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

Chapter 21 - Regaining control

One moment we were happy about the blue sky and the sun and the next moment it is getting too warm. Yes, too warm. Because out here on the high seas, there is nothing to protect us from the sun. No tree, no house, simply nothing except the reflecting and mirroring sea water.

But the unbelievable heat that accumulated especially in the yacht and made it unbearable there, should be our smallest problem. We had completely different worries at the moment.

For example, we were running out of supplies. There was also something wrong with our power supply, as we kept having power outages. And unfortunately, neither Yibo nor I understand any of this. In addition, the seawater desalination plant on the yacht keeps breaking down. It is supposed to convert seawater into drinking water for us. But again and again the device fails.

We couldn't start the engine because the tank on our yacht was empty. I know that Haikuan told Meng Yao during our last shore leave to fill the tank and all the canisters. But none of us had checked to see if he had really done it. And since the empty canisters were still there, we know that they didn't take the fuel on with them. And probably that's more the reason why they just left. They knew we wouldn't get out of there!

There would have to be a strong storm for our sails to take us away from our anchorage. We managed to get the anchor up, but since it has been windless for days, we barely moved.

Well and then there was this huge cruise ship that either no one lives on anymore or they ran out of fuel like we did. Either way, it was slowly but surely getting closer and closer to our position. With each day it got a little closer to us. If the cruise ship kept on coming towards our position and eventually caught up with us, it would flatten our sailing yacht, that much was clear.

So we frantically searched for a solution to all our problems. Yibo even used nautical charts to find a nearby island or mainland. He thought we could take the lifeboat and then with the paddles we would row to the nearest land mass. According to his calculations, it would take us about a day and a half. The problem was, such lifeboats are only designed for a short period of use.

Through a non-fiction book we read about sailing and boats, we learned that it is even safer to stay on a sinking ship than to rely on a lifeboat. But we knew that if we couldn't think of anything else, we would have to take the lifeboat. And that's before the cruise ship reaches us!

With anxious eyes, we kept an eye on the cruise ship, wondering how they could be making progress while we didn't seem to be moving at all. If we were moving, we should have always been about the same distance from the cruise ship. But that's not how it was.

To cool off we went into the ocean instead of the shower and that's when something caught Yibo's eye as he dove near our yacht. I had swum about 50 meters away from the yacht when he called me back and wanted to show me something. I swam back and dove together with him, where I saw the problem of why we couldn't move.

We were stuck! A rope that must have come from a shipwreck had gotten caught in our propeller. I don't know how that happened and was even possible. But the rope was taut and held us in place. Yibo got a knife and cut it. After that, we could only hope that we would slowly move away from our collision course with the cruise ship.

And the latter actually happened that same night. That evening, Yibo and I were sitting out on the deck eating a bowl of rice with canned vegetables when we saw a few small clouds in the sky. We were just hoping that it would be a little windy. But just half an hour after we saw the first really small clouds, a storm broke over us.

Flood-like rain poured down from the sky, it stormed so much that we had meter-high waves and our yacht was rocked back and forth. Again and again it lowered to the right and threatened to tip over. Thunder and lightning crashed over us. And suddenly the cruise ship was very close to us and the wind carried a horrible stench from it to us.