Atlantic Pyramid

by Michelle E Lowe

Neal narrowed his eyes at Carlton. “You have no proof, old man.”

  “We have a witness,” Carlton returned. “Your other victim.”

  “What other victim?”

  “Beating up women is a criminal offence around here,” Carlton said darkly. “I hereby sentence you to the Southern Districts.”

  “Wait!” Neal said defensively, “you said I was going to have a trial.”

  “You just did, my boy.”

  My eyes traveled over everyone. It was a law that a person would be tried before he could be sent to the Southern Districts. But in this case, no one would miss a snotty little bastard like Neal. We handcuffed and placed him in a sturdy rowboat.

  Khenan and Paddy rowed while Travis sat with a rifle. Carlton was in the back and Neal sat in the middle, pleading for mercy. They didn’t let me carry a gun. I assume they were afraid I’d do something stupid.

  “Look, I was pissed, okay?” Neal said pitifully. “You can’t condemn a guy for anger issues.”

  “You should’ve thought about that before you acted,” Carlton replied.

  Carlton had escorted murders, rapists, and the insane out to the Southern Districts for many years since becoming the top dog in law and order here. He said he felt like the Ferryman, carrying the departed souls to the Underworld. No one was ever allowed to leave the prison ship. Many committed suicide there, leaving bodies strewn about the deck that could never be touched. People who’d slipped into insanity were locked away in the brig by other prisoners.

  The fog was light and I could easily see the massive ship. It leaned against the belly of a capsized vessel, the Cotopaxi. Its nearly upright position was one of the reasons why it had been chosen as a prison. She was secluded from other wreckage, with sharks infesting the area, which kept prisoners from venturing into the water. Ever since the ship had been gutted and converted into a holding facility for criminals in 1962, no one had ever escaped.

  When Neal saw it, he cringed and began babbling. “Look, I’ll do community service. I’ll be a goddamn slave. I’ll do anything, just don’t send me there!”

  I hoped Carlton wouldn’t give in to his pleading. I never wanted to see Neal again. I might kill him, and then he’d haunt me forever.

  “You know, that might not be a bad idea,” Carlton said, scratching his chin. “Humility would do someone like you good. Unfortunately, sending you here wasn’t our idea. It was Sandy’s.”

  Neal’s eyes widened. “What?”

  “That’s right. Since you beat her up, we let her decide what to do with you. So, here we are.”

  There was a long silence, then Neal asked hopefully, “How long will I have to stay?”

  “Forever,” I said, as if the question had been directed at me.

  He turned my way, and I thought he might say something, but he kept quiet. As we neared the ship, prisoners began to call to us.

  “Come one, come all! The angels listen but it’s the devil who calls!”

  Inmates gathered at the railing, at least six dozen of them. More faces peered through porthole windows on the lower decks. The sheer terror on Neal’s face gave me some silent satisfaction.

  The boat finally stopped and the prisoners began chanting, “Jump! Jump! Jump!”

  Neal seemed confused and turned to Carlton. “What’s going on?”

  “You have to swim from here on,” Carlton said.

  His eyes widened. “Swim? Why can’t you just take me there?”

  “If we get too close, the prisoners might attack,” Carlton explained.

  “But what about the sharks?” Neal asked, his voice rising. “They could get me!”

  “They might,” Carlton said with no trace of emotion. “I suppose you should start praying that Mr. Livingston can shoot them first.” His eyes grew cold and hard when he added, “It’s time to go.”

  “I won’t jump,” Neal said defiantly.

  “The hell you won’t,” I said, rising to my feet.

  My move seemed to make Neal a little more compliant. After a long silence, Carlton said, “We can wait out here all day, lad. Trust me, I’ve done it before.”

  I made a mental note to ask Carlton why he used British jargon every now and then. In the meantime, he removed the handcuffs from Neal’s wrists. Travis pointed to a steel ladder running up the keel of the Southern Districts. There was a second ladder welded onto the first one to extend its length. “You see that ladder?”

  Neal nodded.

  “Good, that’s where you want to go. Now get started, mate.”

  Neal stepped to the edge of the boat as the prisoners chanted even louder. I wished I’d been appointed sharpshooter.

  The sharks proved to be impatient. One rammed the boat, forcing Neal to topple into the water. I was afraid he’d try pulling himself back in, but he resurfaced and swam toward the ship.

  The swim was a little more than twenty feet to the ladder. The chanting stopped and the world became quiet except for the splashing of arms and legs. A minute later, several fins cut quickly through the water in his direction. The prisoners cheered excitedly.

  “Mr. Livingston,” Carlton said mildly, “show us your talent.”

  Travis aimed his rifle and took a few shots at the sharks. For his sake, I hoped he didn’t hit Neal.

  “Feast! Feast! Feast!” the prisoners shouted.

  Neal made two or three more desperate strokes before he disappeared underwater. A second later, he came to the surface, screaming, “They’re pulling me down! Help me!”

  Khenan and Paddy maneuvered the boat to give Travis a clear shot as Neal continued to scream. But as Travis raised his rifle, Neal vanished again.

  “Bloody hell, where did he go?” Travis cursed, still looking down the barrel of his weapon.

  Neal resurfaced, but not in the same spot. Blood swirled in the water around him. Shortly thereafter, he was sucked into the murky soup, which churned into a froth by the frenzied sharks.

  The water finally calmed as the sharks swam away, leaving only a dark pool of blood and chunks of flesh floating on the surface. The prisoners cheered.

  “Damn,” Travis said with an unaffected sniff. “I suppose that’s a shame.”

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Twilight loomed when I left North Village, forgetting all about the dangers lurking on the beach after dark. If anyone was in the jail, they said nothing as I passed it. I tried not to think too much about what I was about to do. If I did, I’d probably turn back.

  Grief tore into my heart. Even after witnessing Neal’s death, I could feel the heavy weight of sadness pressing down on me. With my thoughts on other things, I didn’t notice what slid out of the sea until I heard an eerie noise.

  I stopped abruptly and looked toward the water. The sound occurred again, a low steady hum that rose in pitch and then descended. A minute later, something moved beneath the sand. I raised my lantern and spotted two slender columns rising in front of me, topped by marble-size eyeballs. The stingray hummed louder than before, alerting others to my presence.

  “Shit!”

  I bolted toward the forest as mounds of sand charged after me, accompanied by vibrating calls. A stingray reached my heels, trying to snare my ankle with its long tail it used like a bullwhip. I leapt to keep from getting stung. If the creatures brought me down, I’d face a merciless end.

  A long mound raced alongside me, trying to cut me off. As its tail sprang from the ground, I had only a split-second to react. I swung my lantern in its direction. The arrowhead stinger crashed the glass box and sliced into the fuel reservoir. I dropped the lantern and it instantly ignited into a fireball.

  A sharp scream came from behind me but I didn’t look back. I spotted a cluster of boulders ahead and leapt onto them, clambering to the top. Only then did I look down as the sand roiled in the glow of the fire. Long tendrils rose from the beach with eerily glowing eyes glistening in the light as they moved.

  I crouched and swung my backpack around to pull out a small torch. Breat
hing heavily, I lit it to watch as the creatures retreated back toward the ocean.

  “Now what?”

  My goal had been to reach the area where Lafitte had left his planks, but I was only halfway there. It appeared I wouldn’t be able to reach it until morning. I contemplated taking my chances but decided it would be best to stay put. There was no real hurry and I had only a vague idea of the dangers lurking in the forest after dark. My business at sea could wait one more night, even if it meant sleeping on jagged rocks.

  To avoid drawing attention to myself, I snuffed out the torch and concentrated on trying to get comfortable.

  Morning light filtered brightly through my eyelids and I squinted as I opened them. A snake-like hissing blew into my left ear, and when I turned, the eye of a stingray stared back at me. I thought I was a goner, until the eye splattered, spraying ocular fluid all over my face.

  I sat up and wiped it off, while Bongo, the leader of the Shark Hunters, popped the eyeball into her mouth. She aimed her red eyes at me, hissing and clicking as I slowly leaned back, hoping she wouldn’t attack me next with her sharp beak.

  “Hey, girl,” I said as calmly as I could.

  I backed away as her beady eyes fastened on me. The pelican-sized bird looked even more intimidating up close. She ruffled her black feathers and spread her wide wings. Hundreds of teeth were lined in three rows inside her beak, with pieces of meat wedged between them. Her spotted tongue looked like a thin strip of pink modeling clay and her breath reeked.

  To my relief, she rose into the air, her wings snapping like a wet towel. The breeze they created brushed against me. She landed amid the rest of her flock on shore, which was gathered around something.

  I climbed down from my perch and slipped quietly away, moving from whatever the Shark Hunters devoured. But curiosity drove me to at least look and I saw what they ate between their feathered bodies—the stingray that had driven the end of its tail into my lantern.

  I hurried along the shoreline as the fog swept overhead, making my way across the ocean to the planks, heading for the boundaries. It seemed easier than before, since I knew what to expect and how to adjust to the unbalanced junkyard. It also helped that it didn’t rain, giving me relatively dry surfaces to walk on. I’d borrowed a life raft from a resident in the village, which I carried in my backpack. When the wreckage thinned, I inflated it and paddled the rest of the way out, hoping a shark didn’t tear it.

  At my plane, I climbed inside and made my way to where Gavin’s body sat, exactly as it had when we’d crashed weeks ago. The stench of urine was less intense but still pretty potent. I clasped him on the shoulder, no longer afraid to touch him, and said, “Okay, Gavin, I’ll set you free, in exchange for your doing the same for me.”

  I’d brought a container of lighter fluid, which I used to drench the interior of the plane. My original plan was to load his body into a wooden longboat, set it on fire, and push it adrift, but since Gypsy Girl would never soar among the clouds again, I decided to put her out of her misery, as well.

  When I’d first planned my escape, I’d thought about returning later to reclaim Gypsy Girl and restore her to working condition. But coming back to the Atlantic Pyramid for the others would be hazardous enough. To risk my life for a plane would be ludicrous, even a plane as precious as Gypsy Girl.

  I squeezed out most of the lighter fluid, then stepped out onto the plane’s wing. I gingerly settled back into the life raft, where I reached into my backpack and pulled out an empty glass bottle and a piece of cloth. I poured the last of the lighter fluid into the bottle and shoved the cloth into its mouth.

  Before I rowed a safe distance away, I spotted Gavin’s body in the cockpit. It was the only thing I hadn’t covered in flammable liquid.

  “This is it.” I said, “I hope this brings you peace.”

  I washed my hands in the ocean before I pulled a lighter from my pants pocket and flicked it to life. I set fire to the cloth and quickly tossed the bottle through the open door. As the bottle shattered, a fire storm roared to life. The flames grew so intense the dashboard began to sizzle and pop.

  I hastily rowed into the boundaries before a piece of debris could puncture my raft. I shuddered as I crossed over into them, my breath escaping in clouds of vapor as the temperature plummeted. When I’d reached a safe distance, I stopped and focused on the spectacle, which was about to get much more exciting than I anticipated.

  I forgot about the PBM Martin Mariners patrol craft nearby, filled with hundreds of gallons of gasoline. As the cockpit of Gypsy Girl burned, the flames eventually found their way to the fuel tank, causing a fiery explosion. Burning debris landed on the sheen of gas floating on the surface of the water and followed it up to the Martin. That burst into an intense fireball, sending debris into the air and pushing the remains of Gypsy Girl out into the boundaries, where she sank into the dark, cold depths. Luckily, nothing pierced my raft as debris fell into the water.

  When it was over, I sighed. I’d kept my word and disposed of Gavin’s body. Now it was time to learn the secret of getting out.

  A faint dripping sound pattered on the rubber of the raft. I twisted around to find a charred and drenched man climbing aboard, looking at me.

  “You’re an asshole,” Gavin said.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  My shock alone rendered me mute. The skin around Gavin’s right eye was scorched black and the white sclera was dark red from blood. His left eye was completely contused. His clothing was in rags and dripping wet. His ears looked as though something had gnawed on them and the rest of his face was blistered. The explosion had blown off half of his left arm and broken his back, forcing him to hunch forward, leaning a little to the side like a sand-filled doll.

  “Did you hear me?” Gavin demanded. Smoke breezed past his blistered lips. “I said you’re an asshole. Look what you’ve done to me!”

  It took a few seconds for any words to come up from my throat. I swallowed thickly and stammered, “Why…why are you here?”

  He shrugged, which caused his shoulders to pop. “Dunno, dude. All I know is I was in a kind of dream world one minute, like I was sleeping, and the next, I’m here. But something—instinct, I guess—tells me it’s because of you. Wanna explain?”

  I was nonplussed. I had dozens of my own questions, but Gavin wanted explanations.

  “You told me to do it,” I said. “You told me to dispose of your body in exchange for telling me how to escape.”

  “Why the hell would I want you to burn me up?” His smoky words dissipated completely.

  “To put you at peace.”

  “Does it look like I’m at fuckin’ peace?”

  “You told me to do it,” I repeated insistently.

  “I didn’t tell you squat!” he fired back. “Like I said, I’ve been in some other place—and a restful one, at that. I felt safe there. That’s what gave me peace, not this!”

  I couldn’t wrap my brain around it. If he was telling the truth, what was it that had visited me every morning since I’d gotten here? It made no sense.

  I turned away and ran my hands through my hair, on the verge of a mental breakdown. “What’s going on? What’s this place doing to me?”

  “From my point of view, it looks like you’ve got it better than me,” he said sarcastically, looking down at his scorched body.

  “Are you in pain?”

  He shook his head. “Nope, don’t feel any pain, but I’m a little ticked now that the Elephant Man would have a better shot at getting laid than me.”

  His words made me think back to when he—or whatever the hell it had been—had first visited me on Lafitte’s ship. That entity had claimed its head hurt like a bitch, yet the Gavin with me now mentioned feeling no pain at all, even though he was more severely wounded. I realized everything the other Gavin had told me was a lie. The pain it claimed to have, the promise of telling me a way out, everything. And I’d been dumb enough to fall for it.

  “Gavin, I�
��m sorry. I swear, you came and asked me to do this.”

  “I’m really gonna scare people lookin’ like this,” he said miserably.

  “Don’t worry,” I said, my voice heavy with remorse, “no one but me can see you. Well, living people, that is.”

  “Oh? I guess that’s a plus.” His strange eyes slid up to me. “So, what’s next?”

  “We go back,” I said soberly.

  As I made the dangerous journey back to shore, Gavin followed closely. He seemed to bounce everywhere, sort of skipping from one place to another. One minute, he stood on the tail of a plane, the next he was sitting in a small fishing boat. He asked the same kind of questions that had popped into my head when I’d arrived. I answered as best I could, while trying to process my own questions about the other Gavin and why it had wanted me to awaken the real Gavin.

  It had been a long day and I decided to visit Jean Laffite onboard The Pride, just as I’d done on my two previous trips through the junkyard. Gavin was stoked to see a pirate in the flesh.

  “That was quite an explosion you caused today,” Laffite said with a grin. “I could hear the boom from here.”

  “It was bigger than I planned,” I said, leaning against the railing. “Gavin promised me he’d show me the way out.”

  “And I told you to ignore him,” Laffite retorted, reclining on the rail next to me. He looked at the soaked gauze around my hand and said, “I’ll give you clean wraps for that, but you must apply some salve to your wound as soon as you return to the village. It doesn’t take long for an infection to settle in.”

  Gavin skipped around the deck, taking in everything. He finally stopped to stare at Laffite. “Wow, I’ve never met a real pirate before. When I was a kid, I wanted to be one. This guy doesn’t look much like one, though. Maybe it’s the clothes.”

  “I don’t understand what went wrong,” I said morosely.

  “I don’t think anything went wrong,” Laffite said. “It seems to me that whatever was planned is working perfectly.”

  “What’s he talking about?” Gavin inquired. “What plan?”