I was attempting to write an apocalyptic time travel story for an entry to an anthology with the theme of time travel. I missed the time travel aspect, but ended up with this story about a stolen aircraft carrier.
It’s called “A THOUSAND WORDS OF DAN.”
Here goes:
We were ping pong balls bouncing across the International Date Line.
A day older.
A day younger.
The Earth was dying.
Everything dies but time.
My name is Dan.
I guessed I had about a thousand words left, how I counted the end.
There were twelve of us, strangers stumbling together.
We had stolen an aircraft carrier from San Diego when the Navy pulled out; they had taken all the jets.
Where they were going to land we had no idea.
Someone asked me if I knew where the gas tank was.
We smashed a few docks on our way to the Pacific.
The Canadian forest fires has been blown south by demon Arctic winds. Cities exploded; fire rolled down the mountains. Rivers boiled.
We had been running out of the burning hills.
We started as three when our stolen Jeep was crushed by a flaming semi sliding down I-90.
I felt like Tom Joad piled in the back of an empty Fed-Ex van; it was the third one we found. I imagined a pack of stunned van drivers marching through a cornfield each with a sack of packages, searching for a GPS signal.
The Navy yard seemed safe and probably had food and water. No one closed the doors when they ran.
A hundred miles out to sea someone appeared on the command deck with binoculars and scanned the black boiling sky like Bull Halsey chasing Admiral Yamamoto after Pearl Harbor.
“Due west, twelve knots,” he commanded.
Finally someone said, “Aye, Aye,” and pushed a button or two and a hundred thousand tons of steel lurched forward.
“Where are we going,” I asked.
“To the date line,” Halsey said. “I want to enter a new day before all this ends.”
“Do you know how to run this thing?” I asked.
“It’s a big ocean,” Halsey said. “We’ll figure it out. Besides there’s nothing out here to hit.”
We assigned ourselves tasks.
No one it seemed knew how to cook.
No one asked names, because, well, no one did.
On the third day there were only ten of us.
“It’s a big ship,” Halsey said.
I imagined them wandering below deck trying to decipher the numbers and letters painted above steps and on walls and bulkheads, repeating their steps, turning, sighing. Maybe they were huddled in a bunk with five gallons of chocolate ice cream and a spoon.
Maybe. It was easy to lose track.
We slept on the command deck, folded into chairs.
One of us typed SOS into every email address she could think of; when they came back undelivered, she cried.
Some kid at a comm desk called into a radio, “This is the USS…. What’s the name of this ship?…”
“Who knows?” someone yelled back. “Does it matter?”
“This is the USS Does it Matter. Come in Pearl Harbor. This is the USS Does it Matter. Come in Guam. Come in Perth. Come in Tokyo. Beijing. Juneau. Come in…”
He sounded like Gary Sinise in “Apollo 13.”
“Odyssey, this is Houston. Do you read?”
Wait.
“Odyssey, this is Houston. Do you read?”
But they came back.
When darkness fell the first night we all looked like aliens with the reflected dots of red, green and yellow lights flashing from consoles on our faces.
“Where’s the light switch?” someone yelled.
It should have been funny.
I wondered where the gas tank was and what would happen when it was empty.
At dawn I sat on the flight deck and imagined the ungodly push of a catapult tossing a F-35 off the deck, into the air, and me as cool as shit pinned to my seat, calling back to the flight crew, “10-4, Roger Dodger, see you on the other side,” or whatever hotshot Navy pilots said as they took their billion dollar joyride.
At dusk we sailed into a sun as broad as the horizon.
And watched the earth swallow it.
I stood on the bow.
The ship seemed a hundred miles long.
I could no longer see California burning.
Halsey had learned how to control the rudder and the ship took a lurching, circular turn to port.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
He pointed.
“This way. Maybe we’ll hit an island.”
Someone on the flight deck was jumping and pointing at a jet ten miles above us.
I wondered if the pilots could land that thing on an aircraft carrier.
After a week, no one talked.
Even Halsey gave up the act.
And the kid at the radio console held his head in his hands.
Before he dropped the fancy Navy binoculars on a desk, Halsey said he thought he saw smoke.
And it sounded like hope.
“But it might just be a cloud bank,” he said.
He wandered away, somewhere on the vast, metallic, endless floating space of what was left of everything we knew, every face, every voice, every name, street, town, ballpark, library, graveyard, can of paint, Beatles record, mismatched sock, cold beer, tongues twirling in soft mouths, everything we had seen and touched and wanted, gave away, stole as a kid, everything we loved, everything we hated, broke and fixed.
I stopped talking, too.
I figured I’d save some words in case that black blot on the setting, orange sun might have been smoke after all.
