2182 Khz

9780375506062

0375506063

Getting into a survival suit was no easy task on flat water. Now it seemed impossible. Seine put a leg in and lost his balance, falling backward against the chart table. He looked up and the Chemist held a hand, reached for a leg. "Here," he said, and helped Seine's leg into the wide boot. Then he laughed, a mirthless release out of some primal source. He squinted through lids like some kind of amphibian. He pulled Seine to his feet and yanked the rubber suit, pulling it over Seine's hips, letting out a little laugh, reaching and pulling the tight hood over Seine's head. Seine zipped the long front zipper to seal himself into it. Narvik was still lying on the deck, his unconscious body rolling port to starboard with each wave, the wind howling through the window. "That was one wicked free radical!" the Chemist shouted, nodding in twisted appreciation. The Chemist reached up and brushed Seine's face. He wiped away the blood and with that simple gesture Seine felt himself floating in a sea of acquiescence, a languid warmth pervading his muscles, soothing his mind, carrying him off-he knew the feeling, from deep somewhere far off he knew and embraced this moment as an old friend, a moment of recognition and clarity and self-service. The Chemist seemed to be aware of it too, and for a moment Seine thought the Chemist was really a walking Deadman, a living ghost there to haunt him with the corrupt choice, as if to say, I know you I know you, you let your father die. In the survival suit, Seine looked like an orange Gumby with nothing but his white face showing. Inside, his scalp itched. Narvik rolled against his legs, stared up blank-faced, blood-wet, shards of glass clinging to his hair, his neck twisted at an impossible angle. Outside the broken window the Gulf roared and hissed, soaring in pitch until somewhere amid all that chaotic sound Seine thought he heard a pattern emerge, a rhythm that blended with highs and lows to become music. He opened the aft door in slow motion and stepped outside to the wing deck, which sat perched like a penthouse terrace with a view of the abyss. The Chemist was right, he was out of time; he lived out of time, a gone, half-dead, half-made ghost of a human being, wallowing in self-loathing, realizing he had no chance to cut tow, as Fearless took her second knockdown and he flew, ejected by force with a curious feeling through wind and ocean air. He screamed and clawed at the wind, reaching for something-anything-solid. Then he was overboard and tumbling down the face of a wave. Underwater an instant. Then up-gasping, half air, half water, disoriented, the burning through his chest of salt-water lungs. He felt the tug falling over on top of him; oh, God, it would land on him, crush him, force him down and hold him under. He hit the trough skidding, butt first, the suit buoying his head as he backed up the next wave and saw clearly the tow wire hooked on the quarter bitt just thirty feet from him. The wire lifted up and away from him. The boat let out a metallic creaking sound. The wire chewed the paint from the quarter bitt, bit into the steel, and lifted, and just like that-fast-flipped Fearless on her back. The tall wheelhouse knifed into the wave and disappeared. The hull bellied up as if exposing herself to the storm, the nakedness striking him even as it sank in a groaning swirl. Seine felt himself cry out, or maybe not; no sound came that he could hear, only the rush of salt water into his body to choke him out and blind him. I'm a free radical now, spinning out of control, flailing through space. He thought he might die right there, his heart stop dead rather than go forward, but then he was past that moment almost without knowing it. For some reason he thought about Irons and how his frostbitten nose must have looked before some surgeon carved off the bl