John Gone (9 page)

The blond-haired man grabbed the portly
gentleman’s arm violently, thrusting the sleeve of his jacket up
and off his wrist.

“The rest of you line up over here,” the
dark-haired man stated loudly to the crowd.

“I do say!” the portly man responded gruffly.
He shook out the sleeves of his tussled jacket and approached the
blond-haired man. “Explain yourself this instant!” he demanded.

The blond-haired man pulled a small gun from
the inside of his coat and fired it into the air above his head.
The portly gentleman stumbled backward onto his rump and scrambled
away from the armed man like a frazzled crab.

The dark-haired man then revealed that he too
had a gun and moved it slowly across the party. The sweep of his
weapon created a wave of ducking and whimpering across the crowd
that matched its lateral motion above them.

“Everybody needs to listen very clearly to
what I say next and do exactly as I tell you,” he commanded. “In a
moment, my friend over here is going to check each of your arms for
something that belongs to us. The sooner we find it, the sooner we
leave.”

The blond-haired man coughed loudly.

John dropped to the ground and rolled under
the white-clothed buffet table. The maneuver tangled him with his
messenger bag, and he awkwardly tried to disentangle himself from
it without drawing the attention of the two armed men.

“You almost crushed me!” exclaimed Mouse.

“Who in the twelve hells said that?” asked
the buffet attendant, her whisper strained. John looked to his left
and saw the woman suddenly lying a few feet from him underneath the
same table, her hair now frazzled as if she’d been rubbing it
wildly with her large meaty hands. Apparently, she and John had
shared the same idea about where to hide from the frightening
commotion at the party.

“What are you doing down here?” he exclaimed
quietly. “Get your own hiding place!”

“Don’t make me jack-slap you, boy; I don’t
work for nobody when I’m in a crisis situation,” she said.

“Okay, okay,” John whispered. “Let’s just
both shut up so they don’t hear us.”

“Name’s Rodney,” she said quietly.

“Rodney?” John replied on reflex. “That’s a
weird name for a woman.”

“Boy, I’m fixing to--” she started.

“Okay, okay, I’m sorry I said anything. I
love your name. Just be quiet.”

“You don’t get to tell me--”

John rolled out from under the table to
behind it. He slowly peered over its surface and watched as the two
men systematically checked the passenger’s wrists.

“They must be looking for the watch,” John
said quietly.

“Who are they?” Mouse asked at a low volume
from his bag.

“I don’t know.”

“What are we going to do?”

“I don’t know that either. I’m still new at
this, remember? All I know is that we need to get out of here.”

“Lifeboats,” Mouse suggested. “I saw some on
the side rail by the bench.”

“Oh, I saw those,” John said. “Good idea.
Five points.” Points were something John and Ronika arbitrarily
assigned one another when they did something well that the other
noticed. The points never added up to anything and weren’t recorded
anywhere, but both John and Ronika were convinced of their lead
over the other.

John hunched down and slowly steeped forward.
Before he could move, one of Rodney’s large callused hands reached
out from underneath the table and latched onto his ankle.

“You ain’t leaving me here to die!” Her
whisper was so loud that John thought she may as well have just
spoken in regular tone. He shook off her grip and stumbled toward
the corner of the cabin.

John found the pulley for the lifeboat tied
off on the railing and slowly undid its knot without taking his
eyes off the two men on the back deck. The gunmen still hadn’t
noticed him, but from the look of things, were almost done with
their check of the deck crowd.

The knot came loose suddenly in John’s hands,
and the weight of the lifeboat pulled the rope supporting it
rapidly through the metal hub of the pulley. He grasped at the rope
to stop it, but the speed of its movement burned his hands.
Suddenly, a large hand appeared above his, and quickly squeezed the
rope to a halt. John immediately recognized the goliath hand as
Rodney’s.

“Boy, you sure don’t know nothin’ about
nothin’. We need to get in the boat first. How were you planning on
getting down there? Jump yonder on your little chicken legs, I
suppose.” She easily raised the boat back up to the railing’s
edge.

“Thanks,” John responded begrudgingly,
knowing she was right.

“Get in,” she said.

John slowly climbed over the rail and moved
into the boat. “Don’t drop me,” he said.

Rodney shook her head in frustration. “Hold
this rope with me now.” She handed him the end of the rope while
maintaining her own grip a few inches above his and awkwardly
entered the small lifeboat. It tipped heavily to the side she sat
on.

Her large hands began to move quickly, one
over the other, lowering the boat to the water below. John watched
the movements and tried to get the timing of his hands to match
hers. Soon, they touched down quietly on the water’s surface.

John felt something wet splash against the
top of his head. He looked up and another drop broke against his
nose. It was starting to rain.

“Thanks for your help, Rodney. I thought they
were going to kill me,” John said as he removed the stolen white
jacket from his shoulders. He grabbed the oars resting inside the
boat and lowered them into the water at his sides. He heaved the
handles back against ocean’s body and began his row away from the
hijacked yacht.

“Kill you? Why would they want to kill some
kid?” Rodney asked, looking back toward the yacht.

“Oh, I don’t know. You know, they looked like
they were going to kill everyone, right?” he answered
dismissively.

She gasped dramatically. “It’s you, isn’t it!
I thought you looked weird, stuffing your bag with food and wearing
blue jeans,” she said. “Stop rowing, we’re heading back.” She
leaned forward and grabbed the end of one of John’s oars. He
refused to let go, and the two began to pull back and forth against
one another.

“Why do you want to go back there?” John
exclaimed.

“Cause I’m giving you up!” she answered,
pulling back hard on the oar.

“Why?”

“I ain’t dying for some dumbass kid,
kid!”

“No one’s going to die,” John said, trying to
lower the volume of their conversation. “We’re escaping!”

“We won’t be soon!” she yelled. “These
pirates are good. They’re going to find out you ain’t on that yacht
and come snatch us up out of the water!”

“No they ain’t!” John yelled back.

“What kind of a pirate wears a suit out
piratin’? One who can afford it! A pirate who’s damn good at his
job, that’s who!”

“Shut up and give me the oar. We’re not far
from the boat; they’re going to hear us!”

“Now that’s a good idea,” she said. “Hey,
mister pirate-man!” she screamed past John toward the boat. “Over
here, I got him for ya! I got him!”

“Quit it, Rodney!” John yelled as he finally
wrestled the oar free from her grip.

“Yeah, Rodney, shut your face!” Mouse
shouted.

John turned back toward the ship. The two
armed men were standing by the edge of the yacht’s railing looking
directly at the rowboat.

“Yeah! Yeah!” Rodney yelled. “I’ve got him
for you!”

One second later a bullet fired from the
blond-haired man’s gun. The shouting stopped immediately. The large
woman beside John flopped down heavily into the back of the boat,
dead before her head hit the planks. The sound of sickness came
through Mouse’s tinny speaker.

John had heard the explosion of the
gunpowder, the whirring of the bullet rip through the air past his
ear, and the sound of Rodney’s body meeting the rowboat’s bottom.
He’d known exactly what had happened without seeing a thing. He sat
in stunned silence facing out at the sea before him.

“Row, row, row!” Mouse yelled, the word
increasing in volume and concern each time the robot repeated
it.

“Yes, rowing,” John finally answered,
breaking trance and taking his first breath since the shot.

“Row, row, row,” Mouse quickly rattled off
again. The robot climbed all the way to the top of John’s shoulder
and sat, keeping its balance by tightly clamping his shirt collar.
“I’ll watch our back, you keep your eyes on the road!”

“What do you see back there?” John yelled
over the noise of his oars crashing against the sea.

Mouse watched as the men in suits bounded
down the side of the yacht, attached to its rail by thin repelling
wire and modified carabineers. The blond-haired man opened his
chest pack and removed a small jar filled with blue, translucent
putty. He pulled out a handful and slapped it to the side of the
yacht. The two men nodded to each other and disconnected their
wires in tandem. A moment later, they splashed into the water and
began swimming rapidly toward John’s boat.

“John,” Mouse said timidly. “They’re coming,
John.”

John turned his head back just in time to
catch an explosion burst from the side of the large yacht,
shredding its hull into twisted curls of metal. The impact
instantly flipped the ship onto its side, catapulting the
passengers upward and outward toward the two swimming men and
John’s rowboat. Well-dressed ragdoll bodies dropped one by one like
massive hail, smashing through the surface of the water. The two
men swimming didn’t react to the explosion they’d created, nor the
bodies that began to litter the waves around them.

John returned his focus to the sea ahead.
“Are they gaining?” he yelled over the splashing of his oars.

“No,” Mouse replied at high volume. “But we
aren’t losing them either. Do you know where we’re going?”

“Nope.”

“I have to stop,” John panted loudly. “I
can’t keep this up.” He’d been rowing without pause since the
explosion two hours ago. His arms were aching badly and his rowing
had slowed significantly. The rain was falling faster now.

John stopped rowing and drooped his arms down
to his sides. “Tell me they’ve stopped.”

“I haven’t seen them in about fifteen
minutes,” Mouse responded.

“It’s getting windy and the waves are getting
choppier. It’s got to be getting too difficult for them to keep
swimming at that ridiculous pace. They have to be getting tired. I
mean, think about it. We’re in a boat; they’re just
free-swimming.”

“You need to get rid of Rodney’s body,” Mouse
said softly. “She’s weighing us down pretty badly.”

“You’re right,” John said. “I’d forgotten she
was back there. Didn’t want to think about it.”

“I know.”

“But you’re right.”

A familiar silence hung in the air for
another few minutes.

“She was trying to get you killed,” Mouse
said. “You know that, right?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Do you want to say something before we, um,
put her overboard?”

“I don’t know,” John said. As he put the oars
down and stood to stretch his legs, his body bent over. His hands
fell to the sides of his waist. He was breathing harder than he
thought, obviously still winded from rowing.

“I don’t know much about her,” he
managed.

“That’s okay,” Mouse said. “Anything is
better than nothing.”

John looked down over Rodney’s body. The sky
was raining steadily now, and the large, shaking drops broke
silently against her corpse. This body was different than Virgil’s,
not frozen in time with a startled expression. This one was just
limp and wet. It was as if it had never been alive at all, just a
fleshy mass crumpled up in the back of a small rowboat.

Gallons of saltwater mixed with blood
splashed at his footsteps as he walked toward the boat’s rear.
Rodney’s right leg was flopped over the edge and dragging in the
water.

Well, that explains why my left arm is
more tired than my right
, John thought.

“She was a buffet attendant,” he suddenly
said aloud.

“Food service professional,” Mouse
interjected.

“She was a food service professional,” John
said. “She didn’t like being told what to do. She knew what she
wanted, and that’s a lot. Um ... ” John stalled, thinking of what
else to say over the body. He looked at the hole that had been
placed with precision through her neck and wondered in passing why
it wasn’t through his.

“She tried to kill me,” he continued, “or to
get me killed, anyway. That wasn’t a very nice thing to do, but
then again, she got the boat in the water that’s saving me now, so
we’re even. Amen.”

John closed his eyes and bent down to lift
her body from the boat as a high-pitched squeak shrieked from the
small robot perched on his left shoulder.

“John!” Mouse shouted. “John, look!”

John opened his eyes and looked back across
the water through the rain. His mouth fell open as he saw his
pursuers breach the horizon. Temporarily lifted and boosted by a
rolling wave, the two men in suits were swimming steadily toward
his boat like sharks, dead-eyed and determined, two expressionless
machines propelling through the water at John without pause.

“John, go now!” Mouse shouted.

John stumbled back to his seat and picked up
the oars he’d left there. He sat down, this time facing the two
men, hoping that rowing in the other direction would be less
tiring. He dipped the oars back into the water and pulled hard for
acceleration. His eyes teared at the pain of the first stroke. His
arms were already in serious need of rest.

“Rodney!” Mouse shouted. “We still need to
dump her!”

“No time now!” John hollered back. “If I stop
now, we’re dead!”