Devour (12 page)

“Christ,” Moore said. “Abandon ship? All we need is someone to fit through that gap and run power to the big pump.”

“Through the bulkhead.”

“Yes. We get that big bilge fixed, we’re fine.”

“But we’re still dead in the water.”

“We can always get a tow,” Moore said. “It happens all the time. Gives us plenty of time to wrap up loose ends.”

“This great mechanic,” Frankie said, tapping a finger on his knee. “He can weld up the cracks in the bulkhead, too?”

“Yes, if he can find them.”

“And how long we got, he can’t fix it? Like none of it?”

“Worst case? Four to six hours.”

Freddy looked down at his hands. “And if you find someone to worm their way through that twelve-inch gap?”

“Then we have all kinds of time.” Moore said. “Why? You got somebody in mind?”

Frankie grinned. “You coulda just come right out and asked.”

F
irst Officer Mason Collins had been treading water for several minutes when he saw the strobe light flicker as the life ring crested one of the dark swells, fifteen feet away.

He had plunged deep underwater after he’d been jarred loose of the
Nokomis
, and by the time he surfaced and got his bearings, the lights of the ship were a hundred meters away. He watched as the searchlight crisscrossed the sea, the beams passing over him three times without pausing. The swells blocked the light from reaching him, and he didn’t have anything to signal the ship with—the strobe light on the life ring, powered by a nearly dead battery, was too weak. Still, he was certain the ship would turn around to get him. It had already seemed to stop; now it just needed to come around and pick him up.

The water was very cold, but he kicked off his shoes, then unbuckled his pants and let them float away. When the
Nokomis
came back around, he would have to swim to it, or maybe swim out of its way.

It took him fifteen minutes to realize that the
Nokomis
was not coming back. Instead, it seemed to drifting farther and farther away.

He kicked forward, pushing the life ring out in front of him. He had to move slowly to keep the ring from diving, and as he swam he kept his eyes trained on the lights of his ship.

Three hours later, dawn had colored the horizon a soft peach color. Collins had long since stopped swimming, and for the past hour had merely floated at the mercy of the current. The water didn’t feel nearly as cold; the storm must have pushed the warmer Gulf Stream waters into the edge of the Kaala. Yet his limbs were weak from holding onto the ring, his thoughts disjointed. The fog had returned, the
Nokomis
had long since disappeared into the grayness, and Collins’s world had shrunk to a radius of a fifty meters.

He had slowly come to realize that in the darkness and the fog he had somehow floated past the
Nokomis
, and was now adrift and alone in the vast sea.

He tried to think about his wife, but his thoughts would not seem to stick. It was little wonder; their marriage was dull, perfunctory. No kids. Who, then? Most of his close friends were now scattered across the country, chasing careers, and the few that remained in town were busy with T-ball and dance and Cub Scouts. His wife, yes, he should think about her. She might miss him for a few weeks, even months. Then she’d concentrate on spending his generous life insurance policy on—

He chuffed mirthless laughter into the interior of his life ring. It would be dolls—his wife had a weakness for porcelain figurines. The lasting reminder of his time on earth would be a bunch of white and blue dolls staring blankly into the future in which they, like all others, must surely shatter.

His mother, though, alone in her apartment on the East Side . . . she would miss him. He remembered when he was a kid and she had decorated his room to resemble a treehouse, complete with a hammock in the corner of his room, after he had fallen in love with
The Jungle Book.
He slept there for more than a year, and some days she would snuggle in the hammock with him, and they would rock away a Sunday afternoon, talking and laughing. He could feel the security of the hammock now, a warm and gentle swaying, secure in the knowledge he would never be alone as long as he had his mother....

Ahead of him, something broke the surface of the ocean.

Collins watched it with glazed eyes, the hammock forgotten. He felt no great fear as the creature swam toward him, no real concern even as it closed to within ten yards. It was the same beast he had seen on the
Nokomis
. Yes, those had been eyes he had seen. Green eyes, huge malevolent cat eyes, and yes, those were teeth as well.

Teeth everywhere, curved like sabers, the back sides marked with back-slanting extrusions, like repeating fishhook barbs. Teeth that were designed to seize prey and never, ever let go.

The thing blinked, and it was that simple movement that finally triggered Collins’s sluggish nervous system. His heart began to thump harder in his chest, pushing warmer blood out to his extremities. The beast watched him, sucking in air, its foul exhale washing over Collins. Its snout, badly gashed, oozed blood into the ocean. Collins watched the blood mix with the seawater, a thin red cloud ballooning around him. The water swirled around his legs from the movement of the beast’s fins. His thoughts began to gain focus as he looked at the wounds on the creature’s snout, the way the blood mixed with water. The flexing of enormous muscles as it raised its head to gaze at something over Collins’s left shoulder.

Collins did not move. The beast was still looking beyond him, its enormous jaws slightly open. It had dismissed him for the moment. Yet he could feel the tensed energy in the creature, a sense that any movement on his part would result in quick and violent reaction.

The creature breathed in, its jaws opening wider. The curved fangs were cracked and pitted, and there was an open and bloody socket where one had broken away. Another tooth was cracked badly, and there was a bright smear of metal or paint along the edge. Beyond the teeth was a huge gullet, rings of red cartilage disappearing into darkness. He could smell its breath, a fetid mix of salt and blood and digested meat.

The water swirled around him as the creature submerged, its tremendous displacement almost sucking Collins and the life ring under the water. Collins kicked weakly, moving away from the swirling vortex. He did a short half-circle in the eddy and came to rest, waiting for those teeth to rip into him. Nothing happened.

He kicked, slowly, and turned to look at the sea behind him.

For a moment there was nothing but waves and fog, and then the shape of a fishing boat appeared, its outriggers upright, empty flagpoles disappearing into the fog. It was silent, a ghost ship with its bow pointed into the waves, floating backwards on a course that would pass a hundred yards from Collins.

He tried to yell and managed a weak, garbled noise. He cleared his throat and yelled louder, kicking his way toward the ship. Perhaps God, or Someone or Something, had sent the vision of the beast to him on purpose, waking him from his reverie. His feet kicked in the current and he yelled again, almost joyously now, pushing the life ring with one arm and waving with the other.

He had only made a few yards when the sea surged in front of him, a wall of water between two waves. The mound of water grew, then broke away to show a mottled green-black head, the enormous eyes squinted into thin green lines. In Collins’s last thoughts he understood the look in the creature’s eyes, what it meant. It was not evil, not hatred, not even contempt. It was just hunger.

Its jaws opened, and First Mate Mason Collins disappeared from the surface of the ocean.

F
rankie and Christie walked down Deck C’s hallway, the doctor stealing an occasional glance at Frankie. They had just finished their early breakfast, and the hallways were still barren. It felt good to be out and about; D-deck was off limits to passengers and most of the crew, and it was easier for them to go up and eat on the main level instead of running every meal down to D-deck. A select few, including Prower and Latham, ate downstairs.

Frankie didn’t mind going up. It was good to see the rest of the crew, feel the mood. Which was better than he had expected. Nobody was panicking, and he had a feeling the gaming deck might even see a bit of activity later on in the morning.

He felt refreshed after his little exercise in the bowels of the ship. He hadn’t been able to worm all the way through the gap, but he had got far enough in to snake the electrical line through to Wright. Ten minutes later, the emergency bilge was running, and another thousand gallons of water was spitting out the side of the boat every minute. It was a mess down in the bilge, rank with a fishy, oily smell, and he’d taken two showers in a row to rid himself of the smell. It felt good, though, accomplishing something real. Now they needed to finish the rest of the morning’s business.

“So you’re an electrician now?” Christie asked.

Christie carried a blood pressure kit in one hand, and he moved with the loose shuffle of a man who had not been yelled at to hurry in a very long time. It wasn’t like the walk a working man should have, Frankie thought. Hell, men
moved
when he was a kid, mill workers and construction guys always moving. Hard-faced men striding to the car or the bus stop, holding aluminum lunch pails, working with their feet and hands all day. Moving, always moving, and then in the late afternoon they’d walk or drive to the bar, finally sit down and their mouths would pick up where their feet left off. Sometimes the hands would come back into play later in the evening, completing the cycle that had started when they’d picked up their lunch pails in the morning.

Now he was in a white-collar world and shit just naturally moved slower. Still, he was tempted to plant a boot in Christie’s bony ass, speed it back up.

“No,” Frankie said. “Not an electrician. But I gotta slide through some nasty bilge, I’ll do it. Just like you better be ready to do your part when the time comes.”

Christie gave him a bland look. “I wouldn’t be here otherwise.”

“Good,” Frankie said. “That’s real good. And how are our clients, doc?”

“Don’t call me that,” Christie said. “How many times do I have to tell you? Somebody hears I’m a doctor, next thing you know I’m down in the First Aid room, treating strep throat.”

“What’s wrong with that?” Frankie said. “You could pick up a few extra bucks, maybe do an exam on some of the better looking girls.”

“I don’t think so,” Christie said. He was thin and pale, with a spray of faded freckles the only distinguishing mark on his cadaverous face. He stopped now, turning to face Frankie. “The last thing I need is someone screaming for a doctor, and everybody starts looking at me.”

Frankie passed a hand through the air. “Settle down. There’s a real doc on board, board certified or whatever. I’m just screwing with ya.”

“I don’t appreciate it.”

“Well,” Frankie said. “It’s a good thing I don’t give a fuck about your feelings, isn’t it?” He reached into his pocket and popped a stick of gum into his mouth. “We going to have a game today?”

Christie shrugged. “Prower’s blood pressure is a bit high, and his leg is bothering him again. Latham’s is better, but his circulation is very sluggish.” He shrugged. “I don’t see anything to suggest we should stop the game. Latham’s request probably isn’t the best idea.”

“I’ll see what she says. Unless you want to ask?”

Christie shook his head. “That’s not my kind of thing.”

“Fine,” Frankie said, clapping Christie on the shoulder. It was, Frankie thought, like slapping one of those fake plaster skeletons. He almost expected to hear bones rattling.

“I’m gonna split,” Frankie said. “You all right? Look like you gotta go take a shit or something.”

“The ship,” Christie said. “Is it . . . ?”

“Oh, hell,” Frankie said. “It’s fine. Besides, we planned for this.” He motioned Christie down the hallway, deserted at this early hour. “Well, not exactly this, but we can get off the rig fast if we need to.”

“But the fog—”

“Fog is an old problem,” Frankie said. “We’re modern men, right, doc?”

“I suppose,” Christie said. “I just never thought we would—”

“Hold on,” Frankie said, taking a step back. The door to one of the service closets was opened slightly. He opened it all the way, let his eyes adjust to the darkness. A young girl sat on a bunch of folded towels in the back of the closet, arms crossed over her knees, looking up at Frankie with red-rimmed eyes. It took him a minute to realize why her teary face caught him off guard. Then it came to him—it had been years since he’d seen a girl crying who didn’t have mascara tracks running down her cheeks.

“You okay, Taylor?”

“How do you know who I am?”

“We been looking all over for you,” Frankie said. “What’re you doing in a closet?”

“I . . . I went to go get some medicine,” Taylor said. “I was supposed to find Doc Perle, but then the boat started shaking, and then it stopped. I heard someone yelling, and this guy with a shaved head came running back up the hallway and . . . I thought maybe we were being attacked, so I hid. I heard people calling out for me, but I didn’t recognize their voices, and I thought it might be the scary guy.”

“This scary guy, did he have bloodshot eyes?”

She nodded.

“Kharkov,” Frankie said. “Don’t worry about him, he only looks scary.”

She bit her lip. “I fell asleep.”

“It’s not a bad plan,” Frankie said, nodding. “Sometimes, shit starts going down, hiding’s the best thing a person can do.” He stepped into the closet and helped the girl to her feet. “You know what room you’re in?”

“C-12.” She looked up at him. “You swore.”

“Yeah, it’s a bad habit. Don’t start, ’cause quitting can be a bitch.”

Taylor wiped her eyes with the back of her forearm and snuffled. Frankie waited, and decided the snuffle was actually a tired sort of giggle, and led her out into the hallway. “Let’s go see your folks,” he said, then turned to Christie. “Go ahead and do that last checkup. He should be awake by now.”

“Right,” Christie said, then patted his portable radio. “Want me to let Moore know you found her?”

“Hold off on that,” Frankie said. “I want to be a hero about as much as you want to be a doctor. Go see our
renunciar,
then meet me down in the bar.” He watched the doctor amble away, then called out his name before he rounded the corner of the hallway.

Christie turned. “Yeah?”

“I went by your cabin last night, heard you listening to Marley.”

“You got some kind of rule against that?”

“What I’m saying,” Frankie said, “is you should listen to the words, not just the music. Like, you know, ‘every little thing, it gonna be all right’?”

Christie considered this, exhaled through his nose. “Not for everyone it won’t be.”

Frankie shrugged. “It will for the people that matter.”

* * *

Taylor’s room was at the far end of the ship, a walk of a couple minutes. They moved slowly, Taylor trailing a hand along the wall. Frankie wasn’t in a big hurry, either, happy at his little piece of luck. Kids went missing and people just went bat shit, lost all perspective. One time in Henderson, years ago, he’d been watching this house, just watching it with no orders to do anything to anybody, which meant the pay was for shit. But work was work and he’d still liked to get high regularly then, an expensive habit. He didn’t even know whose house it was, just that he was supposed to mark down how many vehicles stopped in, how long they stayed, et cetera, et cetera. Typical druggie surveillance.

Around two in the morning the streets lit up with cherries and then the spotlights popped up and then they were all running at him, half-bent over with long shadows trailing, holding rifles and shotguns, all kinds of shit. Frankie put his hands on the steering wheel real quick, and the next thing he knew he was being dragged from the car and his face was pressed against the asphalt, still hot even in the early morning hours. He could smell the tar, could feel the pressure of the swarm of men standing over him, and when they found the knife on his belt his face was smashed even deeper into the asphalt.

He was grilled for several hours, no lawyer. He was pretty sure he wasn’t the guy they wanted. Also sure that his employer, a low-class hustler named Jimmy Twos, wasn’t who they wanted, either. Turned out he was right; some little kid had been snatched the street over from him around midnight, and the mother had said the guy had come crashing into the bedroom, took the kid at knifepoint. The first detective was wound up, all the way up, kept yelling in Frankie’s face; he wasn’t happy with Frankie’s story that he had pulled over to take a nap. After a while, Frankie was pulled from that room into another, where a different detective started talking at him, and this detective was scarred badly along one side of his face and his words came out slowly, somewhat mangled-sounding, and he scared Frankie more than a little. He was thinking of just calling one of the low-price lawyers he knew when the scarred detective was called from the room.

They had found the kid, safe with his father, who had not been brandishing a knife but the kid’s favorite toy, some sort of Transformer fighter jet. The mother was a tweaker, had taken the kid from the father earlier in the night, and so everything was not what it had seemed, which the cops seemed not at all surprised about. Frankie was let go at dawn, and decided, right then and there, it was time to quit working the residential areas. Working around kids was like throwing cherry bombs onto a bonfire.

“Why is the tall man worried?” Tayler asked him now. She had stopped, obviously reluctant to go back to her room. Maybe her folks would beat on her, Frankie thought, though he’d heard that wasn’t in style anymore. Probably not on a thin-walled ship full of suburban liberals, anyway. An old-school parent could end up in jail pretty quick.

“He’s one of those people who worry too much,” Frankie said. “You know what I mean?”

“Like my mom.”

“She’s a worrier, huh? I bet she’s sick to her stomach right now.”

“I suppose,” Taylor said, looking down at her shoes. “What’s a
renunciar
?”

“Come on,” Frankie said, taking her hand and pulling her down the hallway. “This it?” He knocked on the door and it opened a split second later, a wild-eyed woman in his face. She looked down at Taylor, who was crying again, and a flash of something—anger, or maybe annoyance—flashed across her face. Then relief flooded over that other emotion, and she bent down to grab Taylor.

It was an odd reaction, Frankie thought. Being pissed off first, and then she acts like Ma Ingalls. He was reflecting on this when someone barreled into him and sent him reeling, pinning him against the far wall. A fist came up under his arms and hit him low, right in the liver, and his legs buckled. He sank down to the floor, trying to catch his breath.

“Why’s she crying?” a man demanded. He leaned over Frankie, lips peeled into a snarl. He had a short beard that parted around his sour expression. “What’d you do?”

Frankie tried to speak, ended up with a weak cough. It had been a hell of a good punch.

“Found . . . found her.”

“Bullshit.”

“No, Daddy!” Taylor shouted.

The guy’s boot whistled in underneath Frankie’s arm, connecting low in his ribs. He slipped down the wall. When he looked up, Taylor was in front of him, her hands planted on her father’s chest.

Kids,
Frankie thought, trying not to moan.
Like goddamn cherry bombs.

“He found me!” Taylor yelled, and down the hall several other doors opened. “He found me while you and Mom were here, in your room. He didn’t do
anything
!”

The guy paused, his foot halfway back for another kick. People were moving into Frankie’s peripheral vision. One of them was Thor, who placed his forearm against Taylor’s father’s chest and pushed him back, slowly but forcefully, into his room.

Frankie took a couple breaths. Thor was blocking his vision of the guy, which was good, because as his strength was coming back so was his anger. He’d be pissing red for a week.

He struggled to his feet. Nobody offered to help him and he noticed that, too. He looked around, saw the grim faces and narrowed eyes of several other parents in the hallway—the booking agent had placed the young families together in the same wing, it seemed.

He stood with his back against the wall, breathing slowly. There was a metallic taste in his mouth, sweat running down the sides of his ribs.

Taylor squirmed out of her mother’s grip and pushed herself between Thor and her father, talking to her father but, Frankie thought, also addressing the crowd. “I went to get medicine,” she said. “Then something hit the ship, and I got scared. And I hid in a closet, underneath a bunch of towels, and I fell asleep. When I woke up I was still scared. I opened the door a crack, just to watch and see what had happened. Mr. Frankie found me, him and another guy.”

Her father was straining to look at Frankie around Thor’s arm. Taylor frowned, seeing she wasn’t getting through, or her words weren’t right. “Dad, he just found me like, two
minutes
ago.”

The kid was smart, Frankie thought. She had seen the thing twisting up her dad’s mind—all that time she had been gone, the things that might have happened to her in those long, unaccounted-for hours.

“Somebody better call the ship’s security,” one of the parents said. “Just to make sure.”