Divided Lands

Chapter 7

In the merciless, early morning Eric woke to the bellowing calls of seagulls above the deck. He rubbed his eyes, rolled over, and tried in vain to drown out their cries and slip away again into as peaceful of a slumber as the crashing waves of a ship on the sea would allow. After a few moments he was finally forced to accept that the screaming little bastards just wouldn’t give up. He rolled over onto his back, rubbed his eyes until the blurred wooden planks over his head came into focus, and pushed himself out of bed.

Each row of beds in the makeshift dormitory underneath the ship’s deck was empty. Eric blinked his eyes, shook his head, and glanced around to make sure he was really all alone, the last one to wake up. He cursed Evie and Alice under his breath for leaving without him up and made his way up the wooden steps. He pushed open the door at the top, his eyes squinted in expectation for the sting of big, blinding ray of sunlight. When he chanced to pry his eyelids open, however, he saw nothing but stone gray walls.

Eric took a few steps out onto the deck and turned around. There was the sun, bright as always, and the ocean stretched out all the way to eternity beneath it. A quick turn-around in the other direction revealed that the ship had docked in front of a concrete  warehouse of sorts, with its front completely open to the wooden dock in front of him. Inside he could clearly see several workers unpacking boxes from the ships and flicking their eyes in agitation periodically at the row of passengers leaning against the ship’s railing.

Eric scanned the backs of the shipgoers with narrowed eyes until he saw Alice’s straight, brown ponytail and Evie’s blond, bouncing curls. He hurried over to them and yanked Alice’s white dress sleeve.

“Why didn’t you wake me?” he hissed. “And where the hell are we?”

“Beneath Highland City, of course. We’re supposed to slip out in small groups instead of all at once. This is an illegal ship, you know.” Alice answered. She nodded towards a set up steps leading to a door in the ceiling of the concrete shell of a building. “From what I understand, that door opens up onto the street, and passengers have been stopping at this abandoned warehouse and getting off and on this ship three times a year for ages now and no one’s seen a thing.”

She shrugged. “Or, well, at least that’s what I could gather from everyone rambling on around me.”

“Hi, Eric!” Evie bounced onto his back, wrapped her legs around his waist, and was hanging on for dear life before Eric could manage to duck and keep her off of him. His knees buckled, and it took him all of his strength not to topple over onto the deck.

“Hi, Evie.” He grunted. “So…when are we…going to…get off the boat?”

Alice snorted. “Well, people have been getting off of the boat all morning in groups of four. As you can see, there’s still a way to go before anyone gets to us. That’s why I thought I had time before I had to go wake you up. You must have been tired if you managed to sleep through that awful mess of everyone shuffling around the cabin.”

“And me pokin’ yah!” Evie’s bright blue eyes peered down at him from above his head.

“Wonderful. Thanks for the pokes, I guess.” Eric muttered. Thankfully, Evie dropped off his back at that moment and landed on her feet with a clunk. He leaned his forehead against the icy cold metal rail. “I’ve got no clue what time it is and I can still tell that it’s too early in the morning to wait in line.”

The minutes dragged on as if they were hours. To Eric’s left, Evie rambled on and on about a wonderful recipe she had thought of the night before that combined muffins with pie. To his right, Alice simply gave her creepy stare off into space with the occasional flutter of the eyes, as if something unseen she was looking at had moved. He was on the verge of falling asleep standing up when Alice jabbed him in the side with her elbow and Evie tugged frantically on his fingertips.