“Geri!” I yelled. “What do we do?”
“Row!” she hollered.
“Where?”
She spun her head. For the first time, she didn’t have an answer, because there was no answer. Yannis and Nina were gone from sight. I paddled madly, as did Geri, ripping into the waves that broke on all sides of us. The wind whipped my face so hard that tears streamed down. I could barely see. For all I knew we were spinning the raft around like a record player.
We never found them. After ten minutes, my weak muscles groaned in pain. I dropped back and wailed “NO!” and was soaked by another wave, as if to shut me up. The wind howled. The raft was calf high with seawater. The others held their ropes and stared at the horizon, avoiding looks that said the obvious. Two more taken. Two more gone. I could hear the boast in the ocean’s torturous roar. You will never escape. I will have you all.
No one spoke for hours. The storm passed, the rain never hit us, and the sun returned in the morning like a tireless demon punching in for its daily shift. We stared at our feet. What was there to say? Five dead from this lifeboat, plus dozens lost the night the Galaxy went down. The ocean was collecting us.
Lambert mumbled incoherently now and then, something about phone calls and “Security! Call security!” Gibberish. I ignored him. Little Alice was draped over Geri, squeezing her arm. I thought about the morning when Mrs. Laghari straightened Alice’s hair, licking her fingers and flattening her eyebrows, the two of them smiling and hugging. It felt like years ago.
And Nina? Poor Nina. From the moment I met her on the Galaxy, she looked to believe the best in people, and she went to her death believing the stranger in our boat would save her. He did not. He did nothing. What more proof of his charade do we require? She told me once that she had asked the Lord about prayers. He’d said all prayers were answered, “but sometimes the answer is no.”
I suppose it was no for Nina. It infuriates me. When I glare at the man, he returns my look with a placid expression. I can’t imagine what he is feeling or thinking, Annabelle. Or if he feels and thinks at all. When we had food, he ate it. When we had water, he drank it. His skin is chafed and blistered like ours. His face is hollow and bonier than when we discovered him. But he utters no complaints. He does not seem to be suffering. Maybe delusion is his best ally. We all search for something to save us. He thinks it is him.
Yesterday morning, I awoke to see Geri fussing with a patching kit.
“What are you doing?” I mumbled.
“I’ve got to try and patch the bottom, Benji,” she said. “We don’t have enough people to keep bailing. We’ll sink.”
I nodded wearily. Ever since the shark attack, which ripped a hole in the lower tube, one of us has been constantly shoveling water out of our tilted raft bottom. It’s an endless, tiring task, only tolerable because there were many of us. But Lambert is slow at bailing, and lately he has been out of it. Little Alice tries, but she fatigues quickly. That leaves only me, Geri, Jean Philippe, and the Lord. Even collectively, we don’t have the strength anymore.
“The sharks, Miss Geri,” Jean Philippe protested. “What if they come back?”
Geri handed him a paddle, then handed one to me. “Bang ’em hard,” she said. When she saw my reaction, she lowered her voice. “Benji, we have no choice.”
We waited until the sun was high, when sharks are least likely to be prowling for food. With Jean Philippe and me leaning over the sides, paddles up like two exhausted sentinels, Geri took a breath and dropped into the water.
The next half hour was like sitting in a darkened house, waiting for a killer to reveal himself. Nobody spoke. Our eyes darted across the surface. Geri kept coming up then diving back under then coming up again. She found the hole, which she said was small, but being underwater left the glue and patches useless.
“I’m going to try some sealant and stitch it,” she said.
Again, we watched the water intensely. After twenty minutes, Geri said she’d fixed all she could. Then she dove back under one more time.
“What’s she doing now?” I asked.
She resurfaced with her hands full of weeds and barnacles. She tossed them into the raft, and we pulled her in.
“There’s a whole … ecosystem … on the bottom of this raft,” she gasped. “Barnacles. Sargasso. I saw fish, but they scattered … too fast … They’re living off what’s growing on the bottom.”
“That’s good, right?” I asked. “The fish? Maybe we could catch one?”