Ruins

“The fishermen have some boats, but not many,” said Marcus. “Still, they’re better than nothing. I think Nandita has an old atlas in here somewhere. . . .” He searched the bookshelves and pulled out a thick hardback, thumping it down on the coffee table and flipping through it to find a map of Long Island. “Most of the island’s protein comes from fish, caught either here, by Riverhead, or here, in the Great South Bay. There are a few smaller communities out here as well, on Jones Beach. The Riverhead boats are out of reach, but there’s a pretty sizable fleet of sailboats in the bay, and while it would probably take several trips, they could start ferrying people to the mainland . . . here, I guess.” He pointed to the Jersey shore. “If they follow the coast past Long Beach and Rockaway, they can cut across to New Jersey pretty easily, without ever getting out into the high seas and deep water.”

“So if we want to meet up,” asked Falin, “do we go to Jones Beach or look for the boats in the bay?”

“If I was trying to coordinate this I’d send everybody due south,” said Marcus, looking at the map, “to get as far from the blast as possible, then west as far as they can go. If the boats are just shuttling back and forth here, between Breezy Point and Sandy Hook, they can evacuate the island a lot more quickly.” He looked at Green. “Which is a long way of saying that we have a better chance of finding them if we stick to the beaches.”

“Unless the fishermen haven’t been able to get their boats out of the bay,” said Falin. “What if the Partials are holding them? They might need our help.”

Marcus leaned back on the couch, shaking his head. “Obviously you have never had the pleasure of meeting a post-Break fisherman. Where do you go if you’re so traumatized by the end of the world that you can never trust civilization again? Some of them live in the woods, hunting deer and wild cats and whatever else, but most of them became fishermen: They’re independent, they’re mobile, and if they don’t want to trade with our farms, they can ignore the rest of the world completely. That’s where Kira’s sister Ariel went when she left this place—straight out to Islip on the fringe of a fishing commune. I’d bet you no more than a handful of those fishing communities were ever rounded up by the Partials during the occupation at all. They could sail out to Fire Island or hide in Oyster Bay, and pretty much avoid the invasion the same way they avoided our society for the last decade.”

“Then who’s to say they’re going to help at all?” asked Green. “Even if the other humans found the fishing communities, how do we know they agreed to let those humans use the fishing boats?”

“Oh, they definitely found each other,” said Marcus. “Some of these causeways are miles long—we used to travel on them a lot when we did salvage runs—and when a fisherman sees a few thousand people crossing over he’s going to get curious, and when he finds out what’s going on, word will spread fast. I suppose it’s possible some of them won’t help, but I’d bet you dollars to doughnuts most of them will. They won’t want to stay on an irradiated island any more than the rest of us, and when they leave, they’re more likely to take us with them than not. They’re not evil, just . . . antisocial.”

Green nodded. “So what do we do?”

“We follow the other refugees,” said Marcus. “South on the causeways, then west on the beaches. We take as many of the final refugees as we can—we empty East Meadow completely—and then we follow the route the others took until we manage to catch up to them.”

Green asked another question, but Kira wasn’t listening anymore. Marcus’s analysis of the island was solid, and his plans were sound, but . . . how much of it really mattered anymore? Even if they could flee, what were they fleeing to? What hope did humans alone have for survival? They had Green and Falin and a few others, but four Partials, or even forty, couldn’t save thirty thousand humans. Who even knew how many Partials were left? And surely any chance at reconciliation was consumed in the nuclear blast.