Devil Sharks

by Chris Jameson

  Now Cat stepped up beside Alliyah in the surf. “Are we … I mean, we can’t be sure. Harry might’ve gotten out of the water. It’s hard to know from here. Maybe he got around the other side. They could’ve—”

  Alliyah turned to stare at her. She tasted salt on her lips and realized this was the flavor of her tears.

  “Okay, don’t look at me like that!” Cat said, almost angrily. “I heard it, too!”

  She turned away, wiping at her own eyes although she had yet to shed a tear. In all the time Alliyah had known her, she’d never seen Cat cry. Even from the first day they’d met, walking across the grass on that September afternoon their freshman year, Cat had exuded a calm wisdom, a kind patience that seemed almost unearthly. Her songs reflected an inner turmoil that she never revealed in her personal relationships. After they’d all watched The Big Lebowski together sophomore year, Alex had taken to calling her The Dude, after the film’s most enduring character. Alliyah had forgotten about that until this very moment, when Cat’s serenity had been shattered.

  “Alli!” Luisa snapped. “Alliyah!”

  Wiping at her tears, Alliyah let her gaze linger another few seconds on the boat—or more precisely on the dark arc of a fin that cut the water near the Kid Galahad. When Luisa shouted her name again, she twisted to stare at her.

  “What?”

  Luisa pointed at her legs, face ghostly pale. “You’re in the water.”

  Alliyah frowned. “The water didn’t kill Harry, you twit.”

  But the words were in her brain now and Alliyah couldn’t help glancing at her feet through the frothing surf, then up and down the shore of this fragment of the atoll’s ring. She’d see a shark if it came this close to shore, wouldn’t she? The fin? Might she not even see the shark itself in such shallow surf? Almost certainly.

  Still, she backed out of the water as if the sea itself might claim her. Off to her left, Cat was bent over as if in physical pain, either losing control or mustering it. Alliyah turned to see Luisa frozen on the sand, hugging herself as she stood amidst the scattered debris of their picnic in paradise. There were blankets and towels, coolers, trash bags full of empty bottles, cans, and cups, as well as the rubbish from their meal. Tubes of sunscreen. Cover-ups, two pairs of sunglasses, the straw hat Nalani had been wearing when they’d arrived.

  Beyond it all, Dev sat on the rough, rocky patch beyond the sand. He had his knees drawn up in front of him, his face devoid of all expression. Though he must have seen her looking his way, his gaze didn’t shift toward her. Her husband, this man she’d loved and left and loved again, this man whose greatest sin had always been his emotional distance, wouldn’t meet her eyes. He stared into some nebulous spot across the water, not at the boat and not toward any of the shark fins they’d seen. He seemed like his mind had left his body.

  “Dev,” she said, walking up the beach toward him. “Come on. We’ve got to go.”

  “Are you nuts?” Luisa said, facing her on the sand. “I’m not going out there.”

  Alliyah stared at her. She glanced at Cat but found no help. Cat had straightened but now stood with her hands on her hips, back to them all.

  Dev still didn’t look up.

  “Come on, honey,” Alliyah said, standing over her husband, her shadow falling across his face. “Let’s pack this stuff up and—”

  Cat started laughing. “Are you kidding?” she said as she turned toward them at last. Her eyes damp, her expression full of naked pain. “Leave all of that shit there. Come on, Luisa. Get in the goddamned dinghy, right now. Alliyah, your man’s gone catatonic or something, but you’d better get him moving. They can’t come out and get us from the ship, so we’ve got to go to them. Harry’s dead. Gabe might be dying. We’ve got to get the hell out of here.”

  Alliyah turned back to Dev. He still hadn’t looked at her.

  “I’m not going,” he said. “You can go.”

  The way he said it, with such finality, it felt real. Like he meant it.

  For a few seconds, Alliyah was tempted to take him at his word.

  “Get in the fucking dinghy,” she said darkly.

  Dev swallowed visibly, his Adam’s apple bobbing. He kept his gaze forward, but he did not reply.

  He wasn’t going anywhere.

  * * *

  Sami held Alex in her arms. They were curled up together against the railing, and with the chilly breeze blowing across the deck his skin felt cold. The blood from his nose streaked his chin and dappled his chest and it stained her as she pressed herself against him, but she didn’t care. A terrible silence had filled her heart, a dreadful void. The shark that had nearly gotten him, that had crashed against the hull, still swam in the water below. They were the only ones on this trip who had a child, and they’d been slightly irritated that the invitation had not included her. Now Sami had never been so grateful for anything in her life.

  Alex whispered his love into her ear and she kissed his cheek and neck with a tentative softness, as if her subconscious could not quite accept that he was in her arms. That he was alive. She thought of parallel universes and alternate timelines. Schrödinger’s cat. A moment had come, just a minute ago, in which she had imagined Alex both dead and alive.

  “Oh, my God,” she whispered to him now. A prayer of such gratitude as she had never known.

  Her husband began to warm in her arms. Wonderfully alive. But Harry Curtis had just been torn apart. His blood swirled in the water around the boat. His gut-wrenching final scream still hung in the air, somehow filling the silence. And there was silence, at least in this moment. Shock enveloped them all.

  After another moment or two, Sami heard whispering off to her left and knew those voices. Patrick and Nils, comforting each other. Farther along the deck, curled up where they’d left him, Isko had fallen unconscious but continued to moan in misery and pain.

  “I can’t believe that just happened,” Nalani said, her voice catching. “Poor Harry.”

  There had been screaming. Sami thought it might have been herself doing the screaming. Then the stillness as the horror set in. Whatever drunkenness had lingered in her seemed to have burned away in a fire of horror and grief.

  Alex took a shuddery breath and then exhaled. He kissed her temple and nodded. “Come on, love. You can’t help Harry. But Gabe and the other guy … they need you.”

  Sami nodded in return and together they rose to their feet. Nils and Patrick were staring at them both with disdain. Nalani’s eyes were full of grief and recrimination. James stood next to his wife at the railing, but he hung over the side as if fighting off seasickness. He stared into the water below.

  “We have to call for help—” Alex began.

  “Asshole,” Nalani said. “You fucking child.”

  Sami stiffened. “Are you kidding me? You’re not going to blame Alex for what just happened. Harry knocked them both overboard. I’m sorry for him, for this, but he lost his shit. The guy totally unraveled right in front of us.”

  “And your husband didn’t?” Patrick said. He seemed more numb and sad than angry. Lost.

  Sami understood. “He did. He acted like a fool—”

  “A fucking child,” Alex said. “Nalani’s right. I was an asshole. But I didn’t kill Harry. Jesus, I can’t believe I’m even saying that. I can’t believe he’s dead.”

  “But he is,” Nils said. He leaned into Patrick for a moment, then straightened up. “And Alex is right. Gabe and this other man—”

  “Isko,” Sami muttered.

  “Yes. Isko,” Nils said. “They need help. And so do the rest of us. With all of this happening, I understand if you’ve failed to realize it, but without Harry and Gabe, we’re effectively stranded here. We need to call or radio for help and then we need to support Sami as best we can so she can try to keep Gabe and Isko alive.”

  Sami shuddered. The air had gotten cooler. It wasn’t her imagination. But still, it was more than just the chill on the breeze.

  “I’m not sure
you’re thinking about this right,” she said, glancing around at the others. “Are you all sure there’s no way for us to sail back to port? What about Cat and Luisa and Alliyah and Dev? Are we sure none of them can figure out how to sail this boat?”

  Nalani threw up her hands. “We might be able to get the motor running. None of us can sail this thing, that’s for sure. But if we could motor back, and figure out the navigation … maybe if we radio for help they could talk us through it, but—”

  “Why not just sit here and wait for help?” Patrick asked.

  Sami glanced at Alex. “Time. If we could get moving now, we can have these guys in an emergency room a lot sooner than if we wait for a boat to come all the way out here and get us.”

  “So they send a helicopter,” Nalani said.

  Alex shook his head, thinking about Iraq. “I don’t know. We’re three hundred miles from the nearest occupied island. I’m pretty sure choppers can’t do a six-hundred-mile round-trip without refueling. But we’ll radio. We’ll find out.”

  “Meanwhile,” Sami said, “let’s get the others back to the boat and see if anyone can get us under way.”

  A thump resonated through the hull, accompanied by a scraping noise. Sami glanced over to see the top of the ladder shake and rattle for a moment before falling still again.

  “Was that—” Nalani began.

  At the railing, where he’d remained during the fear and recrimination, her husband nodded slowly. “A shark, yeah. They’re still out there. At least three, but I have a feeling there are more.”

  Sami felt Alex squeeze her hand. He gave her a nudge toward Isko. The rest of them hesitated, the thump of the shark against the hull unnerving them. She glanced around and saw the same haunted look in all of their eyes.

  “Hello?” a voice rasped. “Is anyone … oh, shit, that hurts.…”

  They turned in unison, all of them staring across the deck. Isko had been moaning, but it wasn’t him who’d spoken—it was Gabe. He’d rolled onto his side, almost in a fetal position on the deck. With one hand, he probed gently at the wounds on his head. His eyes roved, unfocused, and his eyelids fluttered as if he could barely keep them open … barely focus.

  Harry might be dead, but Gabe was alive. Hope ignited in Sami. She couldn’t pilot this boat, she couldn’t get them to safety, but she might be able to save one life today. She might be able to do that, at least.

  CHAPTER 13

  Alliyah stood over her husband. “Dev, get in the fucking boat. Now!”

  Dev still hadn’t moved. He hadn’t trembled or wept or gotten angry—whatever terror had seized him, it didn’t show on his face. The only expression there was one of fierce determination.

  “We’ve got to go!” Cat called. “Alliyah, seriously.”

  “I know, damn it! Don’t you think I know?”

  She knelt on the ground. Not sand here, but rock and coral, a bit of scrub brush growing. Dev would not look at her, but she reached out her hands and turned his face toward her. He didn’t resist, and at last their eyes met. She could smell the scent of him, so close now. The familiar scent of the man she had loved once—and had started to believe she would love again—the warm and musky odor that had been on his pillow, in their sheets, in his clothes. She’d missed his scent when they’d been apart, no matter how angry she’d been at him. When she’d first made love with another man—when she’d cheated on her husband—it had been so strange to breathe in that other man’s scent after being intimate with only one person for so long.

  “You have to get in the dinghy.”

  His lips quivered as if they were about to form words; then he glanced at the ground between them. When he lifted his eyes again, his determination had returned.

  “There is no way I’m going out there,” Dev said. “Not into the lagoon.”

  “It’s terrifying. I know. But the sharks are in the water. They’re not in the boat—”

  “Do you have any idea how big sharks can grow? If they want to get at us, they can tip that stupid dinghy over anytime they want. Then we’re in the water. Then we’re screaming like Harry.… Then we’re dying like Harry.”

  Alliyah stared into his eyes. They had a glaze she’d never seen in anyone who wasn’t on drugs. She had known Dev had a fear of sharks, but she had never imagined anything like this. He’d had a few drinks, but that glaze didn’t come from alcohol. That was pure, animal fear.

  “Listen to me. You’re being totally irrational. If we don’t get out to that boat … Dev, they can’t come get us; do you understand that?”

  With a wince and a quiet sort of grunt, Dev rose to his feet.

  Alliyah stood, dusting off her knees. “Finally.”

  Cat and Luisa had started to gather up the things on the beach.

  “Just leave all that stuff,” Alliyah said, turning toward them. “Let’s go!”

  “I’m not kidding, Alli,” Dev said. “I’m not going.”

  She spun around and grabbed him by the arms. Her face flushed with the heat of her anger and shock, and with the horror of hearing an old friend scream as he died.

  “What the hell am I supposed to do?” she said, wanting to shake him. To slap him. To wake him up. “I can’t leave you here.”

  “Wait with me,” Dev said. “They’ll radio for help. Someone will come.”

  “You think they’re going to just wait? They need to get Gabe to a hospital.”

  “Then they go. They can send someone back.”

  “Who won’t get here until at least tomorrow! This is ridiculous. I want to be on that boat. I want to be with my…”

  Her words trailed off.

  Dev winced. “Your friends. Right. Not your husband.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake.”

  Cat marched toward them. Luisa had gone to the dinghy and now waited, muttering urgently and profanely.

  “Luisa and I are going,” Cat said. “You’ve got thirty seconds.”

  With haunted eyes, Dev looked at her. “I’m not getting into the dinghy on the lagoon side. What if you go around—find one of the breaks and go through—”

  “How do we get to the Galahad if you won’t go into the lagoon?” Alliyah asked. “You’re not thinking.”

  Cat exhaled loudly. “No idea who’s going to get the Galahad moving without Harry and Gabe, but if we can do it, if we get out of here, I’ll put the dinghy back in the water once we’re outside the ring and come and get you. I don’t know why you think there will be fewer sharks out there—”

  “Mainly because I haven’t seen any sharks out there, but I’ve seen plenty of them in the lagoon,” Dev said.

  “Have it your way,” Cat said. “Alliyah, you’re staying?”

  Alliyah felt sick. She glanced back and forth between Cat and Dev. Luisa swore and shouted for Cat, not moving from inside the dinghy.

  “I guess I’m staying,” Alliyah said.

  Dev glanced away, either in shame or with indifference. Alliyah walked to the scattering of towels and coolers and other things left over from their perfect morning. She picked up a towel and shook off the sand, then sat on a blanket and drew the towel over her shoulders. The air had turned chilly as the day wore on. Overhead, the blue sky had gone from vivid to pale.

  Cat splashed into the surf and pushed the dinghy off the beach, then climbed in. Luisa sat in the front, scanning the water as Cat fired up the motor. Then they were off, skimming the waves, headed for the Kid Galahad.

  Alliyah kept her back to her husband. She thought about Harry Curtis, about the last few days and about much older days, when they’d all been younger and had all their years still ahead of them. All their mistakes yet to be made. Harry had been a complicated person—much more so than most of their friends had ever recognized. Sometimes he’d been an asshole, but he’d made her laugh so often in those bygone days that she’d always thought of him with a smile.

  That would never happen again. Now any dream with him in it would be a nightmare. Any memory of him
would finish with the hideousness of his ending and the thought of that scream.

  Alliyah lay on the blanket and covered herself with the towel. She turned on her side. Her friends would come back for her, she knew. One way or another, they would not leave her out here. Still, she felt stranded.

  Her husband sat not fifteen feet away from her, but she had never felt so alone.

  * * *

  Alex joined James at the railing. Patrick and Nils had gone off to investigate the wheelhouse, to see if they could figure out the radio and, more important, how to start the motor and navigate the boat. Even thinking such things fed the quiet despair that had been inflating inside Alex’s chest, a red balloon of fear and doubt. Gabe had started calling out, but that had lasted only a few seconds before he’d fallen unconscious again. Sami said it was a good sign. Nalani had named herself the nurse and now the two of them were examining both Gabe and Isko again. In a few minutes, Sami had said, she wanted everyone to work together and move both men below.

  But not yet.

  In these minutes when he had nothing to do but dwell on all the things he wished he could erase from the past few days, Alex found that the first among them was coming on this trip to begin with. He’d known better. His heart had kindled a dislike for and resentment toward Harry for a decade. He’d spent his life trusting his instincts, and regretting it when he didn’t. The lure of this adventure had been strong. A week in the Hawaiian islands with all expenses paid, a chance to see old friends, and—yes—the possibility that Harry Curtis had changed … all of those things had tempted him. A different Harry might mean he could have let go of his resentment. They’d laughed together once. They’d felt like brothers, shoulder to shoulder against the world. It would have been a gift to have been able to erase the past, to resurrect that feeling. That confidence in a friendship.

  Alex had barely admitted such hopes to himself, but then today it had felt possible. He’d let his guard down and so had Harry. For a short time, the old camaraderie had returned and it seemed as if past resentments might be erased. Then the world had gone insane. A flicker of nostalgia had been shattered by violence none of them could ever have anticipated.