The kid paddled in on a sundown, oil-slicked tide. Somewhere beyond, the Killer Wave waited.
Aidan had opined, loudly, that he and the rest of the Old-Timers should pretend they’d never seen the kid. They were Rec workers, and it was payday; let the security boats deal with it.
Once the kid really got moving, though, Aidan might as well have suggested blindfolds at a firework show.
The currents of what had once been the Sacramento Valley were strong, unpredictable, and intermittently evil. The wreckage beneath the waves never quite settled, creating white-knuckle rapids between the husks of old city blocks and half-buried bridges.
At first glance, the kid looked like he might snap his paddle, board, and neck, in that order, at any moment. But as he got closer, Aidan could see the confidence. What had looked like lurching imbalance became split-second corrections. The test of a mechanical bull isn’t looking good doing it, after all. The kid held on.
When he made it to shore, the Old-Timer crew gave him a round of applause. Varsha whistled a few bars of “We Are the Champions,” and the kid’s eyes lit up. He hefted his cherry-red board onto the sand and rummaged through a pack bungie-corded to the tail-end.
Then he pulled out the case and unsheathed the ukulele, and there went the night.
Payday usually meant heading down to the Windsong for some beer that they could actually taste and waiting for a shot at the only pool table in town that still had most of the balls. But the kid, Chance, stuck out like a sore thumb, so Rin and Ekoye grabbed a fresh lighter and a case of nothing-ale from the corner shop, and they all hiked out to one of the more private dunes for a bonfire. It was the six of them, Aidan, Varsha, Rin, Ekoye, Pedro, and Skyler, plus the kid. The Old-Timers and the wayward child.
“Old-Timers” wasn’t an ironic handle; they were all old enough to remember the concept of retirement ages, but they had missed that boat like the dinosaurs missed the Ark, or so Pedro liked to say. They were certainly old enough that Aidan thought they were lucky no one broke an ankle dancing like fools in the firelight that night.
Chance was a one-man throwback playlist. He knew his way around his chirpy little instrument and was a decent tenor to boot. There wasn’t much for Aidan; there was some half-remembered song lilting around the back of his head that he would’ve liked to hear, but he couldn’t remember the words and didn’t bother to ask. But the kid played some Stones, some Swift (Skyler shrieked in delight), and eventually Buffett.
That brought the house down like storm surge could only dream about.
Age being what it was, the rest of the gang needed a breather after all that excitement. So, Aidan started interrogating the kid. Where was he from? Was he even old enough to be traveling alone? What the hell was he doing here?
That last earned Aidan some harsh glares around the bonfire, but Chance didn’t seem to mind. He was from a commune built around a lighthouse on the Old Coast up north. They were big on music, apparently. A human song library. It sounded a bit Kumbaya for Aidan, but to each their own.
As for age, Chance reported himself at twenty-two, though he looked closer to seventeen, and a lean seventeen at that. He had unzipped his wetsuit down to his waist, and even in the firelight, they could see the arches of his ribs and the hollow of his stomach under teak-colored skin. Too thin. But then again, who wasn’t, these days?
What he was doing here was fuck-all, because he had come to check on the “reconstruction efforts.” When Ekoye told him there weren’t any, just corporate scavenge operations, the smile left his face for the first time that night.
“When are they going to start?” He asked, looking between them.
“They’re not,” Aidan said. “Sorry, champ. The world ended.”
“Oh,” he said.
For a while, they sat with it, no songs but the duet of wind and tide. Then he picked up his uke and started idly plucking at the strings.
“Hey, do you guys know what cheeseburgers tasted like?”
For everyone but Aidan, that blew up like pure, nostalgia dynamite. Aidan disengaged, cutting his eyes out to the sea, watching for swells, waiting for signs.
The kid didn’t pack up and paddle off at sun-up, despite Aidan’s hopes. He had a tent on the back of that board of his, and his spine was still young enough for sleeping on sand. He set up a camp in the goldenbush and marram grass where he could happily stay a week, or possibly forever.
He didn’t seem to understand why he had to lay low, paddling in unwanted on a corporate reclamation site. Honestly, he didn’t seem to understand a lot of things. Why were they working for a company instead of just salvaging for themselves? Why were they paying to rent run-down housing instead of camping out or building their own places? Why didn’t they leave if they didn’t like it here?
Never mind that this was all that was left anymore. There was nothing freeing about a government, global economy, and biosphere on the verge of collapse. If anything, you held on tighter. Shit job? At least you knew you would be eating every day. Shit apartment? At least it was a roof overhead when the next super-storm blew through. Shit longitude and latitude? Well, a couple of centuries of industrialization hadn’t exactly left any Edens in their wake.
The biggest thing the kid didn’t seem to understand was the fear. Everyone who had survived out here had a story about the time they almost hadn’t. And Aidan didn’t even mean the big stuff: the San Andreas 9.0, the Second American Civil War, and the Hell Summer Double-Pandemic.
Those were just stamps on the bingo card these days. At Aidan’s age, he had seen much closer, more intimate brushes with death. For Rin, it was a jagged piece of rebar and an antibiotic-resistant bacterial infection; three straight weeks in the kind of fevers that usually kill the virus by taking the body with it. She got a fresh reminder looking at the scar in the mirror every morning.
For Ekoye, it was his dog, Walker, swept away in a flood. Ekoye knew better than to wade into that water, but “man’s best friend” were never just words to him. The man had been knocked unconscious against a lamppost for about thirty seconds and ended up under the water. Woke up just in time, and Walker was saved, never to know how close his human came to dying in the line of duty. The dog was still around, as gray in the muzzle as Aidan.
For Pedro, it was the one-eyed seagull. He still refused to talk about it.
For Aidan, it was the Killer Wave.
This was years ago, when his hair was more red than white. He and Clara had parted ways right after Hell Summer, neither one at fault, nerves just too raw to handle a team of two. He still missed her. That woman had never been second-best.
He’d traded Atlantic for Pacific, like you do. Surely if any place needed construction work and was willing to pay, it would be California, right?
But then came San Andreas, and the state of emergency stretching into double-digit months, and the fire season that just wouldn’t stop burning.
So, Aidan was paddling up the PCH, pulling day work, building make-shift hospitals and temporary schools.
The weather forecast called for a goddamn monsoon in three days, and he was surrounded by toothpick architecture, so Aidan had started paddling immediately. It was all blue skies and smooth breezes the first two days. The third day, there was a bit of a current to fight, but he had been doing this how many years? Plus, he could see the chop building. If he had paddled back in to take a rest, he would have been Poseidon’s punching bag trying to get back out past the breakers.
He kept going. Careless.
The birds had all scattered. He never forgot that part. They must have seen it coming.
It was nearly high noon and high tide both. The coast was curving out in front of him, the space between the steady blue and the whitecaps starting to go ombre. The tide kept pushing him toward the splash zone, all in on a Royal Flush. He fought back until his obliques were a wildfire. And all the while, there it was.
It brooded on the deep, rising and falling, but keeping its distance. It peeked above its lesser brethren like a crocodile surfacing to lay eyes on its prey. Then it sank, and Aidan knew, immediately, that he was in for it.
The Killer Wave was coming.
The nose of his board drifted relentlessly toward shore, and the onslaught began. He caught the first few—he wasn’t an amateur—but as soon as one had broken, the next was yanking him back, and the shore was closing in by inches instead of yards. It was a wave train, plain and simple. Each one was seven feet, eight feet at the outside; all together, they were the overture.
He pushed too hard, trying to gain ground (so to speak) on the beach, over-balanced, tumbled.
The board was bungie-d to his ankle, like the bobber to his hook. He climbed the cord to the surface and broke for half a gasp of air before the next breaking wave, which dragged down the board and him by transitive properties. Minutes of this felt like hours, but he still wasn’t ready to give up the board. The main event was still out there.
It waited. That was the part he could never get over. At that size and speed, it should have passed right through the lesser waves, broken beyond him while he was still under water. But no. It waited until he was tired, waited until he was bruised, waited until the fear had dug its fangs into him.
When the last of the waves in the train broke, he managed to splay himself across his board, praying that the big one had already passed. Then he looked up.
It was a plunging wave, a drop-you-in-the-trough-and-blot-out-the-sun wave, an abandon-hope-ye-who-tread-water-here wave.
On the third day, the kid came out salvaging with them. Aidan was dead-set against it. Corporate security patrolled by on speedboat and jet-skis at all hours of the day, but it wasn’t their security those teams worried about. They didn’t even carry life preservers. Reclamation teams lost people with security in line of sight. But they weren’t Coast Guard or Life Guards. They were Corporate, Fuck-You-That’s-Ours Guards. Loss prevention. Keep your friends off the jobsite, or we’ll find a cage big enough for all of you.
Aidan was overruled.
Reclamation work wasn’t glamorous. Mostly they puttered out in their piddly little motorboat (oldest hands got the worst boat, by reason that you want to keep all of your expendables together), hunting down shipping containers. Storms and seaquakes had made trans-pacific shipping a real gamble. But where there’s value, a large corporate entity will swoop in to suck it dry. Hence Green Trove, a “recycling” operation that raided any containers or wrecks that found their way to the coasts and inland seas of California.
The work was that timeless, blue-collar cocktail: hands-on and straightforward, hold the easy. They climbed into the piece of junk boat and followed transponder signals to the day’s plunder. Once they got close, they’d paddle out and dive to check all the seals. If it was beyond saving, they reported in and hauled their asses on to the next one. If the whole thing was still sealed, they tagged it with a beacon for a real team (ie. one with a ship, staff, and actual equipment) to hoist it aboard and return it to port.
But that day, they had the real shit job: a mystery box.
The container was painted royal blue with a large, white W. It was caught between some toppled concrete pillars that were holding it mostly steady. One of the seals, top-front corner, starboard side, had been shorn off like a monstrous bite in the steel. But here was the trick: the box was hauling sealed MREs, so there was a chance that everything inside was still A-OK. That meant getting up close and personal with the behemoth, hoping it didn’t shift, flip, or in any way demonstrate the principle that when steel meets flesh, only the latter yields.
It was Aidan’s turn. They anchored the boat about twenty yards away. He sat passenger on Pedro’s board as the latter paddled him most of the remaining way. Rin, Skyler, and the kid all got out on their boards, ready to come after him if he lost his footing.
The corrugated steel was slick under his heels as he stepped off Pedro’s board, and he was feeling every one of his years as he crossed to the open end. The missing seal was a razor bloom of gunmetal and blue paint. Aidan took the camera off his hip, a water-proof number with a light and lens on a long, adjustable neck. You snaked it into a broken seal, took a look around, and sent it off to central dispatch, who made the call. Or, maybe, asked if you could get your whole arm in there and wiggle it around, they thought they saw a shark.
Standard Operating Procedure, except Aidan could never get the damn thing to work, proof positive that he had truly gotten old, technology turning against him. The screen was taking forever to boot up, and he had to keep bracing on one knee when the sea spat up against him.
A squadron of sea birds passed over him, beating their wings like hell had taken flight. Aidan tore his eyes from the screen and scoured his horizons. He knew the signs of the Killer Wave, and even one put his whole body on edge.
“Watch it!” Pedro called.
Aidan looked down, just in time to see a broadside wave topple into the container. He fell forward, dropping the camera, which slid off into surf. He threw his arms out, too late, tumbling toward the shredded metal—
And fell on his back, wind knocked clean out of him, the flat of a paddle in his chest.
“I got ya!” Chance called out, towering above the old man.
That earned a round of applause from the rest of the Old-Timers and a swooping feeling of frustration and relief from Aidan. Before he even got up, he scanned every direction. Too flat for his wave to hide.
“Yeah, thanks,” he said.
“For sure. We’re all in it together,” Chance said.
Aidan pulled himself up with the paddle wondering which bumper sticker the kid had got that one from.
Upon further inspection, the box was worthless. One of the missing shards of steel had got caught up in the container, and time and tide had shredded the contents. Tens of thousands of meals gone, all because of a bad weld. At least they had probably fed some fish.
They were back on the boat and ready to move on when the kid spotted the other container: white paint with red scars sticking up at a thirty-degree angle from a sandbar.
It took a second for Aidan to make sense of the paint: two rusty, red lines intersecting at the center.
Red Cross.
Another win for the kid. Good eyes, pats on the back all around. He was thrilled.
“We’re stocked up on food, solar panels, and water filters back home, but short on medicine. Does your company do trades?”
“Yeah, cash, barter, IOU, whatever works,” Aidan grumbled.
“Really?”
“No, hon,” said Varsha, comforting him and scolding Aidan with just those two, spare syllables. Downright maternal in the economy of it.
“No transponder,” Rin remarked. “It’s uncatalogued.”
“Probably drowned in that buried half,” Ekoye said.
“Shouldn’t we check it out?” Chance asked.
“Quotas,” Ekoye said, sadly. “Need to be going.”
The kid looked ready to protest, but he clamped his mouth shut.
“Yeah, OK.”
The kid stuck around for the rest of the day, ducking low when security passed by, but always helpful. He was talking up his commune. They really were looking hard for medicine. They were hoping to become the hub for any refugees in the area. If they kept building up, maybe partnered with a reconstruction team, soon they’d be a real town. Maybe a city one day. They were dreaming of less miserable lives and no hate, or something to that effect.
Aidan had the good grace to look away before rolling his eyes, but he still got a swift kick in the shin from Varsha.
At sundown, they went their separate ways, Old-Timers back to town, him to his camp with a sad smile.
“He can’t believe the old farts left the treasure buried,” Aidan said, when the kid was just out of earshot. “The cure for cancer was in that container. Right next to the magic beans. And the Unicorn.”
Varsha finally snapped at that one,“Leave him alone.”
Aidan bristled, one of his most passionate pastimes. He was just trying to bring the human experiment in for a soft landing.
“So, I’m the asshole because I don’t want to clap for fairies? No one’s rebuilding things. That world the kid is dreaming of doesn’t exist.”
“So fucking what, Aidan? The world may be shit, but it’s the only one he’s got.”
Varsha marched Aidan up to the dunes the next morning before sun-up. She wanted him to give the kid a proper thank you and apology. Varsha’s personal wants were so few and far between, she had the energy to really fight for them.
Turns out Aidan was spared. The kid had already grabbed his board and left camp.
They were working fast. A storm was liable to hit after sundown, and the winds were high. They buzzed around all morning, finding a whole lot of nothing. They were about to drop anchor for their mandatory fifteen-minute lunch break when the call came in on the corporate channel.
“Unidentified scavenger spotted in the area. Security dispatched. Anyone who’s seen a young man with braids on a red board should report into—”
“We’re not far,” Rin said. “Sounds like they don’t have eyes on him, just a general direction.”
“Pretty close to the Red Cross box, no?” said Pedro.
“Might be able to make it to him before they do,” Skyler added.
A vote was taken. Varsha locked eyes with Aidan.
Unanimous. Off they went.
Sure enough, there was the kid, right beside the container. When he saw them from a mile out (young eyes like a damn hawk), he waved both arms. Maybe he had found his magic beans.
That was the good news, but they had company. Ekoye had called in a sighting five nautical miles north of them, but a security guard on a low-seated jet ski was tearing through the water behind. The Old-Timers’ boat may as well have been swan-shaped with pedals. He was making a beeline for them, so it was either turn the kid in or step into the shitstorm.
Far off, the sound of waves against steel thrummed like bass notes, one after another: a wave train hitting the Red Cross container. Aidan swiveled his gaze beyond the kid’s sandbar.
Rising above an empty sky, the Killer Wave was coming.
That day by the PCH, he had got one good breath in him and one good look at his personal apocalypse.
It rose above him, blotting out the rest of the world. Most waves are not singular, but a thousand jagged ripples longing for the shore. The Killer Wave was different. It was a million gallons of water moving together, a wall of sea glass with a single purpose in mind: drown any poor bastard in its way.
He cut his board loose right before the wave hit, put as much distance as he could between him and it. Floatation wouldn’t do him any good with a side order of fiberglass concussion.
Then he was in the wash. Industrial wash. At first, his body moved on instinct, trying to cut the water, but it was as hopeless as sprinting his way out of a ten-story fall. So, he gave up.
Giving up was the only reason he was still alive. His body was tapped well before the wave broke. If he had fought for even a few seconds longer, his lungs would have given out, and he’d have choked to death on the Pacific. Instead, he rag-dolled, blowing out his held breath a little at a time but refusing to take another. He let the wave push him down, hold him under. He let the sea happen to him, the world happen to him.
Call it superstition, but for the rest of his life, Aidan would believe the Killer Wave didn’t end him that day because the damn thing thought it already had.
Drifting down into the dark, pressure in his head and chest, he was deafened by the roar of the tide. And just when it felt like all of his senses were giving out, his shoulder hit rough stone. The world had a bottom to it, after all. He got his feet under him and pushed—
Here was another sign Aidan had got old: a lot of things were happening while he was tangled up in memory.
Varsha and Skyler had spotted the wave coming for Chance and were trying to get his attention, but their voices wouldn’t carry, and he was busy with something in his pack. Then, the security guard had come alongside their boat, shouting questions and instructions at the rest of the Old-Timers. Threatening, seemed to be the gist.
At last, the kid turned around and saw the Wave. He threw his board in the water and started paddling. The stupid kid was going to try to ride it, and it was going to shatter him. If he threw away his board and his bag, dove into the water and surrendered, he might survive, but he was so goddamn certain he could take on the world that the world was going to kill him for it. And one of the few optimists left, its last Chances, would become no Chance at all.
Aidan was crying. The happy little idiot had traveled all this way to be a savior for the human race; he didn’t even comprehend that—
Here was the strangest thing Aidan had missed: his paddle, swung at force into the side of the security guard’s head. The guard toppling off the back of his jet ski. Aidan climbing aboard and gunning the throttle right for the kid.
He was motoring straight into the wave train, seven and eight-footers, each one ready to capsize him if they managed to curl around him. But dear god, that engine. He laid off the throttle as the first wave began to pick up beneath him, then gave it everything. The jet ski’s nose rose, and he sliced through the top of the wave, catching air and landing with a bone-rattling splash on the wave behind it. He did it again. And again.
The kid was mostly looking behind him, paddling hard, trying to find just the right speed to ride a wave that couldn’t be tamed. He didn’t see Aidan until he was less than a half-mile out. Aidan had no idea how he looked, but Chance’s face went from excited to confused. The kid looked over his shoulder, and when he looked back, Aidan could see the panic in his movements: the swaying balance, the ragged rowing.
Aidan was closing the distance. As he crested another seven-footer, he knew that he just needed to get close enough to tell the kid to let go of the board, the pack, the uke, to give in and ride it out. But this time Aidan landed nose-heavy and the engine stalled.
His heart stopped with it. He switched it off, waited for the engine to turn. Waited. Waited.
And now the positions were reversed. Last time, he had struggled, and the Killer Wave had waited. This time the water was lunging toward him and the kid, accelerating like a shark toward blood in the water.
The engine turned. Aidan blasted through the last wave in the train and toward the kid. The Killer Wave was unfurling now; Chance rose first, a mountain of water springing up beneath him. Aidan was rocketing toward him, climbing the slope, fifty yards away, then twenty-five. Beyond the kid, the top of the wave began to curl.
Aidan threw his arm out. And without words, the kid got it. He threw away the paddle, ripped the cord from his ankle, and grabbed his bag under one arm. In the moment Aidan came along side, slowing down just a hair, Chance leapt, abandoning the board, gripping Aidan by the bicep and swinging into the seat behind the Old-Timer.
Above them, the crest of the wave was coming forward, blocking out the sky. The Killer Wave had them. No time to turn and ride. Too late and too crowded to play dead. If they ended up under this wave, they were ruined, but there was no way over it anymore.
“PUSH FORWARD!”
It didn’t sound like the kid, and Aidan didn’t remember screaming it, either. But pushing forward was all they had left, so he was going to make it a hell of a push. He gave the engine everything. Then, together with the kid, they pushed the nose of the craft down as hard as they could, fighting the rise with their whole weight. A wall of water closed around them, but they held on, kept pushing. Not pushing up and over the wave: pushing through it. They pushed. The Wave pushed back. They would either break through to the other side or be broken in the crush.
For a moment, the world stopped.
The Old-Timers had abandoned the boat. It was company property after all, loaded up with a particularly irksome transponder. As it happened, the company didn’t take kindly to abetting scavengers and assaulting security personnel. So, they paddled their way across the Sacramento Sea toward the Old Coast, such possessions as they had strapped to their boards. It was a cluttered mess.
They had never found Chance’s board or the jet ski that Aidan had stolen. No doubt that the engine had flooded and it had sunk beneath the waves, like the kid’s Red Cross container: lost to the deep.
It was hard going, paddling out. They were leaving a life behind, and at their ages, habit was like a drug.
It was also hard with two laid-up passengers and a dog taking up space and unable to help row. Turns out, when you burst through the top of a thirty-foot wave, the next thing that happens is falling thirty feet. The sea is a cruel mistress, and gravity’s no sweetheart, either.
Aidan had fully dislocated his shoulder in the fall, and Chance had broken his ankle pushing them clear of the jet ski. But the Old-Timers had been there to scoop them up, and the kid had managed to save a couple of first aid kits, courtesy of the Red Cross, before the Killer Wave had reared its head.
The two men had painkillers to keep their spirits up… and the uke, of course.
It was all of them singing this time, more racket than choir. With a little help, Aidan had remembered some of that phantom song of his: a Modern English track that felt ancient even to him. He couldn’t remember the lyrics exactly, but they sang themselves breathless anyway, charging ever forward. They looked a crashing world in the face.
And they paddled on, sunrise at their backs, the sea burning white and gold beneath, into a wide-open future.
Calvin Sharpe is a writer and blogger from North Carolina. His stories have been published in Five on the Fifth and Daikaijuzine. You can find more of his work at calvinsharpebooks.com. His long-format fiction is represented by Golden Wheat Literary.