The Ocean Dark

16

As Dwyer maneuvered the lifeboat alongside the fishing boat, Josh saw the writing on the stern that identified her as the Mariposa out of Costa Rica. Dwyer cut the engine and let the transport drift over to bump against the side. In the sudden quiet, Josh caught a sound on the breeze — a lone voice singing high and ethereal. He strained to hear more but it was gone as quickly as it had come, snatched away by the shifting wind, and he wondered if he’d imagined it.

“Did you hear that?” he whispered.

Miguel cocked his head, listening, the H&K slung over one shoulder. “What?”

“Music,” Josh said, feeling foolish.

“Maybe a radio on board,” Dwyer muttered. In the moonlight, his white skin gave him a ghostly countenance.

Miguel grabbed hold of the ladder and kept them in place while Josh and Dwyer tossed a couple of bumpers over the side to keep the boats from smashing together, then tied up to the Mariposa.

Dwyer stepped back and raised the shotgun’s barrel, swung it in an arc, but no one appeared on the deck of the fishing boat. Pulleys clanked against metal posts as the waves rocked both vessels, but nothing moved on board the ship.

With the barrel of his H&K, Miguel gestured for Josh to climb the ladder. He didn’t like the idea much, but couldn’t argue. He’d volunteered to help, after all — practically insisted on coming along. If he tried to balk now, Miguel would not be happy. And given the weapon in his hands, Josh wanted to keep the chief mate in a good mood.

He went up the ladder in about three seconds, stayed low as he came onto the deck, and snatched the Sig Sauer from his belt. Standing, he clicked off the safety, making an arc with the gun, checking the shadowy places. The moon showed details in black and white, bathed in gold. There had been a fire on the port side, though it had been put out before any real damage had been done. Equipment had been bent and broken. All but one of the wheelhouse windows had been shattered. Some serious shit had gone down out here, but the Mariposa was still afloat.

Josh beckoned Miguel and Dwyer to follow and started toward the wheelhouse. His heel slipped in something but he managed to maintain his balance. In the moonlight, the damp, jellied mess on the deck looked like the innards of some fish. There wasn’t much of it; a handful, really. But a trail went across the deck toward the far railing, just a hint of something viscous that had been smeared there and then dried.

What the fuck am I doing here? Josh thought.

Taking a breath, he kept on. Miguel and Dwyer came aboard as quietly as they could, but in the near silence they were far from stealthy. Still no noise came from within the fishing boat. If anyone remained on board, they hadn’t heard or had heard and not responded. This last thought troubled him. Certainly there existed the possibility that someone lay injured below and couldn’t come up to investigate the noises they were making, couldn’t call out. That didn’t worry Josh. His concern was whether or not there might be someone on board who had chosen not to respond, who didn’t want the intruders to know they were not alone.

With a glance back, he confirmed that Dwyer and Miguel were in motion. They moved quickly across the stern — the sticky deck where the fishermen would have hauled much of their catch out of the water. Josh had already confirmed for himself that that section of the boat was clear, but he didn’t blame Miguel for not relying on him. Then they started moving up the port side, past the burnt section, until they were parallel with Josh on the starboard. With a signal from Miguel, all three of them continued forward, weapons at the ready as they reached the wheelhouse.

Josh and Miguel moved in sync, stopping to peer through the shattered glass of the wheelhouse windows, weapons trained on the darkness within. They sidestepped, searching for movement, but saw nothing as they continued making their way around the ruined box of a room. The instrument panel looked as though someone had taken a sledgehammer to it, the radio and radar destroyed.

At the front of the wheelhouse, they paused. Miguel gestured silently to Josh to stay put and Josh nodded, pistol trained on the wheelhouse as Dwyer and the first mate searched the bow. The Mariposa was large for a fishing boat, but there weren’t very many places to hide on the deck. They were back within moments.

The three of them moved together to the stairs that led below. This time Miguel went first, the barrel of his H&K preceding them all into the dark. Dwyer flipped a light switch to no effect; the darkness remained. Josh descended last, one hand on the thin wooden rail. His fingers passed over a deep groove, and then another, and he investigated further, feeling scars in the wood.

In the common area of the cabin, they all paused while their eyes adjusted to the diminished light available from the four small portholes in the room. The broken pieces of a wooden chair were piled in a corner near a small card table and another, unmarred chair. The benches seemed untouched, but a rack of DVDs and CDs had been spilled onto the floor. A TV sat unharmed on a shelving unit set into the wall beside the stairs.

Miguel started forward, moving along the short, narrow corridor toward the three smaller cabins. One would have belonged to the captain of the fishing boat, with the crew splitting up to bunk in the other two.

“Josh,” Dwyer whispered, his pale face seeming to float in the dark. He pointed to one of the portholes, which had been shattered.

With a glance back up the steps and then down the dark corridor, where Miguel was now only a shadow, Josh went over to see what had drawn the Irishman’s attention. Dwyer nodded toward the porthole.

“What do you make of that?”

Only a few jagged shards of thick glass remained in the frame, but around its edges the metal had been smeared with something that in the moonlight looked like paint or tar. It had run in streaks down the wall beneath the shattered porthole.

Dwyer reached out to touch it.

“Blood,” Josh said.

Hesitating, Dwyer sniffed the air. His lip curled and his hand came back to close around the shotgun as if the weapon was his most precious possession.

A thump came from the corridor.

Josh spun, Sig Sauer coming up in a two-handed grip. Dwyer fumbled with the shotgun and they were all lucky he didn’t accidentally pull the trigger.

Miguel stood at one end of the corridor, outlined in the open door of one of the crew cabins, the assault rifle lodged against his shoulder. The three men aimed guns at one another for several heartbeats before twitching the barrels aside.

Completely still, they listened, rocking with the gentle sway of the boat, but the only sound was the distant clang of pulleys and winches back on deck. Then Miguel waved them closer, swinging the H&K toward a closed door. He’d been nearer to it, and seemed pretty certain now about where the sound had originated.

Josh padded down the short corridor with Dwyer at his back. He nearly tripped over a single black boot that lay in his path. The oddity of it registered, but he didn’t have time to focus on it.

The thump had come from the head. The room would be tiny — as small as an airplane restroom, with a mini-sink and toilet jammed into a space the size of a closet. Something might have fallen over, but Josh’s pulse quickened, pounding in his ears, and his skin prickled. Someone was on board with them. He’d had the sense that they weren’t alone from the moment they had come down into the cabin, but hadn’t wanted to say anything. He could’ve been wrong. Now he was sure he wasn’t.

He narrowed his eyes, nodded toward Miguel, gestured to the other two cabin doors. Both hung open. No way the chief mate had searched those rooms well. The thump from the head had distracted him from that job. In the gloom, Miguel’s eyes narrowed. Reluctantly, he nodded and turned in the corridor, put his back against the wall and held the H&K ready so that if anyone tried to come at them from one of those two cabins, he could strafe the doorways with bullets.

Josh looked at Dwyer, held up a hand to make him pause, to get him ready. The Irishman might be young, but he’d clearly held a gun before. He seemed unfazed by the tension in the air. Dwyer leveled the shotgun at the door to the head.

With his free hand, Josh tried the door and found it locked.

Nothing had fallen over. They weren’t alone.

He glanced at Miguel, then Dwyer, a simple warning, then stepped back at an angle and put a bullet through the lock, blowing a hole in the door. The report echoed in the closed space and he flinched before he reached for the ruined door and yanked it open.

Dwyer aimed the shotgun into the cramped space. No one came out of the cabins. Josh had expected a scream, some kind of reaction. But no sound rose from within.

A man sat on the toilet in torn, bloody clothes, pressed into the corner of that tiny room with his legs drawn up under him as though he had tried to make himself smaller, forcing his body into a ball. His legs were covered in horrible gashes, blood crusting over, and what they could see of his body through the torn clothes showed dark welts in strange patterns all across the flesh. His face was turned toward them, eyes wide and glassy, lips pulled back in a rictus of terror and frozen in place. Were it not for the tremulous hitching of each breath, Josh would have been certain he was dead.

But the skinny little man still lived, for the moment.

“Jaysus,” Dwyer whispered, his accent flaring up. “What the fuck happened to you?”

The man began to shake and to weep, and he spilled into the narrow corridor like a house of cards coming down, revealing a seeping hole in his stomach. He’d been holding a hand over it, had bunched himself up in that corner to try to keep his insides from poking out.

Now he covered the hole with both hands again, pressed down, curled in upon himself, shuddering. Death had come to the Mariposa, and this man had survived its visit. But not for long.