“I said, I have gotten approval for this from the government. I have three thousand cans of food currently in a deep freezer storage facility covered in plastic. I have printed the note you suggested and included the message for your husband you wanted.”
I’m sobbing happy, shocked tears. Heida, oh, you beautiful Icelandic princess.
“Hello? Frances?”
“Yep, I’m still here, Heida. I’m here. Thank you so much, I don’t know how to thank you.”
“When all of this is over, come to Iceland with Toby and I will show you around the bit of coastline where we are based. It is very beautiful. We are friends now, I think, Frances. We have spoken every day for five months.”
“Well, actually, you don’t pick up the phone on your day off, so not every day.”
“You always leave me voice mails though, which is the same thing. How many voice mails did you leave me last Sunday?”
“Fourteen,” I say in a small voice before changing the subject. “When are you going to drop off the food?”
“Tomorrow. We know their coordinates. The captain provided them before they lost signal. They’ve been anchored since they ran out of fuel a long time ago. We will use a small military plane to make the drop.”
“Heida, I think you might be the best friend I’ve ever had.”
“If I manage to save your husband’s life, I would hope so.”
“Wait, Heida, why have you been telling me it’s not going to work if you had applied for approval?” That sneaky so-and-so has been telling me to get lost for months.
“I didn’t want to get your hopes up. You’re a very optimistic person. You think the glass is half full. I measure the number of millimeters in the glass before I decide what to do with the water.”
“Oh, Heida, you’ll let me know how it goes?”
“I will let you know how it goes.”
TOBY WILLIAMS
Somewhere off the coast of Iceland
Day 338
Sometime in October 2026
I’m going to die soon. My stomach is eating itself, I can feel it. The pain is unbearable. It’s been over a year, or just under, I can’t keep track of the days anymore. I stopped counting once I got to two hundred.
There’s around thirty of us now, I think. We stopped being able to throw all the bodies overboard a while ago. Took too much energy to break into the rooms. Mark is still here, that’s the only thing that matters. We lie out on the deck because the breeze feels nice and it doesn’t smell as much out here. Maybe we’re hallucinating? I don’t know. Frances, I love you. Maisy, my lovely girl. She was a miracle baby. I was forty-one, Frances was thirty-nine. For a while there everything was just too perfect, wasn’t it? I want to go to sleep and not wake up but the pain in my stomach means I can’t. I can’t sleep, I wait and I hold Mark’s hand. If we’re still together I’m not as scared.
There’s a noise. Maybe the boat is sinking? Probably a good thing at this point. This boat is a graveyard. The noise is getting closer. There’s something coming onto the boat. What if it’s a shark? I snap my neck up, no, not a shark. I’ll die happily in lots of ways just please not a shark that’s thrown itself onto the boat.
I stand up and then fall back down in shock. “Mark, Mark!” My voice is so hoarse. There hasn’t been rain in a few days and the water stores are running low so my throat is a husk. I must be dreaming. It’s a big crate of something. It has a plastic envelope on the side. A huge net is rising up into the air and I follow it up. There’s a helicopter. I can see people inside it, now they’re going away, they’re flying away no, no, no come back, don’t leave us here.