Patient Blue

Yasuhiro Fujita, his wife Yoko, her eighty year old Mother Kazumi and the Fujitas’ five young children, awoke early on the floating island they now called home. At first they had called it, this floating pile of crap, but now just home. Their robust wooden house was leaning at an ever more alarming angle but still somehow it remained standing, a testament to robust Japanese structural engineering. The family had lived in the house for more than ten years, but on the island for far less than that, though Yasuhiro had lost track of quite how long it actually was. But in that time, there had been many strange portents, weird pulsating pastel lights in the sky, strange auroras, fierce heat and the deep swells of Tsunami’s, that Yasuhiro knew would grow to a devastating size as they approached the coast.

Yasuhiro also knew that something very wrong had happened to the world, worse even than the earthquake and Tsunami that had washed them away and left them here so many months ago.

The Fujita’s shared their island with the debris of many other houses that had been less robustly built, the rotting corpses of their owners still inside. Wrecked cars, tractors, boats and vast piles of decaying detritus that had once made up their hometown, a thriving fishing village on the north east coast of Japan. The island was approximately mid Pacific now, having been swept out to sea in the great deluge of 2011 and was gradually but steadily heading towards Hawaii, revolving slowly in the current as it went.

The Fujitas were not the only living things on the floating island. There was a large pack of vicious feral dogs and about one thousand rats. Mostly, the dogs were satisfied, as with great stoicism were the Fujitas, with catching and eating the rats for sustenance and survival. The dogs, but not the Fujitas, also feasted on the rotting human corpses, but these were now so foul and putrid that even the dogs had their stomachs turned. The dogs sometimes circled the family house and looked with ravenous eyes at the two legged food within. Earlier, after they had been afloat for about six months, the dogs had attacked the only other human inhabitant, poor old Mister Nakura. He had survived the atom bombing of Nagasaki and the great Tsunami, but could not survive an attack by six large dogs. His screams as they tore him apart and began eating him alive froze the blood.

The Fujitas, were for good reason, very wary of the pack and whenever Yasuhiro left their listing wooden house to collect rainwater to drink from the spread tarpaulin, or to catch a rat for dinner with the wire trap he had made, he always carried his ancient shotgun loaded with its one and only cartridge.

This morning though, Yasuhiro was feeling optimistic. He surveyed the island which he had originally estimated at approximately two miles long by one mile wide, though getting smaller by the day as occasionally chunks would break off and either float away or sink. He was certain that with the steady eastward progress they would either one day soon bump into Hawaii, or attract enough attention to get rescued as they neared land. Although to be honest, they hadn’t seen any aircraft or ships for ages. Though he didn’t consider that to be a particularly bad sign, and was sure they would see more as they neared civilization.

As if to confirm his optimism, Yasuhiro looked up and could see a bright pinpoint of light in the dawn sky. He called his family to him and said, ‘look in the sky a morning star this is a lucky sign.’ The whole family stood by the doorway of the house,keeping a wary eye out for any dogs and watched in awe as the lucky morning star grew bigger and brighter. They were all still feeling lucky as the meteorite, its previously benign trajectory into deep space, altered catastrophically by the last burst of heat and cosmic energy exerted by Fiery showing off, smashed into the floating island with the force of three Hydrogen bombs. The island disintegrated, scattered and sank along with the Fujitas, the dog pack and one thousand rats.

The people of Hawaii and some of the smaller Pacific island groups, those still alive, were in fact the lucky ones that morning as the floating island of debris absorbed most of the strike and the resulting Tsunami that followed was no more than a ripple on the already devastated beaches as it washed ashore.