Natural Enemy 1-7B

“Over there!”

Mako’s hand lashed out, finger pointing to the far end of the reef where another shorter piece of hull stuck out of the water with white foam churning around it. Almost enough to hide everything else, the seafoam couldn’t fully cover the tangled net; a mess of green and brown seaweed drifting near it.

What the… Kai leaned in, trying to see what had Mako scream like that.

What is tha… His eyes went even wider, his stomach dropping like it did on the one roller coaster he’d ever been on; leaving the rest of him a couple hundred feet in the air.

Something was caught in all that; not a fish, not a sea turtle.

No scales or shell, just pale skin as an arm held itself up and out of the water.

No.

A woman, skin the color of skim milk like it had been in the dark too long, was tangled in the mesh; a single arm hooked itself over a splintered piece of timber, face barely out of the water as dark hair plastered itself flat across her face looking no different than the seaweed she was stuck in.

Open eyes stared right… right at him, but they weren’t seeing him.

He wasn’t even sure they were seeing the sun or the sky, the woman awake but not as she stared at nothing; her gaze flat, glassy and half-dead.

Dead. A voice inside him whispered, a voice nothing like the slow island tones he’d started using for so many months. Dead body. Just like the alley behind the convenience store back then. Remember? C’mon, you remember the smell.

Something hot and bitter, rancid as dead fish, pushed itself up the back of his throat, Kai’s eyes watering and stinging as he forced himself to swallow it back down. “We… we gotta help her!”

Mako didn’t need any more convincing, and neither did Uncle Haku.

Boats and boards all got to her in a frantic, clumsy burst of motion; Haku’s frantic paddling already had him leaning over the side of his skiff and grabbing her wrists by the time Mako and Kai even got to her. “H-help me!”

Both boys abandoned their words at his grunt, sliding into the near-warm ocean water. But when Kai grabbed the woman’s waist to push her up, she was almost ice, skin more like wet rubber than anything else.

Oh… A hiss slid out of Kai’s lips before anything else, her flesh already bruising to a deeper purple where he touched her. Oh, shit. Whether it was his strength or her weakened body, he didn’t know and he didn’t want to spend too much time holding her to figure it out.

“Lift!” 

They shoved at Haku’s order, the body not heavy by itself but with the limpness of dead weight that made his skin crawl. Slippery and fragile all at once, they managed to haul her out of the water and into the skiff as she landed with a splash, looking more like a doll than a person. The woman’s head lolled back as she rolled to a complete stop, water streaming from her nose and pouring out from her mouth.

No… Ken stared, upper body hanging off the edge of the skiff next to Mako as a sick certainty washed over him. Is she…

A weak rattling sound came from her, a simple cough barely there but loud enough to be heard over the waves lapping the side of the boat. Another came with a wet click in her chest, a trickle of seawater mixed with pink foam running from the far corner of her blue-black lips.

Alive.

“She’s breathing!” The cool surfer mask completely shattered as Mako let out a gasp, breaths coming heavy and fast as a smile wider than ever broke out across his face.  “Kai, she’s breathing!”

Kai couldn't take his eyes off the woman as she lay at the bottom of the boat, shivering hard enough her tremors shook the whole frame of the small fishing vessel.

The look on her face…

He’d seen it too many times on the streets of South Florida; in the dead eyes of junkies having a bad day after getting a worse fix, on the faces of people getting their houses broken into and beaten up by roaming gangs that nobody stopped.

The lights were on, but nobody was home.

Probably wouldn’t be for a while, either.

“Y-yeah…” Despite all that, Kai was no better, beaming wide and bright even if the smile didn’t feel as real as he wanted it to. “Yeah, she is.”

“The wreckage…” Uncle Haku was as breathless as the both of them, if not more, the old fisherman clutching his chest as he stood up in the boat. “We take it. Chief needs to see this one.”

The hull with the manta on it was all they could manage to take, the rest of it way too big; Ken breaking off the biggest part he could with his bare hands and helping Haku and Mako tie it to the back of the skiff as best he could.

The ride back to the island’s shore was slow, almost painfully slow, as Uncle Haku’s little outboard engine whined, strained and coughed up blue smoke with all the extra weight dragging it back. Kai and Mako hung off the sides of the skiff, holding onto their boards to keep their weight as low as they could manage it.

By the time the boat scraped onto the white sand of the village beach, the whole island was there, bad news somehow traveling faster than they did.

A crowd of silent faces lined the shore; no music, no laughing, nothing but over a thousand watching and worried eyes. Auntie Loa made her way to the very front, the biggest woman in the village pushing through everyone else with shoulders half as wide as the chiefs. 

As soon as she saw her husband, and the woman in the boat, her face went more serious than Kai had ever seen it in a whole year, all the laughter on her face vanishing to nowhere. “Bring her.”

People moved immediately, Auntie Loa’s words as stern as the Chief’s himself. Strong hands of a half-dozen fishermen reached into Haku’s skiff and lifted the small woman, carrying her away and up the beach toward the healing hut as Auntie followed right after them.  

Kai stood in the shallows, water lapping at his shins as he watched them take the half-dead woman away. 

“You good, Kai brah?”

Blue eyes blinked to his right, Mako standing there as he scratched at his chin. He was watching too, same as everyone else still on the beach.

“I…” Honestly, he felt… dirty, and he felt bad about it. Bad about almost throwing up at the sight of the woman and even worse at gagging at the feel of her skin on his.

But Kai knew saying that was even worse than thinking it. “Yeah, Mako brah, I’m good.”

Brown eyes blinked at him slowly. “...if you say so, brah?”

“This was not a storm.”

Both their heads turned again, Chief Milo standing to the other side of them at the skiff. The chief was as big as ever, big enough to almost hide the slimmer shorter form of Uncle Haku behind him as the leader of the village stood over the piece of wreckage they’d dragged out onto the sand. 

No, Kai frowned. It definitely wasn't a storm.

The big man bent down, still the size of a statue when on his knees, as he ran a hand over the shattered edge of the half-smashed half-pulverized wood. His face was dark, a heavy anger on it as his other hand clenched into a fist. “The sea breaks things different than… what happened here. This…” Chief Milo touched a mark on the paint, teeth gritted while his voice rumbled out low. “This is men.”

– o – o – o – o – o – o – o –

They sat outside the healing hut for hours, almost a whole quarter of the village with them as they all stayed quiet. The silence from the month before was back, but now it infected more than just Kai.

Mako and Lani sat on both sides of him, both of them looking his way as if he had answers. Like he was any older than them, really. Seriously, what do you want from me? He wasn’t mad about it, but it’s like they thought the ‘spirits’ or whatever really gave him some knowledge they didn’t have too.

With a sigh, Kai just picked at a scab on the back of one hand, fingers pulling and twisting it until it started to bleed down his wrist and stained the sand a different color.

Soon enough, the sun started to go down, twilight painting the sky in shades of orange and bruised purple that was so pretty it felt like a joke.

A bad one.

A sunset like that belonged on a day where people laughed, not a day where half-dead women washed up like garbage.

Finally, the woven curtain of the hut pushed aside and Auntie Loa stepped outside, shoulders slumped as she wiped her hands on her apron. Kai swallowed a mouthful of dry nothing, Auntie looking out at all of them as she made her way down the hut steps, the strong woman somehow older than she had been a few hours ago.

“She’s sleeping, brother.” She nodded at Chief Milo, her voice thinner than Kai had ever heard it from her. “Cold from the ocean is deep in her bones and a fever, but one she’ll survive. I had her drink some soup and plenty of sweet water to keep her going.”

A collective sigh went through the crowd, tension easing out of all of them at once.

She made it. Him included.

“Did she… did she say anything?” The Chief’s question was as hesitant as Auntie’s words were tired, both of their big voices nowhere to be heard.

Auntie Loa’s eyes went dark as she looked past the burly village leader and out at the darkening ocean past the sands. “She talks in her sleep as much as the fever talks for her.” 

The big woamn shook her head, the movement small and tight. “She talks about the fire and the men. She talks about… screaming.” Another shake of her head had her looking at the chief properly now as her voice cracked.  “She said a name too, over and over. Like a curse.”

Chief Milo’s hand landed on his sister’s shoulder. “Who, Loa? Tell me.”

Auntie Loa sighed low. “The Barrel Scrapers.”

The memory hit him like a physical slap as Kai almost stopped breathing for a second, the dock coming back to him with the smell of rancid cigarette smoke and the bored voices of the Marine kicking his feet above him.

“Nah. Same old crap. Some crew called the Barrel Scrapers hit a settlement up north.” He’d said it like he was talking about the weather, like it was nothing at all. 

Just the “same old crap" to deal with.

And the younger one… the younger one had laughed.

Kai’s eyes trailed from the shattered wood on the beach and back to the hut where the woman was shivering in her nightmares.

They knew there was a crew out there burning villages, but they just…

Just filed a report. 

They checked a box. 

They came here, ‘counted the coconuts’, asked about "freaks," and then they left on their big ship to find more ‘freaks’ to shoot.

The Marines knew everything.

And they did nothing.