Free Evolution of Fear by Paul E. Hardisty Page A

in the wet locker. Punk’s heavy-weather gear was two sizes too small. Clay found an old wool sweater and pulled it over his head, tore the cuffs of the oilskin jacket up to the elbows along the seam and stuffed himself into it. He was too broad. It wouldn’t close across the chest. He found a pair of fingerless wool gloves, pulled on the right one, threw the left back into the locker and donned a black wool skullcap. It wasn’t going to keep him dry, but it was the best he could do. It would get cold in there.
    Soon the beans were steaming. He gulped them down straight from the pan with the rest of the sardines, poured the hot water into a steel thermos and sanded in a handful of instant coffee and a slug of sugar. He stowed the pot and kettle, stuffed a handful of muesli bars into his jacket pocket, wedged the ukulele tight between the settee cushions and climbed above deck.
    Coming out of the warmth and relative peace of the cabin into the fury of the rising storm was like waking up to a firefight, an awakening as rude as birth. His stomach lurching, more from fear than the increasingly violent motion, Clay stashed the thermos in the small aft locker, checked the compass, his watch, and looked up at the rigging, the too-dark sky close, boiling. He had too much sail up.
    It took him the best part of half an hour to put another reef in the main, shorten the mizzen, hank on and raise the storm jib, everything so much more difficult with just four fingers and one thumb. Then he brought Flame ’s bow reluctantly to wind and set course for Ushant and the dark eye of the storm.

    As the depression tracked south and east, the wind backed, pushing Flame along in rising seas. Night fell, cold and brutal. By 21.00 the barometer had fallen another seven millibars. Clay estimated the winds at force five, howling through the taut rigging like woundedjackals. By 22.30 he had to douse the main, fighting with the flapping canvas as Flame pitched and yawed in a universe that seemed to have no end and no beginning. Punk was right. She was a strong little boat, this thirty-two feet of teak and brass, surfing the frothing wavetops, grinding through the black troughs.
    Just after midnight he caught a glimpse of lights somewhere off his starboard bow, a freighter perhaps, steaming south. He watched it a moment, imagining the well-lit bridge, warm and dry inside, the comforting rumble of the big engines underfoot, and then it was gone. Under storm jib and mizzen trysail, Flame hurtled into the depression. With the glass at 993 and falling, Clay closed up the hatch, took the wheel and tied himself into the cockpit.
    By 0300 hours, the last of the coffee gone, Flame was reaching in heavy quartering seas. Clay’s arms and shoulders ached with the continuous effort of keeping Flame on some sort of course. The wind seemed to have stabilised at something like force five, a deafening, almost human cry. Even under shortened sail, they were making ten knots, maybe more. With only the dull phosphorescent glow of the compass to guide them, they rode the contours of the storm. Clay peered out into the darkness. Somewhere out there was the eye, the dark centre of the depression. Fear came hard. Koevoet’s people were out there. Clay had accepted that now, the wound of betrayal, the death of friendship. The company, Crowbar had called it, guns for hire. Just business. But this was a new kind of fear, sharper, more discriminating, seeping from deep within his cortex, Neolithic, ungovernable. And he knew that it was not like anything he had ever felt before. Fuck Koevoet. And fuck Medved – the bastard had deserved it. No, it wasn’t any of that. And it wasn’t the storm, this uncaring thing he was offering himself to. Nor was it death itself, or even the manner of dying, or the totality of all of this, the aggregated power swirling all around him, the pure indifference of it. It was something else. And as he wrestled with the tiller, his shoulders and