Sargasso

by Russell C. Connor

  “What kinda problems?” Carlos had wandered away from the rest of the group, and stood rigid at the far end of the deck with his hands held behind him.

  “Someone—maybe the girl, maybe someone else—sabotaged us. No idea why, but the bottom line is, we need parts, so…we’re gonna have to go scavenge them.”

  Jorge interpreted his meaning first. “What, from those other boats?”

  “Yep. Just gotta pray we find what we need.”

  “I don’t think that’s such a good idea,” Ray said softly, his first contribution to the proceedings.

  “We don’t have any choice.”

  “What about your radio?” Amber asked. “Can’t you call someone?”

  “Sure, we could send out a mayday in the thirty seconds that the lines aren’t bein tied up by that other signal. Only problem is, if we manage to contact anyone at all, it’ll probably be the Coast Guard. And, as you can imagine, that’s not so good for us.”

  “Look, if you just let us go, we won’t say anything. Will we?” Cherrywine and Justin nodded their agreement, while Eric leaned back against the wheelhouse and rolled his eyes.

  “You won’t have to. They’ll know who we are.” Lito put a finger to his upper lip. “Tell you what, though. I can be diplomatic.”

  He grabbed the knife from the sheath on his belt again and sawed through Eric and Cherrywine’s bindings.

  “Everybody gets a vote, even you four,” Lito said, straightening up. “Majority rules. As for my crew, feel free to be honest. Those that wanna try our luck with the radio, raise a hand.”

  Only three went up: Amber, Cherrywine, and Justin’s shaking arm. They all looked at Eric.

  “What? I’m not gonna play this fucker’s games. You really think these criminals are gonna call the cops and get carted off to prison for the rest of their lives if we vote for it?”

  Lito ignored him. “And those that wanna try to get ourselves outta this?”

  He put his own hand up along with most of his crew. Ray was the only one that abstained, shaking his head as he looked skyward. Luckily, it was still enough to swing the vote. “Okay, no more debate. You four sit tight and we’ll find clothes and shoes for those that need them.”

  “Why do we need—?” Amber blanched. “You’re taking us with you?”

  “Of course. I’m down two men. I can’t spare the manpower to guard you here.”

  “If we’re really your guests and not your prisoners, you wouldn’t need to guard us.”

  He sighed. “I meant, for your protection. Better we not split up.”

  Lito turned and walked around the corner, heading below deck. Ray followed him into the gangway, waiting till they were out of earshot to speak.

  “You tricked them into goin along with your little treasure hunt. You know that, right?”

  “It’s either this or call for help, Ray.”

  “Or abandon the Steel Runner and try to find another way out.”

  “Really? That’s your vote? We already lost the yacht, now you wanna leave with even less than we came into this thing?” Lito put a hand on the railing beside him and squeezed that comforting metal. “This ship is all we own in the world, Ray. We leave it and…shit, we’ll be panhandling on the streets wherever we wash up within a week. Not to mention, if Jericho can’t get an engine working in one of these other rust buckets, we’re right back to square one anyway.”

  “It’s just real convenient that doin things this way also lets you go pokin around out there.” Ray crossed his arms. “And we can’t drag these white kids around if we go, they’re dead weight.”

  Lito sighed. “You’re really fuckin up my inner peace here, Ray. I need Jericho with me, and I don’t trust Carlos and Jorge enough to leave them behind. So do you wanna stay here on guard duty? Alone?”

  The other man thought about that. “No.”

  “Okay then. Round up every flashlight, gun and bullet we have on board and get them in the rowboat.”

  “Hey!” The voice belonged to Carlos. They turned in time to see him chasing Eric onto the narrow stretch of deck behind them. The white boy skidded to a stop.

  “Listen.” He wheezed through his swollen nose. “We got off on the wrong foot earlier. I can pay you, okay? My father can pay you…whatever you want.”

  “Oh yeah?” Lito asked. “And just what’s the going rate for an obnoxious, spoiled cabron and the rest of the gang from the Abercrombie catalog?”

  “Who gives a fuck about them? I’m talking about me.”

  Lito chuckled. “That’s very mercenary of you, but ransom isn’t really our thing. Even if it was, what do you expect me to do? We still have to fix our engines.”

  “All I’m asking you to do is leave me here when you go. On that houseboat, maybe. Then call someone when you get away and tell them where I am. Not the police though.” He swallowed uneasily. “I mean, I can give you a number to call.”

  “And where exactly does our payment come in? You gonna run by the ATM first?”

  Eric’s mouth fell open, his tongue working soundlessly within. “I can…mail you a check, or something…”

  Ray snickered.

  Lito leaned closer to the kid. “Your money can’t solve every problem in life, rich boy.”

  “You’re making a goddamn mistake,” Eric snarled.

  Before Lito could tell him how little he cared, the night sky blazed with blue light.

  9

  As Eric got up and chased after Lito, Amber leaned forward to put a hand against Justin’s clammy forehead. He jerked away, scooting out of reach along the wheelhouse wall, and sat stiff and shivering.

  “Woah, what’s wrong?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” he snapped. “Just…leave me alone.”

  Amber frowned. Beside him, she noticed Cherrywine kept her eyes rooted to the deck. “Am I the only one not in on the joke here?”

  “It’s nothing,” he said again.

  Amber looked between them. From the odd sense of guilt coming off them, she couldn’t help wondering if maybe these two actually had gotten up to some hanky-panky while she was in the wheelhouse with Lito. “I just wanted to see how you felt.”

  “Like my insides are f-filled with kerosene and someone lit a match.” All at once, the rigidness left his body and he slumped against the wall. His shivering stopped. He seemed to soften as he said, “I don’t know, it comes and goes. Maybe the cut’s infected. Are you two okay? They didn’t hurt you, or…”

  She shook her head quickly. “These guys might not be as bad as I thought.” She glanced over her shoulder at Jorge, who had retreated to the far end of the deck so he could watch them and look around the corner at wherever Carlos had chased Eric. “Then again, if they’re really shooting children...”

  “It wasn’t like that.” Justin squeezed his eyes shut. “I saw the whole thing, and he wasn’t lying. This girl…it’s like she wasn’t even human anymore. You know that guy with the ponytail? He’s scared there could be more like her. We can’t let them drag us out there into the middle of those ships.”

  Amber gnawed at her bottom lip. That disembodied voice from the radio echoed in her ears. “I don’t see that we have a choice.”

  As she said this, a glaringly bright light bathed them from above. They turned their faces upward. The sky in front of the ship flashed with a vivid, almost neon-blue light, turning the stars into a field of hanging sapphires. The effect was beautiful, like an explosion of fireworks. Except with fireworks, you expected noise and heat on your face, but this phenomenon was eerily silent. Charred ozone hit her nostrils again. The roots of every hair on her body bristled as static electricity coursed over her, causing the fillings in her teeth to buzz.

  And, even though its color was cool and inviting, like pool water on a hot summer day, there was also something entirely unnatural about it. Some primitive sliver of her core cringed away, so much so that she felt sick again.

  Then it ended, not all at once, but dying down to a mutter so
mewhere on the horizon.

  The night—so quiet on the ocean without the honk of car horns or even just the chirp of crickets—stretched on into infinity.

  Lito came running back onto the deck, shoving Eric ahead of him. “Did you see that? What was it?”

  Jorge pointed at the dark horizon. “It came from somewhere out there!”

  Next to Amber, Justin whispered in a dreamy, distracted tone, “God, it was so pretty…”

  The pirates started for the bow, but stopped when a hollow bong sounded below their feet like the clapper of some gigantic church bell, accompanied by a tremor that ran through the deck. All nine people jumped. Another deep gong came right after the first, and this time the entire ship lurched. Cherrywine shrieked and jumped across Justin, into Amber’s lap.

  Lito broke for the starboard side of the boat. More of the noises came now, one right after another, each jolt causing the boat to rock. Ray and Carlos joined him at the railing and looked over. A second later, Carlos exclaimed, “Yo, what the hell are those?”

  Lito turned and jabbed a finger at Amber. “You. Get over here.”

  She looked around at the others—Cherrywine and Eric looked at her in confusion, but Justin was still staring at the sky where those flickers of light had come from—then stood slowly and went to stand in front of Lito.

  “Now you tell me, and think really careful,” the pirate said, moving aside and ushering her to the railing with a hand on her neck. “Are those your goddamn sea monsters?”

  The fishing vessel had drifted away from their ship, leaving a wide canal running between them. Amber squinted at the black water below. There was a disturbance down there, a flurry of splashing movement, and it took her eyes several minutes to pick out what was causing it.

  An army of rigid fins carved through the dark water, glistening triangles of all sizes that parted the mat of seaweed in front of them. They darted at the hull of the ship all along the starboard side, making a beeline that ended with them colliding against the metal hull to produce that reverberating gong. Then they about-faced, swam out several yards, and sped back to do it all over again. It was like some perverse version of Sea World, where Shamu was trained to ram himself against the wall rather than jump through a hoop.

  “No,” she answered Lito. “I already told you. I know the difference between a shark and…whatever we saw.”

  “Good god almighty,” Jericho exclaimed, from farther down the railing. He lifted a shaking hand toward one fin that towered over the others by a good two feet. Amber could make out the rounded back of the thing it was attached to when it breached above the water just before slamming into the ship. “Dat’s a great white, mon. You ever hear of dem t’ings comin so far south?”

  “Sharks don’t do that.” Ray shook his head vehemently. “They don’t attack ships for no reason like that.”

  Carlos leaned out over the railing as several of the thrashing figures below jumped up and hit the boat in unison, tipping them the other direction, and sending Amber’s stomach into a tailspin. The smallest of the trio left a dark smear as it fell back into the water and floated belly-up. “They’re bashin their brains out on the side of the boat! Yo, that’s fucked up, man!”

  “No.” Lito watched a few more strikes then glanced over his shoulder, past the prow. “They’re tryin to push us. Toward the other ships.”

  He reached back and pulled the revolver from the back of his pants. Amber flinched at the sight of it.

  “Relax, this isn’t for you.” He twirled a finger in the air at his crew. “Kill every last one of these things.”

  The others pulled out pistols and opened fire over the bulwark. Jorge ran over and added his semiautomatic rifle to the chaos, each bullet a burst of ruddy light. The water churned below, and, just before Amber covered her ears, she thought she heard garbled mewls drifting up between the shots. She closed her eyes and waited for it to end.

  When she finally peeked, Lito and Ray were using boathooks to snag one of the dead sharks under its fins. The water was littered with smooth, oblong bodies bobbing on the surface. The pirates lifted their catch and hauled it over the railing, then allowed the creature to fall to the deck on its stomach with a wet plop.

  “Jesus, that thing smells like mierda!” Jorge exclaimed.

  “Stay back,” Lito ordered. “Don’t anybody touch it.”

  An unnecessary command; Amber didn’t think she could be paid enough to lay a finger on the putrid, disgusting hunk of flesh still wriggling in front of her. The others gathered around in a football huddle, squatting and holding their noses, and even Cherrywine drifted forward to peer over Amber’s shoulder.

  The shark was a lean creature, maybe six feet from tip-of-tail to rounded snout, just above a mouthful of razor teeth. Amber had never seen one without a pane of glass to separate them from her. It was in bad shape from their attack: bullet-riddled, missing hunks of flesh, its dorsal fin as tattered as a battlefield flag. But even besides this damage, she could tell that its rubbery skin was distorted, covered with ripples and cracked valleys and open, rotten-looking sores, just like the pelican. Ray played the beam of a flashlight down its glistening form.

  The liquid dribbling from its wounds was a viscous, shimmery blue, more like oil than blood.

  “What’s wrong with it?” Jorge whispered.

  “It’s just like de girl,” Jericho answered, voice tinged with disgust.

  Ray exchanged a glance with Lito. “You think its some kinda pollution, maybe? Somethin in the water?”

  “Fuck that, man!” Jorge said. “That’s some kinda disease, like a flesh eatin virus!”

  Beside Amber, Justin stifled a cough.

  “Oh god, that’s what happened to them.” Cherrywine backed away, holding up her hands as if to ward off an attacker.

  “Happened to who?” Amber asked.

  “The people from those other boats. Don’t you see? It’s like the story Eric told us about that man, the one the government took away. All these people, they got sick and their skin started melting off, just like that thing.” Each word she said was more shrill than the one before it. Her manicured fingers stole up to grip the long, blond hair above either ear, like a B-movie scream queen. “Are we gonna catch that? Are we all gonna look like that?”

  Jericho frantically rubbed his palms against the legs of his shorts. “Oh shit, I touched dat little girl!”

  “Hey.” Lito’s calm voice cut through the growing panic in the rest of the group. He was hunkered down right in front of the shark, his face just a foot or so from its maw of tangled teeth. “Everybody, just chill out and take a look at this.”

  He grabbed one of the boathooks and used it as a lever to roll the shark onto its side, revealing the blackened remains of its long belly.

  Looking like one of her professors, Lito used the boathook to point at a gaping cavity in the flesh just below the shark’s open jaw. At first, Amber thought it was an exceptionally big exit wound from one of their gunshots, but then she saw the jagged bits of blue bone sticking out around the edges and she understood.

  It was a second mouth.

  No more than a rudimentary hole buried below the first, ringed with bluish teeth, like the gullet of a lamprey.

  “That, is a mutation,” Lito declared. “When we were fishing him out, I saw another one down there with a second dorsal fin, and another with no eyes. And the girl had the same bluish tint to her blood. It’s all connected, but last I checked, there ain’t no disease on earth that spontaneously mutates you. And there sure ain’t one that keeps you young for thirty years, or every Hollywood actress would be tryin to catch it.”

  “Then we’re back to somethin bein in the water,” Ray said.

  “We swam in there,” Amber said quietly.

  “And when you start growing extra limbs, then we’ll worry about you.” Lito straightened and faced them from the other side of the shark. “My point is, we don’t know anything for sure, so let’s just cut the hysterics.”


  They all went back to contemplating the double-mouthed shark in silence until Carlos finally raised his head and looked around at the group. “Yo, where’s the other one?”

  The question confused Amber until she realized the deck behind them was empty.

  Eric was gone.

  10

  “Looks like all he grabbed was a pair of Jericho’s shoes from downstairs,” Ray reported. “No guns, no flashlights, nothin. Just took the rowboat and ran while he could.”

  “Hijo de puto! Idiota!” Lito brought a fist down on the Steel Runner’s prow. Black rage consumed him, the kind that all his books and meditation were supposed to be saving him from, but at least this was directed inward rather than outward. “My fault for not keepin his ass hogtied!”

  “In that case, we should lock down the other three again.”

  Lito simmered a second before answering. “What’s the point? They can’t go anywhere now unless they wanna swim. No, that other cocksucker was the problem. I say good riddance.”

  Ray shrugged and looked away, but not before Lito caught the look on his face.

  “What?”

  “I’m not blind, amigo. You think showin a little goodwill is gonna get you in with that high class, bookworm, gringa piece of ass? The blonde maybe, she seems desperate enough, but the brunette? Jorge’s got better chances, and his idea of romance is a roofie and a ball gag.”

  “Ray…I got no fuckin idea what you’re talkin about.”

  “Uh huh. So what’s the plan?”

  “Depends. What did Jericho say about the pontoon?” After discovering the last rowboat had been stolen, they’d roped the fishing boat and hauled it closer, then lowered the mechanic aboard to see if the vessel was serviceable.

  “Engine on that thing’s shot. Says he’d have a better chance at fixin the jet skis.”

  “Fine. Then we transfer everybody over and row the damn thing.”

  “We can’t do that.”

  “We sure as hell can. One man on each side with long poles as oars. Be like a gondola ride. We don’t got that far to go.”