by E. J. Foster
I gave an encouraging smile.
“Yes, that’s right,” I confirmed.
The woman’s face was all business now. She had turned, and it was clear that whatever bridge of goodwill we created had burned to the ground.
The goddess moved quickly toward a box on the wall near us. She was as fast as she was fit. She flipped open a clear protective enclosure revealing a large red plunger the size of my fist. I spied a button with a label above it in large bold letters: MOB.
She smashed it.
Alarms sounded from everywhere, consuming the entire ship, and the caged lightbulb mounted above the button spun in circles and flashed bright red.
The woman turned her attention back toward us, her whip of blonde hair flailing as her head spun. The golden locks sailed over her left shoulder and settled against her breast once again.
The look on her face had changed, no longer an invitation. I couldn’t quite read it, but I knew one thing. This wasn’t good.
I turned to Jules in time to see another flash of red sprinting along the railing, down the length of the ship. The mohawk was on the move.
Without thinking, I started after her.
20
Finn's arms shook as he tried to hold the heavy floor hatch open a crack.
Jessa hunted in her backpack, digging for something. She pulled out a book, Sunken Treasures of the Chesapeake Bay. Jessa wedged the book into the slit of light coming through the hatch.
“Ok, let it go… softly,” Jessa whispered.
Finn let the heavy weight of the hatch door rest on the book and finally let it go. He rubbed the burning muscles of his arms, massaging them.
Jessa kneeled down on the floor, getting as close as she could to the slit of light, one eye peering into the hallway below. She listened as the men spoke, trying to watch their lips to help fill in the muffled gaps.
Finn watched Jessa as her eyes and face contorted and changed with each new piece of information she deciphered. Her expressive face was an action movie and went through a torrent of emotions while she listened to the Frenchmen.
After a few minutes, the men’s voices were accompanied by distant footsteps and faded away slowly as they left.
“They’re gone,” Jessa confirmed.
Finn lifted the full weight of the hatch door a millimeter, and Jessa grabbed her book before the door slammed shut again.
Finn huffed, his chest heaving for air.
“What did they say?” Finn was still breathless.
“They said something about precious cargo,” she said.
“I mean about us. Did they see us?” Finn asked.
Jessa’s face changed at the question.
“Yes,” she said.
“Well? Are we in trouble?”
“I didn’t fully understand the verb and how it was conjugated. But I believe the intent was: to eliminate.”
“Eliminate,” Finn said and then asked, “Eliminate what?”
“Les enfants,” Jessa spoke in French. “The children.”
Finn tapped a finger to his lips as he thought, furrowing his brow in the process.
“What do you think they meant? The children?” Finn asked, half to himself as if trying to solve the mystery.
Jessa waited a moment, giving Finn a chance to noodle it through in his head. Finn’s eyes widened and his mouth fell slack, and Jessa knew at that moment that Finn understood.
“Us? Eliminate?”
“I believe my translation to be accurate,” Jessa said.
Finn was searching his brain, trying to wrap his mind around what was happening. He reverted to his base instinct.
“We need to get back home.” The nerves were bundled in Finn’s voice. He opened his mouth again, but Jessa spoke first.
“There’s more.”
21
When I finally caught up to Jules, she was three stories below deck. She had turned and descended the stairs down under the bridge castle, a huge office building at the stern of the boat that housed the crew living quarters, and the wheelhouse.
We came to an intersection where a directional sign hung on the wall. To the left: Hold #2. To the right: Engine Room.
We turned right and ended up at the lowest point in the ship. The engine room.
“Jules. Why’d you run?”
“You saw what she did. She turned against us,” Jules said, whipping her pointing finger toward the upper decks.
“Jules, I don’t think she turned on us.”
“Did you see the look in her eyes? If they were laser beams, they would have sliced right through you. Besides, she hit the security alarm.”
“About that. Jules, that was no security alarm. That was the M.O.B.”
Jules looked at me as if I were speaking a foreign language, and I remembered that Jules wasn’t a boater. She was a hacker. Of course, she would not have understood.
“M.O.B,” I repeated the letters. “Man overboard.”
All the anger fell from Jules’ face, and turned to curiosity.
“Why would she...” Jules trailed off.
“Language barrier. I think it was a simple misunderstanding. I think she may have been trying to help us. When I said something about the kids boarding…”
But I had lost Jules’ attention. Her eyes wandered to the floor behind me, and it was clear she had stopped listening.
I turned to see what was so interesting, and when I did, I recognized something I had seen before. Recently.
On the floor was a black sphere the size of a basketball, with a cracked, rough surface that was scarred with pits and striations.
The thing was half-buried into the steel plating on which we stood. I had seen something like this for sure, in Katie’s lab. But this time, the meteorite was much bigger. I approached it slowly, keeping myself between Jules and the rock.
I stood over the small black boulder and looked upward. I saw something I’d never seen from this far below deck. Daylight.
Red clouds moved slowly across an aperture that must’ve been four or five stories up. A clean clear hole had been cut right through the steel ship. The meteorite had penetrated through several decks before stopping here in the bowels of this ship and burrowing into the floor on which we stood.
Jules must have registered concern on my face.
“What’s wrong?”
“I think I’ve seen something like this before,” I said. “The thing. At Katie’s lab, that I told you about.”
Jules dipped her head but kept her eyes on me, lifting her brows.
“I think this is a bigger one.”
Jules took a step back, reflexively.
“If this is what I think it is, we have to find Finn and Jessa, and get the hell off this ship––fast.”
“I’m all for that.”
“This ship is too large to search. I don’t like it, but I think we’ll have to split up, to cover more ground.”
Without a word, Jules started scanning the area. Her head darted all around. She trained her attention up to the ceiling, along the wall, focusing on the rat’s nest of cables and conduits that ran above our heads.
She began walking along the wall, keeping her eyes up, focused on the trunk line of wires above. She paced forward, tracking each cable, monitoring the leads and analyzing where they went.
“Coax, no. Power, nope.” Jules was mumbling to herself as she identified each wire. She counted and searched for another few minutes. I knew she was on to something. I didn’t know exactly what, but Jules was one of the smartest people I’d ever known; when it came to problem solving, I knew better than to interrupt her genius at work.
“There you are,” Jules sang playfully. “Cat six.”
22
Randall paced back and forth in the dim light of the large below-deck section of the ship.
He played his flashlight up and down the metal shipping container that sat in front of him. It was just one of a network of underground stacks of containers. There were too many t
o count. But Randall stood, interested in this particular one.
He noticed scars and holes on the wall of metal; some small, some large. The maximum damage seemed to converge on this spot, but it was difficult to tell what the actual story was on the inside of the containers.
He’d have to get inside to assess the damage.
Using the tip of his boot, Randall kicked aside some of the small black balls of various sizes that littered the floor of this hold.
“They gotta clean this shit up...” he complained into the darkness.
Randall grabbed a handheld radio from his belt loop and keyed the mic.
“I’m already here. In hold number two. Where the hell are you?” His irritation rose on the last sentence before he released the mic. “Frickin' assholes,” he muttered to himself.
After a moment, the sound of French and static filled the space and then fell silent again, leaving an echo.
Randall keyed the mic again.
“Speak American, dammit,” Randall growled through his teeth. His frustration was complete. Randall killed the walkie and put it back on his belt loop. “We didn’t save your asses in the big one, just to end up speaking French,” he muttered to no one.
Randall had been a pilot for over forty years and had captained every type of boat, from a dinghy to a battleship; he no longer had patience for what he perceived as ineptitude.
The sounds of footfalls echoed in the large hall. They grew louder but seemed to be coming from everywhere at once.
Randall tried his hand at echolocation, scanning the room with his ears. After some analysis, he decided the visitors must be to the left, and turned in that direction, lighting the area with his weak flashlight.
“Hello,” he said and got an echo back.
The footsteps were getting closer, but there was no one there.
A warm hand grabbed his shoulder from behind. Randall spun in a panic, dropping the flashlight.
A whirl of light flashed in circles as the small torch spun on the floor, creating a momentary disco effect and throwing shadows of legs long around the space.
When the show ended, there were two men standing there. Randall took a step back. The flashlight was back in his hand. The light jittered and wobbled on two identical faces, both with jet black hair with a shock of lighting running through it.
The men wore the standard issue work jumpsuits that had been worn by all the crew on this ship.
The old pilot let out a long breath he had been holding.
“God Dammit,” he spat. “You scared me half to death.”
“Je m'excuse,” both men said simultaneously, and then shared a look between each other. One of the men was carrying a heavy four-foot-long wrench propped over his shoulder. He nodded to his doppelganger, passing some silent communique with his eyes.
“Je m'excuse,” he said again.
“American,” the pilot said slowly, just barely containing his disdain.
“Oui. Of course,” he said, pulling the leaden wrench off his shoulder, and lowering it to the floor with a thud. “We speak English,” he continued in a thick French accent.
Pilot Randall half rolled his eyes and reset himself, getting back to business.
“This,” Randall pointed to the damaged container he had been inspecting, “is the one I need opened.”
The twins exchanged another glance, and then the wrench spoke again.
“Surely, this is not necessary.” He spoke with a delicate French accent.
“I need to make sure this vessel is seaworthy before I take her up the Chesapeake,” the pilot said.
“We cannot...” they both started in unison and then stopped, exchanging another communique with their eyes. Wrench nodded and then turned to Randall and started again.
“I cannot open...” Wrench turned to examine the container before continuing, “This one.”
“You can, and you will.” The pilot’s voice was firm, but his flashlight still shivered on the men.
The twin’s eyes met again, the conversation between them unspoken.
“Oui,” the wrench spoke. “But it is not... How you say? Prudent.” The accent was beautiful.
Randall snatched the large tool out of the man’s hand.
“Gimme that,” he practically spat. Randall turned toward the business of the container door. He wrenched on the door lever, using the tool as a breaker bar. The squeal of twisting metal whined and moaned as he worked the thing back and forth. Randall heaved and grunted with each thrust of the wrench, but it refused to budge.
Sweat formed at the pilot’s receding hairline as he labored, huffing and churning, trying to break it loose.
After a minute, it seemed like Randall could go no more when the lever finally broke past the damaged, twisted steel and turned over freely, releasing the catch.
Randall hefted the large hunk of tempered steel that made up the wrench in his hands before handing it back to the man.
“That’s how you do that.” The arrogance was thick in Randall’s voice.
Randall began pulling the large door open. The steel screeched and cried as if being tortured.
The men stood back, giving him room to work the massive door, falling in behind him.
Randall had his flashlight out again, and it danced inside the container. The enclosed space seemed empty of cargo. A huge black meteorite was embedded into the floor right near the door, blocking his path into the container.
Randall trained the beam of light onto the floor, searching for holes or damage, letting the light wander farther and farther toward the dark rear of the container.
“Floor looks intact,” Randall said, as he continued his inspection.
The light danced and changed when it finally reached the farthest depths of the container. A black tarp covered a loaded pallet at the back of the small space.
“What’s that?” the pilot asked under his breath, as he stepped into the container.
The lights went out.
23
Katiana descended the stairs, chasing after the handsome man and the red mohawk. When she reached the bottom, she pondered which way to go. She looked right, toward the engine room. After a moment she shook her head, and turned left, into hold number two.
She walked the entire length of the hallway, deciding to start at the farthest container bays, and then work her way back.
Each stack of containers she passed was separated by a narrow alley way in between, before the next forty-foot-long stack started.
“Un. Deux. Trois,” she said aloud, counting the hallways ahead, trying to determine the scope of her search.
She wished she hadn’t pushed the alarm and chased them off. When they ran, she knew she must’ve done something wrong. A misunderstanding. That’s why she immediately silenced the alarm.
She had made these kinds of mistakes before, with her broken English. But she had never made a man run from her. Especially not a man as handsome as this one.
She wanted to find him. But why hadn’t she enlisted the help of her crewmembers? Why was she doing this in secret? Did she want him all to herself?
And who was the girl with the mohawk? Not a girlfriend. Certainly not. Too young.
Then why was this feeling of jealousy rising inside her and then subsiding again, like ocean waves?
She thought of his brown eyes, and how they had met hers. In that moment, she was sure they knew something about each other. Understood each other.
Her blood tingled and coursed through her body. The same way it did the first time she saw him.
She realized she had stopped counting and started daydreaming when her solitude was shattered by the sounds of voices emanating from one of the darkened hallways.
She froze, listening with intent. A fresh smile on her face. The man.
She had lost count of the stacks. She looked back from where she came, and then turned one-eighty again in the direction she had been headed but couldn’t tell how far along she was.
She
inched along, continuing on as quietly as she could. She brushed the blonde hair off her shoulder, exposing her naked ear and tucking the hair behind it to listen.
The voices again. They must be nearby. Katiana moved faster in the direction.
As she closed in on the next hallway on the right, she slowed, wanting to hear their conversation. Why was she so interested in him?
She peered around the corner and saw a circle of light dancing and moving around the space. Someone had a flashlight.
The calm was broken by the loud wail of grinding metal that echoed around the steel structures, multiplying itself. When the deafening screech went silent again, the voices were back.
Katiana turned the corner, staying in shadow, inching closer. She wanted to see the man again. Enjoy his strong build, and let it soak in through her eyes once more.
This was not the man.
She recognized the standard-issue jumpsuits. The twins stood there watching a third man who seemed to be entering a container, its door opened. She couldn’t quite identify the third man; his body was half inside the container.
One of the twins held a substantial steel wrench that was as tall as his waist. She recognized the tool. It was part of their standard gear.
As the third man started to enter the container, the twin raised the heavy tool above his head like an ax.
Katiana’s eyes narrowed, not sure what she was witnessing.
Without warning, the steel came crashing down on the man’s skull, cracking it. The thud was horrifying.
The sound of metal on bone instantly nauseated Katiana, and she doubled over, reflexively. Her bones went cold, and she couldn’t breathe. In, or out. Panic.
She moved back around the corner, hiding herself once again, trying to remember how to breathe.
The voices were back but were muffled under the sound of blood throbbing in her ears.
She began moving, not able to hear anything beyond her own pulse, back in the direction from which she came. Her heart raced at the thought of them behind her, not knowing if they were chasing her, but too afraid to turn back and learn the truth.