Sargasso

by Russell C. Connor

  Amber tried to make the question sound as pointed as possible, hoping it would get him to offer some explanation about the object currently taking up residence in her pocket, the one he’d been so eager to get rid of when he thought these guys were business associates of his mob boss father.

  But Eric just shook his head and looked away. “Forget it. If you’re not gonna help, I’ll do it on my own.”

  She grabbed his shirt and pulled him back, hard enough to tear the collar. They were almost nose-to-broken-nose. “Don’t you do a goddamn thing to get any of us hurt. That guy Lito has played straight with us so far, so let’s just cooperate and see what happens.”

  He grinned as he removed her bound hands, the superior expression he usually wore, but there was a dangerous edge to it this time that startled her. Cherrywine’s assertion on the houseboat zipped through Amber’s consciousness, about something being broken in the upstairs kingdom of Prince Charming. But of course there was; she only had to look at that necklace of bruises around their companion’s throat to know that. “You can stay here and suck his dick all you want, Amber. I’m gonna do what’s best for me.”

  “Big surprise,” she muttered.

  Cherrywine hugged herself. “Please stop. I can’t take this anymore…”

  There was movement from the direction of the stairs on the other side of the wheelhouse. Justin staggered around the corner, face bruised and swollen, supported by Lito. He stumbled when he caught sight of Amber, fell to his knees, and practically dove headfirst into her lap.

  “Justin?” She cupped his cheeks. “Jesus, he’s burning up! Justin, what’s wrong?”

  Eric scooted closer. “Oh yeah, these guys are fantastic Amber, I wanna use them as my travel agents next time!”

  “Not them. They didn’t do this.” Justin sucked in air and coughed it right back out, then shivered against her. “There was a girl…”

  Amber leaned in to catch the rest of his words. She noticed the front of his shirt was torn and bloody. She held the cloth open to look inside.

  A ragged wound stretched across the front of his chest, not deep but still oozing blood. The flesh at the edges looked dark.

  “What happened to him?” Amber demanded. “You said he was all right!”

  “Extenuatin circumstances.” Lito held up a large, square object. She recognized one of her textbooks even though the cover was damp and badly shriveled. “I need to know, whose is this?”

  Eric, Amber, and Cherrywine took turns exchanging glances.

  “I don’t have all day. Whose?”

  “Mine,” Amber admitted.

  “You’re studyin this? How good are you?”

  She frowned. “Define ‘good’.”

  “You know a bunch of languages and shit?”

  “I…no, not really. I know about languages in general. Structure, form, that sort of thing.”

  The pirate chewed the inside of his lip, then shrugged. “Have to do.” He pulled a knife from a sheath on his belt and moved toward her. Cherrywine gasped and Amber stiffened until they saw he was only sawing through her wrist bindings. “Come with me.”

  She slid out from under Justin, easing him back on the deck, but he sat up and grabbed at her leg as she stood. “Where are you taking her?”

  “Relax hotshot, I’ll bring her right back. You three sit tight and don’t move. I’ll be watchin.”

  Lito wrapped a hand around Amber’s upper arm and led her away. He waved over Jorge and Carlos, who followed them just around the corner of the wheelhouse. Lito let go of Amber long enough to step away and talk to them in hushed whispers. She caught something about ‘checking the entire ship’ just before the two younger men raced away past them, heading toward the rear with their guns drawn.

  “In here.” Lito held open the wheelhouse door. She stepped inside ahead of him. The rectangular space was more modern than she would’ve guessed for an old ship like this, with upgraded, surely aftermarket electronic equipment and readouts installed in the dash around the wheel and throttle controls. Cherrywine and Eric were bound just underneath the front window, so Lito was able to keep an eye on them as he’d said.

  “What do you want from me?” she asked. Despite what she’d just told Eric about cooperating with this man, she couldn’t help but be suspicious. If he made the slightest move to take out his dick, she was going to do her best to remove it for him.

  He watched her for a long moment but ultimately decided to ignore her question. “I’m sorry about your boyfriend. We didn’t do that to him, I promise you.”

  “Okay. Who did?”

  “Someone else. One of my men died tryin to protect him. Believe it or not, we have no interest in hurtin any of you.”

  “Tell that to the scrawny guy outside.”

  “I will. But for now, I brought your boyfriend back to you as promised.”

  His insistence at pointing out this fact made her understand that Justin had been returned to her as a sort of peace offering, to get her to go along with whatever he wanted. The manipulation made her angry.

  Lito moved to the window and looked down on Justin and the others, coming uncomfortably close to her in the process. She caught a whiff of his scent—a clean natural musk, no trace of cologne or deodorant—and took several involuntary half-steps back to maintain the distance between their bodies. He didn’t seem to notice as he took several long, measured breaths with his eyes closed, then asked, “What about the other guy? Eric? If my guy didn’t do that to his nose, then did it happen in the crash?”

  “If you must know, Cherrywine did it to him.”

  He grunted laughter. “I’m likin you girls more all the time.”

  “Glad we could amuse you. Now why’d you bring me here?”

  He reached for a square, metal box sitting on the counter along the back wall and flipped a switch on its side.

  Five minutes later, Amber sat in the room’s only chair, completely engrossed as she hunched over the radio speaker and strained to catch each syllable that drifted out.

  “Well?” Lito perched behind her on the control dash, where he could watch the others and her at same time.

  “I’ve…I’ve never heard anything like it,” she said. That was an understatement; she didn’t know if anyone had ever heard anything like this. “I’m tempted to say it’s nonsense, but it has too much structure. You can’t fake that, especially not at this speech rate. It’s definitely a language of some sort.”

  “Yeah, but what language? Russian, maybe?”

  She shook her head. “It’s full of choppy cadences like Russian, but not nearly as phonetic. I couldn’t spell out these syllables if I tried. I mean, I’m not even hearing anything I can trace back to any of the major world language families.”

  “You’re gonna have to dumb that down for me, gringa.”

  Amber bristled at the name—the connotation surrounding it was insult, but the way it rolled off his Latin tongue gave it the lilt of a pet name—but did her best to answer the question in layman terms. “All the languages on earth can be grouped into nine families, based on geology, distinctive traits, and certain common components. For a trained ear, it’s not too hard to pick out which family a given language falls into, even if the owner of that ear isn’t necessarily fluent or even familiar with the language in question. Now, keeping in mind, I’m no expert or anything, but this? It doesn’t sound like any of them to me.”

  More so than that, it sounded…ugly, to be perfectly blunt about it. Every professor she’d ever had insisted that even the harshest languages in history held beauty in the right context, but she wasn’t seeing it here. This was almost more animal than anything a set of human vocal cords could produce.

  Lito interrupted her thoughts. “So you’re sayin this is some kind of…what? Alien language?”

  A haughty laugh escaped her at that. “I didn’t say that.”

  “Well, if it’s not from one of these earth families…”

  “I just meant that it’s
fabricated. Unique. Someone completely made it up. Like…I don’t know, Klingon.”

  “Not to get technical, but Klingons are aliens.”

  She stared at him as he favored her with a lopsided grin.

  “Anything else concrete you can give me?”

  “Well, it isn’t live. This is definitely a recording.”

  His heavy brow drew together. “How can you tell that?”

  “It plays every two minutes exactly, with a thirty second break in between each cycle. And every broadcast is exactly the same.”

  “Yeah, but how do you know for sure? I can’t hear anything in that garbage.”

  “I memorized the phonemes at the beginning and end of each cycle to see if they matched up. They do. Whatever this is, it’s automated. Maybe a distress call or something. Although why someone would broadcast it in a made-up language is beyond me.”

  “Okay. Well, I appreciate you taking a look.” He slid off the dash and beckoned. “Let’s get you back out there. Lots more to do, and the night is still young.”

  7

  “C-can you see her?” Justin asked. He lay flat on his back, with his eyes closed. The world seemed too bright every time he opened them, even in the middle of the night. He felt like he had a case of the flu, and the wound in his chest burned with a constant, even heat, as if he were being roasted alive.

  Eric rose up enough to peer in the wheelhouse window. Because of his awkward angle, hands still tied to the boat, a sudden gust of wind almost blew him over. The night’s temperature had dropped several degrees since their time aboard the MishMasher. Distant thunder muttered every few seconds from the horizon off the port side of the boat. “Yeah, he’s got her in there listening to something.”

  “The signal. They’re having her listen t-to that signal.”

  “What signal?”

  “Some voice on their radio scanner. Creepiest thing I ever heard. Had them all freaked out.”

  Eric crouched again and held his bound hands over Justin’s face. “Bro, you’re free, see if you can untie my hands before one of them comes back!”

  “No, we can’t. It might make them mad.”

  “Just do it, man! You owe me after wrecking my dad’s boat!”

  “Don’t blame that on me. If I hadn’t gotten us out of there, we’d be—”

  “We’d be, what? Fucking tied up like a dog to a parking meter? Thanks, glad you saved me from that experience!”

  Justin shook his head. “I’m not doing anything that might get Amber hurt while she’s in there with him.”

  Eric gave the wheelhouse wall a frustrated kick. How many times in his life had his royal highness been denied something he really wanted? Justin felt a sudden perverse glee at finally being the one to do the denying. “After what she did to you, you still care if she lives or dies? Don’t be a fucking tool!”

  “What are you talking about? What did she do to me?”

  “Didn’t you pop the big question?” Even with the high-pitched whine in his voice from his broken nose, Eric managed to make the prospect of marriage sound like syphilis.

  “No, I never got the chance.”

  A smile spread across Eric’s face so slowly, glacial ice could’ve beaten it in a race.

  On the other side of Justin, Cherrywine said, “Don’t, Eric. Don’t be an asshole.”

  But that was what Eric excelled at: being an asshole. If they’d offered a course in it at school, he might’ve actually made the dean’s list. Justin had always known it, he’d just figured he was immune to its effects.

  And suddenly, he wasn’t sure if he wanted to hear what his best friend had to say.

  “Let me clue you in here, bro: Amber knew the whole time. About the ring and all of it. She told little miss whore over there she was gonna turn you down cold.”

  “I hate you,” Cherrywine whispered, turning away from them both.

  “The feeling’s mutual,” Eric told her. “And if you go spreading any more lies about me, my nose is gonna look pretty compared to what I do to you.”

  Justin lay still on the deck for a while, trying to figure out if he was more angry at Amber for doing this to him, or Eric for taking so much joy in telling him. He ultimately decided Eric, because he couldn’t pretend he didn’t know this was coming with Amber. She of the 4.0 GPA and him, who had switched majors four times in the last year and a half. Had he actually bought a ring? The whole thing suddenly seemed like a child’s idea.

  Eric nudged him. “So let’s do this!”

  Justin started to tell him to fuck off, but a cramp ripped through his stomach. The scratches across his chest felt like napalm. He moaned.

  “You okay?” Eric asked, with as close to concern as he was capable. “What happened down there anyway? They cut you up?”

  “No, t-there was a little girl. She attacked me. They…they had to shoot her.”

  “Woah…you’re telling me these fucktards killed a kid on this boat?”

  Before Justin could explain further, there were footsteps on the deck. The three pirates that had been downstairs with him strolled out onto the deck, pushing Amber ahead of them.

  8

  Lito had a hand in the small of Amber’s back, guiding her back toward her friends. She had an athletic figure; he felt the muscles bunching as she walked, and couldn’t stop his eyes from wandering south to her hips. He felt sleazy all of a sudden, and even more so when she pulled away from him with a glance back over her shoulder to catch him looking. She sat on the deck beside Justin just as Carlos and Jorge came running up the opposite gangway to join Lito, Ray, and Jericho.

  “Whole ship is clean, Cap’n,” Jorge reported. “We didn’t see nobody.”

  “Yeah, and who were you looking for?” The taunting question came from Eric, still bound to the ship. His eyes flashed triumphantly in the dim light from the wheelhouse. “More kids to kill?”

  Lito saw the look of alarm that crossed Amber’s face. Maybe it had been a mistake to let them intermingle after all. He grimaced as he said, “That’s not exactly true.”

  “Not what my boy here just told me. He says you’re blowing kids away on this piece of shit.”

  “Look, we’re not sure exactly what happened.” He could already imagine saying something similar to a very hostile jury. “A little girl got onto our ship somehow. She was…sick or something. She killed one of my crew and did that to your friend. So we had to put her down.”

  “Put her down? What, like ol’ Yeller?” Eric looked at Amber and hiked a thumb at Lito. “You hear that, your hero over here is murdering sick kids on this boat.”

  Lito tried not to falter at the use of the word ‘hero.’ “It’s not like that. It was self-defense.”

  “Keep telling yourself that. Maybe next you wanna go to a burn ward and poison the Jello.” Jorge hauled back a boot and kicked Eric in the hip. “Fuck! That hurt! Save the rough stuff for your tattooed boyfriend! Oh, that’s right, he’s fuckin dead.”

  “Puta tu madre, cabronito!” Jorge lunged for him.

  “Stop! No more of that,” Lito barked, pointing at Jorge, who froze with his hands in front of Eric’s face. “Whatever else is goin on, these kids didn’t off Rabid, so nobody harasses them. That’s an order. As of right now, consider them our…guests.”

  “L-like at a hotel?” the blonde asked hopefully, through fresh tears.

  Eric held his bound wrists in her face, reminding Lito of some old movie with a plantation slave in shackles. “Sure, they tie me up every time I stay at the Four Seasons, you stupid bitch.”

  “Jesus Christo, what is your deal, you pampered little brat?” Lito felt the last of his self-control slip. “Don’t talk to her like that!”

  “Gimme a break. You gonna defend this whore’s honor now?”

  “Look, I’m tryin to be civil here, but if you want, I can toss your ass down in our cargo hold and leave you in the dark to rot!”

  “Was she Indian?” Amber’s voice was so quiet, Lito barely heard her.r />
  “Who?”

  “The little girl. Was she Indian, or maybe Middle Eastern?”

  From Lito’s right, Jericho tensed. “Yeah, I t’ink so. How’d you know dat?”

  “Because she was on that houseboat with her family at some point. I saw her picture. If what you’re saying is true—”

  “It is true!” Jericho sounded wildly defensive. “Ask your boyfriend! Or better yet, come downstairs and see for yourself!”

  “I’m not doubting you, I’m just saying, where’s she been all this time? And how can she possibly still be a little girl when that boat’s been out here for almost three decades?”

  A silence grew on the deck that Lito rushed to fill. “We can all agree somethin ain’t kosher out here, but there ain’t no way that boat or any of these others have been out here for thirty years. Someone woulda found them by now. This is one of the heaviest trafficked waterways in the world.”

  “I don’t want to debate with you. And I don’t care about what’s going on. I just want to know what your plans are for us.”

  “Well, I was gonna take you into Bermuda and drop you off at the closest port—”

  “No, we can’t leave yet!” Eric, again. Dios, this was one bastardo that thought everyone lived to hear his opinions. This time though, he sounded panicked.

  “Why do you wanna stay so bad, rich boy?”

  The kid hesitated for a second, eyes flicking back and forth like a trapped animal, the first break in that condescending façade the higher tax brackets had perfected so well. “You know that yacht you morons caused us to sink? Well, it’s somewhere below us, and there’s a lotta shit on it my father will probably want back.”

  There was a loud, hacking cough as Justin squirmed and finally sat up. “D-don’t be stupid, Eric. Your dad will understand.”

  “If you think that, bro, then you don’t know my dad.”

  “But we gotta get outta here. Get s-somewhere safe. And I think I need a doctor…”

  Lito cut in. “Look, all of this is moot. We can’t go anywhere. We’re havin some engine problems.”