Rising Force

by Wayne Stinnett

  “What happened?”

  “Don’t talk,” she said, aligning her body with mine and wrapping an arm and leg around me. “Just rest. Cory said you’ll be okay.”

  I tried to raise myself up, but pain tore through my right abdomen and I dropped back onto the pillow.

  Everything went black again.

  Whether it was hours or days later, I woke again. I felt stiff, but a little stronger. I was still in my cabin, and it was warm. The sky outside the aft portholes was bright blue, but I couldn’t see the sun. It was close to noon, I guessed. Remembering that I’d hurt my side, I slowly eased myself up against the bulkhead.

  “Kat,” I called out weakly.

  She appeared in the hatchway, wearing cargo pants and a yellow bikini top. The color made her skin appear much darker. Most of her hair was pulled back in a ponytail, but a few strands hung down on either side of her face.

  “Don’t get up,” she ordered, coming toward me. “I’m making breakfast, if you feel like you can eat. Cory said you need to eat.”

  “Coffee?”

  She gently placed a hand on my bare chest and smiled. “Yeah, I’ll get it. But you stay put.”

  When she turned to walk away, I lifted the sheet and looked down. There was a large bandage on the right side of my belly, wrapped around my side. Other than that, I was naked.

  Kat returned carrying my large Force Recon coffee mug. She placed it on the dresser and helped me to a higher sitting position, propping another pillow behind my head and shoulders. She handed me the mug.

  “Thanks,” I said, taking a slow sip.

  “Cory said you need to rest for a couple of days. You were shot. Brayden brought you back.”

  “How bad?” I asked, reaching a hand tentatively behind my back. No bandage there.

  “Brayden said you were underwater when you got shot. What the hell were you doing that close?”

  I gave a half-hearted shrug. “It’s just something I do.”

  “Cory said that the bullet got slowed down by the water and it missed everything except an artery, but you’ll be sore for a few days.”

  “An artery?”

  “You lost a lot of blood and had to have a transfusion.”

  “Cory keeps blood on hand?”

  “Of course not,” she replied, looking down at me. “You now have a little bit of Weber blood flowing through your veins.”

  “Weber blood?”

  She put her hand on my arm and grinned wickedly. “Since we’ve now slept together, I guess you should know my name. Hi, I’m Kathleen Weber.”

  I grinned. “Pleased to meet you, Miss Weber. Hope I didn’t disappoint you, I really don’t remember much.”

  She lightly punched my shoulder. “Nothing happened.”

  “Who took off my clothes?”

  “Cory had to cut off your wetsuit,” she replied, turning toward the hatch. She stopped and turned around. “When we got you aboard, he told me you’d been in the water too long and to make sure you stayed warm, so I took off your shorts and slept next to you.”

  She turned and went to the hatch. “I made pancakes and sausage. Be right back.”

  The flapjacks were good, and I was hungry. When I finished, I felt strong enough to get up. I’d been several feet underwater when Haywood shot me, so the bullet hadn’t penetrated very deeply. Pain is a tolerable thing. It’s merely a warning that something is wrong.

  “Would you mind?” I said, inching toward the edge of the bunk, with the sheet over my lap. “I want to get dressed.”

  Stepping away from the bunk, Kat crossed her arms and smiled brightly. “Oh no. Cory said you gotta stay in bed. Besides, your body’s no secret to me anymore. I examined every inch of you while you were sleeping. Just in case there were other injuries. You have a lot of scars.”

  She looked at me defiantly, and I felt my face flush. She certainly didn’t look like a girl.

  Throwing off the sheet, I swung my legs over the edge and stepped down to the deck. The pain in my side radiated outward like lava. My head began swimming and my knees started to buckle. Kat caught me under one arm and helped me back to the bunk.

  “I couldn’t give you all my blood,” she said, rolling me onto the mattress. “Cory said you’d be light-headed for a day or two.”

  Groaning, I conceded the win and flopped onto my back.

  “Maybe you’d better wait a bit longer, Captain Courageous,” she said, pushing me over and pulling the sheet back up over me.

  For just an instant, my mind went back in time. Four years ago, my late wife had often used such names for me. In my mind, Kat’s face morphed into Alex’s. Other women’s faces came and went. Women who I’d loved or who’d loved me. It wasn’t always mutual.

  “Ahoy,” a woman’s voice called from outside, bringing me back to the present. My eyes focused on Kat’s face.

  “That’s Macie,” she said. “You stay in bed.”

  A moment later I could hear the two women talking up on deck but couldn’t quite make out what they were saying. Then Kat came back into my stateroom, Macie right behind her.

  “Feeling a little better?” Macie asked.

  Did Brayden tell her about shooting Haywood? I wondered.

  “I’ve seen better days,” I replied, placing my empty mug on the dresser.

  “Want more?” Kat asked, hurrying to pick it up.

  “Yeah, thanks.”

  When she left, Macie approached my bunk. “The Bourgeau brothers never returned last night.”

  “They won’t,” I said. “I saw Mayhew on the catamaran.”

  Macie looked down at the deck. “You mumbled that, when we were bringing you aboard last night,” she replied. “David went aboard their boat this morning. He found the turtle shells.”

  “They were the poachers?” I asked, as Kat returned.

  Kat nodded and handed me the mug. “I knew I had a bad feeling about them. We think the killers came across their catamaran and took over somehow.”

  “Did Brayden say what happened after they discovered me?”

  Macie sat on the bench. “He did. He said he had no choice. She was about to shoot you again. Brayden’s not a violent man, Jesse. He’s taking it pretty hard. But we’re a community and we take care of one another. Brayden did what any of us would have done to protect one of our own.”

  One of their own, I thought. I’d come here under subterfuge, disguising myself to get information. In just a few days, I’d changed. Whether it was the people, the slower pace, or the surroundings, I wasn’t sure. Maybe all of that rolled together.

  Brayden had taken another person’s life to protect me. Had he waited just half a second more, I would have killed Haywood, and he wouldn’t be shouldering that burden. I decided that was something I needed to keep to myself. He did what he felt he had to do at the time. He had no way of knowing I had the drop on Haywood and she would have been just as dead had he not fired.

  “She was an evil person,” I said. “All of them were. Where’s Brayden now?”

  “He and David went out to try to find Mark and Cindy’s wrecked boat.”

  “What for?” I asked. “Did anyone call the authorities?”

  “No,” Macie replied, looking down at her feet. “We don’t want to get you into trouble.”

  “They’re going to recover their bodies,” Kat said. “And bring them here.”

  Macie left then. I could see that something was weighing heavily on her mind. And I had a good idea what it was. I’d brought violence to their little island community. Maybe it would have come without my being here, but that was the way Macie saw it.

  “You need to get more rest,” Kat said. “I’ll wake you when they get back, okay?”

  She wasn’t going to take no for an answer, and I knew it. I was tired. I slid down under the sheet an
d closed my eyes. Within minutes, I was asleep. But it wasn’t a restful sleep. The spirits and ghosts of my past visited me. I hadn’t had those dreams in years.

  Waking in a sweat, I could see the sun through the porthole. It was just touching the horizon. Over on the beach, I could see the fire burning. It was much larger than I remembered it being the last few nights.

  I watched as the sun slowly disappeared, closing my eyes to make the same wish I’d made for years. When I reopened them, the sun slipped silently below the horizon without fanfare. There were no conch horns.

  When I tried to sit up, the pain in my side reminded me to move slowly. Easing my feet down, I stood and shuffled toward the dresser at the speed of rock, where I dug out a pair of skivvies and cargo shorts.

  Finn raised his head and whined softly, as if he was concerned about my getting out of bed.

  “I’ll be fine,” I told him.

  I was bending to put my skivvies on, when I heard bare feet slapping on the deck. They came lightly down the companionway, then Kat appeared at the hatch. She was barefoot, wearing a black dress. She had tears in her eyes. She took one look at me and rushed into my arms, sobbing. Looking up, she kissed my lips—softly at first, then with more insistence. I returned the kiss and it became more sensual, as the rising force of her passion overwhelmed both of us, and she urgently pulled me toward the bunk.

  It was early morning when I woke again; not yet light outside. Only half of the moon was visible; the other half was swallowed up by the sea, just beyond the point. A rippling reflection pointed straight at me, as if blaming me for all the world’s sorrows. It would be daylight soon.

  Across the spit, the bonfire from the previous night was still burning earnestly. A solitary figure moved around it, adding more wood to the hungry flames.

  Kat lay next to me, her head on my shoulder and her left arm draped across my chest. She’d told me last night that the bonfire was a funeral pyre for Mark and Cindy Mathis. They had no children, nor any immediate family. The mourners were their adopted cruising family. A coded message had gone out on the net and would be spread to other mourners. As she’d told me about the couple, I’d found myself wishing that I’d met them. They really seemed like nice people.

  Slowly, and with some pain, I managed to extricate myself from the bunk without waking Kat. I looked down at her sweet face in the remnants of the silvery moonlight. Her color was back, and she no longer looked as if she were on the verge of starvation. Nor did she look like a little girl. Maybe age really didn’t matter in the simple act of giving affection and support.

  However, the realist part of my mind harbored no illusions about attempting to build a relationship that spanned generations. On that, I knew Kat agreed. Neither of us was looking for anything more than a permanently temporary sharing of affection, and we both knew it.

  I dressed and made my way up to the pilothouse, set up the coffeemaker, and turned it on. Then I went down to the lower salon, to the guest head. There, I turned on a light and slowly peeled back the bandage, while looking in the mirror.

  Cory had made a diagonal, three-inch incision across the bullet wound, following the lines of the oblique abdominal muscles. The incision looked clean and his sutures nice and straight. I’d add another scar, but this one looked like it was fast on the way to healing.

  Looking up, I studied my face in the mirror. Kat’s blood coursed through my veins and I could see her face in my eyes. She’d given me life and for that, I’d forever be in her debt.

  I was in dire need of a haircut, and the beard was frightening-looking. I kept a pair of shears under the sink for Finn. Like me, he was collecting scars. I’d had to shave off some fur more than a few times, to bandage a cut or barb.

  Opening the box, I clicked the little battery-powered shears on. It hummed quietly. Switching it off, I looked at my reflection in the mirror again. Seeing the same face over and over, a person doesn’t notice the subtle changes. My brown hair had turned kind of a sand color at some point in the last ten years.

  I lifted the hair at my temple. There were some grays, but they mingled with the dark blond of the surrounding hair shafts after an inch and were nearly invisible. If I trimmed my hair to how I wore it as an active duty Marine, what we called a high-and-tight, the gray would show a lot more. But those days were long ago.

  The gray hair didn’t bother me. I was getting older. It’s the reward a man gets for not dying young. Still, I was only in my late forties, with plenty of miles left.

  Deep lines extended from the corners of my eyes. A lifetime spent outdoors, squinting into the sun. My skin was dark and starting to get a bit leathery-looking. I wondered what I’d look like in twenty years. Would I be completely gray, weathered, and wrinkled, like an old cane cutter?

  Right now, my beard was a darker shade of brown than my hair. The gray hairs there were a lot more visible, mostly on either side of my chin, as if my mustache was dripping silver paint.

  I flicked on the clippers and proceeded to remove the man hair. I didn’t have a razor, so a millimeter of stubble was as close to clean shaven as I would get.

  Finished, I went aft to the nav station and powered up the chart plotter and laptop, laying in a course for Tortola. It was eight hundred and fifty nautical miles. At an average five knots, sailing straight through, it would take a hundred and seventy hours, or a full week of non-stop sailing. Even if I didn’t have eleven stitches in my side, I figured that was a bit too much. Autopilots and warning alarms are great, but a solo sailor would only be able to sleep in short fitful naps.

  Stretching the course more southerly and following the string of Bahamian islands down to Turks and Caicos, Hispaniola, and Puerto Rico, would make it nearly a thousand nautical miles. Anchoring at night, I might make seventy miles a day, taking two weeks to reach the British Virgin Islands. I had twenty days; a six-day buffer, sailing easy.

  “What are you doing up?” Kat asked, startling me.

  I turned and closed the laptop. “Restless,” I replied. “I’m not used to being cooped up.”

  She stopped in the middle of the pilothouse. She was wearing another of my tee-shirts. “You shaved.”

  “Not really,” I said. “Just trimmed it to almost nothing with the shears I use to shave Finn whenever he runs through saw palmetto or something.

  “How’s your side?” she asked, going to the galley and pouring two mugs of coffee.

  I accepted the offered mug and took a sip. “I checked it in the mirror. Cory did nice work, it’s healing pretty good.”

  Kat reached up and touched my jaw. “I knew there was a babe magnet under there somewhere.” She sat at the dinette and studied my face. “You’re leaving, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “When?”

  “Today, if Cory thinks I’m able.” Which meant tomorrow if she balked for even a second.

  She sipped at her coffee, looking at me over the brim. “I doubt Cory telling you to rest for a week would change anything.”

  Rising, I walked over and sat across from her. “I have to go.”

  “I know,” she said. “And I’m not gonna try to talk you out of it.” She paused and took another sip. “We’ll see each other again one of these days. I’d offer to help crew, but—”

  “That’d hardly be appropriate,” I blurted out, without thinking.

  Kat smiled. “Baby steps, Jesse. You’ll enter the twenty-first century sooner or later.”

  I started to say something, but she reached across and put a finger to my lips. “I checked the weather right after you got up,” she said. “There’s nothing in the weekly forecast between here and Tortola.”

  An hour later, after Kat and I had shared a hearty breakfast of steak and eggs, Brayden arrived. Kat and I were saying goodbye on the dock while Finn was rollicking on the beach with Bill for the last time.

  �
��You’re leaving?” he asked.

  Kat said she had something to take care of, lifted herself up on her toes, and kissed me on the cheek. “Fair winds and following seas,” she whispered. “Look me up next time you’re in port, sailor.”

  She walked off toward the end of the dock and out of my life.

  “I still say you’re nuts, mate.”

  “You’re probably right,” I said, extending my hand. “I want to thank you for the other night.”

  “No worries,” he said, taking my hand. “We look out for one another. Even after you leave, you’ll still be a part of our little Chub Cay community of misfits.”

  “How are you handling it?”

  He met my gaze and I could see it. Something was missing. “Never done anything like that before,” he said reservedly. “I don’t rightly know how I’m supposed to feel.”

  “You saved my life, Brayden,” I lied. If he had to know he took another person’s life, he had to feel that it was the last resort. “I’m forever in your debt.”

  He looked down at his feet. I could tell he was unaccustomed to someone being obligated to him.

  Finally, he looked up and grinned. “Make it one worth saving, mate.”

  “I will.”

  “Sorry about your Draegor,” he said, clearing his throat. “I put all your other toys back in their boxes and stashed them down in your engine room. You might wanna put them in their proper places, eh?”

  “Thanks again,” I said.

  He extended his hand and I took it, pulling him in for a quick hug.

  “What’s gonna happen with the whirly-bird?”

  “I’ll contact a friend in the states to come and take it back to its home base,” I replied.

  “Gotta say, mate. Gonna be bloody boring without you around. Come back again one of these days, eh?”

  “I will,” I said, then called Finn.

  Brayden helped me throw off the lines and I idled Salty Dog out toward the cut, the sun just peeking over the horizon. As I rounded the point, I could see that it was Macie who was tending to the fire. A huge pile of driftwood lay beside it.