Salt Storm: The Salted Series: Episodes #31-35 Galvin, Aaron (classic fiction txt) 📖

could see no sign of the pod, or their sea-spray either. Below, she heard Allambee rattling around in the lower cabin, scattering closet drawers and flinging the contents throughout in hurried search.

“Chidi!” Marisa called. “Come! Hurry!”

Chidi was turning to obey when she glimpsed someone waving for attention from the water, thirty yards off, their voice distant and near muted among the crashing waves. Too far out to clearly hear what the person yelled, Chidi squinted for a better look. “There . . .” she said, pointing in the direction of the castaway. “Someone’s over there.”

Girard barely looked off in the direction she pointed. “Can’t see nothing in this mess. If you can, girl, then go tell the cowboy to light them up, so I can see them too, will you?”

Chidi’s face flushed at his tone, but she ran out of the cabin to yell at Bryant all the same. The wind howled in her ears the moment she ventured outside. Chidi lost hold of the cabin door too, a strong gust slamming it against the cabin-side. She left the door open, reaching for the ladder that Bryant had climbed to reach the top of the cabin. “Bryant!” she tried shouting over the whistling wind. “Bryant, someone is out there! Swing to the right!”

Though Chidi could not say as to whether Bryant heard her or no, his spotlight swung around at the sound of her voice. The light fell upon one lost further asea, waving for aid. When the light struck the castaway’s face and torso, Chidi wished that Bryant had not bothered. It’s a trap . . . she thought, recognizing the castaway’s offsetting skin colors for what Salt race he represented. The Orc means to slow the boat, or stop it altogether by waving us down.

Squinting against the beaming spotlight, the Orc-man grinned before a Salt wave swept over him, and he vanishing beneath.

Chidi glanced over her shoulder then, cupping her hands to her mouth to act as a funnel and strengthen her voice as she called out to the Selkie captain inside the cabin. “Girard! Speed up! It’s a trap!”

The words had scarcely left her mouth when one of the Killers erupted from the Salt. He flew toward the boat in half-human form, bearing a spear. Tattered, soaking rags hung off of his torso, ending near his waistline where the Killer Whale’s gleaming black tail melded with his human skin. Reaching the zenith of his leap, the Orc-man aimed and flung the spear at Bryant and his spotlight.

“Bryant!” Chidi shouted to warn her partner, witnessing him leap off the top of the boat in an arching swan dive rather than be skewered. The flung weapon found a home instead in the spotlight that Bryant had manned. The glass shattered, raining its glittering shards across the boat deck. The light flickered and died, the air hissing with the electric current inside until the noise of it died or else was stolen by the whipping wind.

Before Chidi could think to cry out a warning to her other companions, the Salt spat still more of the Killers from its depths too. At scattered locations around the boat, the other Orcs timed their jumps to emerge as a single unit. Each burst free of the Salted shadows, each in their mammoth Leviathan-like forms, their speed matched with planned precision. As one, they transitioned in mid-air to their full human forms before landing upon the ship deck.

The first of them to land at the boat’s front was welcomed by a hail of bullets, all peppered into his chest and driving the would-be attacker backward.

Wincing at the thunderous echo that came from inside the captain’s cabin, Chidi fell to a knee and covered her ears as the flurry of gunfire continued.

The would-be Orc attacker flopped overboard, back into the Salt, his mortal wounds given to him by the boat’s Selkie captain.

Girard shouted defiance from inside his quarters, already reloading his sawed-off shotgun as the other Orcs ran for his cabin. Just as Girard finish reloading, another Orcish spear, expertly thrown, crashed through the window pane and skewered the Selkie boat captain, pinning him against his chair.

Chidi called out Girard’s name, her voice lost to the constant, stormy wind. She watched in horror as Girard collapsed into his seat, then slumped upon the spear and over his captain’s wheel, never to move of his own choosing again. Though her vision was limited, Chidi glimpsed the triumphant Orcs headed for the cabin to collect their prize and lost weapon. All were turned back when Marisa Bourgeois rose alongside the murdered Selkie captain, and she with Girard’s fallen shotgun to thwart the oncoming enemies. Marisa raised the weapon to her shoulder and fired off the double-chambered rounds through the port-side window to fend off the Orc attackers, then threw it aside to fetch up a pistol instead.

Chidi wasted no time in hurrying toward the stairwell leading below. “Allambee!” She cried down the steps at him. “Allambee, hide!”

Her Kenyan friend stepped into her line of sight, a harpoon clenched in one hand, a butcher’s knife in the other. His eyes rounded as they met with hers, and Chidi’s blood ran cold even before Allambee called her name with a warning of his own.

“Chidi, behind you!”

A vice-like grip clamped down upon her shoulder, grabbing hold of her Silkie suit with sausage-like fingers. The next Chidi knew, she was lifted off her feet and flung from the boat. She somersaulted end over end before striking the Salt on the flat of her back. Gasping, a wave thrashed over her, the Salt’s churn sucking her down. Chidi choked down the water and instinctually reached for her hood to adopt the Silkie changes of her Ribbon Seal form. She welcomed the warmth and protection from the frigid, Atlantic water, but then had to fight against her seal’s primal mind for all of the warnings it sensed and heard in the surrounding environment.

The clicks and whistles of Killer Whales encircled the area and