Ruby looked at her closely. “I believe you,” she said and kissed Cathy on the cheek. “Good-bye, honey.”
She and Martha lifted her over the edge and dropped her into the water with a splash.
Cathy’s instinct took over and she gulped down a breath of air and closed her mouth as the water sealed over her. She looked up at the receding surface. Her heart was beating fast enough to explode. She had been a swimmer in high school and knew she could hold her breath for over two minutes. But did she want to?
The darkness closed in and it got cold. Pressure built up and Cathy felt her ears pop. The light above was only a faint echo, a lost and broken promise.
She looked down and saw nothing but a vast and menacing darkness. The enormity of it all was too much for a mind to grasp. What sorts of predatory evil were waiting for her down there?
Cathy couldn’t control herself any longer. She screamed in horror and despair. In the cold dark depths, it made no sound.
The ladies had a pleasant lunch on the deck of Carefree. They ate boiled shrimp and crabmeat, washing it down with sweet tea. Afterwards, they had blueberry muffins from the grocery’s bakery and then sat silently and peacefully in the sun.
“We better get back,” Trish finally said. “The rental’s only for half a day.”
Everyone nodded and gathered up their feast.
“It sure has been nice, ladies,” said Dolores wistfully.
“Don’t say it like that,” said Martha. “This weekend ain’t over yet. Not by a long shot.”
“What’s next?” asked Stephanie.
Ruby smiled, “Guess who’s playing at the Florabama this afternoon?”
“Not Big Earl,” said Dolores.
“The very same,” answered Ruby.
“Well, I think we should go see him,” said Dolores.
They went back into the marina and cleaned the boat thoroughly using bleach and ammonia over every possible surface. The boat owner was amazed, saying the boat hadn’t been that clean even when brand new. He was so pleased that he didn’t get too upset over them losing his spare anchor. Besides, they willingly paid for it and left him the rest of their beer.
They pushed Dolores out into the parking lot and loaded up the van.
“Should we go check on Cathy first?” asked Stephanie. “She might be up by now.”
Everyone was quiet for a minute before Ruby answered. “She can call us if she wakes up and wants to come along. No, let’s just let her rest.”
“You know,” said Dolores after a long pause. “These ladies weekends are good for me I think. I feel just perfectly fine.”
They all smiled in agreement.
_______
Ryan King is a career army officer with multiple combat tours who continues to serve in the military. He has lived, worked, and traveled throughout Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. King is married to fellow author Kristin King and they have four young and energetic boys who keep them constantly busy. Ryan King writes post-apocalyptic, dystopian, thriller, horror, and action short stories, short novels, and novels. You can find out more about Ryan King at Goodreads here: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6422624.Ryan_King
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Table of Contents
VERITAS: CONCUBINE
By R.S. Guthrie
The pair of blockish jailhouse guards with tight crew-cuts, slabs of meat for hands, and disconnected expressions, led the tall, angular man in the orange jumpsuit into the visitor waiting room of the Walla Walla, Washington State Penitentiary. The prisoner was shackled from hands to feet and back again, though, as writer Francis Constantine knew better than most, Shale Veritas was hardly a man the innocent need fear.
For the guilty, however, Veritas was a self-constructed and brutally efficient grim reaper.
The beefy officers of the State sat Veritas down across from the too-thin, cream-colored journalist with the onyx hair so striking it had provided a thousand conversation starters over her twenty-seven years in the field. It was not her most impressive feature by far. The woman could write a story. Yet despite her ego’s protestations, she knew without doubt that her talent was not why she was here.
After further securing their charge to the half-circle pieces of steel mounted to the metal table, the armed men moved back to a corner without ever speaking a word or even making a sound. They’d given up breathing as far as Constantine could tell.
Veritas had the face of an angel—not those of childhood stories and picture-books, but rather a geometrically pleasing shape, narrow yet manly, as if chiseled from a piece of flesh-shaded granite, straight lines and few curves. His hair, as dark as her own in younger pictures posted in newspapers and magazines around the country, was now more salt than pepper, but still flowed down silkily and lay slightly atop his broad shoulders.
His eyes, with near colorless irises, looked not at her but through, as if he could sense that there, in that room, but one man-made wall stood between himself and the outside, where surely such a man could clear the razor-wired fence in a single thrusting leap.
“You look afraid,” he said, crushing the oppressive silence.
“I’m not,” she said.
“If you don’t understand me enough not to fear me, I may have made a mistake in choosing you.”
“It’s not fear. You are a striking man in person. The papers and television don’t do you justice.”
“A flirt?” Veritas said, mocking her with his expression.
“The truth.”
His eyes opened then, more soft than before. “The truth I can appreciate. Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.”
“Benjamin Franklin?”
“Thoreau. I’d have thought you’d recognize your own species.”
“Species?”
“Writus gregarious.”
“You’re intimidating,” she said. “And you enjoy that fact.”
“Not too much truth, however,” he said, and smiled for the first time. His teeth were not gleaming and perfectly aligned, as she’d subconsciously assumed, yet still, they were unquestionably fitting. A partial flash into the reality of his whole; portents of his imperfection and—what?
His humanity?
“How much time do we have?” she said.
“As much as it takes,” he told her. “That’s part of the deal. As many visits, as many phone calls. I want you to get it right. That’s all I ask.”
“You realize this is the story of the century.”
“I hope your written style is less cliché than your spoken word.”
“Cheap shots seem beneath you.”
“They aren’t. I’m not a spectacle or an oddity. I’m also not impervious to human failings. I hurt, I feel, I can easily become embarrassed, or flattered. The press has turned Shale Veritas into some kind of unearthly machination; a construct out of Greek mythology.”
“Can you blame them?”
“Yes, I can. What I’ve done—the acts I’ve committed—are far more human than not.”
“Is that why you picked me?”
“You know why I picked you. Let’s not start this affair playing cat and mouse, as if we can pretend that reality isn’t what it is. If we can’t get something so simple to work—”
“I know why you picked me.”
“Then you know how it is that yes, I can blame them. Or at least you will know.”
“I still want to hear you say it.”
“You want to hear me say it?”