“A kayak,” I said aloud. “Of course it’s a kayak.”
A single, beat-up sea kayak, sun-bleached from red to a patchy, anemic pink, strapped to the roof of a dead man’s Jeep. A paddle lay beside it, secured with a single bungee cord, the blade chipped and scratched but intact.
“Fuck me,” I muttered.
I looked down at the carrier.
Doc Fluffbutt stared back, his face pressed against the grate. His expression communicated—with remarkable clarity for a creature without the capacity for language—that he found these circumstances entirely unacceptable and held me personally responsible for all of them.
“Alright,” I said, meeting his gaze with a level stare. “How do you feel about a kayak?”
He blinked. Once. Slowly.
Unhelpful.
“That’s what I thought.”
I rubbed a hand over my face, smearing dirt and dried blood across my forehead, and turned back to look at the water. It stretched out, gray and heavy, farther than I could see. Its surface was broken into small, repeating chops that would bebigger once you were in them—cold enough to kill you in twenty minutes if you were lucky. Probably less.
“Twenty miles,” I said under my breath. “That’s all. Twenty miles in a commandeered kayak with a cat in the middle of the apocalypse. No big deal.”
Could I do it? Physically, mechanically, could I cover twenty miles of open ocean in a sea kayak with a busted shoulder, no sleep, and nothing in my stomach but adrenaline and the lingering taste of rot?
Yeah.
The military made sure of that years ago. Long distances under worse conditions. No sleep. No food. No complaints. My body knew how to suffer and keep moving. That particular skill set had never gone to waste, and it wouldn’t start now.
Did I want to?
Hell no, I do not.
But on the other side of all that water—past the waves and the current and the miles and miles of nothing—
Libby.
Everything that mattered. Everything I’d built.
I exhaled steadily through my teeth, letting the air leave my lungs in one long, controlled stream, and reached up to start working the bungee cords loose from the kayak.
“Alright,” I said. “Let’s do something stupid.”
The cat meowed from inside the carrier—a single, flat sound, then silence.
“Yeah,” I said, pulling the first strap free. “I know, buddy. I know.”
Forty Seven
My Arms Died Along Time Ago -Finn
The sun had set hours ago.
I couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment, only that it had still been light when I pushed the kayak from shore. Then, the sky was a washed-out gray, the water choppy but visible. Now, the world had gone black. The sky stretched overhead like a void, starless behind a thick layer of clouds. The water beneath me ran darker still—a shifting, formless nothing I could hear but not see, lapping against the hull in steady, rhythmic slaps. These had become the only proof I hadn’t drifted off the edge of the earth entirely.
My arms had stopped belonging to me hours ago.
My shoulders rolled through the stroke without input from my brain. My hands gripped the shaft. Years of training, which I’d hated at the time and now owed my life to, had reduced me to something simpler than thought—just the motion, an engine running on fumes, stubbornness, and nothing else.
Pain had burned through me for the first few hours—my shoulder screaming with every stroke, the cuts on my arms andhands lighting up each time saltwater splashed across them, my back seizing in spasms that made me gasp and clench my teeth. But that had passed. Somewhere around the third hour, the shoulder stopped screaming and started simply grinding, a dull mechanical sensation, like a hinge working loose. Even that had faded until my arms were just things attached to me, pulling water, pulling water, pulling water, with no more feeling than lengths of wood.
