A voice from the water said, “Something’s moving over there!”

The light snapped on, trapping Rebecca in white clarity. Behind her, from the house, came the sound of breaking wood, a door kicked in. A few seconds of breathless silence…

Replaced by a scream and the sound of gunfire.

Rebecca spun toward the house and began running. Get away from the dock! her mind screamed. Lead them away from the dock.

She was a dozen feet from the house when the back door exploded open and a hideous image appeared on the deck: a man with eyes impossibly wide, his mouth frozen in a soundless scream…

And a harpoon bobbing from his abdomen.

Rebecca froze. The man’s hands clutched at his gut. He vomited blood down his shirt, staggered through the rotten deck rail, and dropped into the sand in front of Rebecca.

A pop of gunfire. Pain seared Rebecca’s head. She felt sand rush to her face, grit slide into her mouth. Voices screamed all around. More popping sounds. Someone yelled, “I can’t find it…”

The world spun into hazy colors. A thousand miles away, Rebecca heard footsteps on the dock. As the feet approached she turned away, drawn to a strange scene before her eyes, like a movie she could enter at will: a young woman naked on a beach with multi-stranded light arcing from her belly to the sky. The arc glittered like the Northern lights, bands of color pulsing like heartbeats.

The woman on the beach was her.

What Dr Matthias said was true, Rebecca thought as she spun into darkness. I have a rainbow inside me.

Chapter 2

“People should be sleeping at this hour,” Harry Nautilus muttered.

Beside me, I heard the metallic click of his fishing reel. To the east, the horizon held the blue glow of approaching dawn.

“It’s the best time to fish,” I countered, whipping my lure into the low waves of the Gulf of Mexico.

“Fish should be sleeping at this hour.”

Harry’d stayed in my guest room last night, expecting to fish today. I’d not planned to awaken so early, but hadn’t been sleeping much lately, kept awake by the files on my desk at the Mobile Police Department, a dozen mean and horrific homicides in the past two months. When I’d looked at my clock – 4.37 a.m. – I figured we’d catch the early-shift fish.

“Coffee, bro?” I said.

“Don’t ask, just pour.”

I reeled in my line, set the rod in a tubular spike in the sand. I pulled a thermos of homebrew from my tackle bag, half cheap-ass Mexican espresso, half New Orleans-style coffee with chickory. I’d filled the thermos three-quarters full, topped it with scalded milk, added a quarter-cup of demerara sugar and a tot of Kentucky bourbon. Liquid zip-a-dee-do-dah with a jolt of my-oh-my.

“Crap,” I said, rifling through the bag.

“What?”

“I forgot mugs. Be right back.”

I started jogging to my stilt-standing beachfront home a hundred yards away, across dunes bristling with sea oats. I live on Dauphin Island, thirty miles south of Mobile. It’s my second home on the site, the first having been knocked cockeyed by Hurricane Katrina.

“Wait a sec, Carson,” Harry called from behind me. “There’s something out on the water.”

I turned and wandered back to Harry’s side. Squinting into the dark, I saw a small craft out thirty yards or so, an aluminum rowboat rocking in the waves. It was nearly swamped, water licking its gunnels, the side-slipping tide pulling it parallel to the beach. It was a ghostly sight, like a lifeboat from the Flying Dutchman.

“Jeez,” Harry said, frowning at the empty boat. “You think someone got knocked overboard?”

I sighed and pulled off my T-shirt. “More likely it slipped its moorings. I’ll swim out and grab it.”

“It’ll beach soon enough,” Harry grunted. “Get the mugs. I need coffee.”

I glanced east. A half-mile away lay the wide mouth of Mobile Bay. The tide would draw the boat into the path of watercraft soon to pour from the bay into the Gulf.

“The damn thing’s a navigation hazard,” I said, kicking off my moccasins. Harry rolled his eyes as I sloshed waist-deep in my tattered shorts, threw my hands in front of me and dove. I set my bearings on the boat and pulled a lazy freestyle in that direction.

It took a half a minute to reach the craft. I grabbed a trailing painter, the bow rope, which suggested someone’s knot hadn’t held the boat to the dock. The sloshing craft was too unstable to board, so I put my hands on the gunnel and kicked high enough to glance inside, seeing only a cheap plastic tarp floating on trapped air. I pulled it toward me, planning to jam it under a seat so it wouldn’t drift away and foul someone’s propeller.

The tarp began unfolding. I felt something wrapped in the plastic. With my legs kicking in the water and my biceps on the gunnels, I unwrapped the tarp. A second package dropped out and floated in the water. A pink insulated bundle…

Topped with a baby’s face.

A wave crashed over me, not water, but horror.

Chapter 3

The furious downdraft of the approaching medical helicopter created a sandstorm on the beach. I felt its roar against my back as Harry knelt over the baby and performed rescue breathing. He’d grabbed the infant when I was splashing wildly in shoulder-deep water, simultaneously trying to back-swim to the shore and keep the kid high and dry. Harry had 911’d the Dauphin Island paramedics, who’d sent the medivac chopper.

“I’m not feeling any breathing,” Harry yelled. Jimmy Gentry of the Dauphin Island cops had arrived two minutes back and was using a flashlight to wave the ‘copter toward the sea side of the dunes. The flashers on his cruiser strobed blue and white across my partner’s face. Harry looked terrified.

“Keep going, brother,” I said. “The cavalry’s almost here.”

Harry pinched the tiny nose and tried to puff air into the baby’s mouth. I hunched over the pair and held my opened shirt wide to block some of the sand. The helicopter yawed above our heads.

When the chopper’s rails were still wavering above the sand, two people vaulted from its innards. It was bright enough to make out a guy in his twenties and a woman in her mid thirties. She had a medical bag in her hand and a serene expression on her face, like it was the third time she’d done this today. Despite the quiet expression she outsprinted the guy, skidded to her knees beside Harry, took the child. The woman was long-legged, her hair so blonde as to seem white. The blue eyes looked better suited to someone selling saunas in Stockholm than jumping from helicopters in South Alabama.

“The kid was in the boat,” I told her, my words tumbling over one another. “Wrapped in a tarp. The boat was sinking, but the tarp was floating. I don’t know if it’s, if it’s…”

She held the baby close and did a series of palpations and checks. Harry fell back on to the sand, gasping. The woman spoke quickly to her companion in medical jargon. He ran to the chopper, plucked a mic from the wall and began relaying instructions to the crew at the hospital.

“Alive?” Harry asked the woman.

“Barely,” she said. Baby cradled high against her bosom, the doc stood and retreated to the chopper. Her assistant was already in place and reached for the child. The blonde doc pulled herself into the craft. Seconds later it was roaring toward Mobile.

Harry shook his head as the chopper disappeared into the sky. “I don’t know if I ever got a breath from the kid. It was too small for me to feel a pulse. I was afraid I’d break something.”

“You guys did a great job,” Jimmy consoled. “We’ll know more when the kid gets to the ER. How it’s going to play out.”

Jimmy meant brain damage. Out on the water, when I unrolled the tarp, the infant’s eyes – I’m sure it was under six months old – were closed with no sign of life. But its skin had been ruddy, not the blue of oxygen deprivation. Still, any brief stoppage of breath would start cells dying in the developing brain. Plus there was the aspect of exposure. And infection from aspirated sea water.