It was thirty minutes later, after they had all finished eating breakfast and begun coasting down the bay, that Neil, on his way forward to check the genoa, placed one foot onto the little step built into the cabin wall and stopped. He stared at the cockpit deck. A thin, barely visible layer of something lay on the cockpit floor. He bent over and ran an index finger for a few inches along the deck and looked at it: a gray smudge. He looked up at the sky above him. A thin haze marred the blue summer sky. He went quickly over to the opposite cockpit: the same thin layer of ash covered the deck around the fishing gear and other salvage from Lucy Mae.
He felt trapped. To the south lay a thick cloud over Norfolk; to the northwest the closer, more diffuse gray fog from the blast over Washington. And on the deck at his feet the first radioactive fallout.
“Frank!” he shouted.
Still bleary-eyed from weariness, Frank left the wheelhouse and stumbled to the cockpit.
“We’ve got fallout on deck,” Neil told him in a quiet voice.
Frank reached down to examine the ash, and then looked back at Neil.
“Everybody should go below,” he said. “I’ll wash the fucking stuff off the decks.”
Frank and Neil sent everyone into the main cabin and ordered them to shut all windows and portholes and check for ash, wiping off and throwing overboard any they found. Since every thickness of material between them and the radioactive fallout would give some small additional protection, Skippy was put on the floor underneath the dinette table and a jury-rigged wall of plywood was used to create a cave. The table was covered with blankets and sleeping bags from the forepeak. Jeanne ordered Lisa to crawl under it too. Olly suggested Jeanne make a space next to the dagger board well and beneath the crossbeam for greater protection. Conrad Macklin went into the forepeak and covered himself with bagged sails.
On deck Frank began washing down the boat with buckets of sea-water and a long-handled brush. Neil disappeared for a while and then emerged wearing full foul-weather gear, including rubber boots and a hood tied tightly around his face as if he were about to go out in a gale. He handed a full set to Frank and took over the washing down of the boat while Frank put on his gear. Jim had checked the genoa, and when he came aft, Frank ordered him below with the others. He and Neil would stay on deck.
As they set sail down the Chesapeake for the Atlantic a low-level dread hung over all of them as they huddled in the main cabin. They talked in low voices, like mourners at a wake. On the horizon to both north and south lay the ugly gray cloud masses that seemed to be creeping up the sky to kill them. One was chasing down from the north, and they were sailing south into the one over Norfolk. There was no escape.
When Vagabond sailed past Tangier village Neil looked dully at the wreckage. Two large fishing trawlers lay on their sides among the shells of three houses tilted crazily, as if all five were some child’s toys carelessly cast aside. One of the buildings must have been the bar they had stopped at the night it all began, but even through his binoculars he couldn’t tell which building it was. He saw no sign of life.
To the east the shore was too distant to reveal what had happened, but as Vagabond sailed out into the middle of the Chesapeake, Frank sighted the capsized hulk of a motor yacht a quarter mile to starboard. Other floating vessels became visible, a sailboat sailing south like Vagabond, and two other boats coming from the direction of Norfolk. With a sense of foreboding, Neil realized that on the previous day the bay had been crowded with boats, thirty-five or forty when he’d been searching for the sight of the stolen Vagabond. Not many had survived the explosion and the tidal wave.
It was Frank who spotted the first corpse: a limp, wet lump of clothing floating face-down less than fifty feet from Vagabond’s course. Frank’s first instinct was to alter course to retrieve the body, but then he quickly realized that the last thing they needed aboard was a corpse. There would be more.
The two ships coming toward them remained close to the western shore and soon disappeared past them, headed up the Chesapeake to God-knew-where. That they had survived at all was a surprise. The sailboat on the same course as Vagabond disappeared into a cove or a river on the western shore. By late morning they seemed to be all alone on the vast expanse of the bay.
With a sense of dread and impotent anger Neil observed that enough dust would accumulate in a half-hour’s time to form a visible gray film. He and Frank alternated doing the cleaning work, both of them getting overheated and exhausted in their stifling foul-weather gear on the increasingly hot day. His face dripping with sweat, one of them would plod over the entire length and breadth of the boat with a big plastic bucket and the long-handled brush, dipping the bucket into the bay, pouring it across the deck, then rapidly brushing to push everything back into the water. When he was finished he would stumble back to the other man, at the helm, and without a break the other would take up the exhausting work.
At eleven thirty Frank collapsed on the foredeck. Neil rushed forward and dragged him back, loosening his foul-weather gear. He hoped it was only heat exhaustion, and he carried Frank below where he could be undressed and cooled off. Olly took Frank’s place, wearing his own foul-weather clothing. Macklin was ordered to take a turn next.
Forty minutes later Frank reappeared on deck, dressed again in full gear and ordered Neil and Macklin to go below, saying that if they rotated four men, none of them would get overheated again. Olly came up again to share the ordeal.
Down in the main cabin Neil was struck by the stuffy, close atmosphere and by the silence. The wet towels they’d used to cool Frank down were still draped over the galley shelves. Lisa and Skippy were squeezed into the “doghouse” under the dinette table, Jim was sitting back against the galley cabinets with a Styrofoam cooler and settee cushion on his lap, and Jeanne was huddled beside the dagger board well with a settee cushion covering most of her. Neil stripped off his foul-weather stuff and rubbed himself down with one of the wet towels. Macklin crawled into the forepeak cabin.
“Mommy says the rain has radioactive germs in it,” Skippy said suddenly, peeking his head out of his cave. “Did you see them?”
“One or two,” Neil answered. “I kicked them overboard.”
“Mommy says you’re washing them overboard,” Skippy corrected.
“She’s right.”
Lisa also peered out.
“Is it still falling?” she asked.
“A little bit probably,” Neil answered. “But we’re keeping the boat so clean, you can’t tell.” He knew better, of course. The stuff was still falling, although even Neil thought at a slightly slower rate, and though they were a lot better off here than on land, they were still being exposed, especially those who had to work on deck.
Jeanne crawled out from her hideaway.
“You should get under the crossbeam,” she said. “You’ve been exposed already much more than we have.”
He glanced at the space, then at her. He wanted to lie down and wanted to feel better protected.
“Can we both squeeze in there?” he asked, frowning.
“No,” she said. “But you go ahead.”
He hesitated, but the thought of being able to lie down won out over gallantry; he realized how exhausted he must be. He stepped over Jim’s legs, held Jeanne briefly as he passed her, and then crawled into her space. She covered him with her cushion and sat down beside Jim. Vagabond sailed on. Below, no one spoke.