He attacked the knot. It was a feeble attack; however, with many breaks and snarled curse words aimed at Jillybean and Mike, and at the sea when heavy waves smashed him into the mast. He was fantastically cold. He was so cold that the frigid ocean water felt warm when it washed over him. They were going to die of exposure, if nothing else killed them first.
It took ages to get the knot undone and by then they were being pelted by a stinging rain that was part ice crystals, part sleet, and part snow. Jenn was whimpering, her arm slowing as she cranked the hand-pump. When he could, Mike went to her and heaved the crank around as fast as he could for half a minute or so, then he would go back to keeping them one step in front of the storm.
Stu’s legs weren’t working, and he was forced to drag them along until he reached Jenn. “Move over,” he told her. “Let me have a go at it.” His body was next to useless, all save his right arm. It had been the first to recover and was now at about 40% strength, which meant it was stronger than Jenn’s entire body.
He began to crank and crank and crank. As he did, the arm actually got stronger and the pain grew less. The amount of water coming from the hose could have put out a forest fire and yet they continued to sink. The waves were mountains around them and although Mike was the best there was, the Captain Jack was dying by degrees.
It groaned when the bigger waves hit and sometimes the deck would stay submerged for long stretches. When that happened, Jenn would drop down and help pump. The two of them would work the pump until their breath was ragged.
“We’re not going to make it,” Jenn said after one long stint. She was too tired to be afraid.
“Keep us afloat a little longer,” Mike yelled over the wind. “The tide probably only took us out ten or eleven miles. We should be coming up on land anytime. Jenn, spell me at the wheel for a few minutes. Keep the wind behind us.”
She limped to the wheel, wearing a look of uncertainty. “Why? Where are you going?”
He kissed her on the cheek. Her face was stiff and felt as though he were kissing a smooth cake of ice. They had to get to land soon. “I need to check the compass.”
Her eyes grew big around at the idea. The compass was in the boat’s navigation room, which was in the middle of the flooded cabin. Under any other circumstances it was a simple swim of twenty or so feet. Jenn didn’t think she could make it. Her lung capacity had shrunk and the range of motion in both her arms and legs was a third of what it had been.
She knew Mike was doing better, but not that much better. But she didn’t try to stop him. They didn’t have much time left.
Mike walked down the stairs to the flooded cabins, took a deep breath, choked and coughed on nothing, then took a smaller breath and went under. He was gone long enough for Jenn’s heart to begin to break and when he finally came up again he was grey-faced and barely strong enough to straggle up the stairs.
“We need to make a course change,” he said, between gasps. “Just a slight one.” He struggled to the mainsail and canted it deeply, making a mockery of the word “slight.” The Captain Jack heeled over…way over. Almost immediately the waves began hitting side on, making the boat shudder and groan.
Stu could almost feel it coming apart beneath him as he worked the pump faster. A few feet away, Jenn tried to hold the wheel against the strength of the ocean—the ocean won, and she went tumbling to the gunwale and thankfully just managed to hold on. Mike went to help her, however, she cried, “No!” and waved him to the wheel. He hauled it round.
The Captain Jack had been going north with the wind; now Mike had to gamble with their lives. “Tie yourselves to something!” he yelled to them after a huge wave had sent Jenn to the edge once again.
In between waves, Mike tried to work out a rough calculation as to where they were. The current would have taken them south and west during the night, while the storm had taken them straight north. There was a good chance they were directly west of San Francisco and that if they could keep the boat from going over for the next two hours, they could conceivably slip right back beneath the Golden Gate Bridge.
They did not make it two hours. They made it less than one before Mike found the Captain Jack on the crest of a particularly steep wave. He spun the wheel, frantically trying to turn the boat so it would slip down the face of the wave, but it was too late. The wind heaved the boat around until the rudder was out of the water —they were going down backwards.
“Cut away! Cut yourselves loose!” The scream was meant only for Stu. Mike was already leaping at Jenn. He had tied himself to the wheel post with a mooring hitch and with a simple pull of the loose end he flung himself at Jenn, as the boat was sliding straight down the cliff of water.
Mike collided with her a half-second before the boat hit the trough of the wave. In that blink of time, he took a mental picture of the knot and then held on as the momentum, as well as the weight of the boat, plunged the stern twelve feet deep. The weight of the wave crushed them against the rail. Jenn thought her eyes were going to burst and her chest was going to explode.
But it was only for a second and then up and down changed places as the Captain Jack turned a complete twisting somersault. Mike was thrown, cracking hard against the mast and nearly getting caught up in the sail and the lines. With a storm of bubbles all around him, he fought to get clear and when he did he saw that he was trapped under the boat.
Ten feet away, her auburn hair flowing gently around her, Jenn was fighting the knot she had tied like a mad woman. Her nails bent back as she frantically ripped at the rope. She then grabbed it in both hands, planted her feet on the railing and heaved with the result that the knot only became tighter.
With the boat gyrating and making a huge rumbling sound above his head, Mike swam to her and pulled her hands away. He began scraping at the knot just as she had been doing, but quickly realized that it would be like trying to undo a wet shoelace while on a twenty-second timer. She’d be long dead by the time he managed to undo it. Mike gave up on that end of the rope and concentrated on the other, which was looped around her waist.
Because of her fear of being thrown overboard and lost at sea, she had triple-tied the rope into an unforgiving knot that wound around itself in such a complex fashion that Mike couldn’t even find a starting point. Still, he did not panic. The ocean was his world, and ideas and solutions that others were slow to grasp came naturally to him there. He saw that she had tied the rope over her coat.
Furiously, he yanked the edge of her coat up as he pulled down on the loop around her waist.
She realized what he was doing and began to shimmy the rope off of her like it was the tiniest miniskirt imaginable. Their lungs were bursting when they kicked away and broke the surface in the midst of another crashing wave. They were slammed against the Captain Jack, which was upside down.
With its keel broken and jagged, it looked somewhat like a dead shark and yet they clung to it gratefully with frozen, gnarled fingers. Holding on was all Jenn could handle just then; it was all she could think about. Next to her, Mike was looking around, even more fear in his eyes.
“Stu!” he screamed. In his heart, he knew the scream was in vain. Before the boat had gone over, Stu had not even gained the full use of his legs yet and his hands were still halfway hooked. When Mike had yelled: “Cut away!” it had been based on instinct and not logic. None of them had knives. Stu was, more than likely, still under the boat.
Mike took in a lungful of air and was just about to slip back under when he heard a weak, gurgling voice say, “I’m here.” It didn’t sound anything like Stu.
“Hold on. We’re coming for you.”
He was on the other side of the boat, which seemed a very great distance just then, at least to Jenn. She didn’t want to budge unless it was to somewhere safer and warmer, neither of which were to be found on the other side of the boat. And yet, she didn’t want to be left behind.
She followed after Mike around the end of the boat as it went up and down with t
he rough waves. They found a very wretched Stu Currans, clinging to the battered edge of the hull. “I think a boat fell on me,” he croaked.
“It f-fell on us, too,” Jenn said in a shaking whisper. She was still in a state of shock; her nerves thrumming from how close to death she had been. “How w-were you able to get your r-r-rope off? Did you have a f-fancy knot like Mike?”
Stunned, exhausted and with thunder rolling continuously in his ears, he shook his head once an inch to the right, and once slightly to the left. Even that bit had him fighting not to whimper; he was one giant bruise. “My knot gave up on its own. It just…I don’t think I’m cut out to be a sailor.”
“What do we do now?” Jenn asked. “I don’t think we can hold on forever.” As if to emphasize her point, the water beneath them surged upward and they found themselves on the precipice of another mountainous wave. “Oh, God!” she wailed as the boat began to tumble away from her grip. It rolled down the wave, paused for just a second with its mast stabbing triumphantly straight up in the air, then was plowed over again.
Strangely, in Jenn’s eyes, the three of them did not suffer the same rough and tumble fate. The great surging wave passed beneath them without doing any damage. Like trash, Jenn thought. This bit of unpleasantness was followed by: Or corpses. Once you stopped struggling and just died, it almost seemed like the ocean was no longer interested in you. How many times had she seen corpses floating in the bay? Too many times.
Feeling sick, she fought the pull of the deep and splashed awkwardly through the leaping grey water towards the mostly submerged boat. When she reached it, she clung to it, digging her hands into the ruptured seams in the hull. Jenn’s fingers ached; her whole body ached, not just to the bone, but somehow even deeper than that. She didn’t know how she was going to make it through the next ten minutes, let alone the next few hours.
“I’m starting to think this is worse than death,” Stu said. He had his face pressed against the slick hull as rain and sleet drummed against it. No one had the strength to reply. The short swim in their heavy water-soaked clothes had exhausted them.
The ocean gave them a breather for the next couple of minutes as the waves failed to break beneath them. Mike recovered first. “Get out of your coats and take your shoes off if you can. They’re not going to keep us warm.”
Jenn got her coat off just as the next big wave came. Once more the Captain Jack fell down the face of it. It rolled with a great cracking sound and when it came around, its mast was gone, and its black sail trailed behind it like a cloak. Another wave hit it and this time she thought it had sunk, but then it breached the surface, again upside down. It seemed so far away.
She was the last one to make it. Instead of taking her boots off, she clung to the hull and shivered. Mike took them off for her.
A new wave came soon after and the swim to the slowly disintegrating Captain Jack was easier by the slightest degree. The next time a wave took the boat, she couldn’t make it back. She was too weak. It was all she could do to keep her head above water. Mike slipped an arm around her shoulders like a lifeguard might and did the sidestroke through forty yards of freezing chop to reach the boat.
Stu was dragging so badly that Mike got Jenn got to the boat only seconds after him. Mike pushed Jenn up onto the hull and climbed up after her. The Captain Jack was down by the head. The bow had been ripped away and there were now gaping holes along it. Only air trapped in the stern kept it from sinking completely, but it wasn’t going to last much longer.
“If I don’t make it back next time, leave me,” Stu said. “Don’t try to come after me.”
“Me neither,” Jenn said.
Mike didn’t know what to say. He had never planned on going after Stu; the man was just too big. And if Jenn thought he wasn’t going to do everything in his power to save her, she was being ridiculous.
“We gotta figure out what Jillybean would do,” he said to change the subject. “We know she’d do something. She wouldn’t drown. A little water wouldn’t stop her, not when…” A distant roar of water cut him off. A new wave is forming, he thought. He was too drained to be afraid. In fact, he had a crazy idea: what if they just surfed the boat down the wave and jumped off at the last second?
If it worked, it would put them that much closer and would mean less of a swim. And if it didn’t work…well, Mike didn’t have to think about that. The answer was obvious. He stood up as the water began to mount under them. Higher and higher they went until he felt he was a hundred feet in the air. He had a fantastic view of what was making the roaring sound.
They had made it. The land was less than a mile away and yet he didn’t jump for joy. He had the perfect vantage to see the waves racing straight at what looked like an endless wall of rock and crashing into it with the power of a two-ton bomb.
“New question. How would Jillybean keep us from hitting that?”
Jenn eased into a crouch, saw the cliff and the suicidal waves, and she hunched back down. Compared to the violent death that awaited them, a nice gentle drowning didn’t sound like a bad way to go.
Chapter 7
It wasn’t a rhetorical question in Mike’s mind. “Really. Someone tell me how Jillybean would keep us from hitting that?”
Jenn was too done in to make plans. With the poison still in her system, and the pain and the cold, it was all she could do just to hold on. Stu’s drawn face had soured at the name, but he still managed to summon what energy he had and almost managed to stand. He stared at the rollers as they crashed endlessly into the cliff. “Can you rig an anchor or something like that?”
“We have a real anchor.” Mike pointed to the anchor winch, which Jenn was using as a foothold. The actual anchor was flopped over and hanging by its heavy chain three feet under the water. “But I don’t see what good it will do us. The first wave that hits us when we’re anchored will tear the knees right out of the Captain Jack, and that’ll be it.”
“Sorry Mike, but she’s doomed no matter what. I was just thinking that if we can slow her down before she hits it won’t be so bad. See how there’s like a lull between the waves?”
Jenn and Mike eased up. Between each wave crashing into the cliff there was a ten to fifteen second gap in time when the water churned and frothed as white as beer foam. From this far away, it looked as soft as foam as well. They knew it wasn’t. The water was probably convulsing, going in every direction, and more than likely it would suck a person under, and there was no telling what sort of jagged rocks were hidden just beneath the surface. They could be flayed alive if their heads weren’t beaten to mush first.
The sight was enough to get Jenn’s brains moving at least a little. “Can we steer this thing at all? Maybe if we could get her further up the coast a bit, we might find some sand?”
It sounded like wishful thinking even as she said it. They barely had the strength to hold on, let alone rig a rudder with the bits of nothing they had on hand. Everyone, including Jenn, shook their head at the idea.
“I think we don’t have a choice except to go with Stu’s idea,” Mike said. “It might work.” The lie fooled no one. They were doomed, but they had no choice but to keep going.
Mike prayed through numb lips, while next to him Jenn looked for a sign. All she saw were hungry seagulls wheeling in the terrible wind. The birds were not a good omen. They were only there in the hope that everyone on board would die so they could feast on their rotting corpses.
The only good news was that the waves were no longer breaking beneath the Captain Jack. This was offset by the fact that as they got closer, they could see the ocean’s strength and violence was even more dreadful than they imagined. Even that area of white foam between the waves was more frightening than it had seemed from so far away. The waters there were seething and roiling, sending up chaotic waves as tall as a man. They would come together with explosive force, shooting fountains of water thirty feet into the air. Swimming in such water would be a test for the best swimmers and certain
death for the worst.
Mike’s hands gripped the hull, fiercely, angrily. He didn’t want to die. He wasn’t ready for it, but it was going to happen. A sigh and a curse escaped him as he looked at Jenn in the same way he had fifteen or so hours before, right after he had taken the poison. Just like then, her fear had rendered her ghostly white. He hated seeing her so afraid; it made something ache deep in his chest.
“Go ahead and say it,” she whispered through quivering lips. She tried to smile, but the corners wouldn’t stay upright at the same time. First one would edge up then the other, but never at the same time. “I think now’s our only chance.”
They had faced death many times, and it seemed to have become a simple ritual to express their love for each other at the last possible moment. Usually, it was stilted and forced, their fear so great as to steal any chance of romance away. Still, it had become a habit and so far, something was keeping them alive against the odds. Mike knew their little ritual couldn’t work forever and probably wouldn’t this time. He was bone-tired and didn’t think he’d be able to make the swim. There was no way Jenn could; even when healthy, she was only a mediocre swimmer.
“I love you, Jenn Lockhart,” he said, as much because he did love her as because as a sailor, he knew the incalculable value of superstition.
“I love you, Mike Gunter. Should we, uh, say something to Stu?”
As the Captain Jack sank lower in the water, the grim Hillman was staring fixedly at the cliff face, the white foam, and the curling breakers. Mike thought Stu had even less of a chance than Jenn. His left arm had been operated on only a few days before, he still walked with something of a limp because of the bullet he had taken a month before, and he had taken the most poison.
But these weren’t the main reasons why Jenn had a better chance. Getting to shore safely was Mike’s secondary goal, getting Jenn there safely was his first. If that meant he had to walk across the bottom of the ocean holding her out of the water, he would do it. Stu would be on his own.
Generation Z (Book 4): The Queen Unthroned Page 6
