This week’s story is a sequel to the full-length story Flotsam, which appeared in my short story collection and was recently featured in issue 3 of the Concept Sci-fi ezine.

JETSAM
By Gareth L Powell

Toby Milan thought he’d drowned. When Odette and Safak pulled him from the sea, his lungs were full of water and he was unconscious and bleeding from a knife wound to the thigh. They pulled him into Safak’s old twin engine Grumman sea plane and flew him to Barcelona, where he spent the next three days on a hotel bed in the Gothic Quarter, his leg wrapped in bandages.

On the fourth day, Odette brought him some crutches and took him out for dinner. It was raining. They ate in a restaurant on the twenty-seventh floor of a downtown hotel. She ordered squid with fried potatoes. She had a bag by her feet. As they waited for the food, she nudged it over to him. “Some new clothes and a passport,” she said.

Toby reached down and pulled a Russian hat from the bag. It was khaki with fur ear flaps. “Thank you,” he said.

The waiter came over with a bottle of red wine and Toby lifted his glass. “This is the second time you’ve saved me.”

Odette shrugged. She looked out at the yellow city lights and said: “I’m leaving.”

Toby lowered his drink. In the distance, lightning flashed silently over the flooded Mediterranean. He dropped the hat back into the bag.

“It’s Safak, he’s asked me to marry him.”

“Are you going to?”

“I don’t know, maybe.”

The squid arrived and they ate in silence. After the meal, she kissed him on the cheek and left him standing on the hotel’s slippery steps. He watched her climb into a cab in the rain. Then her turned his collar up and limped across the road to the bus station, where he bought a ticket to the container port. There were too many flooded reactors in Europe and he wanted to get out. He was hoping to find a ship that would take him East to India or China, or West to whatever remained of the United States.