Slither - Edward Lee [126]
"I don't think it's going to go, Nora!" Loren shrieked.
Nora could see up ahead: two outcroppings of rock sticking out of the water. The grim fact whispered in her ear ...
We're going to have to thread this boat between those rocks. Otherwise, we'll have to swim andwouldn't you know it? It's hammerhead season ...
"Push! Hard!" Loren wailed.
The hull grated against the rocks. Just as their forward motion would stop, a high swell came in, lifted the hull, and then the boat glided through.
"We did it!"
Loren was taller, but Nora had already submerged. Bubbles erupted from her mouth as her feet were no longer touching bottom. Shit! she thought. I'm too low to grab the rail .. .
Water splashed; Nora was jerked by one hand out of the water. She flopped over on the deck, dripping.
"Can you believe that shit? We did it! We're clear!"
Nora leaned up and looked ahead. The current was sucking the boat out of the lagoon now, and sending it straight into the seemingly limitless Gulf of Mexico.
We made it, Nora thought, a tear in her eye.
"Looks like something's finally going our way," Loren said, flopping down on the deck. The current was taking them fast. "In ten minutes we'll be a mile or two out."
Safe from the bombs, she hoped.
The sun blazed overhead, welcome sea breezes drying their faces. Loren stood back up and grabbed the wheel at the console. They didn't have power, but he could rudder with the current to get them out faster. He held the wheel with one hand but was looking back.
"What are you looking for?" Nora asked. She helped herself to her feet by a gin-pole. "The ship?"
Loren squinted hard. "There it is. See it?"
Nora shielded her eyes to cut the glare. It looked like a slightly darker piece of the skyline but, yes, after a few moments she could make out its long cylindrical configuration. It was hovering about thirty feet up, near the beach at the far end of the island.
"Those guys," Loren said next, in a lower tone.
Nora could see them, too. Two of the men-or whatever they were-in the black suits and masks. They were both standing immediately below the almost invisible craft. Something bulky stood next to them-a cart full of boxes?
Then the cart levitated upward and disappeared into the ship.
"Jesus," Loren muttered. "Those guys really are aliens, aren't they?"
"What else could they be?" Then she thought, Oh my God, at what they saw next.
A hatch of some sort seemed to cant out of the bottom of the craft. One of the masked men had something in his gloved fist. When he raised his fist overhead ... he, too, began to levitate up to the craft, as if he'd been hauled up on a winch.
But there was no winch.
Then the second crewman rose into the craft the same way.
"I've seen everything now," Loren said, eyes peeled.
As the boat coursed farther away, they stared another few minutes at the spectacle they were certain no one would believe: the otherworldly vehicle hovering in midair.
Then-
"This is it!" Loren said.
-the vehicle began to rise, very slowly at first, and then-
It seemed that in the course of two or three seconds, the craft launched straight into the air so quickly it didn't even blur in their eyes. It was gone in a blink.
There were no exhaust gasses, no shuttlelike roars of burning propellents, no expected blastoff.
The ship simply darted upward and was gone.
"At least we were right about one thing-they were getting ready to leave just about the same time we found out about them."
"Yeah, but you know what that means ..."
Nora did indeed. "Now that they're gone, the bombs will go off. And we know there are at least two."
"TWO?"
"Yeah, after you left the station, one of them came back and activated one of the disks in the room with all the monitors. But-shit!" She'd forgotten to tell him. "I hit the guy in the head and knocked him out, and when I went looking for you, I passed the RTG. And guess what?"
"The bomb we saw