Read Online Dead in the Water by Nancy Holder - Free Book Online Page A

themselves against thousands of other shrimp, and worms, and all kinds of other enemies that have gotten stuck coming in from the opposite direction. Somebody has to get out of the way, but nobody can, so there’s lots of bad stuff coming down, all the time.
    That’s their life, scraping food, fighting enemies, in a chamber of horrors God made on bad acid.
    Then they have babies, and those babies swim off, and if they’re lucky, they get imprisoned inside another sponge. If they’re not, they float out to sea, and drown.
    And which ones make it, and which ones don’t?
    Karma, man.
    And that’s the life of a ship, love baby, and everybody aboard her, just a bunch of nineteen-year-olds, ferrying ammo up the Delta.

4
The Fog

    Ruth, perhaps
,
dear Ruth, perhaps
,
oh, Ruth, perhaps
,
you are the first to get the word
:
    Messages come in small packages
.
Messages come in dead men’s voices
.
And here is a message for you, Ruth
:
    I have heard your siren call
;
I have heard you wish your wish
.
I come to you in waves, on waves
;
Now come to me, oh, Ruth, dear Ruth
.
    Come dine with me
,
Come wine with me
,
Come down to the sea
,
Come down, dear Ruth
.
    Come

down
,
down
,
down, and
    Jump

overboard

now
.
    Ruth sat up fast, panicking as her gaze darted around the close, unfamiliar cabin. “Where …?” she asked groggily, and it came back to her: she was on a ship called the
Morris
, in a cabin near the end of a long corridor.
    With a shudder, she closed her eyes and blew out a breath. Her heart stuttered against her silky pink nightgown, which was damp with sweat. As she rested her weight on her wrists, they shook as though she were having some kind of seizure.
    “Heavens.” She took a deep breath. She was safe; she was all right. She was in a cabin, and the van Burens were next door, and the young policewoman’s cabin was on the other side of the bathroom.
    All right. Everything was all right.
    Her wrists wobbled as she sucked in a few more deep breaths. She had had a dream. Yes, that was it. That was all. Something about a man. An invitation. Or was it about struggling, and not inhaling … The vague outlines of an image floated behind her eyes. A ship. This ship? Too late; too hazy. It floated onward.
    “Heavens,” she said again.
    Her wedding ring caught in her hair as she pushed a stray tendril out of her eyes. She stared into the dark, rolled onto her side to check the clock. The luminous dial was a beacon in the pitch-dark cabin. Ten-fifty. Normally that was too early for her—she was an old night owl, always had been—but the movements of the ship had made her drowsy. She’d caught herself dosing in the dining room while watching
Far and
Away
with John Fielder. Matt and Donna Almond had been sequestered in a corner, playing checkers by the light of a crook-necked lamp. Donna let Matt win most of the games, and he whooped whenever he triumphed, only to giggle and clamp his hands over his mouth when his father told him to be quiet.
    The van Burens (and Hadley) had marched straight to their cabin after dinner. Hers shared a common wall with theirs, and she had come into the cabin after refusing an offer of escort from John, to find her empty room reverberating with the gasps and groans of her neighbors’ lovemaking. A very strange couple. But then, so much was different between men and women these days. Donna was sweet, but rather hard—or acted hard, Ruth wasn’t sure which. In Ruth’s day, she might’ve been considered “fast.” The young men were flocking around her. Like that sexy but very silly Spanish man, Ramón, and John, who needed a woman’s strength just now. Poor man.
    Ruth yawned, stretched, decided to use the toilet. The head, she reminded herself. On a ship, it was called the head. For a few moments she groped around the nightstand, then found the light and flicked it on. The sheets were twisted around her—she must have had a busy night, though certainly not like the van