The tide pulled me back to where I had started. Player one had rolled a six and slid down a snake right back to the beginning. It wouldn’t have surprised me if thousands of feet beneath me, the compacted and crushed hull of the Lord Burringham lay calm in the dark silt. A husk, a skeleton, a thing sucked of life, and cast aside as would a spider to a fly. The same fate was being offered to me. What did it leave behind? A sack of skin or did it cough up the broken dust of our bones? I’d never know the answer. I shouldn’t really care, but right now, to dwell on living and dying seemed my only options.
The oily pancake didn’t turn or change direction, but seemed to breathe in, and gain about a foot in height and roll over itself, surging towards me like an opaque avalanche. The thing didn’t even make a splash. It appeared sluggish, perhaps after feeding its reactions slowed down. I hope. Having been given yet another chance of life after the shark fight, I felt both elated that I’d been granted a few more moments, and drained at the fact my ending was getting dragged out.
I pulled the goggles over my eyes. After a deep breath, panic took over, and I dived down towards the cool embrace of the deep, not wanting to face this monstrosity or become a conscious victim of one of its many probable stomachs.
I couldn’t clamber over the top, nor did I have the time to circle around the creature as it spread its width. The tide was carrying me towards it whether I liked it or not. I could either go under it or straight into its ravenous clutches.
I didn’t need to look back again, for I could see the ominous darkened shadow the thing cast upon the world, where it blocked out the shimmer of the dawn. I thought it’d seemed big on the surface, that was simply the top of its head, the thing had a shapeless body as well, a towering, inverted mountain that I had to swim diagonally away from, away from the surface, away from the ridiculous giant mushroom pancake that had stalked me this past day.
I pulled my arms through treacle, dragged my carcass through a needle eye with a ten tonne weight hanging off my ankles. Defeating death was a slog, but I refused to roll over and be eaten. I wanted to be chased and put this last blast of adrenaline to good use. Death or glory. I wasn’t going to be a sit down and shut up Happy Meal. I’d rather drown before being consumed by that thing. I couldn’t imagine the agony it would cause me. I didn’t want to find out what it did. I only wanted it out of my reality. If I had to go through death to get there, then so be it. I was heading that way anyways, might as well help the process along on my own terms. Though I guessed that if I survived all of this, my nightmares would be filled with this creature until my last sleep.
Something in me said no. Keep fighting, you ballsy idiot.
I don’t know how far I’d dived down, twenty maybe thirty feet. I felt the sides of my skull bulging in every direction; my brains were ready to explode outwards through my ears like boiled worms. With my lungs burning to gasp the fresh sea air that I so selfishly denied from them, I swam beneath, and looked up as the riptide carried me through the thick, deep black. The insidious tower unfurled towards me in a creeping, though deliberate motion, spreading its flanks like a bird of doom as it fell upon its prey. Me.
A bubbling tentacle speared through the water like a burst blood vessel opening up. It slowed and fingered the space around me, wriggling snake-like, dragon-like, tasting the water with short, sharp ticks. I pushed back—kicking out at the nothing that held me fixed above the abyss. I had no grasp, no edge against the pushing nothingness. I had no hand to play but the depleted breath in my lungs, and the roaring ache that burned fiercely through my knackered muscles. I watched as it wound around itself, coiling as if poising to strike. I got a glimpse of the nature of the beast, breezing through the oceans of world, travelling as a house sized jellyfish would; until it hit something solid, where it would coil around, and suck up any sustenance it found.
I gave up on giving up, and kicked diagonal towards the surface, screaming my last breath out in salty flurries of bubbles, breaking through with such force I felt like I’d carry on into the upper atmosphere. Even after a few seconds, not even a minute under water the dawn light felt brighter, stronger. I relished it.
I’d made it to the other side of the beast. The tide carried me away at a gentle pace. I still kicked, powering away in a frantic kick push, kick push to anywhere.
Then I heard the scream. It was human, it wasn’t me, and so it was poetry to my conversation-deprived ears. Then something soft hit me hard and square across the side of my face, exploding stars in my eyes.
As soon as the beseeching shriek rebounded along the surface of my eardrum, I grabbed out at the orange thing that had hit me. Not to pound it or scratch it away from me, but to hold onto it. It wasn’t drooling evil so I assumed it wasn’t the creature, and thus safe to touch. It was something other than the dull limbo of the cold ocean or floating, sentient cancer. Then, before my eyes, the most beautiful vision filled my innermost vision.
A boat.
Long and white, gliding past me and ripping through the waves, penetrating the weird scene like the space shuttle landing during the Jurassic. This shouldn’t be. This wasn’t supposed to happen. I was supposed to die out here. I was sure of it. I wasn’t meant to be saved.
Slowing down, I made out the name on the smooth hull of the Southern Pride. I looped the life preserver around me, pushing my head through like a malnourished gurner. I felt a jarring tug as they pulled me through the water and aboard. I let my legs go limp and gave way to gravity for the first time in a day. It was a struggle. The fear remained that they’d let go and this was all some horrible trick of my own dehydrated mind. I heard voices, high with concern. A happy sigh left my salt chapped lips. I glanced skyward, red clouds bled into each other high above me, mingling with the orange hues of differing altitudes. A tormented sky that promised foul weather eyed us all up hungrily. I closed my eyes waiting for the figment to melt back into the treacherous waves, reality, however, continued.
Hard fingers searched and pinched under my pit for a holding. The water left me in fat, rushing drips as they hoisted me aboard, with a clinging slosh.
I gave in and collapsed to the deck. The firmness of it felt bizarre, as if the structure would lose the bonding of its atoms, and I would be dropped back into the drink. Closing my eyes, I waited for the mirage to end and the Atlantic to flood back over. This was a dream, the most realistic yet. Inwardly, I clapped.
I coughed in their faces. They patted my back.
Congratulations. You’re alive. Here’s a fucking medal.
***
Onboard, I tried to talk, but my vocal cords had withered to jerky. What was left of a man after you’ve taken everything? Just the man.
Someone handed me an open bottle of water. I almost punched them for that sarcastic gesture, then realised I needed it before I could talk. I sank half the bottle before I realised I was gulping it. I’d never known anything so real and pure. I understood how a mythical elixir would feel as the noble knight seeks power before his final battle. So life giving and spirit rousing. The alien sensation of drinking some fresh, cool water grounded me. I knew it was over, I was safe.
“Just sip it,” a caring female American’s voice offered.
I finished the rest, knocking it back with a quick tilt of my head.
“More,” I rasped. I heard footfalls on deck, leaving me.
“Hey, what happened out there, buddy?” an American man asked, his brisk, direct accent told me New York.
My breath refused to come back. I felt as if the joy of being saved wasn’t even real, that I was imagining the whole thing. I fought for a syllable of air at a time through my speechlessness. I smiled, delirious at having been saved.
“I… need… I guess…that we sank … all gone, I ... was ... in ... water.” I tried to explain with denied breath, a definite struggle to get my words out. “I never… knew that… they’d… gone.”
“You’re safe now,” the woman had returned with another bottle of water she p
ushed into my white, puffy fingers, whilst hers unscrewed the cap for me. Her friendly, hospitable lilt took her farther south in the states, Texas maybe. After opening my eyes, I recognized her face from somewhere. She was beautiful even without makeup. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and I detected a few crumbs of sleep in the corner of her bright green eyes. She’d just woken up.
“You’re … the ... Americans?” I asked, still dumbfounded by the sudden turn of fate.
The man and woman nodded in square-jawed unison. I noticed the rest of the crew hanging back behind them, transfixed by my appearance. They looked like models, the lot of them. A tall black man, roughly the same size and shape of a telephone box, stood proud at the helm, the engine chugged along beneath him with a happy putt-putt-putt, his muscles pressing out from his tight black t-shirt as if he were a monument carved from wood.
I looked back at the couple, and I knew in that instant that they were fucking. I could smell it on them. They were Celeste and I from a luckier, less death filled reality. I hated them and the fact they were still living. I wanted to push this grinning dolt off the side and leave him here be eaten, shat out and rot in the depths. I wanted to take his place as king and claim this boat to be own. I was meant to live, to survive, and to win.
I was weak. I couldn’t do a thing. My jealousy of their lives couldn’t be solved by shedding any more blood.
“You’re with Team Britain I take it?”
I nodded, and then squinted at the rising sun in front of us. We headed for its eastern opening eye.
“I was.” I paused for breath, both reviling and bewildered by being on something solid. I looked back west, then back at the dawn glow. “You’re going… the wrong way.”
“We know,” the man answered, his face grave and sullen, “the race has been called off. Adverse weather conditions they tell us. I’m Jerry Everett, captain of the Team USA, this is Tanya Smart. You’re on the Southern Pride .We were lucky to pick you up, there’s nobody else behind us.” He beamed with a whiter than white smile. He looked like a young Tony Stark. Successful, chiselled, with Creatine shoulders and a life done right for a man of adventure.
“The French, the Aussies?” I enquired.
“We can’t reach them on the radio, nobody can,” Tanya revealed, the brightness faded from her face into a grey frown. “The same goes for your guys. I’m sorry. We’ve heard nothing.”
“I thought that we were being tracked by satellite as well? I’m sure that the organisers paid for it from Google Earth. They were going to use the sky shots as a link between segments when the TV show went out. Celeste told me. I remember.”
“They’ve tried, but the signals died on all four boats. They can’t trace them.”
“Four boats?”
Tanya and Jerry looked at each other despairingly. Jerry answered.
“We’ve lost the Italian’s as well. The organisers decided to call it off after they lost them. They said the loss of life was becoming too great at twenty-four missing bodies, well twenty-three now with you safe.”
“No wreckage?”
“None, apart from you,” Tanya responded with a trying smile.
Her humour was lost, though I got where she was coming from. I didn’t smile back. Not from a lack of mirth, but sheer exhaustion.
“We offered to check out the last known positions before they sent the planes out just in case. So here we are.”
“We know the cause, for certain, I mean?” I asked.
Jerry took a deep breath. “They say it was the storm, those ahead got caught in the swells, probably got tipped over…” he broke off and shrugged, not knowing what else to say.
“They’d be wreckage, they’d see it from the air,” I reasoned, glancing out to the rising, falling, and suspicious swells. “They’ve barely been gone a day, is anyone searching for them? I survived, there must be others…”
“They said they’ve checked the last known locations by satellite and found nothing.”
“It’s bullshit!” I spat back with a sudden spurt of energy. The water was doing me good. “We changed course as advised, and the weather was perfectly fine. Hell, we had blue-sky fever above us. It was really nice out. No bad weather to report apart from the storms in the far west. I was swimming. For over an hour! An hour passes and I finally realise something is wrong. I stop. I turn round. The Lord Burringham was gone. I was alone. The weather was still good.”
“I… have no answer for that…” Jerry was clearly unsure of what to say, he hadn’t been in the water; he didn’t know what was going on.
“So, what’s next?” I asked.
Tanya sighed. “You should get some sleep. I bet’cha you didn’t get much in the water?”
“The water may look soft, but it holds many a waiting nightmare. I drifted off once or twice,” I replied sullen and knowing.
She smiled back. “You’re more than welcome to take my bed,” she offered. “You look exhausted.”
Jerry gave me a reassuring pat on the shoulder, and then squeezed with his American death grip.
I imagine he crushed fingers when he shook hands with folk.
“I’ll call the mainland, and let them know we’ve found you.”
I smiled at him and looked around the deck. A flat black box set in the centre of the deck about twenty feet long and raising up about a foot. The old boat had been decked out with solar. A different design to ours, but it cut down on the fuel bill, and the batteries lasted a good while during the grey days. You couldn’t go fast as you could with a traditional motor engine, but you didn’t need it when you’re plodding behind a swimmer. But now, the man mountain behind the wheel had it turned up all the way to cruising speed, at a comfortable eight knots.
The rest of the crew; a pretty, wide eyed young black woman no older than twenty, an old man with a worldly beard, and an Asian man with thick, bare arms hulking out from his vest looked on at me as if I’d dropped from the sky. They were letting Tanya and Jerry do all the talking. Maybe they didn’t want to crowd me. I didn’t really care. I wasn’t in the mood to make friends. I was sure I’d get to know my saviours later.
I quietly thanked them both, nodded to the rest, and then got to my feet, following Tanya below deck.
Below deck was in three sections; a store room, a tiny bathroom, and the living quarters. They each had their own bunk. The kitchen was a foldout table with all the mod cons in miniature form. I noticed an I-Pad set on the table.
“Your internet on?” I asked.
“Of course, always!” Tanya cheerfully responded.
“Mind if I email my parents? I’d rather my mum to hear from me than some official.”
“Sure, does she Skype?”
I smiled. “She does, actually.”
“You know her username?” Tanya asked, booting up the machine.
“Yeah.”
“Sit down,” she said, as the home screen glowed alive, and then tapped on the Skype icon. “I’ll make you some food. We were just about to have breakfast when we found you.”
“Ha. Lucky me.”
Tanya passed me the tablet, and then started to busy herself in the kitchen. I tapped in my username, and then called my parents from my contacts. A pleasant electronic purr vibrated from the device for about thirty seconds before the blue screen slid to the side and my mother’s sleep creased face appeared. Her hair was awry, and her eyes squinted from behind her glasses.
She yelped when she saw it was me.
“Oh darling, you’re okay!” her voice awakened into an explosion of happiness.
“Hey Mum, you okay?” I couldn’t contain my Cheshire cat grin.
“I’m fine, but how are you? They called me yesterday and said your radio was broken.”
“That’s kinda true.”
“What happened, Sam? They said they couldn’t find you.”
“I’m okay. I’m safe now. I’m good, just a bit tired.”
“Is everyone else okay?”
�
��I’ll tell you everything when I get home, but I think they’re gone.”
“What do you mean gone?”
“Is Dad there?”
“He’s taken Milly for a walk.” I imagined my parents Maltese Terrier bouncing around the back field, the dew soaking her raggy fur. I missed my walks with her. I didn’t do it enough. I should have spent more time with my family instead of training. Look where it had got me. I pressed my nail into the end of thumb. Anything to generate sensation and feel alive, I needed confirmation that I was still here, and that this wasn’t all some wicked dream.
“I’m the only one, I think.”
“What do you mean?”
“I was in the water doing my stint, and when I turned, the boat was gone.” I caught Tanya’s gaze catching mine as she listened in. I saw pity as she bit her lip.
She carried on; stirring a pan of rations over the electric stove, the smell of which was starting it hit me. My stomach gurgled in expectation of food.
“Gone? They left you?”
“I don’t think so. They can’t find the boat.”
“It sank?” My mother’s eyes went to the side in that way when something truly surprised her. Her mouth dropped, gaping like a fish. I was sick of fish.
“Yeah, we can’t find them.”
“So where are you now?”
“Another boat picked me up. The Americans. I thought I’d call you first before anyone gave you any bad news.”
“Oh thank you, dear, but no one had told us anything. I suppose no news is good news.”
“Yeah, I suppose.”
“Lindsey’s being round. We’ve been looking at cakes.”
“That doesn’t surprise me. She does love her cakes.”
“Not just any cakes,”’ she smiled coyly, “wedding cakes.”
“Figures. Is she okay?”
“Oh yes, she came for tea last week. She misses you. We all do. Are you going to ring her next?”
“I think I’m going to rest. I’ll call her later. I just wanted you to know I was okay.”
“Okay, sweetie. Your dad will be back soon if you want to talk to him.”
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