The Ocean Dark

57

When Gabe saw the guilt in his brother’s eyes, his first instinct was to shoot him. He had taken his gun back from Tori, and in one swift motion he raised it and swept the barrel around to aim at Miguel’s head. In that fraction of a moment, conscience overrode instinct and anguish; he thought of their mother, and what it would do to her to learn that one of her sons had killed the other. But he didn’t lower the pistol.

“Drop it,” he said.

Miguel slid the H&K assault rifle to the deck and took a step back.

Screams drifted off across the ship and out over the Caribbean, swept away by the wind — cries of help in a place where no one would ever hear, or answer. The sirens — ancient things, Gabe thought, from a time before the world had surrendered its mysteries — came up the hull with a damp, dragging sound, and boarded the Antoinette. His ship. Once his pride.

Pang let loose a cry of such terror — the nighttime fears of prehistoric children, when the whole world was unknown — that both Rio brothers glanced over. One siren wrapped around his legs while a second coiled its lower body around his head, crushing his skull. The gun he’d been holding flew from his hand, skittering across the deck.

“Jesus,” Miguel whispered. “Gabe, we have to—”

Gabe cocked the pistol. “Why?”

People were running, climbing the stairs of the accommodations block or vanishing below, slamming doors, bolting locks.

How long they’d be able to keep the things out, Gabe didn’t know. But he and his brother were staying where they were.

Until Tori grabbed Gabe’s arm and twisted him halfway around.

“Stop!” she snapped. “What are you doing? We’ve got to hide!”

“You heard—” he began.

Miguel lunged for him. Gabe shoved Tori away, turned, and struck his brother across the cheek with the barrel of the gun, laying the skin open to the bone. Miguel staggered to his knees and scrambled up again, starting to back away. He snatched the H&K up from the deck.

“I’m sorry, Gabriel,” he said, only half-aiming the weapon. “You don’t understand. Maya needed me. You hurt her so much, and then it was like she was invisible to you, like you didn’t even see her anymore.”

The things were coming for them, sliding along the deck.

“Stop!” Tori screamed.

Gabe lunged at Miguel, grabbed the barrel of the H&K with one hand, and cracked the pistol over his head with the other. He tugged the assault rifle out of Miguel’s grasp, turned, and tossed it to Tori, who caught the gun as though it might burn her.

“Don’t you fucking talk about her,” Gabe rasped, low in his throat, not even sure his brother could hear him.

Miguel collapsed into his arms, begging for forgiveness.

Gabe held him close, heart breaking. “Sorry won’t do it, hermano.”

Then he turned, aimed just past Tori, and put a bullet into the open mouth of a siren, blowing out jagged teeth and the back of its head. He fired again, taking it in the chest as it reared up, cobra-style, to attack her.

Tori turned, swung the H&K, and strafed three others that were slithering toward them. Gabe and Miguel stood, together, then stepped up on either side of her.

When Tori crouched to pick up the gun Pang had dropped, Miguel took the assault rifle back, and Gabe didn’t stop him. There would be no forgiveness, but they had no time for recrimination, either. Time had run out.