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.
41
Dwyer hated going down into the bowels of a ship, with the engines and boilers, the sweat and the heat close around him. He never visited Angie when she was on duty belowdecks, and was glad that she had never asked him why. How could he admit to her that it frightened him? More than frightened him, really. With the metal closing around him and the water beyond that, he felt as though he would be crushed. Once, while visiting New York, he’d been trapped for over an hour on a broken elevator. Panic had closed off his throat and amped up his adrenaline so that he thought he was suffocating and having a heart attack, all at the same time. But he’d been claustrophobic long before that elevator ride.
He followed Tupper down the metal steps into the engine room. His eardrums were unused to the noise level and he winced as it pressed around him. The heat embraced him, but Dwyer clenched his jaw and kept moving, down through the engine room, out into another corridor, and then into the boiler room, where humidity blanketed him in an instant.
“Tupper!” he barked.
The engineer had gotten ten feet ahead of him, but turned now, wide-eyed and anxious. “Come on, man.”
Dwyer wiped sweat from his forehead, then ran both hands through his red hair, spiking it, wishing for a shower. “Tell me again what we’re doing down here? ’Cause I’ll tell you, boyo, you seem like you’ve gone off your rocker.”
Off your rocker. One of his Gram’s favorite sayings, from back when he was a boy. Stress had a way of making him regress, and always had, as though subconsciously he wished he could go back to a simpler time. Dwyer figured everybody felt that way sometimes.
The suggestion pissed Tupper off. The engineer narrowed his eyes, nostrils flaring. If they were in a bar, Dwyer would have thought he was squaring off for a fight.