Monstrum (8 page)

Without a word, Gray turns his back on me and returns to his oar.

“Jackass,” I murmur to his departing figure.

Gray looks over his shoulder at me, his expression murderous. “Say something else,” he challenges.

This shuts me up.

Looking for a dignified way off the playing field, I turn to the rest of the gang, all of whom are hovering over where Macy lies on the floor, trying to assess her condition.

“If we could just find some dry clothes to put her in,” Sammy is saying, “that would be a good start.”

“You guys search through the junk Bria grabbed,” Carter says. “We need to work on getting us away from the plane.”

The plane.

It's going fast, with only a long and shiny strip from the top of the fuselage and the nose visible now. As the raft moves backward, out of harm's way, water begins to churn harder around the plane's edges, and again I have the feeling that the plane is fighting back and trying to resist this violent fate. For one breathless second, it lingers, where it is, and I find myself rooting for it. Not because it could fly us to safety or offer protection of any sort. But because if this ocean, which looks so placid at the moment, can do that to a plane, what will it do to us before this ordeal is over?

Until this very moment, I'd had no idea how massive the plane is.

Or how relentless the ocean is.

Nothing can win against these dark waters.

The churning cranks harder, into an obscene boil, and the plane protests the only way it can. The aluminum creaks and whines. Unseen parts of its anatomy snap and pop. Sparks fly and hiss as they hit the water. Steam and smoke rise.

And then, with a final gurgling hiccup, the last few inches of the plane sink out of view. My chest squeezes, hard, and I don't know if my despair is for the plane, us, or both. All I know is that that plane was our last link to civilization, and now we're alone and in the dark with this endless water.

We all lapse into an awed and hopeless hush that stretches farther than the invisible horizon.

I'm still staring at the spot where the plane is now making its long journey to the bottom of the ocean, watching all that foaming turbulence slowly subside, when I am caught by surprise.

Someone—Espi, I realize with a start—has swooped in to hug me. It'd be less of a shock to look up and find Santa Claus in my arms.

“Wha—?” I say.

“Thank you,” she says in my ear. “For saving our lives.”

Over her shoulder, I gaze out at our new landscape. There is the sparkling black of the ocean and the flat black of the sky above it. I cannot understand why the ocean sparkles when there's no moon or stars to project light onto the waves, and I cannot understand why the sky is so impenetrable when I know there's no storm and it can't be later than five or six o'clock in the afternoon. I cannot envision what kind of creature made that eerie sound I heard right after the plane crash, nor can I convince myself that I really didn't hear any creature at all and it was just my imagination.

And there's more.

My brain launches into an unwelcome slideshow of all the awful at-sea stories I've ever heard:
Jaws;
the torpedoing and sinking of the USS
Indianapolis
during World War II, which we read about in AP American history; the doomed whaling ship
Essex,
which we learned about when we read
Moby-Dick,
which didn't end well for most of the crew
;
and that one poor bomber guy, also from WWII, who got shot down and drifted for something like forty days before being rescued—by the Japanese, who threw him into a prison camp for two or three years. I read parts of the book about him to Mona during her last month in the hospital, and it was not a happy story. Trust me.

I think of all the ways we can still suffer horribly and die gruesomely out here, and I wonder if it wouldn't be better to throw ourselves on top of the sinking plane, hitch a ride to the bottom, and get the dying over with right now, quick and easy.

My heart feels like a crumbling stone inside my chest.

“Don't thank me yet,” I tell Espi grimly.

“S
hh,” An says suddenly, even though no one is talking. “Listen. Hear that?”

My first thought is that it's that terrible creature, and my entire body stiffens even though I'm determined not to freak out. Espi and I pull out of our hug. We all cock our ears and peer into the darkness, but nothing happens. All I can hear, aside from the water, is Macy's incoherent moaning.

“What're we listening for?” Maggie asks.

An holds up a wait-a-minute index finger, and then, yes, I hear something faint and bizarre.

“Oooo-ear-mee?”

We all exchange excited looks, and I know they heard it, too.

It's a shout. A man's shout.

But it sounds warped and distant, as though the sound waves are being bounced through a funhouse before they reach us.

“It's another survivor,” I say. “I thought they were bailing out down at the other end of the plane.”

“Yeah, but where are they now?” asks Gray.

I hear it again:

“Eee-won-air?”

“Mami?” Espi leans over the tube and shouts into the darkness. “Is that you, Mami? I'm over here!”

“Oooos-at?” calls the voice.

I can't tell what direction it's coming from—it seems to originate from everywhere and nowhere—or if it's getting any closer.

“Over here!” Espi twists around and shouts at Gray and Carter, who seem nonplussed as they shoot each other sidelong looks. “Row over this way! It was coming from over here!”

The boys hesitate. “I thought it was coming from over there,” Carter says, pointing in the opposite direction.

“Mmm-ear!” says the voice.

We're all shouting now:

“
What?
Where are you?”

“We're trying to find you!”

“We can't understand you!”

“I said,
I'm here,
” says Murphy in his unmistakable grumble, and he's now so close and clear that he may as well have had a megaphone pressed up to our ears. This freaks us out, and we all jump as though we've been jabbed in the ribs with a fork. “What the feck is wrong with yer hearing?”

And there it is, suddenly, not twenty feet away—a second raft, with Murphy at one of the oars.

It's just . . . there.

Maybe it materialized. Maybe it was there the whole time. Maybe the darkness simply decided to open up and spit it out. Or maybe this kind of weirdness is our new normal, and we'd better get used to it.

Because here's another bizarre thing: it's now a little lighter, and I discover that I can see better. It's not the breaking light of dawn, or anything like that. The sky is simply a charcoal that allows a bit of illumination, where before it was as impenetrable as a black hole smothered in onyx flannel.

Stunned, I watch as Murphy's raft comes closer, and the shell-shocked faces of the other survivors materialize out of the gloom:

Axel Hendersen, his best friend, Mike Smith, and—

“Mami!”

Espi's joyous shout is returned by her mother, and they lapse into excited Spanish as the oarsmen in both rafts maneuver the rafts together until the edges bump. Both groups call out relieved greetings.

Murphy looks to me and our gazes lock. His eyes crinkle, feathering crow's feet from the corners, and I smile back. Never in my life have I been happier to see someone than I am to see this crotchety old man, but I don't reach out to hug him because our relationship doesn't work that way. When Mona got sick, he pretended he wasn't looking out for me, making sure I was as okay as possible, and I pretended I didn't need his gruff attention and advice unless I was in the middle of fencing practice. Now he pretends that I'm not his favorite student, and I pretend not to know that I am.

I blink back sudden hot tears. “About time you showed up,” I call.

“Don't think I won't make you run extra laps for your cheek when we get back, Bria Hunter,” he answers.

Thus concludes our emotional reunion. Now that I know he's okay, I swipe at my eyes and look around.

I'm thrilled to see the others, of course, but I'd had such high hopes when I realized there was another group of survivors. Now my stomach is knotted with disappointment. My desperate head count isn't adding up to anything close to the nineteen students that were so excited to set out for the Bahamas a week ago.

“Is this it?” I ask.

Murphy, who's busy tying the rafts' ropes together so we won't get separated, doesn't bother looking at me. “Lovely to see you, too, Bria Hunter. Always a pleasure.”

“Sorry,” I say. “I'd just hoped—”

“You hoped what I hoped.” He glances up at me with his wizened eyes. “Which was that there'd be a damn sight more heads in this raft. Isn't that right?”

I nod.

“Well, this is it, I reckon,” Murphy says sadly. “We've circled the area a good bit.” He pauses. “I don't think anyone in the water is long for this world anyway.”

I still don't understand. “But . . . there were so many people in the aisle right after the plane hit the water.” I raise my voice, looking around at the others to include them in the discussion. “They all ran to the back end of the plane, where you guys were. What happened to them? Why didn't they get into the raft with you?”

Everyone in Murphy's raft shrinks a little. They all hunch in on themselves and stare, with glazed eyes, out to sea. It's like they're determined not to answer or even hear the questions I've just asked.

I wonder what could possibly be so bad after everything we've already endured today, but then the memory of that monstrous scream echoes through my head. Dread crawls all over me, clinging to my nerve endings like sargassum.

“Murphy?” I prompt.

He turns toward me at last. Hesitating, he runs a hand over his chest, reminding me that he took a medical leave last year after bypass surgery. He should have retired then, but he's one of those old guys who can't imagine sitting around the house, doing nothing. His face is ashen and I have a sudden vision of him keeling over from a stress-induced heart attack.

“Are you okay?” I ask quickly, not sure my own heart can survive another trauma. He and I are tight after all my years of fencing, and this isn't the first time I've fluttered around him like a mother hen. “Is it your heart?”

Murphy looks affronted, as though I've wounded his male pride. He straightens his wiry body to its full height, which is way closer to five feet than it is to six. “My ticker is fine, thank you very much.”

This makes me feel foolish for overreacting, but mostly relieved.

“So you do have a heart, then,” I say tartly. “Good to know.”

Something in his face loosens even as he continues to glare at me. “Detention for you, Bria Hunter. When we get back.”

“Deal.” Some weird impulse makes me reach out and squeeze his arm, although whether I'm comforting him or myself is hard to say. “What happened to them, then?”

He takes forever to answer, and when he does, his voice is hoarse as he speaks haltingly. “They . . . didn't make it.”

“That's not an answer,” I say sharply. “
Why
didn't they make it?”

Murphy raises a shaky hand and runs it over the back of his neck. Then he licks his lips and his jaws work, opening and closing his silent mouth. He looks up to the sky and then out at the sea.

“Something . . . got them. When they. . . hit the water. I think—”

This isn't making any sense to me, but maybe that's because my brain has kicked into protective mode and is trying to buffer me.
“Something?”

“Sharks, okay?” Mike Smith interjects flatly. He hesitates, swiping the back of one hand over his lips, as though his remembered fear and horror have left a nasty taste he needs to wipe away. “The first group of us jumped in the water and made it into the raft, no problem. Then the last few hit the water, but before they could even start to doggie paddle over to the raft, they started screaming and getting sucked under. The water bubbled and went crazy, and the blood was—”