Without Warning (18 page)

He kept low and swapped out the mag that Jules had been using. The sun was in the last stage of a long dive in the west, which gave him a momentary advantage as the go-fast sped out of the yacht’s long shadow. He saw half of Dan’s crew suddenly throw their hands up to shade their eyes from the burnt orange brilliance of the sun’s rays. This was it. Slowly, and with infinitely more calm than he actually felt, Pete Holder stood up, knees bent slightly to allow him to adjust for movement of the deck. He took careful aim and squeezed off an entire clip in four discrete bursts, forcing himself to drop the iron sight back on the cockpit after each salvo.

“Excuse me, Daniel,” he said to himself. “But cheeky little fuckers sometimes need a good smack on the arse.”

The effect of taking the time to aim properly rather than just banging away was devastating. The first round stitched up Shoeless Dan, raking a line of fire up his fat belly, punching him backward out of the boat. The last Pete saw of him was a pair of blackened, swollen feet as they spun up and over the side. The next two bursts cut down all of the remaining men, bar one, who had the presence of mind to duck out of sight. The yacht climbed up a small wave while he was hiding, but Pete bent loose at the knees, keeping the gun sight on the cockpit of the cigarette boat the whole time. His stomach clenched tightly, and he could feel his anus puckering in fear, but he maintained the stance, even as a couple of rounds strayed up from the battle at the stern of the ship.

“Come on,” he whispered to himself. “Just pop your ugly mug up and …”

He’d fired before making any conscious decision to do so. The last surviving Mexican in Shoeless Dan’s boat suddenly leapt up and tried to snap off a couple of shots while grabbing the steering wheel and spooling up the engines. It was a hopeless, desperate thing to do, and it killed him. Pete sent at
least half a dozen rounds downrange, and while only three intersected the target, they hit him in the back of the neck, tearing through bone and meat with enough force to sever the head. The body was jerked upright and tossed over the side. The head appeared to drop to the floor of the boat.

Nausea and revulsion boiled up inside him, but he sucked in a mouthful of air. It reeked of smoke and gunpowder, which didn’t really help, but there was nothing for it. He had to push on. He turned to run for the stern just in time to see a line of white smoke snake out from the deck above him.

“Eat the worm, motherfuckers!”

It was Fifi, yelling from somewhere up on the pool deck.

His eyes instinctively followed the path of the rocket down through the air and into the side of the second go-fast boat, which blew apart as the warhead speared into her, just above the waterline behind the crew cabin. Pete ducked as debris and shrapnel flew out from the point of impact with enough speed to kill anyone who happened to be in the way. Unfortunately, that described his situation precisely. His old knees weren’t as quick or as flexible as they’d once been, and a fist-sized chunk of red-hot steel neatly took off the top third of his head.

He staggered back a few steps before his knees buckled underneath him and he fell to the deck, vaguely aware in his last moments of life that he had, after all, been fucked by the fickle finger of fate.

“Bugger …” he croaked with his last breath.

The disinfectant stung, but it was the least of Jules’s myriad hurts. She seemed to exist within a tornado of pain, of dull aches and sharp, shooting agonies of bruised muscle and tortured bone. Apart from Mr. Lee, who was smiling as he dabbed at the deep cut on her cheek, they had all taken damage during the fight with Shoeless Dan. Fifi had one arm in a sling, and was limping from a flesh wound to her thigh. Lee finished up by gently pressing a thick bandage into place high on her wounded cheek and handing her a couple of blue capsules. The small pharmacy on the yacht had given up a treasure trove of sedatives and balms.

“For the pain, Miss Julianne.”

“Thanks,” she replied in a dry, cracked voice.

Jules popped her pills and washed them down with a mouthful of gin and tonic, prepared for her by Fifi.

“Would it be churlish, at this point, to remind everyone that a couple of hours ago, Pete had Shoeless Dan tagged as a reliable chap and potential crewmate?”

Fifi sniffed and shook her head.

“He was always a fucking softie, Pete. I loved him so much.” Her face crumpled and she let herself go, releasing a high-pitched keening sound that turned into a series of wails and sobs.

“It would be ungracious and beneath a lady of your breeding, Miss Ju-lianne,” said Lee, whose own face was a mask, carved from ancient teak.

Darkness had fallen outside, or a sort of darkness. It glowed with a noticeable red hue thrown off by the energy wave, which was now eighty nautical miles to their north, but still visible. The three survivors had bathed and changed after cleaning up the worst of the damage and bloodshed. While they were at it, they got rid of the last remains of the former crew members, too. It hadn’t been such a bad job, compared with washing away the carnage of battle.

They’d wrapped Pete’s body in a blanket and stored him in one of the galley’s huge freezer units. He’d once told Jules that if he ever bought it, he’d want his ashes scattered at an awesome surf break somewhere. Wouldn’t matter which one. Maverick’s. Pipe. Margaret River. They were all good. Just as long as it was pumping when he took his last ride.

They had gathered in the upper salon, one of the cozier, less formal spaces. A couple of olive-green two-seater lounges, hugely overstuffed and obscenely comfortable, sat around two sides of a giant brown ottoman. A pair of white single-seaters took up one other side, where floor to ceiling bifold windows gave onto an expansive view of the sea far below. Jules had bathed for two hours to rid herself of the stink of the man she’d killed, and the irrational guilt she felt at living when Pete hadn’t. A couple of hundred dollars’ worth of French toiletries had helped a little with the former, although she still felt as if some corruption had worked its way under her skin. And she knew she was going to be down about Pete for weeks. It was harsh, but she was more affected by his death than by the weird shit happening to the north.

She sipped at her drink, feeling lonely and abandoned, stretched out on the lounge, burrowing deeper into the waffle-weave bathrobe she’d found in one of the cabins. “You know what,” she sighed. “Dan was always a bit of a maddie, but even he wouldn’t start a fight like that without good reason.”

“He had good reason,” said Fifi, who’d recovered some of her composure. “Fuckin’ Jane Austen on full volume. Drives me nuts when you play those vids, Julesy.”

Jules smiled sadly. Fifi still held a grudge for getting her arse dragged into
Sense and Sensibility
by Julianne once. She’d thought she was seeing the sequel to
Dumb and Dumber.

“It’d make me go for the gun locker, too,” mumbled her friend. “Stupid m … mo … motherfucker,” she said before lapsing back into tears.

Jules downed her drink in one long pull and stood up unsteadily, looking for the gin bottle.

“I’m sorry about Pete,” she said. “I’ll cry myself to sleep later, but we don’t have time to wallow. This Twilight Zone rubbish is going to upset the apple cart in the worst way possible, and it will likely happen very quickly. I suspect Dan was simply ahead of the curve. Well, him or someone who paid him. His operation didn’t normally run to go-fast boats, or hired banditos.”

“Shoeless Dan always most unimpressive,” said Mr. Lee as he cleared away the first-aid kit. “First I ever hear of him was of redheaded giant trying to sell stolen dog food to Vietnam criminals. Tried to say real dog in can. Vietnam tie bag of cans to Shoeless Dan and throw him in water. Only escapes because they cannot tie knot well.”

“No,” said Jules as she handed Fifi a Tasmanian beer. “They probably tied those knots fine. But there were some things Dan did know well. Knots, sails, boats, tides, who’d take a bribe and who wouldn’t, the range and speed of every coast guard cutter in the Keys, anything to do with smuggling by sea and he was good for it. But piracy was not his gig.”

“Yeah, well, he surely wasn’t worth a pinch of shit as one,” sniffed Fifi.

“So, what was the story today?” asked Jules as she picked a sandwich from a silver platter on the ottoman in front of her. She wasn’t really hungry. It was just something to do. Fifi had found half a turkey and a leg of Iberian ham in one of the giant double-door refrigerators down in the main galley, and she’d thrown together a small feast of cold cuts and salad. She wasn’t eating either, and Jules suspected that preparing the meal was more about therapy than hunger. Long before Fifi had taken up smuggling she had qualified as a commercial chef.

Fresh rolls, slathered with melting butter, lay in a pile next to a big bowl of baby spinach leaves, walnuts, pear, and Parmesan slivers. The drugs Jules had taken had begun a slow waltz with her gin and tonic, and she let the warm waves of sleepiness wash over her.

“Yeats, my friends. The story today was Yeats,” she said, answering her own question, if somewhat impenetrably. “The center cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. That’s where we are right now. On the edge of anarchy.”

The early-evening drive down to the governor’s residence was enough to convince James Ritchie that the islands were going to go down a tube at high speed unless someone got their act together. The curfew seemed to have had no effect, and the state government had no interest in enforcing it. Thousands of people were milling about the streets, many of them agitated and besieging any place they could buy emergency supplies of food and water. Large, increasingly unstable crowds had gathered outside travel agencies and airline shop fronts, which remained open well after normal business hours. Every gas station had a trail of vehicles snaking away from its pumps, leading Ritchie to wonder where the hell they thought they were going to escape to in their SUVs and family sedans.

His latest reports from Gitmo and Canada spoke of a strange glow, as if from a distant furnace, emanating from the energy wave, and as their route down to the Capitol District allowed Ritchie glimpses of the Pacific reaching away back east, he couldn’t shake the impression of a sunset that seemed denser and richer than normal. Long slow lines of surf banked up in sets of three off the beach at Waikiki, a strong offshore breeze blowing thick foam back off the lip as they crested. The weird, almost ethereal light lent the spray
a bright, burnished cherry color, and seemed to paint the mass of surfers and body boarders bright pink as they carved up the barrels.

The Capitol District was less crowded, probably because it offered little in the way of supplies that could be bought up and hoarded. Police and state troopers were out in force, however, and the pulsing lights of more than a dozen Honolulu PD squad cars bathed the district in a rich, electric red that overwhelmed the ethereal light Ritchie had noticed before. His BlackBerry buzzed as the staff car swung off Beretania Street and in through the gates of the capitol building. It was his wife.

NANCY IS OK! FLEW OUT OF O’HARE THS MNG. IN LONDON. WILL CALL L8R.

A hollow opened in the admiral’s chest and filled with heat, but it subsided quickly and he was left with a loose feeling in his bowels and a giddy, almost guilty sense of relief. His only child had been scheduled to fly out of the U.S. this week for a year’s travel through Europe and Asia. But Nancy was a bit of a free spirit—an “airhead,” he might have said, were she anyone other than his own—and organization was not her strong point. She was just as likely to miss a flight as catch one, and her trip had already been rescheduled twice for that very reason. Ritchie had spent the entire day trying to cope with the end of the world while stomping down on a feeling of utter hopelessness verging on panic for his baby girl. He had spoken to nobody about it. Everyone had people somewhere back home and his first responsibility was to the nation, not to himself or even his family. But he shivered uncontrollably as tears filled his eyes, hot and stinging, and he had to hold his breath to forestall a sob.

Damn,
he cursed silently.
What a time to crack up.

“You all right, sir?”

He kept his eyes shielded from the driver by pretending to stare out the window at plastic barricades that were going up around the House. What the hell were they in aid of? They wouldn’t stop the Wave if it came rushing at them from over the horizon, and the populace was more likely to storm a well-stocked 7-Eleven than the state legislature.

“I’m okay,” he grunted, when he had his voice back under control. “It’s just a message from my wife, that’s all. Our daughter is fine. She flew out of Chicago this morning, before this business hit.”

Ritchie wasn’t sure why he felt the need to say anything. Perhaps to make it seem real to himself. It wasn’t the sort of thing he’d normally discuss with anyone outside of his family, let alone a driver from the car pool.

“That’s great news, sir,” said the young sailor behind the wheel, a new guy Ritchie had met only forty minutes ago. He sounded genuinely happy, and
Ritchie couldn’t help but wonder where the lad hailed from and whether he had family back stateside himself.