“Pirates.” Cari said out loud, not having heard her voice in so long. It sounded rough and dry but it was better than the constant sound of water hitting the cargo container and now the mysterious sound that started a few days ago and wouldn’t stop. “Or a naval ship.” She said, giving a breath of oxygen to sugar snap peas growing on the container wall, attached by wire.

The doppler sonar device wasn’t picking anything up but it never did with its minimal radius. Sometimes she’d be drifting for miles and see ship debris, huge chunks of them usually, and the radar never picked them up. She could see them coming just by standing on top of the storage container before the sonar would even ping. The random debris would clink against her cargo container vessel and float around it.

Looking at the speakers next to her bed roll inside the red shipping container, that soft groaning coming from them, she wondered if she would ever have nice things ever again, seeing loose wires from devices she had been disassembling and an empty water jar. Home, she asked herself, what did that even mean? Her last “home” was several miles underwater, like 90% of the world’s land masses. Like metal being splashing by sea water the world itself seemed to have corroded away. The people, mostly drowned or fighting each other over essential resources across the waves in their own derelict ships, had been the rust of Earth for so long that Cari was almost relieved when the massive waves came and washed everything away.

Eventually the graphene mesh around the helium balloons, the ones holding her afloat under the two containers, would give out and she might sink to the bottom of the ocean. It was easier than she thought, hooking the containers together with metal piping and securing the balloons underneath, but she knew she couldn’t stay out here forever without any sort of rudder or sail. She was fully prepared to make it last though, using mirrors to capture light and have it shine through the containers to grow the plants. On the left, blue container she used a makeshift campfire to boil water during the night. During the day she would hide out in either container looking at the art she found in other shipping containers or read books and sit in her lawn chair which was not as comfortable as her recliner back in the city, the underwater city.

The speakers that were connected to the waterproof mic trailing her little aimless vessel would occasionally pick up whale songs but the groaning that she heard now didn’t at all sound like those. Every so often the sound would incorporate a loud rhythmic tapping. She let it play, pretending it was just the ocean giving her music to dance to. It was a funny thought but any humor and sense of entertainment were important to her mental fortitude against depression and fear. There was nothing else she truly needed, except maybe a cozier bed and some pillows. Inside, the container looked more like an electrician’s workshop than a bedroom. Of course, there was the store of water jars and garden greenery that lined the walls but everything she found floating in the ocean she would keep them here. Who knows when she would need this stuff, especially if she could communicate with someone out there? She cringed at the idea. She was used to the idea of being alone. It fitted her, she had discovered.

When the sound from the speaker grew low, she went to the open door of the container and looked out, squinting to see if anything stood out. There was only the ocean, spread out in every direction, and a soft gust of wind that beat her thin-skinned face. She turned to her left and checked the metal rigging that connected the second, red storage container to the blue one. Walking on bare feet Cari tiptoed over the pipes and grabbed the central support. It was tight. The water splashed around the balloons. At least it was calm she thought. She was lucky to have the Explorer handheld device that gave her the forecast for any impending storms. There wasn’t much she could do with that information other than to batten down the hatches.

There was nowhere to go even if she did have a rudder. When the world drowned, after she survived and found the shipping containers afloat, she realized how silly it had been when she wished for the world to be washed away and now it had. She would have laughed if she hadn’t been crying. Even at an early age she knew that she could only rely on herself and everyone else would just let her down. Battles between naval forces and pirates broke out over the first several months. This was what led her to hook up the underwater mic to begin with, to give her warning of impending ships, whether good or bad. Shockwaves could be felt for miles and she had only seen the railgun cannons firing in the distance. The heat they emitted vaporized the water around them and sent massive gray clouds in the air. The sinking ships created large amounts of water displacement which pushed her vessel away. Thank god.

It hadn’t been all bad, she told herself in the second container. She set the potato plant on the rim of the container, in the sun, and sighed, looking at the red, embroidered scarf she hung up as art. The other plants, the rosemary and blue grass, were billowing in the breeze in their ceramic planters. They gave her some comfort, some company in this oceanic void. As she sat down on the lawn chair and grabbed the corny romance novel, she had been reading she realized how comforting the underwater sounds had been as well. Sometimes they would soothe her to sleep and give her gentle whispers when she’d wake.

She tried to read but the sounds lingered in her head like a melody she couldn’t forget. Like the sappy romance on the pages, she started to feel the cliche emotions of longing and regret. Ever since he broke up with her every song reminded her of Joseph, making her regret she ever met him at all. Even now, when most of the populace was gone, she thought about her past with him and occasionally would hear a melody in the speakers, most likely an illusion in her head, and think of him. The good times, the bad times, but mostly bad, and the times she spent without him, none of it should matter but something in the back of her mind wouldn’t let it go.

She slammed the book down and walked back over to the blue container. The sounds echoed in the container. This time there was loud creaking like bending wood. When the sounds first started, she had many theories but she knew there was no way to know for sure. Whale songs didn’t sound so guttural and eerie. Whale songs were graceful and noble like the howling of a wolf but these sounds were almost mechanical. Volcanic activity was her next guess, or perhaps some geothermal activity. Her last conclusion, and the one that took her the longest to come to, was that there were groups of submarines traveling back and forth. But this became a scary notion. The idea that people were trapped to live out their existence under the waves, trapped in a tin can. It gave her shivers.

Cari spent the rest of the day laying down, placing her ear next to the speaker. It was like the rumble of thunder or the scraping of a porcelain plate on a countertop, combined with the thumping of a beating heart. The beating heart inside the chest of someone that smelled like cologne. She almost didn’t want to know what it was anymore. She just wanted to listen and let her mind go free. Imagination, she found, was much more enjoyable than reality. A voice, a melody, a hum, a song, a man’s lips, an instrumental symphony, a spinning washing machine, a whistled tune; it seemed to have no end. At least until she fell asleep.

A loud bang woke her up. The speakers blared collisions and explosions that left her heart pounding. Metallic grinding screeched. She leaned back and held her ears, kicking the speakers away. There was something below her vessel, something massive…And she was in danger of colliding with it. She screamed in confusion, trying to get the shrill cacophony of clatter to stop. Falling to her knees she pulled at the wires leading to the door and pulled them off the speakers, stopping the noise. But then she turned towards the door and saw it…

The sounds, the soft humming she had heard over the last few days was not at all anything biological or geothermal. It was indeed entirely manmade. She clenched her fist and approached the half-opened container door. The first thing she noticed was the cavalcade of boats and rafts anchored a half mile from her own raft, possibly hundreds from what she could see. But it was the other massive structure that gave her pause and at first caused her to be apprehensive about approaching. Out in the open water, if it could be considered “open” anymore, there was a gigantic junk heap of metal beams and shattered window panes. Beams, hundreds of them stretching in every direction, were so high that they were practically creating a shielding against the sun to the boats that gathered around the water’s edge, appearing almost like a harbor, except that all the buildings had been demolished. A skyscraper junkyard. It took her several moments to fully realize what had happened. The giant waves that washed the world away had been so strong that they carried the buildings from the cities and sent the mass of buildings west, where they collected like debris on a shoreline, but in this case smashed against a mountain range. The sounds she had been hearing were the lower sections of the junkyard crashing or falling into place.

Through the jumble of metal struts, she could see where several people had taken some of the smaller buildings and attached them to the spider web of metal, or made entirely new ones. She half smiled when she saw that some were made from shipping containers. Like her own ship she suspected that the people didn’t really care if the abodes would last. They were only trying to survive the moment, day to day, and worry about the rest later. She admired that and found herself standing on the edge of the door, her chest out and her hair blowing in the wind. Most of the smaller boats seemed to be amateurs, there were no military vessels and only a handful of larger vessels. Through the latticework of gray, she could see a cruise ship harbored off to the right and a cargo ship further beyond that. Her first instinct was that these people needed help but she froze. This was what she had been trying to avoid for so long. The society that she’d been running from. The society…that was struggling to survive like herself, against terrible, greedy people, against mother nature, and against the lack of resources to sustain life.

A boat with an air fan propelling it was headed in her direction. She thought about the peace and quiet she enjoyed and how she might never have that again. But that wasn’t necessarily true. She would have those moments again but with the pride that she was able to help others. After all they were all trapped on this planet, they were all the same. As the boat came closer, she decided she would join them. Despite the dark and gloomy backdrop of the collapsed buildings she saw that it might be a bright future after all.