Jason Frost - The cutthroat

"Duck!"

"Huh?"

"Get your head down!"

She looked around in the dark. Saw nothing. "Why? I don't see-"

Tracy Ammes felt the sharp jolt of Eric's strong hands shoving her roughly off the wooden seat and onto the wet floor of the canoe. She sprawled head first into their nylon backpacks, colliding with such impact that the narrow canoe began to rock furiously, tipping over far enough to scoop great gulps of water over the rails. The black saltwater bounced around inside, soaking the backside of Tracy's tattered jeans.

"Son of a bitch," she sputtered, inching her hands along either side of the canoe's gunwales as she pulled herself upright. "What the hell are you doing? You got me all wet."

"Keep your head down," Eric Ravensmith repeated urgently, then turned and leaned over the stern of the canoe. He poked his paddle at something out in the water. She couldn't see what.

"You're getting weird, Eric."

No response. His paddle thumped something solid.

"You hear me? Weird. Like Tony Perkins or something."

She watched him continue to grapple with whatever he'd found. Something about his intensity frightened her. Eric wasn't the kind of man who spooked easily. In fact, she'd noticed that the more threatening the situation, the calmer he often got, almost icy, like he'd flipped some internal switch that shut down his emotions. That's when he was the most dangerous.

She leaned over the side, trying to see what he was fooling with. No use. Too damn dark.

Tracy swatted at the cold water soaking through her pants. To hell with his over-protectiveness for once. She wasn't little Dorothy from Kansas, he wasn't the goddamned Wizard, and this sure wasn't Oz.

"There's no place like home," she muttered angrily.

"What?"

"Nothing." With a huff she settled her wet butt back on the wooden thwart and massaged her sore knees. They had started to seriously cramp twenty minutes ago and during the last ten minutes they'd gone numb. Not used to the constant kneeling that went along with paddling, she'd taken a break a couple of minutes ago, hauling herself onto the narrow seat and stretching her numb legs. "Stupid canoe," she had complained to Eric. "No wonder the Indians lost. After paddling all day in one of these things they probably couldn't even walk straight."

Then Eric's harsh warning. A brusque shove. Wet butt.

Tracy took a deep breath, calming herself. She'd just been sitting there, nibbling on their last scrawny carrot, which she'd been saving for two days. Testing her discipline. Eric's shove had knocked the carrot out of her hand, but she'd be damned if she wasn't going to sit straight up, head high, and finish every bite of it to spite him. Tracy looked around the canoe for the carrot, squinting through the dark, her hands groping along the five inches of greasy water now swishing in the canoe's bottom. Her thumb bumped something. Quickly, she snatched it up, wiped it on her hooded sweat shirt, and took a loud bite. Salty, but good.

"No noise," Eric whispered sharply.

"Christ, Eric. We're in the middle of the ocean."

"Shhh."

She quietly mashed the half-chewed carrot with her tongue, wondering if she should swallow or spit it out. For a moment she considered hacking it up and spitting it onto his back like a chaw of tobacco. She decided against it. Any other time Eric might have laughed at the idea. But not now.

She heard a splash and Eric's mumbled curse. Though he sat only a few feet away, she could barely make him out in the dense darkness. Since electrical lights were extremely rare anymore, the nights had taken on an ominous blackness she'd not known since she was thirteen, sneaking into the drive-in theater in the trunk of her cousin's Nova to see Connie Francis in Where the Boys Are. Now it was as if all the survivors in California were living inside a closed trunk. Shadows seemed coiled in the darkness, somehow blacker and more threatening. The night looked impenetrable. The only lights came from the scattered campfires that speckled the land like distant flickering fireflies.

She looked over the side of the canoe at the soupy black water. They were far away from land now if you didn't count the fact that what used to be one of Huntington Beach's busiest streets was lying eighty feet directly beneath them. Billions of gallons of salt water were tasting land for the first time. Liking it. The surf shops, T-shirt stores, burger stands, and cheap bars, all hunkered under them like a sleazy Atlantis. No lights there.

Overhead the stars and moon offered some faint illumination, but most of it was blocked by the thick Long Beach Halo which curved over the island of California like an inverted salad bowl. Months ago it had transformed the sparkling heavens into a random series of dim smudges. Eric had once said that it reminded him of a sloppy child's fingerpainting.

"Just what the hell am I ducking from?" Tracy finally demanded, sitting even straighter. She felt unreasonable, but couldn't stop herself. Fear brought out her anger. "I don't see anything out there."

Eric answered without looking up. "By the time you did, it would be too late."

"Screw you, Captain Bligh. We haven't seen another human being in two days, not since we launched this Natty Bumpo contraption of yours. What makes you think we're in danger now?"

Eric was half hanging over the stern of the canoe, his broad muscular shoulders hooded like a cobra as they flexed against some weight in the water. Even here, even now, she felt a warm rush of desire for him. For once she fought it.

"I love talking to your back, Eric."

"Good, it's been lonely for conversation."

"What are you fussing with back there?"

He didn't answer.

"Need help?" Sarcastic.

"Yeah. I need you to keep your head down."

She crunched her carrot loudly in response.

Eric, still struggling with something heavy in the water, paused, glanced over his shoulder at Tracy. "I mean it, Trace. Head down. Something's not right here."

What little light there was in the night air seemed immediately drawn to Eric's glacial face, flaring along the thin twisting scar that climbed out of his shirt collar, up his long neck, along the curve of his boxy jaw, then exploding in a round patch on his cheek. The pattern resembled the sparking of a fuse.

Tracy had known him for months, since before the disasters and afterward at the survivor's camp where they'd made him Warlord. Before he lost everything he'd loved. She was used to seeing the scar. Mostly she found it sexy, exotic. It gave off an aura of danger that spiced his rawboned good looks. Some days in some lights you couldn't even see it. Yet other times its intensity still startled her, the way it seemed to almost pulse with life like a winding strip of plastic explosive pasted along his face. The threat of violence lurking beneath the smooth surface skin.

Did he know the image he projected-tough, hard-nosed, ruthless-and how at odds that was with the other sides of him she'd come to know? Like last week when he'd recounted the last battle of the War of the Roses-Bosworth- where Henry Tudor finally defeated and killed Richard III in 1485. Describing all this while scraping out the slimy intestines of a rabbit he'd caught bare-handed and was about to cook with plants he'd dug up that looked suspiciously like weeds to her, but were, he claimed, herbs used by the Hopi Indians. This was also the same man who yelled at her to keep up with him, then slowed down so that she could.

Tracy saw all that in his scar. Even more important, it reminded her how he got it and she felt a shiver run up her spine on tiny clawed feet. It also reminded her of where they were going now-and why. Again the fear yanked at her stomach. But she didn't want Eric to see it.