Sneak Preview of the Novel

I'm continuing to make progress on the novel. Following up on a tip from other blogger's who talk about creating a market for your writing, especially if you've never done it before, I wanted to skip out some previews of the upcoming novel. This is still in draft form and I've got some editors (read, friends who can be brutally honest) reading it over and giving me their thoughts.

Presented here for the first time, a sneak preview of my first novel: Flotilla

Flotilla – Chapter One

In Which Jim Starts at the End and Then Begins

Jims_log_05_05_2033

It’s about 2230 and all heck is breaking loose out there. I’m hoping that the boat can handle it but it’s gonna be a real close race. Right now we’re shipping water up to the bridge door and the wind is blowing this boat like a kite all over the ocean. I can’t hold my course to more than 2 or 3 degrees. I’m keeping his eyes on the GPS, the compass and my sister Nancy all at once. She’s sitting next to me at the map table, her eyes are as big as saucers but her mouth is nothing more than a small scar in her head. We’re both really scared.

Dad’s last words to us both, along with a quick hug, were: “If you don’t hear from me in three days, send a message to your mom. If you don’t hear from me in four, take the boat, the docks and anyone else you can and go north. There are a bunch of islands near the Puget Sound that are mostly uninhabited. You can dock there and stay for a while. If things go okay, I’ll find you there and we will be together again.”

That was a week ago. We waited three days, left a message on mom’s voicemail and waited some more. Neither of us wanted to accept what had happened but after the sixth day, I started breaking down the docks for transport. We started north early on the seventh day. My 15th birthday was two nights ago. We didn’t celebrate, we were all too scared. The talk about what was happening less than 20 miles away was all we could hear. Not that we wanted to, but it wasn’t anything we could escape from.

It was a bug, they said, a virus. Not only that, it was a coordinated and simultaneous attack. A bug released in several major cities and dirty bombs that spread radioactive material in others. The effect was catastrophic – with all of these major disasters happening simultaneously, the government was inundated and then things got really bad. First they declared martial law, then they cancelled basic services, then they started evacuating people although with this much trouble there wasn’t anywhere people could be evacuated to. Of the people who had moved away from the danger zone, they faced local people afraid that the travelers were bringing bugs or radiation with them. They were not welcomed with open arms.

We listened to it all – the riots in the Bay Area, Phoenix and St. Louis. The bug killing people in Baltimore and here in LA. The entire colony was riveted to the television as it reported on the shootings of innocent people who may or may not have been infected or dying of radiation poisoning. The right combination of bad things got together, dad said quietly. He called it a ‘cascade event’. Two weeks ago, the world was normal. Two weeks ago, we were all together on Dad’s boat - the Horner C.

- End Log

The daylight was streaming through the porthole, creating wavy designs on the bulkhead. Jim laid there in his bunk, listening to the thumps through the stateroom walls as either Dad or Nancy stirred to start the day. In a few minutes, Jim could hear cartoons and so he knew it was Nancy. Dad wasn’t so rigid about get-up times; we got started at sunup and pretty much went until the job was done. Sometimes it was only a couple of hours but other times it went all day. His bed was cozy and warm and Jim stayed there for a few more minutes, just enjoying some peace and quiet. The stateroom is the smallest on the boat – there’s a larger one but it was full of dad’s junk. Jim asked for it one time and dad said sure, just move all that stuff out and it’s yours. A few seconds at the door to that room made him realize that Jim didn’t need that much room. Jim dozed off again but was brought abruptly awake by the squawk of the intercom right next to his head. Dad’s voice rasped through the speaker.

“Jim, get up.”

Jim pretended to be asleep, “Huh? Wha, dad?”

“Knock it off…Get up.” The intercom clicked off. Jim guessed he had tried that one too many times. Kicking off the covers, he got up and stripped off his sleep attire – boxers and a tank top. Jim changed into his wetsuit and went into the lounge. Catching a look at himself in the mirror, Jim saw a kid who was about average height but a thick chest. Blonde hair that was crew-cut-short and eyes that were either blue or grey depending on the light. Jim wasn’t built to be a surfer and he wasn’t hitting the weights enough to let his arms and legs fill out like they should. In short, Jim was like just about every other teenage kid who hasn’t quite grown into his body.

Breakfast was ready when Jim walked into the lounge. He cut off a section of the scrambled eggs still in the pan and poured off the last cup of coffee in the 12-cup pot. Dad had been up for hours, the empty pot told him; Jim made a fresh pot of coffee while watching the waking-up habits of the neighbors in the next boat. This was the second summer that Jim had spent on board. The previous summer he spent by himself with his father. This time his mom agreed to allow his younger sister, Nancy, to come along.

Two older gay guys lived on the Key West Forever – they grew calamari and tuna. The younger one was still over 50; he was a short and bear-like man. Pretty friendly, he reminded Jim of Mickey Rooney for some reason. The other guy was tall, thin and had no qualms about doing naked yoga positions on their back deck, something that his dad never got used to. Jim knew that he was into the whole Eastern thing…tan as an Indian and never without the silver and turquoise pendant around his neck. He sported a salt-and-pepper mullet that he sometimes tied off with a bandanna.

An aluminum fishing boat buzzed by, but Jim didn’t recognize the passengers. There were almost a thousand people who lived in the colony and it was hard to keep track of everyone. Some people tried the fishing business for a few months and then packed up and went home. Others stayed for long periods of time and they became the nucleus of what was otherwise a pretty strange community. Dad called the gay guys The Furley’s, for some reason. They were long-timers, which in this case meant that they had lived on the colony for over three years. The life ain’t easy, Dad was fond of saying. He himself had been with this colony for over seven years, which made him almost a founding partner.

Jim ate his breakfast, eggs and sausage that didn’t come from a chicken or a hog but were culture-produced and then shipped here. Drinking off his coffee and then pouring another cup, Jim sat at the terminal in the mess area and idly looked at the daily news. Dad entered the lounge; he insisted that it was called the “mess”, a term that had nothing to do with its current state of cleanliness. It was just another one of those idiosyncrasies that Jim knew better than to discuss. Jim had been aboard for almost a month and it wasn’t the only inconsistency that drove him crazy about the old man.

“We’re losing some fish,” Dad said as a greeting. He was reading a three-week-old LA Times, eating some eggs and sausage and sipping from his too-strong coffee. He looked up over his glasses at Jim. “I thought I told you to fix those rips in Pen 3.”

Jim didn’t say anything immediately – to respond too quickly indicates guilt, he had learned. He ate eggs and the only sausage left because Nancy usually snarfed them all first. After a moment, he looked up. “I did – I fixed ‘em and checked the whole net from end to end.”

“Then why are we losing fish?” he asked pointedly.

“Who says we are?”

“My fish-finder has the whole group counted – between last night and this morning we lost like 50 of them. I think the net’s ripped – get down there and check it again.”

Jim didn’t say anything back…There wasn’t any point, anyway. Dad rarely went underwater himself since Jim came on board and his fish finder wasn’t the most reliable piece of technology in the world. Jim was going to work on Pens 1 and 2 anyway; he could check out 3 pretty quickly and then get to work on 1 and 2. Jim finished his breakfast in silence while Nancy ate delicately from one sausage as she watched her morning cartoons. She held another between her fingers like a cigar, flicking it like she’d seen dad do to one of his cigarettes.

Outside on the docks, they started getting set up for some underwater work. The family had four pens that held fish – Dad was working on deploying a fifth but it would be a while before he gets the nets installed (Please see Appendix B – Dad’s Home Improvement Never Gets Done). The nets got ripped regularly – sharks trying to get in, boats that run too close. The nets need to stay tight or the investment could swim right out. So, the kids fixed them on their own…that is Pen Patrol. A basic hookah rig with a wetsuit and you’re under the water, sometimes for an hour to fix any rips or tears. The rips aren’t fixed correctly – Dad was pretty cheap – so they ended up closing them with zip-ties or industrial staples. You can spend 14 or 16 hours a day just doing some of the things that go into keeping your fish healthy and your boat above water.

Most of the rip fixing fell to Jim but he didn’t mind. It isn’t every kid that gets to spend his summer building up hours to become a commercial diver just by screwing around on his dad’s boat. Jim was in the water or under it about three or four hours a day. His fingers were permanently raisined from the water and he was becoming a very strong swimmer. Dad finally broke down and bought Jim his very own wetsuit – not a cast-off; something that had some extreme colors that Jim thought might make him stand out with some of the female peer population.

The rule was that you couldn’t go under alone in case there was a problem and you needed help. Nancy was usually his line tender and Jim swam the football-field-sized pens with a small line attached to his belt that they would tug on to tell each other what was happening. They had a system of tugs worked out – 1 tug was are you okay? One tug back meant, yeah – everything’s cool. Two tugs meant come up – you’re needed up here, three meant get your butt up here, pronto. If Jim tugged two tugs, it meant coming up soon and if Jim tugged three times, Nance yelled for dad.

Jim finished strapping on his fins and his face mask by the time the hookah rig was pumping enough air. The pens are about a football field long, about half that wide and up to 20 feet deep. They’re connected by floating docks that attach to the Horner. A small music deck pumps music through underwater speakers so Jim would have something to listen to while working. Sometimes Dad wants to listen to the news but today Jim was listening to dub and some old threshrock. Jim jumped into the water, feeling the momentary shock that comes from jumping into the Pacific that early in the morning. The rule is, just let it go numb and then you’re okay – just be sure to get out if your hands start looking like a cadavers. Peeing in your suit helps, too.

It took Jim about fifteen minutes to work his way down the entire net of Pen 3. Nope, no rips were found. The clouds of tilapia that were inside the nets swarmed around him but didn’t look any different from two days ago when Jim saw them last. Sometimes a single fish will die, float for a while and then sink to the net below. Sharks swimming below will bite at it, get it and take a chunk of net along with them; hence the rips. Jim saw a single dead tilapia and took it to the edge of the net where he reached up and out of the water to flick it over to the sea side.

“Find any rips?” Nancy asked as Jim climbed out of the water.

Jim sat down next to her on the deck, pulling off his face mask and sweeping the water from his face. “Nope, no rips,” Jim replied. “Stupid fish-finder. Why can’t he get new sensing equipment?”

“He doesn’t know it’s broke,” Nancy said.

“I don’t think it’s broke. It just doesn’t work.”

“No, it’s broke,” Nancy said. She looked over at me slyly.

Jim eyed her. “What do you mean?”

“I was playing around with it and it dropped onto the deck. You can’t tell that Jim did but I think it’s broken.”

Jim laughed. “No wonder!”

“Just don’t tell him, okay?”

“All right.” Jim laughed quietly. “Why I even bother, I’ll never know.”

“Because you don’t want Dad to know about you and Stacy,” she replied.

“Shut up!” Jim said, elbowing her gently. Stacy lived on the Seas of Cheese in a berth about a quarter of the way around the circle of boats in the colony away from us. The Seas of Cheese and the Horner C don’t officially have diplomatic relations after they dumped some of their sewage improperly near our holding pens. Jim wasn’t even around for it, it happened at least two years ago. Dad, Jim learned, can hold a grudge and it’s made the SoC a target for his ire ever since.

After Jim caught his breath, they moved over to Pens 2 and 3 and started the whole process over again. Today’s pen chores took about three hours – right until lunch. After lunch they scrubbed and swabbed up as best they could – the Horner cleans up good but it is work. They finished with the chores with about two hours of daylight left and Dad took them in the launch, an old wakeboard rig dubbed Horner C Minor (yes, it’s not the correct musical term…get over it), to the Phoenix, an old decommissioned submarine tender that acted as tender for the colony.

“Remember, meet up here again at 2000,” he said, handing out some pocket cash. He’d been using military and nautical terms since they came aboard, sometimes it was annoying. Jim had to check his watch again to see what how much time that gave Jim…he was still working out telling time in 24-hour. Two hours later, they joined again for the ride back to the ship. Nancy wanted to be a fighter pilot when she grew up, she announced. Jim and Dad just sighed because that was the third career she had proclaimed her heart set on in just under a month.

All in all, they were a pretty happy crew of three as they motored back to the Horner to grill up some fish, drink some sodas and maybe play a checker game or two before bed. The sun flared brightly as it sank into the sea that night – the color of blood stayed on the horizon long after it had disappeared.