Devil Sharks

by Chris Jameson

  Cabot and Patrick grunted and swore and struggled for the gun. Damien raised his own weapon and took aim at both of them, waiting for the outcome. Joriz and Benjie backed away, nervously sweeping the barrels of their guns from side to side, ready to murder all of their captives if Machii gave the order.

  “No, damn it!” Alex shouted, moving toward Sami and Cat, holding up his hands, making sure they saw him. “Don’t do anything!”

  Cabot got his forearm against Patrick’s throat and slammed his skull against the doorframe. Patrick’s grip slipped off the gun for just a moment. He scrabbled for it again, but Cabot jerked it around, took aim, and fired. In the last heartbeat, Patrick shoved the barrel downward.

  Three bullets hit the deck—one of them passed through Patrick’s thigh on the way. Blood sprayed and Nils shouted and rushed toward his husband. Patrick fell into his arms and Cabot lifted his weapon to kill them both.

  Machii barked a command and Cabot smiled. He watched Nils and Patrick embracing, watched Nils slide his bleeding husband to the deck, and then picked up the bag with the Semtex inside it and ducked into the cockpit.

  Sami took a step toward Machii. She pressed her hands together as if in prayer. “Please don’t do this.”

  Alex heard her fear and sorrow, and it broke him. He took her hands in his and lowered them. Nils held Patrick, whispering to him. Luisa remained seated, as she had throughout the violence, and hung her head between her legs as if she’d gone totally catatonic. Cat began to swear at Machii and to plead with him, alternating back and forth.

  The smugglers ignored them all now.

  Alex took Sami in his arms. The two of them fell into a stony silence, just waiting together, knowing they could do nothing more as long as these men and their guns were on board.

  Machii gestured to Benjie and Joriz. “Abandon ship, assholes.”

  Joriz laughed and went to the railing, swung himself over, and started down the ladder. Benjie hesitated a second, pointing toward Isko.

  “You want to leave him? Something goes wrong and he lives, it could be trouble.”

  Machii glanced over at Isko. Snot and blood ran from the man’s nostrils. With the gusting wind and the rain pelting the deck, they could all smell the sweet stink of his rotting leg.

  “He probably won’t even live long enough for the sharks to get him,” Machii said. “Let him suffer. There’s no way he makes it to shore. None of these people are going to risk themselves to drag along a stranger who’s that close to dead.”

  Benjie gave a nod and then followed Joriz over the side and down the ladder. Machii and Damien backed up toward the railing and kept their weapons leveled, ready to fire if anyone did something stupid.

  Seconds ticked by.

  With a thump and scuffle, Cabot emerged from the cockpit. Gun slung across his back, he ran toward the railing with his head ducked low. Alex held Sami tighter and both of them bent their heads. Cat dragged Luisa away from the cockpit and both of them went flat on their bellies on the deck. Nils didn’t move, just kept cradling Patrick.

  When the explosion came, it blew the windows out of the cockpit and the wheelhouse. Safety glass scattered across the deck. Heat blossomed from the broken windows. The deck seemed to heave beneath them with the force of the explosion, but the effect passed instantly.

  Machii cocked his head and waited. Smoke billowed from the shattered windows and the boat began to list to starboard.

  “There we go,” Machii said. He grinned at Cabot. “Nicely done.”

  The two of them went over the side while Damien covered the passengers.

  “We can’t let them—” Cat started.

  “Hush,” Sami said. “It’s done.”

  Damien followed the others over the starboard railing. Alex figured the men in the pontoon boat would be covering the deck of the boat in case any of the passengers tried to attack, but none of them were that stupid.

  The smugglers were gone.

  The pontoon boat’s motor roared. Seconds later, it sped across the rising waves toward the fishing boat. Alex held Sami’s hand and the two of them walked to the railing, staring at the men who had just murdered them as much for entertainment as efficiency. From the pontoon boat, Machii raised his hand in a jaunty farewell. One of the sharks paced alongside the pontoon boat, looking for an opportunity. It vanished below the surface and Alex silently hoped it would smash them from beneath, knock them into the water.

  Then he saw the water churning at the bottom of the ladder and a fin broke the surface there. Waves crashed and the boat tilted and rocked and a second shark appeared a short distance away. A rope remained tied to the bottom of the ladder—the line that tethered the sunken dinghy to the Kid Galahad. A shark brushed so close to the boat that it jostled that line and its skin scuffed the hull.

  The boat listed harder, not just to starboard now but also toward the stern. They weren’t just sinking; they were sinking fast. Any thought of waiting for rescue vanished from Alex’s mind.

  He pushed the sharks out of his mind and locked eyes with Sami. “We swim.”

  “Maybe,” she said, turning away from him and rushing toward the others. “But first we stop Patrick’s bleeding. Nils, get out of the way.”

  Nils wouldn’t have listened to anyone else. Alex knew that, just as he knew how much the man loved his husband. But Sami spoke with authority and compassion and it made Nils back away.

  “All right,” Alex said. “Meanwhile, Cat and Nils and I are going to drag the dinghy out of the water. Whatever it takes.”

  “There’s no time,” Nils said. “Never mind the fact it’s got holes in it.”

  Sami had pulled Patrick’s shirt over his head and was tearing it into strips. Afraid and in pain, nevertheless Patrick was helping her as best he could.

  “Holes can be patched,” Sami said. “Alex is right. We’ve got to try.”

  “If we have to swim, then we swim,” Alex added. “But this boat isn’t going to sink completely in the next ten minutes. We’ve got a little time—not much, but a little—so let’s do everything we can to avoid going in that water.”

  As if on cue, Luisa shoved Cat aside and lurched to her feet.

  “Fuck it,” she said, almost drunkenly. Tears streamed down her face and she walked toward the railing. “Fuck it!”

  She grabbed the railing, put one foot up.

  Even as Cat shouted for them all to stop her, Alex grabbed Luisa around the waist and ripped her away from the railing. She screamed at him, a torrent of the most depraved profanity he’d ever heard, and she tried to claw at him. Alex pulled her close, wrapped her in his arms as she beat at him. He didn’t try to shush her and he didn’t tell her it would be all right. He just held her and let her know that she wasn’t alone out here, even if all that meant was that she wasn’t going to die alone.

  “Oh, my God,” she whispered in a hitching voice. “Alex.”

  “I know,” he said. Nothing more.

  With Sami helping Patrick, Nils and Cat went to the railing. Nils started down the ladder. Cat urged him on, promised him that he could reach the line for the dinghy before any shark might attack. She got a gaffing hook from somewhere and stood ready to bring the line up to the deck to make it easier to haul the dinghy up.

  They needed Alex’s help, but he just held on to Luisa while the boat sank lower in the water and the rain came on harder. He looked out across the lagoon and realized the tide had risen dramatically, that some of the fragments of the atoll were half the size they’d been.

  “Hold on,” he said.

  Cat reached down with the gaffing hook.

  Alex walked Luisa a few feet farther from the edge and sat her down on the deck. She wouldn’t look at him. Instead, she went along with him as if in surrender, and once she’d sat she returned to her previous position, legs drawn up to her chest, head hung between her knees. Alex stared at her, then glanced over at Isko. At this rate, he wasn’t sure which of them stood a worse chance of making it t
o shore.

  “Cat,” he said, “wait.”

  Sami shot him a glance, but Alex ignored her and went to Cat. He leaned on the railing and glanced down at Nils. He could only see one shark now, a fin slicing the water about forty feet away.

  “Both of you just wait.”

  Cat flinched. “Are you fucking crazy? We’re sinking. And the sharks … do you see them? They’re waiting, Alex. It’s like they know.”

  Alex gestured across the lagoon toward the smugglers’ boat. “If they think we have a chance in hell of fixing the dinghy, don’t you think Machii will come back?”

  “They think the Coast Guard’s due any minute now!” Nils called up to him.

  “Maybe they believe that. Maybe they don’t. Just wait. Make it look like you can’t get the dinghy out of the water—”

  “I don’t know if we can!” Cat snapped.

  “Please. Just wait. Three minutes. Maybe five.”

  “We could be in the water in five minutes,” Nils said.

  “You’ve seen the way this guy’s mind works,” Alex said. “You know he’ll come back. He wants us to suffer. He wants us to scream.”

  Cat swore quietly. She put a hand over her mouth as if to stifle a cry, and then she leaned against the railing. Below, on the ladder, Nils tugged on the rope of the sunken dinghy, making a show of how impossible it would be for them to drag it out of the water. Nearby, a second fin surfaced. The rain splashed the waves, leaving little wounds on the water everywhere it touched.

  They waited.

  The boat shifted, tilting farther astern, and Alex had to lean to keep himself from falling.

  But they waited.

  CHAPTER 19

  Alliyah dreamed of music. Some kind of folkie country thing—the sort of song some scruffy, earnest busker would play on a street corner. Maybe it was half a memory, a scrap of a tune she’d once heard while walking down the street hand in hand with her husband or her lover or one of her friends back in her school days. Or maybe her subconscious had invented it. Were there lyrics? In the dream, it was hard to tell. The scruffy busker sang, but the words seemed to slip through the net of her mind.

  She came awake sputtering, choking. A surge of energy pushed her onto all fours as a wave swamped her. On hands and knees, she puked up a quart of seawater that had snuck down her throat while she lay unconscious and the tide came in.

  Pain stabbed into her as if the blade the fucker had used remained lodged in her back and was growing and spreading. She’d have screamed, but exhaustion had dulled her ability to respond. The pain had grown, but she knew she had to carry that pain or die.

  Alliyah wanted to slump into the surf. She wanted to roll over, but the idea of pressing her wounds against the sand chilled her. With the rain coming down hard, insult to injury, she started to crawl out of the water. A wave swept in, lifted her, carried her several feet. Her hands and feet moved in the water, bicycling, trying to make sure she was in control when she touched bottom again. When her left hand hit the ground it was at the wrong angle and she pitched slightly forward as the wave withdrew. Pausing, breathing, knowing that another wave would be along any second, she grimaced and started to creep forward.

  She glanced backward.

  For a moment that extended into infinity, she stared at the wave rolling toward shore. The enormous shape inside the wave, slicing parallel to the beach, seemed so impossible that she felt sure this was still part of the dream that included the scruffy sidewalk troubadour. It didn’t feel like a dream or even a nightmare, it felt real and tangible and so ungodly painful, but this couldn’t be real. Inside the wave, the edge of its fin protruding from the white froth as the wave began to break, was a shark.

  Alliyah gave a short gasp. A spike of pain made her blink and she lunged out of the water, stomping through the shallows. Stumbling, she hurled herself onto the soft, sodden sand, making a deep imprint there.

  Turning onto her side, she watched the shark skid past her in the shallows, two-thirds of its bulk out of the water. It caught for a moment on the sand as the wave receded, but then the next wave crashed over it and the killer managed to glide back into the lagoon. Under the gray-black sky with the rain pouring down, the shark vanished in the deep, but she knew it hadn’t gone far.

  Alliyah stared. She tried to speak, just to curse. A flash of profanity would have made it all feel more real, but the effort of uttering actual words shot a pulse of pain across her back and she hissed air through her teeth. The darkness crept in at the edges of her vision again, but she wouldn’t surrender to it. Adrenaline had surged within her and now her heart pumped harder, thudding in her chest. She tried not to think about how much blood she’d lost and how much blood was too much. She tried not to wonder if she was just marking time, if there might no longer be any point in trying to save herself.

  Instead, she turned and began a slow stutter march down the beach, away from the burning Coast Guard station. Black smoke rose from the building, but she barely noticed it. The rain punished her and the wind gusted into her face, trying to push her back. Alliyah kept going, ignoring the trees on her right, keeping along the arc of the atoll.

  Slowly. Too slow, she thought, but still she kept staggering and bleeding.

  How much time had passed and how far she’d walked she couldn’t be sure, but she came to the first of the gaps in the land. When she’d rushed over here to try to help Alex, the water in this opening had been narrow and less than two feet deep. Now she had to wade across and the water came up to just below her breasts.

  The impossible image of that shark riding inside a wave lodged in her brain and she glanced around, watching for a fin. She stared at the dark water and imagined it was waiting for her down there, one of the Devil Sharks, the taste of her blood already in its mouth like the scent of a fox in the nose of a hound. But she had no choice, so she closed her eyes and forged ahead and a few moments later she scrambled out of the water onto the next fragment of the atoll.

  Alliyah dragged in several deep breaths and forced her eyes to stay open. The pain lancing into her back made her whimper, but she started walking again. Farther along the atoll there were other breaks. How many were there between herself and that picnic spot? How many between herself and the husband she could no longer bring herself to love or trust but in whose hands she now had no choice but to put her life?

  How many steps?

  How much more did she have to bleed to get there?

  “Dev,” she whispered, needing him more than she ever had. Hating him for it. Hating him for how little she believed in him.

  But she kept going.

  * * *

  Sami knelt by Patrick. He wore a grim expression. In the rain, he looked more irritated than terrified or agonized. She finished tying a tourniquet around his thigh. The only bandage was a bright purple fleece hoodie she’d managed to fetch from below. Sami tried not to think about the way the ship was listing, or how much water had already poured in belowdecks. She’d waded through it, climbing up into the corridor where things were still dry. While she was there, she had grabbed a raincoat and her wedding ring, which had been in a zippered pocket inside her purse. She’d left the purse behind. All that mattered to her was the ring.

  Now, though, she wondered what else they would need if they managed to make it to shore.

  “That too tight?” Sami asked.

  Patrick grimaced. “Yes.”

  “Good.” She gave the tourniquet another tug and made sure it was tied securely. “You’re awfully stoic for a guy with a bullet in his leg.”

  Patrick huffed and pushed himself up with both hands, bracing his back against the wheelhouse. “You mean I’m awfully stoic for a guy who just got shot and who’s on a boat sinking into a lagoon full of fucking man-eating sharks?”

  “Yeah. That.”

  “What are my other options?”

  Sami nodded. He had a point. She glanced over at Luisa, who shifted every minute or two. As the boat continued to
sink she would clamber farther up the deck to keep her distance from the water roughly the same, as if she didn’t understand that eventually she was going to run out of room to climb. Eventually, the Kid Galahad was going to vanish into the lagoon. Like a cornered animal, Luisa only looked up to glance fearfully at the water.

  “I should talk to her,” Sami said.

  “No, you shouldn’t,” Patrick said. “I’m fine for now. Check on Isko and then help them get the dinghy floating. If they can’t do that, I’d have been better off with this bullet in my skull.”

  Sami tapped his shoulder. “Okay. If you find you can get up at all—not that I’m asking you to, not with a gunshot wound—but if we get off the boat, we could really use the flare gun. The Coast Guard’s coming, so we can live without food and water for that long. But the flare gun could come in very handy.”

  “I don’t know if I can get into the wheelhouse, but I’ll try.”

  “If you can’t, don’t worry. I’ll go in and look for it—”

  “I can tell you where it is.”

  “Fine. Give me a few minutes with Isko and I’ll do it.”

  Patrick nodded, still stoic, although she could see the regret in his eyes that he couldn’t do this one simple thing. They hadn’t known each other long, but Patrick impressed her as the kind of person who wanted to be useful.

  “Sit tight,” she told him.

  Sami rose into a slanted crouch and turned toward the others. Alex and Nils and Cat had dragged the dinghy up onto the deck. There had been swearing and the smashing of knuckles and Nils had done something to his back. The dinghy was heavy and not meant to be lifted by three people, but with the current angle of the boat to the water they had been able to drag it across the railing. Now it rested upside down. Nils had also been below, where he’d retrieved a tool kit. He muttered to himself constantly as he tried to get the swamped motor cleaned up enough that it would start if they could get the dinghy to float.