Monstrum

by Ann Christopher

  I can see the outline of Mrs. Torres’s head where she’s surfaced, about ten feet from the raft. She treads water for a second, catching her breath, sweeping strands of her long hair out of her eyes and getting her bearings.

  “Espi.” She raises her hand in a slow wave, like what she’s doing is no more dangerous than an outing in the kiddy pool at the local YMCA. “I’m swimming to the yacht, okay, mija?” She points to a distant spot that’s as empty and desolate as every other spot out there in the dark. “It’s right there, you see? I’m going to bring back help. You be brave for me, okay? I’ll be right back.”

  The sound of her mother’s calm voice manages to settle Espi down a little. She stills, although Gray and Carter keep their arms around her and seem determined not to repeat Murphy’s mistake by relaxing.

  “You need to get back in the boat, Mami,” she calls. “The water isn’t safe. Stay there so we can row to you. I don’t want you going out in the dark where we won’t be able to find you again.”

  This sounds perfectly reasonable to me, but there’s no dissuading Mrs. Torres. With a blown kiss and a final wave, she starts swimming with what looks like a pretty strong freestyle stroke.

  Espi loses it again, twisting and trying to break free, although this time she’s a bit more coherent.

  “Follow her,” she shouts at Murphy. “We have to follow—”

  “We’re on it,” Murphy says grimly, directing Mike and Axel, who are grabbing the oars and settling in to row. “Graydon and Carter, you two need to follow along with the other raft. Let’s go, now.”

  “If we let go of Espi,” Carter gasps, still trying to hang onto her as she struggles, “she’s going over the side. And then we’re screwed.”

  “Let me go!” Espi shouts. “I can catch her if you let me—”

  “No one else goes in the water!” Murphy bellows.

  A couple of beats of chaos follows. Murphy and Espi shout at each other, Espi struggles, Axel and Mike begin to row their raft, and the rest of us stare past the front of our raft, desperately keeping an eye on Mrs. Torres as her splashes grow fainter. I strain to keep her in sight, but before long, all I can see of her is the flash of her watch as her left arm swings over her head, and then, too soon, even that’s gone.

  And then Sammy’s voice cuts across the noise.

  “Guys?” he asks, pointing at something behind our raft. “What’s that?”

  Oh, no, I think, turning to look over my shoulder and fully expecting to see the same sort of nothing I saw when Mrs. Torres started seeing a yacht that wasn’t there. Not another hallucination.

  But there is something out there.

  A huge hump—as big as a compact car, maybe bigger—is speeding toward us, slicing through the water as it goes. I look for the telltale black and white markings of an orca, but it’s too dark and the thing is too fast for me to make out any details. All I know is that it’s creating a wake turbulent enough to cause serious problems for the rafts, which suddenly seem no more substantial than a hard plastic kiddy pool you can get for ten bucks at the nearest hardware store.

  Someone yells a warning; someone else curses; I make a shocked, strangled sound, which is as much of a scream as I can manage when my throat has constricted to the width of a needle.

  What is it?

  My bewildered brain flounders with the effort of forcing this unknown entity into a category that I can recognize, but nothing fits. Submarine? Orca? Shark? I can’t tell, and it doesn’t matter. Any one of the three is more than enough to kill us all, and kill us good.

  Terror freezes me solid, leaving me with blocks of cement in my lungs and a heart incapable of beating. If there is something we could or should do—some defense we should launch—I can’t begin to think what it would be.

  Oh, God.

  Oh, God . . . oh, God . . . ohgodohgodohgod . . . please, God . . . please, no—

  “Get back!” Murphy shouts, shoving us away from the raft’s edge. “Get down!”

  Instinct takes over. We hit the deck in a heap, huddling together and covering our heads just in time. The thing, which seems to be gathering speed, streaks past us. Almost as an afterthought, it brushes just underneath the outer left edges of the rafts.

  A brush is all it takes.

  The rafts flip, one after the other, launching everyone into the water with the force of a catapult. Thinking quickly, I’m able to suck in a deep breath before plunging into the cold and cluttered water. I open my eyes and try to find something that might help me live, but there’s nothing but the stinging burn of salt water and the murky gloom of this foul-smelling sea. I kick and flail in my panic, connecting with sargassum, raft, supplies and the thrashing limbs of the others. The surface seems way too far away to reach on my dwindling oxygen reserves, but I try anyway and struggle higher.

  I’m not going to make it, and the only two choices available to me are to let my ballooning lungs explode or try to breathe water. Seventeen years of involuntary reflex wins. I gasp and choke, and that is the moment when someone grabs me by the hair and yanks my head above the water.

  Pain sears through me, collecting in my chest, throat and scalp. I cough and convulse, trying to break free of whatever’s got me, and that’s when a voice pierces my hysteria.

  “Bria! Calm down! Don’t make me hit you!”

  Wait, what? Gray? My streaming eyes are useless at the moment, but I reach out and find the solid strength of his chest and shoulders, and my relief is infinite. It’s going to take me a minute to clear my airway, though, and I continue to hack up a lung. I squeeze his forearms to let him know I’m back in my rational mind, and I feel some of the tension leave his body.

  “Good girl.” Taking one of my hands, he plants it on hard rubber. “Here’s the raft. Hang on to it. I have to help the others.”

  Nodding, I hook my other arm on to the raft and hold tight.

  He swims off and my eyes slowly adjust enough for me to understand exactly how dire our situation has now become.

  The raft I’m clinging to is upside-down, and I’m not the only one holding on for dear life. I do a quick head count around the perimeter to see who’s still alive:

  Sammy and An at the raft’s far end;

  Maggie beside them;

  Murphy next to me, with a distraught Espi on his other side;

  Axel and Mike; and . . .

  “Carter!” Gagging, I have to pause to spit out a mouthful of water. “Wh-where’s Carter?”

  “Over there,” Murphy says, pointing, and I see Gray and Carter frantically diving and resurfacing nearby. “They’re trying to find Macy.”

  “Oh, my God.” My heart contracts, and I press a hand to my aching chest because I know that’s going to be a futile search. An unconscious girl with no life preserver would never be able to stay afloat long enough to not drown. It just wouldn’t happen. “Macy,” I whisper.

  “We need to work on flipping the raft right side up,” Murphy says. “Before that animal comes back.”

  That galvanizes me. I stare hard at the surrounding area, but see no signs of the churning water that signals the thing’s approach. Overwhelmed with relief, I perform a quick inventory. The other raft, which is floating several feet away with a length of rope still attached to it, has been reduced to a shredded and deflated piece of rubber, suitable for a tarp but nothing else. The oars are gone. The supplies are gone.

  “Where’s Mrs. Torres?” I quietly ask Murphy.

  At this, Espi drops her head onto her arms where they lay folded across the raft and begins to sob inconsolably.

  “No idea.” Murphy’s face is pale and bleak. “We lost sight of her.”

  He pauses, then raises his voice to speak to the group just as Gray and Carter swim back and take their places around the raft’s perimeter. “On the count of three, then, we’re going to try to flip this thing right way up—”

  A high-pitched, hair-straightening female scream rises from the surrounding darkness. It comes from e
verywhere—right and left, water and sky, deep inside my head and along the outside of my shivering skin. It goes on endlessly.

  Everyone jumps with renewed fear. Espi turns in a frantic circle, searching in every direction, and shrieks.

  “Mami! Mami, where are you?”

  There’s splashing now—I can hear it joining with Mrs. Torres’ agony. It’s a macabre sound that makes me wish I’d been born without ears. The rest of us are frantic in our uselessness, crying out with alarm, paddling away from the raft’s relative safety, straining our eyes against the impenetrable horizon—as though we could find Mrs. Torres out there, much less rescue her from her gruesome death with our bare hands. Finally we paddle back, because we are cowardly failures.

  Espi is ruined. She presses her hands to her ears, closes her eyes, screws up her face and erupts, screaming along with her mother. Her answering shrieks are so loud and tortured that she is surely destroying her vocal cords.

  Both sets of screams continue beyond our fruitless searching and last into our frenzied efforts to flip the raft. And then the splashing reaches a horrific crescendo, and on its other side is silence.

  An utter, reverberating and awful silence that tells us Mrs. Torres is gone.

  Espi, realizing this, sags limply against Murphy. Her head lolls to one side.

  I thank God that Mrs. Torres’s suffering is over.

  One millisecond after that, a foreboding new fear fills me up and bleeds out of my pores: how long until that cruel animal comes back for the rest of us?

  The answer to this silent question isn’t long in coming.

  That screeching begins again. There’s a round of cries from the group.

  “Where is it?’’ Maggie shouts. We all crane our necks and look around for any hint of another disturbance in the water, but there’s nothing. “Where is it?”

  “Wherever it is, it’s taunting us,” Sammy says.

  I think Sammy’s right.

  Maybe it’s my imagination, but the noise seems less eerie and more triumphant this time, as though the creature that makes it—and I’m certain now that it isn’t an orca, because no mere whale could be this determined and relentless—revels in its reign of terror over us. As though its pleasure is increased by our fear.

  As though it’s . . . stalking us.

  “It’s coming,” Axel says weakly.

  We all spin around to follow his fixed and wide-eyed gaze, and there it is: another speeding hump of water, not a hundred feet away and headed directly for us.

  “The raft.” Murphy’s voice is unruffled, as though what we’re facing is no trickier than changing a car’s flat tire on the side of the road while dodging traffic. But it’s just the thing we need to silence our panicked yells. “We need to flip it. Now.”

  We don’t need telling twice.

  We converge on one side of the raft and put our arms and backs into raising the edge of it over our heads. But by the time we get one corner up, we’ve maxed out our dwindling strength; the raft is huge and heavy, and we’d have better luck grabbing the edge of a tennis court and trying to flip that.

  It’s useless, and we all recognize it by letting go and backing out of the way as the raft flops back into the water.

  A quick glance over my shoulder shows me that the thing has halved the distance between us and is closing in. A wave of cries, shrill and hopeless, rises up from the group, but I’m determined not to give up. Giving up on anything pisses me off, and I have a mutant stubborn gene. Mona always complained that my temperament is somewhere between that of a mule and a pit bull.

  I know resistance will ultimately be futile. It’s not like climbing onto the raft will give us the safety of an aircraft carrier, or anything like that. It’s just that I don’t like the idea of serving myself up to this thing like a cocktail weenie on a skewer—that’s just not me.

  So I hoist one leg up onto the upside-down raft, concentrate on heaving the rest of my body out of the water and scramble onto the slippery bottom. I’ve got nothing to hold on to and no reason to hope for survival. But at least I made it a teensy bit harder for that creature to eat me the way it did Mrs. Torres.

  I’ll cross the next bridge on the way out of this nightmare when I get to it.

  The thing is bearing down on us now, and I realize there’s more to it than was visible on its last pass. It’s the size of a conversion van, not a sedan. And now it’s close enough for me to get a quick glimpse of the black and white markings on its face, a jagged row of teeth and the gleam of an enormous eye that’s luminous and trained on me.

  Oh, God. Please, God, help me.

  Moving as quickly as I can from my precarious perch, I stick a hand down over the side and reach for Maggie. Murphy, getting the idea, helps boost her up from underneath.

  “Hurry!” I shout as Maggie crawls onto the raft next to me, excruciatingly aware that the thing is now within lunging distance, and whatever time we have left is running out. “We have to get out of the water!”

  Without warning, a bright white light shines right in my face, blinding me. I shrink away from it, shielding my face with my arm to stop the sudden bolts of pain through my eyeballs. At the same time, a startling but welcome new sound fills the air: the mournful blare of a ship’s horn.

  The light recedes enough for my pupils to adjust, and I see the creature swerve around the raft and disappear into the water, with only its fading wake to remind us that it ever existed.

  I lever myself up to a kneeling position and try to make sense of what’s happened.

  Is that . . . is that a boat over there, not fifty yards away?

  Since I’ve developed a healthy fear of hallucinations in the last several minutes, I don’t exactly trust my senses. Even when I focus my squint on the massive black hull with Burke & Co. lettered in white; the enormous pair of glowering eyes painted on the hull; the deck, which is lit like the Christmas display in a Macy’s window; and the dark outlines of people standing at the railing and staring down at us, I can’t make myself believe it.

  This astonishing reversal of fortune is too good to be true, and apparently I’m not the only one who thinks so.

  “Oh, my God.” An’s mouth is contorted with laughter, her eyes stream with tears and her words are barely coherent. “I can’t believe it! Oh, thank God! Thank you, God!”

  I watch, crouched on all fours and openmouthed, as a smaller boat zooms out of the ship’s shadows, pulls up alongside the raft and lingers, motor idling. My mind disconnects from this new reality while the several men on board shout greetings in Spanish, throw ropes and life preservers and help the others aboard, one by one.

  An goes first, then Espi, Maggie, Axel, Mike, Carter and Gray, who shoots me an anxious look over his shoulder as he climbs into the dinghy.

  Finally, only Murphy and I are left.

  Panic belatedly sets in, freezing me in place.

  “Bria Hunter,” Murphy says. He’s still in the water with his arms hooked over the edge of the raft. “Would you like to get your arse off the raft and into this dinghy before these kind gentlemen decide we’re not worth the trouble and leave without us?”

  I blink at him.

  I’m fine with the general idea—move your limbs, get off the raft and climb into the other boat. Got it. But I am suddenly so overwhelmed with violent shakes that I cannot make my body cooperate. Five minutes ago, we were all dead, for sure, and now we’re rescued, and I just can’t get over the shock.

  “I—I need a second,” I tell Murphy.

  Murphy lets out a frustrated huff, but something else has snagged my attention. The dinghy has maneuvered closer to my perch on the raft, and a man with wind-whipped hair is clinging to a ladder on its back end.

  No, not a man, I see.

  A boy my age or a little older.

  “This Bria Hunter does look like a lot of trouble,” he tells Murphy in perfect, unaccented English, reaching out a hand to me. The soft mockery in his deep voice scrapes over my spinal cord,
stiffening it. “We’d better help her in since she’s too scared to help herself.”

  That does it.

  Ignoring his hand—screw him!—I roll off the raft and back into the water, which hasn’t gotten any warmer in the last few minutes. Something long trails, almost lovingly, past my thigh, and I jerk in the beginnings of a panicked convulsion before reminding myself that it’s probably just the sargassum.

  I manage to regain a drop of composure and doggie paddle the two feet to the dinghy. Once there, I climb up the ladder, brushing past the imposing length of the boy’s body. Then I inch my careful way to an open space on the bench seat where my surviving classmates are, sit down while Murphy also climbs aboard and settle in for the short ride to the ship, excruciatingly aware of the boy’s attention following me.

  The motor revs, and the dinghy speeds toward the ship. No one speaks. Our rescue party consists of four or five men in addition to the boy, and I’m sure they have questions about our ordeal. But they don’t ask and we don’t volunteer, probably because we’re all wearing identical expressions of frozen shock.

  I, for one, am chained and padlocked inside my lingering terror.

  The wind hums in my ears and the water sprays my face, and then, almost before I know what’s happened, we’ve arrived and are maneuvering into position so that we can be absorbed by the looming ship.

  As the men stand up and secure the dinghy with quick, efficient knots, I look way up, to the deck, where a new, taller man is joining the spectators lining the rails. I can’t see his face clearly, but his stance is wide-legged, and the tilt of his chin is arrogant.

  “I’m Captain Diego Romero, and this is the Venator.” His voice booms over some sort of PA system with an authority that commands attention, if not blind obedience. He pauses, glancing at each of us in turn, and I feel the burning weight of his gaze before it moves on to the next person. “Welcome to my ship.”

  Part II

  By the pricking of my thumbs, Something wicked this way comes.

  Macbeth, IV.i.44-45 (William Shakespeare)

  Once on board, we’re herded into a large cabin with pristine counters and cabinets, several narrow beds covered with white sheets and a stainless steel table. There, we are all quickly examined by the English-speaking medical officer, pronounced healthy except for a few assorted cuts and bruises, covered with blankets and plied with some sort of liquor—brandy, I think—liberally laced with hot tea. I guess when you’ve nearly died at sea, no one cares if you’re legal or not.