Beast Read Free Page A

the exhaust outlet submerged, there was nothing to keep the sea from rushing in.
     
    Elizabeth was sleepy. The boat’s motion was the worst kind of soporific: staccato enough to be unpleasant but not violent enough to force her to stay alert. Perhaps she should wake Griffin.
    She looked at her watch. No. He’d been asleep for only an hour and a half. Let him have another half hour. Then he’d be fresh and she could get some sleep.
    She slapped herself in the face and shook her head.
    She decided to sing. Impossible to fall asleep singing. Scientific fact. So she sang the first few bars of “What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?”
    A wave lapped over the stern of the boat and soaked her.
    No problem. The water wasn’t cold. It would—
    A wave! How does a wave come over the stern of a boat when you’re heading into the sea?
    She turned and looked.
    The stern was four inches from being awash. As she watched, it dipped again, and more water rushed aboard and spread over the cushions.
    Adrenaline shot up her back and down her arms. She sat still for a moment, willing herself to stay calm, to gather data. The annoying gurgle from the exhaust pipe had stopped. Fumes no longer swirled over the stern.
    The seas on either side of the boat looked higher. The boat’s motion was sluggish, wallowing, ass-heavy.
    She reached forward of the wheel, lifted a plastic cover and flicked the switch that turned on the bilge pump. She heard the electric motor start, but something was wrong with the sound. It was distant, faint and laboring.
    “Howard!” she shouted.
    No answer.
    “Howard!”
    Nothing.
    A length of bungee cord was looped over the boom, and she hooked each end around a spoke of the wheel, securing it, and went down through the hatch.
    A stench of exhaust fumes choked her and burned her eyes. It was coming up through the floor.
    “Howard!”
    She looked into the after cabin. Six inches of water covered the carpet.
    Griffin was in a dark, foreboding dream when he heard his name called from what seemed a great distance. He willed himself awake, sensing that something was wrong, wrong with him, for his head hurt, his mouth tasted foul, he felt drugged.
    “What is it?” he said, and he rolled his legs over the edge of the bunk. He looked aft and saw, through a bluish haze, Elizabeth running toward him and shouting something. What was she saying?
    “We’re sinking!”
    “Come on… .” He blinked, shook his head. Now he could smell the exhaust, recognize the taste.
    Elizabeth peeled back the carpet in the main cabin and lifted the hatch covering the engine compartment. By now Griffin was standing over her. They saw that the engine was half underwater. The batteries were still dry, but the water rose as they watched.
    Griffin heard sloshing in the after cabin, saw the water and knew what had happened. He said, “Shut down the engine.”
    “What?”
    “Now!”
    Elizabeth found the lever and choked off the engine. The rumbling died, and with it the circulating pump. No new water was being forced aboard, and they could hear the comforting electric whine of the bilge pump.
    But there was still an open wound in the stern.
    Griffin grabbed two dish towels from the sink and a shirt from a hook, and he handed them to Elizabeth. “Stick these up the exhaust pipe. Tight. Tight as you can.”
    She ran up through the hatch.
    Griffin reached into a drawer and found a crescent wrench. He knelt on the deck and adjusted the wrench to one of the bolts holding the batteries to their mounts. If he could get the batteries out of the engine compartment, raise them a couple of feet, a foot even, he could give the bilge pump time to stop the water from rising. He had meant to move the batteries, after he read a cautionary article in one of the boating magazines about how dangerously dependent modern boats had become on sophisticated electronics. But that would have involved some reconstruction beyond his talents, which would have meant