He swam up and over the now ruddy reef, making sure to stay well above the ocean floor where the carpet of red flakes could be kicked up, further obscuring his flake-impeded view. It was like swimming through a snowstorm on acid. As he rose above the reef, he could see what looked like a large propane tank resting on the ocean floor.
The way station.
He glanced at his air-pressure gauge. Two minutes to spare.
His heart raced as he leveled out over the flat seabed, and then skipped a startled beat when a large object caught the corner of his eye. For a moment he wondered if he’d seen anything at all, then decided he had. The swirling plumes of flakes in the distance indicated something was out there. Something fast.
Miller kicked hard and performed the swimmer’s version of a sprint. He went rigid, streamlining his body, pumped his legs, and dug through the water with cupped hands. As he closed to within thirty feet of the way station he relaxed. Whatever it was had either not seen him, or had seen him and not cared.
With one minute of air remaining, he slowed his approach, conserving the last few breaths in his tank before switching to the pony bottle while the large tank refilled. He’d never used the way station before, but could see the hookups clearly as he closed to within fifteen feet. It wouldn’t take long to refill his tank, but—
Miller’s entire body jerked violently, and then was yanked backward by his left foot. He spun about and the pressure on his foot dropped away. He was free, but ten feet farther from the way station. He glanced at his foot, which throbbed with pain. A quarter of the fin was missing, though his foot was still intact.
Or was it?
A brown cloud seeped out from inside the fin. Blood. He remembered cutting his foot as he was escaping the floundering Aquarius. He had left a trail of blood through shark-infested waters.
Idiot! Miller cursed himself, as he searched for the shark.
It circled, ten feet away.
A fourteen-foot tiger shark. It was second in size only to the great white, but its unpredictability and ferocity more than made up for the size difference. And right now it clearly had little interest in the tiny pink flakes or scores of small dying fish. It was interested in larger, still-living prey, most likely drawn by Miller’s oozing blood and rapid heartbeat.
Staying alert, he moved carefully toward the way station while turning in time with the striped shark. He unstrapped the pony bottle and readied it for use. In about thirty seconds he was going to need it to breathe. He also planned to expel some of the air to scare the shark off. If the beast managed to get hold of him again, he could always use the bottle to pummel the shark’s snout. Without help, without air, he wouldn’t survive, anyway, but he’d rather not be eaten alive.
As the shark came between him and the way station, it twitched twice and then, with a snap of its tail, turned toward him. There was no time to blow the pony bottle. Miller reacted instinctively, kicking up and reaching out. His hands caught the shark’s snout as it charged. He pushed up, moving his torso away from the open maw and squeezing the predator’s sensitive, jelly-filled snout. The shark thrashed and slipped away from Miller’s grip, but its large body smashed into him, spinning him around and knocking the pony bottle free. It sank to the seabed like a falling leaf. A puff of red debris exploded upward as the bottle landed.
He desperately wanted to swim down to that bottle, but his gut told him to watch out. He spun, looking for the shark, and found it bearing down on him from his left. With only a single breath remaining in the air tank, he removed the regulator from his mouth, held it out, and purged the tank. The shark veered off at the last moment, circling once again as it tried to figure out the best way to attack this defiant prey.
Miller let his last breath escape from his mouth and sank to the seafloor, never taking his eyes off the ocean’s tiger. When he reached the bottom, he knelt by the pony bottle, picked it up, and put its regulator in his mouth.
He could breathe again.
He had fifteen minutes.
Staying close to the seafloor, Miller kicked toward the way station, hoping his proximity to the bottom and the large cloud of pink kicked up by his movements would confuse the predator. He reached the station, breathing heavily. He realized that if he kept sucking on the pony bottle like a hungry baby, it wasn’t going to last nearly as long as it was supposed to. So he took one long, deep breath, and held it. After a count of three seconds, he slowly let out his pent-up breath, and, calmer now, set to work on refilling his air tank.
After removing his tank and detaching the regulator, he attached the tank to the way station valve, screwing the connector tight. The entire process took less than thirty seconds. He opened the way station valve and watched his pressure gauge.
It didn’t move.
He closed and opened the valve again.
Nothing.
Panic set in and he began breathing heavily again. He’d done everything right. This was a basic setup! What could be—
Miller closed his eyes and shook his head.
The way station was empty.
But how?
As he searched his mind for answers, a looming shadow caught his eye. The shark still circled, but was now above him. As his eyes followed the shark around, his vision caught an aberration on the ocean surface. A long cigar shape.
A hull!
The sailboat he’d seen before.
Damn them! he thought. Whoever was on the sailboat had taken his air!
He pulled himself to the top of the way station. He was fifty feet down with a pony bottle and a fourteen-foot man-eater. One fin was ruined and his foot was bleeding. He would never make it. With all the air in the world, he would never make it.
Then I’ll make it with no air, he thought.
He removed the pony bottle from his mouth and looked at it. For all he knew, it contained all the breathable air left in the world. Maybe five minutes. But he could hold his breath for three. He took one last, long pull from the pony bottle, crouched, and as the shark circled closer, he banged the bottle’s valve against the solid way station. A dull bong echoed through the water.
The shark jolted and turned toward him.
Miller struck with the bottle again.
The shark twitched its tail, moving in.
The third strike was followed by a loud hiss and a violent stream of bubbles. Miller twisted the bottle away from the boat’s hull and let go. It took off like an injured fish. The shark snapped at the bottle as it surged past, then twisted around and gave chase.
Miller pushed off the way station and swam for the surface, holding on to that precious last breath of air.
Twenty feet from the surface, the urge to breathe welled up within him.
After another ten feet the desire became almost unbearable. The surface loomed and he kicked harder, adrenaline and fear for his life fueling his ascent.
With a quick glance back he saw the pony bottle resting on the ocean floor, still bubbling away its life-giving air. The shark had given up on the bottle and had returned its attention to Miller.
The predator rose from below, pumping its tail hard, gaining on its prey with the speed of a creature that moved much more efficiently through water than man did on land.
Miller knew that death would find him above the surface, just as surely as it raced to claim him from below, but he still did not want his last moment on earth to be one of violent gore. So he kicked hard and reached out as he approached the back of the hull. As his hands pierced the thick film coating the ocean’s surface he stretched out and pushed down, hoping for a dive deck. He found one.
Using his momentum and several last frantic kicks, he flung himself from the water and onto the deck. A fin cut through the pink sludge inches from his leg, then slid beneath again, disappearing as though it had never been there.
Miller threw himself over the rail and onto the sailboat’s aft deck. When he landed, he coughed out the air clutched within his lungs, and feeling safe for the brie
fest of moments, took a breath.
The painful sensation of drowning gripped his body like a python. His muscles tightened and he curled into a ball. Pain filled his body and clouded his mind. This was it. This was death. His vision grew blurry. His eyes darted frantically about as his body shut down. No one was aboard, he realized.
Not a soul.
He was alone, and his air—all of it—was gone.
7
Nearly unconscious, Miller still wasn’t quite ready to give up the fight. Eyes bulging, head pounding, he pushed himself to his feet. Staggering forward, he gripped the large polished wheel located at the back of the thirty-foot sloop, and it rolled under his weight, flinging him off. He hit the deck hard, landing in a thick pile of scratchy pink flakes. His fading vision darkened, but the white cabin door in front of him beckoned with hope. He reached for the small handle, yanked it, and forced his head up for a look.
His vision was nearly gone, but a familiar, bright yellow shape managed to make itself known. He dragged himself into the cabin, down the three stairs, and onto something soft. The air tank was sitting on the floor in front of him. He grabbed it and fumbled his hands all over the metal cylinder until he found the regulator hose. He yanked on it, but the hose resisted.
With the last of his strength—his vision dimmed to near nothing—he pulled again. The hose came free. Miller slid a trembling hand up the hose, found the regulator, and slammed it in his mouth. He breathed in.
After two deep breaths, he tasted the vomit. He wondered hazily if he had thrown up without knowing it, but decided he hadn’t. The vomit belonged to whoever had used this regulator before him. A fierce wave of nausea swept through his body and he closed his eyes, forcing himself to fight it down. The taste in his mouth was horrible and sickening, but the life-giving air was delightful.
After waiting a full minute for his body and mind to return to normal, he opened his eyes. He found himself lying on his back staring at the ceiling. He could have sworn he had been lying on his stomach—most likely his oxygen-deprived senses were all twisted about.
He wasn’t lying on the floor, he finally realized. He was lying on top of something.
He turned to the side.
Oh, God. Not something.
Someone.
He sat up fast and jumped to his feet. The regulator popped out of his mouth, weighed down by the heavy oxygen tank on the floor. Miller held his breath as he looked at the body.
It was a woman. Dressed in a yellow bikini with red polka dots. In life she would have been beautiful. Stunning. In death, surrounded by a pool of dried vomit, the graying corpse was hideous—the woman’s mouth was frozen open in a gaping scream where the regulator had once been.
Miller knelt down next to her and picked up the oxygen tank. He placed the regulator in his mouth again, took one long drag, and removed it again. The sight of the dead woman combined with the flavor of vomit was more than he could handle at the moment. The door to the head lay open behind the body. He stepped over it, and in, yanking on the tap. The water flowed and he swiftly rinsed off the regulator, then popped it back in his mouth.
He held the tank by his side and stepped back into the hallway, eyes locked on the copious amount of vomit.
This woman didn’t asphyxiate, he thought. She still had plenty of air left in the tank. So what killed her?
He decided it was a question better answered later, or not at all, and set about searching the rest of the sailboat. He moved quickly through the small hallway and opened the first cabin. A man lay splayed over the bed, tanned, muscular arms flung wide, like Jesus on the cross. His eyes stared at the ceiling and his mouth, wide open, was full of his own vomit. He’d drowned in it. The bedsheet, caked in the sour bile, stuck to the man’s head.
Here too was an oxygen tank. Nearly full. Miller picked it up and headed for the second cabin. The wooden door opened smoothly and the afternoon light poured through the portal onto a stack of oxygen tanks. Six in all. Despite the gruesome surroundings, Miller smiled.
He quickly checked the tanks. All were full.
He shook his head. Well, now I know who drained the way station.
How many trips had they made back and forth? How long had they been here? And what had killed them?
Ignoring the questions that would normally have been important to him, he turned his attention back to the six tanks lying on the bed and the two in his hands.
Each tank held three thousand psi of air, which, at a sixty-foot depth, would last him about an hour. Here, in the open air, each tank would give him about two hours, maybe more if he could control his breathing. He had eight tanks.
Sixteen hours.
That was a great improvement from the sixteen seconds he had left to live upon boarding the vessel, but he was still nine miles from Key Largo. He couldn’t waste any time.
He stepped into the hallway and over the woman, taking the stairs back out to the deck. He shuffled through six inches of the rose-colored flakes and sat at the helm. He looked over the controls. Everything was automated. He tried starting the boat. The engine wheezed and failed. He tried twice more without any luck. He couldn’t get it to start. Then it hit him.
Oxygen.
Without oxygen there would be no combustion, which meant that any gas-fueled engines wouldn’t work. Or generators, for that matter. He wouldn’t even be able to start a damn campfire.
Miller glanced over at the furled sails. When he’d first seen the ship from the life support buoy he’d thought there was no wind to move the ship, but the sails had simply not been engaged.
He wiped dust away from the helm’s console. The ship’s batteries appeared to be working, which was one bright spot in an otherwise hellish day. The console buttons glowed dully in the afternoon sunlight. A button labeled ANCHOR was lit up. He pressed it and heard a winch start to run. The couple had dropped anchor right over the way station. The two sails were labeled as well: MAINSAIL and SPINNAKER. He hit both buttons.
Gears turned and winches spun. The sails unfurled and raised high on the mast. Before the sails had finished rising, the wind caught them with a whump. The boom swung around and snapped to a stop. The sloop lurched forward and accelerated.
Miller took the wheel and directed the ship toward the tiny sliver of land in the distance.
8
The boat slid through the calm waters of Port Largo, a man-made river lined with docks and slips that gave the owners access to their waterfront homes. Several tributaries reached out from either side, extending the water’s reach. It was like a street, really.
A dead street.
The only things moving were the palm leaves bending in the breeze and billowing clouds of red kicked up by the occasional gust of wind. The trees and large parts of several homes had been swept clean of the dust, which had gathered like snowdrifts against other homes.
Miller looked at the sky. The storm, if that’s what it was, showed no signs of ending. Clouds of flakes fluttered down, spinning in the wind like great schools of fish.
Having made the nine-mile sail in just over an hour, he wasn’t in a panicked rush, but with only fifteen hours of air remaining he needed to find more soon and then work out some kind of plan. Key Largo was a beginning, but he needed to reach a city—Miami for starters—where he hoped to find more air and survivors.
He remembered leaving from Port Largo only a week before. It had been a beautiful day. Dark cumulus clouds and high humidity foretold a coming thunderstorm. He’d flirted, for what felt like the first time in a long time, with the caretaker of Aquarius, a pretty blonde whose name he’d forgotten.
He pulled the sloop into the slip closest to the main street, Ocean Bay Drive. He tied the boat off and hopped onto the dock wearing an air tank on his back. He lugged along a second tank, just in case.
His first stop was the scuba shop. Dave’s Scuba. He’d visited the seaside store briefly before heading out to Aquarius. Most of the tanks in the shop would likely be empty, but
Dave also rented tanks to vacationers who wouldn’t want to wait for one to be filled. Hopefully there would be some full ones left. Without breathable air in the atmosphere, the shop’s compressor would do him little good.
He entered the store and found it free of the pink dust he’d shuffled through to get there. The place looked untouched, as though frozen in time. Wet suits hung on racks. Key Largo T-shirts dangled from the ceiling. Scuba tanks of all sizes lined the walls.
Then he saw a shoe.
He stepped around a rack of swim trunks and found a bare leg. The rest of the body was hidden behind the checkout counter. He peeked over the top. Despite the regulator covering the lower half of the man’s face, Miller recognized him as the owner, Dave. His balding, slicked-back, long hair was hard to forget, or mistake.
The vomit surrounding his head was familiar. Dave, like the two people on the sloop, had not suffocated. They had plenty of breathable air when they died. Something else had killed them.
Miller glanced out the glass door. A sheet of red covered the parking lot. His eyes trailed down to his own body. He was covered in the stuff. Most of it was fine, powdery dust, but the occasional large flake clung to his shoulder and in his chest hair. Forgetting the air for a moment, Miller stepped over Dave and entered the small bathroom. There was a toilet, a sink, and a roll of paper towel hanging from the wall.
The cool water from the tap felt good as he toweled it over his body. His red-hued skin soon returned to its formerly lightly tanned state. A pool of salmon-colored water surrounded his bare feet. He gingerly washed the sole of his wounded foot and checked the gash that had rung the tiger shark’s dinner bell. It wasn’t deep and had stopped bleeding, but it stung.
SecondWorld Page 4
