travel faster than sound, I felt the sledgehammer pick me up and slam me against the far wall before I heard the report of the gun. While the chest plate saved my life, it also knocked every ounce of air out of my chest. I sat there retching, attempting to fill my already-damaged lungs, while Gunner launched himself through the air and began chewing on the shooter. Through the smoke, I heard Gunner growling and snapping, and the man screaming.
I had climbed to my feet and was on the way to help when a single gunshot sounded. Gunner tumbled to the floor, only to try to rise but then fall again. One leg was limp, cocked at a weird angle, and he winced and fell over when he tried to place weight on it. When he stood up a third time, his white chest was painted red. He tried to crawl his way over to me but couldn’t. The man stood and kicked Gunner’s body, then his pistol flashed again, sending something piercing hot into my hip.
Looking at the man, I had a singular thought: You killed my dog.
Two seconds later, I stepped over the man, stared down at Gunner’s unmoving body, and moved farther inside toward the main deck lounge, where three men were coming toward me. I wasn’t in the mood for conversation, so our interaction was short. Having stepped over them, I climbed the spiral staircase up one level to the bridge-deck lounge, finding two more men. After another short conversation, I kicked open the ship’s office door, tripped over a sixth man, and ran into the bridge, which was deserted because of the fire. Either the fire or the tank explosion had blown out the front glass, and a gentle breeze of salt spray cooled my face—which suggested I might have earned some burns from the blast.
I climbed to the top floor and onto the owner’s-deck lounge, where I was met by a large man with an enormous belly and a foul mouth wearing only his underwear. As he screamed at me, I almost laughed at the enormous tattoo of a hundred-dollar bill across his hairy chest. Below the bill, the words “Cash Money” had been tattooed in script. I laid him out, used the curtain cords to hog-tie him, and was able to learn that Cash Money was a frequent customer from Cuba. Owned an oil company. He offered me a lot of money to cut him loose. I told him to hush or I’d cut off his masculinity. When he didn’t hush, I broke his jaw.
A young girl lay on the bed, unconscious but breathing. I pulled an ax off the wall and cut through the Honduran mahogany doors and into the larger stateroom where I found another man holding a knife to another girl’s throat. He was skinny, not dressed, his face smeared with white powder, and he was screaming nonsense.
The amazing thing about the cerebral cortex is how quickly and immediately it controls our movements. It’s the area of our body where we think something and our body moves as a result of that thought. It’s also amazing how quickly it ceases to function when a hard copper object passes through it traveling over three thousand feet per second. With his lights turned out, he dropped the knife and let go of the girl, who stood screaming at the top of her lungs.
Beneath us, Pluto rocked forward suddenly, telling me she was taking on more water than I’d initially thought. She was, in fact, sinking. That told me I had only moments to find Summer, Angel, and anyone else held here against their will, and get off this thing before we all drowned. In the air, I smelled smoke, suggesting the fire had restarted, probably in the engine room because something had disabled the sprinklers. I descended the stairs and turned aft into the engine room, but the bottom half was flooded and the top half was engulfed in flames and the smell of burning diesel fuel, so I waded fore through waist-deep water into the crew cabins, past some sort of prayer shrine, and toward the door of the anchor room, where the water had turned red.
And there I found Summer.
I was in the process of reaching for her when I felt the familiar impact of the sledgehammer lifting and slamming me into the wall in front of me. I tried to lift myself off the floor, but whoever had just