The Killing Sea (7 page)

Ruslan stared at
the end of the gun barrel aimed at his chest. It didn't have a flash suppressor, and the hole looked so big that he imagined he could see the grooves that would spin the bullet into his heart. After all he'd been through, this was how he was going to die? If he weren't so scared, he'd be laughing at the absurdity.

“Wait.” A word of command, spoken by the man with the dead white eye.

The other rebel lowered his rifle.

The man strode up to Ruslan. His dead eye seemed as penetrating as his good one. “Your father is Yusuf the mechanic, you said? And he went to his wife's relatives in Ie Mameh?”

Ruslan nodded, his legs trembling at this sudden reprieve. He tried to hold them still, not wanting the rebels to see how frightened he'd been.

One of the rebels laughed and pointed at Ruslan's crotch. “Look. He's peed himself.”

Ruslan looked down. A big, fresh wet spot marked the front of his drying jeans. His face burned with shame.

“Aw, little boy,” the man who'd pointed the gun said. “You didn't think I'd really shoot you, did you?”

The leader said, “What's your mother's name?”

“Tjut Intan,” Ruslan mumbled. “She was a schoolteacher.”

“What happened to her?”

“She was killed in a firefight when I was three.”

The leader murmured with the scarred man and then told Ruslan, “You come with us.”

“Where?”

“Wherever we tell you.”

“But I need to get to Ie Mameh.”

The leader's smile didn't reach his good eye. “You're with us now. We're your family. We need a pair of strong shoulders like yours. Lots of stuff to carry.”

Ruslan knew that rebels occasionally forced young males into service, sometimes for months. He had to
escape from these men. He had to get to Ie Mameh. But for now, he had to play it smart and go along.

They gave him a zippered gym bag to carry that was as heavy as a rock. What was inside? Ammunition for the rifles? Grenades? He hiked in the middle of the group, the men spread out and keeping a casual but close eye on him. They came to a destroyed village, houses obliterated down to the foundations, with trails of smashed bricks and tiles pointing like arrows away from the coastline. The rebels scavenged through the debris. They found a carton of bottled water, the seals unbroken. These they divided among themselves, two each. The leader made sure Ruslan got his share, which he put in his knapsack on his back.

The scarred rebel found a gold headdress in a broken wardrobe. He unzippered Ruslan's gym bag to put the headdress inside. Other gold objects glittered within. There were also wads of money.

Ruslan said nothing.

They came to two bodies, a shirtless man, a woman in sarong and headdress. The scarred rebel patted the male's pockets. He shook his head. But the female had a gold chain that he unfastened from her neck and handed to Ruslan.

Ruslan backed away in horror. “This is sacrilege!”

The leader turned to Ruslan, piercing him with
that dead eye. “If we don't take it now, somebody else will take it later. There are survivors with us we must feed. Take the chain.”

The scarred rebel held his rifle as though ready to use it on Ruslan for real this time.

Ruslan added the chain to his bag.

The leader stood over the corpses and murmured a quick prayer.

The band made their way along a littered road to the edge of a broad brown river twirling away to the coast and the small town of Teunom. Even this far inland the bridge's roadway had been torn out by the force of the flood, but one metal beam, and the cable that supported it with guy wires, still spanned the hundred yards to the other side of the river. The first rebel slung his rifle over his shoulder and climbed up onto the girder to start crossing.

An idea popped into Ruslan's mind. He faked a shudder. “I can't swim.”

The scarred man patted his shoulder. “You're not swimming.”

“What if I fall?”

“Good point. I'd better take that bag.”

Ruslan was third onto the girder, a metal I-beam whose flat top was the width of his hands. Wide enough, with the cable's guy wires offering
good handholds. But in the middle of the crossing, Ruslan no longer had to fake his nervousness. The river below seemed so far away, its brown eddies deep and powerful. He almost abandoned his idea, but he knew he'd never have another chance to escape these men and get to Ie Mameh. He took several deep breaths and pretended to slip. He wailed with a flailing of arms and let himself fall backward into the air.

The drop seemed endless. He hit the water with a painful smack. The rebels on the girder shouted down at him. He remembered he was playing a role and splashed ineffectively for a few moments before ducking under the opaque surface and letting the current carry him for as long as his breath could hold.

Several minutes later he'd been swept around a curve and out of sight of the bridge. He kept to the deepest, strongest part of the river. The swirling energy of this water was nothing compared to what he'd lived through in Meulaboh. Its current slowed as the river opened up onto a wide estuary. Ruslan began swimming awkwardly in his jeans and shoes to the high northern bank, beyond which lay Teunom.

Several bodies floated in shoreline reeds. Ruslan ignored them. The dead, it seemed, would
now be as much a part of his life as the living had been.

After he squished up the opposite bank, it took only one glance to know there was no more Teunom, no more farmers tending to their fields, no more fishermen hauling their catch to market.

Twenty miles to the north rose the coastal hills of Calang. From where Ruslan stood he could see that the highway along the coast had been ripped apart, great slabs of asphalt torn up and tossed aside. It'd be easier to walk along the beach. He drank one of the bottles of water from his knapsack and trudged along the riverbank to the shoreline.

For a mile out to sea, the waters were still brown and streaked with long patches of foam. The beach's soft gray sand spilled hot into his wet shoes. Muddy waves rose and crashed in foam that hissed up toward his feet. One wave larger than the others wobbled up out of the depths, and in Ruslan's imagination its brown darkened to black as it rose and rose and rose.

He turned and ran, screaming.

Sarah pounded the
water buffalo's head with the oar as water poured into the tilted hull.

“Peter, help!” she screamed.

He kicked at the closest hoof. Sarah swung the oar again. It broke in half on the creature's head. She threw down the pieces and picked up the machete, using the flat of the blade to smack its nose. At the same time, Peter gave its snout a hard shove with his foot. The buffalo's front hooves slipped off the boat. Sarah paddled furiously with the broken oar to get away, the half-submerged boat heavy in the water. The buffalo swam after the boat, but it couldn't keep up, the waves swamping its massive head, which sank lower and lower
in the water. Finally the head sank altogether and didn't come back up.

Sarah stopped paddling and hung her head, panting hard to catch her breath. She felt sorry for the beast, but what else could she have done?

“What was that water buffalo doing way out here?” Peter asked.

“Maybe a boat sank.”

The sheet had loosened on its peg, and the sail flapped. The sun blazed overhead. She'd been asleep at the wheel—
helm
, she heard her father say—for at least three hours. Tiger Island was a blob in the distance, and the opposite horizon was filled with a glorious sight, the mountains, foothills, and plains of the Sumatran mainland.

Using coconut shells, she and Peter scooped water out of the hull before she set the sail again. The boat headed for a cluster of small hills rising from the distant shoreline. She couldn't recall if Malibu, or however it was pronounced, had such hills, but that didn't matter. Wherever she landed, there were bound to be people who would help.

Did they know yet about the disaster that had swept Tiger Island?

She and Peter shared another coconut. He drank the slightly sweet milk, sipping between bouts of coughing.

“We're almost there,” she said. “We'll get you to a doctor and then I'll go back and look for Dad. Lie down. You need to rest.”

Peter didn't argue. He curled up around the sail post. Sarah adjusted the leaves over him, protecting him from the sun.

The blue of the sea changed back again to shades of mottled brown. The boat bumped into an object. A man, floating facedown. She seized the closest arm. Cold and pudgy. With a shiver, she let go. Several more bodies bobbed into view, another man and two women. The man was shirtless, the women partially nude. The last one had her arm over something. The boat's bow wake rolled over her, and her arm slid off the bundle. A small girl.

Sarah put a hand to her mouth to stop from crying out. She no longer thought a boat had sunk. She was beginning to suspect the truth. The boat sailed through the awful flotsam of several more bodies and other odd debris. A round yellow water tank. Cushions. A floating fridge. An upside-down table, with a body crumpled on top of it. The body stirred and croaked for help. Sarah let the sail flutter and paddled back in a hard circle to come alongside the table. She helped the woman slither into the hull. Her sarong and blouse were ripped, her head-dress skewed. Once in the hull, the woman didn't
move, breathing shallowly and licking her cracked lips. Sarah began to cut open a coconut to give her something to drink.

A sharp flare of life returned to the woman's dried-out gaze. She seized the machete from Sarah's hands and in seconds had chopped open the coconut. She guzzled the nut, shaking it for the last remaining drops. “
Terima kasih
,” she said to Sarah, thanking her. She seemed to have no curiosity at all about why a white girl would be sailing a small fisherman's boat hardly bigger than a canoe. The woman squatted to eat the meat, and when that was done, she picked up one of the banana leaves draped over the front of the boat to stare for a moment at Peter. She carefully replaced the leaf and gave Sarah a brief, sympathetic look. She said something that Sarah didn't understand.

“I need to find a doctor for him,” Sarah told her.

The wind had shifted. The boat would land well south of the hills. The shore drew nearer. Sarah eyed the shoreline, a long stretch of gray sand, surf foaming at its edge.

The banana leaves stirred, and Peter sat up. The woman shrieked, a hand clasped to her throat as she stared with fright at Peter.

“Oh,” Sarah said, with sudden understanding. “He wasn't dead, just sleeping.” She put her hands
together and rested her cheek on them to illustrate. “Sleeping.”

The woman relaxed and studied Peter. She scooted forward on the hull's floorboards and gave him a hug. He was drowsily confused at first, but then leaned against her. She felt his forehead, her brow furrowing at his fever. She said something to Sarah, clearly a question, but Sarah could only shrug and say, “I'm sorry, I don't know what you're saying.”

Several minutes later there came into view a man pedaling a children's stern-wheel boat, the kind she'd played on during summer camps at Cloud Lake. This particular boat, done up in bright yellows and reds, had a smiling fiberglass Mickey Mouse standing behind the seat as a Venice gondolier. The driver's right cheek was swollen with an ugly purple bruise. His unblinking eyes seemed to register nothing. He pedaled hard on the bicycle-style gears in catatonic determination, heading not for shore but down the coast. The paddle wheel behind him churned a wide wake.

“Hello, excuse me,” Sarah called out to him as she spilled air out of the sail.

He jerked his head up in surprise and stopped pedaling.

“Meulaboh. Which way is Meulaboh?”

He pointed in the direction he was heading. “Sixty kilometer.”

“God, that far? I need to find a doctor for my brother.”

He pointed behind him to the coastal hills. “Calang has military doctor. You go there.” He bent his head and resumed his determined pedaling.

Sarah glanced back at the Calang hills. What, about fifteen miles away? And upwind, too. She tried tacking back and forth but didn't seem to get any closer. The breeze stiffened, furring the sea with small whitecaps. After an hour she figured that it would be easier just to land the boat on the beach and start walking.

Sarah set the sail again and steered for a gap in the head-high surf. The contrary wind, though, pushed the boat to where the waves were the biggest, thumping onto the sand. The woman cried out in alarm. “Hang on!” Sarah yelled as a wave built up behind them. The boat surfed down the face. The nose dug underwater, and the stern flipped high into the air, throwing Sarah overboard. The last thing she saw before she hit the water was Peter's head bobbing on the foam, and the hull of the boat falling upside down on top of him.

When he reached
the top of the beach, Ruslan stopped screaming. He forced himself to turn around. The wave that had frightened him swished a few feet up the sand. Just a normal wave, the kind he used to enjoy playing in.

Nonetheless, as he trudged toward Calang, he stayed on the landward side of sandy ridges as much as he could to keep the unsettling ocean from sight. He wondered if he'd ever be able to trust the sea again.

The land was silent. No birds whistled, no goats bleated, no children shouted, no horns honked, not a single mosque summoned the faithful to prayer. Caught in a leafless thornbush on one ridge was a
sheet of yellowed newspaper. A corner of the sheet fluttered in the breeze, the crackle of paper unnaturally loud in the silence of this dead land. Ruslan picked it up. It was the front page of a Banda Aceh newspaper, dated December 25. He calculated on his fingers—it was the day before the flood. He scanned the headlines, which spoke of corruption in high places. How angry his father would get when reading such things.
Ruslan,
he'd say,
don't you ever forget, a poor man with honesty is richer than a thief with gold.
But the headlines' events were now meaningless to Ruslan, and he fashioned a hat out of the sheet. In the shade of its brim, he drank half the water in the remaining bottle.

He was trying not to look at the sea, but a curious sight caught his attention. In the distance ahead of him, a hundred yards offshore, a man pedaled a strange-looking boat, its sunshiny colors vibrant against the mottled water. One of those fiberglass stern-wheeler paddleboats from the Calang water park, where his father had taken him several times as a boy. It seemed an odd form of transport, but then again, why not? Probably easier than plodding through soft sand.

He lowered his head and kept walking, picking a path behind a wall of flattened weed that bordered drowned rice fields, newly planted green
shoots turning brown. He came to another flattened village. For several minutes he studied the area from behind a stout tree that had survived the wave. When he saw no rebels foraging through the rubble, he moved forward. He forded several streams and had to swim partway across a wide estuary. When had he eaten last? The tangerines, and before that, Ibu Ramly's banana fritters. How delicious those fritters had been. How he'd love to have some now. Just one. Just a bite of one. The remembered taste of that filled his mind as he kept walking, walking, walking. The hills of Calang didn't seem to get any closer.

Cresting a sand hill, he saw a small fishing boat with a blue plastic sail tacking back and forth. He kept an eye on it as he walked. An inexpert sailor at the helm, that was for sure. Whitecaps from the stiffening sea breeze slapped the small hull. The sailor turned around and headed for shore, where the beach came to a small point, catching the bigger waves.

“Not there,” Ruslan said, “not there!”

But the boat didn't change course. A big wave rose up behind the boat. That irrational panic seized him again, urging him away from the sea, but he could see what was going to happen, and he forced himself to sprint down to the point. The
wave tipped the boat, catapulting the stern. Three people and a cat flew out of the hull. The orange cat and the white boy and white girl were in the air for only a second, but Ruslan recognized them at once. He had no time to wonder what they were doing here. Racing into the rushing wave, he first picked up the blob of orange washing past his thighs and threw the cat as far as he could onto the beach. An Acehnese woman in a head-dress bounced toward the shore. The white girl struggled to get to her feet. He grabbed her arm to help her, but she jerked free, fighting through the swirling foam to the overturned boat.

“Peter!” she yelled. “Peter!”

The boy hadn't come up. The girl tried to right the hull, but the next wave sent the boat crashing into her, and she lost her balance. Ruslan grabbed the edge of the hull and lifted it. The boy pushed out from underneath, spluttering and crying. Ruslan dragged him up to the beach and plopped him onto a piece of broken bamboo matting. The white girl raced up and grabbed her brother. “God, Peter, are you all right?”

He was coughing and crying. “I don't ever want to be on a boat again, I don't ever want to swim again, I want to go home, I want Mom and Dad, I want to go home, please, I want to go home.”

The girl hugged him.

He stopped crying with a loud sniffle. “Where's Surf Cat?”

The cat was licking its belly. Ruslan picked it up and gave it to the boy.

“Thank you,” the boy said.

The girl looked at him then with her blue eyes, the color fracturing the light. “Yes, thank you.”

Ruslan waited for her to recognize him, but she didn't. His disappointment seemed outsized. What did it matter? Besides, the few minutes she'd been at the café she'd been fighting with her mother, not paying attention to who was serving the cold Cokes.

The Acehnese woman who'd been in the boat held her wet headdress tight under her chin with clenched fists, gazing out at the sea with a thousand-yard stare.

Green coconuts bobbed in the water, the swish of waves rolling a couple onto the sand. Ruslan chucked them higher onto the beach and waded out to get the others.

The woman broke out of her trance and called out in Acehnese, “There was a machete on the boat, but I suppose it's lost now.”

The thought of the delicious meat in the coconuts made Ruslan light-headed with hunger. After taking off his shoes, he waded out to where the
boat had tipped over, feeling the sand with his toes. Waves smashed into his chest. He knew this was a futile effort, that the chances of finding the machete were next to nothing, so perhaps that was why on the next step he felt the flat blade. He ducked into the water and plucked it, waving it triumphantly in the air.

Back onshore, he began hacking open a coconut. The woman grabbed the machete away from him. “You city boys are useless.”

“How do you know I'm a city boy?”

“By the way you cut a coconut.” Within seconds she handed him the sliced coconut, the exposed shell neatly holed. Ruslan's mouth watered and his throat convulsed, but he took the coconut to the girl.

The girl first let her brother drink. He guzzled and then turned his head away. She finished the rest. The woman whacked open the nut, making a scoop spoon out of discarded husk, and the girl slurped at the soft white meat.

The woman opened two more nuts, one for Ruslan and one for herself. “I hope you at least know how to climb a coconut tree,” she said. “We'll need more.” She put down the machete and said, “Where were you when it happened?”

Ruslan didn't have to ask what she meant. “Meulaboh.”

“Me too. I'd gone to the market.” She opened her mouth to say more but then squeezed her lips shut and lowered her head, pressing the crook of her trembling arm to her eyes.

Ruslan sat a distance away to give the woman her privacy and ate his coconut, forcing himself to take slow, measured scoops, wasting not a single delicious bit of it.

“Hello, excuse me,” the girl called out to him. “My brother is sick. He needs a doctor. I need to go to Calang for a doctor.” The girl spoke slowly and loudly, her tone capitalizing each word.

“That's where I'm going myself,” Ruslan said.

The girl blinked. It seemed almost like magic, the way those blue eyes vanished and reappeared again. “You speak English?”

“Yes.” Again he waited for her to recognize him—after all, how many employees in Meulaboh harbor-front cafés spoke English?

“Great. You can help me. What's your name?”

She still didn't place him. “My name is Ruslan.” He didn't tell her that he'd served her family cold Cokes at the harbor, didn't tell her that his father had fixed their engine, didn't want his disappointment to deepen.

“Mine's Sarah. He's Peter.”

What had happened to their mother and father?
But that he could imagine quite clearly, the sailboat taken by the flooding sea, the children becoming separated from the parents.

The girl Sarah rose to her feet. “We'd better get going, then.”

The going was slow. Here the beach had sunk under the sea, which now lapped against swamps and toppled oil palms they had to navigate. Ruslan and the woman, whose name was Aisyah, took turns helping the fevered boy, whose main concern was his cat. Matter of fact, it seemed to be the cat who found the easiest traverses. At one point Aisyah muttered to Ruslan, “I think the creature's actually a djinn.”

An hour before sunset it was Aisyah, and not the cat, who pointed out a grove of coconut palms several hundred yards inland. “We need some of those nuts,” she said. “And we might as well spend the night.”

They made what camp they could, using a torn piece of tarp they found in the grove for both ground cloth and roofing. Ruslan tucked the machete in the back of his jeans and wandered out of sight. Each village had men who specialized in climbing coconut trees to harvest nuts—pilots, they were called, because they were always up in the air—and he knew many boys who could do the
same, but he'd never climbed a palm tree in his life. He didn't want to embarrass himself in front of the others.

Still, he managed, even though he slipped twice, scraping his arms. He whacked a couple of clusters out of the first palm, the nuts thudding on the ground. High on the second palm, a swarm of biting ants attacked him. Not wanting to climb a third tree, he gritted his teeth and chopped down the first cluster.

He was just raising the machete for another chop when he heard Sarah screaming.