The Fires Beneath the Sea ebook (15 page)

“Talk normally.”

“In low-earth orbit the satellites are still above the stratosphere, 200 kilometers up at a minimum … or else you get this rapid orbital decay—”

“Jax. Stop already.”

“Anyway, I’ll check it out.”

“You’re telling me we can look at Marconi from, like, outer space?”

“Maybe not us, not in real time,” said Jax. “We don’t exactly have top-level access. Google, for example, uses old satellite photos. But I might be able to get in using Mom’s account. Let me check, anyway.”

“I’m not going out there tonight unless I have to,” said Cara and turned from Jax to pull on a tank top. “Max should go again. Nothing ever happens to him. He’s lucky.”

“I’m amazed Max is even going along with all this,” said Jax. “For that reason if nothing else: things don’t seem to happen to him. It’s like he’s outside it….”

“He saw you with the leatherback,” said Cara. “That’s the only thing he’s ever witnessed that makes him think we’re not just playing.”

“And then the pirate ship,” said Jax. “He’s probably doing it just because of that, at this point.”

“Would you two stop ragging on him?” said Hayley, stepping out of the bathroom fully dressed and with her trademark shiny lip gloss and eyeliner already applied.

“We’re not ragging at all,” objected Cara.

“You are, too,” argued Hayley, flipping her hair. “You act like it’s you two against him.”

Cara and Jax looked at each other—Cara, at least, registering that maybe what she said was true.

“He’s a skeptic,” said Jax.

“And we know that what we’ve seen is real,” said Cara. “That’s all.”

“Huh,” said Hayley. “Well, I’m going down to hang with the guys.”

“Go for it,” said Cara. “Just give me a minute.”

Hayley went out, taking the staircase two steps at a time.

“She is
way
too young for him,” said Jax severely.

Jax was still trying to get satellite feed from Marconi Beach up on his laptop in the late afternoon when Max left to get Zee’s father’s scuba stuff ready. He had all the gear—masks and fins, tanks and wet suits—so Max just had to get it prepped and ready for them to use.

And Hayley had long since gone home. As far as Cara could tell, she was more focused on Max and whether or not he might like her than the fact that they’d looked at a mirror and seen something supernatural that Jax said “practically defied the laws of physics and turned all of reality on its head.”

Cara went into Jax’s room and looked over his shoulder as he pulled up aerial photos of the Cape. Brown and green splotches that were treetops flashed across his screen, the black of rooftops and blue and brighter green of the water.

“You know what?” he exclaimed suddenly. “I got it! We should use the webcam! There’s a webcam at Marconi. Surfers use it to check on the waves. The problem is, it hasn’t been good surf conditions lately, so right now it’s pointing in the wrong direction.”

Onto his screen flashed a scene of the beach—not a satellite photo, from above, but a regular beach webcam. It was a view of the cliffs that rose over Marconi, to be exact. She saw the long flight of wooden stairs that went up from the water to the parking lot that overlooked it, on the clifftop.

“But it’s pointing inland,” said Cara.

“Right.”

“But how can we—do we even know where it is? The actual camera?”

“I do. It’s on the lifeguard station,” said Jax. “I’ve seen it there. Halfway down the beach between the cliffs and the waterline, on that high platform where they sit. All we need to do is turn it around so it faces out to sea. Chances are no one would even notice till morning. Surfers don’t care how the waves are doing in the middle of the night.” He glanced fleetingly at the time readout on the upper corner of his display. “Shoot. It’s getting late. I don’t know if there’s still time before dark.”

Cara thought for a second. Max had taken the car, so he couldn’t drive them. The bike ride took at least twenty minutes. She looked at her watch.

“We’d get there before sunset, definitely,” she said.

“But on the way back…,” said Jax, and trailed off.

“We have to risk it,” she said. “Better than spending all night out there.”

“Even if it was Max?”

If she and Jax went out now, and took the chance of riding home in the dark, Max wouldn’t have to be out later, vulnerable.

“We need to do it,” she said firmly. “You and me. Listen, Jax. Just because nothing has happened to him yet doesn’t mean it couldn’t.”

Jax nodded, but she could tell he was nervous.

“Come on,” she said. “We can do this.”

They practically jumped their bikes off the front porch, pedaling swiftly up the road toward Route 6; but as they got closer and closer it became clear that they had a rare, off-season traffic jam to contend with.

Cars were lined up along the highway at a complete standstill. The fumes from their idling engines filled the air, and a few horns honked way down the line.

“Oh, no,” groaned Jax.

The cars wouldn’t stop them, since they were on their bicycles, but the traffic jam would make the trip a lot less pleasant.

Suddenly she heard the whine of a siren behind them, and then an ambulance careened by at high speed.

“An accident,” said Cara, feeling a chill.

And just like that, she knew there was something wrong. She had to find out what.

“Follow me,” she said to Jax over her shoulder, and took off on her bike in the direction the ambulance had gone, toward the Wellfleet town center. She wove between the stopped cars to get across, then raced up the shoulder.

“Wait up!” Jax was calling behind her.

It was the opposite direction from Marconi.

She yelled back to him to explain, but what she said was probably lost to their velocity. He followed anyway, pedaling behind her as fast as his short, thin legs could go, a puzzled look on his face.

And then she saw it: beside the road, up ahead, a car was wrapped around a tree. A car that looked familiar.

Because it was theirs.

Cara had never felt so afraid, not even when the Pouring Man reached out. Never. The fear lodged in the pit of her stomach, making her almost sick.

When they got to the scene, there was the family car, the front of it forked so far into a tree trunk it looked as though the tree was part of it now. Then there was a police car, lights flashing, parked near the tree, and the ambulance pulled up with the back doors open. Then they saw the stretcher. And the prone form of a boy lying on it.

Max.

She practically threw herself off her bike, let it fall to the gravel and left the wheels spinning as she ran to the stretcher, which they were about to lift into the open back of the ambulance. She had eyes for no one but her brother … she couldn’t see any blood, at least—a good sign, she told herself—and then she was looking down at him, ignoring the paramedics or whoever they were, who were saying things in her ear she didn’t listen to.

“It’s me, it’s me,” she heard her voice repeat, and she was bending over to look into the familiar face.

It was white, but his eyes were open.

“Cara?”

“Oh my
God
,” she said, and her voice caught in her throat. Tears filled her eyes but didn’t spill out. Her legs felt shaky with relief, or shock, or something. He was OK.

She almost had to sit down, she was shaking so hard.

“Your brother’s one hell of a lucky kid,” a paramedic was telling her, and put an around her trembly shoulders. It was a lady paramedic, bulky and kind-sounding. “He’s got a broken arm, maybe a very mild concussion. And that’s all.”

“Never seen anything like it,” someone was saying behind her to someone else. “It shoulda been way worse. Miracle the kid’s still kicking.”

“Max. What
happened
?”

Max tried to smile, which looked kind of pathetic but made the tears slide down her cheeks for some reason.

“Guess Dad won’t leave me in charge again,” he managed weakly.

“Don’t joke! You never have accidents!”

His smile faded, and his eyes seemed to lose focus. The paramedic lady squeezed Cara’s arm.

“Honey, it’s just a broken arm,” she said. “Really. You don’t need to worry about him.”

“… finally met your friend,” Max was whispering.

“They’ll keep him overnight after they set the arm, no doubt,” said the paramedic. “You kids got a ride over there?”

Cara heard Jax answer her but couldn’t listen to either of them. She leaned close over Max, whose lips were moving but whose faint words she couldn’t hear in all the hubbub around her.

“What did you say?” she hissed, her lips a couple of inches from his ear.

“I think I met your friend,” he whispered back. “What did you call him? The man who walks in water….”

Cara felt strange; all over her body her skin was tingling.

“He was here? He did this?”

“He came up out of nowhere,” whispered Max, and then winced. Maybe they hadn’t given him anything for the arm, because he seemed to be in pain.

“He came up?”

“First he was in the rearview mirror,” murmured Max. “
Smiling
. Smiling this … awful smile.”

“He was in the car with you?”

“No. He was just in the mirror—when I turned around there was no one in the back. And then…”

“Then?”

“Then when I turned to the front again, he was crouched on the hood. His face was a few inches away.”

“Oh, no,” said Cara.

“I swerved. I hit a tree.”

“Of course you did. That was what he wanted,” put in Jax, at her elbow.

The paramedics made them move out of the way as they heaved the stretcher up. Cara watched as Max grimaced.

“He did it so you wouldn’t be with us tonight,” said Jax loudly. “He was taking you out.”

“
Who
was taking him out?” asked a policeman sharply, standing a bit behind them.

Cara shot Jax a look.

“We’re just goofing, Officer,” said Jax.

For some reason the policeman reached out and tousled Jax’s hair, like he was cute. It was weird: Jax was acting like Max’s accident didn’t scare him at all, like it was nothing.

The ambulance pulled away with Max inside. Cara watched it go and then turned to Jax. The policeman had walked away, talking on his cell phone.

“
Goofing?
” hissed Cara under her breath.

Sometimes, while trying to pass for normal, Jax impersonated an idiot.

“We’re riding with those guys,” he explained to her. “The policemen? They’ll take us to the hospital to be with Max. And I got an idea to make them stop at Marconi on the way so I can reposition the webcam.”

“Poor Max,” said Cara, biting her lip. “Did you see the look on his face? And he could have been—I mean, it could have been way worse, Jax. I can’t believe you’re not more freaked out.”

“I know it could,” he said, and looked determined. “But it wasn’t. And we have to keep going.”

“I don’t get how the—how he did it,” said Cara. “It wasn’t raining! And it wasn’t night yet, either!”

“I told you, he’s more powerful today,” said Jax. “He must have moved through another kind of water, somehow.”

He walked to the side of the road and looked down.

“There’s a creek right here, going under the road,” he said. “See? There.”

Cara stood beside him at the guardrail, looking down at a muddy trickle of water running into a culvert beneath them.

“He must have come in that,” said Jax. “Maybe he could even materialize just for an instant outside the water, because he’s getting stronger….”

“Hey, kid,” said the policeman with the cell. “We’ll cruise along behind you, why don’t you drop those bikes back at home. Leave ’em here, they won’t last till you get back.”

“Thanks, Officer,” said Jax, and they bent to grab the bars of their cycles.

The hospital was a lot of waiting around in white rooms that smelled a particular way—not bad but not really good, either. Zee showed up, too, with her fisherman dad, who’d driven her there. He was the man from the cheeseburger place—the bearded, sunburnt guy who knew about the algae in the red tides. He was nice enough, though he didn’t recognize Cara.

At a vending machine off the lounge, when she and Zee were buying a soda, Zee leaned in close to her and whispered.

“So, what are you going to do if it’s tonight?”

“I don’t know! Can you get the scuba stuff for us? And maybe leave it somewhere?”

“It’s really expensive,” said Zee. “What if something happened to it? I’d be grounded till I was, like, wearing Depends.”

“I know,” said Cara. “I understand, I really do. But this is so important.”

“What,” said Zee. “Jax’s science project?”

“It’s
more
than that,” said Cara, her voice growing louder. She checked herself and was thinking what else to say when Zee’s dad loomed suddenly behind them and asked Zee to get him a Mountain Dew. A few seconds later, Zee went into Max’s room for her visit, and after that her dad hurried her out, saying something about traps, and they left.

Cara and Jax finally said good-bye to Max at around ten at night. His arm in a cast, he was falling asleep with a baseball game blaring on the TV. He’d be there till the next morning at least, a nurse told them, for observation because of the concussion, but she reassured them that the arm would be fine and Max mostly needed a good night’s rest.