by Matt Hlinak
With the Captain out of the way, that just left Gus. Culann and Frank couldn’t move until McGillicuddy completed his diversion. The cousins stood at the rail, muscles tensed, just waiting for Worner’s signal. The seconds felt like hours, and Culann began to doubt the reliability of the two rednecks who were so vital to the success of the mission.
And then they heard Worner’s weathered voice call out from the deck: “Man overboard!”
The engines shut down, causing Culann to lurch forward as the ship slowed.
Frank caught him. The door to the bridge flew open, and Gus charged out onto the deck.
“Jesus Christ,” he muttered, “I thought I was done babysitting these little faggots.”
When Gus had gone far enough away, Frank darted to the bridge, and Culann followed as quickly as he could with a cannonball jammed in his jockeys. Culann was expecting to see a large wooden wheel like in pirate movies, but the bridge looked more like the cockpit of a passenger jet. The wheel itself was indistinguishable from the steering wheel on a car, but it was surrounded by high-tech equipment with digital displays and an array of switches, buttons and dials.
“Over there,” Frank whispered, pointing to a small door at the back of the bridge.
The Captain’s quarters were small and Spartan, although far more luxurious than the cramped berths the crew members wedged themselves into each night. Shelves built into the wall held the Captain’s clothes, a few books on weather and navigation, and a pair of expensive-looking binoculars. A twin bed on a metal frame that was bolted to the floor took up most of the room. The bed was made, the blanket stretched so tight that no creases could be seen. Underneath were two black suitcases and an army-green knapsack.
“That’s gotta be it,” Frank said.
Culann bent down and pulled the bag out from under the bed. It was heavy. He unzipped the top and saw the orb there, wrapped in a white t-shirt.
“Okay, hurry up,” Frank said.
Culann pulled Worner’s cannonball from his underwear and dropped it in the knapsack. He unwrapped the orb, which was about twice as heavy as the cannonball, and stuffed it down his pants. His leg tingled as the orb made contact with his skin. He wrapped the cannonball up in the t-shirt and zipped the knapsack shut. The switch wouldn’t hold up under close scrutiny, but the cannonball was close enough in size and weight that the Captain might not notice.
“Be careful,” Frank said as Culann slid the knapsack back under the bed. “You gotta get it exactly right. A dude who makes his bed this perfectly is gonna notice if something’s out of place.”
Culann did his best, although he hadn’t paid close enough attention to the bag’s placement when he first saw it. He’d been too focused on grabbing the orb. It was heavy, too heavy for his underwear to hold, so he held his left hand over his crotch to support the orb’s weight. With his right hand, he pulled the hem of his t-shirt over the top to try to cover it all up. He hoped this would allow them to escape detection long enough to get the orb below deck, but he knew they’d be quickly found out if someone saw the obvious bulge in his pants.
“Let’s go,” Frank said.
They cut through the bridge and glanced out a porthole. A crowd of sailors huddled near the starboard side. McGillicuddy and Worner had done well. They just needed to slip past the commotion and drop the orb off in their bunks.
“What are you two doing?”
The voice was commanding and measured. It was almost mechanical with the hint of an echo, as if it had bounced off canyon walls rather than a man’s throat. The voice dug deep into the pit of Culann’s stomach.
The Captain stood before them. Though his eyes were obscured by his ever-present sunglasses, Culann could feel them scanning his face, searching for signs of deception, signs of weakness. The Captain brought the stub of his cigar up to his mouth with his left hand, while his right slid under his jacket to where his pistol undoubtedly waited. Culann tried to swallow, but the saliva had evaporated from his mouth. He heard a click as the Captain’s hand emerged from beneath his jacket.
“We went in to shut off the engine,” Frank blurted out. “After we heard the ‘man overheard’ call.”
The Captain turned his impassive face toward Frank. Culann shifted his weight ever so slightly to try to hide the bulge at his groin. Frank squared up his shoulders, as if fortifying himself against the Captain’s overpowering gaze. All three men stood silently for a few moments.
“Never go on the bridge. Ever.”
With that, the Captain strode forward, forcing Frank and Culann to scurry out of the way. They turned and raced to their quarters, never once looking back. Down below, Culann crammed the orb into his duffel bag and then exhaled for the first time since hearing the Captain’s voice.
They headed topside to join the throng surrounding McGillicuddy, who sat shivering on the deck, wrapped in a blanket. He glanced up at them and smiled as Frank gave him a thumbs-up. Worner slid behind the two cousins and gave them each a fatherly squeeze on the shoulder. They’d just about pulled it off.
Culann took a moment to soak in the exhilaration of his victory. With the engines idle, the Orthrus bobbed calmly on the waves, and Culann felt relaxed for the first time since they’d embarked. He observed the total absence of color in the world around him.
The ship was the color of old gym socks, while the sea beneath them was black. The jagged coastline on the horizon was a pile of gray rocks, and the sky above was a swirling mass of dark clouds. He’d soon be on dry land, where he could start planning the next phase of his life, whatever that might entail.
As if it had been patiently waiting for Culann to first complete his mission, the rain chose that very moment to come pouring down. There had been no preamble of droplets. When the rain came, it came in earnest. Within seconds, Culann was soaked through to the skin, and the men scampered below deck and crowded into the mess, which quickly assumed the musty odor of wet dog. Culann yearned for a shower.
He and his co-conspirators sat together at one of the tables, but it was too crowded for them to discuss what they had done. The four men just grinned at one another.
McGillicuddy and Worner hadn’t yet been told of the close call with the Captain, a story Culann was already working through in his head to maximize its narrative impact on these strange men who were now his friends.
“Why haven’t they started the engines yet?” Frank wondered.
“Beats me,” said McGillicuddy. “That son of a bitch was in such a hurry to get home, you’d think we’d be high-tailin’ right now.”
“Hell, I’m ready to go home,” Worner said. “I don’t want to spend any more time cooped up in this sardine can with you creeps.”
“Something’s wrong,” Culann said. His throat tightened up.
The entire crew of the Orthrus looked up at once as Gus stood in the doorway to the mess. His eyes were narrow, and his scowl dug deeper than usual.
“Greenhorn, Frank,” he called out. All eyes turned towards the cousins.
“The Captain wants to see the both of you.”
12
“What were you two doing in here earlier?”
Frank and Culann leaned against the back wall of the bridge. The Captain stood before them, his face just inches away from theirs. He was even taller than Frank, so he towered over Culann, who felt like a child in the principal’s office. Except that he didn’t know any principals who carried guns under their jackets. Gus glared at Culann from over the Captain’s shoulder.
“We told you, Cap,” Frank said. “We went in to kill engines.”
The Captain let out a short, disdainful sigh. The pistol materialized in his right hand. He jammed it into Frank’s stomach.
“Gus killed the engines, not you. If you don’t tell me what you did, I’m going to kill you.”
“We didn’t do anything, uh, sir,” Culann stammered. “I just was curious. I wanted to see what it looked like in here. Frank didn’t have anything to do with it. He just came
in to tell me that I wasn’t supposed to be in here. It won’t happen again, I promise.”
The gun now pressed against Culann’s ribs.
“You expect me to believe that?”
The Captain’s imperious voice boomed in concert with the thunder crashing outside. Culann pressed his body back as far as he could against the wall, as if he could press hard enough to pass through it. The gun dug into his side, and he resisted the urge to try to push it away with his hand.
“It’s the truth, sir.”
“Then why won’t the engines start?” the Captain shouted.
“Engines, sir?” Culann replied, genuinely puzzled.
“The goddamned engines won’t start. The radio is out, too. I find it hard to believe that you two just happened to be messing around in here before everything stopped working, and that the two events are not somehow related.”
“Honestly, Cap,” Frank said, “we didn’t touch anything in here.”
The gun wedged again into Frank’s broad belly.
“So it’s just a coincidence, is that it?”
“It must be, Cap. Maybe it was the storm. We could’ve gotten struck by lightning.”
“It makes sense, Captain,” Gus said. “I got an easier time believing we got zapped than that these two dipshits were smart enough to sabotage the ship.”
The Captain stood silently for a moment, the gun still all that separated him from Frank. Then he stepped back and slid his weapon back under his jacket. He jerked his thumb toward the door. Frank and Culann ducked their heads and hurried out into the deluge on the deck.
With the engines out and no working radio, the Orthrus bobbed on the stormy sea within sight of land for half a day before another ship came along. The whole time, Culann feared the Captain would peek under his bed and find the orb missing. But the Captain was fortunately preoccupied with the ship’s mechanical difficulties and efforts to arrange a tug back to shore. While the Captain, Gus, and a few of the handier sailors struggled with the engines, the rest of the crew lounged in absolute boredom down in the mess. Crammed together with thoughts of frustration on their minds and home tantalizingly out of reach, a few scuffles broke out. Worner busied himself by duct-taping the combatants’ wounds.
The storm broke around dusk, about which time a ship came close enough to see a few dozen sailors waving frantically from the deck. About an hour later, a tugboat pulled the Orthrus back into Three Fingers. When they disembarked, Culann stumbled as his feet felt the firmness of earth for the first time in over two weeks and he toppled to his knees. The other members of the crew, more accustomed to the transitions between land and sea, snickered at him as they shoved by. He was still a greenhorn, after all.
Twenty minutes later, they all boarded the ferry bound for Pyrite. As the boat pulled away, Culann watched the Captain smoke a cigar on the deck of the Orthrus while waiting for mechanics to arrive. The Captain shrank as the ferry neared Pyrite and then disappeared. For good, Culann hoped.
“You know what day it is?” Frank asked.
Culann had lost track of time almost immediately after going out to sea. He knew they’d been gone for seventeen days because others had said so, but he’d been too overwhelmed and exhausted to count the days himself. He couldn’t recall when they’d gone to sea.
“It’s the Fourth of July,” Frank said with a grin. “Party time.”
Part III
RETURN TO PYRITE
Diary of Culann Riordan, Day 6
I guess I haven’t talked about the fog yet. Christ. As if living in the land of constant sunlight wasn’t bad enough, the whole island is surrounded by fog. Sometimes it stays back. Other times it rolls in and soaks everything. When it gets like that, I feel suffocated. It’s as bad as the dogs.
On top of that, I’m always hearing thunder. It doesn’t sound too far off, but I never see the lightning, presumably because the fog is in the way. I’m worried that lightning is going to strike one of the trees on the island and squash the dogs who are ceaselessly pissing on them. It’s odd, in light of all the dead humans I’ve had to deal with in the past few days, but the thought of even one dead dog really bothers me. I guess it’s because the dogs can’t understand what’s happening to them. Although the people who died were in the same boat. Maybe I just like dogs, which is a recent development.
Well, back to the fog. They say that people with old injuries can feel it when it rains. My injuries are new, but they are constantly throbbing as if to tell me that the weather sucks out here. Maybe if the sky cleared up a bit, I could go 24 hours without smoking pot. Which reminds me…
That feels a little better.
Oh, I almost forgot. The weirdest thing happened today. A fish — I don’t know, a trout or something — jumped out of the water and landed on the dock when I was working on the shore. As I said, I don’t want to see anything else die. It took me awhile to get over there, but it was still alive when I got there. I scooped it up and tossed it back in the water. Not thirty seconds later, the same fish (I assume, but who the hell knows?) jumped back up on the dock and slid across the planks and into the water on the other side. I waited for a good half-an-hour, but it didn’t come back. Weird, right? In hindsight, I guess I should have fed it to the dogs before they starve to death, but then I would have missed the completed trick.
1
By the time the ferry docked, the handful of Pyrite residents who’d remained ashore were already well into the Independence Day celebration. Dozens of dogs barked excitedly before charging forward to greet their masters. The crew of the Orthrus paused briefly to accept this gracious welcome before descending upon the beer tent. The crew arrived unannounced, so Alistair had to send a few guys back to the bar to round up additional provisions. Culann quickly downed his first beer and poured himself a second.
His time at sea had done little to diminish his thirst, but he’d earned this. He inspected the fat pink scar on his palm for a moment and then dumped his second beer down his throat.
He thought of nothing but refilling his plastic cup with more lukewarm keg beer.
Worner came over and draped an arm around Culann’s neck.
“Let’s see it, kid.”
“Oh, right,” Culann replied. “I’d almost forgotten about it.”
He crouched down and unzipped his duffel bag. Drawing forth the orb, Culann ran his fingers across the impossibly-smooth surface. The symbols were not as he’d remembered them. Had they changed? He recalled each one being a separate, quasi-geometrical shape. But now, they seemed to have grown together. Each shape had expanded to touch the symbols around it. The orb now contained a spiderweb of interconnected symbols even more perplexing that what Culann had first seen.
A crowd gathered around as he examined the orb. Word quickly spread of the Riordan boys’ daring exploits, and their two accomplices eagerly described their own roles in the heist. The other members of the crew who’d all been intimidated and mystified by the Captain’s silent authority admired the pluck of the lucky greenhorn who’d managed to outsmart him.
They passed the orb around, reigniting the debates about its origin. Culann had gotten enough of these arguments on the ship, so he snatched up his duffel bag and slipped through the crowd. McGillicuddy followed.
“Hey, greenhorn, come meet my wife.”
McGillicuddy introduced Culann to Margaret, a lanky woman with curly red hair who looked more like his sister than his wife. She smiled with her whole face as she pumped Culann’s hand.
“Well, it’s a real honor to meet such a celebrity,” she teased. “Only in Pyrite can you become a hero by stealing from your boss.”
“You’re right about that,” Culann said with a smile. “I’m glad I finally found a place with a moral code that aligns with my own.”
“Oh, yeah,” McGillicuddy jumped in. “I forgot to tell you, Margie. He’s not just a thief; he’s a pervert, too.”
Culann averted his eyes, but Margaret let out a series of deep belly-lau
ghs.
“Is that right?” she said. “You should run for mayor.”
“Don’t let Alistair hear you say that,” McGillicuddy said. “He’s already salty with the greenhorn for laughing at him.”
“You think he’s still mad at me?”
“Probably not,” McGillicuddy replied, “but he’s a weird dude. It’s hard to know what’ll set him off. Just mind your manners from now on, and you’ll be fine.”
Culann’s first day in Pyrite seemed like a lifetime ago. He could barely remember his initial encounter with Alistair. Alcohol was certainly part of the explanation for that, but Culann felt like a different person now. He’d survived his ordeal and been reborn.
The life he’d led before the voyage faded into the background. This is exactly what Culann had been hoping for, and he owed it all to the orb.
Culann drank hard. The exertion of the last few weeks plus the nerve-wracking encounters with the Captain left him exhausted. It felt good to relax. He reveled in the curious esteem in which the Orthrus men now held him. They repeatedly toasted his courage and ingenuity, so he made frequent returns to the keg, always careful to speak courteously to Alistair, who showed no signs of holding a grudge. The burly barman was all smiles beside his wife, Julia, a sturdy-looking woman with camel-blond hair that ran down to her shoulders, and his boy, Marty, a mop-headed six-year-old wearing an oversized t-shirt that hung from his bony shoulders. The only child on the island, Marty appeared content to chase the many dogs around the picnic grounds. Other than Alistair, there was no one Culann felt any need to impress, especially since the few women in attendance were married and at least ten years too old for him.
And then he saw her.
She wore cut-off jeans that revealed long legs tanned by the eternal Alaska summer sun. Small, firm breasts pushed against a tight tanktop. Her crow-black hair was pulled back in a ponytail that accentuated her delicate neck. A few freckles dusted her pert little nose, and red lips curled up into a beguiling smile. She was beautiful. He had to go talk to her. He ran his fingers through his hair and headed towards her.
