Monstrum (10 page)

Murphy tries to be the voice of reason. “Mrs. Torres,” he says gently. “We haven't found any flares. We've been looking, but—”

“Liars!” Mrs. Torres pauses her frenzied search long enough to drop her face into her hands and roar with frustration. This goes on and on while she rocks back and forth and writhes as though her soul is being ripped from her body. “Why are you all lying to me?”

“Oh, my God,” Espi claps a hand over her own mouth and tries to control her crying, making her shoulders shake with effort. “What's wrong with her? What's happening?”

In a reflexive female move that supersedes the years of dislike and hard feelings, Maggie and An surround Espi on either side and put their arms around her.

Murphy is still working on Mrs. Torres. Bending at the waist, he grasps her under the arms and levers her up to standing again. “There, now,” he tells her. “It'll be all right.”

Mrs. Torres turns her tear-slicked face up to his and struggles to speak through her sobbing hiccups. “We h-have to get h-help. They can't s-see us. They don't know we're h-here.”

“I know,” Murphy says. “But I need you to calm down. You're scaring the kids. Look at poor Esperanza.”

Mrs. Torres doesn't look at her daughter. Instead, she brightens suddenly, and a manic new light flickers to life in her eyes. “I have to swim to the yacht,” she announces.

“No!” several of us shout.

Murphy keeps his cool, as well as a firm grip on Mrs. Torres' torso. “I don't think that's such a good idea right now,” he says. “Why don't we keep looking for the flares, eh? There's a good lass.”

Mrs. Torres hesitates and then nods in a sudden show of cooperation that doesn't fool me for a second. Something about the way her eyes dart back and forth, as though she's plotting her next move, makes me brace for the worst.

“Yes,” she says. “You're right.”

Murphy smiles, visibly relieved, and that's when she springs, backhanding him with a balled fist in one stealthy movement that's swift enough to make a lioness proud.

Murphy yelps with pain, falls to one side, and ends up sprawled on the raft's floor. The rest of us are still yelling with shock and scrambling to process what's happening when Mrs. Torres climbs onto the outer tube of the raft and jumps.

M
rs. Torres disappears into the depths, displacing so much water that it's more of an explosion than a splash. The raft pitches in her wake, and the rest of us wobble before regaining our footing. Murphy lurches to his feet and curses, his mouth bloody. At first I'm afraid he's going to attempt a rescue by swimming after her, but he merely leans over the side and gestures to Mike and Axel.

“Give me one of the oars,” Murphy commands. “Quick, like!”

“No-ooo! Mami!” Espi is halfway to jumping in after her mother. But before she can do more than swing one leg over the side, Carter and Gray, whose reflexes have been honed by years of basketball, grab her arms and pull her back inside.

Espi goes wild, thrashing, kicking and screaming to get free. The boys have their hands full trying to control her, and it's all they can do to remain upright while protecting their eyes from her clawing fingers.

“Mami! Mami!”

I can see the outline of Mrs. Torres's head where she's surfaced, about ten feet from the raft. She treads water for a second, catching her breath, sweeping strands of her long hair out of her eyes and getting her bearings.

“Espi.” She raises her hand in a slow wave, like what she's doing is no more dangerous than an outing in the kiddy pool at the local YMCA. “I'm swimming to the yacht, okay,
mija
?” She points to a distant spot that's as empty and desolate as every other spot out there in the dark. “It's right there, you see? I'm going to bring back help. You be brave for me, okay? I'll be right back.”

The sound of her mother's calm voice manages to settle Espi down a little. She stills, although Gray and Carter keep their arms around her and seem determined not to repeat Murphy's mistake by relaxing.

“You need to get back in the boat, Mami,” she calls. “The water isn't safe. Stay there so we can row to you. I don't want you going out in the dark where we won't be able to find you again.”

This sounds perfectly reasonable to me, but there's no dissuading Mrs. Torres. With a blown kiss and a final wave, she starts swimming with what looks like a pretty strong freestyle stroke.

Espi loses it again, twisting and trying to break free, although this time she's a bit more coherent.

“Follow her,” she shouts at Murphy. “We have to follow—”

“We're on it,” Murphy says grimly, directing Mike and Axel, who are grabbing the oars and settling in to row. “Graydon and Carter, you two need to follow along with the other raft. Let's go, now.”

“If we let go of Espi,” Carter gasps, still trying to hang onto her as she struggles, “she's going over the side. And then we're screwed.”

“Let me go!” Espi shouts. “I can catch her if you let me—”

“No one else goes in the water!”
Murphy bellows.

A couple of beats of chaos follows. Murphy and Espi shout at each other, Espi struggles, Axel and Mike begin to row their raft, and the rest of us stare past the front of our raft, desperately keeping an eye on Mrs. Torres as her splashes grow fainter. I strain to keep her in sight, but before long, all I can see of her is the flash of her watch as her left arm swings over her head, and then, too soon, even that's gone.

And then Sammy's voice cuts across the noise.

“Guys?” he asks, pointing at something behind our raft. “What's that?”

Oh, no
, I think, turning to look over my shoulder and fully expecting to see the same sort of nothing I saw when Mrs. Torres started seeing a yacht that wasn't there.
Not another hallucination.

But there is something out there.

A huge hump—as big as a compact car, maybe bigger—is speeding toward us, slicing through the water as it goes. I look for the telltale black and white markings of an orca, but it's too dark and the thing is too fast for me to make out any details. All I know is that it's creating a wake turbulent enough to cause serious problems for the rafts, which suddenly seem no more substantial than a hard plastic kiddy pool you can get for ten bucks at the nearest hardware store.

Someone yells a warning; someone else curses; I make a shocked, strangled sound, which is as much of a scream as I can manage when my throat has constricted to the width of a needle.

What is it?

My bewildered brain flounders with the effort of forcing this unknown entity into a category that I can recognize, but nothing fits. Submarine? Orca? Shark? I can't tell, and it doesn't matter. Any one of the three is more than enough to kill us all, and kill us good.

Terror freezes me solid, leaving me with blocks of cement in my lungs and a heart incapable of beating. If there is something we could or should do—some defense we should launch—I can't begin to think what it would be.

Oh, God.

Oh, God . . . oh, God . . . ohgodohgodohgod . . . please, God . . . please, no—

“Get back!” Murphy shouts, shoving us away from the raft's edge. “Get down!”

Instinct takes over. We hit the deck in a heap, huddling together and covering our heads just in time. The thing, which seems to be gathering speed, streaks past us. Almost as an afterthought, it brushes just underneath the outer left edges of the rafts.

A brush is all it takes.

The rafts flip, one after the other, launching everyone into the water with the force of a catapult. Thinking quickly, I'm able to suck in a deep breath before plunging into the cold and cluttered water. I open my eyes and try to find something that might help me live, but there's nothing but the stinging burn of salt water and the murky gloom of this foul-smelling sea. I kick and flail in my panic, connecting with sargassum, raft, supplies and the thrashing limbs of the others. The surface seems way too far away to reach on my dwindling oxygen reserves, but I try anyway and struggle higher.

I'm not going to make it, and the only two choices available to me are to let my ballooning lungs explode or try to breathe water. Seventeen years of involuntary reflex wins. I gasp and choke, and that is the moment when someone grabs me by the hair and yanks my head above the water.

Pain sears through me, collecting in my chest, throat and scalp. I cough and convulse, trying to break free of whatever's got me, and that's when a voice pierces my hysteria.

“Bria! Calm down! Don't make me hit you!”

Wait, what?
Gray?
My streaming eyes are useless at the moment, but I reach out and find the solid strength of his chest and shoulders, and my relief is infinite. It's going to take me a minute to clear my airway, though, and I continue to hack up a lung. I squeeze his forearms to let him know I'm back in my rational mind, and I feel some of the tension leave his body.

“Good girl.” Taking one of my hands, he plants it on hard rubber. “Here's the raft. Hang on to it. I have to help the others.”

Nodding, I hook my other arm on to the raft and hold tight.

He swims off and my eyes slowly adjust enough for me to understand exactly how dire our situation has now become.

The raft I'm clinging to is upside-down, and I'm not the only one holding on for dear life. I do a quick head count around the perimeter to see who's still alive:

Sammy and An at the raft's far end;

Maggie beside them;

Murphy next to me, with a distraught Espi on his other side;

Axel and Mike; and . . .

“Carter!” Gagging, I have to pause to spit out a mouthful of water. “Wh-where's Carter?”

“Over there,” Murphy says, pointing, and I see Gray and Carter frantically diving and resurfacing nearby. “They're trying to find Macy.”

“Oh, my God.” My heart contracts, and I press a hand to my aching chest because I know that's going to be a futile search. An unconscious girl with no life preserver would never be able to stay afloat long enough to not drown. It just wouldn't happen. “Macy,” I whisper.

“We need to work on flipping the raft right side up,” Murphy says. “Before that animal comes back.”

That galvanizes me. I stare hard at the surrounding area, but see no signs of the churning water that signals the thing's approach. Overwhelmed with relief, I perform a quick inventory. The other raft, which is floating several feet away with a length of rope still attached to it, has been reduced to a shredded and deflated piece of rubber, suitable for a tarp but nothing else. The oars are gone. The supplies are gone.

“Where's Mrs. Torres?” I quietly ask Murphy.

At this, Espi drops her head onto her arms where they lay folded across the raft and begins to sob inconsolably.

“No idea.” Murphy's face is pale and bleak. “We lost sight of her.”

He pauses, then raises his voice to speak to the group just as Gray and Carter swim back and take their places around the raft's perimeter. “On the count of three, then, we're going to try to flip this thing right way up—”

A high-pitched, hair-straightening female scream rises from the surrounding darkness. It comes from everywhere—right and left, water and sky, deep inside my head and along the outside of my shivering skin. It goes on endlessly.

Everyone jumps with renewed fear. Espi turns in a frantic circle, searching in every direction, and shrieks.

“Mami!
Mami, where are you?
”

There's splashing now—I can hear it joining with Mrs. Torres' agony. It's a macabre sound that makes me wish I'd been born without ears. The rest of us are frantic in our uselessness, crying out with alarm, paddling away from the raft's relative safety, straining our eyes against the impenetrable horizon—as though we could find Mrs. Torres out there, much less rescue her from her gruesome death with our bare hands. Finally we paddle back, because we are cowardly failures.