Hurricane Fever

by Tobias S. Buckell

  Roo laughed sadly. “There’s never a good time to make a major decision. Mister Thompson, there’s another damn hurricane coming. There’s no time for waiting around. There never is, in the summer, here.” Roo could hardly remember a time when hurricanes let up. Too much heat in the atmosphere. Too much carbon dumped into it. And now they bore the brunt of it. Storm after storm slamming into the islands, the hurricane season extending ever longer. The sea rising up over the beaches, threatening the reason tourists came to visit the islands.

  A huge wave of loss threatened to unmoor Roo as he thought about the past and then tried to cut it away.

  Thompson got his attention back to the moment. “A big one coming. A lot of families will be hurting in a week’s time.”

  “Then don’t waste time out here with me,” Roo told him. “Go back to those who need you. And do good by my nephew.”

  “I will,” he said.

  Roo looked back down at his phone. And then sent a massive donation to the man’s church.

  In Delroy’s name.

  He wasn’t sure if it was enough to help with any future sins, but it would be enough to help anyone in Thompson’s community about to suffer from the next explosion of weather-related fury coming their way. He picked the gun back up.

  Downstairs he reached past Kit, who was sitting in the chart table area near the VHF radios, paper navigation charts, backup RDF units, and Roo’s wall-mounted screens. He ripped an old map of the Caribbean with pins stuck into various islands and angrily threw it in the trash.

  A senior summer trip that he would not be taking with Delroy.

  He stalked past Kit, who sat so still it was as if she was afraid any movement or words would destroy him, like a hammer to porcelain.

  In his cabin, the door locked and the gun resting on his bed, Roo stripped off his wet clothes until he stood naked. Nothing but the chain with the tree frog on the end.

  That damn frog.

  The damn forwarded voice mail.

  Roo looked through the slats in his room door into the corridor. Kit hadn’t stirred. Silence hung heavy throughout the catamaran.

  He pulled out a pad Velcroed to the wall. Plugged the tree frog into it, and flipped through the data again.

  More of the same bullshit. Charts of average hurricane formation data for the past century. Growing activity. Nothing you couldn’t snag from any weather research site.

  And more of that esoteric stuff about particulates riding high in the atmosphere.

  “What were you trying to leave me, Zee?” Roo asked the wall.

  But the smooth fiberglass had no reply.

  Zee was studying dust in the Saharan Air Layer. As Roo had told Delroy. Storms would rip across the deserts of West Africa and whip the dust up high into the air. And above the wetter, colder Atlantic air a dryer layer would hold the dust and sweep out across the ocean to rain softly down in the islands.

  With the jet stream wobbling to dip down into the Americas, changing wind patterns due to colder Arctic air constantly battling and changing everything up and down the East Coast, secondary layers often took the dust up into Florida nowadays. Sometimes farther.

  Roo pulled the data out. Zee died to protect it, and there was more. But Roo had never been a researcher. He’d ridden desks, true. Back when he’d been up to no good, Caribbean Intelligence Group pulled Roo out of house arrest, cut the GPS chip out of his ankle, and told him they could use a grifter.

  Social engineering, they’d told him. There were some hackers that could dig into code, or find vulnerabilities in the programming. But the weakest link? The people actually using programs. And Roo had a knack for exploiting the link between the keyboard and the screen.

  You could dress up in a pair of khakis and a blue dress shirt with a name tag and fake company name and show up to fix almost any network or computer. You could frantically call someone and tell them they needed to access a certain security site. You could get anyone to give over all sorts of personal information to fix a problem with their file in HR, if they thought you were HR.

  Fifteen minutes on a phone, and Roo could usually get what would take hours to force one’s way into. Roo read people, figured out how to follow the threads up the chain. Took action.

  Zee, on the other hand, he would dig and dig until patterns came. They’d worked well together. Zee, the bloodhound. And Roo, moving pieces around the board based on Zee’s research.

  He could read Zee’s raw research until his eyes bled and not spot what was obvious to Zee.

  Roo needed to tackle this in a people direction.

  Or he could turn his back on all this shit and put the boat back in the water. Run before the hurricane, like a Viking of old on a longboat before the storm. Lose himself. Start over.

  One of the boards creaked outside.

  Roo, still naked, picked up the gun and aimed it right at the door. “Yeah?”

  “I don’t…” Kit said, her voice breaking slightly. “What happens next, Roo?”

  He looked at the broken outline of her silhouette through the slats in the upper part of the door.

  That was the question, wasn’t it?

  Gun still raised, he moved until the barrel almost touched one of the wooden slats. “Are you serious about justice?” Roo asked, his voice cracking slightly. “Ready to risk it all to find out who did this to Zee, to my Delroy? No matter where it takes us? Because your brother and I, we didn’t sit behind desks when we first met, you understand?”

  Kit shifted on the other side of the door’s slats. “I’ll go wherever it needs to go. We have no parents, no other family to mourn us. It was just him and me. I’m willing.”

  “I think they found me through you,” Roo said, leaning his forehead against the door. “So let’s turn this around, yeah? It’s time for you to go back to that hotel room you told about.”

  She stopped moving forward. “You’re going to use me as bait.”

  More like chum, because those men were sharks. And if she was naïve, she wouldn’t know it. She would trust him and say yes and walk willingly into a line of fire. But if she was in the business, like Roo, then she knew it was going to be dicey, and ugly, and that this was a stupid move for her.

  So, Roo thought, let’s see how committed Zee’s possibly fake sister is to this.

  “Yes. See that police car up by the gate? It’s going to keep trouble away. So we’re gonna get real up close and personal.”

  “And then?”

  “Going to kill the clot-bastard-fuckers for Delroy. And find out why they came up on us. I’m going to tug on this line and see where it leads. Because it’s this, or … I go become someone else. Someone more broken, and tired, and alone. And always I’ll wonder, who did it? Why? What was it for?”

  Kit took a deep breath, then sighed. “I’ll be your bait. For Zee.”

  “For Zee,” Roo said. “And Delroy.”

  13

  Frenchman’s Reef Hotel stuck out of one of the corners of Charlotte Amalie’s harbor. From it you could see the whole town sprinkled along the curving bowl of the mountain-made amphitheater of the harbor. Everything stretched around that curve. From Frenchman’s Reef, to Yacht Haven, which was clustered with gleaming mega-yachts for the unbearably rich, all the way to Frenchtown, where fishermen still pushed out to sea in wooden, brightly painted fishing boats.

  Roo, flamboyantly out in the clear air in his camouflage as a tourist, walked by room after room. The doors to his left, railing to his right. And behind the rails, the nighttime lights of Charlotte Amalie twinkled.

  At the pool, an overweight, pasty woman in a mumu-looking bathing suit had handed Roo an armful of wet, sunscreen-smelling towels.

  “Here you go,” she’d said, with an air of casual expectation.

  Kit had opened her mouth to object, but Roo had just nodded and taken them. At the edge of the pool he had pulled on a pair of swimming trunks, doused himself sopping wet with a hose, and pulled on a Hawaiian shirt that assaulted any
one passing by with its tropical colors.

  “You go ahead,” Roo told Kit. “Let them grab you. Fight them, but let them take you. I’ll be right behind.”

  He had draped one of the towels over his head to obscure his dreads, wore wet, squeaking flip-flops, and had wrapped the other towel around his waist.

  A bright red duffel bag, the last towel casually drooped from the space between the handles, bumped against his hip.

  Kit now reached the stairs ahead of him and, after a deep breath, started up.

  Roo watched her go until her feet were all that were visible. A pair of professionally efficient pumps, scuffed from the gravel, that ticked up one more set of stairs and disappeared.

  He kept moving toward the open stairs. Found his first target just around the corner, down the stairs just in the shadow. Smaller muscle, keeping an eye on the stairs and pulling the trap closed. He was paying more attention to Kit and getting ready to follow her up.

  Roo broke his attention. “Hey, can you tell me where to find the ice machine…” He dropped the duffel bag with a heavy clunk and cracked the towel at the man’s sunburned, heavily stubbled face. There were tattoos up and down his forearms, more swastika bullshit.

  “What the fuck?” The lookout seemed confused, not expecting a swimsuit-wearing tourist to snap a towel at him, so he instinctively grabbed at it. Roo let go, and as the lookout focused on balling it up and throwing it aside, Roo ran into him and flipped him over the rail.

  It was four stories down to the ground, and then tumbling as the body snapped its way through scrub along the steep incline the rooms were perched on.

  Roo hadn’t waited to see the outcome, he’d already unzipped the duffel bag and started up the stairs. He pulled out a two-foot-long speargun and paused to pull the bands into place, forearms straining to get them on the release catch.

  A silencer wouldn’t do shit. It was useful for disguising where you were shooting from, or cutting down on mayhem. But out here, the supersonic crack of the bullet was going to give everyone a head’s up.

  Bullets were loud. That was always a constant.

  A spear, on the other hand …

  When Roo cleared the top of the stairs he could see a guard standing outside the door. All muscle. Slavic and with shoulders so wide he probably had to turn sideways to slip through a normal sized doorway.

  Muscle on muscle, like an over-bred bull. Thanks to steroids, human growth hormone, maybe even some sequenced DNA spliced up, and reinjected with new markers from top muscle builders. You didn’t need to be born with lucky genes, you could always steal them from black market sequencing shops.

  Whether the person who created the new viral DNA strain you were injecting into yourself was any good at his coding, that was another story.

  Shooting a slab of meat this tall wouldn’t even guarantee his silence. Not unless it was a direct hit to the heart.

  But, Roo knew, shooting him in the lung with a speargun was a good way to shut him up. The speargun twanged.

  The mountain of a man grabbed the end of the spear embedded in him and opened his mouth. Blood sprayed the air as he hoarsely tried to shout a warning. But with a pierced lung he was reduced to little more than grunting. Roo yanked on the long string still attached to the spear.

  It came out in a sickly ripping gasp and a tiny rush of air. The barbs were designed to keep the spear in place, but Roo had yanked it back so hard it came out anyway.

  The effect was dramatic. The giant dropped to the floor, gasping and struggling to handle a suddenly collapsed lung.

  He held a hand up, trying to push Roo away, but there was no pity left in Roo. He drove a knee into the center of the man’s chest as he dropped onto him, then slit his thick, corded neck with a shark knife pulled from the end pocket of the duffel bag.

  Now there wasn’t even gasping. Just blood.

  “There was a boy,” Roo whispered to the man, leaning forward and looking into the pale green eyes. “You shouldn’t have killed him.”

  There was no comprehension. The eyes focused on something far away from Roo.

  He reloaded and listened to Kit scream. There was a slap of a hand from inside the room, faint, but audible. Roo stepped toward the door, then grimaced.

  There would be one more guard. With a deep breath he rubbed his hands on his shorts. Inside his head, he was on the edge of a cliff and wobbling. It was good to be scared, it heightened his nerves. What he had just done would sink in later. For now, he needed to keep moving. There was no turning back. The decisions made in anger were solid. He was here for retribution. He was here to do this the messy way.

  He turned away from the door.

  Stepping out of his flip-flops, Roo ran silently for the other stairwell. Around the corner he pointed down, sighted, and shot the other posted guard in the chest before the elaborately tattooed, muscled neo-Nazi could reach for his gun.

  This one Roo didn’t kill. He knocked the gun free from the man’s hands and yanked him up the stairs by pulling on the wire still connected to the spear. The guard tried to scream, sprayed blood in the air instead, and clutched his side. Holding the spear in place and groaning, he stumbled upward until he was close enough for Roo to lean in. “Walk,” he said.

  The guard shook his head, so Roo stepped behind him and pushed him forward by gently tweaking the spearpoint to repeat the request. The guard jerked forward toward Kit’s room while Roo wound the spear line around his arms to bind him.

  Blood dripped on the ground as they moved forward. Enough that Roo knew the guard wouldn’t be standing upright for much longer. He prodded the man forward. “Faster.”

  In front of the closed door, Roo pulled the duffel bag further open, his bloody hands shaking. Another spear, another reload. He pulled on a gas mask and reshouldered the duffel bag. He yanked out tear gas grenades from the bag now under his arm, pulled the pins, and then shoved the guard up to the door.

  “Knock and enter,” he hissed. “Now.” He twisted the spear again, and the reluctant, bleeding man obeyed.

  The door creaked open, and Roo kicked the guard forward while tossing the tear gas grenades in past him.

  A stream of nasty swearing in Russian and Hungarian filled the room as two men scattered from the spitting tear gas like startled cockroaches.

  Roo shot the nearest one in the stomach with the speargun, the twang of the released cable filling the room. The other man Roo hit with the duffel bag, the weight of the guns and ammo inside cracking him hard in the head and knocking him onto the large queen bed in the center of the room.

  He pulled the bloody shark knife free of the bag and crawled up onto the bed. He was breathing heavily in the gas mask, struggling to pull air into his lungs.

  The other man, reddened eyes streaming with tears, blinked as Roo crawled onto the bed. For a moment he managed to get a hold on Roo and pawed for the gas mask.

  A moment passed. One that stretched as they strained and grunted at each other.

  But Roo’d had some training at the dojo with bigger, stronger instructors. He wormed his way out and buried the shark knife deep into the man’s neck.

  He lay for a second, panting, staring at the white speckled ceiling and the unmoving fan.

  Not a single shot, he thought dizzily.

  The first man he’d speared as he entered the room crawled around, trying blindly to find his gun. Kit held it now, aiming it in his general direction as she squeezed her bloodshot eyes shut in pain and tried to wipe tears off with a shoulder.

  Quick thinker.

  Roo jumped up, crossed to the door, and pulled the big guard inside. Then he grabbed the duffel bag, Kit’s elbow, and pulled her in the bathroom.

  “Keep looking up.” He tilted her chin and used a bottle of liquid antacid to flush her eyes out. She thrashed for a bit, unused to the sensation of the chalky liquid.

  He handed her a gas mask and an emergency scuba bottle.

  “Hopefully we have some time before all that blood o
utside is noticed,” he said. “But why don’t you get your things together, take them down to the car. Catch your breath. I’ll be down after I have a quick chat with the man still crawling around on the floor.”

  * * *

  Roo pulled a desk chair over to the tied up, bleeding man with a spear still in his stomach. He leaned close, so that the man could hear him through the gas mask.

  “When I was just so,” Roo held his hand up off the floor to indicate the height of a young boy. “I worked for this dealer named Vincent. Tough yardboy, sent from Kingston to make sure we did it all just right. He told me once, you kill someone’s blood, then you might as well kill them, too. Because there’s no way to settle that, no way to work past it.”

  There was no response. Roo picked up the bloody dive knife he’d used earlier and began to cut the man’s shirt off to look at the tattoos underneath, poking at the swastika.

  “This don’t exactly make you the most sympathetic person,” he said. “Seems like a favor to the rest of the world to get rid of you.”

  That got a response. “Fuck you!” The man spat at him. The spittle ran off the water-repellent glass of the gas mask almost instantly.

  “Whatever you wanted,” Roo said. “You wanted it from me. Why did you drag my nephew into it?”

  The man shrugged, then grimaced as the motion caused the spear in his gut to shift slightly. But he bore the pain like a soldier being interrogated, with some hint of pride that went along with the defiance. “We were looking for a black man with a data chip,” he said in a thick English accent. “A black man showed up, we shot him. He didn’t have the data chip.”

  Simple as that. Roo’s eyes were wet, and it wasn’t from what little teargas had leaked around the edges of his mask.

  He sat back and stared at the Golden Dawn tattoos, the swastikas, the double lightning strikes. Hungarian fascist bullshit. The man was a walking billboard for failed twentieth-century fascism. An easy-to-use foot soldier.

  “Who wants that chip?” Roo asked.

  “Fuck you,” the man said, in such a way that they both knew he wasn’t going to give that up easily. His eyes dared Roo to do something nasty and horrible. “Do your worst.”