And he was gone.
Mom pulled me back from the platform, asked me something, but the words jumbled and reeled, made no sense. Choices spun through my head. Hide down below. Hide on the roof deck. Get away from the ocean. A scream echoed across the narrow alley of water between our boat and Matt’s. The scream multiplied, and then all sixteen of the passengers on the Ruby Pelican rushed to the side closest to us, away from something we couldn’t see. Their boat tipped dangerously. One of the girls got an elbow in the face and fell overboard. She treaded water for a second and disappeared.
More tendrils snaked over the side of the Last Chance and grabbed the girl next to me. A gray tentacle slipped around her head. A crawling mass of filaments followed. She jerked and stumbled. A red welt appeared on her neck, her cheek, eyes impossibly wide, head tipped back as if she were searching the clouds. I remember reaching out for her. A pop, and blood sprayed the deck, the water, and me. I stumbled and fell again. Struggled, trying to wrestle myself out of a thirty-pound albatross slowing me down.
A cry filtered down from the roof deck. Felix. Another whip rose from the water and slid up the side, where my brother stood. Ten cups of coffee in my bloodstream, all at once.
Before I could get to him, Mom rushed for the ladder. I’d never make it up with the tank on my back, so I went for the spear gun instead, the one Phil kept cinched to the wall. It wasn’t there. I grabbed the orange case attached to a bracket under his seat, thinking maybe a flare gun could wound it, burn it. Then I remembered the gas can. We’d left it by the captain’s chair the night before.
More panicked cries, and I was half aware of screaming coming from the Ruby Pelican before an unnatural wave tipped the Last Chance. I stumbled toward the back of the boat, hands shaking so bad I fumbled with the latch on the case.
Splash. Another overboard. Someone I didn’t know. A horrible feeling welled up. Gratitude, that it was them and not me. Not Felix. And maybe the thing swimming beneath us was full now.
Candy grabbed my arm, her eyes full of helplessness and panic. “Sia! What—”
“The gas can! Dump all of it over the side!” I pulled at the latch of the flare gun case, but it didn’t budge.
As she stepped toward the gas can, a tendril as thick as my calf snaked up and over the gunwale and wrapped around her waist. She flew backward and plummeted into the waves. Cried my name once before she disappeared.
A few seconds later Ben was in Candy’s place, dumping the gas into the water.
A flash of silver zipped by, coming from the roof. Mom, with a spear gun, reloading. Felix held on to her thigh. The spear disappeared into the murk, uselessly passing by whatever horrible thing spread out beneath us.
I worked the latch on the flare gun case, digging my water-soft fingernails under the plastic as Ben dropped the now-empty fuel can into the water. The cries from the other boat cascaded around me. I didn’t want to look. But I did, for one horrible second. A dozen tentacles and a thousand filaments snaked up the sides, cradling the Ruby Pelican like a bath toy.
Ben wrenched the flare gun case from me and smashed the latch against a cleat twice. The gun spilled onto the floor and I grabbed it. Fumbled a shell into the chamber just as Ben cried out, a filament wrapping around his thigh, slicing through the skin.
I should’ve grabbed my dive knife. Cut through the rat snake and set him free. But I didn’t have time.
The slick of gasoline over the water shimmered in the rising sun. I tilted the gun up, hoping the flare had enough time to catch fire before it hit the water, praying I would hit the slowly widening patch of fuel. I didn’t think about the consequences of what I was doing. Fire. Boats made of wood. People made of flesh. I just pulled the trigger.
I watched it arc slowly, then drop into the waves.
The world around us erupted into heat and fire. The sea buckled as something enormous thrashed beneath, its writhing rising high above the flames. I caught a horrific glimpse of an eye, huge and unblinking, through the orange glow.
And then the sky tipped as our boat capsized and the world went dark.
ENTRY 8
FLAMES. That’s what burned through my mind when I woke on the shores of the island.
Rough, wet sand on my face. The other side baked in the high noon sun. My body felt stretched and snapped back into place. Everything ached. My fingers tingled. My eyes felt full. Ready to burst.
I pushed myself up to a sitting position, and the world swam. My arms wouldn’t lie flat against my sides, and I looked down to find I still wore the inflated BC. A small part of my brain registered that’s why I wasn’t at the bottom of the ocean.
The rest of me was just thirsty.
I struggled with the clasp on my gear for five minutes before I finally broke the stupid thing with a rock and slid the heavy tank from my back.
I sat for a bit, watching the blue sky, water moving, rolling, waves cresting and falling. God. I closed my eyes at the nausea. My throat stretched like a rubber band. The flames leapt up in my mind again. And the eye of that thing, looking at me through the glow.
I listened to the surf crash and tried to remember. So hazy. I remembered shooting the flare into the water. The fire spreading, people screaming, and my last thought, before we capsized.
Felix.
I stood in a rush of memory and scanned the beach for him. I searched the water for him, for his small head bobbing in the waves, terrified I would have to see my brother pulled under by whatever had destroyed our boat. But there was nobody out there.
I was alone.
When things get bad, we tell ourselves all kinds of things to stay sane. You do it too, I’m sure, lying on your bunk, staring at the stains on the ceiling of your cell. You tell yourself that everything will be okay, and the people you love are alive and well. On the other side of the island, I remember thinking. They’re on the other side, waiting for me. So I started walking.
I made my way down the beach. The island, which I could swear didn’t exist on any of our maps, stretched out for a mile in both directions, its coves smooth white sand, studded with shells and stones and an occasional boulder of black rock. Ten feet up from the water lay a dark line of seaweed from high tide. Another forty feet back, the palm trees began. The gaps between trunks were eaten up by shadows. This will sound totally irrational, but the shadows watched me trudge through the sand, like they were alive or something. I tried to make sense of that feeling, but then the thirst hit again, and I couldn’t think about anything else.
When the sweat made the inside of my wet suit slick, I peeled it off and left it in the dunes. The rash guard kept my torso and arms from cooking, but the bikini bottoms did nothing to protect my legs. My shoulder ached, a reminder of how close I had come to slipping over the side of the Last Chance and joining Teague and Candy and all the others.
I walked for a long time.
Mom. I had to find her. Felix. Where was he? Around the next curve? Maybe Ben, Candy, and Teague made it here. And then I remembered what happened to two of them. But Ben? He could’ve made it. And Captain Phil? An ugly part of me hoped not.
I peered out to sea as I padded barefoot across the wet sand, shading my eyes. The sun bounced off the froth of the whitecaps, glinted across the expanse. No weird ripples or swells like I’d seen just before that thing attacked us. Was it gone?
A quartet of birds, a hair smaller than gulls and whiter than sand, waded in the shallows down the beach, pecking at fiddler crabs. All of it postcard perfect. But there was no tiki hut selling sunscreen here. I swallowed, and my spit tasted thick, like a sprinter’s mouth. The thought of water put an ache in me. Oh God, how I wanted it, ice cubes and all.