The sun beat down with a merciless uncaring on the little, lightly covered boat as its aging engine sputtered uselessly, pushing it, inch by inch, towards its final goal.
It's time to face facts, the Skipper thought to himself as he ambled towards the supply cabinet.
The aforementioned cabinet had three old-school hand-smithed locks, each made separately with three different keys. Each of those keys, at journey's start, had been given to a different crewmember. The Skipper had one, the Engineer had another, and the Sergeant had a third.
Until they ate him.
He had died of sunstroke and dehydration. If it weren't for the fact that he hadn't any water in his body for the last three days, he would have been moaning with fever. Instead, as the life left his eyes, fading from inflamed feverishness to gray, cool apathy, and finally to the glossy stare of death, his mouth had remained open in a silent scream, drier than dust. He hadn't even had the energy to close it.
So, out of mercy, on the fourth day, they relieved him of his submachine gun, shot him twice in the head, and then proceeded to clumsily butcher his body with the imprecision of the delirious and dehydrated. They fed the punters on board with what little meat they were able to carve from the Sergeant's bones. Where it came from was perhaps the ultimate elephant in the room, an unspeakable crime in which every man, woman, and child aboard that boat were made complicit in by each bite of the meat. The tension hanging in the air that day had spoken of cruel acceptance, and a general spirit of if we have to, you might be next on the menu. Time to start cutting the straws...
So, those facts:
They had thirty-six liters of water. Or, well, up until the Sergeant had taken ill, they had had thirty-six liters of water. They had wasted twenty-six of their precious bottles on him, hoping for a miraculous recovery. Instead, he had taken twenty-six liters of water with him to the grave. Now, with ten left, the survivors were placing capped water bottles in the most sunlit areas of the boat, hoping to distill a few drops from the salty ocean air. It might be possible to make their ten liters last, but they would have to abolish the double ration for the kids, a line that the Sergeant, Engineer, and Skipper had all agreed they wouldn't cross. Funny, how the sea makes you change your mind, no matter how stubborn you may think you are.
Another fact: They were completely out of food, and were living on stashed candy bars and what raw fish they could catch in an umbrella. They had been for a week, and the forced starvation had everyone on edge. The Engineer (who had inherited the worldly possessions of the Skipper) had found himself pointing his submachine gun at the smallest children aboard in defense of his meager rations every other day for the past week.
Perhaps the most shameful and embarassing fact of all, though, was the fact that, though they had packed away an extra fifty-five gallon drum of gasoline, they were nearly dry in terms of fuel. One day, while decanting gas from the drum, the Engineer realized that he had forgotten the funnel. At risk of spilling their precious dinosaur distillates, he rushed back to the supply cabinet. While he was gone, a child mistook the drum's contents for water, and attempted to drink some. He vomited into the tank as his body rejected the substance, and tainted it beyond the ancient outboard's tolerances. The Engineer had gone through three water rations in the exertion of attempting to repair the thing.
They were running out of energy, food, and supplies. Their passengers were dropping like flies, and their moods were, too. It was starting to seem like they would all die, and, in a few months time, their boat would capsize, and there would remain no trace of evidence that the trinity of the Skipper, Engineer, and Sergeant had ever made the valiant effort they had.
They needed a miracle.
They needed the Ark.