The Ocean Dark

47

Tori knelt in the prow of the lifeboat, taking deep, steady breaths as Gabe climbed aboard. Kevonne throttled gently forward, turning out to sea, and they all trained their guns on the water around them. Though the angle of the sunlight had changed, and the water did not have the same crystal clarity it had at midday, it was shallow enough here that they could see the sandy bottom, and they watched for any sign of movement below the surface.

Pang prayed under his breath, swinging the barrel of his machine gun, or assault rifle, or whatever the hell it was; he scanned the water, ready to fire. Gabe arranged several guns on the floor of the lifeboat around him, but they didn’t have a lot of room. There were five of them and two big cases of weapons. Anything they didn’t have ammunition for had been left back on the beach. The guns remaining in the crates were all loaded. Tori had two pistols stuffed into the waist of her shorts, the metal strangely warm against her skin. She had learned to fire a gun without falling in love with them. The assault rifle in her hands had felt very light until she’d loaded a clip of bullets into it, and now it hung heavily on the strap over her shoulder.

“Oh, fuck, look out!” Bone said, practically choking. He aimed a deadly little machine pistol at the water, wire stock against his shoulder, taking aim.

“Dude!” Pang snapped, grabbing his arm. “It’s a fish.”

Bone’s chest was heaving and he actually laughed as he relaxed slightly. Tori didn’t laugh, and neither did Gabe. Fear lodged in her throat and for a second she had stopped breathing.

“Jesus, Kevonne, please hurry,” she said.

He glanced at her, nodded once, but said nothing. She wondered if he kept his mouth clamped tightly shut to keep his own fear inside, and how long that would work. Kevonne focused on the water ahead, keeping on course. They’d moved the lifeboat thirty yards down the beach before setting off from the shore. Gabe had spent long minutes studying the arrangement of the wrecked vessels that comprised the graveyard of ships and had chosen their course carefully.

The biggest tangle of wreckage — including a fishing trawler, a fifty-foot rich boy’s toy, the two-masted schooner, and the rusty freighter they’d seen from the Antoinette’s deck — had the tightest conglomeration of vessels. It reached the closest to the island, and thrust farthest from the shore. Gabe claimed that he wanted to stick as close to the derelict ships as possible in hopes that whatever was down there might think they were just another part of the wreckage. Tori didn’t buy that for a second. Gabe wanted to stay close to the sunken ships so that if necessary they could swim to safety the way Boggs had done. And she agreed completely.

Kevonne went slowly, hoping that keeping the noise level low would be less likely to draw attention. Tori’s heart hammered against her rib cage and she trembled with every breath. They were moving closer to the Antoinette, but not fast enough.

“Captain,” Pang said, his voice low and even. “Have a look at this.”

Gabe shifted slightly, and peered over the side where Pang aimed his weapon. Tori looked as well. Perhaps fifteen feet to port, a ripple had appeared on the surface that had nothing to do with tide or undertow. Something long and white moved, serpentine, in the darkness of the steadily deepening water.

“That’s not a fish,” Pang said in that same flat monotone.

“No,” Gabe agreed. “It’s not.”

Bone grunted. Instead of the whimpering he’d done before, his demeanor shifted to a kind of grim humor. “Well, do you think maybe you could fucking shoot it, now?”

“More to starboard, Captain,” Kevonne said.

Tori twisted around, still on her knees, and lifted her weapon, scanning the water. Twin ripples paced the boat on that side, but she thought she saw more than two silver-white streaks down in the deep. She wanted to run, but the ocean surrounded them. She wanted to cry, but she couldn’t afford to lose her focus. A cool, detached numbness began to spread through her — a feeling she hadn’t had since the last time Ted had beaten her, when she had known that her only choices were to leave him or die.

“Wait for my word,” Gabe said.

The ripples vanished, the things going deeper.

“They’re gone!” Bone cried.

“Not gone. They’re gonna come up under us!” Pang said.

“Kevonne, gun it, then dead stop,” Gabe snapped. “Everyone hold on.”

Tori steadied herself with one hand on the gunwale as Kevonne opened up the throttle. The lifeboat punched forward across the waves — fifteen, twenty feet — then Kevonne dropped the throttle back to neutral for a heartbeat before throwing it in reverse long enough to stop them dead.

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 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 among 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 underwater, 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 spiderweb. 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. 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 farther 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 farther 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 when he thumbed the button, the radio crackled.

“Miguel? Listen up, brother.”