Close Reach (8 page)

When the man got within reach of her makeshift pike, she feigned a jab at his face, and while he was bringing the pipe around to block it, she slashed downward and sliced at his ankle. She saw the knife cut through the cheap plastic fabric of his foul weather pants and felt it go deep. The man screamed and stepped back, leaving a long smear of blood on the white deck. She’d been hoping to sever his Achilles tendon, but he was still on his feet. She’d missed. She jabbed again at his face, not wanting to let him collect himself. But this time his pipe connected squarely with the knife blade, and he charged past it and closed on her before she could draw
back.

He was screaming when he tackled her.

They went down together, and he landed heavily on top of her, holding the pipe in both hands and using it to crush her throat. She fought him, but he was too heavy and too strong. Her last idea before she blacked out was to roll with him over the side. She was tethered to the boat; he wasn’t. It might work. She got one arm around his back, clamped down on him and rolled, but he’d already anticipated the move and kept her pinned, pressing harder with the pipe.

They stayed put on the deck.

She felt the trapped blood rush in her brain and knew she was going. But she also knew he wouldn’t kill her. Not yet. They had Dean and Lena and the others in cages on the crab boat’s aft deck. For what purpose she had no idea, but they wouldn’t keep them like that without some reason. And she’d killed two of the men, so they wouldn’t simply murder her on the side of her boat with a pipe.

Not here and not now. They had other plans.

Nothing about this was going to be easy.

There were hands around her waist and someone’s breath was on her neck, but they didn’t feel like rough or dangerous hands and there was no threat in the soft breath, and so she did not jerk awake but lay in a haze of pain and settled back into the comfort of the hands and the breath and the rhythm of the engines.

Later, she opened her eyes briefly and looked through the wire bars of the cage at the sea foaming by in the wake of the ship, the wave chasing them from astern but never catching up. It made her dizzy to watch it, so she closed her eyes again. The hands had gripped her more tightly when she stirred but relaxed when she fell back to sleep, and the breath on her neck remained calm and constant. She slept in fits and woke to watch the stern wave when she could stand it, and the hands holding her let go now and then to tug at the rough wool blankets to keep their naked bodies covered. Then, when they came back, the hands were cold against her bare stomach from being outside the blankets and if she woke in fright from the coldness of the hands, the susurration of breath on her neck rose to a low
shhhhhh
in her ear and she would be still again.

She didn’t know how long the coughing went on before she woke and was aware of its sound or how long she was awake and watching the naked woman coughing up blood on the bottom of a cage before she and that woman merged, and she became the woman who was retching on the clotted blood that was caught in her throat, her pale blue fingers wound into the wire bars of the trap as she leaned away from the warmth of the blankets and spit out the blood. When she was done, she wiped her mouth with her arm and moved to get back under the blanket, and that was when she felt the hands again.

“Are you all right now?”

She turned and saw Lena. She was partly on Lena’s lap, and the blankets were wound around the two of them where they were huddled in the far corner of the trap.

“Can you talk?”

“I think so.”

But it hurt badly to talk, and her voice was a scratch and a whisper.

She remembered Dean then. She craned around to look for him in the higher cages, but there were only naked frozen men who’d died with their hands locked in the bars and pink foam frozen around their lips and noses. She saw half a dozen men like that. But no Dean.

“They took him inside about an hour ago,” Lena said.

“Was he alive?”

“Yes,” Lena said. She gently pulled Kelly back onto her lap and put the blankets around them. Kelly moved her hands up to her throat and felt it carefully with her fingertips. It was swollen badly. Maybe in front of a mirror it wouldn’t look so bad, but with just the touch of her fingers it felt like a bubble of blood the size of a grapefruit was lodged in her esophagus. Lena pulled her hands away and held them under the blankets.

“I wouldn’t touch that too much, not for now, anyway,” Lena said.

Kelly dropped her hands beneath the blankets, and Lena took them into hers.

“Does it hurt?” Lena asked.

Kelly nodded, then tried to whisper. “It’s bad. But it’ll be okay.”

“They took Jim inside. Maybe two days ago. It’s hard to tell the time.”

Kelly’s mind went black.

“That was the last you saw him?”

“Yes, and he was alive then,” Lena said, and Kelly could hear the small note of hope in
her voice. She really didn’t know.

“Have they taken you inside?”

“At least once a day. Like for you. Were you awake for it?”

“For what?”

Lena answered with silence, just looking at Kelly’s face and stroking her hands under the blankets. Kelly wondered how this girl could spare any pity.

“Maybe they didn’t do anything. But—are you hurt anywhere else?”

Kelly hurt everywhere. But she didn’t say it. Lena held her, and they sat in silence for a while. Kelly wondered if this was what it meant to be in shock, and then thought, no, if she could think to ask the question, then it couldn’t be. She was just hurt badly. But it was better to be hurt than to lose her mind.

Then she looked at the frozen men in the cages around them.

“What about them?”

“Already gone when I got here,” Lena said. She nodded with her chin toward the shrunken, frost-covered corpse of an older man in the cage next to theirs. “Except for him. His name was Richard.”

“You talked to him?”

“A little. They’d already taken his clothes, and he didn’t have a blanket.”

“He was delirious?”

Kelly saw frozen icicles of blood dangling from the wire bars of Richard’s trap. As though he’d torn himself to pieces trying to get closer to Lena, who had blankets. It must have been bad.

“Delirious, yeah. I think they were from a research ship. All six of them. The other five were maybe Richard’s students.”

“What do they want?”

“Money. They took our boat, they took the research ship. They took your yacht. They can get a lot for the boats, but it’s not all they’re after. They want, you know, account numbers. Routing numbers or whatever.”

“That’s why they took Jim and Dean inside?”

“I think so,” Lena whispered. “To get them to tell the numbers.”

Kelly opened her eyes again and looked at the husk of the man whose name had been Richard. Once they had the boats, they’d have everyone’s papers. Passports, ship registrations, mail forwarded from port to port until it finally reached the boats. If they had satellite Internet reception, they could do searches. They’d find out who was worth keeping and who could just be tossed aside. Maybe Richard and his graduate students hadn’t been worth it to these men. But Jim and Dean would be. Checking, savings, Vanguard accounts, IRAs, credit lines, offshore
accounts—the whole accumulation of digital wealth that could be wiped out in an instant with the right numbers and passcodes.

“They asked you for account numbers?”

“Not bank accounts,” Lena whispered. “They had my Community Health Index number written on a piece of paper. Had it written down before they even boarded us, like they already knew who I was.”

She’d thought Lena was English from her accent. But she knew about the Community Health Index system, knew the sorts of records that would be on file at the main office in Edinburgh. If the men already had Lena’s number when they caught her, it meant they hadn’t scooped her up at random.

They’d sought her out.

“You’re Scottish?” Kelly asked.

She was dizzy again, the waves rolling under the boat and the bloody lump in her throat working against her ability to think. She tried to focus, and she felt the girl nodding against the exposed skin above her shoulders.

“From Inverness,” Lena said. “They put it in my face, the CHI number, and asked if it was mine. They didn’t ask anything else. I don’t really have any money. My mum raised me on her own, and we—we didn’t have much. The boat, all that, was Jim’s.”

“You met Jim in Costa Rica.”

Under the blankets, Lena stopped stroking her hands.

“You told me,” Kelly said. “In Peru.”

“You’re—” She paused, searching her memory. “You’re Dr. Reid?”

“Yeah. Kelly. We were anchored at Adelaide, too. I forget how many days ago. We heard you on the radio before it cut off. When they started jamming you.”

Lena shifted beneath her but held her with the same care. She started to stroke Kelly’s hands again.

“They’d chased us,” Lena said. “We’d thought we’d gotten away, that they wouldn’t be able to find us in all the ice. We thought we were safe.”

Kelly didn’t say anything. She knew what it had been like. She knew the long dread of the ship’s coming and then the sharp terror when it arrived and swung around to face you. The whole world dimmed so that it held nothing but that single and awful second when you knew that it saw you, that it wasn’t going to pass by and leave you be.

“These men, how many are there?”

Kelly knew she’d need to stop talking soon or she’d lose whatever was left of her voice. But she had to know this much.

“Seven?”

“You’ve seen them all at once?”

“No. I only saw some when they took us. They left one man on
Arcturus
to bring it back.”

“Back to where?”

Lena shook her head; Kelly could feel her bangs move against the back of her neck.

“I don’t know. Richard said they left a guy on the research boat,
Palida.
They took a barrel over to your boat. Fuel, I guess. The man who took it didn’t come back. And I’ve seen a bunch of them when they bring me inside. But I don’t think there’s more than seven.”

“Counting the ones on our boats?”

“Yeah.”

Kelly nodded to herself because now she understood the two radar targets she’d seen coming out of Adelaide. One had been
La Araña,
but the second had been Lena and Jim’s boat.
Arcturus
had turned east earlier, not heading into the main channel of the Drake Passage but staying closer to the southern continent.

“You’ve seen their faces?” Kelly asked.

“I think they’re Chilean. Military or something. Most of them are older. Forties, fifties. But one is really young. Younger than me.”

Kelly had been thinking maybe they weren’t even human. Maybe they wore their balaclavas and goggles to hide whatever was wrong with them. But they were just ordinary men.

“They speak Spanish?”

Lena nodded, then said, “But one of them, the young one, he speaks English, too.”

“You speak any Spanish?”

“Yeah.”

“There’s only five of them now,” Kelly said. “And three of them are on other boats. So that leaves two with us.”

“What—why five?”