The Boat

by Christine Dougherty

  They all went to the rail and stood looking down. Everything was eerie in the moonlight, deserted looking. Well below them, Steve saw movement out in the water and could hear the rumble of the jet ski’s engine…Dave, patrolling.

  “Welcome aboard.”

  The voice came from behind them, soft but strong, full of twisted irony, making them all jump. It was followed by a laugh.

  John Smith emerged from the heavy shadows between them and the door and he held a gun pointed at Maggie.

  “John?” Steve said, his voice full of inquiring confusion. Carl didn’t say anything, only regarded John with caution.

  “Don’t move, any of you.” John said and laughed again and Maggie felt something like a cold hand playing chopsticks on her spine. She shivered involuntarily. Steve put an arm around her.

  “Oh no…no you don’t. None of that stuff, thank you.” He tossed a coil of line to Maggie. She fumbled and it spilled from her hands like a sprung snake. “Clumsy.” John said absently. Then he motioned for Carl and Steve to sit. “Hands behind you to the rails and the lady can tie you. Good solid knots. I’ll be checking, of course.”

  Maggie tied Carl and then Steve, her shock so great that she almost had no feeling in her hands and she kept dropping the line, fumbling the knots.

  “Lady, will you just please…” John’s voice was full of an almost parental frustration–a daddy coaxing a reluctant toddler to eat her peas. Maggie felt a sweep of unreality try and wash over her brain and she fought it.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered, maybe to John, maybe to Steve and Carl; even she wasn’t sure.

  “Good, okay, good enough. Plop right down there and scoot your back to the rail.”

  Maggie did as she was told and the hard rails seemed to brand three horizontal lines across her back from shoulder blades to tailbone. John Smith leaned over her and she closed her eyes at his intimate heat, and new tears slipped from beneath her lashes.

  He tied her wrists and then sat back on his heels and smiled at her and then he saw the tears. He cocked his head.

  “You look sad. How about this…I’ll get you a dog. You can name it and everything. Would that make it better?”

  Maggie’s eyes opened and now that he was close, she could see the shallow scratch that began under his ear and dwindled away by the time it hit his collarbone. It was fresh but beginning to clot. She had a sudden urge to take his pulse…how was his heart? Sluggish? Slowing?

  He smiled and it was the strangest expression she’d ever seen. If you bisected his face at the nose and only saw the smile, it would look like a more or less normal one…possibly just a bit more strained than most. But if you looked from the nose up, just at the eyes, you would see a man who was far away, thinking of nothing, shut off, not home. They were the staring eyes of a catatonic.

  “John.” Carl’s voice, calm and authoritative, just shy of questioning, cut through Maggie’s reverie.

  John turned his dazed stare to Carl, grin widening.

  “John, I can help you,” Carl said. “But you have to let us help everyone else first. John, there are sinkers on board the Flyboy.”

  John’s expression morphed slowly from the grinning mask to a look of surprise so exaggerated that it looked like a caricature of surprise: eyebrows raised, eyes wide and frightened, lips pursed in an ‘o’. “You don’t say!” His voice was laden with the heaviest dose of sarcasm Maggie had ever heard…even that was a caricature of what normal sarcasm sounded like. Then his feature snapped all at once into the easy lines of a man completely comfortable with his circumstances.

  He stood and laughed. “Oh, you’re the psychologist. That’s right. I was going to do that, too. I would have been a good one, you know,” he said absently, looking over the railing. A scream came distantly from far below. “You brought more with you?”

  “Listen, John, we’re in trouble here…I don’t know what this was all about but I don’t care right now. We have to get the sinkers off of Flyboy. Then we’ll get this…whatever you’re doing…figured out.”

  John turned from the rail to regard Steve. “Are you in charge now?”

  Steve glanced to Maggie and Carl in confusion. What was this guy talking about? Carl stared at him hard and moved his head by millimeters left and right…‘no’. Steve looked at John Smith again. A gunshot rang out somewhere close by in the dark, maybe the next deck down. Steve felt his stomach begin to twist itself into an anxious knot.

  “I don’t know what you want. But whatever it is, just take it…whatever you want…and go. Okay? Just go, we won’t stop you. We only want to help everyone else.”

  “Help? Help who?” John asked.

  “Everyone. We want to help everyone!” Steve’s voice was rising in frustration, cycling into anger. “We have to get the sinkers off the ship. They’re just as much a threat to you as they are to everyone else! Why aren’t you getting this? Are you cra–” His mouth snapped shut with sudden understanding, looking into John’s emptily glittering eyes.

  Yeah, he was crazy all right.

  “The sinkers are dangerous,” Steve said, trying to keep his voice calm. He thought if he went point by point, then even this crazy man could follow his logic. Carl could have told him otherwise. “The sinkers are on board. We have to get the sinkers off the boat.”

  “After all the trouble I went to?” John said. He was once again staring into the dark at the decks below, his eyes searching for something.

  “Trouble…?” Steve’s voice trailed off in confusion.

  Heavy footsteps pounded across the deck directly below theirs and John’s face lit with excitement. “Uh oh…that’s one of the men you brought over…he’s–” There was a gunshot, then two, then a third. Maggie jumped at every one. Turning her head, she could just see the deck below. A man was at the railing and he was a black silhouette against the blacker water below. “Ricky, watch out!” Steve bellowed from beside her.

  Ricky glanced up once and then stood with his arms straight out in front of him. Just as another figure entered Maggie’s sightline, Ricky seemed to crumble over onto himself.

  “Gun’s jammed,” Steve said, his voice tight with panic. He began to thrash against his bonds. “Ricky! Ricky! Look out!”

  Ricky began to stand upright but it was too late and the shambling figure was upon him. They struggled together and looked almost like lovers clinched in a passionate embrace, especially as the sinker tilted its head to the side of Ricky’s neck.

  Steve thrashed harder against the rope at his wrists, banging himself back against the railing, still straining to turn and watch as Ricky and his attacker fell to the ground. Maggie could feel the whole deck shiver each time Steve threw himself back. “Ricky!” Steve said again, his voice full of panic and raw, incredulous anger.

  Ricky’s scream ended in an abrupt gurgle. Maggie turned away, facing front again, but she could still hear what went on below. The wet smacking and chewing sounds drifted upwards as if in crystal balloons, filling her with a deep revulsion. She wished she could put her hands over her ears.

  Next to her, Steve had slumped forward, head on his knees. He rolled his head side to side in negation, but still the feasting sounds below went on and on.

  Through the whole thing, Carl had kept his gaze fixed on John’s face, disturbed by what he saw there. A look of pure, happy excitement lit John’s features; he looked like a child seeing Disneyland for the first time. Then the look became one of lascivious interest as Carl heard the bodies hit the deck. When Ricky’s scream was cut off, John had closed his eyes for a brief second, reverential and satisfied. Satisfied. That was how he looked now. Calm and satisfied–like a man who has just come from a vigorous sex session.

  That’s when Carl understood everything.

  “You did it,” Carl said. From the corner of his eye, he could see Steve’s head come up. “You brought Jade over here. Turned her loose. You wanted to see this happen.”

  John looked at Carl and shrugged. “Well,
not exactly,” he said, his voice conveying modesty. “I wasn’t able to just turn her loose; she was too weak, too small. I had to give her an advantage, get the ball rolling, so to speak. So I introduced her to Adam first.” His gaze drifted off, recalling. “It was a good idea. Once Adam was changed, I turned them both loose. That’s when the fun started. You know what sucks, though?” He turned back to Carl. “I thought it would be really cool, being on the boat and all…nowhere for anyone to run, you get me? They’d have to jump ship to get away, but there is a strong aversion to jumping ship…do you think it’s because they’ve lived on Flyboy for two months and are loathe to leave it? Because it has been the safe place? Someone could do a very interesting study on it. But anyway…the problem was that I didn’t get to see a lot of it. There are six decks on this ship! I got to hear everything, that part was great…but I didn’t get to...” He shook his head and now his face was beginning to suffuse with anger. “Once I came up here–to be safer, you know?–there was even less to see. The people from up here poured down to help the ones on the lower decks. If it didn’t happen on the deck right below me, over this rail, then I didn’t get to see it at all!” His laugh was an ugly bark. “I was like ‘Mikey, you fucked this one up!’ and I–”

  “Who’s Mikey?” Carl’s voice, though soft, cut easily into John’s raving.

  John turned to Carl and all the animation dropped out of his face in an instant. It made Maggie’s blood run cold; she felt she was looking at a wax replica that had mysteriously replaced the original man. In that instant, she would have sworn there was nothing going on behind those blank eyes.

  “Mikey,” John said, and his voice was flat, devoid of the excitement it had held seconds before. His eyes were unfocused, staring at nothing. Steve was reminded of the deer carcasses that were almost a constant on the sides of the roads in Princeton Township at certain times of the year, their huge eyes glassy in death. “I used to be Mikey,” John said, “but he died in a fire. And then here I was.” His grin surfaced slowly. It was a shark’s grin, his eyes just as black and flat.

  Carl felt a lift and drop in his stomach. Here was something he’d not yet encountered in his practice–a pure sociopath. He’d read the case studies and thought he had a good understanding of the type at least, but now…he remembered a colleague who’d treated a sociopath and he had told Carl that he’d suspected, but then when he’d known for sure it was as though the patient ‘had stepped casually from his man suit, revealing the monster that had been there all along’. The words had chilled Carl at the time and he felt the same chill now, only worse.

  “John…Mikey…could we talk about this? I’d like to help you and–”

  John Smith cut him off with his barking laugh. “Playing at analyzing me, are you?” John squatted in front of Carl. His smile looked very genuine, very warm. “Are you analyzing me, Carl?”

  Carl swallowed, unsure of how to proceed. “I’m just trying to help,” he finally said.

  “Excellent. You’ll go first, then.” He stood, turned and began to pace. Carl gaped at him, feeling stupidly punch-drunk. “Okay, so let me get back to it. The problem. The problem as I see it…well, ha ha! The problem is that I can’t see it! You understand?” He was cycling up again, this time giddy, his voice almost breathy, almost shrieky. “And it all went so fast. Before I knew it, it was pretty much over. That’s when I thought of you people on the other boats. I was just trying to lure a couple of you over here, but you brought so many! Fun! It’s so much fun!” Spittle was flying from between his lips at every word and he was standing on tiptoe like an overexcited three year old. Then his heels crashed back to the deck.

  He turned toward them and was completely calm.

  Maggie felt her head spinning. She couldn’t keep up with this madman’s crazy train of thought.

  “So I made this…” John turned and fished in the small deck box against the back wall of the bridge. Maggie heard the clinking even as he turned back, a long length of heavy chain in his hands. There was a handcuff at each end. “And what I’m going to do is chain you down there, where I can see, and then we’ll wait. Not long, I’m sure, as you can imagine.” He knelt in front of Carl, face lit with excitement. “You’ll be able to fight…really fight, you see?” He held the chain up. “And I’ll get to see it all!”

  Carl felt his stomach trying to drop out of his body as fear coursed through him. He had to get through to this guy, he had to…he opened his mouth but before he knew what was happening, John had reached forward and snapped the cuff and chain around his neck. Carl pulled back sharply but only managed to bang his head on the rail, hard enough to see brief fireworks. The pain was immense.

  “Oops…be careful!” John said and then reached around Carl again. He cut the line at Carl’s hands and then sprung up and away. He produced the gun in the same movement.

  Maggie was sickened by his speed and agility.

  Now John shook the chain that tethered Carl. “Up and at ‘em.” He shook the chain again.

  Carl rolled to his hands and knees, dazed by fear and the knock to his head. His eyes rolled to Maggie’s and, in his distraught gaze, she saw his doom. She surged forward, forgetting her tied hands.

  “Carl!” she said, panicking. She heaved against her bonds again and glared up at John Smith. “Leave him alone! You’re a monster! Let him go, you bastard! You animal!”

  John’s eyes on her were heavy-lidded with an almost sleepy looking excitement. Steve recognized the look, even if Maggie was too distraught to. It was a look of lust.

  “Oh, yeah, nice. Good; that’s very good. You’re next,” John said to Maggie and then yanked Carl’s chain. “Hurry up or I’ll just shoot you and move on to her. She’s very…exciting…to watch.” His eyes slid over Maggie again and she pushed back as though his gaze were a physical touch, redolent with lascivious intent.

  Carl stood and John motioned him forward with the gun. Carl’s eyes rolled back to Maggie again and she began to cry at the dazed fear she saw in the big man’s features. Steve tried to push himself closer to her as John disappeared through the doorway behind Carl.

  As soon as John disappeared through the doorway, Steve began working his hands back and forth against each other, trying to loosen the rope. “Can you turn around? Let me know when you can see them below.”

  Maggie nodded, her eyes huge. “I’m scared.”

  “Me too. Watch down there.” He was sweating and the heat in his wrists was tremendous. He could feel the skin blistering, beginning to abrade. He redoubled his efforts. He was almost past the widest part of his hands. Just a few millimeters of lost skin and a little blood for grease should get me free, he thought.

  “He has…John Smith has a scratch on his neck. I saw it earlier. It looked infected, do you know what I mean?”

  “Is he changing?”

  “Maybe. He looked very pale and his eyes were…I see them,” Maggie said, her voice a quiet breath. “But his back is to us. You’re okay.” She glanced at Steve’s furiously working hands. “He’s attached the other handcuff to the rail. Oh god, Carl is on his knees, he can’t seem to…okay, he’s up, he’s up. Freeze.”

  Steve froze, keeping his gaze directed at the outside back wall of the bridge, trying to concentrate and keep his heart from speeding him straight into a panic. Maggie’s voice came again, a bare whisper in the dark. “Okay…he’s out of my sight. He’s either headed back up or he stayed somewhere down there to…to…watch. Carl is…he’s looking around, is he looking for a weapon? I think so.”

  Steve worked his hands back and forth, back and forth, the rope stretching minutely each time, his skin snagging between the rolling lines and tearing open.

  “He’s testing the strength of the chain, pulling it, but he’s trying to do it quietly. He’s keeping his back to the rail, but he’s looking around again–that’s right, Carl, find something to use as a wea–he sees something, oh god, he sees something, Steve we have to help him. I think there’s…somethi
ng is standing at the other side.” Maggie’s voice dropped below a whisper. Steve felt as though he was hearing her like thoughts in his own mind. He worked his hands. “Be very still, Carl, don’t move, don’t let it see you. I think it’s…it looks like its moving away…oh god, Carl!” Her last word was an abrupt scream and Steve paused, tensing up. Then he heard a bellow from the deck below–Carl. “God, no! No! Fight it, Carl, fight it!” The railing vibrated as Maggie threw herself against it, screaming. In her terror, she didn’t feel it as the railing split the side of her face, opening a gash on her cheekbone. She drummed her feet and kicked involuntarily. “Carl! Carl! Please, god, please, god! Help him, Steve, we have to help him, please god, oh god, it’s eating him! It’s eating him! Oh my jesus, oh my god, no, no, no…” Her screams wound down, dissolving into gulping sobs and now Steve could hear the wet, tearing sounds below. His stomach clenched.

  Then his hand popped free of the rope.

  He stared at it in stunned amazement as though he couldn’t believe it was free; as if it hadn’t seemed really possible. His hand was covered in blood and the skin at his wrist and the base of his thumb was nearly eaten away, but his hands were free. He turned to Maggie and began to untie her bonds.

  She leaned forward over her knees, sobbing.

  “Maggie,” he said, his voice quiet. “Maggie, we’re free…it’s okay, it’s okay, Maggie. Please be quiet. Please, Maggie. It’ll be okay.” He found that his fingers didn’t want to work; they were nearly frozen with pain and incipient panic. A sob found its way into his voice as he fumbled at her hands. “Please, Maggie, please listen for John.”

  She quieted, her breath hitching. “Okay…okay, I’m listening.”

  Steve nodded and glanced at the deck below. Carl lay against the rail, his body shaking as a sinker feasted at his chest. The deck was awash in blood that looked like oil in the moonlight and as Steve watched, two more sinkers shuffled into his sightline, intent on the fresh meal so close by. Steve felt his gorge rise in a bitter lump and he tore his eyes away.