Devour (7 page)

B
rian watched Gilly trying to cut through the railing, dismay and self-disgust welling inside him.

I never learn
, he thought.

I never, ever learn
.

* * *

As a teenage boy growing up in the wilder regions of northern Vermont, with parents who had grown confident in his abilities and judgment, Brian had few limits on his activities. He had no curfew, save for sunset on moonless nights when his mother feared he might find the starlight insufficient for navigation and wander off into a river or cave—the former of which was unlikely, the latter of which there was a profound scarcity in northern Vermont—but he was sensitive to her fears and returned on those nights early to watch television or read.

There were similarly few restrictions on what items he might take with him on his travels, although his father’s firearms were generally off limits unless it was hunting season, and lighters and matches were forbidden when the woods were droughty. Brian soon discarded the burdensome hatchets and axes he’d read about in his boyhood novels and went about armed only with a canteen and a slender Buck jackknife, a gift from his grandfather, the carbon steel blade thin and long. He took great pride in the knife, and always looked for opportunities to use it, especially in front of others.

One day when he was fifteen he helped his father hang a quarter-beef they had received in payment from a neighboring farmer. The beef, a massive purple-red slab, hung suspended from a block and tackle attached to the garage rafters. A length of rope was needed to secure the quarter to the rafter to release the block, but when his father slapped at his front pocket it was empty. Brian offered his knife with considerable pride and then watched with mounting dismay as his father strained to saw through the rope with the dull blade, the strands popping loose one by one as a steel cable might under great stress.

There had been no reprimand. Later, his father had shown him how to work the whetstone, grinding the invisible cutting teeth into the blade’s edge and then straightening them with several swipes on the sharpening steel. A process Brian had already been shown but one he watched attentively now, the hot blood of youthful embarrassment still burning in his cheeks.

When he was done, his father took the knife, pressed it flat against the back of his forearm, and drew the knife forward. A small cloud of black hairs wafted to the concrete floor of the garage, leaving a bare patch of skin just above his father’s wrist. Then he had spoken one sentence before handing the knife over.

Any tool worth carrying,
his father had said,
should be ready all the time
.

* * *

Gilly had been on the piece of hull for several minutes. He was completely drenched, and there was a jerkiness to his motions, the slowing of articulation that indicated the first stages of hypothermia. The old man lay motionless at his feet, not moving now, even when Gilly slapped his face.

The hacksaw blade scraped against the stainless-steel railing, barely biting into the hardened metal.

Better to cut his arm off,
Brian thought.
But I doubt the blade could make it through the bone. Jesus.

Gilly continued to saw, his arm moving mechanically. The waves were still building, and occasionally the rope stretching from the cleat on the
Tangled Blue
to Gilly’s waist would tighten abruptly when one of the swells caught the slack. Gilly seemed to sense this before the tension could jerk him loose, and would abandon his sawing to secure a grip on the railing until it passed.

The section of hull surged forward on a large wave and Brian chased it, powering up the large swell, the wind howling around the edges of the
Tangled Blue
’s cabin. The hull was five yards to port and above his eye level, and he could see something curved protruding from the underside of the fiberglass, its shape distorted by the water. The bottom of it was pronged, with a slight flaring around the circumference. It curved upward into the thick fiberglass of the
Archos
like a scimitar.

That’s why the hull isn’t flipping over
, he thought.
Whatever it is, it’s acting like a rudder and a counterweight.

He checked his instruments, his grip tightening on the throttle. “Oh shit,” he breathed.

There was a massive green line on the radar screen, half a mile behind them. He knew what it was immediately; the Kaala ran counter to the Gulf Stream’s direction, and the opposing currents and sharp delta in water temperatures had created more than the thick fog. It had also spawned rogue waves, monsters that could swamp even the large merchant ships.

He took a second to watch the radar swing around again. The wave was moving in line with the smaller waves, coming up on the
Tangled Blue
’s stern. Coming on them fast. If they could get under power and cut behind Boon Island, the rocks would break the wave’s power.

He set the engines back to autopilot and leaned over the side of the boat, hands cupped around his mouth. “Gilly!”

His first mate glanced up, long hair falling over his face.

“Rogue coming up behind us!” Brian shouted. “You close?”

“Not even halfway,” Gilly said, his voice shrill. He held up the hacksaw. “This blade’s for shit!”

“Hang on, you’re coming in.”

He hit autopilot and started pulling, the wet nylon rope piling on the floor at his feet. The section of hull was shaped like a triangle, with two rounded points and the third much sharper, with a steel base for the railing embedded in the fiberglass, sheared off in a bright wedge of metal. He paused as the hull neared the two men spinning in the uneven waves. Watching the deadly point of the fractured hull swing toward them, then away. Then back at them. Gilly stuck the hacksaw under the place in the railing where he had been cutting and tried to pry the old man’s arm loose. The hacksaw frame flexed, then bent.

Gilly looked up at Brian and shook his head.

Brian glanced back at the radar. The wave had nearly halved the distance to them in the past minute.

“Stupid,” he muttered, “Stupid, stupid,
stupid
.”

He wrapped the rope around a cleat, then picked up another coil and ran it through the two life rings. He dropped the rope and floats overboard, the life rings bobbing at the waterline of the
Tangled Blue
. A thin protection against the spinning, jagged flotsam he was about to bring in.

He pulled the hull closer, timing its rotation, and when the jagged end spun outward, he yanked in the rest of the slack. The rounded side butted up against the
Tangled Blue
and he ran a half hitch over the cleat, then lunged forward and gathered in the rest of the slack from the rope tied to Gilly. The hull bumped lightly against their side.

“Cap?” Gilly said from below him. “The fuck you doing?”

“Hold on!” Brian shouted over the steady roar of the wind. “I’m sending down the tackle!”

He pulled a pin on the crane assembly, swiveled it over the side, and locked it into place. Denny had used the rig to haul bluefin over the side of the hull in the old days, before Brian had retrofitted the
Tangled Blue
with an aft hatch and an electric winch to haul fish through the back of the boat. The crane was unwieldy, a bit of an eyesore, and added extra weight. But Brian had left it in place, sometimes even using it to unload his catch when the marina’s crane wasn’t working. Mostly he just liked the look of it, a retrograde contraption that conjured images of men in oilskins, kerosene lanterns swaying above decks. Simpler times.

He lowered the rope and hook overboard. Gilly caught it, quickly looped it around the railing, and pounded the side of the boat three times. Brian leaned over the side and looked down at his first mate. “Ready?”

“It’ll be a damn wrecking ball if a wave catches us wrong.”

“Climb up.”

Gilly looked from Brian to the old man.

“He’s pinned,” Brian said. “I need you up here.”

Gilly pulled himself up the rope, hand over hand, and slid over the edge. He looked behind them, peering through the thick wall of fog. They could see nothing, hear nothing other than the wind and waves coupling and clashing, the creaks of the
Tangled Blue
’s hull. The dull throb of the Chryslers—Brian was sure that one or more cylinders were missing now—echoed back to them against the waves. Brian felt an urge to check the radar again and dismissed it. It was the same as seeing fish on the graph—you had to trust your electronics. Just because you couldn’t see something with your naked eye didn’t mean it wasn’t there.

Then, as Gilly moved alongside him, they heard it. Not an amplification of sound but the absence of it, a muting of their world as the giant wall of water blocked out the sounds of the wind and the waves behind it.

He shoved Gilly toward the cabin. “Go,” he said. “Get us in front of it.”

Gilly stumbled to the captain’s chair, leaving a trail of seawater on the boat’s vinyl floor. Brian leaned over the side. The hook of the block and tackle had slid to one end of the railing. The old man was still motionless. Brian leaned back into the rope and began pulling. The crane tower creaked, straining as the hull lifted off the water and its full weight swung into open air.

The Chryslers powered up and the
Tangled Blue
surged forward. The
Archos
’s hull caught the top of a wave, and the crane bent hard, the wood fibers popping. “Back her down,” Brian said, paying out more rope.

Gilly let off on the throttle just as the rogue wave emerged, its height lost in the fog above them. No more than sixty yards behind them, a wall of water that would not simply swamp the
Tangled Blue
—it would turn her into splinters.

The hull dipped into a wave, and more of the heavy marine rope burned through Brian’s palms. The hull swung out from the side of the boat, skipping and then digging, the rope snapping and popping. Water sprayed over the old man, and Brian felt a moment of terrified hilarity; for a moment, the old man looked like he was bodysurfing behind the
Tangled Blue
.

Several large foothill waves reached the
Tangled Blue
and shoved it forward. Another of the waves caught the
Archos
’s hull, spinning it toward them, the jagged end rotating around like a knife spinning on the floor. Brian could see the gleam of shorn metal heading straight for the side of the
Tangled Blue
.

“Hard starboard!”

Gilly cut the boat to the right as Brian pulled his bait knife free of his belt sheath. The fractured hull surged toward the
Tangled Blue
atop another foothill wave, moving with a preternatural speed as the elasticity of the rope pulled it back in. Gilly turned the
Tangled Blue
away, not quite fast enough, and the hull smashed into the back corner. Brian went sprawling across the slick vinyl floor, holding the bait knife out away from his body, and crashed into the corner of the large tackle box on the other side of the boat. The thick plastic buckled under his weight and he spun off it, coming to a rest under the captain’s chair.

Brian choked in a breath, the low slimy fish smell filling his nose as the boat swayed and surged under him.

Must be how the beached bluefins feel,
he thought.

Gilly was calling his name, asking if he was okay, and Brian slapped him on the back of his calf. He was still holding the bait knife in his other hand, which was good. He intended to cut the damn hull loose as soon as he got could get up. He couldn’t see the giant wave or the
Archos
’s hull, but he could tell by the angle of the rope on the block and tackle that Gilly had powered up again. They still weren’t moving very fast; the hull and the old man were acting like a drift sock, keeping them to a maximum speed of six or seven knots. Fast enough to stay ahead of the giant wave, but not enough to pull away.

He felt the first relaxation of his solar plexus, and a thin trickle of air worked into his lungs.

Gilly prodded him with his foot.

Brian got to his knees, digging the point of the knife into the vinyl floor as an anchor point. The crane assembly was straining over the side of the boat, the marine rope popping beads of water out of its taut length.

Go ahead
, he thought.
Cut him loose.

No.

Too cold. The water’s too cold and he’s been in there too long. Already dead
.

Yes. It is cold and he is still alive.

The rational voice, the one urging him to cut the line, was his. The other was different. It was not his dead wife’s voice he heard, nor his dead son’s. Nor his dead father’s. It was his own voice he heard but it felt
of
them, of all of them, distilled into a separate entity. A voice he had heard before.

“I don’t cut him loose we all die,” he gasped.

There was no answer to this, not from Gilly who could not have heard him, nor from that disembodied voice that appeared unsummoned but never truly unexpected. Just his own conscience, with its self-righteous lisp. Most of the time he could believe that, knew he was a man haunted by regret and sorrow but nothing more. Perhaps slightly crazy as well, which he could live with, even appreciate.

He got to his feet and crossed the twelve feet to the starboard side. The back corner of the
Tangled Blue
was smashed in and he could hear the water shooting out the side of the boat from the bilge. They were taking on water, how much he couldn’t be sure.

The shattered hull was fifteen feet behind them, as far as the rope would let it go. The hull was just about to be caught by the last foothill wave, which would undoubtedly push the damned thing into the same corner of his foundering boat. And behind that the rogue, the mountain that pursued them.