“There are other options.”
She sat looking at her hands in her lap and biting down on her lip.
“You mean like…drinking urine, right?”
I tried to keep myself from laughing out loud, but a bit of a snicker escaped me.
“Only in movies, babe,” I said, shaking my head again. “Urine is about as salty as sea water, and a lot more gross.”
Raine smiled and nodded.
“I’m rather glad to hear that,” she said. “What do we do if we run out of fresh water then?”
“Long before we run out, the first thing that will happen you will stop eating, whether there is food or not. Digestion takes a lot of water, especially to digest proteins. You can have carbs a little longer.”
“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.