I closed my eyes.
I almost let it happen.
Almost.
But there was another voice in my head, and it found me down in the salty, deadly darkness. A soft voice that spoke only a single word.
“No,” she said.
No.
She was up there. Close. Probably in our condo in Del Mar, or in her office in La Jolla. Close. And maybe in that moment, maybe as I fell, she knew it. I could even imagine her stopping as if touched, closing her eyes as she listened to the things only she seemed able to hear. Maybe listening for my heartbeat. I don’t know. She’s my lover but even I don’t know everything that goes on inside her. No one does, I’m sure of that. Maybe no one could. She’s not like anyone else I ever met or ever expect to meet.
Junie Flynn.
“No.”
It was as clear as if she whispered it in my ear.
Funny thing is, I didn’t hear it as “no.” Not really. I heard it as “yes.”
As in, yes, stay with me. Yes, be alive.
Yes, there is a reason to keep going.
Which is really all you ever need.
One reason.
One good reason.
I kicked off my trousers, let them fall, taking my gun belt into the deep, and kicked upward. Free of the weight I shot toward the surface. It seemed like a long, long way.
It was.
When you suddenly realize you want to live, that’s when the panic tries to set in. The world with all of its perils wants to make a fool out of you, it wants to cheat you of that glory of survival. It wants to steal everything from you at the moment when you understand the value of what you have, and what you have to live for.
So I kicked.
Kicked harder.
Fought my way up.
And up.
Until I broke the surface like a dying seal. Gasping, vomiting seawater, blind from the black and red fireworks that were detonating behind my eyes. Choking and coughing and trying to be alive.
Something splashed in the water and I turned, pawing the water from my eyes, expecting to see Top or Bunny come porpoising up.
It wasn’t.
A double shot of spouting water vapor burst upward past me like a V-shaped geyser as something monstrous rose from the churning waves. It was simply fucking vast. Forty-five feet long if it was an inch. Gray and white mottling on slate-gray skin. Two blowholes. Barnacles crusted onto its sides.
A gray whale.
So close that as it rose to the surface the displaced water shoved me backward. I was actually close enough to see a line of stiff hairs on its upper jaws.
The impetus washed me hard into a second bulky creature.
I thrashed and spun, filled with mingled terror and wonder, to see that I’d collided with a much smaller whale. Maybe sixteen feet long with no trace of barnacles or mottling. A newborn.
A shadow fell across my face and I saw Big Mama turning toward me. Or rather toward the thing that was swimming between her and the newborn. I’m no ichthyologist but I’m pretty damn sure this was not the place I wanted to be. There was a great surface turbulence and her flukes broke from the water and rose above me. Ten feet across and more than massive enough to smash me into chum.
I dove and swam the opposite way from Big Mama and Junior. I wanted no part of maternal rage. I wanted no part of any of this. Pretty sure I was going to smash my Free Willy DVDs if I ever got the hell out of this.
I swam as hard as I could and didn’t care which direction it was, so long as it was away from them. No idea where Top and Bunny were and, truth to tell, right now I’d have fed them to the whales if that’s what it would take. The sun above me was hot but the water felt frigid and no matter how hard I swam it felt like I wasn’t moving. Behind me I could hear the explosive spouting of the whales. Sounded so damn close. I knew that gray whales eat mostly crustaceans. They weren’t like killer whales. But they were supposed to be very defensive. One of my friends in San Diego told me that the grays used to be called “devil fish” because of how aggressive they got when hunted. So I tried to telepathically assure Big Mama that I was the furthest thing on planet Earth to something that might want to do harm to any member of her species.
I swam.
And prayed.
And swam.
And prayed.
Until…
The seas grew quiet around me.
I didn’t slow down. Not right away. Panic owned me.
Guess it’s fair to say that I stopped swimming when I didn’t die. Sounds stupid, but not in the moment. My muscles were burning with lactic acid, my lungs seared by salt water and exertion, my brains scrambled. Also, in the absence of a modern sequel to Moby Dick, the realities of my situation were beginning to float to the top of my brain.
We didn’t catch our bad guy. Someone blew up our boat. We were fifty miles away from the nearest land. And by “we” I meant me and the voices in my head, because when I stopped and looked around at the top of each rolling swell, I didn’t see another person.
Not Top. Not Bunny.
No one.
CHAPTER EIGHTY-NINE
I floated.
Drifting. Drowsing. Dreaming.
Trying not to die.
Several times I rode a swell to its highest point, cupped my hands around my mouth, and called out.
“BUNNY!”
“TOP!”
“ECHO, ECHO!”
Loud as I could.
The wind took my shouts and shredded them over the tops of the waves. Each time I sank down and had to fight back to the surface.
After twenty minutes, maybe more, I found a seat cushion from the Picuda. Burned, soaked, but still afloat. I snatched it and hugged it to my chest and nearly wept. Spent the next ten or fifteen minutes emotionally bonding with the cushion. It was my best friend and I loved it. We bobbed together in the salt water as I oriented myself and went through my options. The math was against me.
I was maybe forty miles west of Oceanside. Maybe less, but that’s a long damn swim at the best of times. Which this wasn’t. I had no idea if the tide was going in or out. Layer that on top of the fact that I’d gotten the living crap beaten out of me. Everything from mid-chest down was waterlogged and turning into a frozen prune. Everything from the chest up was broiling. No hat, no sunglasses. No food. No drinking water. What was that line from Coleridge? Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink.
I think I yelled some curses at the ocean, the water, the salt in the water, the waves, the sky, the puffy fucking clouds, and the universe as a whole.
Drifting, drifting.
Thinking about the man who did this to me.
Thinking about how much I wanted to kill him.
Thinking about how he’d probably killed me.
Trying to make sense of it. That he was Esteban Santoro was beyond doubt. So, how did that explain his sudden change of body language and accent? Had someone at the Dreamwalking project taken over Santoro, too?
My gut told me I was right about that, although I didn’t really understand it.
The same thing had obviously happened to Top and Bunny. If they were alive, if they survived this, how would they ever be able to get past it? Someone had made them commit wholesale murder. Innocent civilians. Children. It was their hands who held those guns, their fingers on the triggers.
Living past a thing is not the same as surviving it.
I drifted.