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.