KW 09:Shot on Location by Laurence Shames Read Free Book Online

girl.
    The director called for action.
    Donna wheeled and ran. She ran low, like an Indian scout, slightly bent at the waist, arms compact at her sides. Coral shards flew from her heels and when she reached the water’s edge she took a final lunging stride that flattened into a perfect shallow dive. Seamlessly, the dive turned into swimming, hands cupping the water, feet churning the foam. Strong shoulders lifted the determined arms, breaths came in quick but measured sips between the strokes. Distance stretched between Donna and the shore as sunshine put hot white spangles on the broken water.
    It was the sound man who first noticed something wrong. A low rumble coming through his headset, very faint at the beginning, something felt as much as heard but gradually rising in both pitch and volume. He tried without success to catch the director’s eye.
    Donna tirelessly swam, the rhythm steady, the kick unflagging.
    The sound man waved a hand as the low rumble was rising toward something like a mechanical growl. No one saw him waving.
    Donna swam.
    She’d almost reached the tiny buoy when the speedboat — enormous, gleaming, up on plane at a ferocious angle like a breaching orca — came tearing around the far side of the islet, peeling toward the channel at breakneck speed. She didn’t see it. If she heard it, she paid no mind. This was her scene. The big swim. Through the pellucid water she finally saw the mechanical lobster wriggling on a patch of sand a dozen feet below. She pulled in breath, arced her body, the deep dive smooth and streamlined from all those somersaults in the pool, and headed down to grab the prize.
    On shore, people were frantically waving and screaming now. They windmilled their arms at the unheeding speedboat. They shouted to Donna who had no chance of hearing them. Helplessly, pinned between quailing hope and sick certainty, they watched the distance disappear between the careening boat and the place where the stunt girl would surface.
    She came up, facing shore, a smile barely visible, waving the lobster in triumph for just an instant before the speedboat ran her over.
    The planing hull barely grazed her neck and shoulders, almost gave her time to dive away from harm. But the propeller shafts caught her as she tried to sink to safety. One shaft slammed into her shoulder, wrenching it at a grotesque angle in its socket. The other nailed her at the bottom of her ribcage, the propeller biting into the flesh of her side as it raked past.
    At the spot where Donna had last been seen a slick of red appeared in the turquoise water and the speedboat rocketed away without ever slowing down.

10.
    Jake found himself in the water, clothes on, sneakers on, first wading then swimming, surrounded by twenty other flailing people who were trying clumsily, desperately, to help. It could have been a scene from the pilot of
Adrift,
people clawing at the sea with looks of horror on their faces. A better swimmer got to Donna first and dragged the limp body ashore; it left behind it a meandering zag of blood.
    It was impossible to tell if Donna was alive or dead. Her right shoulder was hunched up much too high; the arm seemed stuck in an ungainly position, as if she was about to serve a tennis ball. The salt water had mostly stanched the bleeding from her appalling wound, but the torn flesh had an oozing sheen to it, a sheen like that of defrosting beef. Someone who knew CPR took charge. He turned Donna’s head sideways and pressed lightly on her belly. Pink water, an intermittent stream of it, as from a faulty pump, spilled from her nose and mouth. He cleared her tongue, pinched her nostrils, and starting breathing his own air down into her lungs.
    After a while, her eyes very briefly opened, a single cough wracked her, and she gurgled out something that sounded like
Fuck happened?
Then she either passed out again or died.
    In minutes a helicopter appeared. Riding pontoons, it landed in the shallows and dispatched