Close Reach

by Jonathan Moore

  That’s all this was.

  He was at the lip of the crack now, clawing at the loose dirt and crying as she stomped on his fingers. This would haunt her. The petty squalor of it. He’d brought her to this. But she didn’t stop.

  She couldn’t have stopped it if she’d wanted to.

  She watched herself step back once more and raise the flensing knife over her shoulder and swing it in a hard arc so the flat side of the blade caught Sour Breath’s rib cage and sent him over the edge.

  He fell into the crack and disappeared into the steam. She heard the tumble of his body, the spill of rocks and loose dirt that caved from the crack’s walls and followed him into the darkness. He hit the boiling seawater with a splash.

  The screaming started almost right away.

  He screeched and wailed as he boiled to death, his agony a hook in her gut that pulled her to the crack’s edge to look down. She saw nothing but steam rising from shadows. It was only a minute until he died, but she heard him a long time afterward, the way the wind in the rigging became Dean’s cries during the long storm at sea.

  Every sound was the ghost of some past wrong.

  She sat beside Dean then and took his hand. She buried her face in the blanket over his chest and began to sob.

  Part Three

  The Flensing; the Harvest

  When Kelly exited the flensing house, her skin was hot and flushed from the steam, and the leftover makeup from her call with Annie was smeared from the heat and from her tears. Her sweater smelled like death. She knew it was just the smell of the earth itself. Sulfur and brimstone. Scalding seawater. But she imagined it was the smell of the man she’d killed, the man cooking beneath the ground where Dean lay. In a day, his skin and muscles would slide off his bones, and he would dissolve into the earth as if it had eaten him.

  She stood in the wind and watched the ash and mist blow down the beach, and she saw that the Zodiac was still tied up alongside Freefall. While she had the chance, she ran back to the building where she’d been caged, covering the ground faster without the wheelbarrow. As she ducked behind the building, she heard the outboard start.

  She’d have less than a minute now.

  She ran across the room, took Dean’s exposure suit, and carried it to the cage. Lena’s blanket was still in there. The exposure suit was bulky, stiff with dried blood and urine. She knelt and put it in the cage and put the blanket over it. Then she shut the cage and locked it, feeling the key in her pants pocket. She ran to the corner of the room and stood pressed against the two walls, the flensing knife held out in both hands.

  She heard the Zodiac run aground on the rough gravel beach, heard the electric whine as David raised the outboard’s leg from the water. His footsteps crunched on the rocks as he approached.

  When he stepped into the building, she pressed harder into the corner on his far left. He was looking at the cage. As he came farther inside, she saw how lucky she’d been: he was carrying an armload of electronic equipment he’d stripped from Freefall. He held the Inmarsat satellite transceiver with the SSB radio stacked over it and the ICOM antenna tuner and navigation laptop balanced against his chest. Fifty thousand dollars, right there in his arms. No wonder he was smiling.

  She waited until he was ten paces into the room, and then she came at him fast, the oversized wool socks keeping her feet quiet. David stopped abruptly when he saw that Dean was missing. He dropped the gear in his hands and went for the pistol in his cargo pocket, but by then Kelly was within striking distance.

  “David,” she said.

  He twisted toward her, his hands still fumbling for the pistol. She slashed him diagonally across the face with the blunt side of the blade, knocking him screaming to the ground. The pistol fell out of his hands, and she kicked it. She spun the flensing knife so that its sharpened edge faced out, and she raised it over her shoulders.

  “Don’t move! Or I’ll chop your fucking head off!”

  David was digging his heels and elbows into the dirt, scooting backward away from her. His face was pure panic. She brought the blade whistling down at his neck and stopped it six inches short of his skin.

  “Don’t. Fucking. Move.”

  His khaki pants darkened at his crotch. He looked up at her and went limp. And then he started to cry like a child.

  “Sit up.”

  He just lay there, propped on his elbows, looking at her and blubbering.

  “The Colonel—he made me—I didn’t want to, and—”

  She swung the flensing knife and smacked him hard on the cheek with the flat side of the blade. He fell back, his hands holding his face.

  “I said sit up.”

  He sat, still holding his face, his chest heaving with sobs she couldn’t hear.

  “Take off your clothes. All of them.”

  He looked up at her and shook his head. It was a small gesture and would have been imperceptible if she hadn’t been looking for it. She drew back the flensing knife and tensed to swing it again.

  “Take them off.”

  Instead, he went for the gun.

  He flipped onto his hands and knees and leaped toward it. Kelly swung the flensing knife at his neck, but he was fast: the dull side of the blade clipped his ankles instead. He landed within an inch of the gun. Kelly brought the flensing knife around and swung a second time just as he got his hand on the pistol’s grip. This time she hit him squarely in the back of the head with the flat side of the blade. His face went into the rocks so that his scream was choked and muffled.

  Kelly stomped on his hand and then kicked the gun away again.

  “Try it again, David. Just fucking try it again. I’m a surgeon—you think I can’t do anything I want with a knife?”

  “Kelly—”

  She swung the flensing knife so close to the top of his head that a clump of his brown hair flew off in an arc. David shrieked, but she hadn’t even nicked him. His fingers flew up and covered a white patch of scalp the size of a silver dollar.

  “Shut the fuck up. And strip.”

  He rolled over and stared at her for thirty seconds. His face swarmed with hatred, but she didn’t look away. She tensed, ready to swing the knife and put an end to him. Then his lips started to twitch, and she knew she had him. That with a few hard blows she’d cracked through and found him.

  “You fucking pansy,” she said. “The Colonel, he doesn’t really trust you, does he? You think you impressed him, showed him you’re a man. But he knows, doesn’t he? That you’re a coward. That’s why the others got to take Lena. Why you had to stay here.”

  “He said—”

  She swung at his face, and he fell back screaming. She brought up the knife’s handle so that the blade missed him but sang through his hair again, leaving a second bald patch at the top of his head.

  “I don’t care what he said,” Kelly said. “I told you to strip.”

  He started with his boots and his socks. Then he pulled off his sweater and the flannel shirt he wore beneath it. He stopped and looked up at her.

  “Your pants.”

  He looked up at her, his face red, and not just where she’d hit him.

  “Please.”

  “Please? Fuck you. Say that to Dean. Say it to Lena and see where it gets you. Take them off. Now.”

  His hands slowly went to his belt buckle, his fingers trembling. He undid the belt and unbuttoned his pants, sliding them down past his legs. He wore thermal underwear beneath the pants. They were stained and stank of urine. When he took them off, he brought his knees up to his chest and hugged his legs close to himself to hide his nakedness. But she wasn’t about to let him have that.

  “Stand up. And put your hands on your head.”

  He stood, shivering and cringing, and she didn’t say anything for a while. She wanted him to stand there and feel it. The cold and the humiliation. She let him tremble as her eyes passed over him, head to toe. Judging the worth of his life by the shape of his skin.

  “No wonder you
never got circumcised. There’d be nothing left.”

  She jabbed the flensing knife at his pelvis, and he flinched away.

  “Go to the cage. You cockless piece of shit.”

  He went, and she followed, the knife blade tapping his spine hard enough to draw blood. She took the key from her pocket and tossed it on the ground by his feet.

  “Open it up.”

  He knelt and unlocked the trapdoor, then opened it and crawled inside. He was shivering hard, rubbing his upper arms with his hands.

  “Toss out the soup pot,” she said. She didn’t want him to have the chicken bones. “And Dean’s exposure suit. You can keep the blanket.”

  When he’d thrown everything out, he went to the back of the cage and wrapped himself in the blanket. His dark eyes were already bruising from the blows he’d taken. Kelly picked up the lock, ran it through the hasp, and clicked it shut. She pulled out the key and put it in her pocket. She looked at David for a long time, staring at his wounded face and at the cage that held him.

  It was a solid, heavy trap. Welded of iron and chain link. The lock was made of brass and chrome-plated steel. There were funnel-shaped holes in two of the walls for the crabs to enter, but they were too small for a person to get through and were lined with welded steel. There was no way out. She knew that. She’d escaped only because they’d made the mistake of taking her out. She had no intention of ever letting him out of the cage alive. She stared at him until she was sure he understood that, and then she went to get his pistol.

  When Kelly left David, she figured La Araña had an hour’s head start. It was probably ten or fifteen miles from the island and would draw farther away the longer she spent getting ready. But it would do her no good to leave too soon. If she sailed Freefall through the pass and into the open ocean when La Araña was within radar range, it might pick her up and swing around to deal with her. She’d been beaten at that game once and didn’t want to try it again. If she gave it a fifty-mile lead, she could leave without fear of it seeing her. To follow it beyond radar range, she’d need to know where it was going.

  She needed two things from David: a longitude and a latitude. Coordinates to intercept La Araña before the Colonel’s men could get started with Lena.

  After that, David’s life was worth nothing to her.

  She went out the back door, walking to the closest hut. This one had been fixed up a little, with tarps over the broken windows and a door that opened and shut. Earlier, she’d guessed the men were living in a building nearby. If there were things to learn, they’d be in here. And if one of them had stayed behind, this would be the place to look for him. She leaned the flensing knife against the wall, blade up. Though she didn’t know how to use the pistol, she drew it and held it in her left hand, her finger curled over the trigger. She opened the door with her right hand and stepped inside.

  The first thing she noticed was that the room was warm. A propane space heater sat in the middle of the dirt floor, the radiant cone atop the tank glowing orange. Around it there were seven cots. On one of them there was a waterproof plastic bag that held a spiral-bound ship’s log and folded charts. She picked it up and rolled it to fit in the cargo pocket of her pants. This must have been David’s cot. The satellite phone was on the pillow. She took it and put it in her other pocket. Then she stepped past the cots and past the heater, the gun held out in both hands. On the far side of the room was a doorway covered with a blue plastic tarp. She used the barrel of the gun to push the tarp aside, then stepped into the next room, sweeping the gun left and then right to clear the corners.

  Now she was in a makeshift kitchen. Hand-pumped kerosene camp stoves sat atop shoddily built wooden tables. A wooden shelf held pots and pans. Another bowed under the weight of hundreds of cans. Mostly stew and beans. She thought of Lena, the bowl of stew they’d promised her. She remembered her own promises to the girl and to Dean. She aimed to keep them. There was a white plastic cooler on the floor. She lifted its lid with her foot and looked in. Slabs of meat and chickens floated in pink brine with chunks of sea ice.

  The last room was just storage. This was the largest part of the building, yet she could hardly get in. There were too many boxes and crates to count. She saw dismantled marine electronics, scientific instruments. Vast stores of food. There were sea chests and waterproof duffel bags and even suitcases whose contents she couldn’t guess. She got as far as she could into the room and checked the corners to be sure no one was hiding there.

  Back in the kitchen, she found a six-pack of tomato juice on the shelf. She took a can and shook it. It wasn’t frozen. She popped the top and stood there drinking it. It was thick and salty. She drank the whole can and put it down, her fingertips tapping the table.

  It was just the three of them here on the island.

  If David had known there was someone left to help him, he’d have been shouting from the cage. The other men—and Lena—were aboard La Araña, probably heading north to Tierra del Fuego. She opened a second can of tomato juice and drank it and then set the empty next to the first one. She came out of the hut quietly, shutting the door without a sound. She took the flensing knife and tiptoed in her socks back to the other building. When she got to it, she stood outside the door and listened.

  From inside there was a steady, rhythmic grinding noise. She knew immediately what it was, because she and Lena had tried it, too. She looked around on the ground and found a rusted footlong scrap of iron rebar. She tucked the gun into her waistband and set the flensing knife down and went quietly into the building.

  David tossed the rock aside when he saw her. He pulled the blanket around himself and moved to the middle of the trap.

  “That won’t work,” she said. “Sawing at the latch with a rock. These rocks, they crumble.”

  She came the rest of the way up to the trap. She was holding the iron bar in her left hand, close to her hip, where he couldn’t see it. David looked up at her and didn’t say anything. A slowly bleeding wound ran from the bridge of his nose to the right side of his chin. Both of his eyes were black, and she thought he was lucky. If she’d hit him with the other side of the blade, he’d be missing half his face.

  “I told you to take everything off,” Kelly said.

  David looked at her without blinking. His eyes were like a raccoon’s. Dark and welling with distrust.

  “But you didn’t. You’ve still got something on. Something of Dean’s,” she said. She was whispering so quietly that he’d have to lean close to hear her. She didn’t want any part of this to be easy for him. Even listening to her speak would have to be work. A struggle. And there’d be consequences if he missed something.

  She squatted near the wall of the trap, gathering her hair to one side so it wouldn’t hang within his reach.

  “So you’re going to give it back to me. Hand it through the funnel. Or I’ll come in there with the flensing knife and cut off your hand. Then I’ll take it off the stump.”

  Nothing happened right away. David was taking a while to process things. Maybe he was in shock. Then, after about ten seconds, he got it. He understood. He raised his left hand from the blanket and showed her the watch. The one she’d given Dean.

  “Take it off,” she said. “Hand it through the funnel with your right hand. Don’t drop it.”

  He did what she told him to, his right hand sticking through the small hole in the side of the trap, the watch’s stainless steel band looped on his index finger. She watched him. He was trembling, waiting for her to take it. She flashed out with her right hand, grabbed hold of his wrist, and pulled his arm until his shoulder was flush against the wall of the trap. He cried out and tried to haul his arm back, but she had the advantage of leverage.

  The watch fell to the ground. She bent his arm backward until he screamed, and then she started to hammer on his fist with the piece of rebar, pounding his knuckles until her arm muscles burned. He wrenched and twisted his arm, but she wouldn’t let him get away. She clamped on to him a
nd bent his arm back, wanting to hear his shoulder pop. When his fingers were a bleeding pulp, she started on his forearm, savaging it with the iron bar until it was bleeding from wrist to elbow.

  Finally she let him go. He pulled his arm into the cage and hugged it to his chest, sucking on his bloodied fist. He rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet and moaned. The blanket had fallen off him, and he was naked. Ash and grime covered his thighs where he’d wet himself. He looked so small now that he was caged and hurt. Like he’d shrunken to the size of a child, a forest animal. It didn’t make her pity him, this diminution.

  “Good,” she said. She picked up the watch and dusted it off. “I catch you with another rock, we’ll do your left hand, too.”

  She didn’t think she’d find him with a rock again. He wouldn’t be doing much except nursing his wounds. Rocking back and forth under the blanket to stay warm. Still, she checked the latch to make sure he’d done no damage. There were fresh scratches in the metal, but it was barely worse than he could have done with his fingernails.

  Before she left, she knelt and looked at him. He wouldn’t meet her stare.

  “I’ll be back later,” she said. “You don’t give me what I need, it’ll get pretty hot in here. You remember saying that to me? So think about it. You’ll want to tell me everything. In a hurry.”

  She left then and walked back to the flensing house, where Dean was waiting. On the way down, she thought she heard David screaming her name, but she didn’t turn. It was good he wanted to talk. He’d want to even more later. That would make it easier on all of them. She was exhausted but couldn’t let him see it. Forcing it out of him would wear her down. She’d listen to him when she was ready.

  Dean came first, though.

  * * *

  His face was purple, and he was curled in a ball and coughing when she came into the flensing house. She ran to him and knelt over him, checking his pulse with her fingers. He was burning up, and his heart was hammering. And the fissure had expanded in her short absence. Loose rubble at the top had collapsed into the widening crack. Dean was closer to the lip now, and the wheelbarrow was about to fall in. She dragged it back from the edge and righted it.