by Rob Swigart
Kimiko did not consider herself particularly brave, but as a policeman’s wife she was accustomed to death in its violent forms. She hadn’t thought that the pilot might have died of some contagious disease, so she continued her examination without fear. Probably he was alone on the ship and had either taken ill and died quickly, only having time to lash himself to the wheel, or he had encountered the storm she imagined, had tied himself in his seat, and had a heart attack. She was not a doctor. So the second body surprised her more than the first.
The woman was lying on the floor of the lower deck companionway before the door to the head, one arm outstretched as if she had been reaching for the handle when death overcame her. Her cheek was pressed to the ridged rubber mat. Her dark eyes, too, were open, staring into the wall a few inches from her face.
Now Kimiko felt the first real stabs of fear. Something had killed these two people, and it was too much to expect coincidence to have struck them both down of heart attacks at the same time, particularly in light of the pilot’s relative youth. This woman was quite a bit older, but did not look to Kimiko like the kind of person to have died suddenly of heart disease, though Kimiko had only a vague and, she thought, probably inaccurate idea of what kind of person that might be. But she knew enough not to touch anything else.
She looked around. The walls were plain, metal, gray. She thought there was something smudged on the one by the door, but decided it was normal.
Nothing suggested crime, but two bodies on one ship did suggest something contagious, and that set off alarms. She stepped carefully around the woman’s body and stooped a little to study it without touching.
The woman appeared to be in her mid-fifties. Her long black hair was tied back severely in a French braid held by a tarnished silver clip shaped like a sea horse.
She was stocky. Her outstretched fingers were blunt, the nails cut very short. The first and middle fingers appeared stained yellow by nicotine.
She wore jeans and a denim jacket over a dark purple blouse of some silky synthetic. Her topsiders were worn and scuffed. She seemed to be not a vain woman, but someone who considered herself practical. A no-nonsense woman. Like the pilot above, she was Caucasian.
The next body was not. He was tall for a Polynesian, heavyset as any native Hawaiian, with a broad face and soft flesh. A light splattering of acne scars dusted both thick cheeks.
He was seated in the galley, his head tilted back against the shelf behind a plastic-covered bench. His mouth was open, an expression Kimiko found more obscene than the open eyes of the other bodies. Unlike the others, though, his eyes were closed. For the smallest moment Kimiko thought he might be only sleeping, but there was no rise and fall of breathing, no small pulse in the open, vulnerable throat. He wore shorts and an absurdly loud short-sleeved shirt, unbuttoned to the waist.
His head must have hit the shelf with some force. A can of Comet and two or three small bottles of herbs had fallen on either side of him. The Comet had left a green trail down the bench when it rolled onto the floor.
She moved through an open bulkhead and found the doors to the staterooms. One by one she opened them and looked inside.
The first two were empty, the bunks carefully made, the small lavatory sinks clean and empty. In the third a toothbrush lay on the sink beside an open tube of Colgate. A metal hanger clicked against the door as she opened it. It held a plain white cotton dress and a belt of red leather. The small closet contained a suitcase and a pitifully small collection of women’s clothes. They were not the kind of clothes the middle-aged woman beside the bathroom would have worn.
Kimiko passed through several more chambers before she found her in the engine room, across from the body of a thin older man. Both were bent uncomfortably over the open hatch to the engine compartment. A young woman barely out of her teens, she looked only a few years older than Kimiko’s daughter Kiki, and would have been pretty if she weren’t so dirty and dressed in such baggy, unattractive shorts. Her tank top had once been white but now was streaked with oil and grease. Her fingernails were black. Her face, what Kimiko could see of it through the mass of tangled hair that hid it, was plain, the lips cracked and chapped. The skin on her shoulder was either peeling or red where it had been burned. She was the kind of person who would never tan, just burn and peel.
By contrast, the man’s skin was weathered almost mahogany. His face was deeply lined, his thin gray hair cropped short. His nautical cap sat a few feet away on the floorboards, and had left its white line on his forehead where the tan stopped abruptly.
He was lying on his side, his legs twisted under him, as if he had been felled abruptly by a sudden blow. Kimiko could see no signs of violence, though, only the same relaxed, indifferent blankness as all the other faces.
She moved on to the cargo bay toward the stem. She saw a dozen or so cardboard boxes stacked against the outer walls, which left a narrow aisle down the middle with two metal bulkhead doors at the other end of the room. The floor was a bare metal grid. Kimiko could hear the soft splash of bilge beneath it as the ship rolled very gently back and forth with the waves. Soon now the tide would lift her off the sand and she would have to do something to secure the ship.
She tried the first door and found behind it an equipment closet that contained two fire extinguishers and a mop.
The other door resisted her efforts to open it. She pulled a couple of times, hesitated, then tugged once more. The hinges creaked as they gave, and a heavy-set black man fell out into her arms. Instinctively she clutched at him, catching him under the arms, but his weight and the surprise threw her backwards off balance. His body landed on top of her.
If she hadn’t been contaminated by now, this would do it. Panic seized her, and she struggled hopelessly with the man in her arms; he seemed to be tugging at her. She thought for a moment it must be like this to drown, to be pulled down.
She gasped in pain and caught herself. His weight was awful on top of her, but she took a deep breath and rolled him gently sideways, what she should have done before. Her tenderness seemed empty since he was as dead as the others, but some deeply ingrained fastidiousness in the presence of death lent her strength.
She stood up, breathing hard, wiping her hands unconsciously on her rust-streaked thighs. Even lying on his back, she could see he was large but not fat. He must have been an athlete, a football player, with that thick neck and those powerful arms and legs. She figured he had not played in some time: There was a layer of soft tissue over the hard muscle beneath. His jeans were clean and well worn, his shirt new. It was molded to his powerful torso as if a size too small for him.
His body showed the first signs of violence: One cheek was bruised, the eye above it swollen nearly shut. Other than the bruise, though, he looked just like the others, as empty of expression and as dead.
She peered into the closet. There she saw the drawing, a crude human skull chalked on the metal wall. The chalk was streaked, as if someone had rubbed out other drawings. A prank, she thought. That’s all.
The man was far too heavy to move, so she left him there. She could feel now the soft lift of the tide and climbed back to the pilot house to see if there was any way to start the ship, move it back out into the cove and anchor it.
The pilot had not moved. His eyes were still open, staring into green cane fields above the narrow cliff over the beach. The fly had gone. Kimiko stood beside the body and looked in dismay at the instruments and switches on the console before him. There should be a key or something to turn, but she could not find it. This was no motorboat, but a real ship. She had no idea how to start it up. Besides, the girl and the older man below had been working on the engine, so most likely it had broken down. She left the pilothouse and moved along the deck toward the bow. At least she could lower the anchor and keep the ship from drifting any further before she left to report the derelict.
She inched past the lifeboat hanging from its davits on the port side. There should be one on the starboar
d side, but the rope ladder she had used trailed down it and she had seen no lifeboat. Another mystery.
Ocean Mother lifted off the sand and began to drift almost imperceptibly back out to sea. To the south astern was nothing but the Pacific, although if everything was favorable and they were extremely fortunate they might eventually reach Tahiti. She wasn’t sure about the currents and winds, but whatever they were, it was a long way to land.
The metal railings were scuffed and tarnished. She trailed her finger along them, wondering how much time she had left before whatever had killed the crew got her. The worn metal was warm under her hand and glowed in the late-afternoon sunlight slanting across the low black volcanic torment of the cape to her left as she moved forward. A few of the perpetual clouds that shrouded the crater atop Waialeale tumbled the orange light like huge friendly puppies over the green slopes. She could see few buildings far away against the slopes— the island seemed nearly uninhabited. It might have been a thousand years ago, except for the incongruous body she tripped over on the forward deck as she walked, bemused by the evening. This time she let out a brief shriek of surprise as she threw her hand out to catch the rail.
She saw half of him in the pilothouse— only one foot and calf lay across her path to trip her. But as she fell forward she caught a look at the rest of him. He was dead as the others.
She realized now that she was barefoot, dressed only in a black bikini, in the presence of more death than she had seen in one place before. She crouched beside the final body, and from this low angle could see the livid splotch of blood pooled in his cheek where it pressed the deck. She also felt the uncomfortable heat of the metal decking, the itch of salt drying on her bare skin, the sharp flakes of rust on her legs and arms, the aura of fear she trailed behind her like a cloud of pestilence.
He must have been the captain, the skipper, whatever they called him. It was there in his casual uniform, in the look of command that no longer animated his face, in the hat that lay a few feet away, rolled to the edge of the anchor port. It was there in the pistol he wore in a holster on his belt.
Crouching there beside him she found something poignant in the way his hand lay, palm up, the wiry fingers gently curled, as if he had been holding something very delicate and had just let it go. As if someone had just taken it from him.
The other hand was trapped underneath him. His shoe, not the one on the foot stretched out toward the side, but the one from the foot tucked up, had come off and rested an inch or so away. His socks were black, a sharp contrast to the white shoes.
This detail too seemed heartbreakingly poignant, but Kimiko kept her face impassive. This did not seem like a time to fall apart over a shoe, especially since she was barely keeping her own sense of panic in check.
She looked up. The ship had drifted away from the beach and was nearly parallel to the end of the cape. It was time to take action, or she would drift too far out to sea for the anchor to hold, and nearly too far to swim back. She scuttled forward.
The anchor was wound up on its chain. She examined the winch for a moment or two, peered down through the hole where the chain disappeared, and could clearly see the top of the anchor snugged up against the side.
She pulled on the winch’s lever. For a moment, nothing happened. Then with a startlingly loud roar, the anchor fell away and splashed into the water. The chain followed like a demented snake down a small mammal’s burrow. It clattered past her feet and she had to jump back.
After a few moments the slithering chain slowed, sagged, and stopped. Should she reel it back in, make the boat a little tighter? She turned the winch handle, but as soon as she let go, the chain unrolled back out again as the ship’s bulk pulled at it. She realized she had to apply the brake once she had it where she wanted it to secure it.
The sea was calm, the tide gentle. It might not stay that way. Kimiko moved to the other side and released the other anchor. Once it was secure, she thought it would be safe to leave the ship with its awful cargo.
She edged past the captain, now plunged into gloom as the sun sank behind the low rocks to port. The shore was only a hundred feet or so away. The captain’s white shoe was tinged a bloody red by the setting sun.
Perhaps the healing salt would wash away the horror. With one last look behind, Kimiko turned and dived cleanly into the ocean.
TWO
FIRE IN THE SEA
The sea was fearfully alive, frenzied.
What looked like some mythical animal made of whorls and loops, of mounds and rolling pseudopodia, of tentacles that groped bluntly along the tortured bottom, seemed to boil with an awful, demented, impossible growth. As it rolled, it twisted inside out, heaving, groaning, subsiding, and rising again.
From time to time, sheets of blue fire crackled over its surface, as if discharging electrical power over the writhing skin of the beast, as if it were dying, over and over again beneath the pressure of the water. Rings of the blue light boiled across the surface, fluttered away as the skin rolled under and turned dark, only to flash again, in jagged ripples that flashed like lightning.
The heat was appalling, but the pressure was even more so as the beast advanced, pushing all animal life before it into panicked flight. Seaweed and anemones, anchored where they were, vanished slowly into the beast’s hot maw, consumed by its voracious, unstoppable hunger.
Chazz backed away as the hot waves pushed at him. He could see, deep inside the electric blue of the shimmering lightning, a deep red glow, the eye of Satan glowering out of his rage.
The beast stretched out of sight along the coastal shelf in both directions, reaching out its arms to lap at stony mounts or coral growth, to encircle and engulf.
To his left the beast had died with a long wheezing sigh, and Chazz kicked over that direction. He let himself sink down toward the dying beast’s back, where the skin had already turned black and rounded, though he could still feel the heat radiating from it.
It was smooth like bowel, with hummocky billows on the surface, and rounded into yard-wide pillow shapes. Inside, perhaps, it was still living, but the heat was dying fast, and soon this would be merely the new sterile bottom of the sea, and then the life would move back.
The volcanic vent erupted suddenly to the north with a scream of renewed rage, and the water boiled up again as the molten rock touched it. It shimmered once more with instant steam turned blue this deep where the light is leached of all but its most aggressive reds and yellows. Steam discharged once more over the molten stone in sheets and flares of actinic light. Again Chazz backed away.
The other two divers, Jack Wellburn and Sy Eckerling, drifted a few meters away, watching him. Jack held the underwater camcorder. They were at sixty feet, only a quarter mile from shore, off the southwest coast of the big island of Hawaii, examining the volcanic eruption at close hand. Chazz had been collecting marine plant specimens that had moved back into the previous lava flows in the past couple of years, curious about the effects on plant DNA of such strange conditions. Sy, his temporary graduate assistant, was helping him collect.
He gestured and Sy kicked over to him. Twenty feet below them the sea bottom was undisturbed, its sudden plain of smooth sand broken only by a scattered forest of slender green-tinted eels stretched upright from their burrows and drifting gently back and forth with the currents. Even this close the eels were barely visible in the murky light since their pale color matched the light at this depth. Chazz tilted head down and kicked toward the sandy plain below.
There was little other life at this depth. From time to time, a bland-colored wrasse swam by as if it were off course. A few stalks of pale seaweed grew down here, and Chazz collected a couple of specimens. As he handed them to the younger of his two companions, a sudden roar behind him made him spin abruptly.
The lava face shoreward was splitting open vertically, small fragments of ancient lava shot away from the destruction, one or two hissing past Chazz to vanish in the gloom. Inside the lipless mouth of the
split, the thick ooze of lava rose, welled out, and began to slide down the vertical surface, roaring and hissing. Again blue steam writhed over the pillowed surfaces as the lava oozed, rolling and turning black.
A small motion below the falling lava caught his eye. An immature octopus had panicked. One of its tentacles was snared in a rock cleft. The lava was spilling down above it, and its tentacles were twining around one another, pushing against the rock. Its burrow was visible behind it, with the small semicircle of carefully placed stones before its entrance jittering in the sudden shaking as the fracture in the lava face widened, tumbling more chunks of black fluffy rock onto the symmetrical arrangement.
Chazz dove swiftly toward the creature, reached out his arm and allowed it to curl its tentacles around his forearm and wrist. He gently worked to ease the trapped tentacle free, glancing up frequently as the glowing lava oozed toward him. One of the suckers had caught its edge against a sharp outcropping, and he was having difficulty releasing it. The frightened creature struggled against him as well.
He could feel the heat against his back and neck. Soon he would have to abandon the octopus to the lava flow. He squeezed the tentacle and milked it backwards from the cleft, kicking awkwardly to the side. Suddenly it popped free and wrapped around his other wrist in a convulsive grasp.
With his hands bound together by the panicky creature, Chazz kicked violently away from the face. A large viscous drop of rapidly cooling lava fell behind him.
When he reached the other two he saw they were shaking oddly. It took him a moment to realize they were laughing. He held up both his hands, bound together by writhing tentacles, and smiled around his regulator. Very gently then he began to unwind the tentacles, but it seemed as soon as he got two free, one of them wrapped itself around his arm again. It was a bit like trying to free himself from chewing gum. Soon his two companions were pounding each other on the shoulder, doubled over with underwater laughter. Bubbles burst out and rose, expanding in irregular clumps.