You, the apocalypse and me! [YiZhan FF] Fantasy

Chapter 22 - Sailing and Sailing

Three months ago, Haikuan and Meng Yao snuck away in the middle of the night, leaving Yibo and me alone. We lost our luxury sailing yacht and almost all our belongings only a short time later, in a stormy night. And we were able to save ourselves by escaping in a lifeboat before the yacht was rammed by a cruise ship and thus destroyed. Now it lies at the bottom of the sea, which will be its graveyard forever.

For three months, Yibo and I sailed from one island to the next. In the process, we learned to sail properly and had to deal with several bad storms, in which we could only survive because we finally knew how to sail properly and with a good portion of luck.

We headed for one island after the other. At the beginning we were always looking for the big islands, hoping to stock up our supplies there and find important or useful materials. But at almost every of these big islands we saw the same picture. Death and destruction everywhere we looked.

When we arrived at our first big island, we already suspected that we would not go ashore there. Already hundreds of meters before the island, the sky turned an orange-yellow color. So it was clear that there was a sinkhole there and where there are sinkholes, there are creatures. Nevertheless, we sailed closer to the island.

A good 20 meters from the island, Yibo dropped the anchor into the water. We didn't have to get any closer to the island and its beach. We could smell the death and see the destruction even from this distance. Bodies lay everywhere on the beach. Some looked like they had been burned. Birds and crabs were feasting on the flesh of the dead and a huge dog ran into the bushes with a forearm.

The buildings that could be seen were all destroyed. Some were even still burning. Others looked as if someone had simply torn them down, or at least tried to. A few boats were also lying on the beach, the owners had not even made it into the water. Most of them lay lifeless next to or in the boats.

Yibo didn't want to believe that everyone there was dead and steered our sailboat around the island several times. At first I just let him do it, but at some point I asked him what he was going to do when he found survivors? After all, our sailboat had already been too small for both of us and our island chicken, which Yibo called chicken fricassee.

But Yibo just shrugged and asked me instead, "What if we can at least save some kids?" I said nothing to that and continued to search the beach with my binoculars. But we didn't see any survivors. Yibo, however, didn't want to give up yet and anchored in front of the island. He told me we would wait this night, send up some flares to the sky and maybe possible survivors would see and understand the signal and then come to us. I doubted it, but I just let Yibo do it.

In the end, one night turned into three nights. But we found no survivors. But we saw creatures coming to the beach and collecting the bodies. They didn't destroy the boats, which was probably the final proof that there were no more living people there. Or they didn't know that people could use them to get to the sea. There were no flying creatures there, just as on the other large islands we had headed for.

Our journey continued and we headed for at least 8 more large islands before Yibo finally gave up the illusion that we would find a solution to all our problems there. Instead, we had headed for smaller islands in the meantime, where we at least found fruits and berries that we could eat. Because chicken fricassee, as our chicken is now called thanks to Yibo, was now our pet. Yibo did not have the heart to slaughter our last island chicken, so we had to live on fruits, berries and lots of fish.

The last big island we went to was not completely free. Because at least there we found a solution for our much too small sailboat, which was probably already old and would have given way at some point with the permanent load. We found a larger sailboat, which had probably once belonged to a family of 6 or 6 friends. Now it was ours!