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With Miriam driving, Tommy slipped into the seat across from Macy at the front of the boat, wiggling this way and that to avoid the sharp edges of the worn leather poking out. He tried to remember the last time he’d gone out on a boat. His stomach sloshed with every wave, but he couldn’t be sure whether it came from impending sea sickness or worry.
“You ok, detective?” Macy asked across the way, her voice elevated to cut through the wind.
“Yeah. I’m ok.” Tommy nodded, then changed the subject, motioning up to Miriam through the plexiglass windshield. “How does she know where we’re going?”
Macy smiled. “Saw a map on Bark’s boat. Mir has a thing for maps. Memorizes them like instantly. It’s spooky.”
“She seems to have a lot of weird skills,” Tommy mused.
“Yeah.” Macy giggled. “You haven’t even seen the really weird stuff yet.”
Tommy tried to imagine what the really weird stuff might be. He had a hard time squaring the young, mousy-haired girl with the stories he’d read about her killing the beast of Rose Valley. She looked innocent, unassuming, and shy. Yet, somehow, he believed that she possessed the skills it would take to rescue Stacy — currently, his only goal.
It didn’t seem too far-fetched for Tommy to go off the book to get a job done; he was the cop who always looked the other way, after all. But this seemed crazy even for him, and he couldn’t help but appreciate the irony of his actions being so uncharacteristic as to bring into question whether they were his at all.
“You think she’s right?” he hollered to Macy. “That they’re being controlled?”
Macy shifted in her seat, taking a beat to look up at Miriam and then back to Tommy. She shot him a half smile, and he thought he caught a wink but couldn’t be sure in the dim light.
“First thing to learn about Mir is that everything goes a lot smoother if you just assume, she’s right. She’s always right about these sorts of things.”
A parasite controlling Bark. And Newt. Causing Joe to do something so stupid that it got him killed. Tommy couldn’t decide if that made Joe’s death easier or harder to accept. Maybe if he’d listened to Stacy. Tried to get Joe medical help. Maybe a doctor could have found the parasite and cured him. And then maybe Stacy wouldn’t be held captive by someone in the thrall of a kraken. It sounded outlandish even in his private thoughts, but Tommy tended towards believing Macy about Miriam’s accuracy in such matters.
The motor on the Mama Jean slowed down, growing quiet enough for Tommy to hear the water again. Was this the vortex? It looked just like regular ocean to him. As he scanned the horizon, though, he saw a boat in the distance, a shadowed, angular monstrosity that could only be a coast guard vessel. It had to be the USCGC Orvar; the only coast guard boat assigned to Cape Madre. No sign of the Mayhem, though.
Tommy hopped up and made his way to the cockpit, holding on to the railing to keep his balance, lamenting that he never spent the time to earn his sea legs. Miriam fiddled with the radio.
“I didn’t want to turn this on,” she said. “But something seems off. I’m gonna try to raise them.”
Tommy leaned against the doorframe and peered back out towards the cutter. Its searchlight bobbed up and down with the waves, haphazardly pointing into the ocean. He hadn’t seen the ship enough to know what the silhouette should look like, but the front seemed sharper and longer than he would have imagined.
“Coast guard vessel, please come in, over,” Miriam said into the handheld microphone, as if it all came second nature to her. Tommy wondered if she had a handheld radio license. Seemed consistent with her weird set of skills.
While she waited, Miriam moved towards Tommy and stared out across the horizon. “Looks like its launching ramp is deployed. They wouldn’t sail like that.”
She stepped back to the radio, turned some dials, then tried again. Tommy felt like he should be helping, but he didn’t know what he could do, so he pulled his sidearm from his side holster and double-checked that it was loaded. It was the only weapon they had save for the bloody baseball bat, but Tommy couldn’t bear the thought of having to shoot Bark.
Miriam hung up the mic, then cranked the motor back up.
“Gonna go check it out,” she said.
Tommy only nodded, holding on to the frame of the door as Mama Jean surged forward. In a matter of minutes, they pulled up alongside the Orvar. A chill shot up Tommy’s spine when he could see the deck in disarray, covered in water. As Miriam suggested, the launching ramp extended out over the waves. Something was certainly wrong.
“Um guys,” Macy yelled from the front of the boat.
Miriam and Tommy both rushed to the front and peered over the edge, following Macy’s gaze to the water where something floated. A pair of pants, maybe? The blue fabric billowed, until a wave caught it and thunked it against the side of the Mama Jean. Tommy swallowed hard.
Miriam put an arm across Macy’s chest and pushed her back away from the edge, confirming to Tommy what he suspected. A pair of pants, yes, but the legs were still in them and the torso was gone.
“Ew. Ew. Ew!” Macy exclaimed, collapsing back onto her bench. “Is that...?”
Miriam frowned. “I’m going over there. Stay here.”
“I’m coming with you,” said Tommy.
Miriam stopped and studied him, leaving Tommy to wonder whether she would deny his request. Though she couldn’t, of course.
“Will you be okay over here by yourself?” she said to Macy.
The girl looked shaken. Unlike Miriam, Macy didn’t seem to have a handle on things at all. She nodded slowly, then stood up. “I’ll wait in the cockpit.”
The three of them made their way to midship, where Macy peeled off, leaving Miriam and Tommy to cross over to the Orvar. Miriam grabbed a nearby rope and started tying it into a noose.
“Did the kraken do all this?” Tommy asked while she worked.
“Not sure, but probably. How many people would you say were on this boat?”
“I don’t really know. At least a handful. Maybe five? Ten?” Tommy responded, considering the insanity of ten trained coast guard officers now dead to some legendary monster.
Miriam tossed her noose over the gap between the Mama Jean and the Orvar, barely missing one of the mooring anchors on the side of the ship. Tommy half-expected her to nail it on the first try.
As she tried again, Tommy hollered across the water, “Hello?”
No answer.
On the second try, the loop hit its mark. Miriam pulled, tightening the rope.
“Wanna help here?” she asked with a hint of exasperation.
Tommy scrambled behind her and picked up the rope. Together they heaved, the two boats drifting towards each other across the waves. Before long, the two hulls clinked together, and Miriam began tying one end of the rope to the railing of the Mama Jean so that they could cross over.
Tommy joked, “Nice work. Were you a boy scout?”
Miriam hopped over the railing and into the Orvar before answering. “Dad thought boy scouts were amateurs.”
Of course. Of course he did. Tommy worked his way over next, pulling his sidearm from the holster the second he reached even footing. Miriam lit the way with the white light of her cell phone.
The Orvar seemed quiet. Eerie. They boarded on the port side of the ship. Other than the water on the deck, things seemed normal. As if all the officers had decided to go for a swim.
“Watch out,” Miriam said, putting an arm up before Tommy could take another step.
He looked down and saw broken glass all over the deck. Probably not sharp enough to cut through his shoes, but certainly better safe than sorry. He followed the shards to a fire suppression container on the side of the cockpit, its glass broken, but most of the contents still intact.
“A fire?” Miriam asked rhetorically. “Surely not a fire.”
Tommy surveyed the equipment inside the case and tried to account for what might be missing, but he came up empty. Maybe the glass had been broken accidentally. For a kraken attack, he expected more gore, but somehow the surreal silence unnerved him more than a hypothetical deck full of blood.
They rounded in front of the cockpit and made their way to the starboard side, where Miriam rushed towards a large metal gun bolted to the deck plating. It looked old and rusted, with a leather strap hanging from the butt of the gun.
Miriam ran her hand along the shaft, as if to appraise its worth. At her feet, in a metal case also bolted to the deck, were a stack of metal harpoons. They were huge. The kind Tommy could imagine one might use to take out a great white shark, or whale. With nothing except the kraken nearly that large in the waters of Cape Madre, Tommy wondered why the coast guard even had such a relic.
“Man,” Miriam said. “I wish we could take this with us. This is what we need.”
“Ship’s too big for us to pilot,” Tommy said. “And I don’t think we’ve got the manpower to move that thing.”
“Yeah,” Miriam responded. “Probably they use a crane to mount it. No matter, though. I’m sure they’ve got weapons onboard somewhere. I think that should be our priority.”
Clearly, there existed little hope of finding any officers alive on the Orvar. Trying to picture what might have happened to them made Tommy want to throw up, so he pushed the images away and followed as Miriam worked her way around the ship. Past the harpoon gun, they found a crowbar on the deck, along with a hint of blood. The first they’d seen. Neither of them touched the crowbar.
“Fighting a kraken with a crowbar?” Tommy asked. “Seems like poor odds.”
Miriam knelt and studied it, and only then did Tommy notice the faintest drops of blood trailing off towards the side of the ship as Miriam traced the path with her light.
“I don’t think the kraken did this,” she said.
Tommy shuddered at the thought of the crew turning on one another, trying to escape a creature that they couldn’t understand. It seemed impossibly unlikely that it would have come to that.
Miriam stood up and shined her light back towards the bow of the ship. “Launching ramp.” She pointed the light back to the crowbar. “This.”
“Bark?” Tommy asked.
Miriam shrugged. “Maybe. I think they definitely docked with another ship, and surely our kraken’s not clubbing people with crowbars.”
Tommy considered the possibility. Clearly, the creature was smart, so maybe it could pick up weapons and use them. But why do that when it could just strangle people to death, or drown them, or, as his roiling stomach reminded him, eat them?
“How many more coast guard ships are stationed here?” Miriam asked.
“Just this one,” Tommy responded.
Miriam sighed. “So, we’re alone, then.”
“Corpus Christi isn’t far. They’ll send back up.”
“This will all be over by then,” Miriam said, shaking her head.
Tommy didn’t respond. The two of them found the metal stairs leading downward and descended into the dark hold. Miriam found a light switch in short order, though, and for the first time since they’d boarded the Orvar, Tommy felt a little bit comfortable, glad for at least the illusory safety of the light.
Miriam slipped her cell phone into her pocket. “We need to find weapons. Traditional guns are fine, but handheld harpoon guns are better.”
“You don’t think they hit it with those big harpoons upstairs?” Tommy asked.
“Hopefully, but I doubt it. If they took out the kraken, there’d still be someone here.”
Fair point, though Tommy preferred to believe that some brave officer spent his dying breath firing a harpoon straight into the kraken’s brain.
As they searched, Tommy asked, “I seem to remember something about octopuses having multiple brains.”
Miriam nodded, snaking her way through a bunkroom, Tommy in tow. “Yeah. Nine of’em. Kinda. It’s complicated. And the plural is Octopi. Still, though. Hit the central brain, and it’ll die.”
At the end of the bunkroom, they found a smaller chamber full of weapons. Miriam immediately started sifting through them. Tommy searched the walls and found a rack of perfectly-spaced harpoon guns.
“This what we’re looking for?” he asked.
“Perfect! We should take’em all. And all the harpoons too.”
She motioned down to a large case filled with harpoons. Dozens of them. More than they’d be able to carry in one trip. Tommy reached down and cradled as many as he could carry in the crooks of his elbows, while Miriam pulled two of the guns from the wall. Together, they made their way back to the port side to the Mama Jean.
“Macy!” Miriam hollered. “Come help us here. Take these and put them inside.”
Macy appeared in a heartbeat. Over the course of multiple trips, she emptied their arms into the cockpit. After two more trips, they had six harpoon guns and what seemed like an inexhaustible supply of harpoons.
Both happy with the haul, Miriam and Tommy stepped back onto the Mama Jean, and Miriam leaned over to unlatch the Orvar. It immediately drifted away in the waves. Tommy hated to watch it go, feeling as if they’d lost some level of protection.
In the cockpit, Miriam checked a handgun she’d pilfered for ammo. Tommy hadn’t seen her take it.
“What’s that for?” he asked.
She sat the gun on the dashboard and started up the Mama Jean’s motor.
“That’s for Bark.”
