Fractured Tide Read online

  Teague screamed again, and I slid with him, gliding across the slick fiberglass deck. Toward the water. Toward the thicker part of the root snaking out of the water to take whatever it could. Hands clung to my tank, my hair. I caught the edge of the bench, but my wet neoprene greased right over. Someone grabbed my arms to keep me from going over, but Teague held on, screaming. My shoulder popped, and I cried out. Pulling me apart, I remember thinking, until I’m in pieces.

  Candy dug her fingers around the tentacle and the filaments circling Teague’s thigh. Then she jerked her hands back as if she’d been burned.

  Teague and I slid another foot and slammed against the edge of a bench.

  And he screamed, the same thing over and over. “Pull it off!”

  I couldn’t get enough air. The world blurred into a panic of high-pitched voices and pain in my shoulders as my rescuers pulled me apart.

  Another tentacle, wrist thick, whipped out of the water and wrapped around his waist. Three filaments followed. Tightened. His eyes went wide, and he stopped screaming. The hand he’d threaded into my long hair tightened, and God, the white-hot pain as a fistful came out by the roots. Out of instinct, I grabbed for his T-shirt. Mom rushed past me, catching his wrist. He slipped to the edge of the platform. My grasp slipped, and he tumbled over the side.

  And he was gone.

  Mom pulled me back from the platform, asked me something, but the words jumbled and reeled, made no sense. Choices spun through my head. Hide down below. Hide on the roof deck. Get away from the ocean. A scream echoed across the narrow alley of water between our boat and Matt’s. The scream multiplied, and then all sixteen of the passengers on the Ruby Pelican rushed to the side closest to us, away from something we couldn’t see. Their boat tipped dangerously. One of the girls got an elbow in the face and fell overboard. She treaded water for a second and disappeared.

  More tendrils snaked over the side of the Last Chance and grabbed the girl next to me. A gray tentacle slipped around her head. A crawling mass of filaments followed. She jerked and stumbled. A red welt appeared on her neck, her cheek, eyes impossibly wide, head tipped back as if she were searching the clouds. I remember reaching out for her. A pop, and blood sprayed the deck, the water, and me. I stumbled and fell again. Struggled, trying to wrestle myself out of a thirty-pound albatross slowing me down.

  A cry filtered down from the roof deck. Felix. Another whip rose from the water and slid up the side, where my brother stood. Ten cups of coffee in my bloodstream, all at once.

  Before I could get to him, Mom rushed for the ladder. I’d never make it up with the tank on my back, so I went for the spear gun instead, the one Phil kept cinched to the wall. It wasn’t there. I grabbed the orange case attached to a bracket under his seat, thinking maybe a flare gun could wound it, burn it. Then I remembered the gas can. We’d left it by the captain’s chair the night before.

  More panicked cries, and I was half aware of screaming coming from the Ruby Pelican before an unnatural wave tipped the Last Chance. I stumbled toward the back of the boat, hands shaking so bad I fumbled with the latch on the case.

  Splash. Another overboard. Someone I didn’t know. A horrible feeling welled up. Gratitude, that it was them and not me. Not Felix. And maybe the thing swimming beneath us was full now.

  Candy grabbed my arm, her eyes full of helplessness and panic. “Sia! What—”

  “The gas can! Dump all of it over the side!” I pulled at the latch of the flare gun case, but it didn’t budge.

  As she stepped toward the gas can, a tendril as thick as my calf snaked up and over the gunwale and wrapped around her waist. She flew backward and plummeted into the waves. Cried my name once before she disappeared.

  A few seconds later Ben was in Candy’s place, dumping the gas into the water.

  A flash of silver zipped by, coming from the roof. Mom, with a spear gun, reloading. Felix held on to her thigh. The spear disappeared into the murk, uselessly passing by whatever horrible thing spread out beneath us.

  I worked the latch on the flare gun case, digging my water-soft fingernails under the plastic as Ben dropped the now-empty fuel can into the water. The cries from the other boat cascaded around me. I didn’t want to look. But I did, for one horrible second. A dozen tentacles and a thousand filaments snaked up the sides, cradling the Ruby Pelican like a bath toy.

  Ben wrenched the flare gun case from me and smashed the latch against a cleat twice. The gun spilled onto the floor and I grabbed it. Fumbled a shell into the chamber just as Ben cried out, a filament wrapping around his thigh, slicing through the skin.

  I should’ve grabbed my dive knife. Cut through the rat snake and set him free. But I didn’t have time.

  The slick of gasoline over the water shimmered in the rising sun. I tilted the gun up, hoping the flare had enough time to catch fire before it hit the water, praying I would hit the slowly widening patch of fuel. I didn’t think about the consequences of what I was doing. Fire. Boats made of wood. People made of flesh. I just pulled the trigger.

  I watched it arc slowly, then drop into the waves.

  The world around us erupted into heat and fire. The sea buckled as something enormous thrashed beneath, its writhing rising high above the flames. I caught a horrific glimpse of an eye, huge and unblinking, through the orange glow.

  And then the sky tipped as our boat capsized and the world went dark.

  ENTRY 8

  FLAMES. That’s what burned through my mind when I woke on the shores of the island.

  Rough, wet sand on my face. The other side baked in the high noon sun. My body felt stretched and snapped back into place. Everything ached. My fingers tingled. My eyes felt full. Ready to burst.

  I pushed myself up to a sitting position, and the world swam. My arms wouldn’t lie flat against my sides, and I looked down to find I still wore the inflated BC. A small part of my brain registered that’s why I wasn’t at the bottom of the ocean.

  The rest of me was just thirsty.

  I struggled with the clasp on my gear for five minutes before I finally broke the stupid thing with a rock and slid the heavy tank from my back.

  I sat for a bit, watching the blue sky, water moving, rolling, waves cresting and falling. God. I closed my eyes at the nausea. My throat stretched like a rubber band. The flames leapt up in my mind again. And the eye of that thing, looking at me through the glow.

  I listened to the surf crash and tried to remember. So hazy. I remembered shooting the flare into the water. The fire spreading, people screaming, and my last thought, before we capsized.

  Felix.

  I stood in a rush of memory and scanned the beach for him. I searched the water for him, for his small head bobbing in the waves, terrified I would have to see my brother pulled under by whatever had destroyed our boat. But there was nobody out there.

  I was alone.

  When things get bad, we tell ourselves all kinds of things to stay sane. You do it too, I’m sure, lying on your bunk, staring at the stains on the ceiling of your cell. You tell yourself that everything will be okay, and the people you love are alive and well. On the other side of the island, I remember thinking. They’re on the other side, waiting for me. So I started walking.

  I made my way down the beach. The island, which I could swear didn’t exist on any of our maps, stretched out for a mile in both directions, its coves smooth white sand, studded with shells and stones and an occasional boulder of black rock. Ten feet up from the water lay a dark line of seaweed from high tide. Another forty feet back, the palm trees began. The gaps between trunks were eaten up by shadows. This will sound totally irrational, but the shadows watched me trudge through the sand, like they were alive or something. I tried to make sense of that feeling, but then the thirst hit again, and I couldn’t think about anything else.

  When the sweat made the inside of my wet suit slick, I peeled it off and left it in the dunes. The rash guard kept my torso and arms from cooking, but the bikini bottoms di
d nothing to protect my legs. My shoulder ached, a reminder of how close I had come to slipping over the side of the Last Chance and joining Teague and Candy and all the others.

  I walked for a long time.

  Mom. I had to find her. Felix. Where was he? Around the next curve? Maybe Ben, Candy, and Teague made it here. And then I remembered what happened to two of them. But Ben? He could’ve made it. And Captain Phil? An ugly part of me hoped not.

  I peered out to sea as I padded barefoot across the wet sand, shading my eyes. The sun bounced off the froth of the whitecaps, glinted across the expanse. No weird ripples or swells like I’d seen just before that thing attacked us. Was it gone?

  A quartet of birds, a hair smaller than gulls and whiter than sand, waded in the shallows down the beach, pecking at fiddler crabs. All of it postcard perfect. But there was no tiki hut selling sunscreen here. I swallowed, and my spit tasted thick, like a sprinter’s mouth. The thought of water put an ache in me. Oh God, how I wanted it, ice cubes and all.

  Forcing myself to go into the shadow of the palm trees, I looked for a stream or a spring or even puddle of rainwater. I stepped over masses of roots, through the cool, moist air trapped beneath that canopy, and got the feeling again I was being watched. Once I thought I saw a shape, a person walking toward me, but I blinked and he was gone. A mirage.

  I stumbled back out into the light, emerging at a different spot on the beach, around a curve. I left the thick palms, crunching through the fallen fronds, and the damp scent of that place gave way to salt and seaweed. The sun against the sand was so blinding I almost missed the shape down in the surf.

  A white craft. A charter. Forty feet long, blackened up one side, beached and listing starboard.

  The Last Chance.

  “Holy God,” I said to no one, and sprinted, kicking up sand. When I reached the side and stopped, I was winded and woozy.

  “Mom? Felix?”

  No response from the shadows under the canopy. Waves swelled and faded and beat the shore. All around drifted the smell of engine oil and suntan lotion and neoprene wet suits, which were still bungeed to the benches, life-sized dolls with all the bones removed. Tanks too. BCs—most of them had stayed in their tethers.

  I searched for water bottles and found none. No food either. I sat beside a tank and ran a hand over one of the tethers. You always taught me to keep the bungees tight so we didn’t lose our gear in rough seas. Take care of your gear, you said, take care of yourself. A lot of good it did me, I remember thinking.

  I didn’t appreciate it then, all the stuff that had made it through. No one does, I guess. Appreciate what’s left, I mean, after a storm takes your life and flips it upside down. So I was thinking about all the cell phones and the ice chest full of fruit and the flare gun. Kinda like you, lying in your bunk, missing your ceiling fan and your reggae playlist and your minifridge. But at least you still had us, across town, waiting for you.

  Another sound came to me over the waves. At first I thought it was Felix, crying. But a deep breath cut off the sound.

  It was me. Crying like I hadn’t cried since you went away, huddled in the shade of our ruined charter. And I wasn’t crying for the people who’d died that morning, who were dragged screaming into the ocean like fish bits. No, I was too selfish to think of them. I was crying for what I needed most, my family back again, more than water or a rescue. I was crying for Felix. My mother. And you. Always you.

  Click.

  My eyes snapped open. That sound had a direct line to my heart. I knew it, from the time you took me into the woods to shoot beer cans.

  I inched around. My instincts told me no sudden movements.

  A man’s shadow blocked the sun, which had dipped a good five feet. It burned a corona around his shape. I squinted, shifted. A Colt pistol in his hand, the kind you first schooled me on, before we moved up to the Glock and the rifle.

  The gun shook, barely. That much I could see. Maybe tremors meant he’d lost his nerve. Or maybe it meant he was out of control.

  “Hey,” the man said. “Get up!”

  I didn’t.

  “Do you speak English?”

  “Of course I speak English.”

  “Well, get up, then. Now.”

  I rose to my feet, and the corona behind the man with the gun disappeared.

  He wasn’t so much a man as a boy, around my age if I had to guess. Acne covered both his cheeks—speckled red and faint, like it was just clearing up—where it wasn’t covered with a poor attempt at a beard. His dark hair brushed the collar of a dirty white shirt. His eyes were wide-spaced, which gave him a sort of peaceful, farm-boy look, as if he was used to staring out over grain fields instead of holding a gun.

  I kept my voice calm. Soothing. “You were on Matt’s boat, right? The science trip? I was on the other one. I’m one of the dive masters.”

  His expression stayed blank.

  “Remember? Your boat was going to take our divers out to the reef at the Haystacks”—I spoke slowly as if he had sunstroke, which at the time I thought likely—“because of the accident.”

  “Yes, I remember the accident,” he said, his face hardening. He said accident with such venom I would’ve backed up a step if there hadn’t been a boat behind me. We watched each for a good minute, both of us barefoot in the sand, while I figured out what had happened.

  I put my hands out, palms up, and he flinched.

  I took a step forward. “We’re both stuck here, and we both have to get home, so put the gun down.”

  “Home,” the guy said, the gun wavering an inch.

  “Yes, home,” I said, reaching out to push his gun hand down, toward the sand. He let me, and I exhaled.

  “Home,” he said, running a palm over his face. “I hadn’t considered it.” He looked me over again, calculating. Considering something. I had to keep myself from bolting. The look in his eyes . . . I felt like I’d just glimpsed the underside of a rock.

  I watched him struggle with himself, as if he didn’t want to cry in front of me. Behind him was a long stretch of thick palms, up off the white sand beach. They moved like seaweed caught in a current, and I blinked, because I was imagining the trunks bending, as if they’d been caught in a Category 5 hurricane. And then I blinked again, and they straightened up, like I’d dreamed it.

  Dehydration. That’s what I thought then, but of course I was wrong. I just didn’t know it yet. And I had the weird feeling yet again, that I—no, we—were being watched, and I also felt something else. Even if this guy was losing it, at least I wasn’t alone anymore.

  He tucked the pistol into his waistband. Now that I could focus on something other than a gun in my face, I noticed the stains on his clothes. Patches of soil that must’ve come from the forest. His shirt used to have sleeves. He’d apparently ripped them off, exposing his broad, wiry shoulders. That shirt had once been white. Pants too.

  Despite the full sun, cold rushed through me, and I wanted to sit before I fell down. Because I was wrong about him. He’d been here on the island more than a few hours. He’d been here at least a few weeks. Which meant one thing.

  The guy with the gun wasn’t from the science trip.

  The man-boy took a few steps back in the sand, his gaze on mine, as if he expected me to go for a knife or a bomb or a garrote wire.

  He took the gun from his waistband again and waved it at me. “You tell anyone you saw me, and I’ll come back. I’ll kill your whole family.”

  And then he turned and walked toward the trees, disappearing like a fish slipping back into the kelp forest, and then into the deep.

  ENTRY 9

  YOU WOULD’VE FOLLOWED the mystery guy into the palm trees. He had water, if he’d been here long enough for his clothes to fray and his beard to grow half an inch. You would do what had to be done.

  That long summer reading list you made for me last year rose up in my head, full of stories like The Tempest and Moby-Dick and Life of Pi. Always you picked the ocean for me, p
reparing me for this moment, I guess, although that makes me sound like I believe in fate or something, which I don’t. And after seeing the man-boy with the pistol, I couldn’t stop thinking about Lord of the Flies. And the last thing I wanted was a replay of Piggy and a bloody rock, with me holding the rock.

  I decided to find water another way.

  I spent the next hour in the palm trees, looking for hydration. The air, once I stepped into the shadows of the forest, dropped fifteen degrees, oddly, as if I’d just entered a basement, the kind old ladies use for roots and mushrooms and other things that shy from the light. The forest floor gave underfoot, as if made of flesh rather than roots and earth. Palm fronds, green with brown edges and some paper-thin ghosts of leaves, lay in drifts against trunks and in hollows made by their thick roots.

  This place seemed not so much a forest as a vast cave. I know that sounds strange, but it’s what I kept thinking as I tromped around, mouth begging for water.

  Water. People describe being thirsty as burning. A burning thirst. But it’s so much worse. You aren’t thirsty. You become thirst. It takes over your whole being, that drive for a cold swallow, the glass beaded with drops snaking down the sides, and yes, you can remember how good it is to drink. The whole glass. And another. So here’s my next confession.

  After a while I stopped thinking about you. And Felix. And Mom.

  It shocked me later, to remember how easily thoughts of my family had been replaced by a single basic need.

  After an hour search, I’d found no puddles. The few coconuts I came across broke easily and were black inside. I picked up a shell and dug in a moist spot. Nothing.

  By the time I made it across the hot sands and back to the boat, the heat had stretched me thin, and my gums felt like they were pulling away from my teeth. I don’t remember being afraid of dying then. Just all the stuff that came before it.

  And then I remembered the lessons you taught me on those camping trips. How to start a fire, how to navigate by stars.