The Ocean Dark

35

Gabe wasn’t happy when they found the guns. The crew of the Mariposa had tramped through the brush, sometimes carrying and sometimes dragging the thick plastic trunks loaded with assault rifles, illegal ammunition, and exquisitely manufactured semiauto pistols made from nonmetals, which would not be picked up by the typical security scan. The latter weren’t likely to get on airplanes in the U.S. — not after 9/11—but there were plenty of other places where metal detectors were still the safeguard of choice.

Boggs had found the cave directly inland from where the men of the Mariposa had come ashore, maybe a hundred and fifty yards from the beach. According to the chief, this particular cave had no features that distinguished it from the others on the island, so it had to have been chosen for its proximity to the place they’d made landfall. Having never seen the other caves, Gabe only had the grotto to compare it to. This cleft in the base of the hill looked to have been formed by a shifting of the earth — some kind of underground tremor, maybe even a quake. Not that he knew the first thing about earthquakes, really. But since it was more a split in the face of the hill than the sort of cave he thought of, that felt reasonable. More than anything, it looked like the gleaming ebony rock that formed the foundation of the island had cracked open. And if the number of caves was any evidence, it seemed to have cracked open in a great many places.

He wondered if Tori had been wrong about the grotto. Maybe it hadn’t been a storm at all that had broken through into the huge chamber inside that coastal cliff; maybe an earthquake had brought it down. But whatever it was, that chamber — and the weird writing they’d found engraved on parts of the shattered wall — were evidence that some of the caves had been on the island a very long time.

“Gather them up,” Gabe said, staring at the ground.

The weapons were scattered around the mouth of the cave, discarded or dropped or unpacked but never used. He knelt and picked up an assault rifle. The weapon was light as a feather but he didn’t take that to mean much, since they were built to be lightweight. When he popped the clip, however, he found it empty.

“Shit.”

“This one’s unopened,” Kevonne said, as he and Pang dragged one of the plastic cases out of the cave. It measured about four feet by two feet, black plastic with steel locks, no markings at all.

Two more of the cases had been shoved aside just outside the cave, open, their contents either missing or among the weapons arrayed on the ground. Gabe knew some of the weapons would simply be gone, lost in the hands of the members of the crew of the Mariposa, wherever they had vanished to. The bottom of the ocean, probably. The weapons scattered on the ground would fill maybe two-thirds of a case if they consolidated into one.

Boggs came out of the cave, running a hand over the stubble on his scalp. Sweat beaded up on his forehead and ran down his neck.

“Three more inside, all of them open, but it doesn’t look like they took any guns out of them. Just ammo. Reloading, I’d guess.”

Tori gave a little laugh, just off to Gabe’s right, and he shot her a look. He didn’t like the sound of that laugh; it had the faint edge of crazy in it. But Tori just shrugged her shoulders.

“Yeah, reloading, why not?” she said. “But what were they shooting at, Gabe?”

Who, he thought. Who were they shooting at? But he felt certain Tori’s word choice hadn’t been accidental, so he didn’t attempt to correct her.

“Help me with these,” he told her, getting down on his knees and reaching for the nearest of the weapons. “You want to get out of here, so let’s make it quick.”

As Tori joined him on the ground and started helping him repack the guns that lay scattered around into a single case, Gabe looked up at Boggs and the others.

“Get the rest packed up in there, close the cases, and drag them out here. We’ll have to make two trips back to the cove, I think.”

Boggs hesitated.

“What is it, Chief?” Gabe asked, impatient to be moving.

“Just wondering why we don’t radio the Antoinette, ask the chief mate to bring her around to this side of the island,” Boggs said.

Gabe swallowed, then glanced back the way they’d come, toward the two men who’d shot each other rather than face whatever had made the rest of the Mariposa’s crew vanish.

“It didn’t work out real well for the last guys who tried it. Anyway, it’s not even half a mile, Chief. Just get moving and we’ll be fine.”

That last bit, about them being fine, rang a little hollow in his ears, but if the others felt the same way, no one dared to mention it. They set about dragging the other cases out of the cave and packing the guns away. Inside, in the dark, Gabe heard the dripping, and beneath it the shushing sound of water in motion, ebb and flow. This cave went deep and somehow the ocean had gotten in. It seemed the grotto wasn’t the only place where the sea had found its way underground. If the island had really been shifting and cracking for as long as he imagined, there might be dozens of such tunnels down there.

He wondered for a moment if some of the Mariposa’s crew might still be ashore, hiding down in those caves. But the two dead guys on the beach and the abandoned guns in the dirt suggested otherwise, and Gabe wasn’t in the mood to go exploring. He was just here for the guns.

They’d found six of the plastic crates altogether out of ten that the Antoinette had been expecting to pick up from the Mariposa. What had happened to the other four, Gabe had no idea, but now that they had found these six, he had no intention of spending more time searching this damned island for them.

With the scattered guns consolidated into a single case, he would only return with five, and his employers would want to know what had happened. Gabe would tell them the other crates must be with the Mariposa’s crew, wherever those men had gone. No one would debate the story. They’d just be happy to have recovered anything. And maybe, if he could pull off the crazy plan he’d committed himself to, he would still be able to hold on to his job after all the arrest and court proceedings were through. Gabe told himself that if he showed Viscaya loyalty, the company would be loyal in return.

He only half believed it, but he didn’t see any other choices.

There were eight of them. They could have taken four of the five cases, but the damn things were so heavy they would have been stopping every hundred yards to rest, and he did not like that idea at all. Gabe Rio wanted a little hustle out of his crew, so he made them work in teams. They took three crates on the first run, intending to come back for the other two. While two people walked alongside, the other six carried the weapons cases, two to a case. Each team would be spelled for a little while by whichever two weren’t currently carrying anything, and in that way they made decent time.

The trees and brush forced them to alter course more than once, but in just under an hour, they reached the cove where their lifeboats were moored.

In the hours since they had first landed here, the tide had receded enough so that the lifeboats were stranded on the sand. Gabe didn’t give it a second thought — it would be simple enough for them to slide the boats down the wet sand and into the surf.

But the tide had stranded other things on the beach as well. The sand fell away steeply just twenty feet from the high tide line, revealing a wide swath of seashells and doomed jellyfish. Among them were smooth, timeworn shards of bone, and a dozen or more skulls. Like the few in the grotto, they were old things, but no less human. No less dead.

“Jesus!” Boggs shouted, dropping his end of a case.

Kevonne stared, gape-mouthed. “What the fuck is this shit?”

Tori reached out and took Gabe’s hand.

That was when Bone started to cry.