Sargasso

by Russell C. Connor

  “Don’t force me like this, it’s not fair.”

  “Quit stalling and answer the question.”

  “Then no, goddamn it, I don’t! Are you happy, is that what you wanted?”

  Justin cocked his arm back and threw the box as far out over the water as he could, regretting it the instant it left his hand. He could see its arc against the sky, but lost sight just before it hit the water.

  “That was fucking childish,” she said.

  He opened his mouth to answer, and a massive cramp ripped through his guts, accompanied by a wash of fire across his chest. He moaned and lay back, curling up on his side.

  He felt Amber crawl up next to him. “What is it, what’s wrong?”

  “Nothing, go aw—” He was in too much pain to finish. Justin squeezed his eyes shut, but the darkness behind them was threaded with a soft neon blue.

  “Would you stop? We can deal with our problems later, but just let me help you.” She forced him to uncurl and laid a hand on his forehead. “Your fever feels worse. Let me see those scratches.”

  His t-shirt was damp with sweat. She lifted the end to look at his chest, but said nothing.

  “Is it bad? Let me see.”

  “No. Just lay still.” Amber stood. “I’ll be right back.”

  As she walked toward the door of the cabin where the captain and his ponytailed right-hand man had disappeared after they all got on board this piece of floating garbage, Cherrywine asked, “Where are you going?”

  “To make this captain of theirs listen to reason.”

  3

  Was it awful that the first emotion Amber felt when the ring hit the water was relief?

  It was like when her father used to put her to bed, and open up the closet door to show her a distinct lack of monsters. The boogeyman’s gone, it can’t hurt you anymore. She could imagine part of herself sinking with the diamond, maybe one of those fly’s eye versions she used to imagine, one that had said yes and married Justin and been the happy little homemaker.

  So, relieved that it was over and she didn’t have to hide anymore…yes. Still worried about Justin…also yes. The flesh around his scratches had turned a necrotic shade of black, and the network of veins around it was visible beneath the skin, a dark web spreading up toward his neck.

  She pushed open the door to the cabin without knocking. Its hinges squalled as a rain of dust and rusted metal flakes drifted down. The space beyond was narrow and cramped. A tiny kitchenette full of cupboards sat just inside the door, which then opened up into living quarters the size of a family tent, with hammock-style bunks that folded down from the walls. Broken dishes, old food wrappers and other garbage was spread across a carpeted floor that was spongy with water damage and giving off the cloying scent of mildew. The conditions looked worse than a prison cell; she couldn’t imagine taking to the open ocean on this junkheap even when it was brand new.

  Old, rust-colored stains painted the floor and walls in irregular patterns. In the far corner, an adult-sized skeleton lay wedged between the end of one bunk and the back wall, dressed in a few shredded scraps of cloth. Not a stitch of flesh remained on it, and the bones were so old, they’d taken on a dingy, waxen look. The skull grinned up at her, jaw askew as though caught in a perpetual moment of surprise.

  Lito and Ray crouched in the middle of the living space as they dug through the layer of garbage on the floor. An electric lantern they’d brought from their ship sat on an old folding stool in the middle of the room.

  “Looking for something to steal?” she asked.

  Lito glanced up. “Tryin to find out who our friend in the corner is.”

  “Oh. Any luck?”

  “Near as we can tell, his name was Robert Watts of Wilmington, North Carolina. Found a gas station receipt that says he left port sometime around June 3 of ‘97.” He lifted his chin toward the huddled skeleton, with its wide, shocked look of surprise. “Somethin tells me that’s about the last time him and this boat were ever seen.”

  “Can you tell how he…?”

  “What, died? Sorry, I left my forensics kit back on the boat.” One side of his mouth pulled up into that smarmy grin as his sidekick chuckled.

  “I just meant, was he like the shark and the little girl?”

  “Not that I can tell. But then again, we don’t even know that the problem with the shark was the same thing that was wrong with the girl in the first place.”

  Amber was quiet a second while she thought about that. “Can I talk to you? Um, privately?”

  “I was just leavin.” Ray climbed to his feet and had a rapid exchange with Lito in Spanish, obviously to keep her from hearing.

  The only problem with this being, her degree plan called for her to learn at least two foreign languages, so she was fluent in both Spanish and German.

  “I’ll leave you alone with your girlfriend here,” Ray told him.

  Lito’s eyes cut over to her. “Would you knock that shit off?”

  “Only if you admit your little schoolboy crush.”

  “I’m a sucker for a perfect ass. So sue me.”

  Ray grunted and switched back to English as he squeezed past Amber on his way out of the cabin, and she pretended not to notice as he checked her out from behind. “I’ll let you know when we get close to the other boats.”

  Other boats. Amber had been trying hard not to think about where they were headed. The idea of more abandoned ships—more pictures of missing families, more forgotten rooms covered with decades of accumulated dust—frightened her.

  Of course, the thought they might not be abandoned terrified her even more.

  Lito pushed up from the floor and perched on the edge of one of the bunks, then motioned to the other one. “Wanted to have a word with you, too. Take a seat.”

  She stepped carefully through the flotsam—jumping far over the remains of Mr. Watts’s shinbones—and took a seat on the narrow bunk across from Lito. The netting sagged on its frame, causing her to sink down until her chin was almost on her knees, so she struggled back up and balanced on the edge. They stared at one another from a few yards away. The light from the lantern turned the scruff on his dark face into a beard of shadows.

  “So, gringa, what can I do for you?”

  “It’s Justin.”

  “Your boyfriend? That’s still what we’re callin him, right? Doesn’t sound like he got upgraded to fiancé quite yet.”

  She licked a bead of sweat from her upper lip. “You heard all that?”

  “Florida heard all that. You two might wanna consider a marriage counselor before you take the plunge.”

  “That’s not any of your…can we just…?”

  He held up a hand. “Sorry, sorry. Start over. What about him?”

  “He’s getting worse.”

  “I know.” He bent over, pulled a small plastic first aid kit out from under the bunk, and slid it to her. It clattered against the skeleton’s dusty hip bone. “I found some antibiotics and aspirin for him. Expired for about a decade, but maybe they’ll still help.”

  “But if he’s got whatever this little girl had—”

  “Okay, again, it can’t be a disease. No disease could be responsible for everything we’ve seen. He probably got some blood infection from the wound. We’ll get him help as soon as possible.”

  Amber thought briefly about the man from Eric’s story, the one that had come back from the Bermuda Triangle with a disease so awful, the government made him disappear. “And what if that’s not soon enough?”

  Lito ran a hand back and forth through the short bristles of hair on the back of his head, took another of those slow, deliberate breaths, and said nothing.

  “You realize how stupid this is, don’t you? Going to these other ships, after everything that’s happened?” She nudged Mr. Watts with the toe of her sneaker, causing a rattle that reminded her of hard raindrops against a windowpane. “You don’t think he ended up like that from natural causes, do you?”

  “We don�
�t have much of a choice. We either find the parts we need, or try to get all the way back to the east coast on this thing. It’s about three-hundred miles ahead of us. You think your boyfriend will last that long?”

  “You did have a choice, though. You could’ve tried calling for help. You still could.”

  “And me and my men would’ve spent the rest of our lives in a cell the size of this room. But hey, so long as you white kids are happy, right?”

  She frowned and let her voice frost over. “That’s not really fair. We wouldn’t even be in this situation if it weren’t for you.”

  “Listen, we can point fingers all night, but it ain’t gonna help. We need a solution, and that’s what we’re lookin for.”

  “Is that really it? Or are you hoping you’ll find something out here besides boat parts?”

  A series of creases raced across his forehead. “You think you know so much about us, don’t you?”

  “You’re not fooling me,” she said. “Sure, you’ve been decent to us now that things have gotten weird, but that doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten you’re all just criminals. In the end, I can’t trust a thing you say.”

  Now there was outright anger on his boyish face, and she wondered if she’d gone too far. “You want honesty? Yeah, I admit, I wanna scavenge these derelicts, but that don’t mean I’m heartless. I lost two men already, and I’m gonna have to live with that long after you’ve gone back to your mansions and your cars and your life of endless parties.”

  “Mansions?” She broke eye contact with him for the first time, and looked at the wall. An odd sense of embarrassment crept over her, as if she should be ashamed to have been on that yacht. “Sounds like you’re the one with the preconceived notions.”

  “Four loudmouth, twenty-year-old yuppies on a boat worth more than everything I’ve ever owned in my life? I see your kind all the time.”

  “Yeah, when you’re robbing them.” She swiped at the moisture accumulating at the corners of her eyes. She’d never met anyone so infuriating in her life. “So tell me this: would you have killed us? If we hadn’t cooperated, or even if everything had gone according to plan and you’d taken our boat? Made us walk the plank, or something?”

  “No,” he answered, without the slightest hesitation. “I just don’t appreciate you judgin me.”

  “Yeah, well…ditto. And for the record, you’re the first person to use the word ‘yuppie’ since 1989.”

  “But pirates makin people walk the plank is all good, huh? You prob’ly expected me to have an eye patch and a hook hand.”

  She shrugged. “Or at least look like a young Cary Elwes.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “You’re a strange one, gringa.”

  “Yeah, that’s what they tell me.” An awkward silence fell between them, and she rushed to fill it. “What did you want to talk to me about?”

  His demeanor darkened as he shifted uncomfortably. “I just wanted to make sure we all had our facts straight, in case we do run into the cops. About that girl—”

  “Relax,” she interrupted. “Justin told us your mechanic saved his life. If we run into the police, we’ll tell them that.”

  “Okay. Thanks. Probably won’t help with the hijacking and kidnapping, but at least it’s one less thing to worry about. And my crew has plenty of those at the moment.”

  “Like this ‘Dominican’ person?”

  Surprise spread across his face. “How did you—?”

  “You mentioned the name back on the Mackerel, remember? You thought we knew something about it.”

  “Right, right.” He shrugged. “That’s just a drug dealer who wants us dead.”

  “Classy. I can see how that would happen a lot with you guys.” They sat for a minute, looking at one another in the lamp light, but this time the quiet was nice. “I better give these to Justin.” She grabbed the first aid kit and wiggled, trying to climb out of the creaking bunk. He stood and offered a hand. As he pulled her up, there was a heavy clunk on the floor between their feet. She looked down to see that the glass statuette had fallen out of her cargo pocket. She’d almost forgotten about it.

  “What’s this?” He picked it up, and she got her first good look at the figurine. An ugly thing, leering like some ancient totem pole. Lito ran a thumb across the tiny devil’s broken horn.

  “Beats me. Belonged to Eric. He tried to hide it back on the houseboat.”

  “Got that valuable antique look.” Sudden understanding came into his eyes. “Might this be the reason he was so eager to stick around out here?”

  “Yeah, I think so. Probably belongs to his father.”

  “Who is this guy anyway?”

  “Some kind of Philly mob boss.”

  Lito gave her a sharp look. “No shit?”

  “That’s what Justin told me. I had no idea before tonight.”

  He tried to hand the statue back, but she pushed it toward him, her palm brushing his fingers in the process. “Keep it.”

  Lito raised a dark eyebrow.

  “I know it’s not a yacht or anything, but maybe it’ll cut some of your losses. Serves the dipshit right for abandoning us.”

  He seemed on the verge of saying more, but the door opened and Ray stuck his head in. “Lito…get out here and take a look at this.”

  4

  There were more ships out here than they’d thought. Lots more.

  Lito figured they’d only been able to count the closest ones in the dark from a distance, but now that they were approaching the frontier, he could see that vessels of all sizes floated in this loose grouping. How far they strung out on either side along this anonymous stretch of the Sargasso—or even how deep they went ahead—was impossible to tell, but the prospect of sailing into their midst struck a primal chord in Lito’s head akin to entering a skeletal, leafless, autumn forest in the middle of the night.

  “I don’t wanna go in there,” Cherrywine whimpered. She cowered behind Amber, peering over her shoulder as they closed in. No one answered her.

  Carlos and Jorge steered their pontoon raft into a narrow corridor lined with derelicts haphazardly drifting in all directions, with barely fifteen yards of clearance on either side. Lito spotted commercial fishing boats…schooners…more yachts, sailboats and pleasure ships of all sizes…a steamer that looked like something from the 1920’s…and other, less identifiable crafts, including some small industrial freighters that towered above the others. He lost count somewhere in the forties, and still there was no end in sight. After a few minutes, they were so deep that the view behind them closed off, and every direction held only more derelicts. Most of them were in even worse shape than the houseboat—weatherbeaten and falling apart at the seams, a few of them no more than rusted-out husks—but some looked as shiny and new as the day they rolled off the assembly line.

  Again Lito was struck by the idea that, even though they may look like ships, they were really coffins. Burials at sea.

  “What is this place?” he asked aloud.

  Ray crossed his arms as he watched a broken-down party yacht with the upper floor caved in slide by to their port. “A floatin graveyard,” he whispered, reading Lito’s mind. “There’re more ships here than we could possibly search on our own.”

  They all stood at the periphery of their raft now, gazing in wonder at the forgotten vessels. Lito turned to Jericho and asked, “You see anything that would have what you need?”

  “All depends on de fuel deliv’ry systems. Wouldn’t know unless I took a look meself.” The mechanic frowned. “But hoses rot fast, so we can pretty much count out some of dese dat look like dey been here since Jesus was a bitty baby in de manger.”

  “Not that long.” Lito shook his head adamantly, wandering over to starboard where a mini-freighter drifted by, bearing a collection of barnacles on its hull so thick a person could climb them like a ladder. “Like I said before, there’s no way these boats coulda been out here longer than a few months unanchored. Besides the fact that the tides woulda carr
ied them apart, someone woulda stumbled onto ‘em.”

  “Someone did stumble onto ‘em, just like we did.” Ray turned to him and swept a hand across the other boats. “How you think they all got here in the first place?”

  Lito had a brief flash of the Steel Runner out here in fifty years, abandoned and left to rot. The image made him sick.

  There were several gasps behind them. Lito spun around to find a huge wooden ship looming out of the dark, its long, pointed prow about to pass right over them. He pulled out his flashlight and said, “Slow us down some, guys. Bring us over there.”

  Jorge and Carlos manned the paddles to reverse their momentum until the edge of the pontoon bumped gently against the other boat. Lito moved around the deck toward the contact point and shined his flashlight along the side.

  The vessel was old-world craftsmanship, like something his imagination would’ve conjured from the adventure-on-the-high-seas books he read as a kid, an all-wooden sailing sloop at least fifty yards long with a rigid, straight-backed stern riding high out of the water. The top of the bulwark rose at least five yards above their heads; taking its girth into consideration, there was probably enough room below deck for this boat to hold sixty men. Lito could see square portholes down its length, studded with blunt metal spikes all around. The fat, round barrels of cannons poked out from a few. It was in great shape too, not a barnacle in sight, still so fresh and new he could practically smell the varnish and laminate on the darkly-stained beams that formed the hull.

  Lito turned his flashlight upward as far as the light would reach, following the shaft of the main mast, all the way to a huge cloth sail stretched between wooden timbers. It whipped and rippled in the strengthening wind, but the ship was turned the wrong direction for the sails to fill. He centered his light on the depiction in the middle.

  A crude, blood red hourglass painted on a background of black canvas.

  “That’s a jolly roger,” Ray said. His voice was full of awe.