Free Hurricane Fever by Tobias S. Buckell

was a starboard hull for the men to have to search, and two ends in each hull. There was a decent chance that if they boarded the catamaran, and Roo was betting they were just seconds away from doing just that, they wouldn’t come at this area first.
    There was a hatch on the inner hull here. Catamarans occasionally flipped. And if that happened, unlike a monohull, they pretty much remained upside down. Like a turtle on its back.
    The hatch allowed you to get out when everything was upside down.
    Roo turned the latches that kept it tightly sealed against water and, ever so carefully, quietly, lifted it open, to look out. He listened as footsteps creaked, the sounds of two men trying to stealthily move up the wooden ladder and onto the rear starboard scoop on the back of the hull.
    The two men carefully walked across his cockpit, still trying not to make a sound, but failing. Roo’s ears knew every squeak and creak of the boat.
    He put a finger to his lips and slipped out of the hatch headfirst. In a slow motion somersault Roo kept his hold on the lip of the hatch in the air over the gravel until he had carefully lowered his legs to the ground.
    Once standing he reached up for Kit and helped her down.
    He heard the sliding door open above them as the men entered the main cabin.
    Roo held Kit firmly in place with one hand on her upper arm, the other aiming the flare gun into his cabin.
    A deep breath. Another. A third. He listened to the sound of boots tramping around inside his boat. A sound that curled the corners of his lips with annoyance. They’d be tracking dirt all over his varnished floors.
    They were headed forward, and down into one of the hulls.
    “Now,” Roo said, and yanked at her. She didn’t want to move, though. Roo looked over to the rear of the port hull. Her two bodyguards lay underneath a tarp, hidden from the midday sun in the shade underneath the Spitfire, their faces exposed as the end of it blew slightly up into the air. Their throats had been slit; the blood had pooled under their necks and stained the gravel black.
    “We have to move,” Roo hissed.
    Gravel crunched as she let him pull her along. Roo steered her toward the long keel of a nearby yacht, with patchy gray paint and dried seaweed caking the bottom of its hull.
    They ducked underneath, panting and inhaling the smell of dead ocean as they skirted around the rudder.
    “They’re dead,” Kit murmured, swallowing hard. “Who did that to them? What’s going on?”
    “I don’t know.”
    Those were all good questions. But not for now. Because they’d end up dead, too, Roo figured, or worse, if they didn’t loop out to the parking lot to get out of here. He was breathing heavily now. The adrenaline ramping up, making him focus on random things that his jumpy mind thought important.
    He forced himself to take a slow, deep breath.
    Calm down .
    “Let’s keep moving,” he said. They crossed the yard, ducking from the shadow of one hull to another. “My car’s on the other side of the gates.”
    A tall wire mesh gate ran around the whole boatyard. During the day there were large gates left open so people could drive in and out. And in the parking lot just past the gates: Roo’s rented hatchback. A way out of this messy situation.
    Shadows moved along with them as they ran, but on the other sides of the chocked boats. Boots slapped the gravel hard. Roo, suddenly chilled in the hot sun, glanced over at a nearby hull as a thin man in black boots and gray cargo pants suddenly rounded a rudder.
    He’d assumed that were only just the extra two other people out in the yard here. A stupid mistake, Roo thought, yanking the flare gun up and steadying his aim by resting his right arm in the crook of his left as he skidded to a halt.
    For a moment both men stared at each other.
    Roo pulled the trigger.
    The flare gun kicked, spitting smoke. The flare dazzled the space between them, even in the bright midday, then struck the man in the leg and