“You have to pull over,” Howard said, his voice harshened by the tinny receiver. “Oh, over.”
“I don’t think we’re going to do that, Howard. Drake tried to kill Astrid. You and Orc almost killed me. Over.”
That occupied Howard for a minute while he thought up a good lie. “It’s okay, Sammy, Caine changed his mind. He says if you behave yourselves, he’ll let you all go free. Over.”
“Yeah. I absolutely believe you,” Sam said.
Sam edged his boat still closer to the barrier. It was so close now, he could have touched it.
He depressed the send button again. “You try to run me down, you may run into the barrier,” Sam warned. “Over.”
There was a silence. Then, a new voice, faint but audible. It had to be coming from a radio onshore. “Get him,” the voice commanded. “Get him or don’t come back.”
Caine. He was using the radio he used to stay in contact with Drake and the day care and the fire station.
Howard said, “Hey, Caine, they have Astrid and the retard, too. And Quinn.”
“What? Say again: Astrid is with them?”
It was Sam who answered him, relishing the moment, even though the triumph was likely to be short-lived. “That’s right, Caine. Your pet psycho failed you.”
“Get them all,” Caine ordered.
“What if they use the power?” Howard whined.
“If they could use the power, they’d already have done so,” Caine said with a smirk that carried across the airwaves. “No excuses: take them down. Caine out.”
Astrid said, “Sam, if you can do it, you need to do it.”
“Do what?” Edilio demanded. “Oh. The thing?”
The radio crackled to life again. Howard said, “You have till I count ten, Sammy. Then we hit it and run you down. Doesn’t have to be like that, but we have no choice. So…ten.”
“Edilio, you and Astrid and Little Pete, down on the deck. Quinn, you with them.”
“Nine.”
Edilio pulled Astrid down beside him and lay flat on the deck with Little Pete between them.
“Eight.”
“This better be a good plan, brah,” Quinn said. But he went and crouched with Astrid.
“Seven. Six.”
The bow of the cigarette boat towered above the stern of the Whaler, a huge red cleaver, bouncing up and down, chopping its way toward them. The roar of all three engines bounced off the barrier, twisting and amplifying the sound.
“Five.”
He had a plan. But the plan was suicide.
“Four.”
“Everyone ready?”
“Ready for what?”
“Three.”
“He’s going to hit us.”
“That’s your plan?” Quinn shrilled.
“Two.”
“Pretty much,” Sam said.
“One.”
Sam heard the twin engines of the cigarette boat ramp up. The red meat cleaver bow leaped forward. It was like someone had strapped a rocket to the back.
Sam shoved the throttle of the Whaler into neutral and steered to scrape the left side of the boat into the FAYZ wall.
The Whaler slowed very suddenly.
“Hang on!”
He dropped into a low crouch, kneeling on the wet deck, clutching the wheel with one hand and yanked it to the right, then steadied it. He covered his head with his free arm, shouting to keep his nerve up.
The Boston Whaler slowed.
The speedboat did not.
The tall, dagger-sharp prow ran up over the left half of the Boston Whaler’s stern.
There was a screech of shattered fiberglass. The impact knocked Sam away from the wheel. The back end of the Whaler plunged, and the five of them and the entire boat were suddenly underwater. Sam was yelling into water, yelling and fighting to avoid being sucked up into the propellers that tornadoed the water a millimeter above his head.
The speedboat blocked out the sun, deep red and death white, a knife drawn across the smaller boat. The big twin outboard engines screamed.
But the cigarette boat didn’t entirely crush the smaller boat. Instead, hitting the Whaler at an angle, the cigarette boat went airborne like a stunt car hitting a ramp. It rolled in midair and smashed its topside into the barrier, shattering its windshield and crumpling its railings.
The cigarette boat hit the water hard on its side twenty feet ahead of the Boston Whaler. It landed in a sideways belly flop, plowed so deep, Sam thought it might stay under, but then it wallowed back up like a surfacing submarine and righted itself.
The Whaler had taken a bad beating. The stern was crushed, the railings on the left side were gone, the black-cowled engine was askew but still attached. There was a big divot smashed out of the fiberglass on the bow. Two feet of water sloshed on the deck. The command console was bent forward and to the side so that the steering wheel was askew and the throttle handle was out of its slot and hanging loose. The engine had been swamped and had sputtered out.
But Sam was not hurt.
“Astrid!” he yelled, terrified when he didn’t see her immediately. Little Pete was alone, staring, almost as if this at least had really penetrated his consciousness.
Quinn and Edilio jumped up and leaned over the back. They had spotted Astrid’s slender hand holding the railing. They pulled her aboard, half drowned and bleeding from a gash in her leg.
“Is she okay?”
Edilio nodded, too waterlogged to answer.
Sam turned the key and hoped. The big Mercury motor roared. The throttle was stiff, jammed, but by pushing with all his might he could shift it forward. The crooked wheel still turned.