Above and Beyond

by Riley Morgan

  Zeus didn’t look well, but he hadn’t since they got to Cuba. He kept fixing his collar, smoothing back his hair, looking over his shoulder. He was nervous about something.

  Ramon

  Ramon did not envy the headache that the guard on the loading deck was going to have when he woke up. The man had seen the grappling hook hit the deck, but must not have realized what it was. He walked right up to the railing and looked overboard just as Ramon reached the top of the rope. By reflex, Ramon grabbed the man by the back of the neck and slammed his head forward into the railing. He dropped instantly. Ramon pulled up his rope and tucked it back into his back, trading it for the handgun. He searched the man and found an earpiece with a radio and a keycard. The keycard got him into the cargo compartment. Just after he entered, the bulkhead door across from him began to creak open. Ramon dove behind the only thing he could, a big crate, and listened.

  “T minus five minutes. Are your people ready to move?”

  “They’ll make a big noise. I’ll spring them as soon as security shifts to you. Do you have eyes on target?”

  “Zeus is with him now.”

  “Remember, clean shots. If you hit the boy, we’re fucked.”

  “Ready to move out?”

  The bulkhead door slammed behind them. Ramon looked out and saw that the coast was clear. So this had been Zeus’s plan? Take out Ivan? Maybe he thought he could control Damien through Lena. Maybe he thought he could install Lena as the head of the Acala crime family and take on a whole new empire. But what about the suitcases? Ramon was certain that they were bombs. Nothing else made sense. What the hell was he going to do with those?

  Ramon had considered his encounter with Zeus’s men a fortunate one, even before he realized that they had left him two tuxedos. He found the larger of the two and dressed himself. It would make getting around a lot easier than in a wetsuit.

  As he was straightening his bowtie and putting in his stolen earpiece, the bulkhead door opened again, catching him off guard.

  “Where the fuck have you been? Quit jerking around and get back above deck. We’ve got some trouble. All hands on deck.

  Ramon followed the man up to the top of the ship. There were a few dozen people milling around. Half of them were probably security. It didn’t look like anything was wrong.

  Then he heard shots. The security contingency of the crowd immediately identified itself by putting in earpieces and assuming a more vigilant posture. The guests must have gotten used to lots of strange noises, because none of them seemed to realize that somebody on the boat was shooting.

  “Suspects detained on deck three. Transferring to detention now.”

  The other guards stood down. Ramon moved through the crowd. He tried to relax and blend in, but knowing that he was dead if anyone on the ship identified him made that tricky.

  He was looking for Lena. She was on this boat somewhere. It looked like the wedding ceremony had just ended, and there were no throngs on the above decks wishing good luck to the new couple. They must have gone below deck. It was just after 1:50. Ramon didn’t know what, if anything, would happen in ten minutes, and that made him very nervous. He kept a careful ear on the radio in his ear, wishing that he had any better way of staying ahead of the curve.

  Following a chatty couple, he went below deck and continued his search there. His disguise was working perfectly. None of the security people knew all of the security people, everyone just assumed that the musclebound freak with the earpiece and the bad suit was somebody’s detail. It would work as long as nobody looked at him too closely. He moved in straight lines when he could, hesitant to turn around blind corners and potential run right into Zeus or one of the brothers.

  “What happened.”

  It was Lena’s voice. He heard a man that he didn’t recognize tell her that everything was going to be alright. Ramon peeked around the corner and saw Lena with Damien, Zeus, and another older couple that he assumed were Damien’s parents. There were a few other people with them, a photographer and some others that were probably security. Ramon couldn’t approach them, and he couldn’t exactly sit here lurking around the corner. The decision of what to do was made for him when he heard another volley of shots fired somewhere below deck.

  “I’m taking Lena,” Zeus said.

  The other man swore and stormed down the hallway towards Ronan. He had Damien with him. Ramon had to think fast. Lena and Zeus were headed the other way. When Damien and his parents were about to turn the corner, Ramon sprinted around it with his hand on his gun and his other at his earpiece. He nearly knocked Damien over, but nobody would have guessed that he was just another dumb guard trying to do his job. He turned down the hall where Lena and Zeus disappeared and glanced back to see that he had not been made out.

  He followed them through the bowels of the ship, around corners and up a flight of stairs. They went into a private room and closed the door behind him.

  Lena

  There had been at least two sets of gunshots since the end of the wedding. Lena had no idea what was going on, but she was scared. Zeus grabbed her by the arm.

  “I’m taking Lena,” he said.

  Damien went the other way with his parents. Zeus dragged her through the winding hallways of the bottom of the ship like a child who carelessly swings their doll into corners and bulkheads and pipes. He would not release her wrist and he would not slow down. They went up a flight of stairs and turned into the presidential bedroom that Damien had taken her to earlier. He slammed the bulkhead door behind them and sat down with her on the bed.

  “Listen carefully,” he said. “There are men on the boat. They are dangerous. You need to stay right here. Someone will come and get you when it’s safe. If they are not here by 2:30, you need to get off the boat. It doesn’t matter how. Jump if you have to. Cuba is five miles due south.”

  She nodded and watched as Zeus left the room. It was already 2:02. Why the hell did she need to get off the boat? Maybe this would buy her another night free from Damien. Maybe this would buy her a lifetime free from Damien.

  Not one minute after the bulkhead door closed behind Zeus, it began to open again.

  “That was fast,” she said.

  “I’m sorry it wasn’t faster,” said Ramon.

  “Ramon!” Lena shouted. He held his fingers to his lips and looked around to see if anyone heard her cry. “Ramon!” she whispered as she ran from the bunk to his arms. He stepped inside and closed the door behind him and held her and kissed her and she hugged him and cried because in all her life she had never been so happy to see anyone as she was to see him then.

  “I thought you were dead,” she said, her cheek pressed to his heart.

  “It was close. But we aren’t out of the woods yet, and I think that everyone on this ship might be in danger.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Zeus was making bombs in your garage. Big ones. I saw him loading them into the truck right after you left.”

  “He said that I should be off the boat by 2:30.”

  “It’s 2:05 now,” he said. “I don’t see why we should wait around.”

  “We have to warn the people,” Lena said.

  “How? There have been a dozen shots fired in the last half hour and they’re still up there dancing and drinking.”

  Lena looked at a very full decanter of brandy and at the sheets on her bed. The room was very full of very flammable things.

  “I like how you think,” Ramon said.

  They stripped the bed and stuffed the sheet into the mouth of the decanter. The silky material turned a translucent amber color as it soaked up the whisky. Ramon rifled through the drawers of a small table with an ashtray and a cigar cutter on top and found a butane lighter.

  “Are you ready?”

  Lena nodded.

  “Then let’s get out of here.”

  “I don’t think so,” Zeus said. He was standing in the doorway, furious. Ramon raised his pistol but the big man was already on
top of him. He never would have guessed that the old bastard could move so quickly. Ramon dropped the gun when Zeus slammed into him. He managed to slip to the side and avoid getting pinned under the giant man. They squared off. Zeus made a few feints trying to get Ramon to commit to something. Ramon was a big man, but he looked small next to Lena’s step-father. He was an inch shorter, and at least a hundred pounds light.

  Zeus reached for Ramon’s arm and missed. Ramon countered with a quick jab that caught Zeus square in the face. The big man didn’t even seem to notice. Ramon hit him twice more in the nose before he got his guard up. Apart from a trickle of blood, it was impossible to tell that Zeus had just been hit three three times.

  The room was small and didn’t afford Ramon a lot of room to move. Zeus knew this and approached him slowly, trying to corner him. Ramon was fast. He struck on Zeus’s open side and slipped under his arm near the wall and got behind him again. The old man lurched forward, caught off balance, and Ramon got a haymaker into his kidney. This caused Zeus to cry out and stand up straight, his back rigid with pain. Ramon attacked the back of his knee and tried to bring the big man down, but Zeus swatted his leg away with laughable ease.

  Lena climbed up on the bed to avoid Ramon’s desperate scramble to avoid Zeus’s next charge. She knocked the decanter over and what had not already been absorbed into the sheets spilled onto the bed.

  Zeus ran Ramon into the wall, grabbing him by the shoulders. Ramon landed a few blows into Zeus’s immense gut and a knee to his groin, but the big man did not let him go. Zeus slammed him into the wall. Ramon’s head made a nasty crack as it struck metal. Not a second later, he whipped it forward and connected his forehead with Zeus’s nose. He grabbed his face with both hands and Ramon slipped between his legs,both of their blood running down his face.

  Zeus turned around, enraged. Ramon was still on his back. The floor was slick and he slipped as he tried to scramble to his feet. He looked scared.

  Ramon

  Ramon had never wanted to fight Zeus hand to hand. Ramon had studied the art at length, and was as good as almost anybody, but there was one truism that mattered more than anything. Size matters. And against Papa Buldova, Ramon was sorely mismatched. It didn’t help that he was stuck in this damn room. There wasn’t any room to move. If he had more space, he might be able to tire the old man out and get in position to attack his joints or wear him down with body blows to his vulnerable back and sides. He’d started the fight with this tactic, but it quickly became obvious that he was never going to wear Zeus down before he delivered a blow that would end the fight.

  Things had felt pretty good until Ramon got himself cornered and Zeus slammed him into the wall. A desperate headbutt had bought him some time, but it worsened the blurring of his vision and the spinning of his head. He couldn’t even get to his feet now, and Zeus, while thoroughly battered, was still ready to fight.

  Ramon backed up as much as he could, trying to get away, but it was no use. Zeus walked towards him, well aware that the fight was his. Ramon had survived this long because Zeus had mistakenly believed that his hirelings could be trusted to kill him. He would not make the same mistake this time.

  He wondered what Zeus would tattoo to his arm. Surely he’d earned a place amongst the defeated enemies of the kraken. Maybe he’d even gone so far as to warrant a slash or a spear on its giant scarred hide. Zeus stood over him now, looking down at him with pity and disgust. He kicked Ramon once in the side and Ramon’s body responded by curling into a ball, trying to protect itself. Ramon took a kick to his covered face and tasted blood. He was bracing for another blow when a deafening blast rattled the tiny metal room. He opened his eyes and saw splatters of blood become pools, and past them, Lena. Ramon’s gun was in her hands, and the barrel was smoking.

  Lena

  Lena had thought about killing her step-father before. Plenty of times, actually. Not just for her own good, but because in the time that she’d lived with him, he’d killed more people that she could remember. He was a bad person, and the world would be better off without him.

  But each time Lena had one of these thoughts, she let it go. She wasn’t a killer. She couldn’t kill Zeus. How many people before her had tried? It was true, she had better opportunities, but she never once seriously considered murdering him.

  When she saw him slam Ramon against the wall. When she saw the gun on the ground by the bed. When she saw death in Papa Buldova’s eyes, she did not think. She reached down and picked the gun up, looked down the ironsights, and waited until she had a good shot.

  Since she was only five feet away, and Zeus was a big man, she did not have to wait long. She pulled the trigger. There was a flash of light, and then blood. Zeus did not scream or shout. He turned around, surprised, reaching back to try and feel the hole that Lena had put in him.

  He staggered, collapsed, and laid still.

  Ramon got up, shaking.

  “Lena…”

  “He… I… We need to get out of here.”

  Ramon took the gun from Lena’s hands. She was surprised how steady they were. Ramon took her by the hand and started towards the door.

  “Wait,” she said, and lit the bedding on fire. “Ok, let’s go.”

  They turned out of the presidential suite and ran up a flight of stairs, across the deck with people running and screaming every which way as the fire alarms began to blare. Lena looked at the watch on Ramon’s wrist. 2:24. Smoke began to pour out of one of the ventilation ducts and people were rushing the lifeboats.

  Ramon lead her down below deck, fighting a stream of scared people going the other way. They went into the cargo bay and found it empty. Ramon put the gun back in the wet bag and pulled out the grappling hook. They ran out to the cargo deck and Ramon tied the line off on the rail.

  “You go first, I’ll help you down. Don’t fall, this high up and you could break something.”

  “Thanks…” Lena said. She climbed over the railing and began to work her way down the rope, one knot at a time. She was surprised how cool the water was when she felt it around her ankles and dropped in.

  Ramon came in after her, and gestured towards the bow of the boat. Swimming in a wedding dress was hard. Ramon didn’t look like he was having a good time of it either.

  She saw a strange machine bobbing in the water. There was a lifeboat not thirty feet away from them. Someone saw them and started shouting, but nobody else turned. Ramon showed her where to grab the machine and then started it up. They jerked forward through the water and it rush up and ran into Lena’s mouth and nose. Ramon held on with one hand and used the other to put the respirator over her face.

  They surged away from the boat skimming over the seas. The moved fast, and the waves crashed into them, buffeting Lena to the point where she was quickly becoming numb. Her dress dragged and pulled and threatened to rip off.

  There was a flash of light behind them. Lena looked back of Ramon’s shoulder and saw a fireball blossoming into the sky and a huge pillar of black smoke rising up from it. She wondered how many people were still on the boat when it blew. She hoped that Zeus still was.

  Almost two hours after they set out, Lena saw a sleek motorboat bobbing on the horizon ahead of them. Ramon climbed aboard and helped pull Lena up. Her dress was so heavy with water that she nearly pulled him back in. It tried to suck her back into the ocean and keep her, but Ramon managed to get her into the boat without incident.

  The fabric of the dress clung to her. She was so cold. Ramon was shaking too. He went to the other end of the boat and started digging through a storage area at the other end of the boat. He stripped out of his wet clothes and tossed them onto the deck.

  “Take that off, it’s going to keep sapping your body heat until you’re both dry.”

  “I need help. It took an extra pair of hands to get this thing on when it wasn’t soaking wet.”

  Ramon helped Lena undo clasps and zippers and eased the dress off of her with tender care. She turned aroun
d and wrapped her arms around Ramon’s bare chest. He was so warm.

  “I’ve got a towel and an emergency blanket, we can dry off and get warm again,” he said.

  Lena traced her finger along the chiseled contours of his chest and kissed him.

  “I was thinking we warm up a different way.”

  Ramon

  Ramon was surprised, to say the least when Lena kissed him and pressed her body against his. After everything they’d both been through, he didn’t think she’d have this on her mind. But she wasn’t the only one.

  He held her hips, slipping his fingers around her back. She kissed him with tender tenacity, as though she were starving with a hunger that only passion could sate. His hands slipped down and he pulled her up so that she was a foot off the ground, her eyes even with his. She cried out in surprise, laughed, and started kissing him again with her legs wrapped tightly around his waist.

  The day had take a lot out of Ramon, and he could hardly hold himself up anymore. Thinking with their continued comfort and safety in mind, he took a step back and sat down on one of the benches that ran along the side of the boat. Lena released him and put one of her knees on either side of his thick legs and raised herself up, an arm over each of his shoulders, and kept kissing him.

  Ramon was so grateful to be here, to be anywhere with her. In the Buldova torture chamber, he’d given up on Lena. Given up on himself. The hope hurt too much. But some of it must have survived because here they both were. Alive and with each other.

  He knew that he could never let go of her again.

  Lena

  Lena could feel Ramon hot and hard between her legs. She’d been thinking about taking off her dress before Ramon told he to, and not because she was concerned about body heat.

  Ever since she saw Ramon walk through the door, she’d had one thought at the front of her mind. The fight, the fire, and their flight had only enhanced that feeling.