The Killing Sea (3 page)

The water around
the trapped
Dreamcatcher
continued to drain. Sarah's father grabbed the binoculars from the cockpit and aimed them out to sea. He was still focusing the knob when the
Dreamcatcher
's keel touched bottom. The sailboat tilted, throwing him off balance and knocking him against the railing. The binoculars flew out of his hand and over the side.

“We'd better get off the boat. Everybody, pack a bottle of water. And put on your shoes.” He said this as casually as if suggesting a picnic, but his hands were bunched into fists.

Sarah snatched her sandals from the cockpit box and crammed them on. Her father slipped into
his loafers. Sarah's mother was below in the slanted galley, getting out the bottled water from the storage bin.

Peter, already wearing his sneakers, pointed seaward. “Look!”

At the mouth of the bay a wave was rolling in, no bigger than a normal beach wave. But beyond it the horizon was no longer flat and level against the sky. The ocean had risen into a wobbling cliff of water, sunlight glinting off the towering face.

“Betty!” Sarah's father roared. “Forget the bottles! Get the hell out! Everybody, off, off! Run for the hill!”

Sarah's mother raced up the companionway and took in the nightmare scene on the horizon with one quick look. She grabbed Peter by the arms and swung him off the stern of the boat, where the water had already dried out to damp sand.

“Surf Cat!” Peter cried. “Let me get Surf Cat!”

The cat hurtled past Peter and streaked across the dried reef toward the jungle.

Sarah and her parents jumped off the boat. The four of them sprinted toward the nearest spit of beach. Sarah came to an angled slope of coral that should have been underwater. The coral crunched under her sandals, slowing her down. Her father's hand pushed her. “Faster!”

Behind her she could hear a hiss of water rushing into the bay. From the exposed reef rose the familiar salty scent of low-tide wading pools, now mixed with a stink that smelled like sulfur. Several yards in front of her, the reef cracked open between two staghorn corals, and steaming green water erupted in a head-high geyser. She yelped and veered, which turned her at an angle so that she saw what happened next. The reef in front of her father split open and his leading leg plunged into the crack. The bone broke with an audible snap as he fell forward, his hand accidentally catching Peter on the ankles. Peter went tumbling as well.

The water from the first wave growled and gurgled onto the outer coral beds.

As Peter got to his feet, Sarah helped her mother pull her father out of the hole. His leg bent at a horrible angle midway between his knee and ankle.

The onrushing water swirled around the sailboat, spilling over its lower side. Sarah had no name for what was just outside the bay—it wasn't really a wave, but an uplifted chunk of dark water bigger than a city block. It loomed higher and higher over the mouth of the bay, tall enough to block out the morning sun and cast a shadow that raced over the shoreline.

“It's no good,” Sarah's father said. “You guys get going.”

Sarah's mother put an arm under his. Sarah did the same on his other side, but her mother pushed her arm away and said, “Take Peter. Run!”

“The highest ground,” her father said, grunting between clenched teeth. His tanned face had gone sallow.

“No,” Sarah said. She was dizzy with fear, but she had to help her dad.

Her mother slapped her on the cheek. Hard. Through her smarting tears, Sarah could see the implacable coldness of her mother's face. “You will obey me. Take Peter and run. Now!”

Sarah snatched Peter's hand. He resisted at first, crying incoherently. She gave him a vicious yank. They ran. She looked back once, when they reached the beach, and saw her mother helping her father hobble across the coral. Foamy water surged up around their waists, and they began to swim with its flow.

Sarah and Peter plunged through the wall of jungle. A vine's nasty needles tore the skin of her arms, but she felt no pain. Once behind the initial screen of vines and drooping branches, the jungle stretched spaciously uphill, with enormous trees scattered about like pillars supporting the high canopy. She ran up the steep slope, several times falling to her hands and knees. The ground was
slippery with a thick layer of decaying leaves and mulch. With her longer arms and legs, she sometimes had to pull or push Peter along. Her heart pounded so hard she became afraid it would literally burst. Sweat poured off her.

How high were they? Were they safe? She paused, her chest heaving as she tried to catch her breath, and looked down the hill. Fifty feet below her, a tide of frothy brown water rose up the slope with hardly any noise. She seized Peter's arm and scrambled higher. The water caught up to them and floated them off the ground with a surprisingly tender touch. They soared on the surface of the upwelling, up through the trees, until Sarah's shoulder finally smashed into a branch. She clung to the branch in a daze. The water rose a few feet higher and then stopped. Sarah swung onto the branch and tucked herself against the main trunk. Peter's head bobbed among the drowned branches of the outer canopy. He swam toward Sarah as the water began to recede, slowly at first, and then with increasing speed, sucking him down with it.

“Swim harder!” Sarah shouted at him.

He put his head down into the mucky water and stroked furiously. She stretched out on the branch and reached out a hand. He grabbed it just as the water gurgled away from him, leaving her holding
on to his dangling weight. She tried to haul him up onto the branch beside her, but his wet hand slipped away from hers and he fell back into the draining water five feet below. He looked up at her, his brown eyes wide with fright and shock.

“Grab something,” Sarah shouted. “Anything!”

He managed to clutch a sapling, but the increasing violence of the receding water ripped it out by the roots. A growing whirlpool carried him down and out of her sight. Now the water had a voice, a full-throated roar filled with the grinding of stone and wood. Lower on the hill Sarah could see big trees toppling with great swishes of their branches as the earth was scoured away from beneath them.

She had no thoughts, only the sounds and the images, as if her mind were a video camera recording everything. No fear or pain or anguish. Just the detached certainty that her father and mother and brother were dead and she was still alive, being bitten all over her dirty, scraped-up body by a swarm of red ants.

Ruslan rushed out
of the house, his unbuttoned yellow shirt flapping, and abruptly halted on the front steps.

Far down the lane, men, women, and children shrieked as they ran in front of a surge of blackish brown water clogged with chunks of wood and plastic garbage. Several people gunned up the narrow track on motorbikes. A young man took a running jump onto the empty back of a scooter driven by a woman, sending both of them sprawling to the asphalt.

But what had frozen Ruslan on the porch was what he saw beyond the point of Ujung Karang. On all three sides of the peninsula, the whole ocean
had lifted up and was racing landward. The sea was so tall that its face was visible above the houses and trees. From its top edge rose a churning white mist. One of the thirty-foot fishing boats got caught up in the frothing lip, which sent the vessel tumbling down the face.

The color of this sea was black.

That broke his trance. Ruslan sprinted up the lane, dodging around slower runners. From behind him came a sound like a thousand bulldozers at full throttle, ripping through buildings and grinding them up. He glanced over his shoulder. A tremendous wall of black water had swept onto the south side of the peninsula and another onto the north, both submerging not only buildings but also coconut palms. The two walls collided with a deafening thunderclap that dwarfed the grinding roar. White spray erupted hundreds of feet high. A bicycle twirled high in the spray, blasted into the air by the force of the impact.

This demented flood shot up the peninsula, riding over the earlier and shallower surge. It gobbled an old grandmother and a young policeman wading as fast as they could through the shallow water. Ruslan put his head down and forced his legs to sprint even faster. He turned up the road to the Old Mosque, to the boulevard that would lead away
from the sea. Black water poured out of alleyways in front of him, cutting off that direction. Without breaking stride, he careened into a lane that would take him the other way, toward the gas station. A thick tongue of water surged around a corner, turning down toward him.

He spun into another lane, and then another, his path always blocked by the sudden appearance of water determined to devour him. This part of town was as familiar to him as his paint palette, but in his terror he became disoriented. He burst from a lane onto the middle of a street of two-story shop houses. The flood raced toward him from either end of the street. He ran into the first shop house on his right, pushing through the shopkeeper's family, who'd rushed downstairs to see what was going on. “Run up! Run up!” he shouted to them, and sprinted up the stairs to the family quarters on the second floor. The response he got was an angry shout from one of the teenage sons, which turned into a panicked screech as water roared into the shop.

Within seconds the flood poured onto the second floor. The water was thick with sand and muck, and gushed with extraordinary violence, smashing furniture into the walls. Ruslan struggled to the narrow flight of stairs that led up to the attic. The water followed him up the stairs and poured
in through the attic's small, barred windows. Ruslan dog-paddled to stay afloat. The water lifted him higher and higher, toward the underside of the roof, which had a thick lining of insulation under the outer tiles.

God help him, he was going to be trapped and drowned like a rat. He stood on a support beam and frantically tore at the insulation. Thick chunks came away in his hands, but the water was now up to his chin. He took a deep breath just before his head became submerged, and he banged away at the roof tiles with the flat of his hand. His lungs began to burn. Several tiles at last gave way. He gripped the edges of the hole and hoisted himself up out of the water and into blessed air, which he inhaled with ragged whoops.

From the roof he could see a flood raging along several of the town's streets. Upright cars and overturned boats and uprooted trees and debris from shattered houses tumbled in the current. People were also carried along, trying to stay atop the mess, their desperate silent efforts far more chilling than their previous screaming. Ibu Ramly, the fritter seller, pushed her young son onto a floating refrigerator whose door was open. He fell inside. As she tried to climb on, the door shut on her son, and she fell into the water and did not reappear.

The roof underneath Ruslan began to quiver. The eave below him crumbled. The shop house was collapsing into the flood. Ruslan raced on his hands and knees along the cracking roofline to the adjoining shop house. He was just feet away when the beams underneath him gave way. God help him, the flood was going to get him after all. But now his fright became an instant fury. He was not going to let the water win. With one last lunge he jumped up and grabbed the base of the satellite TV dish on the edge of the neighboring rooftop. The metal pole bent under his weight. A bolt popped. Water tugged at his dangling legs and ripped away his sandals. He strained to fight off the current, scrabbling his feet against the wall. His toes found a crack, and he pushed off the tiny surface. That, and his grip on the bending pole, was enough for him to scoot over the edge of the roof.

A woman floated by, just a few feet below him. He recognized her as one of the fishmongers, clutching on to her market table. Her mouth gaped at Ruslan, her eyes blank with fright. He lay down on the sloped roof and grabbed her arm. For some reason, she tried to fight him off. He shouted at the panicked woman and heaved her up out of the water, landing her like a fish onto the rooftop beside him.

A moment later a Toyota sedan spun into view on the water. It carried on its top Haji Kamarudin, his white skullcap still plastered on his head. He noticed Ruslan and held out a beseeching hand, but he was too far away to reach. The sedan bumped into a submerged obstacle and halted, forming an eddying whirlpool. A log from a local lumber mill rolled onto the Haji's back, trapping him on top of the sedan as he and the car slowly sank, the Haji's terror-wide eyes still fixed on Ruslan, his hand still outstretched. In a moment all Ruslan could see above the water was the Haji's raised hand, waving for help, and then that too went under.

Sarah barely sensed
the red ants' fiery stings. She clung to the branch, staring at the ground below her.

Heights had always scared her. Whenever she stood on the edge of something taller than she was, nausea would flutter in her stomach.

Now she was fifty feet above the ground, on a tree with no branches in reach below her and a trunk too big to slide down.

“Help!” she screamed. “Help!”

Her cries were smothered by the jungle's absolute silence.

She lowered her forehead to her arm, squeezing her eyes shut.
When I open them, I'll wake up and be in my bunk.

An ant bit her on the eyelid. That one she felt. “Ow!” She slapped it dead and all others in reach. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a stout vine dangling behind her all the way to the ground.

Holding on to the trunk for balance, she gingerly rose to her feet. The vine drooped just out of reach. She would have to jump. She glanced at the ground far below and moaned. Something moved on the trunk near her hand. A lizard as big as her forearm, staring at her with cold eyes. She jerked her hand away. This threw her off balance. Her arms flailed. She was going to fall. In desperation, she sprang for the vine, which smacked her in the face where her mom had slapped her, the skin still tender from the blow. Her arms and legs automatically wrapped around the vine's rough bark. When her stunned senses cleared and she realized she wasn't falling, she inched her way down.

A minute later she stood with trembling legs on a tilted bed of newly exposed rock. The air reeked of stirred-up muck. Water lay in a hollow of a large boulder torn out of the hill, deep enough for her to rinse her filthy face.

Salty as seawater.

God, you idiot, it
is
seawater. That was a tsunami. When you were studying about them in earth sciences with dandruffy old Mr. Andaars,
you never thought you'd be in one, did you? You were too busy passing notes—

Tsunami.

Peter. Dad. Mom.

“Peter!” she shouted. “Dad! Mom!”

Before, the jungle floor had been shrouded in shadow. Now sunlight poured through huge gaps in the canopy. Fallen trees sprawled at random. Boulders big as cars had mowed through their branches and scythed down smaller bushes, leaving ragged trails.

How could her parents and brother have survived?

Yet at the same time, her heart insisted they were alive.

She scrambled over tree trunks toppled across her path, sometimes walking down their lengths with arms outstretched for balance. She continued calling. “Peter! Peter! Mom! Dad!” There was no reply, not even a bird's call or an insect's chirrup. At the torn roots of one tree, a boar with enormous yellow tusks lay dead on its side. She made her way around it and climbed the fallen trunk. Through a breach torn in the jungle's shoreline, she could see the bay. Swirling blacks and browns stained the bay, the water littered with a jungle's flotsam, including entire uprooted trees. She did not spot the sailboat. The sun was a white ker
nel in an achingly clean sky. Had so much time already passed?

She squeezed around a tangle of vines and jumped onto the beach. Most of the sand had been stripped away, exposing sharp limestone ridges.

One high dune remained. There, resting against a rotting fishing net, sat her mother, her back toward Sarah, her tangled hair fluttering on the breeze.

Sarah dashed over. “Mom! Mom!”

Her mother regarded Sarah with a flat look of anger, as though ready to scold her for not keeping Peter safe.

Sarah stepped closer. “Mom?”

Her mother's eyes didn't track her. Her nightie was torn across the waist. Both her feet were caught in the fishing net. Her mouth was agape, and from her left nostril peeked a bubble of froth. Dried blood trailed down her forehead, having dripped from a crusted wound in the scalp. A cloud of flies buzzed around her head. Dozens had landed, probing not only the scalp wound but also her lips and eyes.

Sarah's head spun. She turned away and retched violently. When the spasms stopped, she rinsed her mouth in a limestone tidal pool and faced her mother again. More flies had gathered.

She took off her T-shirt and swatted the flies
away. Where had they come from? “Bastards!” she shouted. “Leave her alone!”

The flies circled and darted back in, patient and persistent. She swung away at them, keening in her rage. Her fury was soon spent, and she knelt in exhaustion in the sand. She studied her mother's face. The cold look was the same one that had been there when she had slapped Sarah, telling her to take Peter and run. Sarah could still feel the blow on her cheek. She waited for grief to come. It didn't. It felt as though something inside her had short-circuited.

She had to bury her mom. Protect her as best she could. She disentangled her mother's feet from the net. Her limbs were stiffening up and hard to move. “I'm sorry, Mom,” she muttered, for there was no elegant way to do this. With a shove she toppled her mother's body onto the sand and then rolled it down to the shallow limestone crack at the foot of the dune. She scooped sand over her mother with her bare hands. The effort left her panting.

Not much of a burial. But only temporary, after all. Later there'd be a proper church funeral. She'd clutch a handkerchief and cry as a daughter should. Right now, she wiped sandy sweat from her forehead. Where was all this sweat coming from when her mouth was so dry?

She froze. Something was in the bushes. Just the littlest swish of leaves. Something was stealthily creeping behind the line of flattened and matted plants.

Tiger.

Sarah thought that all her fright had been used up. Not true. New fright sizzled in her veins. Her throat clogged. She stumbled backward, away from the jungle.

Surf Cat jumped from the foliage onto the sand dune. He bared his tiny fangs in a falsetto roar. Sarah burst into laughter that bordered on hysteria. She forced herself to stop.

Surf Cat meowed, pacing the sand dune, heading for the jungle and then circling around. His twitching tail seemed to be a signal to follow.

“Oh, all right,” Sarah said.

The orange cat led her twenty feet into the strip of ruined jungle. She heard coughing. A blob of brown hair moved in the shadows of a tree's overturned roots. “Peter!” she cried, and broke into a run.

Peter sat in a pool of mud, his shorts filthy beyond washing. A deadfall log as big around as a garbage can lay across his lower right leg. “I can't get it off,” he said with a plaintive wheeze. “I'm stuck.”

Sarah hugged him. Tears came to her eyes. “Oh, God, Peter…”

“Could you please get it off me?”

Sarah bent to the log, digging her hands into the mud to get underneath the smaller end, which still seemed impossibly heavy. As she grunted and jerked upward, strength surged through her. She lifted the end high enough for Peter to pull back his leg, and then let the log drop with a splat.

The soft ground had prevented Peter's bone from breaking. He limped over to Surf Cat and picked him up. Rubbing the kitten's head, he asked, “Where's Mom and Dad?”

“Mom's dead. She was caught in a fishing net.”

“Dead?”

“It was a tsunami, you know. Tidal wave.”

“I don't believe you.”

“I just
buried
her, Peter.”

“Where?”

“On the beach where I found her.”

“Show me.”

“I'm not teasing you, okay? This is not something I would ever tease you about.”

“Show me.”

She showed Peter the net on the dune and the burial mound of scooped sand.

“I want to see her,” Peter said.

Wordlessly, Sarah brushed sand away.

Peter studied their mother's exposed face for a moment and poked a cheek. His lower lip began to
tremble, and his eyes blinked rapidly. He caught his lip between his teeth and bit hard, blanching the skin. Then he put Surf Cat down so he could kneel and kiss their mother on the cheek.

Sarah watched.
Why didn't I kiss her good-bye?
The oversight confused her. Too late now. Peter was pushing sand back into place.

“Is Dad dead too?” he asked.

“Of course not. We'd better go look for him.”

Their father was a tough and capable man. He'd sailed around the world when he was younger. He'd once been marooned for a week on a South Pacific island. Another time he had sailed through a hurricane with a cracked skull. A big news write-up. Even with the printed X-ray of his cracked skull, some people refused to believe it.

A broken leg was nothing.

Sarah and Peter made their way along the beach, scrambling around boulders and over downed trees. Surf Cat trotted alongside them, pausing to sniff at dead fish. They called for their father and listened for his reply. Nothing. Only the mocking sound of small waves lapping on the ruined beach.

“Dad! Dad! Dad!” Peter shouted, his voice rising until he was shrieking.

His infectious panic incited Sarah's own. To
calm herself as well as Peter, she gathered him up and shushed him.

He pushed her away, coughing hard, his freckled face mottling with the effort. He spat out a mouthful of gunk flecked with dark spots. “I'm thirsty,” he said in a wheezy voice. “Can we find something to drink?”

The sun hovered closer to the horizon and shone with relentless cheerfulness. Sarah climbed onto a boulder to look again for the sailboat. Probably smashed to bits, but still, there'd be canned food and bottled water. She swept her gaze across the bay and along the shoreline. No boat. No wreckage.

An oblong patch of orangey red rested in a clump of fallen bamboo. An unnatural-looking color—the only red that shade had been the ice chest kept on the stern of the boat. Sarah ran over and yanked the chest out.

Within was a single can of Sprite.

She popped the can and gulped the wonderful liquid.

“Hey,” Peter said, grabbing her arm. “Don't drink it all.”

“I'm not,” she said, giving him her big sister glower.

“You hate Sprite.”

She did, too. Or had. Reluctantly she handed
Peter the can. He guzzled the rest. God, he sounded so piggish.

Sarah sat down at the edge of a large wading pool to wash her mud-caked sandals.

“Hey, Sarah,” Peter said, pointing over her shoulder to the bay's last finger of water.

Sarah looked. A sailboat hung in an enormous, shaggy tree. She glanced away and then back again. The
Dreamcatcher
was still there, cradled in a nest of branches, the bottom of its big keel ten feet off the ground. The boat looked undamaged, ready to sail into the air. The shorts and T-shirts from yesterday's wash were still strung on the back line.

For a giddy moment Sarah expected her father to appear on deck, wiping his greasy hands on a rag.