Free Dead Reckoning by Tom Wright Page A

to.”
    “Me too.” Jeff squeaked.
    We knew that things might fix themselves the second we left. We’d have felt awfully stupid if they had. But we both sensed that things were not right and not just because of the stuff we knew about. Sure, the plague was bad. But not being able to communicate at all, the bits of information Jeff’s friends in comms had been able to gather, C ontinental not arriving; it all added up to a deep sense of dread. We held out hope that once we got back to the closest point of civilization, we could just hop a plane from there, or at least call our families.
    Jeff and I spent the next hour hashing out a plan to cross the ocean on his sailboat. We talked about fuel, gear, food, and the weather. We worried what would happen if we got caught. We planned a route and decided no one should know about it unless it was absolutely necessary. But we realized that we couldn’t do it alone, and we agreed to ask Sonny to come with us. We trusted no one more.
    Jeff had one last thing on his mind.
    “You know Bill pretty well, right?”
    I nodded recognizing the rhetorical question.
    “Do you trust him?”
    I nodded.
    “He’s the only one with access to guns, and we need one,” Jeff said. “I mean, chances are we won’t see a soul all the way to the CONUS, but we can’t take a chance. There will surely be pirates out. As soon as anything goes wrong those types come out. And God knows what we will find when we get there.”
    I agreed, obviously. But I would be taking a real chance asking Bill to get me a gun.
    “I’ll see what I can do.” I said, tentatively.
    “Again, don’t say anything to anyone else,” Jeff said. “You haven’t talked with anyone about this, have you?”
    I shook my head.
    “Good. Oh, and although it’s summer, I don’t have to tell you that the North Pacific is still quite cold. You’ve got a coat, right? Rain gear?”
    “Coat? I don’t have….” my statement trailed off.
    I felt like an idiot. Over my objection, Kate had brought winter clothes with us when we moved to Kwaj saying: “You never know when you’ll need this.”
    “Actually, I do have a coat,” I continued.
    “Good. Me too. Wives, huh?” Jeff said with a smile.
    Jeff ticked through a final list of things that needed to be accomplished and I wrote them down, divvying the list up between Jeff, Sonny, and I.
    Satisfied that we had a workable plan, Jeff turned back to his workbench.
    “It will probably take us until tomorrow night, to accumulate everything we need and be ready to go. I’ll talk to Sonny this morning. Let’s plan on bugging out middle of tomorrow night. If we slip away in the dark, nobody will see us.”
     
    . . .
     
    10 A.M., WEDNESDAY MAY 30TH, KWAJALEIN
     
    I only intended to stop by my quarters briefly on the way to see Bill, but I woke up on the couch two hours later. It was the best sleep I’d had in days. It’s funny how much of a relief it can be to simply make a decision.
                  I checked my watch and decided that I would wait until lunch, since I knew exactly where Bill would be then. I chose instead to begin collecting the items I would need for the trip. Once I’d checked the essentials off my list, I rifled through drawers and cabinets in search of useful items that we hadn’t thought of. You could never have too many flashlights or batteries. Who knew when I might need that small pocket knife I found in a kitchen drawer? I emptied drawers on the floor and ripped out the contents of entire shelves in one pull, the way a burglar might have.
                  By the time I had searched nearly everywhere, a multitude of things lay strewn across the floor. Suddenly it struck me how useless most of our possessions really were. My house contained so much expensive stuff that it likely came to many multiples of the average lifetime wage for most people on earth. But when it came right down to it, almost none of it mattered. It was all