Free the mortis by Jonathan R. Miller Page B

way through them rather than heading further out into open water.  He plots the course and pulls hard right.  Bombarding.  His heaviest draw strokes.  Digging the blade in on the right flank.  Again and again, hacking away wildly, full-blooded.  
    He takes the boat into the center of the rock encirclement.  He goes hard with the paddle, trying to push ahead past the cape and pivot around to the other side, to head back toward shore.  The crashing sound of swells around him.  A constant showering of spindrift against his face and the sting of salt, caustic, the burning in his sinuses.  He channels through, and he’s almost turned the corner when a surging wave broadsides the craft and sends it slewing off, listing.  It tips sharply to the side.  He leans his body upwind, trying to stay steady, bracing strongly with the paddle, and for a moment he thinks the boat will hold but then it bellies over, capsizing entirely, deck down.  He skids out of the cockpit into the boil. 
     
     
    Carried by the vest, he bobs to the surface.  Thrashing, wild-eyed.  His breath is spastic and shallow.  There is the deafening sound of the churn on all sides of him, and before he can even begin to get his bearings he is snatched by an eddy line and driven toward the coarse stone headwall.  Swept back and upward. 
    He impacts head-on, and his brow cracks against the flat rock face.  The world goes white and he blinks rapidly, seeing nothing.  There is the immediate smell of gunmetal.  The quick warmth of his own blood.  Blindly he manages to turn himself around so that his spine is riding the wall.  His body rises and falls, helpless, and the rear collar of the lifejacket rasps against the basalt ridge. 
     
     
    The world gradually comes back to him.  As his eyes refocus, he spots a sheltered position embayed from the constant train of waves and he moves toward it.  Kicking, edging along the pocked wall.  The spray of water shedding radially off the rocks into his eyes, his nose.  His head is pulsing.  He makes his way across to the bolt-hole crevice and wedges himself in as much as he ’s able.  It’s a better position, but his body still lurches sickeningly up and down.  He coughs and spits.  He wipes blood from his eyes.
    To his left he sees the upended kayak.  Its pale underbelly.  The hull is pinned against a small rock formation, and whitewater is roostertailing off the end.  The paddle is on the surface, straining against the tether line, whipping to one side and then the other like a leashed animal—it isn’t very far from him.  Maybe five yards, that’s all.  He could probably reach out a hand and take hold of it, pull the nylon line hand-over-hand and haul the boat free.  The entire thing is only about forty-five pounds.  But stranded at the periphery of the churn, he can’t force himself to move forward.  He just stares, lost, trying to regulate his breathing.
     
     
    Beyond the cape, past the rock formations in front of him, there is nothing but open water for about five hundred miles northward.  Just an empty expanse.  It seems impossible, but if you could cover that five hundred miles, you ’d reach the continent—which could be a good or a bad thing.  It’s hard to be certain, since there’s no way of knowing how the disease has impacted life on the mainland.
    You can ’t see the continental landmass at all from this distance.  The curvature of the earth being what it is.  Looking toward the skyline, there’s nothing visible other than vast horizon, the ocean stretching, desolate, all the way to the offing.  But the continent is out there somewhere, and there was a time when they considered trying to row the stretch.  Just taking out a tandem sea-porter and paddling all the way to landfall.  Fifteen to twenty days on the water, that’s what he figures.  Fifteen to twenty days, given a fully laden boat and eight hours at the blades before every sundown.  As with