Chapter 15: Off the Coast of the Southeast United States - October 2014
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Teylor laid on his bunk, staring at his phone. Six weeks ago one of his bunkmates would certainly have made a joke about him wacking off, but not today. These days, nobody even thought about it, such levity a thing of the past. Captain Chandler had warned them about stray cell signals - if warn was even the right word considering that they were all praying for word from home - but what the Captain failed to mention, what he probably never even considered, were the texts. Requiring minimal service to send, and little power or space to store, they began bombarding the crew's phones as soon as the Nathan James came within range of the mainland.
Teylor was not one of the lucky few who managed to get through to their families, either in the Arctic or today. But he did receive a few dozen texts from friends and family, and even managed to send a few back, although there was no way of knowing whether they would actually be received given that the electrical grid was down for more than half the country. The message were garbled, out of order, and sometimes cutoff. Still, they provided some hope, some comfort that his family might still be out there, alive, waiting for him.
Teylor scrolled through the messages from his mother again. At first she sounded composed, mentioning that Oz and Eli and the girls were at the house due to the growing threat in New Orleans and grousing about Maria's refusal to leave the city. As the messages continued, though, Teylor could sense his mother's growing panic, her demands to know where he was and when he was coming home growing more and more insistent until they abruptly stopped.
Oz's texts, by contrast, were little different that the ones that they exchanged pre-virus. If anything, Oz seemed mildly annoyed at being tasked to locate his brother, most of his messages started with "Mama told me to tell you..." or "dude, you are so in for an ass-whopping when you get home." One message that took over an hour to download turned out to be a picture of all of them - Oz, Eli, the girls, his parents - sitting around the fire-pit cooking hotdogs. Without a timestamp, Teylor couldn't tell if the picture was from yesterday or four months ago but he wanted to believe that was what they were doing right now.
As though the pandemic was nothing more than an extended camping trip.
There was nothing from Mas, unsurprising as the man didn't own a cell phone, or from Maria. Teylor knew that the later was a bad sign but, as he told Miller earlier when the kid broke down and confessed that he still hadn't heard from his mother, there were a hundred reasons why a text might not have gone through, such as what service provider someone was using and whether the tower nearest to their house was down.
Teylor hoped that the excuse didn't sound as hollow to Miller as it did in his head.
Skipping over the messages from Jones, letting Teylor know that he and a few of the other guys were in a safe zone in Georgia, Teylor moved to the last set of texts.
Caroline.
There were only three, the first two so typical of Caro's no-nonsense style of communication that he could hear her saying the words.
Heard that all Navy vessels are being recalled to port. Call me once you are back. Want to know you are safe.
First cases of the Red Flu here in CT. Guess the plot of Outbreak wasn't as absurd as I thought. Hospital called us all in, just in case. If I miss you, tell me where to call you back.
But the last one, that was the message that he couldn't stop reading. The message that was burned into his brain.
Doubt you'll ever see this but I'm too far from the water to use a message in a bottle. (And that was a stupid movie anyway.) I'm still at the hospital. Power's been out for almost a month. We are running on a generator but almost out of fuel so doubt my cell will last much longer. I regret so many things right now, Tey. I play through the last year in my head and want to scream at myself for being so stupid, for thinking that I had all the time in the world. But something I don't regret is spending time with you. More than anything, I wish I could keep the promise I made to be there when you got home. You are a good man, Javier Teylor Cruz.
Dropping his phone to the bunk, Teylor rolled to his side, wondering, once again, whether his presence on the Nathan James was a gift or a curse.