Sly had stopped crying, suddenly becoming interested in what had happened. “Big fish?” he asked.
“Real big,” said Jim, holding the revolver tightly, scanning the sea around them.
“Fish on dish can skate on plate,” chanted Sly, rubbing water from his eyes.
“Quiet,” said Jim urgently. “This is dangerous, Sly. The fish is angry, and it could come after us and try to tip the boat over. So everyone keep still and quiet. Sit still, kitten… Heather. Sit down.”
Hearing the note of anger in her father’s voice, the girl quickly sat down on one of the thwarts, turning her head from side to side to watch the serene expanse of ocean that surrounded them. There was no sign of land.
“Sure it was a big white?” said Carrie. She had drawn her own gun, a 6-shot .22 Smith & Wesson— the 2050 Model with the four-inch barrel.
“Sure I’m sure,” Jim said, then paused. “No, I’m not. It was bigger than a city transit bus. And I doubt you can put a dent in it with that toy gun.”
“There,” whispered Sly, throwing his right arm out toward the west in a dramatic gesture. “Big angry fish comin’ this way real speedy.”
“Shit a brick,” said Carrie, leveling her revolver and then thinking better of it.
There was blood leaking from two holes in the protruding fin, black in the faint moonlight. For a moment the gigantic head lifted from the ocean, about sixty yards away from them, the marble-chip eyes seeming to drill into Jim’s skull.
“It’s not,” said Heather.
“Not what?”
“Not a great white.”
Jim was holding his Ruger as steady as the boat’s movement would permit. “How d’you… what is it, then?”
“Basking shark. Eats plankton and stuff. Might’ve accidentally tipped us over, but it definitely wouldn’t have eaten us, Dad. You shot it for nothing.”
He kept the gun trained on the motionless creature, trying to figure out whether his daughter was right. The jaw didn’t really seem like a great white. But it was still enormous. “Reckon it’ll get over those two little holes,” he said.
“I hope so, Dad.” Heather sighed. “Look. It’s going now.”
They all watched as the shark cruised slowly away, moving with an effortless dignity toward the west and the expanse of open ocean, finally disappearing with a last imperious wave of the great tail.
“ARE WE GETTING anywhere, Jim?”
“Sure,” he said through gritted teeth. “We’ve been rowing hard for over an hour now, since the biz with the shark, and I still don’t see any sign of land. Can’t go on forever.”
“STOP ROWING a minute, Carrie.” He shipped the oars, hearing the water dripping off into the sea. There was a tight band of iron around his temples, and all the muscles in his chest and shoulders and arms and thighs and stomach were aching.
Sly and Heather remained fast asleep, tangled together in the bow like puppies.
“Could be there’s an offshore current. I think we should be able to smell land by now, even if we can’t see it yet.”
“I know you’re the second fucking navigator, Carrie, but it doesn’t make you some kind of fucking oracle about small boats in the fucking Pacific.”
There was a silence between them for a dozen heartbeats, then she laughed quietly. “You’re that worried, huh?”
“Yeah, I’m sorry. I am sort of worried.”
The night was coming toward its ending, with a faint lightening of the sky to the east, over where Jim knew the coast of California must lie.
“Could be we rowed too far west, or there was a current we didn’t appreciate.” He leaned forward, drawing in slow, deep breaths. “I don’t know.”
Carrie carefully stood up on her seat, balancing with outstretched arms. She put her hands around her eyes to try to focus her vision to the east.
“Just water,” she said.
“Wait a minute.”
“What?”
“Well, the word was there’d been big floods. Pacific had broken in for miles and miles after the quakes.”
Carrie sat down again, smiling at him, her teeth a pale blur in the dim light. “Sure. So it’d be like a big new baby. If the lie of the land was right, it could be anything like… fifty to a hundred miles across.”