Sargasso

by Russell C. Connor

  But now…

  She was about to be raped.

  A small voice spoke up in Cherrywine’s head, listing her only two options. She could lay back, stay still, and get this over with…or she could find a way to skip out on the check.

  As Eric forced his way into her—the full length of his penis like a burning rod—she got one of her hands loose and pistoned it upward, as she used to do when her brother tried to wrestle her. It was a blind shot, more panic than instinct, but she felt the heel of her palm strike him directly in the nose.

  There was a brittle crunch. He grunted and fell back off the bed, pulling out of her but leaving a dripping scarlet trail down the length of her naked body. Cherrywine sat up and scooted away from him across the covers.

  Eric stood hunched over, holding his broken nose as blood leaked between his fingers. She expected anger, expected him to be coming back at her any second, but instead his eyes were rooted on the floor beside the bed. He reached down and came up holding what looked like a shard of smoky glass.

  He stared at it, lowering his hand from his face to reveal the ruins of his nose, then glanced toward a cabinet mounted on the wall beside the door. “You been snooping in here?”

  “Huh?”

  Eric moved toward the cabinet. He flung open the doors and shoved liquor bottles out of the way, spilling several of them on the thin carpet. He reached in and pulled open some kind of door in the wall behind them, then brought out a tube wrapped in shredded paper.

  “Oh my god,” he snarled. “You fucking whore.”

  “But Eric, I didn’t do anyth—”

  He came for her again, but this time it wasn’t sex on his mind. His eyes were wild, crazed, but still with that faraway look in them, as if Eric Renquist had taken a step back in his own head and a more primitive identity had hopped in the driver’s seat. He leapt on the bed and threw his weight on her before she could react. His hands stole up to wrap around her throat. They squeezed.

  She felt her air supply trickle to a stop. Her eyes bulged as she tried to pry his fingers off.

  “You whore, you bitch, you fucking tramp,” he chanted, emphasizing each insult. “You’re trying to stop me but you can’t, nobody can, I have a destiny, one that makes me invincible to a cunt like you.”

  She didn’t know what to do. The world was going dim. She screamed, but it sounded far away, and then she realized that it couldn’t have been her, because she didn’t have air to breathe, let alone scream.

  “What the hell?” Eric blinked, seeming to come back to himself. He released her and jumped to his feet to pull back on his swim trunks and shirt. Cherrywine sucked in air, coughing and clutching at her raw throat while he shoved the statue in his pocket, then reached into the door at the back of the cabinet and drew out a gun.

  He flew out of the bedroom, and she heard him pounding up the stairs to the deck.

  Cherrywine grabbed for clothes—a new pair of panties and the long t-shirt she’d brought to sleep in the only items at hand—and followed him.

  8

  Justin at first took Amber’s reaction to the impending proposal—which involved screaming and clutching at him—to be good, if slightly out of character. Then he realized she was looking over his shoulder.

  He turned…and saw stars as a fist smashed into his forehead and left eye. He sprawled backward, narrowly avoiding taking a header into the still-smoldering fire pit. Through a film of tears, Justin blinked up at the huge guy in the ski mask standing over him.

  “Get up! Now!” the man growled, a trace of accent to his words. “Both of you, lay on the couches, face down! Do it!”

  The whole side of Justin’s face throbbed as he tried to make sense of this. Where had the guy come from? Did he stowaway somewhere on the MishMasher before they set out?

  The stranger knelt so their eyes were level. He casually pulled a knife from the inside of his boot and tapped the blade under the shelf of Justin’s chin. Justin swallowed, feeling the metal tip press against his jugular.

  “Tell ya what, mate,” the stranger said calmly. “You don’t move your ass, I’m gonna stick you fulla so many holes, we’ll be able to use you for a sprinkler. Or maybe I’ll start with her.” His eyes moved up to Amber, who was studying him with as much intensity as she did her textbooks.

  “Don’t hurt her,” Justin whispered.

  Pounding footsteps came from the stairs. Eric ran onto the deck, blood pouring down his face and holding the revolver that Justin had seen behind the trapdoor in the liquor cabinet. He spotted the stranger, skidded to a stop, and leveled the weapon with both hands. “Drop the knife, asshole!”

  The stranger stood and turned around slowly. Justin was struck all over again by just how big he was. He held up his hands, but kept the knife in his right. “’Ey now, mate, careful with that li’l thing, you wouldn’t wanna hurt y’self.”

  Eric snuffled blood through his crooked nose. “Drop the knife or we’ll see how little it is.”

  The intruder lowered one tattooed arm and tossed the knife across the deck to Eric’s left. Eric’s eyes tracked the object, causing the .38 to drift away…

  Timing the distraction, the stranger whipped his hand back and scrabbled under the vest he wore for a huge gun tucked in his waistband.

  “Eric, look out!” Justin shouted.

  His friend reacted fast, whipping the gun back on target and firing wildly. Because of the angle, Justin and Amber were as much in the line of fire as the other guy. The first shot punched a hole through the deck several inches from where Justin sat, but the second hit the intruder in the right thigh, just above the knee. He cried out and fell across the deck facedown, the large revolver in his hand flying away to strike the bulkhead next to the stairs.

  Cherrywine emerged into the night behind Eric and started screaming also, one long, hoarse note that rolled away across the ocean.

  “Shut up!” Eric told her. To Justin he shouted, “What the hell is this, where’d he come from?”

  “I don’t know! What happened to you?”

  Eric wiped at the blood across his lips with the back of his forearm, but only succeeded in smearing it further. “Nothing, I’m fine.”

  The intruder on the deck turned on his side. He clutched his leg as blood pooled beneath him and cursed from the side of his mouth. Eric walked over and kicked him in the shoulder, forcing him over onto his back. He stuck the .38 in his face. “Who are you, fuckhead? What are you doing on my boat?”

  The intruder’s lips, visible through the bottom hole of his black ski mask, stretched into something halfway between a snarl and a grin. “You li’l rich shitstains…just bought y’selves…a world of hurt…”

  From behind them, a bright light blazed, throwing their shadows long across the deck.

  9

  Lito saw the muzzle flashes from the yacht when the two shots went off. They’d drifted closer after Rabid left, and the other boat was only fifty yards away now.

  He glanced at Ray, who frowned and shook his head. “That was too small to be Rabid’s gun.”

  “Goddamn it, how could he fuck this up? Get your masks on, everybody!”

  Up and down the bow, the rest of the crew pulled on their own ski masks. Jericho—whose dreadlocks made a lumpy mess of the mask’s tight-knit fabric—handed a bullhorn to Lito. “All right boys, keep a cool head and we can still pull this off.”

  A high-beam searchlight was mounted on the front of the Steel Runner. Lito switched it on and trained it on the yacht. He saw several figures moving toward the stern, raising their hands to shield their eyes from the light.

  He said through the bullhorn, “ALL OF YOU ON THE YACHT! PUT DOWN YOUR WEAPONS AND LAY FACEDOWN ON THE DECK! NO HARM WILL COME TO YOU IF YOU SURRENDER NOW!”

  In response to this, there were more muzzle flashes, and bullets spanged off the hull of the Runner.

  Jorge whipped his AR-15 up—a weapon almost bigger than he was—and opened fire. The figures on the yacht leapt for
cover.

  “Stop!” Lito shouted. “For Christ’s sake, stop!”

  “They’re shootin at us!”

  “Yeah, and every bullet you put in that boat is comin outta your cut!”

  From his other side, Ray asked, “What do you wanna do, Lito?”

  “Let’s get in closer. We need to end this fast.”

  10

  From where Amber lay between the railing at the stern and the padded benches, she heard Justin ask, “Who are these guys, the Coast Guard? We didn’t do anything wrong!”

  “Does the Coast Guard wear ski masks and carry automatic weapons?” Eric yelled from behind the bench opposite them. “Whoever they are, they’re after me, to get to my father!”

  “Cherrywine, are you okay?” Amber shouted.

  “Yes.” It sounded like the squeak came from the stairwell to the lower deck.

  The growl of an engine drifted across the water. Amber rose up enough to peek over the railing. “They’re coming!”

  Eric popped up and fired again at the approaching ship. After one shot, the hammer clicked on empty cylinders. “Shit, where’s that other guy’s gun?”

  Justin got to his knees to look across the fire pit. “Eric, man, don’t shoot at them!”

  “What am I supposed to do, flash my dick?”

  “Don’t make them mad! Let’s just do what they say!”

  “Are you fucking nuts? They’re gonna kill us!”

  “They said they wouldn’t!”

  “Listen to ‘im, mate,” the wounded man said through clenched teeth. He was still stretched across the deck between the benches, with a sizable blood puddle around his leg. “We ain’t gonna do shit to you. All we want’s the boat…”

  “Oh, right! I’m supposed to believe you’re just pirates? And you just happened to pick this boat to hijack?”

  “Maybe it’s true!” Justin insisted. “Just cooperate, we don’t have any other choice!”

  “Eric’s right.” Amber grabbed Justin, forcing him to face her, and sank her nails into his bare shoulders. “If these guys are here because of his father, then the rest of us are just collateral. And if they really are pirates…they’re gonna kill you guys, and rape me and Cherrywine. They cannot get on this boat.”

  This seemed to get through to him. His eyes grew large…then he stood and pounded away across the deck.

  “Hey, where you going?” Eric demanded, his voice nasal from whatever had happened to his nose. He dropped to hands and knees, scrabbling around on the deck to look for the wounded pirate’s gun.

  Amber looked behind them. The other ship, which looked like a dirty garbage scow compared to the yacht, had closed to within thirty yards, and was churning up a mass of seaweed in front of them as they approached. She could see a line of men standing in its bow, all wearing masks.

  Beneath her, the engines of the MishMasher roared to life.

  Eric’s head came up. “Christ, what’s he doing? The anchor’s down!”

  The boat was in motion. Eric ran to the control box for the anchor mounted on the bow. They picked up speed fast, the searchlight from the other boat falling away to leave them in darkness. A small rowboat slipped aside in their wake, probably what the injured man had used to get from the other boat to theirs. As the distance between the ships increased, Amber stood up. Cherrywine came to join her.

  The other girl was in tears. Even in the dark, Amber could see the ring of dark bruises around her throat, above the collar of the much more modest t-shirt she wore.

  “Oh my god. Cherrywine…what did he do to you?”

  The girl fell against her, sobbing. Amber held her as the wind whipped their hair. “It’s okay. We’re safe.” This seemed to be true, at least as far as their attackers went; the other ship was falling further behind each second, unable to keep up.

  The pirate on the ground gave a chuckle that sounded full of pain.

  Eric stood at the bottom of the small set of stairs leading up to the yacht’s control room and shouted, “Bro! What the fuck are you doing?”

  Justin leaned out of the compartment and looked down at him. “I’m getting us outta here!”

  “Get down here now! Nobody drives this thing but me!”

  Cherrywine shrieked in Amber’s arms and jabbed a finger toward the front of the boat. “Look out!”

  Amber glanced up in time to see what appeared to be a wooden wall loom out of the darkness directly in the yacht’s path. They rushed toward it. She had time to see the bow of the MishMasher

  strike this surface dead-on before the world tilted, and water enveloped her.

  1

  Ray pounded a fist on the outside of the wheelhouse window. “We’re losin ‘em!”

  “I can see that, but they gotta be doin forty knots!” Lito shouted back. “I got her opened all the way up, but we just can’t compete with that thing for pure speed!”

  On the foredeck, Jorge bounced on the balls of his feet, while Jericho, Carlos, and Mondo watched their payday speed into the night, taking a member of their crew with it. The nervous tension had even dragged Cheech from his bed downstairs. The dog paced back and forth across the planks, more restless than Lito had ever seen him.

  Just as the yacht passed beyond the edge of visibility, a tremendous, rumbling crash rolled back to the Steel Runner, followed by the squall of tortured fiberglass.

  Lito ordered, “Get that spotlight up!”

  Jericho swept the light across the ocean’s surface, the yellow beam cleaving through the night to illuminate the fertile bed of seaweed around them. He trained it on a shape coming up fast off the port bow, and Lito cut the engines to let them drift as he tried to make sense of what he was seeing.

  The pleasure yacht had crashed into another vessel midship. A curious wooden craft, long and narrow with a rounded hull, whose bulwark rose only a little taller than that of the yacht. A huge square sail—blood red with a yellow sun—flew proudly from a crooked mainmast that had been cracked by the impact, and an ornate dragon’s head stared from the prow. A row of square holes ran down the length of the hull up near the deck; it took Lito several seconds to figure out what they were.

  Oar slots. The kind that men with horns on their helmets rowed from. Because what you’re looking at is a real-life Viking ship.

  He shook his head. He’d seen pictures of such things before, on TV or maybe even in school, and this vessel matched his mental picture so closely—not to mention looked so fresh and new—that it had to be a fake, some sort of prop rig built to look like those old seagoing Norsemen ships.

  In any case, he wouldn’t be able to look for long. The yacht had hit the wooden ship with enough force to punch right through, almost tearing the thing in half. The rear end of the vessel was quickly sinking beneath the weed-infested surface of the Sargasso Sea. A stream of sharp cracks and pops sounded as stressed timbers snapped. The mast broke completely and hit the water with a splash.

  Ray stuck his head in the door of the wheelhouse. His eyes seemed to float in his black ski mask. “Are you seein this?”

  Lito nodded and angled the rudders so they coasted within fifty feet of the Viking ship’s bow. The dragon head stared at them briefly before the weight of the sinking ship forced it to turn skyward and then pulled it down toward the ocean floor. Vikings in the end zone, he thought giddily.

  On the deck, Cheech began to bark his head off.

  The rich kids’ sleek craft was just beyond the remains of the Viking ship, listing at a nearly forty-five degree angle to starboard. The bow had been crushed from the impact, and the port side of the fiberglass hull had a crack several yards long and as wide as a basketball running up it. The water had rushed in with enough weight to cause the boat to roll the opposite direction. This had bought the yacht some time, but not nearly enough to save it.

  All their work—not to mention all that money—was minutes away from sinking.

  And there was nothing they could do to stop it.

  Bodies flailed
in the water. He couldn’t tell who was who. Lito leaned out the wheelhouse door, trying to catch a better glimpse of the figures in the splashing and chaos as they passed, and heard panicked shouts from the foredeck in front of him. He looked forward and heard himself yelp.

  Now the Steel Runner was about to collide with another vessel. A large pontoon fishing boat floated diagonally across their path just twenty yards ahead, no more than a rectangular raft with a cabin in the middle.

  Lito dove for the controls and threw the engines into full reverse. “Brace yourselves!”

  The crew grabbed the railing. Lito gripped the wheel and turned hard to port, hoping to give them a few extra seconds to slow. The Runner’s hull was hardened steel, and their speed hadn’t been too great to begin with, but he still didn’t want to risk plowing into the heavy aluminum pontoons head on. He squeezed his eyes shut and waited for the verdict.

  2

  Amber tried to swim beneath the water, but her limbs felt heavy. At first she thought it was disorientation, or perhaps the lingering effects of the alcohol, but after struggling for a few seconds, she realized she was tangled in some kind of slick, slimy rope. She opened her eyes in the murk. The salt water burned, but she could make out the shadowy fronds of seaweed all around her.

  It was everywhere she turned, brushing against her face, wrapping around her arms and legs. The stuff was so thick, it made her feel like she was swimming in molasses. And the more she moved, the more ensnared she became.

  In fact, in her panic, it almost felt like the seaweed moved with purpose, creeping around her wrists and ankles and tugging her ever so gently toward the dark depths of the ocean.

  Her lungs ached. She made one last titanic effort, ripping the plants away from her with one hand and then kicking hard toward where her natural buoyancy told her the surface lay. At last the seaweed parted, and her head breached. She sucked in a lungful of new air, coughing and spluttering.

  Someone was shouting. Amber didn’t recognize the voice. She wiped water out of her eyes and dogpaddled in a circle.