“Just me? You won’t stop eating?”
“I already stopped eating,” I said, “but I’ve been through a little starvation before. I’m not too concerned about that.”
“You should eat while we have food, shouldn’t you?”
I shook my head.
“Maybe in a couple of days,” I said. “I won’t drink any more today, either, because I’m probably going to be really sick. The less I take in now, the less I’m gonna lose tomorrow.”
“Why will you be sick?”
I fought the urge to tell her to use her fucking brain. I mean, I had told her, hadn’t I? I’d been thinking about it but not talking about it. Just because I told her I was an alcoholic didn’t mean she understood what that really meant. I took a deep breath and tried to control my voice.
“Because I’m a fucking alcoholic,” I said through clenched teeth. “By tomorrow morning all the alcohol will be out of my system, and my body is going to be seriously pissed off about it.”
I held my arm out straight in front of me so my hand was just a foot away from her face. My fingers bobbed up and down uncontrollably.
“I’ve already started getting the shakes, and I’m probably going to start throwing up continually by noon tomorrow. I might start hallucinating, and if that happens, I know I won’t be of any use to you. That’s why you need to remember all this shit because I may be out of it for a day or two. You can’t drink too much or too little water. You have to eat half a carb bar every six hours, and you have to watch for other ships or boats or anything else to come by.”
Raine looked from my shaking hand to my eyes – I felt my heart skip a beat – and then back down to my hand again. Her brow wrinkled up in thought, and she gnawed on her bottom lip again.
“You better tell me everything I need to know pretty quickly then,” she said. “I’ll probably want to go over it a couple of times, and it’s probably good to do that while you still can.”
I nodded, seeing the sudden determination in her eyes. It was good to see her losing some of the panic she was feeling before. Of course, that may have had a lot to do with me being a dick as well. We went over the survival guide, and I continued on with the shit she really needed to know, like how to set off the flares and how to use the signal mirror. We talked about keeping dry as much as possible and above all, saving energy.
“The more you move around or get worked up about shit, the more energy you use,” I explained. “You have to conserve energy because energy uses water and dehydration is what is going to kill you.”
“Okay,” Raine said. “I get it. You’ve said that ten times now.”
“Well, then you shouldn’t fucking forget it, should you?” I snarled, and she flinched, her eyes darkening at me. I took a deep breath and ran a hand through my hair. “All right, what do you still have questions about?”
“What if we run out of fresh water?”
“That won’t happen before I’m back to my shitty self,” I said. “Really, you can actually drink a small amount of seawater without it making you sick, but only do that if there isn’t any fresh at all because it isn’t going to help much, either. There are some other ways to get fresh water if it doesn’t rain. It won’t be much, but it will keep you alive. That won’t be for a week or so, though. In general, hope for rain and always be prepared to collect it when it comes.”
“How do you know so much about surviving like this?” Raine asked. “I mean, did you just learn it as part of getting a boa…er…a ship?”
“No, I learned it before that.”
“Were you a boy scout?”
I couldn’t help but laugh out loud at that one.
“No, definitely fucking not.”
“May I ask how you learned?”
I glanced over at her and met her eyes. I knew what she was doing – asking me if she could ask instead of just asking the actual question. She was giving me the easy out. I looked away from her and down at my hands. The shaking was worse. I couldn’t hold them steady at all. I wondered how long DTs usually lasted. I’d never made it very far in the past – it was just so much easier to take a drink instead.
“Someone taught me,” I said. “He was a retired Navy SEAL, and he taught me just about everything I know.”
“What was his name?”
“Landon,” I answered.
“Will you tell me about him?”
Did I want to talk about Landon? Good question. The answer wasn’t so straightforward. In a word, no – I didn’t want to talk about him. However, I probably could talk about him without saying all that much, and maybe Raine would be appeased.
“He was…kind of like a father to me, I guess,” I finally said. “I never had a father, so I think that’s what they’re supposed to be like. I looked up to him, anyway.”
“I can’t imagine you looking up to anyone,” she said and smiled a little. “You’re so tall, I mean.”