Sargasso

by Russell C. Connor

  “Put that on,” the man growled. “No reason I gots ta do ya the indignity of sittin around half-nekkid.”

  Justin bent, got the shirt, and pulled it over his head, something in his back throbbing when he raised his arms to put them through the sleeves. He felt like his whole body had been fed through a woodchipper, and the welt on his head was making him dizzy. While he dressed, Mondo grabbed a metal chair from the table, turned it to face the stairs, and ordered Justin to sit.

  He hesitated. Once he allowed himself to be tied up, it was game over. Any hope he had of helping Amber and the others was gone. But what could he do; the guy had a gun.

  After he sat, the man used nylon cord to bind Justin’s ankles to the chair legs, then tied his wrists behind him and wrapped the rope around his chest and the chair back a few times for good measure. When Justin was secured, he put away the pistol, tucking it in the back of his waistband, then pulled off his ski mask. Justin expected someone along the lines of 50 Cent, but instead Mondo turned out to be a grizzled old black man that could’ve just come from the set of Sanford and Son.

  “Hate wearin those things,” he muttered. “’Sides, I’m too old ta care if some poh-leese artist wants to draw my pretty face.”

  Mondo limped to the refrigerator in the corner and retrieved a bottle of ice cold water, then held it to Justin’s lips while he drank.

  “T-thanks,” Justin murmured. He’d been struggling to keep his head from lolling on his neck, but the water cleared some of the cobwebs from his brain.

  The old guy bent over him to examine the knot above his temple. “Ya feelin okay, boy? Dizzy?”

  He nodded.

  “Look like ya took a nasty bump, but long as ya eyes ain’t rollin back, I think ya be fine as paint after some rest.”

  “My friends. Where are they?”

  “Should be here soon. Crew’s goin ta fetch ‘em right now.”

  “They better not hurt them.”

  “Relax, boy. I been workin with Lito fer a while now, and trust me, if ya gotta get jacked by pirates, he’s defin’ly tha cap’n ya want.”

  “Oh yeah, look at me, tied to a chair. I feel like I just won the lottery.”

  “Better than tha altern’tive.”

  “Which is?”

  “A bullet in tha brain and a meal fer tha sharks.”

  Justin said nothing, just stared at the canvas tops of his shoes.

  “Lissen, ya just sit tight down here, don’t make a fuss, and this’ll all be over soon. Ya want somethin to eat? Or maybe some weed?” He pulled a tightly rolled joint from his shirt pocket. “I got some of tha most mellow cann’bis you evah tried. I lace it with honey. Mmmm mmm, that shit hits tha spot! Happy ta share with ya.”

  “Uh…no thanks.”

  “Suit yaself.”

  Mondo walked around him one last time, making sure the ropes were tight. As he straightened from checking the ankle bindings, his arm brushed against Justin’s shorts and felt the lump in his lower pocket. He reached inside.

  “No, wait, please don’t—!”

  Mondo pulled out the ring case, flipped it open, and gave a low whistle of appreciation. “Now that’s a pretty sight. Who tha lucky lady?”

  “Amber. One of the girls your men are going after.”

  “She say yes yet?”

  “She’d be wearing that if she did.”

  The pirate turned the diamond back and forth, admiring it in the light. “I’d guess this be worth ‘bout…two grand? That in tha ballpark?”

  “More like three. Please, please don’t take that ring.”

  Mondo snapped the box closed and rolled it in his hand. “I ‘as married once, ya know. Most beau’ful woman in the Caribe. Died of breast cancer just ‘fore my thirty-fifth.” He pushed the box back into Justin’s pocket. “Considerin we came out here after yer boat, three grand don’t seem like it’s worth tha trouble. Just don’t let none a tha others find out ‘bout it.”

  Justin sighed with relief. “Thank you.”

  “Hollah if ya need anything. I gotta get out on deck ta keep an eye on all this crazy bidness. There’s evil tidings afoot.” With that strange pronouncement, he hobbled back upstairs.

  The dog under the table raised its head, regarded Justin, gave a long, squeaky fart, then went back to sleep.

  2

  Jericho Trellis waited on the deck of the Steel Runner until Lito and the others made it over to the houseboat, then radioed on the walkies to find out what was up with all the shooting. The crack of the shotgun had rolled back across the water, bringing him to full attention, but he’d just about choked on laughter when Lito told him he’d taken down a crazed pelican. Then, after Mondo returned from tying up the white kid to monitor the VHF scanner, it was straight down to the maintenance room to find out why the engines weren’t turning over.

  He’d been a boat mechanic just about his entire life, helping out around his father’s business as soon as he was old enough to hold a wrench. That experience, however, wasn’t really needed in this case. Even a novice could’ve diagnosed the problem in seconds.

  Jericho sat in the sweltering engine room, removed his ski mask, and stared at the empty couplings where the fuel line normally connected. How the hose could’ve disappeared was one question; what they were going to do about it was entirely another. He dredged his brain but came up with no workarounds.

  Finally, after his dreadlocks were dripping with sweat, he gave up and climbed the ladder out. His head had just poked above deck when he heard the scampering of feet.

  The maintenance hatch was in a narrow alley between the bulkhead leading downstairs, and the one that comprised the upper part of the cargo holds. A shadow flitted past the entrance several feet away, a short, small shape heading down the gangway toward the stern of the ship. Jericho whipped his flashlight up, but was too late to catch whatever it had been. He stayed frozen for a moment, waiting for it to return.

  From around the corner, he heard a low, angry hiss, like a wet cat.

  The sheen of sweat on his skin turned cold all at once.

  Jericho crawled the rest of the way out of the maintenance hatch and got to his feet. He’d left his damn pistol back in the wheelhouse, but his trusty machete was strapped to his back as always. He reached over his shoulder and pulled it from its sheath, two feet of razor-sharp, gleaming steel, then eased to the edge of the alley. The pontoon boat was visible next to them through the guardrail, the shredded remains of a curtain flapping from a broken window in its cabin. Jericho held the flashlight with one hand and hefted the blade over his head with the other.

  He psyched himself up and jumped around the corner.

  The gangway leading toward the back of the boat was empty. He lowered the machete—

  “Jer’cho?”

  —and then brought it right back up again as he spun around to find Mondo standing on the deck behind him. Jericho managed to curb his reflexes just short of taking the old fuck’s head off.

  “Jesus, why you creepin ‘round like dat?”

  “Sorry.” Mondo looked like he was on the edge of a coronary himself, eyes wide and mouth hanging open.

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah.” He licked his lips. “C’mere a sec. There’s sumthin I want ya ta hear.”

  They returned to the wheelhouse, where Mondo pointed to the portable VHF scanner. “I was skimmin channels…just like the Cap’n said…listenin fer chatter from them other boats…and I heard sumthin.”

  When he said nothing more, Jericho asked, “Yeah? What was it?”

  “Jus’…jus’ turn it on and hear fer y’self.”

  Jericho went to the scanner—a square box with a telephone handset mic attached by a cord, almost like a CB radio—and asked, “What channel?”

  “Well…all of ‘em.”

  He turned the scanner on, releasing a brief squawk of static through the speaker on top. After that, there was nothing but the hum of an open line.

  “It was pretty faint,
” Mondo told him. “Ya might hafta turn it up.”

  “Or maybe all dat pot finally fucked up your brain.”

  “I tell ya, I heard it!” the old man snapped.

  “Heard what? You haven’t even…” And then a voice poured from the scanner, just as faint as he’d claimed. Jericho turned up the volume as far as it would go.

  He was tempted, at first, to believe the line was distorted somehow, the transmission garbled or maybe even encrypted. But no; aside from being quiet, the channel had crystal clarity. It was the voice itself that was the problem.

  The timbre was deep and rough, like listening to someone who’d been smoking for a century. The language it spoke was not English or Spanish, the only two Jericho would’ve recognized, but rather something more guttural. Each sound—word?—that it made seemed to crawl into his ear, jostling about in his head in a way that made him nauseated.

  He reached toward the scanner, meaning to change the channel frequency.

  “What’re you doin?” Mondo cried out, horrified. “Don’t answer it!”

  “I’m not!” Besides the fact that he wouldn’t be able to broadcast while the other party was already doing so, the very idea of pushing the transmit button and trying to answer that somehow obscene voice filled Jericho with dread. It would’ve been like that old urban legend about saying ‘Bloody Mary’ in the mirror five times; tempting fate, in other words. He spun the dial to switch channels and found the same voice broadcasting on each one.

  The receiving range on a VHF scanner like this one, if a highly amped broadcast came from a tall transmitter or a high hillside, was, at most, sixty nautical miles. From ship-to-ship in crafts as small as the Steel Runner, it was more like five.

  Unless there was a freighter passing somewhere close by, that meant this transmission had to be coming from one of the derelicts.

  As Jericho mulled that over, the speaker on the radio stopped abruptly, and the line was given back to open silence.

  “It’s the Voice of the Deep,” Mondo said solemnly.

  “Huh? What’re you talkin ‘bout now?”

  “My grandfather. He was a voodoo priest on Saint Thomas, long befo’ the white man came and startin buildin hotels on the island. I ever tell ya that, Jer’cho?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Well, he was, and he used ta tell me stories about the Voice of the Deep. An angry, vengeful creature that uses the ocean for its own whims. Not a god, not a demon, but sumthin in between.”

  Uneasy silence reigned after he finished speaking. Usually the old fart’s stories were easy to pass off. Now though, Jericho could feel gooseflesh walking across both arms.

  Before they could say anything else, the white kid began to yell from downstairs.

  “I’ll go see what he wants,” Mondo said. He walked out of the wheelhouse, leaving Jericho alone with the scanner.

  He quickly switched the device off before that voice could speak again.

  3

  As soon as he was alone, Justin heaved at his bindings. The ropes were loose enough not to chafe, but still far too tight to slip out. Struggling got him nowhere except exhausted. But using his feet, he found he could move the chair in half-inch increments.

  On the kitchen counter sat a block of cooking knives. He worked his way around the table toward them at an agonizingly slow pace while the dog watched. After what felt like two hours of work but was surely no more than ten minutes, he was covered in sweat and barely three feet from where he’d started. He sagged in the chair and rested his chin against his sternum.

  Footsteps on the stairs brought him around. Justin raised his head and tried to think up an excuse for his new position in the room. “Sir, I gotta take a leak so—”

  The words hung in his throat.

  The figure descending toward him was not Mondo. It was barely four feet tall, and looked like it might once have been a little girl around five years old, dressed in the tattered remains of a tiny pair of Levi’s and a short sleeve, flowery blouse. And probably of some eastern ethnicity, judging from the dark tint of her skin.

  Or what little skin she had left.

  Most of her flesh looked runny and wet, almost gelatinous, and covered in oozing pustules. Her head, in particular, was horrible to look at. It was lumpy with tumorous growths, and only a few clumps of long hair remained on her diseased scalp. The skin of her face sagged in flaps and lumps like it was in the process of sloughing off, resulting in a hideous mask that had sealed over her right eye and left icicles of flesh dangling from her misshapen nose. It reminded him of the sick kids they used on TV to get you to donate money for disease research or burn wards, except they always found the cutest ones possible for those ads. This tiny little girl made him want to retch. She stood hunched on the next-to-last riser of the staircase, one shoulder swollen so much it almost reached her ear, small hands flexing slowly at her side as she looked around dazedly. When her remaining eye passed over Justin, she fixed him in a glassy stare.

  Under the table, the dog rolled over on its stomach and growled.

  “Um, hello?” Justin said tentatively. She may look like hell, but he didn’t care who she was or what was wrong with her, especially if she could get him out of this. “Can you…can you help me?”

  The girl’s cracked lips peeled back, revealing blackened, gummy teeth. She threw her head back and shrieked at the ceiling. The sound was pure fury. She leapt off the last stair and ran at him full out, arms outstretched.

  “Hey, stop! What’re you doing?”

  She was two feet away when the pitbull came flying out from under the table, knocking the whole thing over. Poker chips and empty beer bottles flew in all directions, along with Amber’s textbook. The dog jumped at her with a shrill bark, the fifty-pound girl colliding with the sixty-pound canine to produce a meaty thud. The girl was knocked flat to the floor on her back.

  The dog waded in to attack, latching on to her forearm just below the elbow. Justin watched in stunned horror as it shook its powerful head back and forth, mauling the appendage. Her boiled skin seemed to disintegrate beneath the canine’s teeth. But instead of blood, a bright blue, almost phosphorescent liquid spilled from the sides of the dog’s muzzle and poured across the floor.

  A pungent, eye-watering stench singed the hair in Justin’s nose.

  The pitbull deflated at the first taste of the goo. It let go and backpedaled, whimpering and gagging. Before it could get out of range, the girl whipped out a hand, grabbed its lower jaw, and wrenched. The dog’s head split across the middle as the two parts of its muzzle separated. Its limp body fell to the floor, and the girl looked up at Justin and hissed.

  “Jesus Christ, help! Mondo, help!”

  She came at him, hunched and ghoulish.

  He struggled again in the chair, this time hurling himself side-to-side hard enough to lift the legs off the ground. The girl reached him, such a tiny figure but so much stronger than she looked. She grabbed his hair and yanked him toward her. Her stink enveloped him. Justin glimpsed her melted features coming at his face, teeth bared.

  He threw all his weight toward her, tipping the chair. For a moment, he was suspended by his hair where she gripped it, but then it ripped out by the roots. Her fingernails dragged across his chest as he fell, shredding his borrowed shirt and the flesh beneath. His veins filled with fire as he hit the floor hard on his shoulder and writhed.

  For a split second, his eyesight was blotted out by a cobalt blur, as if a neon flashbulb had gone off in his face.

  “What’s all this ruckus, boy?” Around the legs of the girl, Justin saw Mondo come down the steps. The old man took in the situation. His face bloomed with panic as he shouted up the stairs, “Jer’cho! G’down here!”

  The girl spun and flew at him. Her appearance must’ve repulsed Mondo just as much, because he wasted no time pulling his pistol. He got off two shaky shots into the bulkhead before she was on him, climbing his torso with the agility of a monkey. Clinging to his jac
ket, she darted forward, sank her teeth into his throat, and tore it out. Blood sprayed across the room in an arc, making it all the way to the poker table. He flailed at the girl as she continued to take bites out of him.

  Then Mondo—the man who was once married to the most beautiful girl in the Caribbean—collapsed at the base of the stairs with his eyes still open and staring at nothing. The girl leapt away as he fell.

  Justin thrashed on the floor, but he was still bound tight. His chest burned where the insane little bitch had scratched him. She was coming back a third time, skittering toward him on hands and knees like an animal. Blue drool that looked like the stuff from the inside of a glow stick leaked out the sides of her mouth. He lay helpless as she fell upon him.

  Another gunshot rang through the ship. The top of the girl’s head sheared away. She slumped over Justin.

  A second black man with dreadlocks past his shoulders stood on the stairs, holding Mondo’s pistol. As Justin watched, he bent over and voided his last meal onto his shoes.

  4

  “Say again Jericho?”

  His mechanic’s voice was broken by poor reception, but even so, Lito could hear the panic in it. “I said he’s fuckin dead, mon! Mondo’s dead!”

  Lito looked up from the walkie. They’d tied the white kids up with strips from the clothes in the front closets of the houseboat and had been in the process of loading them into the rowboat when he’d finally gotten a response from the Steel Runner. Now everyone stopped and stared at him, Ray frozen with one foot in the rowboat and one still on the sunporch. Lito stepped to the far side to escape his audience and lowered his voice. “What do you mean? How?”

  “Some crazy, fucked-up little girl bit his t’roat out! She killed Cheech too!”

  “Did you say a little girl?”

  “Oh god. God, I shot her, Cap’n. I shot her right in de head, but I didn’t have no choice! Dere was somet’in wrong wit her, she was sick or somet’in!”

  “Jer, man, chill out, you’re…you’re not makin any sense!” Lito felt some panic of his own coming on. If he understood correctly, Jericho was not only telling him that he’d lost a second crewman, but that someone else—and not just anyone else, but a fucking child—had also been murdered on board their boat. That raised a hell of a lot more questions than it answered, but it also meant a long prison stretch would start looking good compared to the death sentence they’d get if they were brought in now.