The Ocean Dark

40

You’re a survivor, Tori. That’s what you do. You make it through.

She held such thoughts close to her, repeating them over and over like a mantra. Whatever had happened to the people whose bones now rolled in the surf as the tide went out, Tori refused to end up like them.

“Hey,” Gabe said quietly, stepping up beside her. “It’ll be okay.”

Tori nodded, but would take no comfort from him. She kept her distance now from all of them. When they had discovered that the FBI was onto them, that Josh was an agent and they might all be going to prison, she had thought they were screwed right then. But whatever this was, she knew it was worse. They had scoured half the island and seen no sign of anyone living, and if the Antoinette had picked up ships returning — pirates or raiders or whoever had killed the Mariposa’s crew — Miguel would have signaled Gabe. As the shadows grew longer and the breeze off the water picked up, the sense of foreboding she’d had for hours now only increased.

Despite who he was, Tori liked Gabe Rio. Ironically enough, she also liked Josh. If she thought about it, she’d grown fond of most of the Antoinette’s crew during the voyage. Boggs, Tupper, Angie Tyree, and a few others she could do without, but guys like Dwyer and Kevonne and Bone made her smile. They were in this together, and she’d do whatever she could to help get them all out of it.

But she had felt herself closing off the doors between herself and the others ever since she and Gabe had seen those bones in the grotto. As they had lugged the gun cases through the trees, she had thought about her father’s cruelty, and the way her mother had turned a blind eye, and she knew that had been a lesson. Marrying Ted had been another. Tori could not rely on anyone except herself. When she had found kindhearted George online and he had helped her to escape from Ted, she had thought of him as her rescuer. But she had found George, and asked for his help, and she had taken what he had to offer and then moved on.

Tori had finally reached a place of peace and confidence inside her head, and a moment in her life when she felt she really could start over. The intensity of her attraction to Josh and the chemistry between them had felt like the result of that, or even a reward for finding her own inner strength. How long had she dreamed of a man she could really trust and believe in?

Now, with the new life she’d been trying to build falling apart around her, and with a heart full of dread like she had never known, she had to learn the lesson all over again.

Was she a damsel in distress? Damn right. Her whole cursed life.

But there were no heroes on this beach, and none on the Antoinette, Josh included. So she would go along with whatever Gabe wanted to do, and help where she could, as long as her best interests matched his. But the only person she could rely on was herself.

Standing on the beach, just a few feet from where the waves swept across the sand, she thrust her hands into her pockets to keep them steady. Tori could taste the fear on her lips, but she didn’t mind so much anymore. She’d known fear intimately in the past, and thus far it had kept her alive.

“Watch it, you idiots!” Gabe shouted, storming down to the water.

Boggs had left his two lackeys to move the three boxes of guns from the beach to his lifeboat, heading back into the trees with Pang, Kevonne, and Bone, to retrieve the last two cases. Gabe had let the two sailors rest for a while, since it would take time for the others to return with the rest of their salvaged cargo.

Now they’d nearly dumped one of the cases into the water, and Gabe waded into the surf, looking like he might be itching to use one of those guns himself. The two sailors apologized profusely as Gabe steadied the heavy case and they finished loading it. Tori had been feeling bad because she didn’t know their names, but from the way he dealt with them, she got the idea that Gabe wasn’t quite sure what to call them, either, and he was the captain. She didn’t blame him, or herself. The two guys — she thought one of them was called Mitchell — kept quiet, and mostly to themselves.

Once they had all three cases loaded, they stayed in the lifeboat, talking quietly, stealing nervous glances between the island and the Antoinette. Tori understood those glances. What are we waiting for? they said. Let’s get the fuck out of here.

They were still sitting like that, and Gabe and Tori were together on the beach, talking about everything except their tense circumstances, when Pang and Bone staggered out of the trees with the fourth case.

“Thank God.” Tori sighed.

“For Christ’s sake, Bone, what took so long?” Gabe asked.

As he spoke, Boggs and Kevonne trudged out of the brush with the last of the salvaged cases. The chief’s face had turned bright red and sweat dripped down his forehead and scalp. He looked like a steamed lobster.

“All due respect, Captain,” Boggs said, “but we were moving our goddamn asses.”

Tori happened to agree with him. The four men had really not been gone that long, all things considered. But since she hated Boggs, she wasn’t about to defend him. Gabe spent a couple of seconds looking like he might get pissed off at Boggs for the back talk, but then he waved a hand and the moment passed.

“All right. Let’s just get going.”

Grunting, sweating, looking altogether like they might just collapse there on the sand, the four of them struggled down the beach. They made it a dozen feet before Kevonne stumbled.

“Watch it!” Boggs snapped.

“Hey, Chief, can we just set these down for a minute?” Bone asked. “Get a better grip, okay? I don’t want to end up dropping these guns in the drink.”

By that point, Bone and Pang were already lowering their case to the ground. Even if the chief wanted to yell at them, it’d be too late. Instead, Boggs started to lower his case as well. When he and Kevonne set it on the sand, his groan of relief made him sound like an old man.

Tori glanced at Gabe. She could feel his impatience, and she shared it. By silent, mutual understanding, they had all avoided talking about the bones and skulls that rolled in the waves just offshore, but each of them was anxious to get back to the ship.

“Chief,” Gabe said. “Your lifeboat’s ready to go. Start back. We’re right behind you.”

Boggs visibly relaxed. “Yessir, Captain.”

He headed for the lifeboat. The two sailors, Mitchell and not-Mitchell, straightened up, jumped out of the lifeboat, and started pushing it back from shore before Boggs had even reached them. The chief snapped at them, but even his ire didn’t slow them down, so anxious were they to get out of there. Tori envied them, and from the looks of exasperation on the faces of the others, she knew she wasn’t alone.

Gabe took Boggs’s place and nodded at Kevonne. “You ready?”

“Ready, Captain.”

They lifted together, and started, stiff-legged, toward the other lifeboat. Bone and Pang did the same with the final case. Tori felt fairly useless, but she didn’t feel like she had anything to prove. She had done her share of the lugging with the first three boxes of guns and her biceps and forearms ached from it. If the four guys — all of whom were stronger than she — wanted to volunteer, she wouldn’t argue with them. Gender bias didn’t even make it onto the list of her current concerns.

The motor of Boggs’s lifeboat roared loudly for a second, but then it dropped to a low drone as the chief throttled down. He still had to navigate the graveyard of ships that separated the beach from the open water. Tori watched them go, wishing she had thought to go with them. Much as she hated Boggs, getting off the island quicker would’ve been worth spending ten minutes with him.

“Tori, come hold her steady, will you?” Gabe called.

With a nod, she started toward the men who were gathered around the remaining lifeboat. The gentle surf swayed it only a little. The tide had withdrawn enough so that the front half of the boat sat on the sand now, the anchor line stretched out across damp beach. When they’d landed, one of the guys had dug in the anchor as far ashore as the tether line would reach. Now they didn’t even need the anchor. The lifeboat wouldn’t be drifting anywhere until the tide came back in.

Tori hurried up and grabbed the side of the lifeboat, even as Kevonne stepped into it from the other side. He set the edge of the gun case on the edge of the boat and it tilted hard. Tori used all her weight to provide a counter, tilting it back up again, and Kevonne and Gabe muscled the heavy plastic case into the lifeboat.

The captain helped her keep it steady as Pang and Bone slid the last case into the boat, and Kevonne dragged both of them around on the floor of the lifeboat a bit, arranging room for all five of them to sit. It would be cramped, but they’d manage. Nobody was going to be waiting around on the island for a second trip.

“All aboard,” Gabe said.

“Damn straight. And full speed ahead,” Bone muttered.

Tori climbed into the lifeboat from the front. Pang went up the beach and tugged the anchor out of the sand, then carried it back to the boat, looping the rope around his forearm. He dumped it in beside the gun cases, then braced both hands against the prow. Gabe and Bone flanked him on either side, and the three of them began to push. The lifeboat rocked a little, but its rear end was still afloat, and it started to slide into the water.

Bone gave a little groan of revulsion and dragged himself aboard, turning to look back down at the water he’d just been trudging in. Tori didn’t look. She knew from the look on his face that the shush and rattle she heard were bones in the surf. The only other sound was the other lifeboat’s engine just offshore, like the growl of a neighbor’s lawn mower on a summer day.

Gabe kept pushing, wading out a little, stoic as ever, either untroubled or unwilling to reveal it if he was. Pang had hidden his own fears behind his sunglasses again, but he’d stashed his iPod somewhere.

He was the first to look up, frowning deeply, realizing something was wrong. The other lifeboat’s engine had started to rev higher, whining.

“What the hell—” Kevonne started to say.

Tori turned just as shouts began to carry across the water to the island. The graveyard of ships filled her field of vision, tangled and jutting and jagged like some bizarre bit of modern art. The angled gap among the derelict ships was like a corridor back out to open sea, and Boggs’s lifeboat had just begun to traverse the gap.

One of the sailors shouted again, the word fuck echoing back to the beach. The motor whined louder. Chief Boggs shoved one of the men aside and knelt at the back, staring down into the water at the propeller, trying to figure out what the hell they had snagged on.

“Chief?” Gabe called from the shore. “What is it?”

Pang hauled himself up beside Tori. Only the captain remained standing — waist-deep now — in the waves. But they were all focused on the other lifeboat, out there amid the ruined ships.

“Goddamn, did you see that?” Boggs cried, turning to the two who’d accompanied him. Mitchell and not-Mitchell, as Tori thought of them.

The one at the prow leaned way out over the water, gazing down, and even from that distance Tori thought he looked like he was about to puke into the sea. He swayed a bit, then started to shake his head and fell back into the boat, scrambling away. He bumped right up against the other side of the lifeboat — there wasn’t much room for retreat.

“Chief?” Gabe shouted again.

Boggs looked up at the captain, and at Tori and the others. His features were slack with shock. Then the lifeboat flipped, the port side dipping down into the water as though a massive wave had swept up beneath it — except no such wave disrupted the coolly rippling sea. Boggs hurtled through the air and splashed into the water nine or ten feet from the lifeboat. Mitchell — Tori felt sure he must be Mitchell — dropped just beside the upturned boat, but not-Mitchell had been lying sprawled on the bottom of the craft, and it turned over so fast that it covered him completely. He must have fallen out then, along with the three plastic crates of guns.

“Jesus Christ!” Gabe shouted, wading farther into the water, their own lifeboat forgotten for a moment. “The fucking guns! You assholes, what are you—”

Mitchell came up screaming, a four-inch swathe of his face turned to ragged, bloody mess. He scrabbled for the edge of the lifeboat, but something cracked in the boat itself, and it buckled and began to sink, half-submerged in seconds. Tori held her breath, felt herself waiting for obscene cursing or prayers to an uncaring God, but whatever had hold of Mitchell filled him with enough pain and terror that he uttered not a single intelligible word, and somehow that was worse.

He screamed again, still trying to pull himself up on the remnant of the boat, and then he stopped and juddered in the water as though in the grip of seizure. Like the lifeboat, something in him cracked, then he vanished below the water, swift as a hanged man down the throat of the gallows. The crystal blue Caribbean waters blossomed with crimson.

“Swim!” Tori shouted, standing up in her own lifeboat. “Chief, swim for it!”

Boggs had been staring along with the rest of them, but they were near the shore and he was bobbing out there in the gap amid the graveyard of ships. Shaken from his entrancement by Tori’s voice, or Mitchell’s blood on the water, he turned and started kicking for the nearest derelict ship.

Pang and Bone were shouting for Boggs to swim as well. Tori tore her eyes away from the chief and looked at Kevonne, who stared back as they shared a sudden realization. He lunged for the starter, got the motor coughing, and grabbed the throttle.

“Gabe!” Tori yelled.

But the captain could not look away from the sight of Boggs frantically thrashing in the water. Tori glanced that way, saw a ripple on the surface of the water, and knew that whatever had dragged Mitchell down was now aiming for Boggs.

The chief reached the wrecked cabin cruiser. He grabbed hold of the frame of a shattered window and hauled himself out of the sea, got his footing on a railing, and climbed higher on a ladder of empty window frames. Only then did he turn and stare down at the water.

The third man, not-Mitchell, never emerged from the overturned ruin of the lifeboat. The ripple in the water vanished, whatever had caused it swimming deeper or falling still.

“Gabe!” Tori screamed. The captain snapped his head around to stare at her. “Get back on shore!”

Kevonne throttled up and the lifeboat roared toward the beach. They’d only drifted a dozen feet from the island, but Kevonne gunned the motor and drove the boat right up onto the sand. Tori collided with Pang as they hit the beach. Bone leaped out, jumping around, clutching at his head with both hands like it might break apart.

“Come on,” Tori said, grabbing Kevonne’s hand.

Pang scrambled so madly to get out of the lifeboat that he fell over the edge, splashing in the shallows. When he came up, spitting water, his sunglasses had fallen off, revealing his terrified eyes. Tori and Kevonne jumped after him.

Gabe slogged to shore, eyes wide with some mix of fear and fury.

“What the hell are you doing?” the captain screamed at Kevonne. Then he looked at Tori. “Get back in the fucking lifeboat.”

“Are you crazy?” Tori snapped, heart racing, face flushed. “Didn’t you see what just happened? Something’s out there!”

Gabe rounded on her. “No shit. I’m not fucking blind. But we can’t just stay here. If we don’t get back to the Antoinette, we’re as good as dead.”

“What?” Kevonne said. “Why? We’re on land, Captain. That thing, whatever it is, that’s in the water. No, man, we gotta stay here, figure something out. We got guns. We got—”

“So did the crew from the Mariposa,” Gabe said, his words clipped and his eyes cold. “And where are they?”

Silently, all five of them turned to look out to sea — at the graveyard of ships, and at Hank Boggs, stranded among the wrecks, and at the Antoinette, which sat waiting for them less than half a mile offshore.