Ripples traced the water behind them, for a moment looking almost like part of their wake.
“Fire!” Gabe shouted, even as he pulled the trigger.
Pang and Bone strafed the water, bullets punching the surface in tiny plinking splashes. Gabe emptied an entire clip in seconds and tossed the gun aside, snatching another up from the floor of the boat.
“Tori!” Kevonne yelled.
She spun, caught a glimpse of something white underwater, just off the prow, and pulled the trigger. The recoil pushed her back but she steadied herself and kept firing, breathing evenly, drawing deep within herself. Adrenaline made her skin flush and prickle and she kept firing.
“Jesus, look at it! What the fuck is it?” Bone shouted.
He’d been firing off the starboard side and Tori whipped around to see the thing floating on the surface. For a second she thought it was a human body, maybe the corpse of one of the Mariposa’s crew. It had arms and a head, skin that was fish-belly white, and its long fingers were covered with suckers like the tentacles of an octopus. Then she caught a glimpse of its face—multiple gill-like slits where a nose ought to be, round black eyes, and a wide mouthful of needle-sharp piranha teeth. Its lower body had a silver-green hue, thick and tapered like a serpent or an eel, and ended in the same kind of suckers that covered its fingers.
Where it bobbed above the water, it began to blister and boil and burn in the sun, the flesh melting away.
Gunfire punched the water again as Tori stared at it.
“Kevonne, hit it!” Gabe screamed.
The lifeboat jumped forward, surging through the water and then racing over the surface. Something slammed into them from beneath and the boat rocked but didn’t tip. They’d glanced off of it, but more were coming.
Tori picked her way toward the back. Gabe, Bone, and Pang kept firing, discarding weapons. Hundreds of rounds plinked the water, the reports slamming her ears. But she found a spot and started firing as well. Three shots and she hit an empty chamber and tossed the gun overboard, grabbing another from the nearest crate.
“How we doin’ Kevonne?” she called.
“Good! We’re good!” he shouted, the words stolen away by the wind, which buffeted all of them as the lifeboat shot across the water.
Out of the corner of her eye Tori saw that they’d entered the alleyway amongst the graveyard of ships, hugging the lee of the sunken vessels to starboard. Boggs was across the gap, on their port side, but they were too busy trying to stay alive to worry about reaching him now. They skipped right past the fifty-foot yacht, coming up on the fishing trawler.
“Not good!” Kevonne yelled.
His tone told her all she needed to know. Beside her, Pang tried to turn. Bone kept firing into the water behind them. Instinct made Tori hunker down and grab hold of the side of the boat, just before the impact took them from below, slamming up beneath the bow on the port side.
Gabe jumped from the boat, lunging over the side, even as they shot upward, boat twisting in the air. She heard the motor whine as the blades spun in open air, and then she plunged into the water.
No. God, please no.
Tori thrashed in the water, eyes tightly closed against the salt. She sucked in a lungful of water and began to choke, getting her bearings, breaching the surface. Coughing, frantic, she whipped around and saw the lopsided deck of the fishing trawler a dozen feet away. She swam for it--choking up water, desperate to scream, every inch of her flesh burning with the expectation of attack.
Her fingers struck wood. The deck of the trawler. Something splashed just behind her and now she did scream, glancing around, chest pounding, spotting the deck railing nearby. A hand grasped her wrist and she screamed again, thinking they had caught her. She looked up to see Gabe above her. He lay across a metal trunk that had been bolted to the deck. She grabbed his other hand and he pulled her out of the water.
Tori had time only to mumble a muffled thanks as they stood atop the trunk. Then Gabe scrambled over to the deck railing. Tori hesitated, then leaped to the railing on the opposite side, wanting to leave room for the others. Latching on, she climbed the deck rail like a ladder. The wheelhouse was half under-water, but she could get above it, stand on top of it.
“Come on, Bone! Swim!” Pang shouted.
Tori stopped, ten feet above the water now. Across from her, on the other railing, Pang had climbed onto the ruined trawler to perch just below Gabe, but Bone hadn’t reached the boat yet. He swam toward them, blond hair slick against his skull, eyes wide with fear, despair and a terrible knowledge.
Ripples circled him.
“Bone, hurry!” Tori cried.
Gabe screamed for him to swim. Pang joined in, and then Kevonne added to the chorus from a tangle of thick netting that hung off one side of the wreck like a spider-web. He’d climbed halfway up, just six feet out of the water, but now hung with one hand lowered.
“Come on, man!” Kevonne screamed. “You can make it. Take my hand!”
Bone reached for him, still a few feet away. Kevonne hung lower, hope in his eyes. Then Bone stopped short, grunting with sudden pain, and he was tugged backward and down. Then his hands broke the surface, thrashing, and he bucked against what held him, his face emerging from the water.
A long hand snaked up from the water and clasped his face, suckers attaching to his flesh. Those fingers began to burn in the sun, even as they dragged Bone down into the darkness of the ocean.
For a few seconds, none of them spoke or moved. Then, as one, Tori, Gabe, Pang, and Kevonne dragged themselves further up the wreckage of the trawler, as high out of the water as they could manage. They came together at what had once been the bow of the boat, staring at each other.
“What are they?” Tori asked.
Kevonne hung his head. “Does it matter?”
Tori stared at him, angry for a moment, then her shoulders sagged. “No. I guess it doesn’t.”
She looked at Gabe, but the captain wouldn’t meet her gaze. Pang slid down the deck a little to stand on the peak of the portion of the wheelhouse that was still above water.
“Watch your step,” Tori told him.
Pang gave a sick laugh. “You think?” Then he pointed out across the alleyway they’d been trying to travel through to get back out into open water. “I see the Chief.”
That woke Gabe up. He blinked, a fierce determination flickering to life in his eyes. He looked at Tori, then slid down to join Pang. Tori didn’t need to get that close to the water to see Boggs, who stood framed in the broken wheelhouse window of a scuttled cabin cruiser just across from them. His wreck was separated from theirs by maybe thirty yards of ocean. It lay canted to one side, and Boggs perched inside the lower half of the wheelhouse, almost underneath the ship, ten feet above the water.
“Chief!” Gabe shouted. “We need to figure out a way to get you over here with us!” His voice echoed off the hulls and decks of dead men’s ships.
Boggs cocked his head, listening, and then shouted in return. “Why? You’re just as stranded as I am!”
Gabe sat back a bit and looked around. He didn’t say it, but he didn’t have to. Tori had eyes, and so did the others. Boggs was right. They were all stranded. It was only a matter of time, now.
“We were right, weren’t we?” she said.
The captain looked at her. “About what?”
“The sunlight. You saw them burn. They’re, like, some kind of underwater vampires. They like it down there, dark and cool, but they don’t need to stay in the water. Not once the sun goes down.”
Pang and Kevonne stared at her, but Gabe nodded.
“Yeah. I think that’s exactly what they are,” he said.
The Antoinette was close, but not nearly close enough. Tori glanced at the horizon, where the sun had dropped even further in the sky.
“We have to think of something,” she said. “And fast.”
Gabe unclipped the radio from his belt. Its leather holster had been dampened, but whe
n he thumbed the button, the radio crackled.
“Miguel? Listen up, brother.”
~48~
“Oh, my God,” Angie said, barely aware she’d spoken.
She stared out the wheelhouse window, watching the people from the lifeboat climb onto a half-sunken fishing trawler. A few feet away, Josh and Miguel shuffled into new positions so both of them could glance out at the island, even as they kept their guns aimed at one another. Suarez and Rogan stood by the instrument panel. Rogan had positioned himself near the wheel and the radio, as though he thought that gave him some kind of control, but now he tried to get a look as well.
“Can you see who made it out of the water?” Miguel asked.
It took Angie a second to realize he’d meant the question for her. Josh didn’t even glance at her, so she looked out the window again, counting heads.
“The captain, for sure,” she said.
Miguel exhaled, bright eyes going dull, closing off whatever emotion he might have felt.
“Tori and, what’s his name, Pang, too,” Angie went on. She glanced at Josh, but if Tori’s survival meant anything to him, he didn’t show it. “Someone else is there, hanging on a net, but I can’t…” She let the words drift, but then the man on the net climbed higher and she saw he was black. “Kevonne. The other one’s Kevonne.”
“So the one in the water, that was Bone?” Josh asked.
“Had to be,” Angie said.
“That sucks. He was a good kid.”
Miguel spat on the ground, raised the barrel of his pistol. “Fuck you. Good kid? You’d have put him in prison.”
“It’s not up to me who goes to jail, Miguel. But you can bet you and Gabe would end up there. Maybe you could be cellmates?”
Miguel’s hand trembled and his lips pressed into a tight line. “If I’m going to prison anyway, tell me why I shouldn’t shoot you.”
“Hang on,” Suarez started, but Miguel silenced him with a glance.
Angie tensed. She didn’t know how much Josh knew about the Rio brothers, but he must at least realize that pushing Miguel would be unwise. Angie looked at Rogan, trying to plead with him with her eyes. But his gaze had turned bitter, and she knew there would be no help from him.
Josh’s shoulders rose and fall as he took a long breath. He cocked his head, cracking the bones in his neck. His aim never wavered and he had stopped glancing out at the survivors stranded on those ruined ships.
“You don’t want to go to prison,” Josh said. “I get it. But I’m guessing your brother’s life might be worth it.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” Miguel sneered.
Josh tilted his head, gesturing toward the Personal Locator Beacon, where it still sat on the instrument panel, right by the wheel.
“Give that to me. I set it off. FBI and Coast Guard come and get us. We get your brother and the others out of there, kill whatever’s in the water—“
“And Gabe and me go to prison,” Miguel finished.
Josh shrugged, gun barrel bobbing. “You can pick what happens next in this story, Mr. Rio, but you can’t choose how it ends. That’s going to be up to a judge and jury.”
Miguel fixed him with a glare of such hatred that Angie flinched and turned away. But when she looked back, a strange calm had come over him, as though he might actually be listening to reason.
The radio crackled. Captain Rio’s voice filled the wheelhouse. “Miguel? Listen up, brother.”
Nobody moved. Frozen, they stared at one another, locked in the paralysis wrought by the presence of guns.
“Josh, let him answer,” Angie said. “You can’t leave them out there.”
Miguel, Suarez, and Rogan all stared at the FBI agent.
“I don’t intend to,” Josh said, after a moment. He gestured toward the radio with his gun. “Go ahead. Tell him you’re trying to decide between going to prison and keeping him alive.”
Miguel actually laughed. “You don’t know shit. Gabe would rather be dead.”
“You want to give him his wish?” Josh replied.
“Idiots,” Suarez muttered. He picked up the radio and thumbed the button. “Glad to hear your voice, Captain. You had us worried.”
The radio crackled again. “Had myself worried, mi amigo. Miguel there?”
Suarez held out the radio and Miguel took it from him, using his left hand, keeping the gun in his right as steady as he could. He kept it pointed at Josh. Angie glanced at the PLB, sitting there on the panel, no one paying it any attention at all, though it might be the one thing that could save them all. She could try for it, but Rogan and Suarez were both in the way.
“I’m here, Gabriel,” Miguel said, ignoring Rogan. “Just trying to figure out what we can do to help you. It doesn’t look like more lifeboats would do the job.”
The button clicked as he let it go. The radio hissed.
“You’re right. They might get here, but probably not back,” Gabe replied.
Miguel glared at Josh as he growled into the radio. “Our options are limited, hermano. We’ve got a situation in the wheelhouse.”
Click. Hiss. “Got a little situation out here, too, Mikey. What’s going on?”
“The cook’s up here, and he’s got a gun pointed at me right now. Fucker stabbed us in the back, and right now he’s standing in the way of me doing anything to help—“
Josh interrupted with a snort of laughter. “Right, so I’m the villain now? Who’s the bad guy, Captain?” he called. “The FBI agent doing his job, or the asshole who’s fucking his brother’s wife?”
Angie’s mouth dropped open. Rogan and Suarez swiveled around to stare at Miguel. He’d been annoyed, waiting to finish what he’d been saying to Gabe, his thumb still on the button. Now it slipped off.
Click. Hiss. Nothing.
Then, Gabe’s voice. “What did he just say?”
Miguel’s face contorted into a mask of rage and shame. “You bastard! Why the fuck…?” But he couldn’t even finish. Instead he started to shake his head and he opened his mouth in an awful scream.
And pulled the trigger.
Angie yelped and threw herself against the window, cracking the glass. The bullet punched through Josh’s shoulder and exited his back in a spray of blood.
The gun flew out of Josh’s hand and clattered on the floor. Angie pushed off from the wall and ran for it, but Rogan got there first, stamped his foot down on it, and backhanded her across the face. She staggered back, and all her fear evaporated in a burst of fury. Lunging, she punched him in the throat. As he tried to grapple with her, she slipped inside his reach and took a fistful of his red hair, then drove her knee up into his groin.
Angie had been hurt before, and she had learned how to hurt back.
Rogan twisted just enough to block most of the strength of her knee-shot, but still let out a grunt of pain and staggered back, stepping off the gun. She reached for it, but a second gunshot rang out against the metal and glass inside the wheelhouse and she jerked back, looking up to see Miguel now leveling his gun at her.
“That’s enough,” he said.
Slightly bent, Rogan walked gingerly toward her, lips upturned in a sneer. He reached for the gun.
“Not you, either,” Miguel said. He gestured for Rogan to back up with a wave of the gun. “Suarez, pick it up.”
The old Cuban walked over, casual as ever, and picked up the gun. He clicked on the safety and tucked it into the front of his pants. On the ground, Josh lay bleeding, but conscious. He slid back to the wall, leaving a streak of blood on the floor, then sat up, staring expectantly at the officers of the Antoinette.
“What now?” he asked Miguel.
Miguel looked out at the island, and the graveyard of ships. Then he glanced out the front windows at the cargo and the ocean beyond, maybe trying to decide whether to leave his brother there after all.
He clicked the button on the radio. “Gabe, listen. If you can make it to the schooner, the way she’s laying, you can get a
cross to that old freighter out there.”
He hesitated, then let go of the button. The hiss went on a few seconds.
“Miguel?” the captain asked, his voice full of pain and threat and uncertainty.
“I have a plan, bro,” Miguel said, ignoring the questions inherent in his brother’s tone. “It might take a while, but I have an idea.”
This time he did not hesitate before taking his thumb off the button, but the wait for the captain’s reply went on three times as long. Angie held her breath during the long, wordless hiss, and she felt certain Miguel did as well. Perhaps they all did.
“Make it fast,” Captain Rio said at last. “Whatever it is, it’s gotta happen before the sun goes down. Otherwise, you’ll be too late.”
The hiss returned to the radio.
Miguel looked around the wheelhouse. “Rogan, come with me. Suarez, you watch the cook.”
Angie stepped forward. “What about me?”
Rogan had one hand over his throat, and when he spoke, his voice was a rasp. “Feel free to shoot her.”
Suarez sniffed. “I don’t take orders from you, boy.”
Miguel laughed. “Just watch them, Hector.”
Then he and Rogan were out the door. Josh sat against the wall, bleeding. Angie and Suarez stared at each other for a moment, and then the old Cuban rolled his eyes dismissively and went back to watching the radar screen.
~49~
Hank Boggs crouched inside the empty frame of a window in the cabin cruiser’s wheelhouse and watched Captain Rio, Kevonne, Pang, and that bitch, Tori, as they scrambled for better purchase on the tilted deck of the half-sunken fishing trawler. He’d watched as they’d set off from the island, praying that they’d stop and pick him up, or at least get back to the Antoinette and send back help.
Then he’d seen the water rippling around them and he’d known his prayers fell on deaf ears. If God existed, up in the heavens, he wasn’t listening. Or perhaps this place—any place where things like this could exist—were in his blind spot.
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