of those things she’d thought had gone away forever. Apparently not, because she’d somehow managed to make everything as awkward as humanly possible without even trying. She got as much of it out of her system as she could, and then realised that now she really had no idea what she was supposed to do. But she still wanted to learn how to fish, and it couldn’t be that difficult, could it? Mark managed to do it, and he still put his shoes on the wrong feet sometimes. She went back inside and grabbed all of the gear she’d brought up the night before, and took it all back outside with her. How hard could it be to put a hook on the line and make a fish try to eat it?
Very hard, it turned out. Twice, she got the hook caught in her hair when she tried to throw it out to the water. Once she caught another boat. Now she had the hook in the water, but it wasn’t doing anything. Usually when the boys did their fishing, they’d have all of their rods cast out at the same time, but Dodger didn’t feel confident enough to do that without getting them all tangled up, but she thought for sure something should have happened by now.
“What are you doing?”
Dodger jumped at the sudden voice behind her, and turned to see Mark staring at the fishing pole like he was trying to solve a math equation. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, which wasn’t unusual, but suddenly Dodger wasn’t really sure where to look for some reason.
“I’m fishing,” Dodger said.
“Can I?” Mark asked, pointing at the pole.
Dodger shrugged. “Yeah, I think I’m doing something wrong,” she said, handing the pole over.
Mark slowly reeled it in, looking even more concerned. If he could tell just by doing that that she’d done something wrong, she must have found some brand new way to mess up. When he pulled the hook out of the water, he nodded and reached for it. Dodger had picked one that looked like a small, silver fish. It had several joints, and big plastic fins, which made it look fairly realistic, if you ignored the massive three-pronged hooks coming off it in several places.
“Ah. That’s a trolling lure,” Mark said, crouching down at the tackle box and pulling out a little pair of cutters. He snipped the lure off and tossed it back into the box, right where Dodger had originally found it, and slid the shelves in the box around until he found something else. “You use that when you’re pulling it behind your boat. But we’re not going anywhere.”
“Oh.” Dodger wasn’t sure why she felt dumb for not knowing that. It wasn’t like she had any reason to have that information. It’s why she wanted help.
“Normally, we’d want bait. But we don’t have any of that.” He looked out at the calm harbour water, and pulled something out of the tackle box. “Let’s try a spinner today.”
He sat down so she could see what he was doing, and she leaned in to watch. He tied a complicated-looking knot to get the lure on the end of the line, where Dodger had just tied as many knots as possible when she’d tried it.
“We’re gonna add a little bit of weight to it,” he said, taking a little, round ball of metal and clamping it onto the line about six feet above the lure.”
“Is that so it sinks?” Dodger asked.
“Yeah, but we don’t want it to. We just want it to be easier to cast out.” So he picked up a red and white plastic ball, and clamped that onto the line about a foot above the metal ball he’d clamped on. “The current will make this thing spin and look like food, and that’ll keep it close to the surface,” Mark said, pointing at the lure and the bobber respectively.
He stood up and pointed out toward the main channel. “We want it to land out there, so we don’t get tangled on the boats,” he said. And then he effortlessly cast the lure off toward the main channel, landing it about 50 feet away from them. There were these things that Dodger had thought were cupholders along the wall, but Mark dropped the rod into one of them and sat down in one of the chairs. Suddenly, he looked like the sort of person who took four cups of coffee to get out of bed, before everything changed.
“What are you waiting for?” he said suddenly, pointing at the other rods on the floor. “Get the next one going.”
Dodger jumped, realising that they didn’t really have time to do this one line at a time, since the seagull had been completely eaten the night before. She grabbed another rod and started digging through the tackle box for another lure that looked like the one Mark had used.