The Surface, page 17
She was trying to use shape as the distinguishing factor, but even then, with their speed, mostly she was counting how many fins could she see at once. She couldn’t identify any one individual. It probably didn’t help that, each time they got close, she felt more terrified. She’d seen the woman who knocked on the door of the dorm… was it just two nights ago?
But Kimura pulled her attention away from her dawning realization with his clearly professional assessment. “Nine, possibly thirteen.”
More than twice as many as she’d counted. None of that was good. The thought of dipping a toe into the water and attracting thirteen aggressive sharks was deeply unsettling.
But he wasn’t done. Kimura quickly scrambled to the opposite corner of the two boats. This time as he sat back on his heels, he wadded the meat up. Instead of flinging it like a fluffy little frisbee, he chucked it overhand into the distance.
It sailed through the air, and his hands leaned onto on the ring. As he leaned dangerously forward to watch, Joule placed her hand onto his shoulder. Palm flat, she slowly pushed him back, lest he begin counting sharks under his own nose.
“How many?” she asked.
Kimura shook his head, “They’re further away than I can really see, but at least ten.”
“Could they be the same ones from over there?” She was calculating the timing even as she asked.
He shook his head again.
Well crap, she thought. The total grows every time he counts. But Kimura was willing to explain.
“That was the point of my experiment. I threw the bait in different directions, fast enough that they shouldn't have been able to close the distance. I quit counting new sharks once enough time had passed that the same individual could reach the second location from the first.”
He spoke like a researcher. Not like a man in the rain, his sweater vest soaked through, his knees in a puddle of water in the middle of an inflatable raft. None of that made the answer any better.
He sat back, his butt plopping into the water that pooled at the bottom of the boat. Joule knew it was time to grab the containers he’d brought and start bailing again. Unlike Gabby's big bowl, Kimura’s containers were square and squat. They could be scraped along the bottom of the boat, and hopefully yield more water out for every pass.
Between the rowing and the bailing and the rain and the panic, they were going to wear out quickly.
“The immediate area is infested with sharks. Probably worse than you thought,” Kimura offered up quietly, making her little existential crisis worse. He pointed in a wide circle around them. “Within a twenty-foot radius of this boat, probably at any time, there are twenty or more sharks. Actually, that’s a bare minimum. It’s probably a lot more.”
He said it with the cold academic interest Joule had come to expect from him, but she had lost the ability to catalog it that way.
“They all came this way because of the rains, yes, but to account for this number? There must be a rich food source. They venture out of saltwater and into brackish water like this only to hunt.”
The sharks weren’t simply here and the boat was disturbing them. No. They were specifically here to hunt the people. That had to be the food source Kimura had graciously left unnamed. Them.
No, she thought defiantly. She had survived the Night Hunters. She was not going to die in this liquid hell.
39
“Well, there's a sight you see right before you die.”
The words were whispered a little too sweetly into Cage’s ear.
He felt more than heard Holly stop rowing behind him. They’d been rowing for forever, it seemed, and had shifted positions several times. Sky and Gabby were now navigating and bailing the boat, the two designated non-rowers. Cage had filled that position for a time, and it hadn’t been the break he’d hoped it would be. They were all wearing down.
When people got tired, they made mistakes.
Kimura had even joined in rowing, and they'd recalculated their weights and how they should be distributed between the two boats. They’d switched sides, to at least allow some muscle groups to relax for a while. But none of it had changed the fact that they were moving slowly, the work was hard, and they were all on their last wind.
Cage looked up to see what had stopped Holly, and what had made her say that. It only took a moment for his eyes to focus on the water in front of him. It was more gray than brown out here, but it was choppier, too. He hated it. Still he saw the fins in front of him.
They cut the surface of the water with no provocation. Just sharks. Circling.
“What does that mean?” Gabby asked. They’d all stopped now, supposedly to check their surroundings, but everyone was breathing a little heavy and they needed a break. If he was worried that they might not have the strength to get out of the water before the sharks got them, now he knew they wouldn’t. They’d be too exhausted to climb back into the boat.
Around him, his friends put their heads together to look forward at what appeared to be sharks waiting for them.
“Good sign, bad sign,” Kimura told them. He'd been sharing his knowledge and little pieces through the rain and the murk. They've been rowing for quite a while and getting a little bit of a marine biology education.
Cage could only assume they were making really crappy progress. They were constantly held back by the weight of the water in the boat, despite all the bailing they did. The odd and shifting currents of the floodwaters created a need to navigate around buildings, parking garages, trees, and—they quickly discovered—telephone poles and power lines.
Sometimes the lines showed above the surface of the water, but sometimes they didn’t, and the group couldn’t tell if they were dangerous or not. So they'd been going out of their way, cutting a bizarre, snake-like pattern while trying to stay aimed in the right general direction.
“Bad news?” he prompted the professor.
“Lots of sharks, hungry sharks. The circling behavior is restless. They are waiting for bait, and then they’ll fight over it.”
Cage felt his stomach clench. From the looks on the faces of his fellow rowers, they felt the same. “Good news?”
“Shallower waters,” Kimura murmured to himself, seemingly not catching on that he was upsetting nine-tenths of the boat’s occupants. “If they're here and they're not openly in a feeding frenzy, it would indicate they know this is a food source. The food—smaller fish—tend to be in shallower waters. Especially in freshwater species.”
“This is deep, not shallow,” Holly protested.
Kimura shook his head at her, and Cage heard the professor’s response. “It’s deep to you, but not to them. They’re from the bay. This isn’t deep.”
Cage disagreed with the fish, but he couldn’t fault the professor’s analysis.
Joule leaned in closer to him from the other side. The boat rocked slightly, every movement magnified now that they weren’t moving to stabilize the system they’d created. “If they're here and they’re moving around because there's a food source,” she asked, “then it makes it doubly dangerous to go into the water at all, right?” When Kimura didn’t answer immediately, Joule continued. “Because as soon as any part of us cuts the surface, we become the food source and they're ready to eat it.”
“Yep!” the doctor replied. He sounded completely non-academic for once.
Cage wasn't dismissing what Joule had said. He knew the danger was even higher here, but he felt hope surge in his heart and in his tired muscles. “We’re close though?”
“I think so.”
They took a few more minutes of break—probably all they could afford—and switched up their positions. Cage was glad when Kimura took a rowing spot and wondered if it would actually keep him quiet. Probably not.
Marcus took up their navigation position and pulled out his phone, checked the maps, then held it out toward Kimura. “Is this the neighborhood you were thinking we would go to?”
Before the professor could even answer, Sky asked a question, almost too softly to be heard. “What if these people don't let us in?”
“I'm sure one of the houses will be abandoned.” Ginnifer was finding her foothold, contributing more. She spoke with confidence, even though Cage was certain it was false bravado. So far, his only issue with her was that Joule disliked her so much. Her information seemed solid. “I’m sure plenty of people left town.”
But other people, Cage thought, toughed it out. Kind of the way the students had. The school had recommended that people leave for the weekend if they could. But they’d missed on demanding that the students leave. There’d been no evacuation. The warnings had been too late, and the last instructions had told everyone to “shelter in place.”
People who were likely to tough it out probably felt safe. Maybe they thought it couldn’t get this bad. If they’d been ready to leave, it had been too late, and the roads were all washed out.
His other concern was the kind of people that would stay behind. Even though Palo Alto wasn't the place that you would expect to have a large population of preppers and gun nuts, they were here. In fact, they were everywhere, Cage had found. The kind of people who believed they were ready to make a stand—the kind who would stay in their homes in the face of a disaster—were more likely to greet people with shotguns, if at all.
Still, he held out hope that they could find something open. Or at least someone friendly, someone willing. God help them, a shed would be better than where they were now.
He was about to go crazy from the incessant pounding of raindrops on his skull. His hair was plastered to his head and had been for hours, even though his hood was still up. He was bone weary, and his eyes had lost focus a lot of the time. He still couldn't quite see where they were going.
Cage was sure he wasn’t the only one at the end of his endurance. But they had to keep themselves together until they had their feet on solid ground. He was growing less and less certain about the plan to return and rescue their fellow students.
“The water will get shallower as we get closer to high ground. Shallow waters are problematic,” Holly piped up. Even in the middle of a real disaster, her voice still sounded peppy. But looking at her face, Cage surmised that was due to her vocal chords and not her mood. “Shallow water means more telephone poles, more treetops, and more difficulty navigating, because there’s less space between obstacles. It will also amplify any currents we have to work against.”
Cage turned and looked at her. She so infrequently contributed to the conversation, it made her words seem more important. None of what she said sounded wrong, but he must have been making a face of some kind at her.
“Engineering,” she offered with a half-smile. “Sophomore. City planning.” Maybe it was her way of saying “I know what I'm talking about.”
“So we need to be more careful?” He wasn’t sure he could be. He wasn’t sure any of them had enough energy to focus more.
“No—well, yes, but… we've had the boats aligned wrong the entire time.”
Cage felt his eyebrows go up. They should be rowing, but if they were wrong… ? He didn’t even know what she meant.
“Look,” Holly continued, waving her hand toward the corners. “They're basically rectangular. They're really just made for rescue operations, or for drifting and waiting to be picked up. This wasn’t designed for easy forward movement. By tying them side by side, we’ve made it worse. We're cutting a wider path. First, it means we have a wider front pushing against the water, which is more work. Second, by being wider, we make it harder to fit between obstacles.”
Her eyes glanced one way and then another. Everyone was paying attention. “If we unlaced them—” Everyone started protesting at once. No one wanted to be two separate boats. The thought alone struck fear in his heart, and Cage protested along with the others.
“Listen! If we walk them around and tie them up end to end instead of side by side, then the second boat will draft off the first. The front will be only one boat wide, not two. It will be easier to navigate.” She looked among them and Cage felt and saw the protests diminishing.
Still, he had one. “The last thing you want to do now is take the boats apart. Look at what's in the water.”
“I know,” Ginnifer replied, “but it would be worse to run into a live wire or have something sharp cut one of the rafts open.”
Cage looked a Joule, but he could see she wasn't looking back at him. Her eyes had narrowed, and her gaze wasn’t on anything in particular. He knew that look. She was already contemplating how to make it happen.
Holly had suggested that the set of boats moving more like a train made them narrower. He wasn't sure why they hadn't thought of that in the first place—or why Holly hadn't piped up hours before.
There was silence for a few moments, and then he watched as his sister took over. These were her boats. She had been the only one smart enough and with enough money to plan ahead. They were all here—and not huddled on the roof waiting for a rescue that still probably hadn’t even been launched—because of her.
Joule explained her plan and then listened as her friends made suggestions and amendments.
Once they all knew how it was going to happen, they began to unlash the boats. That wasn't difficult, but it took some time.
The knots had grown as the water absorbed into the rope, despite the fact that it was a poly-based line and not cotton. Together, they tried to push the rope to loosen the knots or dig it out from where each knot had buried into itself. Cage’s fingertips felt bruised with the effort and he saw they were wrinkled now and not merely wet.
Though their progress was agonizingly slow, eventually, they got the knots free and unwound the rope from where it held the boats side by side.
It became clear that, without the rope binding them, they might drift apart. But they all reached out and grabbed on to the opposite boat and held tight. Slowly, the group began walking the boats around.
Hand over hand, they shifted until the other boat was still beside them but nearly a full boat-length behind. Corner to corner, they passed the point at which they were the most vulnerable, with only a few hands able to hold on, their connection at its most tenuous.
And then it happened.
Cage and Max were the only ones able to hold on. Perched in their respective corners, they had to muscle the boats around so they could be dragged into their new positions—end to end. Cage was in the boat that would be in the front, and he and Marcus were looking at each other, discussing adjustments when he felt the line pull across his wrist.
He let go before he looked, already concerned. Sure enough, a fin had surfaced and brushed his skin as the shark cut the small space between the two boats.
“Shit!” Marcus yelled, his own hand suddenly up in the air. He held his wrist with the opposite hand as though he’d been burned.
Cage had jerked backwards at the touch, too startled to think or even keep breathing. But the result was already done. The boats had lurched at the sudden movement and now they began to drift apart.
Reaching out over the water was hazardous, but it had to be done. He and Max scrambled back into place, shark fins be damned. Leaning out, he felt his friends grabbing onto his shoulders, his rain gear, anything they could to haul him back quickly if a mouthful of teeth launched out of the water for his hand.
But even though they both stretched out dangerously far, their fingers didn't touch.
It only took a moment and another fin to make them snatch their hands back for safety. With that movement, the others took action, dragging Cage backward and out of harm’s way. He was unceremoniously plopped into the constant puddle that was the bottom of the skiff.
He could only watch as the two boats began to drift apart.
40
Joule’s heart pounded in her chest in a way she would have thought impossible just a few moments ago. Despite being exhausted, she’d harnessed her adrenaline surge and launched into action. Now she clenched her hand, feeling Cage’s arm beneath her fingertips, grateful that he was still there.
For half a moment, she rested—but only half a moment, because it occurred to her then that she didn't know if he had all of his limbs or if he was bleeding out into the pool of water that had collected in the bottom of their skiff. Lifting her head, she searched him top to toe and saw no glaring red gashes. So she again laid her head back into the water and sucked in a breath filled with rain drops.
The water stung her face. It rolled along the sides of her head, sneaking into her ears, puddling in the corners of her eyes, and making tracers down the back of her neck. Normally, the rain would have irritated her no end. Now, it was the least of her worries.
As the boat began to rock, she scrambled upright like the others. This was no time to relax. She watched as their sister ship moved farther away on the subtle but powerful waves.
Gabby was swearing a blue streak. Marcus was scrambling through backpacks. Kimura was patting at his pockets, as though he might find some some magic rock to save them. And Sky and Roxie were both leaning over the edges of their vessels, hands pushing into the inflated rings though their friends were holding them back.
Joule once again flexed her grasp. Once again, she felt her own twin’s hand beneath her fingers and could only imagine what Sky and Roxie were going through at this moment. Then again, she’d been in this situation before…
“The rope!” she yelled, finally sitting upright and beginning her own scramble around the boat. The backpacks were partially underwater. That meant the rope was underwater, too.
She frantically worked to tie knots into the end, the only thing she could think of to do right now. Even as her fingers moved, she looked around. She needed something with…
