Sea Sick: A Horror Novel

Donovan seemed to think about it, then decided to holster the gun in a leather slip on his hip. “Fair enough, but you just behave now, y’hear? You already know I’m not afraid to use it!”


Jack’s eyes went wide. “What? You mean you remember-”

“Blowing your ribcage to pieces? Yeah, I remember, alright. Yet, here you are now, all alive and such. Ain’t it the darndest thing?”

Jack was short of breath. He was excited to find yet another person in the same predicament as he was. “How long…how long have you been reliving the day?”

Donovan headed between two pallets and reached into the darkness. He came out with two foldable deck chairs. He handed one to Jack and the two of them took a seat opposite one another. “Let me see now…” The man let out a big sigh as he thought about it. “Guess it must be a good six, seven months now. How ‘bout you?”

“I lost track, but I guess about the same. How come I’ve never seen you before? I mean, up until the last couple of days.”

Donovan spread his arm in a wide semi-circle. “I have a job to do: to stay here and keep an eye on this here cargo. I take my profession very seriously, pardner.”

“So you’ve just been sitting down here on your own for half a year?”

“That about sums it up. Figured whatever’s gone wrong will right itself soon enough. Least I thought so, until I met you and your lady friend, that is.”

“Tally? What did you do to her?”

“Nothing,” said Donovan, looking ready to leap up at the slightest hint of aggression. “After I shot you dead, she backed off. We had ourselves a little chat and we discovered that we were in the same boat. Which is why I’m now happy to be more…cooperative.”

“You mean you’ll answer my questions?”

“If you’ll answer mine.”

“Okay, deal.”


Donovan got up from the chair, making Jack flinch, but then stepped away and went over to the same pallets from where he’d gotten the deckchairs. He came back with a bottle of bourbon whisky.

Jack grinned. “I think we may have just gotten off on the right foot.”

“You a whisky man, Jack?”

“Scotch usually, but what you have there is close enough for me.”

There were no glasses, so Donovan took a swig and handed over the bottle. Jack took a swig of his own and gasped as the liquid burned his gullet. Then he glanced at his new companion curiously. “What time do you wake up every day?”

“6AM, same as I have my whole life. It’s a sin to waste the day.”

“I wake up much later than that,” Jack said, his head aching as he thought about what the discrepancy could mean. “In fact, I wake up eight hours later than that.”

Donovan whistled. “I’d expect as much from a listless teenager, but a grown man…? Now that’s a crime.”

“Well you could say that I had a few problems even before I came aboard this hell-forsaken ship. Guess that’s not really important now though?”

“I guess not. So what do you make of all this? Your pretty little angel said we were under some sort of spell, that some fella hiding onboard is pressing the cosmic reset button every night.”

“Every night at midnight,” Jack added.

Donovan took another swig of the bourbon and then cleared his throat. “Well, I don’t rightly stay up as late as that. I like to get my head down by ten each night. Sleep is what makes a man as strong as he is.”

“Maybe that’s why I feel like such a shattered mess all the time then.”

“You got things on your mind, Jack?”

Jack took his longest swig on the bottle yet and lost his breath for a moment. Then he nodded, but gave no answer to the man’s question. There was no way he was willing to trust Donovan quite yet. Not until he got some answers. “What is all this money for?”

Donovan glanced at the open crates and grinned. “From what I understand, it’s a bribe. A harmless, run-of-the-mill payoff.”

Jack wrinkled his brow. “To whom?”

“Tunisian Government.”