The others could only watch as the Moorea Explorer was pulled away.
The pace picked up slowly, and by morning they were bobbing in the waves with the other ships, all heading north into the vortex. The buzz of rescue choppers was ceaseless.
The passengers demanded that the captain bring the rescue to them. He laughed. “I’ve begged. I’ve threatened. I tried to bribe them. They say we have to wait in line. There are a thousand people that have to be rescued from the other ships before they get to us. But they won’t get to us. We’re dead meat. We’ll be in the vortex by lunchtime.”
The captain was right. There were still five fully loaded passenger ships in the flotilla when they reached the vortex. Every patrol ship within a hundred miles was befouled before it could move to intercept. A fleet of helicopter gunships arrived with depth charges, and the Pacific Ocean rocked with the thunder of the charges. The squid died by the thousands, their slimy bodies turning the ocean to the consistency of egg drop soup. The flotilla came to a stop, and still the depth charges continued to thunder, until the gunships had used them all. The gunships raced away to get resupplied at their base ships.
Minutes later, the ships started moving again. More squid had arrived, ignoring the countless dead brethren and taking up the towlines.
Five empty ships, and five ships full of human beings, were pulled inexorably into the vortex, where no rescue could follow them.
Chapter 42
The seizures were just a part of her existence now. Everything else in the world was new and changed, too, and the seizures were just another novelty. She rode them out and carried on. Sandy knew they were a sign that her head wound had caused something to go terribly wrong. She might die from it. But there wasn’t anything she could do about it so why bother worrying?
She spent the night in a lean-to of collapsed, ancient stone, and she wandered out the next morning feeling groggy. Hungover. Her lover was standing on the beach looking intently at the sea. She stood in front of him.
“I don’t like the looks of this,” he commented.
“Hey, spend the night squirming on the ground and see how good you look.”
“Oh. Hi, Sandy. Glad to see you made it. I meant that.” He speared the horizon with a finger.
There was a ship offshore, gliding smoothly across the current and raising a cloud of mist from under her curiously flat hull. It took Sandy a minute to figure out that it was a hovercraft.
“It’s looking for a clear landing place, I think,” Lagrasse said. “Free of wrecks.”
The vessel came to the shore at a point nearby, drifting onto the beach as easily as it had moved over the ocean, then settled with a winding down of the engines.
“Let’s check ’em out,” Lagrasse said. “Act friendly.”
Sandy didn’t know why she wouldn’t act friendly. Her lover was sort of a suspicious jerk sometimes.
The hovercraft looked alien and huge—the one intact and upright vessel in a field of scorched wreckage. People came down the retractable gangway, looking stunned.
“Hi!” Sandy called.
They spotted her. A man pushed through the others and jogged over to meet her. “Let me help you!”
“Help me what?” Sandy asked. “That’s a cool boat.”
“You’d better lay down,” the young man asked, putting a gentle hand on her shoulder. “I’ll give you my shirt.”
“Why?”
“You’re naked,” he pointed out.
“I’m not cold. It’s always warm here, even with no sun.”
“Who are you people?” Lagrasse demanded.
The young man took one look at him and exclaimed, “Oh, my God! What happened to you people?”
“Shipwreck. You’re the first un-crash-landing so far,” Sandy said.
“Why’d you come?” Lagrasse asked.
Sandy thought her lover, what’s-his-name, was showing his moody side. She didn’t quite understand it—unless he was jealous. Did he think she was going to start giving up her goodies to every other warm body that showed up? Well, yeah, sure she would.
That was the strange thing—all the chains were gone. Fear. Doubt. Inhibitions. All the mental insecurities that had governed her words and actions had dispersed when she landed on the rock island. The old Sandy had never touched alcohol, never smoked, and remained celibate until she was twenty. She thought she had freed herself when she joined up with her old boyfriend and his loony sex cult. But now she was really, truly free.
“You guys have any booze on that tub?” she asked brightly.
Mick Chad powered down the Flying Fish and locked the bridge, then emerged to find Melissa Juk glaring over the rail.
She wasn’t looking at the countless shipwrecks, the rotting corpses or the vast monolithic ruins of the interior.
There was a naked woman on the shore, and Missy wasn’t happy about it.
“Whoever she is, she’ll steal the attention away from us.”
“Oh,” Chad said.
“No, no, everybody goes naked here,” said the naked woman to the others on the expedition team.
“There you go,” Chad said. “Everybody goes naked here. So you go naked, too, then all the attention will be back on you.”
She scowled at him.
“You’re way hotter than she is,” he elaborated.
“Yeah, well, half her head’s caved in,” Missy shot back.
“Head wound or no head wound, you’re hotter,” Chad said sincerely. “As far as the audience can tell.”
She considered that, then stripped naked. Chad thought Missy Juk was the best woman he had ever met.
Henry Lagrasse was getting more agitated all the time. “The specimens are in the city. Don’t you want to go into the city?”
Dr. Williamson recovered remarkably well when his newest intern scampered down the gangway in her birthday suit. “This is more incredible than I expected,” he commented. “The island, I mean. What’s your take, Good?”
Goodall’s eyes were dancing in their sockets. “There’s all kind of theories about volcanic activity raising land inside the vortex, but not reraising land that has sunk previously. This is incredible.”
“But where do you think we’ll find specimens?” Williamson asked.
“In the city,” insisted the young shipwreck survivor, who was a pushy sort of a man.
“You don’t even know what we’re looking for.”
‘If this land emerged from the sea floor with living creatures on it, they’ll be long dead,” Goodall suggested. “There’s a chance that we’ll find samples washed up on the shore that could still be alive.”
“Or less decayed—my thoughts exactly,” Williamson said. He then turned and called out, “We’ll start by scouting the island on foot.”
“I’m going to get these people recuperating in bunks on the Flying Fish,” announced the young man with the biomedical background.
But the shipwreck survivors, the naked woman and her moody boyfriend, had no intention of getting into bunks. The entire group set off on a march around the island, spaced out to cover the entire beach from waterline to the edge of the ruins.
They didn’t get far.
“Things are looking up,” Lagrasse exclaimed aloud, but to himself. There were ships coming in from the south, carried like derelicts in the current.
The team of researchers began panicking. Shipwreck virgins, Lagrasse thought disdainfully. “They’re gonna crash!” exclaimed one of the older men over and over.
Lagrasse had to admit it was an awesome sight. Even he had never seen so many ships coming in together. All big ones, too. As the current flung them onto the shore one after another, the spectacle was breathtaking.