Hurricane Fever

by Tobias S. Buckell

  But the chain held.

  The other ship, its rudder tangled up in the chain, spun so that it faced the mangroves. Side to side, the Spitfire and the monohulled yacht slammed against each other. Fiberglass shrieked and tore. Crunching sounds shivered through the portside hull of the catamaran as Roo ran up to the bowsprit.

  It was three seconds, and an eternity, before he reached the anchor chain and cut it loose.

  The chain yanked free, a section of it flailing back like a mace and striking him.

  The wind knocked out of him, ribs bruised or possibly worse, Roo fell back into the netting between the catamaran’s hulls. Freed of all restraints both ships spun as they swept toward the mangroves, still locked in their creaking, hull-ripping embrace.

  He needed to get back to the cockpit and use the engines to pull them free. They could spend a night up against the mangrove roots. But not with another ship on top of them, he thought. But Roo struggled to draw a full breath.

  And then, Roo saw the two masts above him strike. Spitfire’s shivered and gonged. But the other ship’s mast had had enough abuse for the night. It just splintered.

  It broke in a half, upper section dropping right for the net.

  Roo scrambled back, machete still in hand and held out like a shield as he got clear.

  This was bad. This was really bad.

  The mast punctured the netting. But Roo was already up and on the port deck. Shattered glass exploded from the front-facing parts of the cabin. One of the spreaders on the mast punctured the port deck.

  Bound together in the embrace of rigging and mast, they all swept into the muck of the mangroves.

  Roo shoved his way along the railing, rabidly chopping with the machete at the debris on deck. The rigging was easy, on his hands and knees he got most of that cut away and thrown over into the now-empty space where the netting had been. Getting the mast was like chopping down a tree, though. He hacked at it for a solid minute, lost in a world of piercing rain, wind that slammed and howled at him, and the steady sounds of violent crunches, until the damn thing parted with a screech.

  Roo slid mast and rigging off the deck and down into the water between the two bows where the netting had once stretched.

  As he pushed the last length of mast away, the other boat slammed into them again. Roo, leaning hard to push debris, fell forward. He grabbed the ruined remains of netting dangling from the deck to stop himself from plunging into the water between the Spitfire’s hulls.

  His feet dangled for a moment, and he strained, trying to pull himself back up on deck. But it was wet, and slippery. Every time he got a good handhold the ships collided, knocking him back down.

  His back ached from all the cutting and shoving. His fingers quivered.

  Maybe, Roo thought, he should let go and spend his strength swimming for the mangroves.

  A hand grabbed his wrist. Roo looked up as Delroy pulled him up onto the deck. The boy had pulled the top part of his survival suit off and was soaking wet, but he’d done that to put on a pair of gecko-finger gloves.

  “I told you to stay in the cockpit!” Roo shouted at him. He grabbed him by the collar of his shirt.

  Delroy held up both gloved hands in reply. “Even this wind couldn’t knock me off the mast if I climbed up with these.”

  Roo pushed him toward the cabin.

  Delroy was right. The bio-mimicry in the gloves kept you stuck hard to anything, as long as you pressed the gloves to the surface in the right way. Delroy was always using them to goof around, climbing the mast to jump off into the water.

  “You need to listen to me,” Roo said in the main cabin. The soaking wet main cabin. The wind blew rain in through the shattered front windows.

  “I could see you in trouble,” Delroy said. “Say what you want; I couldn’t just stand and watch you hanging there.”

  And they didn’t have time to argue further. They were staggering around as the other ship slapped hard against theirs. Roo passed into the cockpit and flicked the engines on.

  In full reverse he scraped and shuddered away from the other boat. Once free, it blundered into the mangroves, and Roo let Spitfire do the same.

  The mangrove roots, though, had give and flexibility. The catamaran bounced off them as the waves shoved them.

  “Pull your suit all the way on,” Roo warned Delroy. “Leave the gloves.”

  And then he ran down into the Spitfire, flicking on lights and destroying his night vision as he looked for leaks. None of the sensors scattered all throughout the bilges were pinging the cockpit with alarms, so that was good.

  Most of the damage looked like it was above the waterline. A puncture here or there. The plastic weaves mixed in the fiberglass on the modern hull had flexed, most of the horrible sounds had come from the other ship.

  Roo let out a deep breath and climbed back up to the cockpit.

  The winds had fallen. The storm, just in the last hour of madness, moving on.

  Then the water alarms started pinging with gentle urgency. In the cockpit a schematic of the ship showed leaks in the port hull, forward and middle.

  “We taking on water?” Delroy asked. “Should we get in the dinghy and head for the mangroves?”

  The catamaran began to automatically pump water out of the bilges. Roo squinted at the readouts.

  They’d spent a night in the mangroves once. Last year. In a full hurricane. Far more windy than this. And it hadn’t been fun. Roo had resented every minute away from the ship.

  “We’re in shallow water, already up against the roots with Spitfire,” he said finally. “Let’s keep the pumps running and stay put. We’ll figure out what to do in the morning, once the storm finishes blowing itself out. Come help me board up the cabin.”

  Even taking on water, the catamaran had a lot of natural flotation built in. It would take more than a few holes to sink the Spitfire.

  7

  The worst of the tropical storm passed. The winds had died back; they’d screamed themselves hoarse.

  Aboard the Spitfire the pumps strained, not built to keep up with this much water. There were two holes punched into the inner part of the port hull, a present from the end of the mast Roo had cut up and shoved overboard. It had gotten trapped in the shallow mud just under the two hulls, one end buried and the other waiting to skewer his boat.

  But all that flotation built into the hull kept the hull buoyant. And the flow of water rushing in had a stabilized a bit.

  “The wind died out,” Delroy noted. “What you want to do?”

  Roo looked out at the harbor. Three yachts lying against the mangroves, and the motorboat half sunk in the mud. The calmed water looked safe.

  “Motor us out into the middle of the inner harbor, and hold the position,” Roo said. “I’ll get the patch kit.”

  Once he came back out from the storage lockers in the starboard hull, Roo found that Delroy had moved them away from the mangroves. It was risky, he thought, as he got into the dinghy with the duffel bag holding the patch kit. By the mangroves, the catamaran couldn’t sink more than a couple feet before grounding. The boat could always be rescued.

  Out here, now, the only thing above the water would be a mast if the ship went all the way down.

  Roo clipped a few emergency lights onto the side of the dinghy and pulled himself along the hulls.

  He unzipped the emergency patch kit, and jammed the nozzle of what looked like a fire extinguisher into the two gashes. When he triggered it, foam gushed in, expanding quickly until it spilled back out of the broken hull and Roo stopped pumping it in.

  The foam hardened up in minutes. Roo knocked at it with his hands, checking to make sure it was solid.

  “How bad is it?” Delroy asked when Roo came back up and slid the door into the cockpit.

  Roo grabbed his shoulders and smiled for the first time in hours. “We still afloat, right?”

  Delroy grimaced, not quite playing along with Roo’s heartiness. But Roo could feel his nephew’
s shoulder’s relax slightly.

  He clapped him on the back of the neck. “It’s calm enough. We have a dinghy we can jump in if she starts to sink. Let’s see if we can get Spitfire up to Independent Boatyard in Brenner Bay.”

  “The patch’ll take it?” Delroy asked, still seeking assurance.

  “I don’t know,” Roo said, honestly. “We won’t know unless we try, and if the patches get knocked loose, we’ll turn back into a harbor and tie up. But I want to get Spitfire out the water. I want to start working to fix her. It might be the wrong decision, but it’s a decision. It’s better than sitting here waiting to see what comes next.”

  He nudged Delroy out of the way and took the wheel, pointing Spitfire out of the inner harbor.

  This time out he didn’t head back out to open water, but stayed between Water Island and Crown Bay, pumps still working at full capacity as they started emptying the bilges instead of struggling to keep up.

  He spent all morning staying close to the coast as he passed Hassel Island and through Charlotte Amalie harbor itself. People were out, checking around. Cars moved along the harbor front road. Dinghies began to leave docks to motor out to anchored boats, concerned owners checking them over.

  Damage on shore didn’t look too bad. Some downed trees. Power lines. Roo noticed some roofs missing solar tiles. The worst of it seemed to be the leaves, stripped bare of the trees. It left the island looking somewhat grayish.

  Then it was past the cheerfully painted pastel-colored condos and the gleaming white hotel complex of Frenchman’s Reef, and farther along the coast, pumps and motors straining, until they reached Brenner’s and navigated through the increasingly browning water into the boatyard.

  Roo greased a few palms ahead of time via e-mails and shuffled money, and by the time they arrived a massive crane on wheels waited by the haul-out slip for them.

  By sunset Spitfire was up on wooden blocks in a corner of the boatyard, batteries all but dead from lack of sun and overuse, dripping water out from around the pieces of now dislodged foam.

  * * *

  An older man, hardly much thicker than the mast of the Spitfire and wearing gray jeans coated in daubs of different-colored paint, approached Roo in the late morning to watch him chipping the last of the foam out of the hull. He folded his arms across his armless shirt after running his hands over a shaved head.

  “Where’s your boy?” the man asked.

  Roo stopped and wiped at sweat with a rag in his shorts. “School.” He’d called an automatic cab to pick Delroy up.

  “The day after a storm like that?”

  Roo stared at the holes in the inner side of the hull. “Wasn’t that bad of a storm for anyone on land,” he said. “We used to them by now, right?”

  The man chuckled. “You know, when I first moved down here as a kid, there were a bunch of wooden-built houses. That’s back when the big hurricanes only hit every five years or so. And when the next one hit, those stick houses just blew away. And for a while, the land would just sit there empty. Then these state-side contractors would show up, get all excited, and build another bunch of wooden houses that would stand a few years. Until the next one hit.”

  The fiberglass guy would be here later this evening. Before he came, Roo needed to scrub down the hull and get all the scum and barnacles blasted off so it was clean enough to paint. He nodded absently as the man continued talking.

  “Eventually the insurance companies stopped insuring anything other than hurricane-ready houses,” the thin man, who introduced himself as Samuel, said. “All bunker houses now. Concrete roofs and concrete walls. Brick if you can afford to ship it. Extra strong tie-downs for your solar panels.”

  “There was a reason people who lived here a while used to build just concrete and storm shutters,” Roo said. Though, he thought bitterly, even building with concrete wouldn’t help much in some situations. Like living too close to the water.

  “Uh huh,” Samuel agreed while eyeing Spitfire’s hull. “Look, you ever try the shark-based bio-paint for your anti-fouling?”

  Roo looked over at him. “No.”

  “You got that old copper-based shit.” Samuel walked over and scraped at a bit of it with a thumb. “It’s soft. Copper stops some of the growth but you still end up having to jump in the water and scrape barnacles off your boat’s bottom every month. I used to like the lead-based bottom paint, much more effective. Illegal up here, though. But a nice, hard paint. Didn’t ablate off too much over time, kept the shit from growing on your hull and slowing you down. But regulations didn’t let us little people have it, even though large shipping companies had their exemptions to put it on their container ships. But the shark paint’s good. Expensive, new to market, but good.”

  Roo eyed the man much the same way he was eyeing Spitfire’s hull. “And you’re selling?”

  Samuel smiled. “You buying?”

  There was a marine supplies store right here near the boatyard. Roo wondered what toes he’d be stepping on here. “What does the bio-paint do for drag?”

  “Oh, bio-paint reduces friction. You’re adding a couple knots to your ship’s speed, as well as keeping the crap that grows on the bottom of your boat off for a couple years. Like owning a whole new ship. I mean, these are real sharkskin cultures, mixed in with the bonding agents. Once you get that coat on and it solidifies, the bottom of your boat is an oceanic creature.”

  This was like buying a joint off the first person you met coming off the plane, Roo thought. Shark paint was military, still not for general sale. Definitely illegal for civilians.

  Not that it stopped offshore factories from producing it and kicking it around marine yards around the world for sailing enthusiasts looking to get more speed out of their ships.

  And it was going to be expensive.

  Roo picked up a hose attached to a power sprayer. “I have to clean off the hull so they can repair the damage,” he said. “When I’m done, you can buy me a beer at the bar and tell me what you think it’ll cost for you to paint that on.” That’d give Roo time to feel the man out a bit more. Make sure he wasn’t getting entrapped. Though the man’s sunburned, scaly face indicated he all but lived here in the scorched, gravely boatyard.

  Samuel’s answer was drowned out in the whine of the compressor and blast of water as Roo started stripping mossy seaweed and barnacles off from below the waterline with each wave of the power sprayer.

  * * *

  No man was truly an island unto himself. But nowadays on a boat you could get pretty damn close. Roo had been sailing around the world aboard a catamaran for long enough to feel fairly comfortable as a modern vagabond.

  There was a 3-D printer and a supply of plastic and metal raw feed for it. He could build basic parts for the ship. Emergency sealant foam took care of most quick emergencies, like the puncture they’d taken. The watermaker used reverse osmosis to create drinkable water. Solar panels along the cabin top, and extras that folded out of the davits on the back and on the top of the mast, meant that they were usually well charged up.

  Some cruisers wandering around the world had small meat stills along with their refrigerators. Steaks grown inside by feeding microbes seawater, which then laid down and reproduced cloned meat from some long-lost original sample.

  But those machines broke down too much, and Roo wasn’t good at keeping them going. Better to just find a port of call and buy what you needed. He wasn’t going to go through the hassle of trying to turn the netting area in the front of the catamaran into some sort of square garden, or dabble in aquaponics.

  He was just too damn lazy for that shit.

  But he liked knowing he could pull up the sail, with a larder full of a few months of canned goods and frozen foods, and head out where his whim took him.

  This summer, Delroy and he were supposed to sail south. Down through the Caribbean to see Martinique. And then a long stretch out in the Atlantic to get all the way to South America. The great cities down there were something
Delroy should experience.

  But the boy’d been struggling with classes. That was the main reason Roo’d sent him back to school right away after the storm, instead of asking him to help get the boat ready over the last few days.

  They fell into a rhythm. School for Delroy and work on the boat for Roo. Delroy helped paint the hull when he got back, which was tricky business. Laying down lattice for the bio-paint to adhere to as it slowly bonded with the hull rewarded patience and precise fingers.

  Later in the week, the two of them worried over tracking another powerful storm brewing in the Atlantic, but this one headed for Florida.

  There was always a bit of guilt about being relieved the storm was off to hit someone else. But at least state-siders could still use vehicles to retreat along the highways and wait out the storm.

  Roo had thrown himself into refitting the ship, and dropped into bed each night tired. Bone-deep weary.

  And, he knew, ignoring the data hanging on the chain around his neck.

  I’m not ignoring you, Zee, he thought. I just can’t face it all just yet. He needed to get everything sat back in place, shipshape, before he could take on the heavy weight of figuring out what was in the damn tree frog drive. He’d charged in too quickly in Tortola, instead of playing it safe. That left him making things up in the field.

  If the person had been less worried about public violence, the whole scene in Road Town could have ended very badly.

  Maybe that was an excuse for his delaying. But Roo had always worked his way sideways toward things.

  And with the tree frog hanging just inside his shirt as he worked, he felt like he still had a piece of his old friend with him. When he really dug into it, he was going to probably have to let it go. Come to terms with Zee being dead.

  Roo had never been good about that sort of stuff.

  * * *

  With Spitfire back in shape and just a few days left in the boatyard for them to relax, Roo made a trip to the Tutu Mall area a couple miles down the road, with an electric Haier hatchback he’d rented for the afternoon, to pick up more deep-frozen food for the catamaran and an extra set of batteries.