The Last Barge

Chapter 1: The December Barge

The barge came in sideways.

That was the first thing Ray Bost noticed—the way the flat-bottomed hull caught the crosswind coming off the Bering Sea and slewed against the dock pilings with a sound like a giant cracking its knuckles. The crane operator on the pier, a Samoan named Tui who weighed close to three hundred pounds and moved with the delicacy of a watchmaker, swore into the wind and adjusted his swing. A pallet of canned goods dangled forty feet above the black water, spinning slowly.

Ray stood at the mess hall window with a cup of coffee that had gone cold twenty minutes ago and watched the unloading. He counted pallets. He always counted pallets.

Shishmar Island sat at the ragged western end of the Aleutian chain like a tooth God had forgotten to pull. Eleven miles long, three miles wide, treeless, wind-scoured, and home to nothing that chose to live there voluntarily except seabirds and a species of vole that had been evolving in the wrong direction for ten thousand years. The Karas Seafoods processing station occupied the island's only sheltered harbor—a collection of metal-sided buildings, fuel tanks, a dock, and a hundred and forty seasonal workers who had come north for the winter king crab run because the money was good and the questions were few.

Ray was one of them. Forty-one years old, lean in the way men get when they've spent more years skipping meals than eating them, with a face that had been broken in two places and healed without much interest in symmetry. He had hands like dock cleats—thick, scarred, permanently curved from years of gripping things that didn't want to be held. His hair was going gray at the temples, and his eyes were the color of dishwater, and they missed nothing.

Two prison terms. One in Walla Walla, one in Monroe. Assault the first time, fraud the second. His son, Derek, lived in Tacoma with his mother and had stopped returning Ray's letters fourteen months ago. The last one had come back with NO LONGER AT THIS ADDRESS written in Derek's own handwriting, which was a particular kind of cruelty that Ray had filed away in the part of himself where he kept things that couldn't be fixed.

He'd come to Shishmar because it was the last place in America that didn't run background checks. Karas Seafoods needed bodies on the butcher line, and Ray was a body. The pay was twelve dollars an hour, the bunkhouse was warm enough to sleep in, and the work was the kind of repetitive violence that suited a man who needed to keep his hands busy and his mind quiet.

Crab came in. Crab got butchered. Crab got packed. Crab went out.

The world was three hundred miles away in a town called Dutch Harbor, and the only thing that connected Shishmar to it was the monthly barge.

Ray counted seventeen pallets coming off. The manifest he'd glimpsed on the dock office clipboard listed twenty-six.

He filed that away too.

"You're staring again," said a voice behind him.

Carrie Ann Bostick set her tray down across from him and sat without waiting for an invitation. She was the station medic—mid-thirties, broad-shouldered, with short dark hair and the kind of calm that came from having seen the inside of too many people. She'd told Ray she'd done two years as a trauma nurse in Fairbanks before taking the Karas contract, and Ray believed about sixty percent of that because Carrie Ann had the look of someone who was always leaving out the most important sentence.

"I'm not staring," Ray said. "I'm counting."

"Same thing, the way you do it." She unwrapped a sandwich. The bread was the last of the fresh loaf from the previous barge. By next week, they'd be back to the frozen stuff that tasted like compressed sawdust. "What's the count?"

"Short."

"Short how?"

"Nine pallets short. Maybe they're still in the hold."

Carrie Ann looked at him with the expression she reserved for men who were being smarter than was good for them. "Or maybe the seas were rough and they couldn't load everything."

"Maybe."

"Ray."

"What?"

"Not everything is a system trying to screw you."

He smiled, which was a rare event, and it made his broken face look almost kind. "Name one that isn't."

She didn't answer that. She ate her sandwich.

Outside, the wind picked up to forty knots, and the crane operator brought the last pallet down with a crash that shook the dock. The barge captain was already signaling to cast off. These boats didn't linger at Shishmar. The harbor was shallow, the currents were treacherous, and the weather windows closed like traps.

Ray finished his cold coffee and went to work.

The butcher line ran eighteen hours a day during peak season. King crab came up from the holding tanks in wire baskets, still alive, legs churning, and went onto a stainless steel table where men in rubber aprons and chain-mail gloves broke them apart with hands and knives. The legs went into one bin, the bodies into another, the guts into a third. The smell was something you either got used to or you didn't, and the men who didn't were usually gone before the first month was out.

Ray worked station six, between a kid named Toby Rell and an older Filipino man named Danilo who never spoke and never slowed down. Ray had been on the line for nine weeks, and his hands knew the work now—the twist that separated the leg cluster from the carapace, the flick of the knife that opened the shoulder joint, the toss into the bin that kept the rhythm going. His body did the work. His mind did other things.

Toby Rell was nineteen and trying hard to be twenty-five. He was tall and thin, with a wispy beard he was clearly proud of and a habit of talking too much about things he didn't understand. He'd told Ray he was from Spokane, that he'd dropped out of community college, that his old man was a long-haul trucker who'd taught him to fight. Ray doubted the last part. Toby had the hands of someone who'd never hit anything harder than a pillow.

But the kid worked. He showed up, he didn't complain about the cold, and he didn't steal. On Shishmar, that put him in the top quarter.

"Hey, Ray," Toby said over the grinding of the conveyor. "You see how light that barge was?"

"I saw."

"Ricky from the dock crew said they were missing a whole pallet of batteries. And the diesel looked short too."

"Ricky talks too much."

"I'm just saying—"

"Don't just say. Work."

Toby worked. But he kept glancing at Ray with the expression of a dog that wants to be told it's done something right.

Ray had seen that look before. On his son's face, years ago, before the second conviction, before the letters stopped. It was the look of someone who'd decided you were worth following and hadn't yet learned what that cost.

He looked away and broke another crab.

The shift ended at midnight. Ray walked back to Bunkhouse C through horizontal sleet, his boots crunching on the gravel path that connected the plant to the living quarters. The path was lit by sodium lamps that turned everything the color of old teeth. To his left, the fuel depot squatted behind a chain-link fence—four massive diesel tanks and a cluster of propane cylinders. To his right, the dry-goods warehouse, a corrugated steel building the size of a basketball court where the non-perishable food stores were kept.

He paused and looked at both buildings the way a man looks at a locked door when he's thinking about what's behind it.

Then he went to bed.

Bunkhouse C held forty men in twenty double bunks arranged along both walls of a building that was essentially a shipping container with insulation and a heating duct. The heater worked most of the time. The insulation worked some of the time. The plumbing worked when it felt like it.

Ray's bunk was on the lower tier, third from the door, which he'd chosen deliberately. Close enough to the exit to leave fast, far enough from the heater to be undesirable, which meant no one fought him for it. The men who wanted the warm spots near the back could have them. Ray wanted options.

He lay in his bunk and listened to the sounds of the bunkhouse settling—coughs, snoring, the creak of metal frames, someone muttering in a dream. The wind outside was a constant presence, not a sound so much as a pressure, like the island itself was being squeezed.

He thought about the nine missing pallets.

He thought about the fuel that looked short.

He thought about the way the barge captain had been in such a hurry to leave.

Then he thought about nothing, because thinking too much was a luxury that got you killed in places like this, and he went to sleep.

Three days later, the world ended.

Not the real world. The real world kept spinning out there beyond the horizon, fat and warm and indifferent. But the world of Shishmar Island—the small, closed, fragile world of schedules and shifts and ration cards and the monthly barge—that world ended at 3:47 in the morning on December 19th, when Ray woke to the sound of an explosion and the bunkhouse wall turned orange.

He was on his feet and moving before his conscious mind caught up. Years of institutional living had wired his nervous system for exactly this—the sudden noise, the wrong light, the need to be vertical and near a door before you understood why.

The fuel depot was burning.

He could see it through the bunkhouse window—a column of flame punching straight up through the sleet, so bright it turned the night into a sick parody of daylight. The chain-link fence around the depot was already sagging from the heat. As he watched, one of the propane cylinders blew with a sound like a cannon shot, and a ball of fire rolled across the gravel toward the dry-goods warehouse.

Men were shouting, scrambling out of bunks, pulling on boots without lacing them. Someone was screaming. Ray couldn't tell if it was pain or panic.

"Move," he said to Toby, who was standing frozen in his underwear, staring at the window. "Boots. Coat. Move."

Toby moved.

Outside, the chaos was total. Men ran in every direction—some toward the fire, some away from it, some in circles. The plant's fire suppression system consisted of three extinguishers and a prayer, and none of it was going to touch what was happening at the fuel depot.

Ray grabbed Toby's arm and pulled him toward the mess hall, which was the farthest building from the fire and the most solidly built. Other men had the same idea. Within ten minutes, sixty or seventy workers were crowded inside, some of them barefoot, some bleeding from falls on the icy gravel, all of them watching through the windows as two-thirds of Shishmar's diesel supply and the entire dry-goods warehouse burned.

The warehouse went up like paper. Whatever was stored in there—flour, rice, canned goods, coffee, sugar, powdered milk, toilet paper, cleaning supplies, the thousand small things that kept a hundred and forty people alive—it all fed the fire. The heat was so intense that the snow on the surrounding ground melted in a spreading circle, and the meltwater ran toward the harbor and steamed when it hit the cold.

Bud Lachance appeared in the mess hall doorway like a man who'd been carved from granite and then given a clipboard. He was fifty-three, built like a fire hydrant, with a flat-top haircut and a face that had never once considered smiling. He wore his Karas Seafoods jacket zipped to the chin, his steel-toed boots laced regulation-tight, and his expression was the one he always wore: controlled fury at a world that refused to follow procedures.

"Everyone stays inside," he said. His voice carried without shouting. It was a foreman's voice, built for noise. "Anyone who goes near that fire without my say-so gets written up and docked. We've got a head count to do. Sound off by bunkhouse."

And they did. Because Lachance was the kind of man people obeyed even when the sky was falling, not because they liked him but because he was so certain of the rules that certainty itself became a kind of shelter.

The head count took forty minutes. Nobody was dead. Fourteen men had minor burns or cuts. Carrie Ann set up a triage station in the mess hall kitchen and worked through them with the efficiency of someone who'd been expecting exactly this kind of night.

Ray sat in a corner and watched.

He watched the fire die as it ran out of things to eat.

He watched the men's faces cycle through fear, relief, anger, and then the blankest expression of all: the realization that they were in trouble.

He watched Lachance make notes on his clipboard with a mechanical pencil, each notation precise and legible.

And he watched the harbor.

Because while everyone else was watching the fire, Ray was watching the ice.

The harbor had been open three days ago when the barge left. Now, in the bitter cold that had followed a weather system nobody had predicted, a shelf of new ice was forming across the mouth of the cove. It was thin yet—an inch, maybe two—but it was growing. The temperature had dropped to fifteen below, and the forecast, if Molly Hake's radio reports were accurate, called for another week of the same.

Ray knew what that meant.

If the harbor froze solid, no barge could get in.

And if no barge could get in, then whatever was left after the fire—the remaining diesel, the food in the kitchen stores, the medicine in Carrie Ann's infirmary—was all there was.

He sat in his corner and did math in his head.

The numbers were bad.

Walt Briscoe arrived at the mess hall at 5:15 in the morning, which was notable because Briscoe usually didn't emerge from his office-apartment in the administration building until 8:00. He was a tall man, soft in the middle, with thinning hair combed carefully over a scalp that was losing the argument. He wore wire-rimmed glasses and had the look of a middle manager who'd been promoted one level beyond his competence and knew it.

Briscoe's office was the only room on Shishmar with a lock that worked and a satellite phone that could reach the mainland. He used both frequently and shared neither.

"Listen up," Briscoe said, standing on a chair so the crowd could see him. He looked pale. His hands were shaking, though he gripped the back of another chair to hide it. "I know this is bad. I know you're scared. But I've already been on the phone with the Karas mainland office, and they are dispatching an emergency resupply barge. We're looking at three weeks, maybe less."

A murmur went through the crowd. Three weeks.

"In the meantime," Briscoe continued, "we have sufficient food in the kitchen stores to maintain reduced rations. We have enough diesel in the remaining tanks to keep the generators running and the heaters on, as long as we're smart about it. Bud Lachance is going to implement a conservation plan, and I expect full cooperation from every man and woman on this island."

Lachance stood beside him, clipboard ready, nodding.

"This is a setback," Briscoe said. "It is not a catastrophe. We are professionals. We will handle this professionally."

He stepped down from the chair and retreated to his office.

Ray watched him go.

He didn't believe a word of it.

Not because Briscoe was lying—Ray wasn't sure yet whether he was. But because Ray had survived institutions before. County lockup, state prison, halfway houses, work camps. He knew the architecture of closed systems the way a carpenter knows wood: by the grain, by the stress points, by the places where it splits.

And the first thing every closed system tells you when it's about to fail is: help is coming.

Help is always coming.

Right up until it isn't.

Ray went back to his bunk, lay down, and stared at the ceiling.

Then he reached under his mattress and pulled out two cartons of cigarettes he'd been saving.

Time to go to work.