Shark Island Read online

  She shifted, boot scraping rust off the platform, and wondered why she wasn’t crying. Earlier, on the boat, she’d been a broken thing, a pile of shattered glass in the shape of a person. But she felt whole now, not shattered at all. And she damn sure didn’t feel like glass.

  About the others she could not say the same.

  Wolchko clung to the side of the tower, on the topmost crossbeam. Rosalie and Naomi had dragged Tye back up onto the platform and now the other woman was sitting with him, trying to rewrap the wounds on his leg. Rosalie’s attachment to him was clear, but she wisely kept silent about her feelings. Tye lay on his side on the platform, his back up against the fragment of wall that remained. His eyes were dull hollows. Rain accumulated in those hollows and slid across his nose, ran across his forehead, and sluiced along his lips. Tye didn’t bother to wipe it away, remained so still that it almost appeared that his wounds had finished him, that it had been him the sharks had just killed, instead of Kat. Her death had shut him down. Whatever their relationship had become, he’d obviously still loved her.

  Rosalie touched his face with her fingers, brushed the rain away from his eyes. Naomi thought she had venom in her, a poison that worked both directions, touching those around her even as it was working in her gut, but she saw the pain on Rosalie’s face now and couldn’t stop herself from feeling sympathy.

  “He’ll be all right,” Naomi said.

  When Rosalie turned, it was as if she’d forgotten she and Tye weren’t alone up on the platform.

  “He’ll live,” she said. “That’s not the same thing.”

  Naomi popped her head over the edge of the tower again. Wolchko clung there, just a few feet below. Another ten feet below him was the other guy, their new arrival, this massively tall fisherman to whom only Wolchko had yet spoken. This guy seemed like a wreck, too, unraveled by the horrors he’d just seen. He kept muttering to himself, and Naomi thought he might be praying or swearing or a little of both.

  “Eddie?” she said, just loud enough to be heard over the storm.

  Wolchko hooked an arm around a crossbar and leaned out to look up at her. He seemed exhausted, stubble on his cheeks and dark puffy circles under his eyes. His pupils were little pinpoints, almost like he might be high, but she figured the slack expression on his face was its own sort of shock.

  “Do you—” she began.

  A shark thumped into one of the legs of the tower. Naomi flinched and held her breath. She thought her heart even stopped for a few seconds as she listened for the sound of damage, the grating crunch of rusty joints giving way. Of things getting worse.

  Down below them, the fisherman ratcheted up the volume on his stream of profanity. No prayers there, it seemed. Only curses.

  “You did this!” the fisherman said, glaring up at them. “Just had to fucking play God!”

  Naomi saw the way Wolchko’s face went ashen. Even in the storm and at his age, he’d never looked so wan. So old. She didn’t ask if he was all right because she knew the answer— How could he be? The fisherman was right. All of this was Wolchko’s fault. His and the rest of Kat’s team. They rushed the research. They’d been too eager, too cocky.

  “Eddie,” Naomi said again, “I don’t think the water’s getting any higher.”

  Wolchko nestled himself back into the crook of metal above the thirty-foot beam. “Agreed. The tide’s in, and the surge might have subsided a little. The wind’s dropped some, too. But it’s not the water I’m worried about.”

  Naomi nodded slowly. “I know.”

  The problem wasn’t the tide or the surge. Not now. The problem lay with the tower itself. She slid along the platform, still giving Tye and Rosalie room, to the opposite side. When she hung her head over, she could make out the section of rusted metal that had been smashed apart, and it wasn’t her imagination that the platform tilted slightly in that direction. Climbing up, she had noticed several pieces of latticework that had deteriorated so badly that they had rusted through, two bars hanging down at odd angles like broken spokes on a bicycle wheel.

  The sharks would keep coming. With the boat, the rumble of the engine had riled them up, but even without that noise they somehow knew there were still people up here. Maybe the growl of voices resonated through the metal into the water, or maybe just the blood that had already been spilled. It didn’t matter. They might not be attacking as consistently, but they were out there, and every impact on the tower vibrated the rusted joints a little more.

  “The hell with this,” Naomi said, scrambling back to the side of the tower where Wolchko waited.

  “What are you doing?” Rosalie asked.

  Naomi shot her a look, wanting to snap at her, ask her why she cared. But she saw the brokenness and fear in the other woman’s eyes and any last traces of yesterday’s animosity vanished.

  “Not sure yet,” Naomi said. “But I don’t intend to die here.”

  Rosalie almost sneered. “Good luck with that.”

  Naomi ignored her. She turned around and slid over the edge, a little too fast, nearly losing her grip before her prosthetic foot found a V joint below. Then Wolchko had grabbed her legs, helping her climb down even as he asked her the same question Rosalie had asked.

  Side by side with him, arms feeling somehow weary and powerful at the same time, Naomi hung from the metal lattice like it was part of the monkey bars in the schoolyard near where she grew up.

  “Get up there. Take a rest,” she said to Wolchko. “I may need you.”

  He started to protest again, but she was already moving down, sidling around the corner of the tower to avoid a section of broken bars. The fisherman looked up at her as she climbed, all of his bitterness gone. He stared like he had never seen another human being.

  “What’s your name?” she asked him.

  “Walter Briggs.”

  Naomi didn’t like being so close to the water, but she moved down until she hung beside Walter, the smell of rust filling her nostrils.

  “I’m sorry you got into this, Walter,” she said. “I’m sorry about your friends.”

  The guy stared at her. He had huge hands, a bunch of little scars on the backs of them, and a rounded beer belly. A strong guy, she figured, maybe used to being strong in a lot of ways. Definitely not used to the kind of horror he’d just seen.

  “I didn’t know the young guy, Dorian,” he said. “Me and Jamie just picked him up. He and his dad were kayaking out from Deeley to try to get you folks outta here.”

  Naomi widened her eyes. “Are you kidding? They tried kayaking in the middle of this?”

  She didn’t mean the storm, and it was clear Walter understood that.

  “They didn’t know, did they?” he said, voice rippling with anger. “They didn’t know what you idiots did.”

  She could have argued, explained that she wasn’t a part of the WHOI team, but she was too surprised to separate herself from the whole business.

  “How do you know about that?” she asked.

  Walter shifted, hoisted his body into a diamond-shaped opening in the trestle so he could rest his arms a bit. “We didn’t know exactly. We read about it and got pissed off about you bringing so many seals to the waters up here, worried they’d eat all the damn fish. We wanted to stop it, or at least make some trouble, but then we got a call from the harbor master, said you folks were stranded.”

  A flicker of hope in her chest. “They know? Someone knows? The harbor master sent you?”

  Walter scowled. “It sounded like bullshit, but we were out here anyway, so he asked us to check it out.”

  “But when they don’t hear from you, they’ll send someone,” she said excitedly.

  A wave of disgust crossed his face, leaving only sadness behind. “I guess they will. Maybe pretty soon.”

  Naomi’s heart had been so frayed, her emotions so raw, that she didn’t understand why Walter would be anything but happy at the prospect. Then she remembered the fishing boat, and this guy Dorian, and …
r />   “Jamie,” she said. “He was your friend?”

  Walter looked as if he might be sick. He hung his head. “My best friend. Shit … maybe my only real friend.”

  He blinked in surprise, as if he hadn’t expected to speak the thought aloud and now regretted it. Fresh grief etched itself onto his face and he looked away, out at the water, where the sharks were circling.

  One of them broke away, even as Naomi and Walter watched, and started for the tower, picking up speed.

  “Hold on,” she said. “They’re determined to knock us off.”

  Walter did more than hold on. He climbed another couple of feet and wrapped his arms around the sturdiest bars he could find. As the shark darted at the tower, Naomi did the same. It thumped hard at the base, down under the water. The whole structure shook and rust rained down, and all she could do was wonder how much damage it had caused down there under the water, where she couldn’t see.

  The tower listed northward, creaking, but she told herself it would hold. That a little rust wasn’t enough to tear it apart.

  “What happened to you?” Walter asked suddenly, staring at her prosthetic leg.

  Naomi watched the sharks. Watched the churning sea. “They did,” she said. “Last summer.”

  “Shit, I thought I recognized you,” the fisherman replied. “You’re the governor’s kid.”

  Naomi didn’t correct him. Her mind was otherwise engaged. She had escaped sharks before and she would find a way to do it again. Maybe the harbor master would send someone else, but even if that happened, unless they were in a boat sturdier than Walter and Jamie’s fishing boat, it would do no good. Not while the signal kept going. Sure, the storm would subside eventually and the tide would recede and they’d have Bald Cap to themselves again.

  But she didn’t think the tower would last that long.

  “Eddie!” she shouted up to Wolchko.

  He poked his head out, looking down at them. “You okay?”

  “Not even close,” Naomi said. “I think we’re gonna die. I think we’ve got maybe one chance to avoid that happening.”

  “You’ve got ideas, I’m all ears,” Wolchko said.

  Naomi pointed out to the spot where the Thaumas had gone down. “Someone has to dive on the wreck and shut the signal down. It’s the only way.”

  Wolchko stared at her, lost for words.

  “You’re outta your friggin’ mind,” Walter said. “Anyone dives down there is dead.”

  Naomi shot him a dark look, then glanced up to include Wolchko in her disapproval. “Either of you have a better idea?”

  Neither of them did.

  CHAPTER 40

  Lorena had zero skill when it came to setting up a tent, but fortunately Jim had taught his sons very well. Kyle had broken down the tents in their camp and now he set one of them up again at the edge of the clearing in the space of ten minutes. Lorena stood and watched as he finished the job, tapping a couple of anchors into the dirt. Rainwater sluiced from a branch overhead and spattered the top of the tent, but it would be dry inside, at least.

  “Ready?” Kyle asked, masking his unease.

  “Very much so. And grateful, too.”

  Kyle held back the flap so that she could slip inside. Before she did, Lorena slid out of her rain gear. She wore a sweatshirt and yoga pants underneath, which were comfortable and mostly dry. Squeezing rain out of her hair, she ducked into the tent and balled up a blanket to sit on. It wouldn’t be warm inside, but at least it would block the wind and keep the rain off.

  Quiet and swift, Kyle removed his own coat and hung it from a tree branch. He left the pants on and climbed in beside her. Side by side, with the flap open, they were able to see out past the edge of Deeley Island. Kyle had erected the tent to face the watchtower on Bald Cap, but if a kayak were to pass by on the way back to the point where Jim and Dorian had launched they’d see that as well.

  “That was awful,” she said quietly. “I’m so sorry you had to witness it.”

  Kyle huffed and shuddered, making a show of it. Making light of it. “Yeah, me too.”

  Lorena’s chest tightened. The storm seemed to have subsided slightly, but the wind still screamed around them and made the walls of the tent snap like a flag in a gale. For the rest of her life, she knew that she would associate every big storm with this day. She and Kyle had watched as the fishing boat sank, blessedly unable to make out the details as sharks moved in to attack the people who’d been onboard. The boat went down so fast and all she could think was that the hole in its side must have been huge.

  That’s not all you thought.

  The view from the mouth of the tent allowed her and Kyle to see down along the path they’d climbed. From here they could watch the waves flooding the shore of Deeley Island. The tide had risen dramatically, the storm surge covering the rocks and the steep slope down to where the water would normally have stopped.

  Stop thinking about it, she told herself.

  “Do you think they were on the boat?” Kyle said softly. “Dad and Dorian?”

  Lorena shivered, trying to pretend it was the chill in the air. “I couldn’t make out faces. Maybe if the phone was still working and we could’ve zoomed, but … Anyway, no. I don’t think they were on the boat.”

  “That one guy … he looked skinny enough to be Dorian.”

  “You saw him for a second or two. We don’t have any reason to believe that was your brother.” She put a hand on his back. “We’re just going to wait here, Kyle. We’re just going to sit and wait for them to come back.”

  Her voice sounded hollow, even in her own ears.

  “Those sharks,” Kyle said, “the way they attacked that boat…”

  He let the thought go unfinished, but Lorena did not need him to explain. His father and brother had gone out in kayaks. Given what had happened to that fishing boat, two men in kayaks wouldn’t stand a chance, but she told herself there were plenty of things that might have drawn the sharks’ attention. The engine noise or maybe a net dragging in the water with fish in it. She didn’t know how likely those things were, but she needed to tell herself there were possibilities that didn’t end in heartbreak.

  “Just watch the tower,” she told Kyle. “Your dad said they were going to head south and circle around behind Bald Cap. He and Dorian will get there. Those kayaks will show up. And once they learn what’s happened, they’ll have the sense to just stay there on the tower with whoever else that is over there.”

  Kyle shifted a little to get a better view out through the open mouth of the tent. “Okay. Yeah. We’ll just watch for them.”

  So they sat and stared out through the open flap of the tent and Lorena wished that she had known Jim longer, that she had developed more of a relationship with his sons. She wanted very much to comfort Kyle—and to comfort herself—by putting an arm around him. But they just didn’t know each other well enough yet. She might be engaged to his father, but she and Kyle weren’t family. They were all going to have to work on that.

  She scanned the water out past the tower for any sign of something yellow, purposely ignoring the flash of yellow she’d seen earlier, through the zoom on her camera phone. If the phone’s battery hadn’t died, they might have gotten a better look at the men on the fishing boat, including the skinny one, the one Lorena told herself wasn’t Dorian.

  The seals had clustered on the shore of Deeley Island, moving farther and farther uphill and inland as the storm surge had driven the water higher. Now they were only about thirty feet away, barking and shifting, unable to settle down. She had seen seal herds before, both in real life and in pictures, and they always seemed to mostly laze around doing nothing, but these were agitated by something. Most came ashore, rested briefly, lumbered around, seemed to threaten one another, and eventually slipped back into the water.

  They weren’t her focus, those seals. Lorena watched the tower and the figures clinging to it. She saw that it tilted to one side and wondered if it had been that way w
hen they arrived or if the storm surge had done it. Her attention might be diverted for a moment or two by the fins circling the tower or swimming the channel, but it was the people up there on that old Tinkertoy structure who had her interest.

  Then she heard the commotion in the water, down at the shore, and glanced down just in time to see one of the fat seals sliding up onto rock and scrub from a huge, crashing wave … and the shark that burst from the wave and bit the seal in half, blood and viscera spraying the ground as the wave pulled back. The shark lay stranded, whipping its body back and forth, dinosaur brain not understanding where the water had gone, not realizing that it had doomed itself. But even then, its jaws kept gnashing. Another wave crashed down and it slid several feet down toward the water.

  “Oh my God,” Kyle said. “What the hell is happening to them?”

  Lorena thought the ocean might reclaim the shark after a few more big waves, but she couldn’t be sure and she didn’t want to have to look at it. Didn’t want Kyle to have to look at it. She took his hand in hers, gave a reassuring squeeze, and then leaned forward to pull the tent flaps closed.

  “We’ll look again in a little while, see if anything’s changed,” she said.

  “What if it doesn’t?” he asked.

  Lorena squeezed his hand again but said nothing.

  CHAPTER 41

  Wolchko sat on the edge of the platform, trying to determine the exact location of the Thaumas and how far out he’d have to jump to make sure he wouldn’t hit the rocks of Bald Cap. The storm surge hadn’t gotten any higher and the tide had begun to turn. Already the highest swells were a few feet lower than they’d been at their worst.

  “You are not doing this,” Naomi told him.

  “Who do you suggest?”

  “I’ll go,” Naomi said.

  Wolchko actually considered it for a moment and then hated himself for that hesitation. “Not a chance.”

  “If this is some bullshit over me being female, I swear to God—”