X-Isle (42 page)

The blade was stiff, and Baz’s hands shook as he struggled to get it open. His grubby thumbnail was too short and bitten-down to get a proper grip, his fingers too sweaty. Again and again they kept slipping. Ah... there... it was done.

Then the cabin darkened. Baz looked up to see Preacher John standing in the doorway. At the same time the ringing in his ears became more persistent.

Ting!

The sound had some meaning, but Baz couldn’t think what it was. He kept staring at Preacher John.

Ting-tingggg
.

A frown of irritation crossed the preacher’s face, as though he’d been disturbed, interrupted. He looked at the penknife.

“What do you think you’re going to do with that? Drop it.”

“No, I have to cut the wire... the lead—”

“Drop it!” Preacher John stepped forward. He reached down and grabbed Baz’s wrist, twisting it back so that the knife immediately fell from his hand in a tangle of green string. Baz was yanked towards the doorway, dragged through it and out into the daylight.

“Aargh!”

Ting... tinggg...

The bell rang for a third time, clearer now on the open air. The bell! Baz remembered what the sound actually meant... the divers... signalling...

“No! Don’t!” Baz kicked and fought against Preacher John’s overwhelming power. It was too late, though, too late to explain, too late to take any action. In another moment he was swept upwards, the world spinning briefly about him... deck... tripod... sky...

“No! No! There’s a b—’ Baz was still trying to shout, but his face was jammed into the back of Preacher John’s neck and his mouth was full of greasy hair. He was aware of body heat, the musky smell of salvage and candle-smoke, horrible textures on his tongue.

He heard Preacher John’s roaring voice: ‘Away to your Maker! Gahhh...”

The sky whirled above him in white and grey patterns... spiralling clouds...

... and down he went. Baz felt the stinging slap of the waves across his shoulders, and the sky disappeared. He was instantly submerged, the unbelievable shock of cold water snatching his breath away, filling his mouth with bitter saltiness. Strange echoes... pressure in his ears... a booming green void. He kicked out at the darkness, sure that he was continually sinking. But then he found himself bumping into the slimy wooden hull of the boat. In another second he was thrashing around on the surface, and Preacher John’s angry voice was in his ears again.

“Come on, you motherless heap of scrap!”

Who was he talking to?

Thunka-thunk...

An empty hollow sound.

Baz spat out a mouthful of water, coughed, tried to get some air in his lungs.

“What the hell’s the matter with this thing? Graaggh!”

Tha-tha-thunkk...

Again the rhythmic half-familiar sound. Something turning. An engine failing to catch.

Oh God. Preacher John was trying to start the winch motor!

Baz threw himself forward in a desperate attempt at swimming, a frenzied bid to get as far away as possible from the prow of the boat. Arms pounding and clawing at the water, legs kicking, he struck out towards the stern. In his panic he was making more noise than progress – thrashing and splashing and spluttering – but he kept going.

Tingggg... t-tingg...

The divers’ bell sounded its warning above him. But he was getting there... getting there... closer to the stern now.

Crack!
 Not an explosion. A gunshot! Baz ducked beneath the water, breathed in a great mouthful of it, came up choking.

Crack!
 Another shot, and this time Baz heard the 
zzzip
 of the bullet in the water beside him.

“Should have shut you up before I threw you in!” Preacher John’s raging voice again.

Crack! Crack! Crack!

Baz dug at the waves, trying with all his might to get beneath them, but only succeeded in rolling over onto his back. White sky above him... the dark stern of the 
Cormorant
. The bow of the dinghy just beside him. Then Preacher John was shouting again, his voice muffled now, more distant.

“Gaaah! I’ll deal with you in a minute. Soon as I get this damn thing start—”

Baz saw it before he heard it – a huge flash of light, the planking bursting outwards as though kicked from within by some mighty boot, a great gaping hole at the waterline. 
Ba-DOOOMMM! Kkkkk... wowowowow... whoommFFF...

His eardrums felt as though they had exploded, but then the sound was just as suddenly gone... dissolving into absolute nothingness. Up and away he floated... far, far away into the smoky void. So peaceful. Such wonderful silence. And there was the blue angel, just like in his dream, sailing across the horizon... a gentle smiling face. She put her hand to her chin, tilted her head upwards...

Whoooorrff...

The world tipped over, and he was surrounded by water again, roaring flames shooting from the salvage boat, great gouts of fiery liquid arcing across the waves. Something banged against his shoulder blade – the dinghy – and Baz automatically reached upwards, grabbing at the rocking side. The boat yanked him out of the water, tearing at his arms, and as it fell once more Baz half tumbled, half scrambled over the lip. He was in the dinghy, cracking his elbows and shins against the ribs and struts, tossed this way and that, completely off balance.

As he got to his knees, facing the prow, he saw the transom of the salvage boat rising before him... and continuing to rise. It was coming out of the water, the green-encrusted propeller dripping, and Baz realized that he was being dragged towards it. The bow of the dinghy was still roped to the 
Cormorant
.

Shhroomphhh!
 Another flaring explosion, scatterings of fire falling all around. The 
Cormorant
 was going down, and pulling the dinghy with it! Baz scrambled to the prow of the boat, grabbing at the piece of string tied to his belt loop. Miraculously the penknife was still dangling there, blade still open. The nylon tow rope tautened jerkily, ripped from his grasp again and again as he tried to saw through it. He couldn’t do it... just couldn’t do it. A sudden great lurch, and Baz was thrown sideways. The rope lashed at his face, whipping across his eyes. He was half blinded, in agony, but he knew that the rope had snapped. The rope had snapped.

Bits of vision came back to him... fountains springing up from the deep... whirlpools... the dinghy rocking and spinning... and the word 
Cormorant
 disappearing, fading, swirling down into the darkness below. A last great belch of smoke and steam, and she’d gone. Scattered flames still danced on the waves like floating tea-lights.

The waters calmed, and the lights went out one by one. Baz was all alone. He lay against the prow of the dinghy, rubbing his eyes, half deafened, too shocked and too exhausted to move. The horizon slowly revolved, and the distant hills of the mainland came into view, rocking gently, a roughly drawn pencil line between sea and sky.

“
Arrrk...
 
”

The sound made Baz jump, a harsh squawk, alarmingly close. He spun round. A bird! It was perched on the petrol tank of the outboard motor. Huge, it seemed – grey and white, its head to one side, regarding him with a cold yellow eye. A gull?

Yes, and there, beneath the curiously twisted grip of its claws, was the word 
SEAGULL
, embossed on the petrol tank. As though the bird was a labeled exhibit: 
SEAGULL.

“Yaaah!” Baz waved his arms, a delayed reaction to his fright, and the gull hopped into the air. It rose vertically with no apparent effort, borne upwards on lazily hanging wings, calm and un flustered in contrast to Baz’s own frantic flapping. The seagull banked and wheeled away, dipping down again as it headed off in the direction of the mainland, skimming low over the waves.

Baz watched it go, lost for a moment in the wonder of seeing such a creature.

Then the world came flooding back in, the horror of what had just happened, all that he had just witnessed. Were there bodies? Was that why the bird had descended – in the hope of easy pickings? Baz looked around, scanning the choppy waters. Two or three pink marker buoys bobbed about in the near vicinity. An upside-down wine bottle. Nothing more.

Baz clambered down to the stern of the boat and looked at the outboard motor. The starter rope lay coiled beneath the bench seat, along with a red plastic fuel can. He remembered how the rope worked. But what about the controls? What had Gene done exactly to get the motor going? Baz felt panicky now, frightened by the very silence that surrounded him. He had to get out of here.

Wind the rope around the flywheel, then. No. Something else first. Gene had fiddled around with this little pump thing, pressed it up and down a few times. Yes. Like that. And then there had been a lever. This one, with the cable attached to it? Open that up a bit. Now the rope.

He pulled it too timidly the first time. The flywheel turned, but only in a feeble half-hearted way. Baz tried again. He wound the rope around the notched flywheel and then gave it such an almighty wrench that he nearly overbalanced. The engine caught instantly, rapidly picked up speed, and in the next moment it was racing completely out of control, the screaming note of the exhaust causing Baz to panic even more. Which lever? Which lever? This one. Baz pulled the throttle lever right across, and the clamoring engine slowed to the point where it was firing only intermittently, in danger of stalling now. Try opening it up a bit more then.

Baz fiddled about with the throttle lever until the engine sounded comfortable, a fast tickover. OK. But the boat wasn’t moving. There was something else he needed to do. He had to put it into gear, make the propeller work. Baz searched around the brackets and the engine casing until he found the only thing that looked like it might be a gear lever. Which way did it go – left or right? As he hesitated, frightened of doing the wrong thing, he saw a swirl of turbulence beyond the stern of the boat, and then something came bursting up through the surface in a great eruption of froth and spray. Metal cylinders... glistening black rubber... the unmistakable flash of a diver’s mask. Like tentacles the looped breathing tubes surged through the water, the diver lunging forward, arm outstretched, fingers clawing, reaching... reaching...

Baz cried out in horror and tumbled backwards, his hand still on the gear lever. He felt the clunk of the motor engaging, and then the lever was wrenched from his grasp as the boat leaped into reverse. There was a muffled yell, a horrible thud beneath the transom. The dinghy rocked sideways but kept going, slewing round stern-first in an increasingly tight circle. 
Oh God... oh God
. Baz scrambled to his knees and struck out at the lever, banging it across with the heel of his palm. An awful graunching sound – the screech of suffering gears – and the boat gave a violent jerk in the opposite direction. Baz was thrown towards the transom.

He fell onto the seat next to the outboard and grasped the tiller bar, swinging it wildly back and forth in an attempt to steady the boat. At the same time he was trying to look over his shoulder, terrified that the diver was about to come shooting up from the depths once more. Nothing there. 
Oh God – just concentrate. Stop panicking and concentrate. Left this way... right that way. Left... right. OK, then. Go. Get this thing moving. Open up the throttle lever and get out. Get out, get out, get out!

Baz looked behind him, still fearful that some great hand would rise up, that Preacher John’s huge red fingers would appear over the edge of the transom. But it didn’t happen. The marker buoys receded into the distance, bright spots of color riding the swell.

For a while he simply kept going, heading in the direction of the mainland, engine running flat out. But once he felt relatively safe from attack or capture, Baz shut off speed, slowing the revs down to a minimum. He allowed his aching shoulders to sag, put a hand to the back of his neck and leaned forward. He couldn’t escape the awful images that flashed through his head, or the pounding in his heart, no matter how hard he gunned the motor or how fast he travelled.

Jesus. That was awful. The sight of that diving mask, shooting up out of the water. The thud of the boat as it had ploughed straight into...

And the explosion. Again and again the explosion replayed itself before him, ripping through the side of the salvage boat – arcs of burning fuel shooting out like flamethrowers across the water – the painted word 
Cormorant
 swirling away into darkness – and the last deep belch of the ocean as the boat was swallowed up.

Preacher John was dead. And Isaac was dead. The two divers... he couldn’t tell. They might have survived, might be swimming for the mainland right now, or they might not. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that the bomb had actually worked.

And now it was over. The Ecks were gone.

But what was he planning to do next? Go back to X-Isle? How?

Baz tried to get his bearings, looking from the blue hills of the mainland to the empty horizon on either side. But from which way had they come? Over there? Yes, he thought it was from the right. So... if he kept the mainland behind him, and to his left...

Yet if he was wrong he could miss the island completely, and simply keep travelling forever. Or until the fuel ran out.

Baz looked beneath the seat of the boat and dragged out the red plastic fuel can. It was reassuringly heavy. Probably it had been filled in preparation for today’s trip. He guessed that the petrol tank was full too, and maybe he’d check in a minute. What was that, though? Baz could see something else beneath the seat. A bottle of water! The divers had obviously come prepared to use the boat. As he reached down to retrieve the water, he discovered yet another object – some orange-colored thing.

It turned out to be an old fishing spool – orange nylon line wrapped around a squareish wooden frame, the whole thing wedged firmly in between the seat supports and the planking. And this had been stuck under there for years by the look of it. It might even have been to the bottom of the ocean and back. Baz unwound a meter or two of the line from the spool. There were several ancient and rusty hooks, vicious-looking things, and he had to watch his fingers. Then came a circular lead weight, tire shaped, a series of raised hemispheres pimpling its surface. Baz examined the hooks again. Amazingly there was still a fragment of bait attached to one of them, a long dried-up strip of fish, perhaps. Well, it was no good to anyone now.