Cut Off (33 page)

"Frying
shit
," Ke said, muffled. She pulled out an earplug. He circled the body. "Is it dead?"

Tristan drew the long knife from her belt, dropped, and plunged the blade into the alien's eye socket until she felt it click against the back of its skull. The body jerked and went still. "It's pretty fucking dead."

She withdrew the knife with a slurp. The smell of the spent shells was replaced by the pickled, sour scent of the creature's guts. It wore a sort of bandolier or vest and Tristan checked each pouch, extracting a blunt-barreled pistol and stuffing it in her pack. It also carried a number of small silver discs thicker and heavier than a quarter, like the one they'd seen on the dog's collar, as well as a plastic container of dried, pungent material that resembled giant fish flakes, minus the food coloring. Last was a pad that appeared blank. She left all of the non-gun things alone, wiped her knife on one of the pouches, and stood.

"Need to stay on the move. Faster than ever."

Ke frowned. "I thought they can't hear."

"They can't. But they can certainly trip over their dead friend's sludge."

Ke circled around the body and continued up the tube. It climbed gently but steadily. Over time, the carpet of orange widened, coming nearer and nearer to where the walls curved into the floor. Tristan thought the temperature might have dropped a couple degrees as the elevation had risen, but it was still warm and tight and she began to wonder if they would have enough water.

It was some three miles into the tubes before they hit their first fork. As they approached, Ke slowed, stopping before the Y-shaped branch. Both routes led upward. Both were matted with the orange flooring. Tristan moved from one to the other, trying to detect a breeze, but felt nothing.

Ke wiped his brow, grimacing down one of the forks. "Don't even suggest we split up."

Tristan swigged from her water, allowing herself a single mouthful. "While we're at it, why don't we desecrate their ancient alien burial ground, too? Let's take a break and think a minute."

They sat down, the matter coating the rocks giving under their weight. Ke had no sooner sat down than he got back up and headed down the right fork. He crouched and picked something up. "This is like a fucked up Hansel and Gretel."

In his palm, he held a tiny silver flower.

They rested a few minutes, then stood and trotted into the right branch of the tubes. Tristan's breathing was steady enough, but her sides were beginning to ache. At least she'd trained herself to run in the sand and her calves were more than used to the sponginess beneath them.

Half a mile later, the tunnel forked again. They headed down the right branch, keeping close watch on the floor. After a hundred yards of nothing, they backtracked to the left and soon found a metal gecko charm resting on the orange. Past it, the tube inclined sharply, spiraling up into a ramp. Thirty feet up, the ramp leveled out and Tristan found herself before a pebbled, fleshy door.

It appeared seamless with the rock, but she knew better. She ran her fingertips near its edges until the skin of the orange shrank beneath her touch, revealing the gap between the door and its "frame." But as she pressed deeper, the matter pressed back. Her fingers got stuck halfway to the second knuckle; she tried to withdraw, but the orange clamped tight.

Panic geysered up her chest. She made herself breathe, relaxing her fingers. After a moment, the orange relaxed, too. She got out her knife and gave it a poke. The door wept a few drops of fluid, then sealed its cut.

"What's up?" Ke said. "Wait for one of them to come out, then bull rush it?"

Tristan leaned her shotgun against the wall and got the laser pistol from her pack. The man at the camp in the desert had used one so she knew it didn't require alien fingerprints or the like to activate. She aimed it at the rocky wall and thumbed one of the buttons at the side of the grip. Nothing. She tried the one on the other side: more nothing. With no other obvious options, she tried them together.

A pure white bolt flashed between her and the wall, so bright the night vision struggled to adjust. She shouted and twitched. The beam seared across the wall. Ke threw himself flat. The beam shut itself off. Vapor hung in the air, blocking her goggles. It smelled hot and dusty.

"Quit gawking and get ready," she said.

"You almost cut me in half!"

"Since when would your head count as half? Cover me."

He shook his head and grinned. She leveled the laser at the door, meaning to sizzle her way straight through, but the moment the beam touched the orange, the door sucked back from its frame, swinging open on its own weight.

Sunlight spilled over her. She pushed her goggles up her forehead and gazed on the prettiest garden she'd ever seen.

22

Ness' stomach shrank on itself. "Seen a lot of typhoons, have you?"

"A few," Sprite said. "Never from sea, though."

"Get the sails down. Get
everything
down. Then help me figure out how we're not going to die, because those clouds look like the Four Horsemen finally realized the end's been nigh for years now."

He ran from the cabin and found Sebastian in the prow staring into the black wall of clouds. Jarred from his alien reverie, Sebastian climbed the front mast, furling the sails and tying them tightly away. Ness made sure the hatches on the deck were latched, then headed belowdecks. They had stowed most of their goods in reasonably fast positions, but their cargo hadn't been tested by anything near as raging as the waters ahead. He moved about the stowage, checking lids and clasps, tying things to handles and each other, clicking panels shut. The space was low and cramped and he could hear Sprite and Sebastian thumping around above him. The boat rolled with increasing amplitude. Ness tumbled into a wall, stuck there by the angle of the yacht's list, then worked his way to the stairs and pulled himself up top.

In the minutes he'd been below, the skies had gone gray. The waves ahead were high and crested with white. Rain spattered the windshield.

"I don't know shit about any of this," he said, "but I'm pretty sure we want to be pointed into the waves. If we're sideways to them, we'll get rolled over."

"I'm trying," Sprite scowled from the wheel. "A lot harder to move with the sails down."

"Use the engine if you need to. No use saving gas now, is there? Not unless Davy Jones' locker has drive-thrus."

Sprite nodded and returned to the controls. Ness could hardly hear the engine come on over the rain and the waves, but he could feel the vibration beneath his feet. Sprite pointed their nose straight into the shifting horizon of the swells. The boat quit rolling and instead pitched front to back, cleaving through the surging gray waves.

The rain thickened until the individual drops merged into solid planes washing down the deck and windscreen. Wind tore through the masts, yanking at the rolled sails. The waves loomed higher and higher, the engine straining as they climbed each one, seeming to exhale in relief as they surged down the swell's back side.

"This is fucking crazy!" Sprite shouted at the top of his lungs.

Ness held fast to the metal handles on the wall, trying not to picture how small they must be in comparison to the storm. "How are we doing?"

"I want to go back to Macau!"

"At this rate, we'll be swept there in a few minutes." He was about to say more, but they slid down the back of the largest wave yet and he was preoccupied with re-swallowing his breakfast.

The storm plateaued for some time, whaling on the yacht without doing any obvious damage to anything besides Ness' nerves, which were ready to pop like guitar strings keyed too tight.

"Should I ease down the throttle?" Sprite said.

"Keep doing whatever you're doing," Ness said. "Anyway, the faster we get through this, the better, right?"

"Your planet storms nicely," Sebastian signed.

"Is that something your people value?"

"Some. Don't yours?"

"Some," Ness gestured. "Preferably when it's happening to someone else."

Sebastian clicked his claws together rapidly. "This is same for all excitements. But if you experience them and still exist you would not trade them for anything."

The rain and wind clobbered the yacht. Just as Ness was beginning to think it might be slowing, the tarp they'd used to patch up the window broken in the gunfight gave way, flapping madly. Rain and spray burst into the cabin, slicking the floor. Sebastian clawed forward to wrestle the tarp back into place. They banged down a wave and crashed into the next, a wall of water bursting across the deck and gushing against the cabin. Sebastian fell, clinging to the metal handholds. Cool water foamed across the floor. It drained through the back entry and the slots at the base of the walls, but it was replaced every time they struck the larger waves.

When the ship tipped back, he saw the blackness of the sky; when it tumbled forward, he saw nothing but the water rushing up to swallow them. A hatch tore open on the deck and orange lifejackets spun into the air. The fridge door clunked open. Pineapples and breadfruit rolled across the cabin floor. Holding to the handle set in the wall, Ness crouched down, trying to snatch up what he could. Once they hit the bottom of the wave, he scrambled to toss what he'd caught back into the fridge, then slammed the door tight. He was almost back to his handhold when the next wave struck.

He tumbled back through the cabin and banged into the elevated platform that held one of the beds. Dazed, he lay there for a few wave cycles, water gushing past him, then found that his body wasn't a broken doll after all. Sebastian was up front, entangled in every handhold he could find, bulbous eyes staring at the darkened world. Sprite clung to the wheel, black hair scraggling his eyes.

"You okay?" Sprite yelled.

"Fine. How's the ship?"

"Above water!"

He'd no sooner said this than a wave jumped the rails and smashed into the windshield. They both winced, throwing their arms in front of their faces. The boat rolled, listing; Ness felt himself tipping, his bare feet sliding across the floor. The ship leveled and cut its way down another dune of water.

The sea rolled on, gigantic, titanic, as hostile and inhumane as the plague. More than once, the nose of the yacht disappeared beneath the surface and Ness thought it was the end—Sebastian might survive, so long as he wasn't torn apart by the tides, but Ness and Sprite would drown in moments—but each time, it popped back up a moment later, foam boiling off its sides. The engine coughed and muttered but pressed on.

After a while, exhausted and sick from motion and terror, he crawled to a bunk, pressed himself against the wall, and clung there, nose buried in the thin, musty mattress. Eventually, impossibly, he fell asleep. Either that or a swell banged his head against the wall. Whatever the case, Ness woke to find that they were still tossing up and down, but far less wrenchingly.

He found his feet and staggered to the front of the cabin. Sebastian remained entangled in the handholds, sprawled across the wet floor. Sprite sagged against the wheel, mouth hanging open in focus. Now and then a bolder wave dashed through the rails, but there was far less water incoming from the sides and from above.

"Still floating?" Ness croaked.

"I feel marinated," Sprite said. "Did you
sleep
?"

"I think so."

"Can I?"

"I think you're our best shot to make it out of here."

Sprite slowly shook his head. "I'm too tired to feel tired anymore."

Ness rubbed his face. The idea of piloting the boat through these waves made him want to fold in on himself until he was a single speck, but Sprite looked dead on his feet.

"Tell you what," he said. "Show me what you're doing and I'll see if I've got what it takes."

A pure smile spread over Sprite's face. "It's easy. All you have to do is watch the waves until your eyes are ready to sink into your face and roll down your neck."

Sprite was obviously cracking up—hopefully from nothing more than exhaustion—so Ness made a special effort to get the gist of the technique. Pretty straightforward, really. Figure out what angle the wave was coming in at, then point the nose to hit it perpendicularly. Ness got into it so deeply that, when he looked up a few minutes later, he discovered Sprite had collapsed into a bunk.

It was nerve-racking stuff, knowing that one wrong move could send them all tumbling to a watery grave, but it was essentially the same maneuver over and over. Ness passed the time by pretending it was an early (and failed) arcade game. Putting a bit of psychic distance between himself and the consequences of what he was engaged in helped quiet the worst of his anxiety.

The waves calmed, shrinking bit by bit. After an hour, Sebastian rousted himself and stood for a look outside.

"Small waves," the creature gestured. "I thought we would become dirt for the sea."

"Same here."

He didn't voice his concern that they might have entered the eye of the storm and could be in for more once they crossed into the other side. The rain slowed to a drizzle. The wind drooped to moody gusts, then quit altogether. Ness killed the engines. Earlier in the trip, the current had been flowing west, working against them, but for the moment, it was dragging them southeast. Since that was sort of in the right direction, he let things be, then rousted Sprite to help take a look at the damage.

In one sense, it wasn't so bad. The sails were soaked to hell and pretty beat up, but they were more or less intact. Same deal with the rigging, and though a line or two had snapped, they had lots to spare down in the hold. The satellite gear outside the cabin had vanished, but who gave a crap about that? Beyond these minor issues, the boat seemed to be ship-shape.

In another way, the damage was lethal. The boat had water tanks down in its belly, but early in their work, they had discovered these were full of mud, dead bugs, algae, and general awful slime. Rather than mucking this out and rinsing the whole thing with bleach, they'd chosen to forgo them in favor of the various tubs they'd brought onto the yacht for themselves.