Sick of weapons, sick of their noise, the jarring kicks, and of what they did, the percussions and repercussions, Sasha slid the rifle overboard. She dropped the .45 and the remaining rounds. She stripped off the camouflage jacket. Stood there for a moment thinking. Then she peeled out of her jeans and shirt, her bra and panties. She reached behind her, peeled the band off the end of her braid, unraveled it, and shook her hair loose.
She took her time, smoothing her hands across her hips, breasts, nipples, her soft white belly, the black coarse triangle of hair. Gliding palms across her flesh to wake herself, revive her senses. For a moment something sexual stirred, then was gone.
She bent at the waist, ran her hands up and down her legs. Bristly, untended. She felt a bruise near her knee. Felt an ache and puffiness in her left ankle. Arthritis she’d inherited from her dad, that man who’d hungered for a son and got only her. She thought of him and saw once again that afternoon on Nightmare Creek, stranded as the tide ran out. How good the fishing was, how scared she’d been, and how well she’d hidden it from her father.
Here she was, stranded again. Stranded worse than ever. No one left to hide her feelings from.
Griffin urged her to flee. He called her beautiful, said she still had a chance at life. Go to California, Spain, Switzerland, the Alps, someplace distant. Be his eyes, see the far-off lands. Travel, take him with her.
She could start over. Find a man who’d sweep her into his arms. Marry him, cook his food, eat, watch sunsets, talk and listen. She was still young enough, just barely, to have more children. That’s what Griffin wanted for her, and it’s what C.C. would’ve said, too.
Disappear from this and reappear somewhere else.
Like getting new orders. Open them, read them through. Where she was being sent next. Her mission, her destination. Put on her uniform, pack, and go. Protect her buddies. Kill those trying to kill her. Good death, useful death.
She’d done it all before. Done it once as well as it could be done.
Sasha Olsen stood naked in the night. She looked out at the dark bay. A mile due west was the houseboat. Close enough that she could swim.
She didn’t know who was still alive. She’d killed Milligan, held him under like his mother; she’d killed the retarded guy, the one claiming he was Thorn. She’d shot two others, a young man and young woman. Shot them down and watched them tumble. She’d fired so many rounds her body ached. She was half deaf from the noise.
But the others could still be alive. They could be hurt and dying. Or if she left them, they might survive and someday they’d resume what they’d been doing. Pine Tree School, the Peace River. Nothing would have changed.
From the first she’d had her doubts. Head of the snake.
She was never a true believer, though she’d hidden it from Griffin. She knew enough of the world to have those doubts. She could kill every Bates and every Milligan, and the corporation would survive. The draglines would still be carving giant pits, stacking up the waste. Some other group of men with different names would arrive and fill the offices and chairs and sit behind the desks. Some faceless people in rooms off in big cities. There were always more snakes to replace the snakes, and more snakes to replace those. Where they came from she didn’t know, but they came and they came.
The breeze from the north ran its hands across her flesh. Sexy.
A ghost of what C.C. could do to her. Those whispery things that never got routine or lost their flame.
That joy—could she ever have anything close to that again?
Did she want to try?
California? What was there? What was anywhere?
The night was darker than dark could be, and the breeze was steady across her flesh. There were night sounds, twitters and squawks and splishes in the mangroves she couldn’t identify. Creatures prowling, reptiles on the move.
Who was Sasha now? Stripped of everything. What nub of self was left that might sprout and grow into a new thing?
She inhaled the Everglades and let it go. What she’d had and lost was more than she could imagine regaining. Her emptiness had no bottom. Timmy was another loss. Sasha had asked of her the unthinkable. To betray her sacred pledge. Sasha corrupted her, destroyed the only friend she had.
The walkie-talkie trilled.
She picked it up from the console and pressed the button and, though it was barely true, she said, “I’m still here.”
And the voice on the other end said, “He’s coming for you. Thorn is coming in his kayak. Fifteen minutes and he’ll be there. Do him and it’s over.”
It was blacker than black. Everglades dark, with a sky cloaked by layers of clouds. A place so distant from man-made light, I could’ve been buried in a coffin a mile beneath the earth. A solid darkness I could feel against my skin, like a velvet hood, a suffocating gloom.
Human eyes don’t adjust to that level of dark. Maybe some million-years-ago ancestor could’ve made his way just fine, but we moderns had lived too long in the dazzle of twenty-four-hour radiance. It was never ever really dark. Never ever as dark as that moment on the black water with the black sky above and the black black air before me.
In the last minute before pushing off from the Mothership, I climbed the spiral stairs to the wheelhouse, feeling my way through the blindness. The wind vane was unbroken, still mounted alongside the cluster of weather sensors on the roof. The electronic stuff was dead, but the vane still swiveled with the breeze.
I read the Braille etched into the base with my fingertips. Wind out of the north by northwest. I spent a minute up there taking readings to be sure it was steady enough to trust.
And now the wind was my only compass. I steered east, keeping the breeze at my left shoulder, the slightest oblique push from behind.
Even the smoldering red glow of Miami that was usually visible from fifty miles away was smothered by cloud cover. This was darkness that drank light. Absorbed it, and didn’t give it back.
Not a glimmer on the water as I paddled. Not a flicker of raccoon eyes, or possums in the woods. No stars, no moon, not even a passenger jet circling over the Glades to make its approach.
Just the wind to tell me I was still on earth.
Blackness. No horizon, no up, no down.
The throb in my neck kept me company.
If I was bleeding to death, if I was about to die, then this was the place for it. The best place I could imagine.