Micah's Island (3 page)

Breakfast was a couple of cold raspberry
Danishes and a glass of milk.  I hate milk, but I drank it anyway.  I felt like
I had to keep my strength up.

I wanted to take a shower, but with no
electricity to power the pumps below, I couldn’t. I got just enough water out
of the lines in the shower to scrub Dolph off, thank God.   I threw my ripped
tank top away and wrapped a towel around me. Hey, it was better than nothing.

My brain bounced off the walls of the
cabin for the next several hours as it got hotter and hotter. I was sweating
like crazy.  I had no water.  I tried to open the window, but of course, they
don’t want you to do that on a ship.  Now I know how a dog left in a hot car
feels.  I started to see and hear things that weren’t there. I had a fight with
my mom about Calvin.

Finally, I lay down on the floor trying
to keep myself as cool as possible, but I just knew I wasn’t going to survive
this.  It was too hot.  I was going to die alone, cooked to death on a ship
with no air conditioning miles and miles from home, while Calvin drank margaritas
made with Cabo Wabo tequila on my beach.  It was my last thought for a while.

~***~

I heard the screeching groan from deep
in the belly of the ship just about the time I felt the blast of icy cold air
come through the vents over me.  I honestly didn’t even know where I was for a
few minutes. When I revived enough to have a coherent thought, I was shocked as
hell to be alive.  The floor around me was wet.  I think I might literally have
been melting on the floor of the cabin. 

The cold air puffed just once for two or
three seconds, but it was enough to cool the room off considerably.  I heard
the noise from deep inside the ship again, and it gave me chills. This sounds
overly dramatic, but it sounded like dragons from hell raking their talons over
a metallic blackboard. I can’t think of any other way to describe it.  The ship
sort of shuddered underneath me. That was what brought me to my feet.

I went across the bed on my knees and
looked out the window.  The night was inky blackness, but the moon was blood
red, shining across the ripples on the water.  The moon looked weird to me,
really large and close.  Half in, half out of the horizon.  I could see clouds
roiling around it, like a storm was blowing up, but these clouds were moving
really fast.  An oily, black tendril slid its way across the blood red moon,
twisting like a tornado.

And that’s when the blue and purple
lightning started to flash across the sky.

Let me stop here and say this:  I‘ve lived
in the Bermuda Triangle since I was a kid, and I’ve never seen anything out of
the ordinary. Never talked to anyone who ever said they saw anything weird.  At
that point, I just thought a really bad storm was brewing.

 I think I was so terrorized by then
that I wasn’t willing to face the truth.  
Nothing
about that night was
normal.

Another puff of icy air, and I mean
icy.  I reached up and touched the vent. It had a thick layer of frost around
the edges. I heard the deep metallic grinding sound again, like a steel girder being
twisted into a pretzel.  The ship quivered and groaned.

Then the most amazing thing happened. 
It
felt like a giant hand picked the ship up, turned it a perfect 180 degrees, and
dropped it back into the water from a great height!

The sense of vertigo was unlike anything
I’ve ever experienced. It felt like the drop on the biggest roller coaster I’ve
ever been on.  I crashed to the floor; my head bounced off the coffee table as
it slid over the top of me.  The drawers of the built in chests in the cabin
all slid out into the middle of the room.  I scrambled up onto the bed,
breathless and bruised, my heart in my freaking throat.

~***~

I don’t want to sound like a drama
queen, but when I think about the way the ship felt as it was being tossed
around...well...I think maybe I’ve watched too many Syfy movies. It really felt
as though something was playing with the ship.  One end would tip up in the
air, as though a giant, unseen finger were pushing the other end down into the
water.  Then that end would be up in the air, and the other end would be down. 
Lather, rinse, repeat for about twenty minutes.

I can’t even begin to tell you how
terrified I was as my insignificant body flew from one end of the cabin to the
other, in the dark, with only that bloody moon shining through the small window.

  The furniture and I were rolling
around the room like dice on a Las Vegas craps table. I was hoping the wall
mirror wouldn’t break and toss razor sharp shards around the room along with me.
The only solid thing I could ground myself with was the towel bar I’d been tied
to, and that quickly came loose and broke off the closet.

I finally managed to get myself into the
small bathroom and wedge the door shut with my feet. I was sick to my stomach
as we rolled end over end, cold arctic blasts of air alternating with so much
heat I was sure it could melt concrete.  At this point, I wasn’t trying to wrap
my brain around anything besides not being human popcorn. 

And then I heard the water. 
Shit.

As I said, I hate ships.  I hate open
water.  Water scares me to death.  I could hear water sloshing around out in my
cabin.

I didn’t want to look. But I couldn’t
not
look.  If water was flooding my cabin, I had to get the hell out of there as
fast as I could.  

I stood up and opened the door of the
bathroom to find about three inches of ocean splashing around on my floor.  It
smelled fishy and salty; my stomach immediately went up into a knot.

The ship had stopped doing the see-saw
motion, but now it tilted downward at an angle. That clearly meant two things: 
We were taking on water. We were sinking.

It’s funny where your mind goes when
you’re in deep shit like that.  All I could think of was
Titanic
.  Rose
and Jack, running hand in hand up the halls of a listing ship, blah blah blah. 
Life is never as neat as it is in the movies.

Big problem: my door was locked.  Water
was seeping in under it, getting ever higher around my bare ankles.  I pulled
and yanked and screamed, but the door didn’t budge.

I threw my shoulder against it.  Again
and again.  With all of my might. 

I pounded on it and screamed for Dolph. 
Yeah, like he was going to come down here and risk his life to rescue me.

Okay, I’m a fighter.  I wanted to live. 
I had hope.  But as the minutes ticked by and I couldn’t get the door open,
that hope began to melt away, replaced by real, shit-your-pants terror. The
water was up to mid-calf on my legs.  God, I was going to drown trapped in this
room.

I took a few steps back from the door,
swearing and cursing, promising Calvin I would see his miserable ass in hell
someday, when the most remarkable thing happened.

The door swung open into the room.

Well, it didn’t exactly
swing
open.  It sort of exploded open. The flood of seawater that had been building
on the other side of the door gushed in, took me off my feet, and swept me out
into the hall.

I flailed around a bit, then got a
toehold on the carpet and started to climb up the hallway, which was tilting
upward at a 45° angle.  It was pitch black; I couldn’t see a thing. If I was
going to get out of here, I would have to do it by feel.

 The water was around my hips. I took
several deep, calming breaths and prayed that whatever was playing with the
ship wouldn’t start again, at least until I could get up from below.

To this day, I don’t have a clue how I
got out of there.

I used to have dreams when I was a kid
of someone chasing me and I couldn’t run fast enough to get away from them. 
The water chased me that way now.  I didn’t waste precious breath screaming,
but man, I had one in my throat ready to go!

  I climbed up the tilted hallway like a
monkey up a tree, and the water came after me just as fast. At times it knocked
me over and tumbled me around, but I always came up spitting and sputtering,
fighting and climbing. It really
was
like Titanic.  I was Rose without
the miserable, long, wet dress pulling me under.

I scrambled up the stairs at the end of
the hall, used the banister as leverage, and launched myself up another wide
flight of stairs.  I finally got ahead of the water.  I could hear it behind
me, but I didn’t feel like my death was imminent anymore.

I came up on to the top deck in the bar
of the casino, and it was the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen in my life. The
moonlight was bright enough that I could see everything was gone. All the
booze, the glasses, the chairs, the one-armed bandits. Gone. Some of it was
piled against the stained glass windows of the bar, which remarkably remained
intact, but the rest of it had slid out through the open doors and into the
ocean lapping further down the deck. Some of the slot machines had just busted
through the wall.  All of the deck chairs were gone and floating in the ocean. I
knew I didn’t want my already battered and abused body to end up in that meat
grinder of debris sliding up the deck of the ship as the ocean swallowed it.

Being in near darkness was terrifying
enough, but the sounds around me were taking all of that up a notch. Every now
and again, a giant bubble would issue up from the belly of the ship with a
giant
glug glug.
Water was swishing and rolling, coming closer and
closer.  My heart was pounding. I heard glass breaking, wood snapping, and
every now and again, that deep, tortured groan from the belly of the ship.

Trying to move around at an ever steeper
angle as the bow of the ship went under was exhausting. Even so, I scrambled
back out the other end of the bar and headed for the stern, almost on my hands
and knees.

I don’t know why I fought so hard. 
Really, where did I think I was going?    I was going to be thrown into the
ocean sooner or later.  I guess I just wasn’t willing to accept that yet.

Whatever had been playing with the ship
came back for the grand finale.  It felt like giant fingers grabbed the bow of
the ship under the water and pulled...
pulled
...it the rest of the way
under.  So fast it was mind-boggling.

I didn’t see what happened next.  I can
only give you impressions.  Me, grabbing at the railing of the ship and
missing. Me, flying through the air, screaming, pumping my arms and legs, praying
I wouldn’t land on anything that would kill me.  Then praying I could get my
hands on something that would keep me afloat.

I hit the water feet first. It was hot;
I had the absurd notion that it was boiling just before it pulled me under
completely.  I rolled, pushed, prayed, held my breath. It felt like I was
submerged for an eternity.  Finally, I bobbed up into the air like a cork. 

I came up out of the water gasping like
a landed fish.  I pushed my hair out of my eyes and tried to find something to
grab ahold of.   That shouldn’t have been problem with all the stuff that was
floating around me, but every time I grabbed something—a chair, a cushion—it
started to sink with me clutching it.

God, I wanted to live!  I knew it was
hopeless, but I wanted to live!
Goddamn
you, Calvin!

I flailed around desperately, turning
180° in the water trying to find something to climb onto when I saw it.

It was one of those little covered
lifeboats, bright orange so it can be seen from the air. It wasn’t that far
from me. I’ve never been the strongest of swimmers, but I kicked and stroked
for all I was worth.  I was going to get to it or die trying.  (Haha, Deveraux! 
You are some kind of comedian!)

Hope gave me determination, and
determination gave me strength.  I struggled through the water, finally getting
my hands on the back of the lifeboat. Working my way around to the hatch, I
spun the handle and pulled.  It popped open; had I not been in the water, I’d
have done a freaking happy dance.

Getting it open was one thing.  Hefting
my body over the side and into it was another.  Every time I tried to pull
myself up on shaky arms, it tipped in my direction, sending me back into the
water.  After five or six tries, I was ready to give up. I was worn out and
exhausted.  One giant, epic fail.

I had a damned lifeboat in my hands, and
I couldn’t get into it.  I was beyond pissed. I closed my eyes and lay my head
on the plastic rim of the boat, half-drowned, feeling mighty sorry for myself
when Calvin popped into my mind.

Fuck you, Gianna.  It’s what you
deserve!

No way was I giving that bastard the
last word.  I decided I had one last try in me. Just one.  I had to make it
count.  Swearing and praying, I pushed myself upward on shaking arms, willing
my body up and over the side of the boat.  And I did it! I scraped the skin off
of my boobs, belly, and thighs doing it, but mission accomplished!

I didn’t have much time to bask in my
success. I rolled to my knees and vomited ocean all over the inside of the
boat.  Once, twice, three times my stomach contracted painfully as I emptied
myself out. Geez, how much seawater could one person swallow? Gasping, my
stomach finally purged, I rolled onto my back in a puddle of salty vomit and
blacked out.