by Joe McKinney
“Hey, don’t get upset, man. I’m just saying. I mean, I signed up for this because I trust you and your dad all the way. I respect you both. You’re capable. But . . . your brother, I mean, let’s face it, Anthony, he’s a drunk. I like him and all, but I don’t want him to—”
“It’s not open for discussion, Jesse. He’s in this with us. He’s my brother, and I’m not gonna leave him out of the money.”
“I don’t begrudge him the money,” Jesse said. “That’s not what I’m driving at. He gets a share just like the rest of us. I’m cool with that. I’m just saying that, you know, he might not be able to do his part in the operation. That’s all I’m saying.”
“He’ll do fine. Now drop it.”
Jesse looked at him, then nodded slowly.
“Sure,” he said. “Okay.”
A short distance away they came upon the ruins of a trailer park. The destruction they had seen up to that point was incredible, though most of it was still underwater, only the tops of buildings and cars still visible. The worst of it was left up to the imagination. But here, in this trailer park, which was at a slightly higher elevation than most of the surrounding area, the water had for the most part receded, and what was left was far worse than either of them had imagined.
They rose to their feet as the water grew shallow, clipped their flippers to their belts between their legs, and walked through knee-high water, their heads on swivels as they scanned the wrecked trailer park. Several trailers were on their sides, tumbled together like a child’s blocks. Some had been crushed by fallen trees. One was split nearly in half by a shrimp boat. Everywhere they looked they saw endless piles of lumber and roof shingles. There wasn’t an unbroken window anywhere. Tree limbs and leaves and brown sea plants clung to everything.
And there were bodies. Lots of bodies.
Mud had poured into one of the trailers and set like a lava flow. Inside, Anthony saw a mother with her arms still wrapped around a child, partially buried in the muck that had invaded their living room.
Anthony looked upon the desolate scene, on the ruined trailers, the toys and lawn chairs and the piles of gray, warped lumber, the broken windows so like eyes, the damp piles of leaves covering everything, and he felt a depression more complete than any he had previously thought possible. Those who knew him would never confuse Anthony for a deep thinker. Since boyhood, when he discovered that both baseball and girls came easily for him, little else occupied his thoughts. And so it surprised him to encounter such a complex web of feeling upon seeing this place. He was at once sickened and afraid. Turning his head slowly from one wrecked trailer to the next he wondered what it was that was making him feel such dread, such loneliness, but he couldn’t quite grasp it. Whatever it was that rattled him so was just out of reach, an elusive thing, a half-resolved and ominous it lurking in the darkness, waiting to put a cold hand upon his shoulder.
With a tightness in his chest and the stench of rot and open sewage seeping into his mask, he continued on.
They saw a mangy black dog eating something that looked like a human leg.
Anthony didn’t hesitate.
He raised his rifle and dropped the animal with a single shot. And after the sound of that shot died away, Anthony stood watching the animal. Despite all he had seen, this was the worst. That dog, eating on a human corpse, somehow brought everything into focus, and in that instant he realized that he was witnessing the end of the first half of his life. Just like that.
Abruptly, a strange memory surfaced in his mind. He remembered riding in his father’s boat out on Clear Lake as a kid, the wind in his hair as he reached over the side, slapping the spray while his dad taught Brent to steer and work the throttle. They had passed a buoy, and Anthony, momentarily fascinated by it, had turned and asked his dad why it was there.
“It’s the dividing line,” his dad had said, “between the lake and Galveston Bay. From here on out, we’re in deep water.”
It was that last phrase that hung in Anthony’s mind now.
Deep water, he thought. Yeah, that was it. Deep water. That dog eating that corpse’s leg, it was like a buoy, and everything from here on out is deep water. There’s no coming back from this. The city of Houston is dying, even if it doesn’t know it yet.
He caught movement out of the corner of his eye and turned toward it.
“You see that?” he asked Jesse. He pointed to a trailer, the inside dark as a cave. “Over there.”
Jesse scanned the trailer.
“No, what’d you see?”
“There’s somebody in there. I don’t see ’em now.”
They were at a lower elevation now, the water up to their thighs. Jesse sank down into the water so that just his head was above water.
“If it’s a survivor we’ll pick ’em up on the way back,” he said. “Come on. The ship should be just around those trees up there.”
Anthony’s gaze lingered on the trailer a moment longer; then he sank down into the water and followed after Jesse.
They rounded a copse of trees and there it was.
The Santa Fe.
It was an immense freighter, listing to one side, partially buried in mud and slag.
Anthony grew up in Houston. He was no stranger to the large freighters that frequented the Houston Ship Channel. But always, when he saw them on the nightly news or while driving down to Galveston for a day at the beach, they had been in the water, the vast majority of their bulk, like an iceberg, out of sight below the surface.
None of those memories prepared him for the Santa Fe.
The storm surge had pushed it at least a mile inland from the docks. Its huge bulk stood like a monument to destruction on a vast field of mud. Even from four hundred yards away, it caused the breath to hitch in his throat.
His chest felt tight once again. His eyes were dry and burning beneath his mask. His hands felt cold and an uncomfortable sweat popped from the skin on his arms. It was primitive fear, he realized with a sudden flush of humility, fear of this cathedral-like vastness rising from the mud, an endless jumbled plain of refinery wreckage.
“Damn,” he whispered.
“Yeah, you ain’t kidding.”
“Are we gonna be able to find what we’re looking for on that thing?” Anthony asked.
“We will if the blueprints the ATF gave your dad are right. Of course, the way that thing’s listing, everything could have gotten tossed around in there.”
They reached the ship and tossed their climbing ropes onto the deck. Both were experienced climbers and there was little discussion until they had the ropes securely fastened to deck.
It was then that Anthony happened to glance over his shoulder, back in the direction they’d come. There were people there, a small group, coming around the copse of trees. Anthony stared at them, and the vague, undefined sense of unease that had been nagging at him since they first entered the trailer park turned into a steady, blaring warning siren in his head.
“You ready?” Jesse said. There was a pause. “Anthony?”
“Huh?”
“I said are you ready?”
Anthony pointed back in the direction from which they’d come. “Look over there. You see them?”
The figures he was pointing at were too far away to make out any details, but even from where they stood Anthony could see that their clothes had been ripped to pieces by the wind and the rain, revealing emaciated arms and sticklike legs.
And there was something wrong with the way they moved.
They seemed stiff, their movements jerky, unnatural.
“What’s wrong with them?” he said.
“Survivors, I guess,” said Jesse. “If they’ve been out here since Kyle, they’re probably starving. What do you want to do?”
Anthony forced down his unease. One thing he had inherited from his dad was the ability to focus when things started to unravel. Right or wrong, his father had always said, you make a decision and you go with it. The worst thing you can do
is sit there with your thumb up your ass wondering what to do.
“We have to finish this,” he said. “My dad said we only get one chance to handle this ourselves before the FBI sends in their people.”
“Yeah, but what about them?” Jesse said with a nod toward the approaching survivors.
“We’ll get ’em on our way out. Come on, let’s go up.”
They climbed the ropes quickly, Anthony reaching the deck first. He turned and extended a hand to Jesse. “Need some help?”
“From a SWAT puke?” Jesse said. “Not hardly.”
Anthony waited for Jesse to climb over the railing; then the two of them, flat on their bellies, looked across the deck. Though Anthony knew little about large ships, he had read some Clive Cussler books, and that little bit of knowledge helped him feel like he was at least somewhat familiar with his surroundings. The boat was probably eight hundred feet long, her beam one hundred feet. There were seven derricks, all but one forward of the funnel and superstructure, leaning like terra-cotta warriors over the hold doors, waiting to unload cargo that would never again see the light of day. The deck itself was a wasteland of oil drums and tools and rusted equipment. The Santa Fe, evidently, had not been in very good shape even before getting beached by Hurricane Kyle’s storm surge. Anthony could see patches of rust and flaking paint on the bulkheads and superstructure. Here and there he caught a glimpse of a porthole leering back at them like a cracked and yellowed eye.
“Where to?” Anthony said.
Jesse pointed to their left.
“The superstructure up there. We can get down into the hold from there.”
Anthony nodded and fell in behind Jesse, and they worked their way to the superstructure.
They were dropped into darkness as soon as they stepped inside the bulkhead. Turning on their flashlights, they found the stairs and made the awkward downward descent, the deck below them tilted at a crazy angle so that they had to walk on the walls and on the railing.
Garbage had fallen down—or up, it was hard to tell—the stairs. It had piled up so high in places that they had get their shoulders behind a big piece of it and muscle it out of the way. The first time they did it a large metal cooler went tumbling down the stairs with all the subtlety of a fire truck trying to force its way through traffic. When at last the echoes of it died off in the darkness Jesse looked at Anthony and said, “Well, there goes stealth mode.”
Anthony laughed, and they pushed on.
The cargo level, when at last they reached it, had five feet of water in it. The hold was pitch black, except where their flashlight beams lanced into the darkness. It was ungodly hot down here, and so humid Anthony could feel it in his throat. But the smell was the worst. Something was dead down here. He would have pulled his shirt up over his mouth if it too hadn’t been soaking up the filth around them.
“This doesn’t look good,” he said.
“No,” agreed Jesse. “Come on. I think we need to go that way.”
Jesse pointed his flashlight into the bowels of the hold, revealing a length of metal railing and the ribs of the ship and a jumbled mess of crates and shattered pallets.
And then, in the light, something moved, followed by a heavy splash.
“Fuck, what was that?” Anthony said, simultaneously swinging his AR-15 into position. He hit the flashlight button below the barrel and a bluish-white LED lit up the section of railing where they had seen the movement.
“I lost it,” Jesse said. “You see it?”
“No.”
“What was that?”
“How the fuck should I know? Just stay ready. Cover right; I got left.”
Jesse pulled up beside him, his own AR-15 now at the ready.
“Clear?” Anthony asked.
“Yeah, clear.”
“Police officers,” Anthony shouted into the darkness. “We are armed. Identify yourselves or you will be shot.”
They waited, still scanning the darkness with the LED flashlights mounted on their rifles. Jesse’s flashlight happened to catch the reflected glint of a pair of eyes, and both men swung their weapons toward it.
A rat, soaking wet and glistening from the sheen of oil on the water, glared malignantly at them from atop a wooden crate.
“Fucking rat,” Jesse said.
“That was no rat,” Anthony said. “Whatever that was, it was a whole lot bigger than a fucking rat.”
Again, they scanned the darkness, listening for the sound of splashing, or anything else for that matter.
But whatever they had seen was gone now.
Anthony motioned for Jesse to lead on, and the two of them moved slowly forward, weapons at the ready as they searched for the crates from Tsing Si Chemical that held the ammonia gelatin.
They found them a short distance forward, half submerged.
“Is that gonna be a problem?” Anthony asked. “Being all wet like that?”
“It’s an underwater explosive, you jackass. What do you think?”
Jesse reached into a pocket of his BDUs and pulled out a lock-blade knife, which he used to cut into the plastic sheet that covered the dynamite sticks. Anthony stared at the explosives, and his mouth went dry. He tried to swallow but couldn’t force down the walnut that had suddenly formed in his throat. They were sitting on dynamite, for Christ’s sake.
The next thing he knew Jesse had pulled from his pants pocket a device that looked like an old-fashioned transistor radio. He also had a small Ziploc baggie with a length of copper wire inside. As Anthony watched, Jesse connected the transistor radio–looking device to the wires, and then the wires into a few of the sticks of dynamite.
Then he pulled out five sticks and motioned for Anthony to turn around.
“What are you doing?” Anthony asked. But he knew even before he asked. He could feel Jesse tugging at the zipper to his backpack, working the flaps open to get the dynamite crammed down into the pouch.
“Relax,” said Jesse. His voice was breezy. “These things won’t explode without a detonator.”
Jesse zipped the backpack closed again and went back to working on the rest of the dynamite still inside the crate.
“So what are you doing there?” Anthony asked.
“Attaching a detonator.”
The walnut in Anthony’s throat finally went down.
With a chuckle, Jesse finished the job and stood up. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get moving.”
“Just like that? That’s it?”
“Yep, that’s it. I’ll activate the charges once we get to a safe distance.”
“When you hit the detonator, there won’t be any danger with the . . .” He trailed off there, but motioned with his thumb toward the dynamite in his backpack.
Jesse smiled.
“Stop being such a pussy,” he said, slapping Anthony on the shoulder. “Come on, let’s get moving.”
They made their way back to their stairs and started up. Anthony was still tense, the smell of death strong in his nostrils, and he kept his AR-15 at the low ready. Up ahead of them, a hazy white daylight seeped down from the top of the stairs. Anthony kept his gaze moving, careful not to stare into the light too long so that his eyes wouldn’t lose their low-light acuity. But the sweat was popping out all over his face and it was hard to tell if the flickering light above them was coming from his rapid blinking or something moving.
He stopped, and ducked into a crouch. Jesse continued a few steps up, then stopped as well.
“You hear something?” he whispered.
“Shh.”
Anthony listened. He squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them again and slowly scanned the darkness. He had heard something. What was it? The faint clicking of fingernails on a table? Or was it simply the distant, muffled plink . . . plink . . . plink of water dripping from a bulkhead somewhere down in the hold? It was hard to tell. The sound, if indeed it had been a sound at all, had seemed to come from above him and below him simultaneously.
But now, in the d
arkened stillness of the stairwell, all he could hear was the slow, measured sound of his own breathing.
“I don’t hear anything,” Jesse said, and stood up. “Come—”
In the low light, something moved fast behind Jesse. There was a crash, a sudden stuttering growl that sounded like a fast series of notes on a piano keyboard, and something that was all teeth flashed into the air, lunging for Jesse’s head.
Anthony was ready, and fired, the stairwell turning orange from the muzzle flash, the pop-pop-pop of the rifle echoing off the walls.
A moment later, the after burn of the muzzle flash still sending white blobs of light sailing across his vision, Anthony lit up the crumpled form at their feet. It was a dog, its ribs visible down the flanks of its mangy coat, teeth still bared in a grimace of mad hunger.
Jesse, meanwhile, was leaning against the wall, staring down at the animal. He looked at Anthony, said nothing, then looked back down at the dog.
“You okay?” Anthony said.
“What is it with you and dogs?” Jesse answered. “Shit, man, I think I streaked my shorts.”
Anthony shook his head. “Yeah, you and me both. Come on, let’s go.”
They climbed the stairs back to the deck and found their ropes. As Anthony was climbing over the side he happened to glance to the north and saw the five survivors they’d seen earlier. They were very close now, less than two hundred feet from the ship. Close enough that Anthony could hear them moaning.
“Jesse, over there,” he said.
“Shit, they’re way too close. Anthony, we have to get them out of here. They need to be at least a thousand yards from the blast point.”
“Start down,” Anthony said. Then he turned to the approaching figures, cupped his hands over his mouth to trumpet his voice, and yelled, “You there. Stop. The ship’s not safe. Don’t come any closer. We’ll come to you.”
He was about to yell again, for they didn’t seem to hear him, but then he dropped his hands from his mouth.
Something was wrong.
They didn’t move right. They didn’t sound right. From where he stood, he could see their eyes, and it seemed to him that he had seen that same vacancy, that same profound emptiness, in the sightless, unblinking stare of the freshly dead.