The Killing Sea (6 page)

The python gathered
speed. Ruslan realized that in his squatting position he looked like something tasty and easy to swallow. He scrambled to his feet, backing up to the trail bike, but too late. The python sprang, its jaws missing Ruslan's leg but biting the cuff of his jeans. The rest of the giant snake whipped up to coil around him. Ruslan spun and pressed the snake's blunt head against the bike's hot exhaust pipe. At once the python let go and writhed away into the water.

Ruslan got back on the trail bike and rode for another hour into the night, his world condensed down to the beam of his headlight. The bog finally dried up and the trail climbed to scrubby dry
ground. He braked to a halt on a level patch of rock and scree and turned the bike handle left and right, using the headlight as a search beam. All he could see was ordinary brush.

After he swung off the bike, the delayed reaction to the python attack finally set in. Drowning was one thing, but being eaten was another. He trembled violently for at least a minute before he could say his evening prayers. When they were finished, he spread out on the ground as close as he could to the bike, tucking his head into the gap between the front wheel and engine, using the knapsack as a pillow. He fell sound asleep, too bone tired for any dreams or nightmares. When he woke, stiff as the flat rock he had slept on, it was already dawn. He peed into a bush and with a groan swung his sore body onto the trail bike. How much farther did he have to go? If he remembered correctly, the logging track would at some point turn back down to the coast and end at Teunom, a village beside a river mouth. There he could get something to eat and drink before continuing on to Calang and Ie Mameh. He didn't have any money, but by now the people at Teunom surely knew of the disaster that had befallen Meulaboh and would help him.

The trail was a jarring path of ridges and ruts. Eventually the path widened into a potholed road
that wound along the side of the lowest foothill. He came to an intersection. The right-hand fork led back up into the hills. To where, Ruslan didn't know. He chose the fork that descended through oil palms to the flat coastal plains and the main road to Calang.

At the bottom of the hill a spring burbled out of the rocks, forming a small pool. Ruslan stopped. He waded out into the pool and cupped his hands at the spring to drink. His thirst at last slaked, he turned and sank into the waist-high water for a good soak.

He froze. In the wattle brush lining the far end of the pool, a man stared at him with wide and bulging eyes.

Unblinking eyes, rigid with death.

Around him were several more corpses, caught in the brush like debris.

The flood had struck here, too.

Ruslan drove on. Fallen trees and mounds of swamp muck made the driving difficult, and then, after half a mile, impossible. He pushed the trail bike into the crown of a downed oil palm, camouflaging it as best he could with the leaves.

A shadow of a man holding a rifle fell before him. Another shadow appeared, and then a third. Ruslan spun around.

A band of five armed men in civilian clothes had
materialized out of the destroyed land. Lurking in the backs of their eyes was something as hard and hollow as the barrels of their well-oiled rifles.

Rebels.

One of the men had a dead eye, nothing but a white swirl. He didn't speak. A man with a livid scar on his forearm nodded at the hidden bike. “What you doing with that motorbike, boy?”

“Trying to keep it safe,” Ruslan said. “I borrowed it. It's not mine.”

“That's right. It's ours now. Give me your bag.”

Ruslan handed him the knapsack, which the man checked and returned. “Where you come from?”

“Meulaboh. It's been destroyed by the flood. I came along the old logging trail.”

“We saw your headlights last night. The military let you pass their checkpoints?”

The question sounded idle, but Ruslan sensed a trap. The rebels trusted no one they did not know. The military employed all sorts of agents and informants, from grandmothers to fresh-faced schoolkids.

“My father is Yusuf the mechanic,” he said. “He's gone to Ie Mameh. That's where I'm going, to find him. Meulaboh's destroyed.” He gestured at the ruined land around them. “Just like here. A monster sea wave.”

The man glanced at the white-eyed man. “Ie Mameh, is that right? Now, why would a mechanic from Meulaboh be going to Ie Mameh? They have their own mechanics there.”

“That's where my mother's from. Her relatives asked him to come.”

“Let's see your ID.”

Ruslan thought of his ID card, tucked away in the officer's pocket. “I lost it.”

“What's that in your back pocket?” Ruslan handed him his wallet. The man inspected its contents. “Why would you have your wallet and not your ID?”

Ruslan opened his mouth to lie that the ID card had been in his shirt pocket, but instead other words rose to his tongue before he could stop them. “You're worried about my ID? Look around you! Look what's happened!”

Another man spat. “We don't have time for this. Let's just shoot him.” He aimed his rifle at Ruslan's chest, his finger tightening on the trigger.

Sarah stared at
the empty shoreline. Oh dear God, the tsunami had surged around the whole island and torn out the village. Not a stick remained.

Peter threw himself down onto a patch of soft grass and was instantly asleep.

Sarah licked her dry lips. What was she going to do now?

A few miles to the west, black smoke drifted into the big blue sky. Smoke from a fishing boat, heading toward the island.

Sarah laughed and clapped her hands. Then she realized that the boat's present course would take it a good ways offshore. She stopped clapping. She had to do something to catch its attention. A
fire. Plenty of dry wood here for a big one. She'd throw in green branches to make billows of signaling smoke.

She rushed about, gathering moss, twigs, and leaves for the starter fire as her father had taught her years ago on a camping trip. She arranged this material in a pit she scooped out with her hands. On top of that she layered larger sticks and waited for the boat to draw closer. No point in starting the fire too soon.

The boat grew bigger. The dull beat of its engine became audible on the breeze. Sarah knelt by the prepared stack with the gas lighter. The blue flame licked the twigs, which blazed for a moment before dying out. She rearranged the material in the pit and clicked the lighter's trigger. No flame. Another click. Still no flame. She shook the lighter and pulled the trigger again and again and again.

She'd used up the last of the lighter's gas burning off those leeches.

With an angry cry she hurled the lighter into the bushes. Tears of frustration streaked her cheeks. She raced down to the shoreline and waved and shrieked as the boat chugged past a half mile offshore. It held its course and all too soon presented its disappearing stern to her.

She sank to her knees in the mud. A big blank
nothingness rose up around the edges of her mind, threatening to swallow it up. There weren't even any more tears.

“Dad,” she whispered.

Her father's calm voice came to her.
Look at Surf Cat, playing with those coconuts.

She focused her gaze on Surf Cat, who was in a nearby palm grove planted in a jungle clearing. The cat stood on his hind legs beside an uprooted palm tree, swatting a dangling green coconut with his paws. God, after everything that had happened, the cat could still play? Then it struck her: coconut. Lots of them in the fallen crown of the tree, in easy reach. Sarah made her way over and twisted one of the young nuts off its stem.

Now what? It was the tuna can all over again. She had to find something to open it with.

She paced along the shore, scanning the ground for any sharp object she could use. Nothing. She came to the rocky ridge that had marked the village's northern boundary. Now, here was stone. Lots of stone. She recalled the time Mrs. Koenigswald had brought into her history class a professional knapper, a person who made blades out of stone, as people had done thousands of years ago. God, who would have thought that such a skill could still come in handy? She should have paid closer attention.

She picked up a rock the size of a football and threw it as hard as she could against a boulder. The rock bounced away.

Wait a second. Why not smash the coconut itself? She climbed the ridge, looking for a suitable spike in the rock to puncture and tear the nut's tough hide. Beyond the ridge was an inlet, a keyhole packed with spiky-legged mangrove trees. There'd be nothing there for her.

She was just turning away when she noticed out of the corner of her eye something rocking back and forth between two of the mangrove trees. A wooden boat, its narrow open hull about ten feet long, rocking in the incoming tide. A blue plastic sail was furled around two long pieces of bamboo.

She made her way down the other side of the ridge and waded out in the mangrove muck to the boat. The few inches of water underneath the floorboards stank of fish. A paddle rested on the cross plank that served as the seat, as though the fisherman had casually left it there minutes ago.

“Hello, hello?” she called, but only the clicking of crabs answered her.

A wooden handle was stuck behind one of the rib planks. She reached across the hull but didn't have the leverage to pull it out. The hull listed as she clambered over the side. She tugged on the
handle, and the rest of it appeared, a fisherman's cleaver with silver fish scales dotting its dark blade. She whooped in delight. From the Stone Age to the Iron Age, just like that! She bent over the side of the boat to wash the machete in the water before hacking open the coconut. Even with a stout blade, it was harder than it seemed, the coconut repeatedly spinning out of her hand onto the floorboards. When she had bared part of the hard brown shell, it cracked in the wrong place, and coconut milk sloshed into the dirty bilge.

“No!” she said, quickly righting the nut. Fortunately, the remaining milk, sweet as heaven, slaked the burning edge of her thirst. She whacked open the rest of the nut to scoop the soft meat out with her fingers.

The quiet was suddenly shattered by Peter's faint but hysterical screams rising from the other side of the ridge. “Sarah! Sarah! Where are you? Sarah!”

She grabbed the oar. Fear galvanized her awkward paddling. “I'm coming!” she shouted. His screams ceased, and her imagination feared the worst. A tiger.

“He's okay, he's okay, he's okay,” she chanted as she stroked. When she rounded the point, she saw him on the shore, bent over and coughing
hard from his screaming. She stopped paddling, limp with relief. He looked up at her, and she waved the oar. He was still pale from his fright, but trying not to show it now.

“Look what I found,” she said, patting the hull.

“We're going to go in that?”

She looked at the empty horizons and up at the fair-weather clouds scudding across the blue sky. She noticed too how Peter was beginning to flush with fever. “Yup.”

She chopped open two more coconuts for her and Peter. He drank the milk but said he wasn't hungry for the meat.

“Eat,” she said.

“You sound just like Mom.”

“No dessert until you do,” she said.

He smiled and ate a few scoops. When he was done, he helped her gather the rest of the coconuts off the fallen palm and stock them in the boat. While Peter rested, she searched along the edge of the jungle and found a type of wild, fruitless banana tree with long broad leaves. She cut down half a dozen leaves and put them in the boat to provide shade. She unfurled the plastic sail. It took her a while to figure out how it worked. One pole remained upright in a hole in the boat's forward crossbeam, while the other skewed at an angle,
stretching out the triangular sail. A line—
a sheet
, she heard her father say—was tied to the second pole, and this held the sail steady to the wind.

“I guess we're ready to go,” she called out to Peter.

He boarded and crouched in the front of the hull, holding Surf Cat in his lap. She pushed off the beach, the sail flapping in the mild breeze. When she hauled on the sheet, the boat tilted to the side and surged forward with surprising speed.

“You sure we're going the right way?” Peter asked.

God, how stupid of her. She hadn't thought of that. She studied the lay of the island, the sun, and the direction of the boat. As far as she could calculate, they were headed in the right direction for that last town they'd been in. Out on the horizon was a haze that could only be the tops of clouds over Sumatra's mountains.

“Malibu, here we come,” she said.

“Huh?” Peter said. “Malibu?”

“Where we got the engine fixed.”

“Meulaboh—
meh-lah-boh
.”

“Okay,
meh-lah-boh
, Mr. Smarty Pants. You can speak to the natives when we get there.”

She tied the sheet off on a peg obviously meant for that purpose. Peter gazed brightly around him
and then seemed to instantly run out of energy and curiosity, curling up before the sail post with bent knees, his head cradled on his hands. She put several of the banana leaves over him to protect him from the sun and stuck another inside one of the boat planks to give herself a strip of shade.

“Can you feed Surf Cat for me?” Peter asked.

Using the tip of the machete, Sarah pried open a hole in the can of cat food. She thought about opening a can of tuna, but decided to save the tuna for when they didn't have coconut. Surf Cat ate all the cat food and then fearlessly crouched on the bow of the boat to lick his fur.

The boat sailed itself, putting down a straight thin wake. With nothing to do, Sarah became conscious of her dirty teeth. She had always been particular about brushing and flossing before bed, and now her teeth felt mossy and all gunked up. It drove her crazy. She rubbed them with her forefinger and scratched them with her nails, but that didn't satisfy her. A piece of nylon fishing line wound around one of the boat's ribs. She picked it off, washed it over the side in the sea, and used it as floss. When she was done with that, she used the tip of the machete to dig out dirt from underneath her fingernails. She hadn't had a chance to do them.

Behind them, Tiger Island dwindled, and around
them, the sea changed from brown to the blue of open ocean, a color that made the hull seem awfully small. She scanned the horizon, hoping to see a ship.

And there, a smokestack, rising from a funnel—she jerked upright, blinking her bleary eyes to clear them. The dream vessel had vanished. She splashed water on her face to stay awake, but her tiredness pulled her head down onto her arms, the heat and the boat's rhythmic motion lulling her back to sleep.

A thud woke her. Two enormous claws rose out of the water, accompanied by a rapid huffing noise. For a second she thought this too was a lingering dream, but the claws didn't vanish. She screamed, sure that a sea monster was attacking them. But it wasn't a sea monster. The claws were hooves that scrabbled up onto the side of the hull, tilting it to the water. Then the water buffalo's face appeared, its reddened eyes round with fear as it tried to climb aboard the tiny boat.