Ocean Burning (18 page)

88:43.

“Drink it, Frank.” She raised the gun. “Or I’ll kill you. Because that’s the thing. You never had any balls without a few glasses in you.”

I glanced back at Hawking’s face, bruised and bleeding. I stared down the barrel of the gun. A lot of money.

89:01.

“Go ahead,” I said, “do it.” I nudged Ben’s good ankle with tip of my boot.

Carmen bit her lip. She knew something was wrong. “What is this? You’ve got principles now?”

“Something like that. You should give it a try.”

“You don’t have to do it,” Ben said again.

I held up my watch, no sense in hiding it now.

89:31.

“But I want to.” She thumbed back the hammer.

“Go ahead,” I said again, “but do me first. I want you to remember my face.”

“Your funeral.” She leveled the gun.

“Something like that,” I said, and threw the liquor bottle right at her, hard and fast.

She pulled the trigger just as it reached her, blew the bullet right through it. The glass shattered into a thousand pieces, but momentum being what it is, they all kept heading in the same direction.

89:43.

Glass shards and scotch took her in the face like a cloud of knives and fire, and she screamed, clutching at her cheeks. I grabbed Ben and we made for the stairs. He even put weight on the broken ankle. Adrenaline is a hell of a drug.

My heart hit the inside of my ribs like a jackhammer. Blood flowed into my eyes from the scalp wound.

An inhuman scream issued from behind us just as we reached the deck. I pulled Ben to the side, around the bulkhead, just as a shot rang out.

“Move,” I said, and pulled him along the side. My small sea kayak was bolted near the rail at the bow. I made for that.

“Don’t even think about it.” The voice hissed from right behind us. We both froze in place, then turned. I gasped.

She stood between us and the engine housing, her face flayed and bleeding from a thousand cuts. She’d never be beautiful again.

“Look what you did to me,” she screamed. “I’ll kill you both.”

Ben looked defeated. I looked at my watch.

89:58.

89:59.

“Burn in hell, you bitch,” I said.

90:00.

Nothing happened. She grinned crazily, assumed the classic A-frame stance, and aimed. She wouldn’t miss this time. It was impossible.

I closed my eyes, and for the second time that morning I waited to die.

And then something started ringing, muffled, like an alarm clock wrapped in a blanket. The egg timer.

I opened my eyes. The engine exploded behind her.

The flare gun ignited the gasoline vapors collected under the housing, shattered the fiberglass and threw us all to our knees. A small fireball bloomed skyward, and thick black smoke poured out of the stern.

The blast had enough concussive force to rupture the tanks. Fuel snaked its way across the wooden deck towards us. Fire caught back at the tank, and slid up along the greasy diesel as though a fuse had been lit. The heat was palpable, washing across us like a wave.

The fire crept closer and closer, a living thing, hungry for flesh. Carmen turned to us with a look of horror, the flames painting her bloody face scarlet.

“The kayak,” I said, and pulled it from the it’s hooks and tossed it over the side, keeping good hold of its rope.

“The money,” she yelled, and headed for the stern. She jumped a burning pool of fuel, and disappeared.

“No. No!” Ben screamed, and made to go after her.

“No time,” I said. The fire had already engulfed most of the stern and seemed staving for more. “We have to go.”

I lowered him into the kayak. It wasn’t built for two, but I thought we could do it. The water, as far as I could see, was clear of sharks. Even they had sense enough to avoid the flames.

I crouched down behind Ben, popped the paddle out of its locked slot, and pushed us away from the bow.

The current was vicious, and threatened to carry us away into the deep ocean. Stroke after stroke, I carried us away from the heat and towards land. My arms were nearly dead from the effort, and the island seemed only marginally closer.

“Wait,” Ben said.

“Can’t stop. The current is too strong. If we don’t break free of it, we’re done for.”

“Just look,” he said. I glanced behind me, and my jaw dropped.

We were a hundred yards off the
Purple
’s bow, or what remained of it. The entire superstructure shot flame into the sky. As I watched the stern popped and roared, sending two more fireballs up into the sky, scorching the sea. The reserve fuel tanks had blown.

The deck attached to the anchor lines had burned away, and my boat was adrift in the current, being dragged away by the ocean itself.

The stern began to take on water—the beginning of the end—and the whole boat flashed at us like a dying coal.

“There.” Ben pointed.

“Oh my God.”

At the tip of the bow, through the black smoke, I could make out a crouched figure. Something was in her hands, large and square, a door from below maybe. A black canvas duffel bag wag strapped to her back.

The bow lurched upward, and she took that as her cue. The figure leapt into the sea, climbed mostly aboard the piece of wood, and started swimming toward us.

Ben looked at me with questioning eyes.

“If we go any farther out, we’ll never make it back—that’s a fact,” I said. “But we can try to wait for her.” I didn’t sound convincing, even to myself.

“Yes,” Ben said. “We should try.”

I paddled backwards anyway, fighting the current just to keep us in the same place. Carmen made progress in our direction, but I could tell she was tiring.

“It’s the bag,” I mumbled to myself. Then: “Drop the bag,” shouted out across the water. “Drop the bag or you’ll never make it!”

Carmen raised her head, startled. She was just far enough away that her face appeared blurry and indistinct. I gestured her towards the kayak, kept paddling, staying in place. The ocean sucked at us, a palpable presence, like a million fingers trying to drag us out into the open sea.

“Drop it,” Ben called to her. “Just drop it.”

She shook her head at us, kept kicking and kicking. The current was picking up, though. With every kick, with every passing second, she got a little farther away.

She must have realized it, because she started to panic then. She flailed about on the board. It had no stability, tipped, threw her into the water. When she came up, the bag was gone.

And so was she. She just didn’t know it yet.

We watched her kick and kick and kick, watched her shrink and shrink and shrink, receding from our vision. Slowly, surely, she headed out to sea. Just before she was sucked between two waves far in the distance, she waved at us and screamed something, but I couldn’t make out.

Then she was gone.

My arms felt dead, but I put my head down and just kept paddling, ignoring the pain blooming across my spine and my ribs. Eventually we made it back to the island. I pulled us in near the rocks, where the relentless arm of the California current couldn’t reach us, and we watched the remains of the
Purple
. The plume of black smoke it put out was probably visible for fifty miles. For both of us, I think, it was a marker. Things adrift in the same current move together.
She
was there, clutching a thin piece of wood, almost certainly still alive but ultimately doomed, a Greek tragedy in motion. We watched the fiery remains of my boat as they headed south, glowing like an ember in the distance, until only a dot on the horizon remained.

The ember blinked at us once, like a firefly, before it finally went out.

Chapter 19

“WHERE DO YOU think she’ll end up?”

We lay sprawled on the sand, nearly dead the both of us.

“Depends,” I said. “If she tends south-southwest, the North Equatorial Current will get her and she’ll end up in the middle of the Pacific.”

“But not necessarily.”

“No. If she ends up going more south-southeast, the counter-current will take her down toward Antarctica.”

Ben said nothing, just stared out at the sea. So did I.

“Why didn’t she drop the bag?” he said. “She should have dropped it.”

“Greed,” I said simply. “Greed got her in the end.”

Ben rolled over onto his side and pulled up his shirt.

My jaw dropped. At first I couldn’t process what I was seeing.

All around the waistband of his shorts, two deep, packets of money sat pressed into his flesh. He started pulling them out, stacking them in the sand.

“How many?” I finally managed.

“Of the half that Rigger left? All of them.”

How, I wanted to ask. No words came out. He saw the look on my face.

“While I was locked below. After the beating he gave me me, I think Rigger thought he’d broken my spirit.” He paused. “Hell, I suppose he did. But because of that, he didn’t lock the door. He didn’t think it mattered anymore. Either that, or he clean forgot.”

I said nothing.

“It was like the raft, you know? Like the timer. A fail safe. I thought I was about used up, but I also thought that maybe—no matter what else—I could make sure Carmen didn’t get a dime out of this.”

I stared at him.

“Honestly, I was thinking it would be one last laugh from beyond the grave. She’d dump our bodies, then check the bag and realize what was really in it.”

“Which was what?” I asked, my voice back.

“Bed sheets, old newspapers, whatever was around. I didn’t think they would check, not in the middle of all that confusion. And I was very, very right.”

He looked out to the sea again. “Do you think she would have made it? If she hadn’t been dragging that worthless bag? If she hadn’t weighed herself down with nothing?”

“Does it matter either way?”

He dragged his gaze away from the waves and looked at me, his face creased in all the wrong places.

“I don’t know,” he said.

I knew what he meant. I’d expected to feel better if we beat them, if we made it off the
Purple
alive. But I didn’t. Not really. Maybe it was the fact that now we were trapped on the island. We’d never get off this thing.

“I managed to grab this too,” Ben said, and pulled the small radio out of his pocket.

I stared at it, thought about kissing him, thought better of it.

He fiddled with one of the dials; static came out of the speaker. “No food, no shelter. I’d say the odds are still against us.”

“What else is new?”

“Think you can get to the top of the mountain,” he asked, “and call down to the village on the other side?”

“And come back for you?” I grinned.

He grimaced. “You better. Can you make it?”

I kept smiling. I couldn’t stop.

We sat there for a long time, until it was sunset. Out at the horizon the sun slid behind the waves and blazed the ocean red. I used to think the sea looked like blood at this time of day, and I should have thought the same thing now, today of all days.

But I didn’t. I thought it looked beautiful.

“Can you make it?” Ben asked again.

“I’ll make it,” I said. “I know I will.”

The End

Keep reading for an excerpt of Henry Carver’s new thriller,
BLOODSTAINED
.

THE GRAVE yawned into the darkness.

Above it, a mosquito buzzed through the humid night air, homing in on Alvin Farris’s carotid artery. It touched down lightly and went in for the kill, fattened itself up on rich blood, then retracted its proboscis and made ready to take flight, full and happy.

It nearly made it.

Alvin slapped the side of his neck. A small thrill of satisfaction ran up his spine. It was a tiny enemy, but squashing it gave him a sense of power and control and undeniable pleasure, things all too rare the past few months. His fingers came away stained a dark red and he wiped them on the side of his jeans. More of it was probably running down his neck and under the collar of his dirty white t-shirt, but he didn’t particularly care. He couldn’t feel it, that was for sure. Even four hours after sunset, the legendary humidity of the Florida panhandle persisted. His skin had glazed over with sweat about a minute after leaving the house that morning, and dust and grime had been sticking to him all day.

What was a little blood?

He leaned against the backhoe and dug into the front bib of his overalls, looking for his Luckies. Once he had one lit he stared down along the rows of the orange grove and wondered just how those mosquitoes always managed to find him in the inky blackness of rural night.

Truck tires crunched their way across gravel somewhere nearby.

He pulled hard on the cigarette and it burned quickly all the way down to his fingertips. The cherry flared and he could feel the heat. He let it burn him for a second before throwing it down and grinding it under the toe of his boot.

A truck crested the rise. It was a Dodge Ram with the crew cab and big aggressive aftermarket tires. The top of the truck had a roll bar slung across it, and attached to the roll bar were a series of huge round lights. Alvin had some of those on his own truck, though not as big. Used them to spotlight deer. The stupid things froze in the light and you could take your time shooting at them.

The truck came to a quick stop in front of him and rocked back and forth on its suspension as it fell into park. The driver’s door opened. No one got out. Instead, the lights on the roll bar flared to life.

Alvin shielded his eyes, then turned his head. These lights were a lot brighter and a lot whiter than the ones on his truck. Their shallow angle made the back hoe and the pile of earth cast huge, long shadows out into the trees.

The hole in the ground seemed darker than it had before.

Bottomless.

Boots crunched as two men got out of the truck. Alvin couldn’t see their faces back there behind the lights.

“Marty, that you?” Alvin said.

“Yeah,” Marty said.

He walked forward into the light—a short man, once muscular but gone to seed. Middle age and hard living had chewed up what muscle tone he’d had. He wore a leather vest, no shirt underneath. Flab squeezed through the arm holes and his stomach strained against the cheap plastic buttons.