Ocean Grave

by Matt Serafini

  Her first thought was to go back down to guest services and see what the resort had on the agenda for tonight. But she spotted Guillaume and Jean-Philippe in the lounge. They’d moved up to the actual bar and were deep in conversation with a young Hispanic couple. She hurried out into the humidity.

  She passed the pool, tennis courts, and even the beachfront cabanas. The beach was unique, a long jetty that reached out through the ocean like an arm, capped by a balled fist. A bar and rounded patio sat on that fist, overlooking the bay.

  The beach was filled with couples. Sara goose-stepped them and twisted her shoulders around the waiters who made endless return trips, bringing frozen drinks to patrons who scarcely tipped. She noted Guillaume’s advice and wished she had someone to share it with.

  She found a patch of sand that was mostly clear, and she got close enough to the water so that she could keep her ankles submerged, thinking that would cool her off while she closed her eyes and tried to sort her thoughts.

  It was there among the pleasant and ambient beach chatter that Sara closed her eyes and slept.

  ***

  She awoke to a scream. A dozen screams, really. Sara sprung up into a sitting position and rubbed the gooseflesh on her forearms while she fought to recover her bearings.

  It was dark now. The beach had thinned considerably. What little crowd remained stood gathered in the shallows, shrieking over whatever commotion was happening beyond them.

  Another scream. The on-lookers scattered, jumping clear of something. The sudden motion startled Sara into standing.

  The shadow of a woman wobbled down the center of the jetty. Her feet scraped through sand as she walked. Two crooked lines were engraved on beach behind her. As she neared the bar, the ambient light there found her, brought her body into detail.

  The woman was nude, two-toned. Dark skin with blacker bruises across her chest and stomach. She spoke in deep wheezes and little spittles of blood rained into the sand. She continued to shamble as the people on the patio began scattering in panic, some even diving into the water.

  She reached the ocean and the resort light lost her. The night swallowed her whole. As she vanished, an indecipherable cry in her native tongue united the beach in stunned silence.

  They stood listening to the sound of a gentle breaststroke that carried the woman from the shallows. Every so often, they heard her scream. A repeated phrase that made Sara wish like hell she spoke Malagasy.

  People on the jetty tried to figure out who got touched by the woman’s spittle, and the denials were growing desperately angry. Sara was getting ready to retreat when the worst scream she’d ever heard plunged the whole place back into silence.

  Complete terror rushed in off the winds, swooping through the souls of every tourist. That horrible noise somehow continued even though nobody’s lungs could hold that much air. The scream was wet and swirled with madness because there was laughter in it too. Relief. It seemed to go on forever, until it didn’t, leaving everyone there listening to the benign sound of ebbing water lapping somewhere in the dark beyond.

  ***

  Sara got back to her room three hours later, opened the door and found Blake sitting there, hat in hand, looking ready to give an apology for the ages.

  She rolled her eyes at the sight. Of course he’d show up now. After she spent the last two hours talking to authorities. Everyone’s story was in sync: A woman from the village who suffered from respiratory plague had slipped past the resort gates and marched straight for the water.

  Given her disease, nobody had wanted to stop her.

  Because of that, sixty people were in quarantine. Sara would’ve been number sixty-one, except that security cameras showed her far enough away from the action the entire time. Couldn’t have been in contact with the woman’s highly contagious spittle.

  Nobody knew why this woman would carelessly risk the lives of so many innocent people, though everyone agreed on what had been her final word. The twisted way in which she’d said it.

  “Angatra.”

  “I heard what happened,” Blake said, bringing her back to an equally depressing reality.

  The hairs on the back of Sara’s neck tingled. Her first instinct was to go to him, throw herself around his shoulders and cry. For the horrible sight she’d witnessed. For all the stress he’d given her. She needed release, but as she watched him stare at her toes, unable or unwilling to lift his eyes any higher, her needs folded into anger.

  “Nice talk, husband,” she growled.

  “I screwed up.” His gaze landed on the whiskey glass atop the bed table and he had the balls, the actual balls, to look indignant about it.

  “Tell me how,” Sara said. “How’d you screw up?”

  Blake didn’t want to tell her. He tried sidestepping the topic by asking about tonight’s chaos.

  Sara refused. She stood her ground and dressed him down to the bone.

  “This made sense in my head,” Blake said. “Now, as I try and articulate it...”

  “You’ve been gone for two days.”

  A crowd rolled past their door, moving down the hallway in a stampede. Somebody threw an elbow against the door. The group laughed hysterically, chanting, “Shots! Shots! Shots!”

  Blake lunged for Sara, trying to throw his arms around her as if he could simply hug his way out of this. She shoved him back with a growl so ferocious it surprised even her. “Not until you tell me where you’ve been. You owe me that.”

  Blake’s attention went back to her feet. “I was afraid to hear no,” he said.

  “You’re gearing up to hear fuck off.”

  Blake accepted that bitter pill with a grave nod. “If you had said no straight away,” he said, “I wouldn’t have been able to refrain from at least trying.”

  It hurt Sara to hear this. Her husband had secrets because he had no confidence in his partner.

  “I’ll tell you,” Blake said. “Please sit down with me and you’ll hear every word.”

  “If I don’t like it, you can sleep in the bar for all I care. That’s the condition.”

  “Fair.”

  Sara went to the whiskey and poured a glass, slammed it back and lifted an eyebrow that dared him to say anything about it.

  Blake ignored the bait. “The burning man,” he said, and then got to his knees, professional groveler that he was. He watched Sara pour a second drink and sip the glass.

  He was a frightened dog and he’d better have a good goddamn reason for playing this card. Because the night in question, the night of the burning man, had been bad.

  She’d never seen anyone more broken than he’d been then.

  She found him sitting at the kitchen table in the early hours, a zombie at the tail end of a twelve-hour shift. His eyes glistened like gasoline-soaked charcoal and he stared out at the treetops visible through their dining room window.

  The world around them had been silent, save for the ticking wall clock. She counted the ticks out of discomfort and got well over one thousand before he spoke.

  When he did, his words were so soft she might’ve imagined them.

  “Saw a man die tonight.”

  That wasn’t unusual for an EMT, but his one-thousand-yard stare suggested this was different. When he finally worked up the courage to turn his head, streaks of tears had cut a clean swath straight down through his soot-stained face.

  The story was horrific. His unit had responded to a call where somebody had lapsed into unconsciousness. It was a hot summer night and the air was humid enough to stick to your skin. A large amount of brownouts lined the Maine seaboard because everyone and their neighbor had air conditioners blasting.

  Blake and his partner trudged up four flights of stairs in pitch darkness, and as they neared the apartment in question, the air became gas station bitter. The front door was ajar and inside they found a man rocking in a recliner, soaked to the bone in gasoline and trying to light matches by striking them against wooden teeth that so far had failed to catch
.

  A dead man lay crumpled at his feet, two fresh smoked bullet holes drilled through his brain. A six-shot revolver lay discarded on the floor, tossed aside because it had served its purpose.

  “Looking,” the laughing man told Blake. “But not finding.” In his free hand were several pages of yellow parchment. “Let it burn.”

  Something about the man compelled Blake forward. He snatched the papers from the jaws of annihilation as the laughing man’s match caught, transforming him into a human bonfire.

  And while Blake didn’t know what had possessed him to risk everything in that moment, Sara knew now what a fool she’d been to pretend he hadn’t been searching for answers this entire time.

  All those nights he’d wake up screaming, visions of molten flesh staining his eyes. All the ways Sara tried to soothe his mind. All of those struggles, and Blake Jovish had been working the angles without her.

  “You bastard,” Sara said.

  Blake ignored it. He reached underneath the bed and slid a small cloth wrap out from underneath it. “I’m chasing it,” he said and unfurled several piss yellow papers, displaying them on top of the bed comforter like sacred texts. “I should’ve told you, but thought I could get it done faster on my own.”

  “You thought you could come to a foreign country and, what? Follow a treasure map to a pot of gold?”

  “It’s not exactly a map, but I got close, Sara.”

  “Sounds like you came up empty.”

  “For now,” he said. “But I’m still close.”

  “You said that.”

  “A few more days, baby. Shit, I never meant to deceive you.”

  Sara’s laughter was so aggressive it startled him into silence. A sense of humor straight up emboldened by the whiskey sloshing around inside her head. At last, it made sense. Here was the real reason for his silence, humility, and trembling hands.

  “Lemme guess,” she said. “Guy you’re working with is out there cruising around with our down payment. That’s why you’ve got shame in your eyes.”

  “If I’m right about this, none of that will matter.”

  “Pretty big if,” Sara said.

  Blake couldn’t afford to get into the weeds with her. He lifted the largest of four documents, dangling it in her face like the answer was obvious.

  “I’m going to find this,” he said.

  It would’ve been easier to swallow her husband having an affair with some island native, because this was bullshit. “I don’t know what that is,” she said.

  “It’s what the burning man died for that night,” he said, and his face winced at the memory. “We’re going to have a home on the coast in every state.” Blake took a deep breath. Then he took another and held it there for good measure before giving her the spiel. Oddly rehearsed. One she didn’t care to hear.

  Her husband was persistent, but the details of the story incensed her. Pirate gold. Lost loves. Hidden treasure. This is the crap that had occupied his thoughts?

  She had to give it to Blake. He was right. She would’ve shot this down with the quickness, because who believed in buried treasure anymore?

  She wondered what Guillaume and Jean-Philippe might say about this. Their sudden appearance in her thoughts turned her blood to ice.

  “Who else knows you’re here?” she asked.

  “The guide I’ve been paying to take me around the island. Why?”

  “And all the people you’ve been asking along the way?”

  “Yes,” Blake said. “I guess.”

  Sara swallowed the whiskey. “Word’s getting around.”

  “Shit, Sara,” he said. “In my head, this was going to be my gift to you. I was going to deliver something that nobody in modern history can give. To be able to come through that door and tell you this day truly was the beginning of the rest of your life.”

  “We just got married,” Sara said. “That was the first day of the rest of my life. It was four days ago.”

  Blake waved that away because he was eager to reach the end of this rainbow. “This is different,” he said. “This is a life where we don’t have to suffer at the hands of the system. We can have beach houses, fast cars, give our children the future most people only dream about. The whole thing. We deserve that.”

  There was a knock at the door. Blake turned from salesman to scarecrow.

  Sara turned and knew she had to answer it. Knew who was there before she looked.

  Guillaume. A spirit conjured by mere thought. He haunted the peephole with a grim smile. Her first instinct was to hush Blake, but he hadn’t said anything since the knock. He hadn’t even moved.

  Sara thought about opening the door to the end of its bolted chain. This timing wasn’t coincidental. Guillaume and Jean-Philippe weren’t interested in cheering her up any more than getting her in the sack.

  Stupid Sara, she thought. You’re not this naïve.

  “I see your shadow in front of the hole, you know,” Guillaume said. Gone was the flirtatious attitude and pleasant softness in his face. At this angle, the light sharpened his jutting cheekbones into knives.

  “I think you’re a little early,” Sara told him.

  Blake took point beside her. He reached for the knob, twisted it—

  And Guillaume flung the door open. The chain braced, leaving the two men glaring.

  “Who’s this?” Blake said.

  “A friend.” Guillaume didn’t bother to smile. “Who would like very much to come inside.”

  “It’s late,” Blake said and started to close the door.

  Guillaume’s shoe was wedged inside the jamb. “Sara?”

  “It’s late,” she agreed.

  Guillaume frowned at the rejection, angled his face so that he could see over their shoulders. “Is there nothing I can say to make you reconsider? Three friends and a bottle of wine at the bar? On me?”

  “It’s. Late,” Sara said.

  “Too late, I suppose.” Guillaume gave Sara a small frown and walked off.

  Blake closed the door and pulled his shirt off, tossing it aside and dropping onto the bed like all was forgiven and this was just another night on vacation.

  “I think we’d better go home,” Sara said.

  “Soon.”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Why don’t we get up extra early and pack.”

  “Good.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Because we’re headed out on the ocean tomorrow.” He rolled back over so their eyes could meet. “Sara, I want you out there with me.”

  “I don’t get a say? You’ve already made the decision.”

  “My guy, Kahega, is making the arrangements. Will you give me a few days? It’s where we’ve got to go. To finish this.”

  Sara watched him roll over and bury his face in the pillows. A moment later, he was snoring.

  She poured another whiskey, desperate to quell the drumming in her heart.

  She wasn’t going to sleep tonight.

  Too anxious.

  She only stared at the door, fearing the man beyond it would be back.

  Eight

  Zane killed the motor and dropped anchor. He stripped and reached for the crumpled diving suit on the floor behind him.

  “How long you need?” Lullo slid a plate of body armor over his chest and loaded the AK-47, certain that trouble was coming. Already on edge from it.

  “Thirty minutes, I hope.” Zane didn’t have the heart to tell Lullo that pirates would turn him inside out before he could fire off a single shot. Lullo had fancied himself Zane’s protector since they were kids.

  The mainland was a black splotch on the horizon line. Zane had never been one for maps, just eyeballs. He stared at the distant landmass and flashed his thumb up, squinting so that his overlong fingernail fit neatly into the rounded dome of Maromokotro’s peak.

  It wasn’t exact, but damn close.

  With his gear assembled and his body stuffed inside the constricting body suit, Zane popped his mouth and placed the bre
athing apparatus inside. He gave Lullo a supportive tap on the back.

  Zane balanced himself on the rail and dropped toward the water. The moonlight reached down a few kilometers so dark blue became a gradient of deeper blacks. Soon he was paddling through impenetrable onyx.

  He flicked on his light once the world around him grew so dark and weightless that he might’ve been paddling through space.

  A pair of butterfly fish darted through his beam. Zane grinned as wide as he could with the breather in his mouth. Theirs was an important sight and he knew his sense of direction hadn’t failed. Butterfly fish fed on coral polyps, and so he knew there was coral here.

  Red coral, specifically.

  A quick sweep of the floor proved that Zane had already harvested this shelf. It was nothing but nervous fish and uneven terrain. He was the only one who knew about this spot, discovered through a stroke of miserable luck. Most coral hunters stuck to the reefs, picked them clean because the picking there was easy. Zane never bothered with the obvious places unless he happened to catch the regrowth.

  Tonight, he was going to have to go deeper.

  This was more than just a luxury hunt. Zane needed as much of that red gold as his hands could carry. His daughter was headed off continent to university. His wife gave reminding eyes of that fact every night, weighting their relationship with permanent urgency. When Zane was home for the evening, it wasn’t to relax. It was to sit and strategize how he was going to find more coral.

  Zane hated the globalized world. The Internet squeezed this planet like a tightened belt. Anybody with a computer could buy every single color of coral. And since the Internet’s marketplace was global, the demand was constant. Interested parties scoured every corner of the world for whatever they could sell.

  Everyone praised progress without considering how inconvenient convenience was.

  Zane swam up on the edge of a cliff that dropped so deep it was impossible to see how far down it went. Overhead, the boat’s spotlight resembled a moon.

  Flippered feet wobbled against the edge and Zane took a deep pull on his valve, swallowing a burst of bottled air before dropping through the gloom like a brick.