Devil Sharks

by Chris Jameson

  Instead, she bent against the rain. Nils saw what she was doing and ducked so she could have an uninterrupted view of the shore. They’d covered about half the distance—still hundreds of yards from shore, but making progress. Cat tried to get a glimpse of some of the debris they’d left on the beach earlier, the coolers and towels and other detritus of the moments before paradise had filled with horror. The rain lay a thick veil across her vision, but finally she spotted something bright green—someone’s towel or T-shirt—and aimed directly for it. The tide had come in and swept much of that debris away. The coolers would be bobbing somewhere in the lagoon now. And the tide kept rising.

  She spotted someone moving on the beach. Dev. A wave of relief went through her. Alex had told them that Alliyah had been murdered by the smugglers—stabbed to death—but they hadn’t been sure what had happened to Dev.

  They were going to make it. She felt it, now. Whether she could get back to the boat and rescue the others remained to be seen, but this group—they were going to reach shore.

  Patrick saw it first—saw it just a moment before it hit them. He pointed, started to shout, and then there came the bump that rattled the dinghy so hard Cat slipped off her perch and the throttle slid from her grasp. The motor coughed and purred and they came nearly to a stop on the water. A wave climbed high and lifted them and the dinghy started to turn sideways, almost parallel to the beach. For a breathless moment, she thought it might overturn them. If they’d been nearer to the shore, it might have.

  Then the wave passed and Cat gripped the throttle, gave it a twist, yanked it sideways. The dinghy roared and jumped toward the beach again. Cat wiped rain from her eyes and thought they must be playing tricks on her. The beach seemed even farther away.

  No. She’d gone slightly off course. Whipping her head around, she caught sight of that green fabric again, and then Dev. He stood on the diminishing fragment of the atoll’s arc and waved his hands in the air. In the gray and the rain he seemed barely a silhouette of himself, but she saw him pointing somewhere off to her left.

  Cat didn’t need to turn to know the shark had returned. Maybe more than one.

  “Go!” Patrick said. “Come on, Cat. Please!”

  Nils reached out and took his husband’s hand, trying to calm him.

  Another bump, softer this time but more insidious. A fin glided right beside them, headed in the same direction, the shark’s body rasping against the side of the dinghy.

  Luisa had gone near catatonic again. Cat stared past her, focused on the shore, not wanting to see the way her friend had closed down. Maniac-bitch Luisa had been terrible, but not as worrisome as this version.

  But then Luisa’s eyes widened. She wasn’t staring out at the lagoon, though. Her shoulders rose and fell with rapid breaths and her brow furrowed as she stared at the floor of the dinghy.

  “No, no, no. Look at this! We’re dead.” She glanced up at Cat, eyes frantic. “We’re dead!”

  Cat knew what she would see when she looked down. She’d already felt the water at her heels and she knew the leaks in their patches had grown worse. They weren’t going to hold. Already she had tried to think ahead and figure out how she might strengthen the patches. She wouldn’t leave Alex and Sami and Nalani—and Isko, even him. She wouldn’t leave them to die, but if the dinghy had started leaking that badly—

  Luisa turned to Patrick. “It’s you! You’re bleeding. Oh, you fucking bastard, you’re bleeding!”

  She started to punch him. Patrick had been shot, but he was still strong and he grabbed her wrists.

  “Luisa, stop!” Nils demanded. He shifted forward in the dinghy and tried to grab at her again.

  Cat started shouting and cursing at them. Patrick gave her a look of protest—he was clearly not to blame—but Luisa kept struggling. She tore herself free of his grip and stumbled backward. Nils lunged for her and caught her arm, yanking her forward so that she splashed to her knees in the thin layer of water that had seeped in. Her eyes were wide, and for a few seconds she couldn’t do anything but repeat, “Jesus, God,” over and over.

  “Lu, what the hell?” Cat shouted at her.

  Luisa snapped her head up. With a savage scowl, she scooped water from inside the boat and splashed it in Cat’s face. Cat sputtered and reached up to wipe the saltwater from her eyes.

  “You nutcase!” Cat barked. “Just sit your ass down, please. We’re practically there.”

  Which was a lie. They were still a ways from the beach, but closing in by the second.

  Luisa splashed her palm in the inch or so of water in the dinghy. “Are you blind? It’s his blood, goddamn it! Patrick’s bleeding.”

  Nils threw up his hands. “We know he’s bleeding. It’s a bullet wound, for Christ’s sake! What do you expect him to do, hold it in?”

  Luisa knelt in the prow beside Patrick, who still sat on the front bench. She pointed at the water again. “He’s bleeding into the boat. The water’s coming in through your seal job and that means it’s also going out. His blood is in the water. Sharks can smell a single drop of blood in the water from miles away. Don’t you get it, he’s drawing them after us!”

  Nils shook his head. “They did this before. It’s the motor. They’re used to preying on people. You know—”

  Another thump, then. The shark hit the side of the dinghy so hard they could hear something crack. They all cried out, then. The dinghy rocked to one side, but she kept the motor revved, kept them leaping the waves toward the beach. The shark seemed to lift the boat on its back, racing alongside them, and then it vanished below, still so deep here. Still too deep.

  “There are more,” Nils said, and Cat whipped around to see two more fins on their left.

  Patrick had gone even paler, and she knew he must be thinking the same thing she was thinking. Luisa might be right.

  “Luisa, sit down,” Cat said.

  One of the other sharks approached. Luisa started screaming. She splashed her hands in the water again.

  “We’re gonna die!” she shouted. “We’re gonna die because of this!”

  The shark rose up out of the water, one dead black eye staring at them, and it hit the side of the dinghy hard. Halfway through Luisa’s resulting scream, another struck from the other side, and the cracking sounded more like splintering.

  All of the holes were small, but the largest—left behind by the shotgun—burst open. Water fountained up from beside a flapping piece of duct tape.

  Luisa screamed in terror, but Cat saw her face twist with rage. Even as Luisa turned toward Patrick she cried out, but she didn’t slow them down. They were still more than a hundred yards out.

  Then Luisa punched Patrick in the face. As he lifted his hands to shield himself from another blow, she slapped them away, then threw herself against him. Sitting too high, one leg useless, Patrick went off kilter, and Luisa saw it. She felt it. Cat could see from the look on her face that what came next was absolutely intentional. With a mighty shove, she pushed Patrick overboard.

  Nils screamed and started to rise. Cat told him to stay down, even as she eased off the throttle. Frozen, she had no idea what to do. Dive in after him? That would be suicide.

  “Get him!” Cat said, but Nils didn’t need to be told.

  This was his husband. Nils screamed and reached out his hand, calling for Patrick to swim. Patrick, with a bullet in his leg, started to do just that. Luisa shouted at Cat, wild-eyed and frantic, not to turn the boat around, but Cat knew she couldn’t live with that. She used the throttle as a tiller, got them turning, circling back the way they’d come. Luisa screamed again and lunged at her, passing through the fountain of water jetting up from the floor of the dinghy. They were taking on water fast, but Cat thought they could still make it—they had to make it.

  Then Luisa clawed at her face. This woman who’d once been among her dearest friends clawed at her face. Luisa’s nails raked her skin and Cat twisted away from her. Luisa shoved her, not off the boat but just to get her
away from the throttle, wanting to control the motor herself. Cat smashed her in the chin with the flat of her palm, punched her in the left breast, and then shifted and kicked her onto her back. Luisa crashed onto the bench where Nils had been sitting. The jet of water flooding in splashed all over her.

  Nils screamed, still reaching for the water.

  Cat turned to see a huge wave rolling toward them, understood immediately that they’d gone sideways again. Parallel to the beach. Parallel to the massive wave coming at them. Then she saw the blood spreading out across the wave and Patrick in the water, flailing, trying to swim while a shark tore at his leg. A second shark came in so fast it was like a blur. Its jaws closed on his torso, just below his flailing arms, and then that huge wave passed over Patrick and the sharks and washed his blood toward them all.

  The dinghy overturned. Cat heard Luisa’s screams even as she plunged into the water. Then the lagoon enveloped her. The power of another wave shunted her forward and she banged her head against the hull of the dinghy. For long seconds she flailed weakly, disoriented, holding her breath by instinct. Then her lips parted and water slid down her throat. Her eyes went wide. The knock on her head had shaken her, but now Cat dragged herself to the surface. She burst up through the waves, coughing hard, and whipped around.

  The dinghy lay half-submerged about a dozen feet away. Luisa clung to it—or tried to, her fingers scrabbling against the hull. She kept turning, looking into the water around her. Luisa had stopped screaming now—too terrified to scream.

  Of Nils and Patrick, the only sign was blood.

  The wind and rain battered her. A massive wave lifted Cat up and lowered her again. In the trough between waves, she spotted a shark. The fin cruised past the sinking dinghy only six feet from Luisa, but her back was turned. Cat could have screamed for her, warned her. She probably should have. She understood that. But she knew it would be pointless.

  Someone burst from the lagoon only seven or eight feet away from her. Cat jerked backward in the water, heart pounding, not as numb as she’d let herself believe.

  Nils saw her. His eyes were full of an anguish Cat thought no one should ever feel.

  “Patrick…,” Nils said, and his expression made clear what had become of his husband.

  “I’m sorry,” Cat said.

  Over at the vanishing dinghy, Luisa screamed—and this was a different sort of scream. This was neither hysteria nor terror. This was pain and shock. The scream lasted only seconds. Cat glanced over just in time to see Luisa dragged beneath the sinking dinghy.

  Nils tried to say something. Blood spilled from his lips. Bubbling.

  A wave crashed over him and rolled him sideways and Cat saw that his left arm had become a ragged stump, a piece of bone jutting out, and an enormous chunk had been taken out of his side.

  Beyond him there were two fins, slicing dispassionately through the water at strange angles, as if the sharks wanted to appear nonchalant. As if they wanted her to think they had no further interest in her bleeding, dying friends. In her.

  You’re in shock, she thought.

  Then it all made sense.

  She ought to have been screaming. Swimming for shore. Terror and a knock on the head had done something to her and her thoughts had a kind of blur to them. Cat turned to look at the shore. A figure stood ankle deep in the water, waving his hands above his head, too scared to come any farther. Her eyes focused and she knew that face.

  Dev. Screaming for her to swim.

  As if from outside herself, Cat noticed that the shore was really not so far away now. No more than a hundred feet. If she swam toward Dev, it might not be long before her feet could touch the bottom. The waves would carry her, crash against her, lift her toward safety.

  She ought to be swimming.

  The water around her warmed with Nils’s blood. Cat glanced at the dinghy as the last of it slipped beneath the water and she saw Luisa’s red hair fanned out on the surface, some portion of her floating there.

  “Oh, Lulu,” Cat whispered to herself.

  A shark surfaced from beneath the shadow of the sunken dinghy. This one did not seem as shy as the others. It glided toward her.

  Almost idly, mostly to stop Dev from shouting at her, Cat began to swim toward shore.

  She didn’t make it.

  * * *

  Alliyah could see Dev. He stood on the sand only sixty or seventy yards away. A gust of wind staggered her, but she planted her feet and refused to fall. Even to go down on one knee right now might be the end for her. In the rain, she turned and looked out at the lagoon. She could see the Kid Galahad in the distance and it was clearly sinking. The boat lay at an angle in the water, its mast out over the waves. Anyone still on board would be sinking along with it.

  With the wind and the rain—and with Dev shouting out across the water—she hadn’t been able to get his attention. Alliyah raised her own voice as loudly as she could, but his attention was elsewhere. As she was wracked with pain and frustration, it took her a few moments to realize that Dev wasn’t shouting across the water at the yacht. He waved his hands back and forth, then beckoned furiously, but his focus wasn’t on the boat.

  Dev was shouting at people who were in the water. Now that she’d seen them, Alliyah couldn’t tear her gaze away. She watched as the sharks toyed with someone. Cat—Alliyah though it must be Cat. At this distance it was hard to be sure, but she saw the fins and she saw the head bobbing on the water as someone—Cat—swam for shore. Alliyah saw a shark bump against her. She caught the ghost of a scream in the midst of the storm and then she saw Cat stop swimming. One of the sharks had gone under, gone deep, and a few seconds later, with Dev still shouting at the water, a shark erupted from the lagoon. It breached like a whale, Cat flailing in its jaws, and then flopped back into the water with her in its teeth. They disappeared together.

  Alliyah couldn’t even cry. All she could do was try not to collapse.

  On the shore, Dev’s arms dropped. He hung his head, for there was nobody else out on the water for him to wave to.

  “Dev!” she called. Barely a rasp. Not a shout or a scream. She lowered her voice, tried to aim his name at him, to push it out of her lungs and make it real and tangible in the midst of the storm. “Dev!”

  He lifted his head, looking hopefully at the water for a moment. Then he seemed to realize where the voice had come from and he glanced to his left. Dev saw her and shouted something. The relief that washed over Alliyah clouded out her more complicated feelings. Dev might be a coward and an asshole, but he was her husband and she needed him now. More than she ever had before.

  Alliyah glanced at her feet.

  Waves crashed in from both directions, the water rising above her knee.

  She stood at the edge of one fragment of Orchid Atoll’s ring. They should have recognized that the rising tide would change the appearance of the atoll dramatically. The larger fragments, like the shrinking island where the Coast Guard station continued to burn and belch smoke into the sky, would stay above water, but some of the fragments were smaller and lower and now the waves crashed over them and they continued to diminish with every wave.

  Alliyah stood at the edge of one fragment. Dev ran toward her along another. He’d remained on the piece of the atoll where they’d picnicked. The water had covered all but the ridge that ran along the spine of that bit of the ring. The gap between the edge of the fragment where Alliyah stood and the one Dev now ran along had been six feet wide and only knee-deep when she’d gone to try to help Alex. Now that gulf was twenty feet wide and the waves from inside and outside of the atoll crashed against each other. The currents were at war in the channel between herself and Dev, but it wasn’t the current she worried about.

  Dev ran toward her. When he was perhaps a dozen yards away, he got his first good glimpse of how wide the gap was, and how turgid the water. He slowed, his footfalls unsure now. Then he glanced out at where the sharks had been moments before. Where her friends had died.
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  “Now,” Alliyah rasped, trying to be heard over the storm. “While they’re busy.”

  Dev took three more steps toward the edge and stared at the water churning in the gap.

  Alliyah smiled at him. My hero, she thought, knowing he would never come to her. Not with the water this wide and this deep. Not with the chance of sharks. She bled from the wounds in her back. Where the knife had gone in, parting flesh and muscle, the pain continued to seethe. She thought of fallen angels having their wings torn off after rebelling against God.

  You flatter yourself, she thought.

  And she jumped.

  It wasn’t much of a jump, really. She threw herself into the water, her body incapable of much more than that. The maelstrom formed by the conflicting currents tugged at her, but the churning ebb and flow somehow balanced. Her legs began to kick. The water had been knee-deep and now it seemed to be over her head. Her toes brushed against coral.

  One arm against her rib cage, she managed to use the other to pull her through the water. Reaching down with her toes, letting herself sink, she pushed off the coral and propelled herself toward the other side. Alliyah tasted blood again, but that might have been her imagination. Or it might have been her wounds, still weeping.

  A wave washed across her face. She sputtered and blinked, keeping that one arm pinned and the other in motion, halfway dog-paddling now.

  Dev knelt on the coral ridge on the other side of the churning gap. His eyes were wide and fearful as he reached a hand out to her. He called out to her encouragingly and she realized she had made progress. Ten feet, which meant she only had ten remaining. She tried to reach down with her feet, but now her toes wouldn’t touch bottom, so she kicked her legs. Every kick dug into her wounds, sending spikes of fresh pain through her.

  Eight feet.

  “Come on, Alli! Swim! You’re so close!” Dev called, and he reached out even farther.

  Six feet. She kept kicking, teeth gritted against the pain the motion caused her, but she lifted her right hand out of the water—the other still pressed to her ribs—and reached for Dev. Their fingers were just a couple of feet apart. With a kind of wonder, she watched their fingers move toward each other.