by Peter Clines
“I don’t know. It seems a little wonky to me. And risky. If the boat doesn’t come back, won’t it make any doubters left out here doubt him even more?”
“I don’t know. How many do you think there are?”
“Beats me. But I mean, it sounds like more than a dozen, the way Hussein was talking.”
“People are going to die?” whispered Ash.
Barry shook his head. “Not if we can help it, buddy.”
St. George looked up at the red-and-gray-streaked sky, then at the garden beds. Most of the workers had left about an hour ago, but a last six or seven were inspecting the plants. “I’d say we’ve got maybe ten or fifteen minutes until sunset, then another half hour until full dark. We do it then.”
“You sure?”
“Not really, no. But we can’t just sit here while he takes everyone over the horizon and drowns them. We’ll move fast, try to save all the kids. The darkness should give us better odds. And then we can deal with Nautilus.”
Barry jerked his head a few times. “This’d be a perfect time for our ace in the hole, Corpse Girl, to show up and take out a guard or two. It’d really shift things in our favor.”
“I don’t think we can gamble on that,” said St. George. “We still don’t know for sure if she’s woken up, or what kind of shape she’d be in if she did.”
“Well,” said Barry, “I’m looking right at her and she looks fine. I think everything’s coming up Milhouse.”
“What?” St. George twisted around.
Madelyn loped along one of the cargo containers, as far from the garden plots as she could get. Her jacket was tucked under her arm, and a bright blue baseball cap was perched on her head. The orange sunlight masked her white skin. One or two of the garden workers glanced at her, but it seemed keeping their heads down and quiet won out over reporting someone they didn’t recognize.
Or maybe Hussein was right about how many people wanted off the island.
Madelyn stepped into the gap between one of the big containers and the next one. Her pale skin almost glowed in the shadows. She leaned her head out to watch one of the far guards, the Asian man, and then slipped back out. A few quick steps took her to the next opening. It was barely a crack, ten feet from the cage, but she crouched against it.
St. George could see where her wet suit had been ripped apart. Where she’d been ripped apart. A swath of translucent skin stood out across her midriff, brilliant against the black wet suit. “Hey,” she stage-whispered, “what the hell is all this?”
St. George cast his eyes down at her exposed stomach. “Are you okay?”
She smiled. “How many times do I have to tell you? Being dead is my superpower.”
“See?” murmured Barry.
Madelyn started to move forward, but St. George gestured her back. She wiggled her fingers at the cage struts. “So what gives? This thing can’t actually be holding you, can it?”
“They’ve got hostages all over the island,” said St. George. “Kids. If we try to get out, the guards give a signal and the hostages die.”
The Corpse Girl shook her head. “Man, I hate this place.”
St. George turned his head to gaze at Mitchel, a few dozen yards away. The man was half turned from them. He had a long knife out and was sharpening it against a metal rod. “There’s him and two others. One over there between the gardens, and another one facing Barry.”
She nodded. “I snuck past him coming over here.”
“Think you can get all three? Fast and quiet?”
“Dead quiet,” she whispered with a smile.
“No joking around,” he said. “If one of them yells out, the kids are going to drown.”
Madelyn’s smile faded. “Got it,” she said. She straightened up, walked along the storage container, and vanished into the next gap.
St. George twisted his head back to Barry. “Lean forward a little more.”
The kids shifted away, and Barry stretched toward his knees.
St. George stretched his fingers to the shackle on Barry’s far wrist. He fumbled, gripped the chain between his fingertips, and squeezed. There was a faint squeal, a sharp ping, and a broken link clattered on the deck.
“Lord almighty, free at last,” Barry drawled.
“Almost,” said St. George. He put his free hand close to the other and snapped the cuff, then did the same with the other wrist. “Keep your arms in place until she’s got the guards.”
Mitchel Kirby with one l was hating life.
He dragged his bowie knife along the sharpening rod. It was really some kind of big kitchen knife, not an actual bowie knife. Malachi had told him the name of it once, when he’d showed Mitchel how to sharpen it without wrecking the edge.
Normally the sound of the knife on the rod made him feel tough, but now the slight vibration from it traveled up his arm to his nose, like the little tremor before a sneeze. And the tremor felt like broken glass in his nostrils.
He was pretty sure Nautilus had broken his nose, and positive he’d broken a tooth. His first square one, top back left. Mitchel’d touched his nose once, and it felt like being stabbed with a red-hot knife. He’d wiped his mouth five or six times, and there was still blood in his mustache. The side of his face was swelling, too. He could feel it.
The boss had just turned on him for looking at some dead girl’s cooch and little apple titties. What was the big deal? It’s not like he’d touched her or anything. Well, sure, he’d touched her when he’d dumped her body in the Hole. But she was for-real dead then, so who cared?
The top of the sun dropped under the horizon. The sky was still bright, but it wouldn’t last long. Have to light the fires soon. And maybe goddamned Hong would come relieve him so he could get someone to check out his nose. Could a broken nose get infected?
Who cared about the dead girl at all? She was a fucking ex. Why was he getting his nose broken and his tooth knocked out over her? It’s not like he killed her. Or infected her.
He was getting thrown under the bus was what it was. The boss was losing hold, and Mitchel was the sacrificial lamb. Nautilus needed to look fair and tough and all that shit, so Mitchel had to take the fall.
If the damned fish man tried something like that again, though, Mitchel would gut him like a fish. Yeah the boss was strong and tough, but a sharp knife would still go through his skin and open him up. If nothing else, he needed to remember Mitchel was one of the chosen. He knew where the bodies were buried, so to speak.
Mitchel wasn’t stupid. Every job he’d ever had, he figured out how he could rob the place. The Walgreens in Kailua. The Jack in the Box at King and McCully. The beach sandwich shack. Even that secondhand DVD store in Honolulu, and he’d only worked there for twelve days. He could’ve robbed any one of them blind and gotten away with it, because he planned ahead.
He always knew there was a chance his past would come back to haunt him. Maybe one of the girls would start talking and make herself out to be some kind of victim. Or maybe one day the big guy would come back from a swim with one of the people he’d let live, and they’d point the finger at him. Nautilus liked having loyal people, but Mitch knew sometimes examples had to be made. And in one or two of these hypothetical cases, he’d be prime example material.
So he had a plan ready. He called it plan B, because everybody in the movies ended up going to plan B anyway and it always worked. So he figured he’d just start with that one. He was smart that way.
Something moved in the corner of his eye and knocked him out of the shallow depths of his thoughts. He brought one hand up to protect himself while the other hand fumbled with the knife, but it was just a girl. One of the older ones, walking toward him. She was wearing a tight black sweatshirt that left her smooth belly exposed, and it was zipped low, too, so he got a glimpse of the cleavage between her firm little apple tit—
Mitchel’s gaze went up to her face, and as she stepped forward he saw the dead white eyes under the brim of her baseball cap.
He didn’t black out so much as white out. His whole brain just turned to light and roaring and then he came out of it and SWEETHOLYSHITTHEPAIN!! A fucking Fourth of July Roman candle was going off in his head. His jaw locked up so his breathless scream just came out as a long hiss. He couldn’t even open his left eye and his right eye was watering and there was blood in his mouth and holy fuck the little dead girl was back and she was going to kill him because his nose hurt so much.
His hands were empty. He’d dropped his knife. He still didn’t know where the shotgun was. He was on his knees in front of the dead girl. He put his hands up to protect his nose, and her fist slammed into the side of his head. Not hard enough to knock him out, but it shook his nose again and made his eyes spasm.
Her foot sank into his gut, air shot out of his mouth, and it whistled over the empty socket of his tooth like a fucking razor blade. He tried to suck some air back in. One scream. One scream and the brats died and it was all her fault. Her and the fucking super—
She punched one of his protective hands right in the palm. He tried to grab her fist, but the back of his own hand smacked into his broken noOHFUCKINGHOLYJESUSTHEPAIN. The white sound faded, and he opened his eyes in time to see the deck rushing up at him. He tried to twist out of the way, and the metal plates hit him in the forehead and shook his broken nose.
This time he did black out.
Freedom had taught Madelyn to always go for the weak spots, and the cowboy’s bruised and swollen nose had made a great target. She leaned in, ready to throw another punch, but the guard with the cowboy mustache was out cold. She kicked him twice in the leg to be sure, and thought about kicking him in the nads to be really sure, but she didn’t want to risk waking him up.
The man’s nose and mouth were bleeding a lot, and she felt good about that. Having him stare at her chest, even for just a few seconds, had made her skin crawl for some reason. She was pretty sure the guy was a creeper, whoever he was.
His knife had cut right across her boob. Through the wet suit and sports bra into her skin. The zipper had stopped it from going farther across her chest. She poked at the wound, just to be sure her body and her clothes were going to hold together.
She took the cowboy’s shotgun and knife with her. Circling around the large garden patch took her a few minutes. She tried to move casually, but with a purpose. Act like you belong there and nobody will look too close. She’d heard that somewhere. Or read it.
When she reached the second guard, he was watching the last few inches of the sun vanish behind the horizon. It was pretty, with all the reds and orange and even some purple striped back and forth. But he had his back to the cage, which Madelyn thought was sloppy for a guard.
He heard her footsteps and started to look back over his shoulder, but he was way too relaxed. She just walked up and hit him in the back of the head with the butt of the shotgun. Both hands, jerked it forward, hit him right in his mess of dreadlocks. His body spasmed, his own weapon slipped from his fingers, and then he crumbled.
She watched his body for a moment to make sure he was still breathing. These guards all needed to be knocked out, but she didn’t want to kill anyone. Not even creeper-cowboy guy.
There was a big metal barrel near the guard that looked and smelled like it was used for fires sometimes. She dropped both shotguns and the knife in it. One guard left.
Madelyn crouched by another storage container and peered over at the last man. He was looking in the direction of the cage, just like he’d been when she worked her way around him a little while ago. Clear view in front of him, but she could probably walk right up behind him.
She found a gap between one of the storage containers and the ship’s railing. It wasn’t even a foot, but it was enough to squeeze in sideways and shuffle down to the far end of the ship. It was like inching along a ledge with the ocean shifting back and forth forty or fifty feet below. She couldn’t remember ever having a fear of heights. Good thing.
Seven minutes of shuffling later, the ledge opened up into a wide space near the front of the ship. No more containers, just some hatches and little pillars and other ship-things she didn’t recognize. She slipped to the edge of the big steel box and eased her head out to look around. She wasn’t quite behind the guard, but she was close. At his eight o’clock, if she was using the term right.
How good was his peripheral vision? He hadn’t noticed her sneaking up to the cage. Or maybe he had seen her and just hadn’t said anything because she hadn’t tried to break the other heroes out. Maybe a lot of teenaged St. George groupies had been stopping by the cage in the time she’d been healing and climbing out of the oil tanker’s ex-filled hold.
If she walked back a little bit, she could curve around and come up right behind him. It was already pretty dark, and she’d just be a shadow to him if he did catch a glimpse of her. She just had to move fast and not hesitate. She wasn’t sure how much longer the other two guards would be out.
Madelyn started walking. Slow, easy steps at first, just in case he caught a glimpse of her. Then faster as she got behind him, out of his field of vision. She took long strides on her toes, not quite running so her boots wouldn’t make noise on the deck. The guard was thirty feet away. Twenty. Ten.
Her foot scuffed as she put it down. A bit of dried dirt and rust. Not a loud sound, but a different one. It stood out. The guard’s shoulders shifted. His chin came around and gave her a glimpse of Asian features.
She lunged and tackled him. They tumbled down, and her hand slapped over his mouth. He tried to yell, and she pushed her fingers between his teeth. His tongue twitched against her fingertips. He looked at her and screamed, but it was a stuttering, muffled screech around her knuckles. Then his mouth was opening wide, his tongue pulling back, and he almost gagged trying not to touch her cold skin.
Madelyn pulled herself up on top of him and slammed her forehead down against his. It was a clumsy head butt. She knew there was a certain way to do it, but didn’t know what it was. So she just smacked their skulls together again and hoped the blow would connect right.
He twisted under her and got an arm against her throat to hold her head back. He wrenched his head around. Her fingers slipped from his mouth, he took in a sharp breath and—
The cage exploded.
“She’s got the last guy,” said Barry. “Let’s do it.”
“He’s out?”
“He’s down. Time to go no matter what.”
St. George turned and grabbed the shackle holding Ash to Barry’s thigh. He snapped it with a quick jerk of his hands, then broke Lily’s. “Come on,” he told them. “Let’s go to the other side of the cage.”
Ash looked between the two men. “Now?”
“Yeah, right now. Come on.”
Barry shuffled on his hands, turned around, pushed himself up against the opposite wall. He reached out and grabbed the bars of the cage.
“Hug each other tight,” St. George told the kids, “look that way, and keep your eyes closed, okay?” He put his back to Barry, shielding the children with his body, and put his arms up so his hands covered their faces. “Do it.”
Light and heat blasted across St. George. Arcs of power cracked up and raced along the struts and beams of the cage. The kids wailed.
The blazing light lasted a few seconds, then vanished. St. George looked over his shoulder. Smoke rippled off his leather jacket.
The far wall of the cage was gone, replaced by a hole almost six feet across. The edges of the bars still glowed dull red. One section fell off and clanged onto the steaming deck.
The sun had come back up, and it raced across the sky.
Zzzap did two fast circuits around the island and spotted the cages held out over the water. One on the bow of the container ship, closest to where he an
d St. George had been held. One on a fishing boat. One on the tanker.
Just over three seconds since he changed into his energy form.
He hoped the element of surprise meant he wouldn’t have to hurt anyone.
The container ship first. The cage hung three feet out past the ship’s railing, held up by a thick length of aircraft cable that ran along a short steel arm. The cable ran back through a series of heavy block and tackles and what looked like a winch. Maybe part of a small crane that had been part of the ship to start with.
The whole thing was mounted on a raised section of deck. The man and woman standing by the manual cranks were closest to the guards Madelyn had taken out. They’d be the first to hear anything if someone shouted. He recognized the woman with the slack face and sun-leathered skin. Alice, very clearly not through the looking glass. She was looking out at the ocean, twisting her head around. Probably still registering his trips around the island and what they meant.
The three children in the cage—two boys and a girl—looked at him with wide eyes as he placed his gleaming hands around the block and tackle. He inched his palms closer, and the heat swirled between them. The block glowed red. Hot enough to fuse, but not to melt the block or the cable.
A thunderclap echoed across the sea as Alice fired her shotgun. The kids screamed. Barry shuddered as the pellets melted inside him. He glanced at the kids to make sure they hadn’t caught any of the blast, but didn’t see any wounds.
He turned and deformed the barrel of Alice’s shotgun with a wave of his hand. He reached out and destroyed the man’s, too, just in case they decided to carry out their threat in a more direct way. He let off a growl of light and heat that made the two guards flinch back. Alice leaped off the raised deck and landed rough. She limped away, followed by the man.
The kids were safe for the moment.
Then he was across the island at the back end of the oil tanker. Same setup here, but with a smaller crane, thicker cable, and four kids in the cage. Three girls and a boy. Only one guard, a bearded man in a ragged Hawaiian shirt, also with a shotgun. He dropped the weapon and leaped back as the gleaming wraith appeared above his platform.
