The Hike

by Landon Beach

  Using her spear gun, Shannon motioned for him to surface. The man’s head turned slightly to the right as if to get a look at something behind her.

  Two lights were making their way down toward them.

  The man opened the bag and reached inside.

  “Is that a...it’s an explosive charge!” Keller yelled.

  Shannon aimed her speargun at the diver’s center of mass and fired. The spear found its mark, and the diver threw his head back in agony. “Get that bag!” Shannon commanded.

  She watched as Keller swam down to grab it, but the man stuck his hand inside one more time before Keller could get there.

  An explosion erupted from the bag.

  ✽✽✽

  “Chief? Chief, can you hear me?”

  Shannon’s eyes opened. Both of her ears were ringing, and her right leg felt as if the blood inside had been set on fire and a million pins were stabbing her flesh. There was someone on top of her; her mask was off, but the image was blurry. The rest of her body felt cold and clammy.

  Where was she?

  Her left arm was lifted up. A wrapping had been placed around her biceps. A tourniquet? Please, no. She felt a squeeze and started to cry out.

  Her vision returned to her, and she could see that it was not a tourniquet around her arm, but the black canvas wrapping used to take a patient’s blood pressure. A navy corpsman was squeezing the rubber ball at the end of the tube while studying the gauge. She exhaled and looked up into the face of the CDO.

  “Chief? Can you hear me?”

  Her ears continued to ring, but she could make out what he was saying. She said, “Yes, sir, barely.”

  He gave a thankful smile.

  “My ears—”

  “You’re going to be okay,” he said. “We’ve got the base ambulance on its way.”

  “My leg,” she moaned.

  “Our ship’s doc has got it stabilized,” he said. “It’ll need surgery, but you shouldn’t lose it.”

  She tilted her head left and saw other Zumwalt crew members huddled around her. She looked for Keller. Not locating him, she turned her head to the right. Two rigid-hulled inflatable boats were speeding out the mouth of the river and into the Atlantic. The basin’s water lay flat with moonlight shining down, making a silver-mirrored strip across the center. She was on the pier. There had been an explosion. Underwater. Was everyone okay? She locked eyes with the CDO. “The other divers?”

  “They’re in the water, making a sweep. Basically, every available diver in the basin is getting wet, searching.”

  “Keller?” she asked.

  His eyes became moist, and he dropped his head.

  “No,” Shannon said, tearing up.

  He lifted his head back up. “I’m sorry, Chief.”

  She closed her eyes, and the noises around her disappeared as the ringing got louder.

  ✽✽✽

  At the first sound of the base sirens, Marcus had weighed anchor and sped down the coast, leaving the two divers. Clumsy fools were on their own now. Probably fucked it up because they were cold, he thought. Should’ve used some of my local boys. He knew that if they had been the ones diving, then there would not have been any problems. As for him, he was too old to dive now and had survived too long to be caught. If the wealthy men overseas wanted better results, then they needed to start sending him better soldiers.

  Throttling down after ten minutes, he raised a pair of night-vision goggles and scanned the water aft of him. There were two small boats motoring back and forth along the coast just offshore of the base. He was certain that he had not been spotted because they would be giving chase if he had been. However, it didn’t mean that they wouldn’t head this way soon, or that another more powerful vessel wouldn’t emerge from the basin and chase him down. Following the original plan was too risky now. He checked his depth. Almost seventy feet. It would have to do. Cabin cruiser, dinghy, the whole thing was going to the bottom. Of course, this meant a longer swim, but he couldn’t chance getting caught in the dinghy. He shut off the engine and looked down at his round tummy putting a strain on the front of the black wetsuit he was wearing. Even this adult girdle couldn’t fully suck in his fat. He raised a hand to his heart and massaged his chest while looking at the shore dotted with lights, far off in the distance. He felt tightness in his left arm and pulled it away from his chest. Then, he shook his arm up and down to see if the tightness would loosen up. It didn’t. He swallowed.

  Stop it, he told himself. You can make it. Going to get to the beach, take off this body-sized diabetic sock and be at the beach house before dawn. Gonna rest up, fork out some serious cash on a couple of whores tomorrow night, do some blow, and then watch as the two lovelies work their magic on me. Hell. Yeah. Delivering the bad news could wait. Striking their adversary was a virtue, but so was relaxing after putting your ass on the line.

  He went below, set the charges, and quickly emerged from the cabin carrying a pair of fins, a mask, and a hood. Taking one more look with the night-vision goggles, he saw no craft approaching from any direction. He threw the goggles into the sea.

  The hood took some effort to put on as he pulled the neoprene sleeve down over his large head full of thick, curly, gray hair. Once it was on, he felt an annoying pain underneath, and he struggled to reach in and pull both of his ears up as they had folded over on the final yank to get the hood down. Putting the mask over his face, he could now hear his heart beating in his ears and decided that he did not like it one bit. Everything was calm topside as he walked toward the stern. A nagging feeling washed over him. What am I forgetting? A moment later, it finally hit him. Oh, right, the cabin! He turned around and padded back across the deck to the opening next to the helm. He shook his head in annoyance as he closed the fiberglass cabin doors, slid a Master Lock through the metal eyes, and snapped the lock shut. The timer had been set for two minutes.

  Get going already.

  Marcus stepped through the open stern gate and sat on the swim step, putting his fins on. A quick dip of his hand in the ocean told him that this was not going to be a pleasant swim. Fuck it. He stood up, said a prayer, and jumped in.

  The cold water engulfed him, and he thought that this was how it must feel when you are buried alive under an avalanche. His arms and legs felt clumsy, like dead weights that would not listen to the signals his brain was giving them. He turned over onto his back and started kicking to warm up his body. This way, he could also keep an eye on the boat. Smart, he thought. Thirty seconds later, he felt vibrations in the water and watched as the cabin cruiser slowly slipped below the surface. He kicked and watched for another minute and then turned over and started a lazy crawl toward shore.

  He didn’t get far. As if a bolt of lightning entered his left thumb and traveled down an inner expressway to his heart, Marcus jolted upright in the water. Reaching for the heavy and tightening fist-sized section of his chest, as if his touch would relieve the pressure, his eyes became wide behind the tempered glass of his mask. He gasped and then died.

  ✽✽✽

  A month later, a morning jogger would slow to a trot as he approached what he thought was a large clump of seaweed. A minute later, he would be on his knees, vomiting in the sand. Behind him, half-hidden by an entangled mass of seaweed and feeding crabs, would be the hooded head, shoulders, left arm, and upper torso of a diver.

  ✽✽✽

  Chief Petty Officer Allison Shannon blinked her eyes at the roof of the ambulance as it sped toward the base hospital. A female paramedic sat next to her, rubbing her shoulder.

  “You’re going to be fine, Chief. Hang in there. Just a few more turns, and we’re there.”

  Shannon tried to give a smile, but the tears coming out of her eyes betrayed the attempt at positivity and hope. All she could think about was Keller and the fact that he was gone forever.

  I’ll never get in the water again. I swear it.

  Little did she know that the water would call her back…

>   1

  Shelter Harbor, Michigan

  Present Day

  Remington Bradshaw Cranston Jr., the man deemed “Mr. Ordinary” in his senior yearbook, exited the front door of Sunrise-Side Press on a perfect June day, descended two concrete steps, and walked across the dirt parking lot toward the only thing he had left in life that he could count on: his 2010 Ford F-150, nicknamed “Rusty.”

  He’d never previously nicknamed a vehicle in his life, but when one gets divorced at forty-one, one tends to do stupid things like buy a brand-new truck and give it a nickname. And so, he’d taken out a car loan—cash to purchase it? Ha! No way—and settled on a regular cab because Brad Cranston didn’t foresee anyone sitting in the passenger seat, let alone anyone sitting behind him in the extended cab section. His only child had just turned eighteen when he bought Rusty and was on her way to the University of Southern California to study film. A year prior, he had protested, telling her that in four years she would have a fine arts degree that was basically useless. Then, the marriage had tanked, and he had changed his mind: Who in the hell was he to tell her the pathway to success in life? Four years later, she did graduate with a degree and had been accepted to film school to get a graduate degree in screenwriting. Well, she was now twenty-eight, and the current count was three spec scripts sold totaling over a million dollars and two more scripts under consideration. And where was he? A fifty-one-year-old divorcee, walking across a dirt lot toward a ten-year-old pickup, the color of rust, after working for eight hours as an underpaid cover artist for a small Michigan press.

  “Hey, Brad! Hold on a minute.”

  Not now.

  Brad stopped and turned around to see the director of the Sunrise-Side Press, J. Michael Preston, lumbering down the steps, tie bouncing off his gargantuan gut. If there was ever a body type that announced “heart attack imminent,” it was J. Michael Preston’s. Three hundred pounds of pure lard, maintained by a rotating schedule of fast food takeout for lunch and at least a twelve-pack of Miller Lite tallboys each night before going to bed, which Preston bragged about from behind his office throne. His ass crack showed every time he bent over to pick something up from the floor in the office, and he demanded that he be called J. Michael when he was promoted to director after going by his first name, Jerry, for the previous fifteen years.

  Brad had no problem with him. In fact, when Preston was the managing editor at the press and the head of the editorial, design, and production department, he had fought to keep Brad on as the press’s cover artist when the budget had thinned. Behind closed doors, Brad was the only one who could still call Preston “Jerry.”

  Preston arrived at the spot where Brad was standing, halfway across the dirt parking lot. “Jesus Christ, that walk gets longer every day, I swear,” Preston said.

  It was early June, and the temperature still hung around the seventies during the day—hot enough to celebrate the end of another wet, gray Michigan spring but still cold enough to keep most people out of Lake Huron. Sweat beaded on Preston’s large forehead, and the underarm portions of his expensive shirt had massive sweat stains.

  “What can I do for you, Jerry?” Brad said.

  “That’s what I like about you. Always to the point. Always to the,” he pushed a meaty index finger into Brad’s chest, “point.”

  Brad stared at him, then raised both eyebrows.

  “Right,” Preston said. He edged closer as if they were in a crowded room and he wanted to tell Brad something that no one else should hear. “They don’t like the cover for the new book.”

  He knew who they were, the sales and marketing department. Same old small-town press political bullshit. His entire department recognized the limitations of the project. An author named Jody DeWaters from East Lansing had just penned his third novel, completing a trilogy about a fictitious state senator who had been a closet pothead for his two unremarkable terms before rising to power. In book one, The Pot is Boiling, Senator Tiger Aiken shocks the chamber and introduces legislation to legalize marijuana. In book two, Rise of the Memory Eraser, Tiger endures the wrath of Michigan’s governor, but at a heated press conference outside the entrance to his favorite Lansing bar, Tiger says, “If you’re going to kick the tiger in his ass, you better have a plan for dealing with his teeth.” Brad had told Preston that DeWaters had stolen the line from the back cover of Clancy’s Teeth of the Tiger, but Preston let it stand. Eventually, Tiger Aiken strong-arms and bullies other senators into an alliance to get the necessary votes to legalize. And now, in book three, The King of Weed, Tiger celebrates his legislative triumph and then retires to private life. Considering how horrible the books were—Preston mandated that every book the press was publishing be read by each of the press’s thirteen employees—Brad had done all he could with the cover: a smirking Tiger Aiken wearing a dark suit, sitting on a beach chair with a joint in one hand and a book with the Michigan State Seal on its cover in his other hand—cannabis plants sprouting from the jeweled golden crown that Tiger wore over his greasy silver hair. On the back, a polished Jody DeWaters stared out at the hopeful purchaser from behind a mahogany desk in a darkened law office, wearing a suit exactly like his main character’s and sporting a heavy brown beard trimmed to perfection. Brad hated Tiger, but Brad hated Jody more.

  The editorial, design, and production department had been at war with the sales and marketing department since The Pot is Boiling had been acquired by the press’s acquisitions editor five years ago, who had been fired last year after being busted for dealing crystal meth. Why sales and marketing liked the trilogy so much, he didn’t know, and neither did his book design manager, Larry Eckstein. “It’s a dumbass book about some sleazy senator who gets laid at will, smokes up in his Lansing townhouse, and carries a fuckin’ Glock 22 in a shoulder harness under his Brooks Brothers suit jacket,” Larry had said. But Preston had pushed and wanted the three books to be the same high quality as the press’s other acquisitions.

  “Jerry, they’re awful books,” Brad said. “The cover’s fine.”

  Jerry gave his eyes-wide-open shrug that he always offered when he was caught between two disagreeing departments. It said nothing and everything. “They don’t think they can market the book.”

  “Neither does Larry,” said Brad. “Neither do I—no matter what cover we give it. The first two books were flops, and this one will be too.” Brad turned to leave. “Let it die, Jerry.”

  “The books sold well, and you know it,” Preston said.

  Relatively speaking, yes, they had made the press money—a minor miracle in itself. If they hadn’t, there wouldn’t even be a third book. The problem was the competition with the rise of independent authors publishing their books on Amazon. The press had acquired some real talent a few years back—stories with complex characters, a beginning, middle, and end, and some length—at least eighty thousand words. But, with little to no marketing budget and the cost of printing, the books had died a slow death and had not even attained the respectable rank of mid-list. Brad had compared the books to the books published by indies on Amazon. There was no comparison because the indies priced their books so goddamned low. The press was charging $27.95 for the hardcover on its website—there was no e-book or audiobook available, and the paperback wouldn’t be printed for another year. Other than a simple press release that went out to other small presses across the country, the press had arranged for one book signing at the local library and one in the author’s hometown. Both were disasters. No one was paying $27.95 for a hardcover book, and the people who showed up to the library thought that there would be free pizza.

  Additionally, the patrons weren’t there to buy the book, they were there to reserve the library’s only copy. In the end, the author had signed two books: one for his mother—his father didn’t even show up—and one for Brad, who was proud of the cover he had designed. Well, like everything about the book industry, rarely were there answers that made sense. People are people, and they have different tast
es and purchasing patterns. And, quite evidently, the modern consumer was not interested in small press authors, which was why the pompous sonofabitch Jody DeWaters was an anomaly. Why the Michigan faithful had lined up behind Jody was beyond him. Preston had even waved fan letters in front of the entire press and read snippets like, “Reading Jody DeWaters is like catching up with an old friend by the fire in the midst of a Michigan snowstorm,” and, “I don’t trust many authors, but I trust Jody. His stewardship of Tiger Akins’s career is an unparalleled literary feat.” Then, Preston had shown a video of master storyteller Jody at a book talk prior to a signing: “Tiger is my ethical compass—” (sympathetic nods of deep understanding from attendees) “—and sometimes—” (self-depreciatory grin) “—he gets into trouble,” (laughter from the audience and a few coffee cups raised in salute). “Actually, I’ve been throwing around the idea of taking that old warhorse all the way to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and ploppin’ his ass behind the Resolute desk—” (crowd cheers)—"Maybe even have President Aiken—” (raises eyebrows) “—God, that’s got a nice sound to it—give that famous Howard Dean yell from 2004 the first time he signs an executive order,” (room explodes in laughter, and one brave soul does his best Dean scream, “Yeeaaaaa!”). “Remember, my friends, Michigan was the last state he mentioned before he talked about going to D.C. to—” (raises voice) “—take back The White House!” (awestruck audience claps in recognition of his genius). Brad and Larry couldn’t get to the bar fast enough that afternoon. Pitchers had been consumed, and expletives had been slung across the pool table in reference to trusted and valued author Jody DeWaters.

  “They don’t like—”

  “What?” Brad said, turning back around.

  “The crown,” Preston said.

  “For crying out loud, the title is The King of Weed!”

  “Okay, okay,” Preston said, taking a step back. “All I’m asking is that you take a look at it when you get back in on Monday.”