She fired a round every other second, as if timing the trigger pulls to her unhurried pulse. The wind was dying down. Her boat held steady about thirty yards off the Mothership, suspended in some perfect stasis between the incoming tide and the northerly breeze, as if God himself was collaborating with her.
There was something dreamlike about the cadence of her firing. Like a drumbeat that gave an orderly rhythm to the wild confusion of shattering glass and screams.
In the first few minutes of the fusillade, I managed to slip into the water on the submerged port side, then duck about three feet below the surface and frog-kick twenty feet north. I came up quickly for a breath and dove back as a spurt of water erupted two feet to the right of my face.
I grabbed Holland’s left ankle and sidestroked back to the loading platform, tugging him along. Twice the water dimpled close beside me.
I wasn’t sure if he was still alive. His eyes were open, but if he was breathing I couldn’t detect it.
While Rusty helped boost him aboard, slugs blasted golfball holes in the fiberglass behind us. One of the Mercury outboards took a hit that tore open the cover; another round ricocheted off its props, snapped one blade, and set the others spinning. The bob and dip of Sasha Olsen’s boat was probably all that was keeping us alive.
As we positioned Holland on his back, he grunted once and drooled a shot glass of spume. One round had scraped his throat, another had winged his right arm. Ugly flesh wounds. He swallowed and gritted his teeth and seemed to be trying to speak.
I tilted down to hear him.
“Fuck-er.”
It coul’ve been one word, or it coul’ve been two.
Then he shut his eyes and began to moan some off-key song.
Thirty feet out, Annette floated faceup, the upper portion of her skull gone. The tide had her in its grip and was dragging her body south faster than I could swim. The city girl whose been-there-done-that smugness never gave the Everglades a chance. Usually the jaded scoffers were converted by a few hours in that wilderness. Maybe it woul’ve happened eventually with Annette. Then again, she might have been one of those rare ones who were constitutionally unable to yield to forces larger than themselves. Their selfimportance was so deeply rooted, so habitual, they were immune to the grace that nature can confer and found endless ways to scorn its power.
“Why’s she staying out there? Why not come finish the job? She has to know we’re helpless.”
“Maybe she’s having too much fun,” I said.
I slung Holland over my shoulder and Rusty waved me ahead. I lugged him up the four-rang ladder and rolled him onto his back in front of the salon door. I was slumped low, as another slug shattered the tinted window three feet overhead, and a moment later the window beside it blew apart. Holland winced and grumbled a feeble complaint.
At the top of the ladder, Rusty faltered and lost her footing, then I saw her face go out of focus, and I lunged for her right hand.
She huffed deep and long as if she’d lifted too much weight.
Her eyes fixed on mine for half a second, then her mouth went slack. I grabbed the front of her shirt and slung her on top of me and fell backward, a double body-slam, and spun us down the slope of the tilted deck out of Sasha’s sights.
Rusty was groaning softly in my arms. “Aw, Jesus . . . aw, Jesus.”
I skimmed my hands across her body until I found it. Rusty’s left knee was blown open. A single fragment of bone poked through her tattered trousers. Her head lolled in my arms. Aw, Jesus. The gunfire kept time to its demented metronome, opening hole after hole in the thin skin of the Mothership.
I hooked an arm around her chest and, flat on my belly, wormed our bodies across the deck to the salon door and into the cabin that was half full of bay water.
And still they came, one and-a two and-a three and-a four. The thousand-feet-per-second chunks of lead cartwheeled through the walls and windows, Sasha squeezing off another round and another, following the beat of the mad conductor’s baton.
Mona was huddled in the passageway to the staterooms, knee-deep in water. She stared at me with such blind detachment I was staggered for a moment, thinking she might be dead.
“Mona?”
“She’s crazy,” Mona said. “Sasha’s gone insane.”
I settled Rusty in the high, dry corner, went back for Holland, and stretched him out nearby. Then I slopped down into the pool of oily water and sorted through the jumble of furniture and pots and pans and toaster and coffee maker until I found the heavy oak dining table. I dragged it on its side up the steep incline and pressed the thick tabletop flat against the wall, then eased Rusty and Holland behind its screen. It wasn’t much, but it was better than relying on the three-inch wafer of fiberglass.
Sasha Olsen ceased firing.
Maybe taking a moment to snap in another clip. That she might have run out of ammunition was too much to hope for. I hadn’t been counting, but it seemed like close to two dozen rounds since she started. High-capacity magazines could hold twenty, sometimes slightly more. When she began firing again it would be worth noting the number. Use the reload interval to make a move. If I could still count at all by then.
No doubt when she’d blown open the pontoon, she’d emptied a full clip. From a half mile away I’d counted roughly eighteen shots. How many clips could she have brought on such a mission? If her original intent had been to knock me off, more than forty rounds seemed excessive.
Rusty groaned and closed her eyes. I took her hand and squeezed it and she gripped back. She wasn’t going gently into that goddamn night. No need to cheerlead, urge her to hang on, stay with me. All that bullshit didn’t need saying with Rusty. Hanging on was what she did. What she’d always done and always would.
Holland was chanting a string of curses and seemed to be drifting in some twilight of consciousness.
Stooped low, I hiked across the salon, wedged past Mona, went down the passageway by the staterooms and out the door onto the bow. Since I’d last looked, Sasha had changed her position, and when my head emerged, a slug blew the door from my hand and knocked me forward on the deck.
A hornet was stinging my neck and wouldn’t stop. I blinked my vision clear, reached up, and fingered the spot. Red strobes blazed inside my eyes. I bit down hard, used thumb and first finger to pinch at the protruding nub, and plucked the splinter free.
A jagged one-inch needle of fiberglass. Blood seeped down my neck, soaking the collar of my shirt. A trickle or a flood, it was hard to tell. If I’d lanced an artery I’d bleed out in minutes. Not much I could do. I’d get that verdict soon enough.
I stuck my finger into the ripped opening at the elbow of my lucky shirt and tore off the bottom of the sleeve. Then I wrapped the fabric once around my throat and knotted it like an ascot.
On all fours I circled to the submerged port side, out of Sasha’s sight. With water to my chest, I held to the top rail and half swam the length of the ship to the wheelhouse spiral stairs. I’d given up hope of finding the medical supplies we stored in the galley. Even if I could’ve located the kit, it would’ve been unusable, since the storage cabinet was four feet beneath the waterline. Worthless wet bandages. The only other first-aid box was in the wheelhouse where I was headed.
For the seconds it took me to climb the spiral stairs and duck into the cabin, I’d be fully exposed. But I needed to close Rusty’s wound, and if she was going to survive the next few hours without going into shock, she’d do well to gobble a handful of the codeine tablets we carried in the kit.
Assuming we had a few more hours.
The sky was overcast and dusk was nearly done. Bad light for shooting. Though it was small comfort to consider the night ahead.
At the base of the metal stairs, I gathered my breath and touched an experimental finger to the wound on my neck. I shouldn’t have. Teeter’s waffles rose up an acid column at the back of my throat. I turned and heaved them overboard along with another plateful of food. A pretty target I made for several seconds. But she wasn’t shooting anymore.
I made it up the stairway, found the medical pack, and got down again in half a minute. I slogged back to the bow, peeked around the corner, and found she’d disappeared. I ducked inside, then jogged down the passageway into the salon.
It was all exactly as I’d left it: Mona still crouched in the passageway, the half-swamped cabin, Rusty breathing unsteadily behind the cocked-up dining table, Holland auditioning for some punk-ass band.
I unscrewed the hydrogen peroxide and took aim. When it met the open wound, it frothed like beer into a frosty mug. Rusty rocked her head back, shut her eyes, and endured my clumsy field dressing in silence. She couldn’t straighten the leg, and I didn’t see any point in trying to splint it. I used an entire roll of gauze, wrapping it as tight as I dared to staunch the bleeding, bandaging her from ankle to thigh and adding three more wraps around the knee itself. She passed out once but came to a few seconds later. I retrieved a plastic bottle of water floating with the rest of the debris and fed her three codeine tabs.
When I was done with Rusty, I sterilized Holland’s wounds. The one on his arm was a ragged groove just above the elbow. The welt on his neck was more like a burn, as though he’d been touched with a branding iron. I used the last of the roll of gauze to wrap both of those.
I spotted his broken camera stranded at the edge of the debris on the salon deck. I retrieved it and set it on his belly. Holland looked at it, then looked at me. He cradled the camera to his chest and nodded his thanks.
The sun had set and the last silver flush was draining from the clouds. We had about fifteen minutes till night settled around us.
I gathered all the flashlights I could find and handed them out. For Mona, the big bruiser: eighteen million candlepower, brighter than the tungsten floods that indoor photographers use. Visible more than eight miles away. Sixty-watt H4 halogen bulb, using a battery that could go half an hour without a recharge.
I laid the black police Maglite next to Rusty. Four D batteries in the long heavy cylinder. Could be used as a baton to club drunks and other assorted idiots. Fresh batteries, weighed four pounds.
I took the Mini Maglite for myself. It was the size of a half-smoked stogie and fit in my shirt pocket. Three triple-A’s powered the circle of tiny halogen bulbs. Its beam was narrow. Using it in the dark was like looking around a room through a hole in a sheet of paper.
“Will they survive?” Mona had come over and was squatting beside me.
“Damn right they will.”
Rusty’s eyes were closed and every few seconds she puckered her lips and blew out a sharp breath as if she were in the last moments of labor. Holland seemed to be sleeping, his chest rising and falling like a sprinter at the finish line.
“What now?”
“Now it gets dark,” I said. “Very dark.”
“And then what?”
“We’ll have to see.”
“Maybe she’s gone.”
“No.”
“Maybe out of ammunition. Maybe she’s had a change of heart.”
“She just set her son on fire and murdered several people. That’s not a mind I can read.”
We sat on either side of Rusty and watched the darkness invade the cabin. The wind lay down and the Mothership grew still. I heard a hundred thumps of wings passing overhead, and some squeal and creak of metal, the ship’s structure straining from the unnatural position.
“Don’t use the flashlights,” I said. “Only as a last resort. If she’s out there, it could draw fire. So keep them off. Do you hear me, Rusty? Only in the worst-case emergency.”
She nodded that she understood.
I slipped my hand into her hip pocket and drew out the walkie-talkie, then held it out to Mona.
“What?”
“Take it,” I said.
“You want me to call her? Now?”
“No.”
“What then?”
“Is your wristwatch still working?”
She shot her cuff and nodded that it was.
“Illuminated dial?”
“Yes.”
“Now this is the big question, Mona. Can I trust you?”
She had to consider that longer than I would’ve liked.
“What’re you doing, Thorn?”
“I’m going to get her.”
“How?”
“It’ll take me about thirty minutes to reach the inlet. It took longer this morning, but the seas were rough. Thirty minutes max.”
“In the dark?”
“In the dark.”
“And you’re sure she’ll be in the same place?”
“No,” I said. “I’m not sure of anything.”
“What’s with the radio?”
“Thirty minutes, then call her. Keep calling her, keep talk-ing to her. That’s how I’ll home in on her position.”
“If she has her radio on, you mean.”
“She’ll have it on.”
“Why me? Why don’t you take it with you? You press the call button when you’re set.”
“Then if she presses hers, I’m exposed. No, you’ve got to do it. Thirty minutes from the time I leave.”
“How do you find your way, Thorn? There are no lights, no stars.”
“I’ll make it.”
I leaned close to Rusty’s ear. She was focused inward, working on each breath, in and out and in again.
“I’ve got to go,” I told her. “I’m going after her. Will you be all right?”
She made a noise in her throat. It had already grown so dark, I could barely see her face. I found her hand and squeezed it and her grip was as strong as it ever was, maybe stronger.
I slipped the Mini Maglite into my pocket, got up, and located the reciprocating saw balanced on the backside of the television. I took it out of its case and flicked it on and pressed the trigger. She was still alive and well.
“You’re taking a saw? Why?” Mona asked.
“If I get a chance, I’m going to cut her in half.”
“I think you should stay, Thorn. I think it’d be safer for all of us.”
“Thirty minutes,” I said to Mona. “Starting now.”