Tsunami Blue (22 page)

I knew where John had gone in, but in the few moments that had passed there were currents and tide action and— I saw him. I saw him. Only a few feet before me, he wasn’t moving.
Damn.
I swam alongside him, cutting ropes from his feet, then his wrists. I tucked him under my arm in a neck hold and kicked with all my might, pushing for the surface. I aimed for daylight and air and life.

Seconds later we burst to the surface—just as Gabriel and Trace tumbled overboard.

What had just happened? Now all four of us were in the water? Unbelievable.

Let’s play, Blue. Let’s play
, the sea whispered.

“Let’s not,” I said as I treaded water.

Ready?
whispered the sea.

I wasn’t, but the swells hit us anyway. Hard, fast, and furious, they tumbled us over and over and over until we were spit out onto the rocks and sand and debris.

We were sprawled out on the beach like salmon fillets drying in the sun.

Gabriel and John didn’t move. They could not be dead. They just could not.

Trace was up on his feet. He carried a piece of driftwood in his hand like a club. And he was coming right for me.

I scooted backward on my butt, scrambling on all fours like a crab, but he reached me quickly and had his boot at my throat.

“You are a shitload of work, Tsunami Blue,” he said as he ground his boot into my neck. “And I’m not sure that you’re worth it. But the way I see it, you’ll do your job just as well with or without an ear.” He knelt and, with his knee on my chest, he pulled a knife from the small of his back. The blade looked sharp enough to cut silk. “Let this be a lesson.”

He put more pressure on my chest, and now I could hardly breathe. “Gabriel will kill you,” I said in a gasp.

Trace laughed. “Gabriel is dead, sweetheart. They both are.”

“No…” My voice was weak, and stars were starting to form from lack of oxygen.

He leaned over me. “Oh, yes,” he hissed.

Trace fisted my hair in his hand and brought the blade down just under my earlobe.

“You sick fuck,” I wheezed.

“You got that right.”

I saw a flash, a blur really, of rich colors. Gold and white and black twirled together and flew before my eyes. Trace went airborne, screaming. I heard growling, thunderous and frightening. What was happening? What-? I pushed up and saw stars. My vision blurred. I put my head between my legs to keep from passing out. The feeling passed in seconds. My vision cleared, only to be clouded again from tears.

Max.

It was Max.

My Max
.

I was sobbing now, calling my dog’s name, calling for him to stop. To come.

He was doing what he always had. He was protecting me.

Standing right behind him, leaning on each other for support, were John and Gabriel.

I cried harder.

My Max and my Gabriel were alive. Alive!

I was on my feet, calling my dog’s name. Max stopped and looked first at me, then at Gabriel. Gabriel pointed and Max ran to me, knocking me over. We tumbled and tangled and rolled. He licked and barked and hit me with a tail that refused to stop wagging. He was matted and filthy and oh, so beautiful.

For the first time in I didn’t know how long, I laughed. I cried tears of real joy.

I was so involved with Max that when Gabriel told me a few moments later that John the Snake Man had taken Trace’s life I dropped to the sand on weak knees. And I sure as hell was glad I didn’t see that before John delivered the killing blow, he had sliced off Trace’s ears and tossed them to the circling gulls above. 

The lights of New Seattle beckoned in the distance. Standing out in the ink of night, they twinkled and waved, looking friendly and harmless.

Not so.

The lights were huge fires, lit on platforms that stood hundreds of feet in the air. The Runner fires. Fire from hell was more like it.

New Seattle held the largest contingency of Runners in the northern hemisphere. After the last big wave, they had sailed into the city, set up base, and never left. It had pretty much ruined my underwater shopping adventures. And even though I had prayed that most would be gone, frightened off by my message of impending doom and all, it was unrealistic to think there would be none left behind. There were always disbelievers in the bunch. And there were the opportunists. The ones who would risk anything, even their own lives, for the old finders-keepers game. That applied to anything left behind. Including women and children.

We had sailed from New San Juan with the wind and sea pushing us along at an unbelievable speed. It was like nature knew what lay ahead and was forcing us forward before we changed our minds. But forward to what? I had to wonder. Life? Or death?

We had said good-bye to John. For now. Using Trace’s boat, which was now his boat, minus the rotting body and skulls, John had sailed to New False Bay.

The Snake Man, it seemed, was our new babysitter.

And no one was more shocked about that than I was.

But, boy, were the twins revved up. When we had raised them on the shortwave, they had insisted on putting Aubrey on for introductions. She was excited to see all his colors.

The boys knew him. Turns out John the Snake Man had been a friend who had visited New False Bay often. Gabriel trusted him. And me? Well, I had saved his life, so he owed me. But when the kids didn’t sound scared anymore, when they knew John was on the way to take them as far north as possible, I decided we were even. Because even Tsunami Blue hadn’t been able to take their fears away.

John had been a friend of Gabriel’s in another life before being captured and hauled away to perform in Trace’s cage of terror. He’d been born with the spooky film over his eyes. A birth defect. A freak on nature. And didn’t I know how that felt. But the tattoos and piercings and the rest had been done by the Runners. Then they had split his tongue.

All against his will.

And I thought my childhood was hard.

But for me it was saying good-bye to Max—again—that was the hardest. I had gotten my best friend back, but as I watched him run along the deck and bark his good-bye, I broke down all over again. Logic dictated that it was the best move to take Max to the kids and Bacon and safety. But my emotions said differently.

I wiped my eyes.

“Thinking about Max?” Gabriel reached out and smoothed my hair. “I’m so glad you got him back.”

I managed a smile and nodded.

A huge flash of flames shot high into the night sky.

“The fires of hell are burning bright tonight,” I said.

I stood with Gabriel, and as we sailed into New Seattle, I braced for the same old insanity that only this many Runners could conjure.  

But tonight was different. There was more chaos than ever. More insanity.

The Runners were moving out.

There was panic in the air. We could see the flurry of frantic activity. Like a mass of killer bees, the Runners swarmed. Men raced across platforms, carrying supplies. They hung from scaffolding, using pulleys and weights to haul cargo down to the waiting ships. They shouted, swore, fought, and killed. I watched as a man slipped, snapping his leg. As he lay screaming in agony, a Runner kicked him off the platform. Another put an arrow in him halfway down. He was still screaming when he hit the water. A crippled Runner was a dead Runner. It was just the way of the world. Their twisted world, that is.

We sailed on, blending easily into the insanity all around us. What was one more ship in the midst of hundreds? We passed the shark pens and a fierce chill swept along my spine. The pens were legendary. As were the great whites held captive in them. It was once thought that the sharks couldn’t survive in captivity. But leave it to the Runners to figure out a way.

They kept the sharks well fed.

To keep my fear at bay, I sat in the cockpit huddled under a blanket and watched Gabriel at the wheel. And I talked. And talked. And, well, basically, I drove Gabriel crazy.

“So you’re not a Runner, but you pretended to be a Runner and then you got a tattoo. Doesn’t that make you a Runner?”

“Blue.” He leaned down where I now sat and kissed me. “I am
not
a Runner. I never was a Runner. I only pretended to be a Runner to find you. If I could find you, then together we could do so much good. We could stop these monster waves, stop this insane destruction, save lives. We could try to give humanity a chance.” He sighed and ran his hand through his hair. “There were thousands of Runners looking for you, Blue. Thousands.”

“Thousands?” My voice squeaked.

He nodded. “They had better resources. More manpower. So I joined.”

“And that doesn’t make you a Runner?”

“It makes me a
pretend
Runner. Pretend.” He swung the wheel and the sails responded, filling with the night wind.

I thought for a moment. “And when you found me? When you gave me Max? Why?”

“I couldn’t get you out safely. They were closing in. All the factions. Trace, Indigo, all getting close. So I took them in another direction. That other direction lasted five years,” he said bitterly. “I left you Max just before I convinced them to go south.”

“Ah, south.” I thought of his sun-kissed skin. “And when I found you? When you almost died?”

“They had found you and were coming for you in the morning. I tried to beat them to it. The sea was rough, too rough.” He shifted his hands and gripped the wheel. “I almost didn’t make it in time to save you.”

I watched the tension in his body build as he relived that night. I stood and shared my blanket with him. “But you did make it, tough guy, you did.”

 “So. How ’bout I change the subject?” I said after a moment. “I have a few more questions.”

He looked skeptical.

“How does this thing work?”

“This thing?” he asked.

“Yeah. You know, the whole, stoppin’-the-wave thing.” I twirled my finger in the air.

“It’s complicated.” He looked wary, like he always did when he didn’t know what was gonna come out of my mouth.

“So let me see if I can wrap my mind around this.”

“Let’s not.”

“Crystals?” I said, ignoring him.

“No.”

“Meditation?”

“No.”

“Chanting?”

Sigh. “No.”

“Incense and peppermint?”

“Not funny.”

“What?”

“Never mind.”

“I’ve got it. Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme.”

“Damn it, Blue.”

I shut up. The shark pens were too close. He might give ’em a snack. Me.

We sailed through the city that had once been so green and lush, so unbelievably beautiful on a summer’s day. It now lay in ruins, like every other major city in the world.

We passed Seattle’s famous landmark, the Space Needle—actually, just the needle. That was all that remained for human eyes. Everything else was underwater.

Stick a needle in your eye,
the sea whispered at me.

It was then, at that moment, that I knew the exact location the wave would come in. The sea, with its taunting game had just pinpointed it for me.

Do you know how to thread a needle, Blue?

I knew without looking that all the color had drained from my face. I thought I might be sick.

And of course Gabriel noticed.

“You okay?” he asked.

“No, not really. But I will be. If you can really do what you say you can. Because now I know exactly where the wave will crest. Exactly.” I fought back the nausea while the sea laughed and taunted.
Needle in a haystack, Blue. Needle in a haystack.

“The wave?” Gabriel asked.

“There,” I said as we sailed past. “The wave crests there.”

Gabriel squinted into the dark at the famous, now partially submerged Seattle Space Needle. “The Needle, then?”

“The Needle.” He didn’t ask me again. He believed me.

And it was time I believed him. Completely.

We sailed among the rooftops of Pike Place Market. I had been there only once as a kid. I remembered the noise and the people and colors and smells and food. But mostly, I remembered the fish.

 I remembered the boys at the fish market throwing salmon through the air for their customers to catch if they dared. The kings were slippery and a worker was always there as backup should the customer miss. The customers missed a lot.

I loved it. So sure was I that those fish, the king salmon, could fly, I told Seamus. It was the first time he called me stupid. But now, knowing he had suffered and died without giving me up, that in the end he had protected me, took the sting out of the memory. It took the sting out of a lot of memories.

Gabriel tied the boat to an old sign advertising Starbucks Pike Place Blend. If Christmas Blend traded like gold, the Pike Place Blend would be platinum.

“We wait here,” he said. “It’s a good vantage point. I can watch the water.”

I went below. I didn’t want to care anymore. I was with either a madman or a miracle worker. Either way I didn’t think we’d live to see the morning. And for the first time I started to grieve for my future. For Gabriel’s future. A future that held the promise of us.

 I woke to footsteps above deck. Loud voices echoed in the night. Swearing, laughter, and one oh, so familiar voice. Indigo.
Damn it.
I’d so much rather die in a wave.

The hatch flew open and a nasty-looking Runner, ripe with alcohol and weed, climbed down.

“I found the bitch!” he said, revealing teeth he’d filed into wicked points.

I turned to run. Yeah. Like that was gonna work. So much room in a sailboat.

He grabbed me and twisted the butter knife out of my hand, almost breaking my wrist. I was hauled up by my hair and tossed at Indigo’s feet. When I looked up, he was embracing Gabriel.

Gabriel pulled away and thumped Indigo on the back with a hearty slap. “I knew I’d find you here. Thought you’d be pleased with my little present.” He nudged me with his boot. “All that’s missing is the bow.”

I thought I was going to be sick.