Hurricane Fever

by Tobias S. Buckell

  They’d come close to draining the ship’s battery bank in the storm. And the last few days of clouds hadn’t helped; they were still running a bit low. Last night the virtual talking heads had started chattering about yet another storm that could possibly turn and start coming for the islands. One of three forming up in the overheated middle of the Atlantic.

  Better to get prepared for even worse, everyone said. No breaks this year in the constant summer-long hammering of storms up through the middle of the Caribbean and lower East Coast of the U.S.

  Roo parked the car, picked up a battery in each hand, and walked across the gravel of the boatyard, through the sporadic forest of boat hulls with their masts towering overhead.

  A table saw kicked up a whine in the distance, a bit of vibrato kicking in as it bit metal. Someone else blasted music as they painted a hull.

  Always a handful of people working on hauled-out boats. Other boats were still and quiet, some wrapped in polypropylene. In storage. Waiting out the hurricane season.

  Roo’d gotten used to the rhythm of the boatyard already. He’d been in enough of them.

  So the two men in jeans and shirts off near one of the boats caught his eye.

  Casual wear. But clean clothes. Not covered in paint splatters, barnacle slime, or dust from sanding. No oil or grease.

  Roo kept walking toward the Spitfire. He’d already gotten halfway through the yard. It was a point of no return. He’d keep walking to the boat.

  And maybe they weren’t there for him.

  He thought about the green tree frog drive hanging from his neck, suddenly pressing hard and sharp against his chest. Thought about the man in the floral shirt glaring at Roo as he pulled away from the dock.

  There was a woman waiting by the Spitfire’s stern. Pale-skinned, slightly freckled, blond hair ponytailed back, and wearing a gray pantsuit. She looked a bit flushed in the boatyard’s heat. The air hung still over the mangroves and bay here, and it cooked everything. Worse: it was midday.

  Two bodyguards flanked her.

  They were heavy and serious-looking, but more bouncers than killers. Because killers was the vibe Roo got from the two angular men out in the shade of the ancient Pearson 42 a couple hundred feet away.

  “Hello!” she said, as he approached the boat.

  Roo put the batteries down. “Hello,” he said, warily, looking up at the largest of the two bodyguards. The man could have been in one of those Strongest Man competitions, representing Iceland and picking up massive logs to throw across a field in feats of strength. A real-life Viking.

  The man could break Roo in half with his bare hands.

  “You’re Prudence Jones,” the woman said.

  Roo looked back from the Viking to her. She had, he thought, very sad green eyes.

  “You’re Prudence Jones,” the woman said. She knew it. It wasn’t a question. She’d found what she wanted.

  And nothing had happened. The Viking hadn’t attacked, or done anything. Just stood there, scanning the yard.

  “I’m Zachariah’s sister,” the woman said. “I know you’re the last person he called.”

  Zachariah … Something in Roo wanted to correct her. No one ever called Zee Zachariah. Not that Roo had known of. But that was his first name.

  “There was a lot of encryption on my phone,” Roo said at last, and carefully. “How’d you find out about that call?”

  “I paid a lot of money to Heimdall Incorporated here to crack the last call he made. And find out where. I flew down here the moment they tracked you down, along with two of their bodyguards.”

  Two.

  Roo glanced briefly at the shadows under the chocked hull of the other boat down the yard. The other two men were leaning against the keel, faces in the shadows.

  Well, he thought. She was either lying or hadn’t realized she’d picked up a few extra guests for this meeting.

  “My brother’s dead, Mr. Jones,” she said, her voice quavering slightly, getting his attention back. “My brother’s dead, and of all the people in the world, he called a stranger right before he died. You.”

  “Come on board,” Roo said, picking the batteries up and moving for the stepladder on the back scoop of the port hull.

  The other bodyguard, who had a more Hell’s Angels sort of look going, but cleaned up with a suit and mirrored sunglasses, moved to block him.

  Roo looked incredulous and the woman shook her head. He stepped back while Roo moved up the ladder onto his boat. “Leave the muscle to guard the boat,” Roo told her as he turned and held out a hand.

  She looked dubious, for a second. Then nodded.

  He glanced back and around, then waved her in past the cockpit into the Spitfire.

  “Your brother called to ask me for a favor,” Roo said, closing the door behind her. “He left a message. He was a good friend, not a stranger. I’m sorry to hear he passed, Miss…?”

  “Kit,” she said.

  “Kit Barlow?” Roo asked, making sure of the last name.

  She nodded. “Mr. Jones, I recently got a phone call saying Zachariah died of a hemorrhagic fever. From the CDC. They didn’t let me bury him. He was already cremated, and handed over. I never even got to…” She took a deep breath. “I never even got to see him one last time.”

  Roo pulled a seat cushion off the bench near the table and pushed it up against the side window. All the curtains were already drawn against the sun. A sort of twilight filled the main cabin. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “You’re sorry,” Kit said in a monotone. “The CDC was sorry. Everyone’s sorry. Do you know what I do for a living, Mr. Jones?”

  Roo stopped and looked at her. “What do you do for a living?”

  “I work for an insurance company in Boca Raton. Do you know what the statistical chances of a fit male in Florida dying of hemorrhagic fever are?”

  The bench had a small catch. Roo unsnapped it and opened the lid. The bin under the seat bench was full of emergency supplies. Medical kits, water filtration straws, rope, expanding foam, and whatever else Roo thought might come in handy. “I don’t know,” Roo said.

  “Zachariah traveled a lot. I know he worked, sometimes, for the Caribbean Studies Institute doing research all over … but … he told me once he really worked for the Caribbean Intelligence Group. Mr. Jones, what are you looking for there?”

  Roo pulled out the bright orange revolver, and three cartridges. “Flare gun,” he said mildly.

  “A flare gun?”

  “I don’t usually keep firearms on board. Got a teenager living with me.” He cracked it open and slid a flare in, much like loading a shotgun. “But this’ll have to do.”

  He snapped it back shut, pocketed the other two flare shells, and turned back toward the door.

  8

  Roo glanced out past the cockpit by the door. He couldn’t see the Viking’s long blond hair out there anymore. Nor Mr. Motorcycle and his tattoos.

  Not a good sign.

  “Are you worried about my bodyguards, Mr. Jones?” Kit asked.

  Roo retreated farther back into the dark cabin. “Your brother and I used to work together a long time ago.” He slid over to one of the windows and peeked through a gap in the curtains to scan the yard. “With the CIG. He was calling in a favor. He talk to you much about what-all he used to do for CIG?”

  “No,” Kit said. “He kept me out of it. But … one has imagination.”

  The reason people at CIG recruited agents with no families, or desperate to walk away from their own.

  “We used to work together, a while back.” Roo pulled out his phone and took a quick shot of her face. He set it to run facial analysis, curious to see what it showed up on the public record. “Was a good man.”

  Kit was a pale blob in the darkness of the main cabin out of the corner of his eye. She shifted uncomfortably, but he had her covered just slightly with the flare gun, though it wasn’t too overt. He was still trying to get a good scan of the boatyard.

&n
bsp; Was she a lure? Or an unsuspecting lure? Was this a setup? She sounded, and looked, genuinely upset and curious.

  “Why did you lie to me about the extra bodyguards?” Roo asked.

  “What?”

  “There are four people out there. The two you introduced to me as bodyguards, and two others a few hundred feet back under nearby boats watching us. Who are the other two?” Roo looked at her, the flare gun pointed down at the floor but ready to come up when needed.

  But Kit shook her head, and Roo looked into widening eyes the same color as the varnished teak trim in the cabin.

  Not lying. Or a damn good actress.

  Either way. “Call out to your two bodyguards, let’s get them up in the cockpit,” he decided. “But stay right where you are.”

  She squinted, looking a bit dubious. But she leaned forward a little and called out. “Olafson? Brewer?”

  They didn’t reply.

  She opened her mouth again, but Roo grabbed her arm and pulled her with him. “Follow me,” he whispered.

  He pulled her with him down the stairs into the port hull, past the chart table and Roo’s old flatscreens on hinged arms. “Is it safer here?” Kit asked in a frightened whisper.

  “Nah,” Roo said, shaking his head, dreadlocks tapping the back of his neck. “Hull’s just fiberglass. Won’t stop a bullet. But we’re harder to spot.”

  He walked her back to his cabin and, very, very carefully, shut the wooden door behind them. There was a starboard hull for the men to have to search, and two ends in each hull. There was a decent chance that if they boarded the catamaran, and Roo was betting they were just seconds away from doing just that, they wouldn’t come at this area first.

  There was a hatch on the inner hull here. Catamarans occasionally flipped. And if that happened, unlike a monohull, they pretty much remained upside down. Like a turtle on its back.

  The hatch allowed you to get out when everything was upside down.

  Roo turned the latches that kept it tightly sealed against water and, ever so carefully, quietly, lifted it open, to look out. He listened as footsteps creaked, the sounds of two men trying to stealthily move up the wooden ladder and onto the rear starboard scoop on the back of the hull.

  The two men carefully walked across his cockpit, still trying not to make a sound, but failing. Roo’s ears knew every squeak and creak of the boat.

  He put a finger to his lips and slipped out of the hatch headfirst. In a slow motion somersault Roo kept his hold on the lip of the hatch in the air over the gravel until he had carefully lowered his legs to the ground.

  Once standing he reached up for Kit and helped her down.

  He heard the sliding door open above them as the men entered the main cabin.

  Roo held Kit firmly in place with one hand on her upper arm, the other aiming the flare gun into his cabin.

  A deep breath. Another. A third. He listened to the sound of boots tramping around inside his boat. A sound that curled the corners of his lips with annoyance. They’d be tracking dirt all over his varnished floors.

  They were headed forward, and down into one of the hulls.

  “Now,” Roo said, and yanked at her. She didn’t want to move, though. Roo looked over to the rear of the port hull. Her two bodyguards lay underneath a tarp, hidden from the midday sun in the shade underneath the Spitfire, their faces exposed as the end of it blew slightly up into the air. Their throats had been slit; the blood had pooled under their necks and stained the gravel black.

  “We have to move,” Roo hissed.

  Gravel crunched as she let him pull her along. Roo steered her toward the long keel of a nearby yacht, with patchy gray paint and dried seaweed caking the bottom of its hull.

  They ducked underneath, panting and inhaling the smell of dead ocean as they skirted around the rudder.

  “They’re dead,” Kit murmured, swallowing hard. “Who did that to them? What’s going on?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Those were all good questions. But not for now. Because they’d end up dead, too, Roo figured, or worse, if they didn’t loop out to the parking lot to get out of here. He was breathing heavily now. The adrenaline ramping up, making him focus on random things that his jumpy mind thought important.

  He forced himself to take a slow, deep breath.

  Calm down.

  “Let’s keep moving,” he said. They crossed the yard, ducking from the shadow of one hull to another. “My car’s on the other side of the gates.”

  A tall wire mesh gate ran around the whole boatyard. During the day there were large gates left open so people could drive in and out. And in the parking lot just past the gates: Roo’s rented hatchback. A way out of this messy situation.

  Shadows moved along with them as they ran, but on the other sides of the chocked boats. Boots slapped the gravel hard. Roo, suddenly chilled in the hot sun, glanced over at a nearby hull as a thin man in black boots and gray cargo pants suddenly rounded a rudder.

  He’d assumed that were only just the extra two other people out in the yard here. A stupid mistake, Roo thought, yanking the flare gun up and steadying his aim by resting his right arm in the crook of his left as he skidded to a halt.

  For a moment both men stared at each other.

  Roo pulled the trigger.

  The flare gun kicked, spitting smoke. The flare dazzled the space between them, even in the bright midday, then struck the man in the leg and ricocheted madly off down the yard as he fell over.

  “Go.” Roo grabbed Kit and pulled her along.

  The man rolled on the ground, screaming and trying to shake off the glowing magnesium that was scattered over his pants. Roo carefully reloaded the flare gun as he kept moving.

  He glanced back and saw the man ripping his shirt off to beat the flames out. Pale muscles rippled under intricate tattoo work.

  And then Roo didn’t have time to focus on it. Bullets kicked fragments of gravel up as someone else in the shadows of the boat hulls fired at them.

  “Faster,” Roo snapped. They were in the open, now. Running past the fence toward the parked cars. Metal twanged, the gate getting hit. More dirt hissed, but the worst of it was over. Hard to hit a moving target with a pistol at this range.

  He fired the flare gun back behind him, though, to dazzle and startle.

  They got to the Haier hatchback and yanked the doors open. Roo clicked into drive and stamped the accelerator as they both ducked low. Roo didn’t even close his door, no time for it, just let it slam closed as he took off.

  The back window cracked, safety plastic splintering as a bullet struck it, suddenly opaque with impact veins as Roo ripped them through the gravel and then onto the road.

  He swerved to avoid a sedan that almost hit them dead on and wobbled the hatchback onto the right side of the road, facing traffic for a second. Kit, for the first time, screamed. Her palms were shoved hard against the large sticker on the dashboard with an arrow that said REMEMBER: STAY LEFT IN THE VI!

  Roo glanced up at the rearview mirror. “Shit.”

  “What?”

  “They’re following us.” A sleek, matte-black sports car accelerated out of the yard. The angry grill on the front seemed to sneer as it passed traffic to catch up to them.

  Kit turned around to look at their pursuers. “Mr. Jones?”

  One of the jackbooted men leaned out and started firing at them. “Prudence!” Kit shouted.

  Roo looked down at the flare gun he’d dropped on the floor. Just one round left in his pocket.

  That wasn’t going to do any good right now.

  “Don’t call me that,” he said to Kit. “Call me Roo.”

  He yanked the steering wheel and tore them off the coastal road, heading uphill.

  9

  The rickety hatchback tore up increasingly potholed roads as Roo used his shaky memory of the interior of the island to try to find higher ground.

  Somewhere up here, Roo thought, there was a road that would do the tri
ck. For a moment they got stuck behind a dollar cab trying to chug up the inclined road ahead. Ten or so passengers sat facing one another on benches bolted into the back of the modified pickup truck, an open plastic roof over their heads, groceries and bags at their feet.

  “What are we going to do?” Kit asked, craning to look behind them again.

  The road straightened and Roo zipped around, glancing out of the car to the steep drop just a few feet from the car’s tires. And right behind them came the lean black sports car with its two gunmen.

  Roo almost spun the hatchback out taking another hard turn, down onto worse roads carved into the steep hill. Pocked holes jarred the car. He could see the lower-slung sports car behind them smack even harder against the rough road.

  “Almost there,” Roo said.

  The little Haier hatchback was light, designed specifically for islands or for countries where speeds never got much over thirty or forty miles an hour. And its high wheelbase was meant to handle potholes.

  “Here.” Roo grunted with satisfaction. They zipped through roads where concrete and plasticblock houses on stilts leaned into the hillsides.

  Kids who should have been at school, sitting on steps and liming around, scattered at the pop-pop sounds of gunshots. Roo accelerated the little hatchback as fast as the electric motors could scream.

  “Hold on.”

  The four wheels lost their grip on asphalt as the turn came. It was almost a switchback turn, with a tin-roofed outdoor store selling fruit nestled deep into its leafy elbow. A pair of old, gray-haired rastas with long locks jumped up from their chairs to shout at them.

  Roo slammed the car over a rain gutter at an angle with a shudder and screech, using momentum to bounce over it. Then he pointed the car up the steep, half-dirt road, and climbed.

  They tore uphill again, the hatchback shuddering and wobbling, something in the axle or wheels knocked out of alignment.

  Behind them he could see the sports car try to take the hill as well. But at this speed, and with no warning, it bottomed out even harder on the gutter. Sparks flew, and the chassis screamed as it broke itself on concrete. The car came to a complete stop. They reversed, this time slowly approaching the dip at an angle.