“Noah,” she whispered, though there was no reason to. “Who is doing this?”
She no longer thought of it as a stupid question. In fact, it was the only thing that mattered now. In about seven seconds, she was probably going to die. There wasn’t anything she or Noah could do about it. All that was left was to answer that one burning question: why?
Who wanted them dead?
Five alligators… four alligators…
Noah didn’t answer. “Cover your head,” he said, much louder than her whisper. “Keep your mouth open.” He opened his mouth in a wide O, and when she tried to emulate him, her ears popped and her jaw hurt.
Two… one…
Zero.
Nothing?
Did I mess up the count? Maybe it’s not—
2
Jenna had been helping Noah run trips on weekends and during breaks from school nearly all her life. They were partners as much as they were family, and often she thought of him more as a mentor than a father. He was not an absentee breadwinner, like the parents of so many of her friends at school. He was always there, including her in everything, teaching and molding her at every opportunity. The Kilimanjaro, Noah’s forty-eight foot Uniflite Yacht Fisherman, was as much a second school for her as it was his place of business, and of course, it was the place they both called home.
The gleaming white fiberglass craft was a comfortable, if not exactly traditional home. The centrally located cabin contained a spacious salon that served as both dining room and galley. In addition to the forward Master Stateroom, which Noah maintained for the use of guests on overnight trips, there were two smaller staterooms, one for him and one for Jenna. When not cruising through the waves, propelled by twin 410 horsepower engines, Jenna often passed idle afternoons on the forward deck, soaking in the sun. There was also plenty of room to hang out and relax on the aft deck, or on the bridge above the cabin, where she often went to watch the picturesque sunsets.
The complete absence of any kind of familial resemblance between her and Noah was also a factor in defining their relationship. Noah was five-ten, average height for a man and solidly built. All his life, so he claimed, people told him that he looked like a young Ernest Hemingway — young being a relative term as Noah was in his early fifties, which seemed positively ancient to Jenna. Perhaps because of the perceived likeness, Noah had chosen to emulate the literary icon by leaving the rest of the world behind and retiring to the Keys to raise his daughter and spend the rest of his life ‘chasing that big fish.’
Jenna on the other hand was tall — she already stood nose to nose with Noah — and willowy. Nature had seen fit to let her skip over the body-awkwardness of early adolescence. With long straight chestnut brown hair that looked black when wet, but in a certain light, glowed almost red, and with dark brown eyes, she was often told that she looked exotic. People sometimes asked ‘What was your mother?’ She understood that they meant nothing offensive by the question, but it was a hard thing to answer.
What was she? Alive. What is she now? Not alive. Jenna didn’t know much more than that. Not her name. Her face. Or something as basic as her nationality.
Noah had no pictures of the woman and almost never spoke of her. When her mother did come up in conversation, she was always ‘your mother.’ It was the one topic of conversation Noah refused to indulge. Jenna never detected a hint of lingering grief in his tone, but she imagined that they must have been deeply in love. There was no other way to explain his refusal to share memories of the woman with her only daughter. Jenna often daydreamed about her mother, but all she really knew was that the woman must have looked a lot like her, because Jenna looked nothing like her father.
Jenna wondered why thoughts of her mother, of family and the familiarity of home, had popped into her head at a moment like this. Maybe it was her version of that old cliché about a person’s life flashing before her eyes before she died.
As the world around her screamed, shook and burned, Jenna wondered if, at long last, she was going to meet her mother.
3
The world moved in slow motion. Jenna’s senses, hyper-acute with adrenaline and anticipation, dissected every excruciating detail. The fiberglass wall bulged inward. A deep soul-crushing thump pushed through her body. The air in the small compartment flashed blast furnace hot.
Is this what it feels like to die?
Then even her heightened awareness could not keep up with the overload of stimuli that followed. Everything went dark. She felt herself turned upside-down. Shocking coolness replaced the intense heat as the Gulf of Mexico poured in around her.
There was a grunt of exertion and then light flooded in. Noah had wrestled the sprung door out of the way. With her first glimpse of the aftermath, Jenna wondered if she had been transported to some kind of parallel universe where everything was familiar but nothing was where it ought to be. She lay on a bulkhead, with the deck sloping away beside her and the molded plastic commode somehow protruding out above her head, blue chemically-treated water sloshing out.
We’re sinking.
That was only partly true. As Noah cleared the opening, Jenna saw that the world outside the head had likewise undergone a profound reality shift. Instead of the warm and welcoming wood-paneled salon with tinted windows affording an almost unrestricted view of the marina, there was only torn fiberglass, dangling hoses, wires and dark water.
“Move it!” Noah shouted.
Jenna shook off her sense of dislocation and pulled herself through the surreal three-dimensional maze. It was like trying to escape from a carnival funhouse. Nothing was what it seemed or where she expected it, and the only way to stave off vertigo was to close her eyes and keep moving. She felt Noah’s hand close on her biceps, pulling her the rest of the way through.
Outside, the situation was no less disorienting. Aft, the mostly intact deck was canted upward, like a ramp leading nowhere. Most of the superstructure — the top of the cabin and everything that had extended up above it — was gone, ripped out by the roots. The hulls of the vessels in neighboring slips — the First Attempt and the Martha Ann—rose up on either side, looking none the worse for wear. The sight of the two completely intact boats hit Jenna like a cold slap of reality. The only home she had even known was in ruins all around her, and the rest of the world would just keep going on like nothing had happened.
The forward end of the Kilimanjaro was completely gone past the galley, split apart like a mailbox vandalized by a delinquent with a cherry bomb. What was left of the front end was settling quickly into the harbor. Whatever Noah had done with the bomb in the last few seconds before the timer ran out had focused most of the blast energy out the front end. His quick thinking had saved their lives.
Jenna started to crawl up toward the still dry aft deck, but Noah pulled her back. “Not that way. The sniper is still out there. We have to make him think we’re dead.”