John Gone (10 page)

“If we don’t get rid of that 250 pounds now,
we’re dead in another hour when your arms fall off!”

“Okay,” John said. “I’m going to try to rock
her out.” He began to sway the small rowboat back and forth against
the water.

“Are there any other abilities Mouse has that
might be helpful?” John asked.

“I’m sorry, John,” Mouse replied.

“Hold on tight,” he said as he pushed and
pulled on the sides of the boat. Soon, the rocking became so
powerful that John thought the entire craft might flip over. Much
to his relief, it didn’t, and Rodney’s body finally slipped out
over the side. The sudden loss of weight shifted the boat and
Mouse’s grip on John’s shirt failed.

“Ronika!” John shouted.

“Still here,” the robot called from the back
of the boat.

Mouse dug its left hand between the tightly
fitted boards making up the bottom of the craft and pulled itself a
few inches forward. It moved its right hand to the next plank and
repeated the process. The crawl was slow, and more than once John
thought the small robot would be lost to the red, sloshing water
that crashed against its body, often pushing it back or forward
without warning. Slowly, Mouse made its way back to John and
eventually climbed his pant leg.

“Get under my shirt,” John yelled over the
howling winds and crashing rain. Mouse inched up his jeans and
ducked beneath his wet T-shirt. Clamping to the fabric, the robot
climbed to its top and popped its head out from under John’s
collar.

Mouse rotated its head toward the two
mechanical men behind them. They were still swimming strongly
through the storm, just as fast as they had been two hours ago,
fixed on their objective.

“Unbelievable,” Mouse said quietly.

John looked up to the sky and noticed the sun
setting stealthily behind dark storm clouds hanging low in the
evening sky. Though the gap between him and his pursuers was
widening, the light of the day was dropping, making the men in grey
suits more difficult to see against the choppy waves of an angry
ocean.

He leaned his head forward to his working
forearm and roughly wiped the rainwater from his eyes. Looking back
toward the ocean, he could no longer see either of the men chasing
him.

“Can you see them?” John shouted to Mouse,
still under his shirt, clinging onto the collar beneath his
chin.

“No,” Mouse answered.

“I think we’re gaining ground, or water,
whatever. Now that Rodney’s gone, we’re going a lot faster.”

“Yeah, but for how long? Aren’t you getting
tired?”

“Don’t remind me.”

Over the course of their departure from the
sinking yacht, the sharp, hot pain in John’s shoulders and arms had
settled to an even burn across his upper body. If he stopped
thinking about his discomfort long enough, he could almost forget
the pain and concentrate solely on escaping. His discomfort was
growing by the minute, though, and ignoring it was becoming
increasingly hard for him. He worried that his muscles might give
way at any moment, leaving him helpless against the men’s mad
strokes across the waters behind them. He needed a plan.

“We need to stop again,” John called to
Mouse, spitting the rain sharply from his mouth as he spoke.

“Are you too tired to continue?” it
asked.

“Not right now, but I might be soon. We
haven’t seen them for fifteen minutes. I think that’s a good point
to break. I need you to keep watch for them when I rest. If you see
them, let me know.”

“Aye, aye,” Mouse answered, already
vigilantly scanning the black waves of the darkening sea.

John braced himself and pulled the dripping
oars inside the boat. He dipped his head down until the side of his
wet cheek was touching Mouse’s plastic head. The rain quieted,
halving in volume and speed.

“How much longer can they keep up that pace?”
he asked tiredly, closing his eyes.

“I don’t know,” Mouse replied quietly.

John sat in silence for a few minutes,
letting the boat float free while resting his eyes and arms.
Finally, he broke the quiet with a soft voice.

“I didn’t mean for it to go so long,” he
said.

“What?” Mouse asked.

“The time since we last talked to each
other,” he said. “I know it’s been months.”

“Six.”

“Yeah.”

“What happened?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t have an
excuse. But I want you to know that I didn’t just go to your
apartment last night for help. Okay, that’s why I went there last
night, but I really wanted to see you. I mean it.”

“I tried calling you.”

“I know, I--”

“John, they’re coming again.”

The robot’s sudden warning was surreal. It
was as if it had just reminded him that a television show was
coming up, or that dinner was ready in the kitchen. John responded
accordingly, raising his head swiftly, and answering with a calm
“Alright.”

He lifted the oars from the boat’s bottom and
put them back into the water. He began to row, taking a few cycles
to warm up before reaching full speed. Both of his arms were numb,
but operable.

John looked up at the sky and saw nothing but
darkness above him. It was same thing he saw looking in front of
him, behind him, and to his sides. He’d never imagined that the
ocean could be so frightening when no longer blue.

The rain picked up again, this time stronger
than before the break. John shook the clinging wet hair from the
skin of his forehead and continued to row. He watched the two men
swimming behind them slowly, so slowly, shrink back into the
distance as he gained speed.

John repeated the process six more times,
rowing away from his predators until having not seen them for a
quarter hour. If he could row for fifteen minutes without the men
appearing, it was usually safe to stop and break. Rests were
short-lived, just ten minutes before the two armed men showed once
more over the horizon like clockwork, forcing him to begin another
endless row in an overlong game of cat and mouse. It was a game
that needed to end soon; John could feel his muscles finally begin
to fail.

It had been hours since John and Mouse had
first entered the lifeboat, and just twelve minutes since their
last sighting of the two men relentlessly pursuing them. John sat
slumped in his seat, overcome by fatigue and exhaustion, and the
edge of his chin dipped slowly over Mouse’s visor.

“John!” Mouse shouted over the rain. “Don’t
fall asleep! We’re almost at the next break! You have to hang in
there!”

John didn’t respond. His chin dropped farther
down with enough force to knock Mouse to the side. His rowing
slowed to a halt.

“John!” Mouse yelled again, straining its
speakers. A large black wave crashed into the small boat’s side,
knocking John alert. The oar he held in his left hand slipped from
the grasp of his shaking fingers to the water below. John quickly
pulled the right oar back into the boat and leaned his head past
the edge, straining to find the other.

“I’m sorry!” John yelled in a panic, not
seeing the oar.

“Don’t apologize!” Mouse yelled back. “What
are we going to do?”

John rose from his seat and stood shakily to
his feet against the rain.

“I have to find it!” he yelled. “I have to
get it back!”

“Where did it go?”

“There!” John exclaimed, spotting the oar
flipping back and forth against the surface of the ocean ten feet
from the boat. “I’m going in after it!”

“No!” Mouse screamed.

It was too late. He’d already decided. “If I
don’t get it now, we’re stuck here! Those men will be here any
second!”

John placed Mouse quickly onto the seat
beside him and held his hand on its back until it could take hold
of the wood beneath it. Without further delay, he jumped into the
choppy sea that raged beneath his boat.

The chill of the water took hold of him
first, icing his skin and slowing his movement. A large, heavy wave
crashed over him from behind, sucking John deep below the water
with the force of its weight struggling to keep him below its
surface. He kicked his legs furiously, hoping that he was pointed
up toward the air above. He tried opening his eyes. They stung
against the salt, and for nothing. He couldn’t see anything. His
chest tightened, and the air in his lungs had lasted as long as it
could. He exhaled. A few moments passed, and John lost hope.

Suddenly, the side of his arm breached the
surface and John compensated his swim to push for the air above.
His mouth touched the rainy wind above the water a moment later and
breathed in deeply, inhaling a small amount of splashing water in
the process. He coughed violently and looked around him. He saw his
rowboat rocking against the waves just ten feet to his left.
Something struck the side of his head from behind. It was the
missing oar.

John shouted to the clouds in victory and
clasped onto his buoyant prize with the strongest grip he could
manage. Oar in hand, he kicked toward the boat. Soon, it was
getting closer.

I can do this
, he thought.
I’m
going to make it.

As John approached the rowboat he could hear
Mouse yelling to him. The words were lost against the storm.

“I’ve got it!” he yelled back. “I found
it!”

Two feet closer, John could hear the content
of the robot’s scream, “They’re here! They’re here!”

John looked behind his shoulder and saw the
two men swimming at him. A wave overtook him, breaking his line of
sight to the hunters and pushing him forward under the water. John
flipped around, and floated back to the surface just moments later
near the edge of the boat. He looked behind him as he treaded
water. Perhaps it was the darkness, perhaps the thick black rain,
but he could no longer see the men in grey.

Quickly, he threw the oar into the rowboat.
It landed noisily against its twin.

“Hurry, John!” he heard Mouse yell.

John grabbed onto the edge of the rowboat,
his weight turning it on its side. The small black robot slid
across the curvature of the boat’s bottom, stopping next to John’s
hand.

“Hold on!” John yelled. Mouse pinched onto
John’s shirt as he climbed back into the boat, tumbling into its
center and landing on his stomach. John powered from the floor to
his feet and made his way to the seat in front of him, grabbing
both oars along the way. For a moment, the boat leveled, only to
suddenly rock violently in the opposite direction a second
later.

Mouse was yelling again. “Look out!”

John looked to the dipping side of his craft.
A bolt of lightning illuminated two gloved hands and a blond head
of hair making their way into the boat from the sea. John dropped
the left oar to his feet and gripped the right with both hands. In
the flashing light of the storming sky, he raised the oar to his
chest like a spear and thrust his weight behind a heavy strike to
the intruder’s forehead. The man’s grip gave and boat jerked back
to level on the waves.

“
Row!
” Mouse screamed.

John lifted the other oar from his feet and
put both into the stirring water at his sides. A burst of deafening
thunder cracked and rolled across the dark sky above him.

He rowed forward into the night, stronger and
faster than he had before. Despite the tired, despite the pain,
John refused to break for even a moment during the last of the
long, wet night. Hours later, and for the first time since finding
it, John felt a great sense of joy the watch’s hands reached
3:14.

24 HOURS EARLIER:

Dr. Robert Castler stood next to his large,
rounded thirty-story window and gazed out to the clouds forming and
breaking in the sky beyond his office. He noted the ratio of
cumulonimbus to nimbostratus hovering above the building and
carefully predicted the afternoon’s weather. He scowled at the
low-hanging, thick clouds that obscured his view of the mid and
upper-level formations, and tried to shoo them past with a
frustrated wave. They refused to obey him.

One of these days, cirrus
kelvin-helmholtz. Wouldn’t that be a sight!
he thought. Cloud
analyzation was one of the doctor’s less strenuous hobbies, though
he had little time to practice it. Castler had little time to peer
into the sky at all, as his work took him so often underground.

An extremely pressing matter had been brought
to his attention earlier that morning, and to ensure proper
resolution, he would, as usual, be required to offer it his
immediate and personal attention. He sighed loudly and looked back
toward the zebrawood desk at the center of his elegant, Spartan
office. It was always like this when something called him to the
surface, his beautiful window teasing him, that elusive sky
expanding beyond it, no time to spend enjoying it.

“Tell me that you’re sure,” he’d told the man
who’d called his phone at four o’clock that morning. Though Castler
had already been awake, he didn’t like being disturbed in the quiet
hours of dawn, nor at any time on his personal line.

“Once more. I want to hear you say it one
more time so that I can hold you personally responsible if you
misread the data. We don’t hear anything in thirty years, and
you’re telling me that such an arbitrary day as today is when the
silence breaks?”

Castler had listened as the man on the other
end of the line repeated his analysis of the data in a nervous,
wavering voice. “Pack up your office Mr. Carroll,” Castler had
answered, “because once I get there, you’re moving out. A promotion
to an office one floor up if you’re right about this and fired
without severance if you wasted my time. I’ll be there this
afternoon.” He’d arrived by helicopter two hours later.