“Amy—?” he began to call.
“Right here.”
He could see her dark outline bobbing in the water. A few strokes brought her over to the makeshift float. A great hissing wave rose over them, the comber at its top sweeping over their heads, pushing the float under for a moment. They rose again, shedding water. Gideon took a gasp of air, sputtering.
“Thank you,” he managed to say.
Another great wave towered above them, and they were buried again under the foaming crest.
Gideon clung to the makeshift raft for dear life, gasping for air. The only thought going through his mind was: One hundred and sixty miles from land.
32
The dawn was little more than a smear of mud along the eastern horizon. The storm continued unabated, mostly wind, roaring over the sea and roiling up gouts of spume. Gideon and Amy clung to the mass of life preservers, too exhausted to speak. It seemed to Gideon their lives had been reduced to a kind of ghastly sea-rhythm: the rise, rise, rise on each swell; the growing hiss of the approaching comber; then the sudden boiling of water, pushing them under while they clung for dear life, often gripping each other, then clawing back to the surface, gasping for breath — and then the awful sinking into the trough, with a sudden silence and cessation of wind, to be followed by the inevitable rise that repeated the terrible cycle all over again. The air was so full of water it was all he could do to breathe. The seas and wind were driving them westward at a tremendous rate.
At least they had drinking water. Gideon managed to open a drysack and get one bottle out, at the cost of the bag shipping seawater. They managed to pass it back and forth, draining it. Gideon immediately puked it all back up.
Slowly, slowly, the day rose. The wind didn’t abate, but at least the sea became more orderly, the great march of waves going in the same direction as the wind and currents. Periodically, bands of rain came lashing down in torrents, the sky split with lightning. The heavy rain seemed to flatten the chop and lessen the wind, and Gideon finally ventured to speak. He could see Amy’s dark hair and small face, drawn and pale, as she clung to the other side of the makeshift float.
“Amy?”
She nodded.
“You…okay?”
“All right. You?”
“Good.”
“More water.”
Gideon waited for a wave to pass, and then he unsealed the drysack and pulled out another liter bottle. More water slopped in as he resealed the bag. He waited, cradling the water bottle protectively as another wave crushed them, and then handed it to Amy.
She opened the top, drank deeply. Another wave passed and she handed the half-empty bottle to him. He finished it. Thank God — this time the nausea passed and he managed to keep the water down.
All day they fought the sea, enduring the endless cycle of up and down, wind and water, the half drowning with each passing wave. Toward evening, Gideon could feel his arms growing numb. He would not be able to hold on much longer — certainly not for another night.
“Amy, we need to tie ourselves on,” he gasped. “Just in case we can’t—”
“Understood.”
Gideon struggled to get the rope out of its drysack, and then, with numb fingers, managed to loop it through his belt and through the rope holding the life preservers together, and then through Amy’s belt, keeping it slack but not so slack they might become entangled.
The wind began to abate as night descended, and once again they were surrounded by the thundering blackness of the sea. They had now been in the water eighteen hours. In the darkness, with his eyes open, Gideon began to see shapes, in brown and dull red, flickering about. At first they were mere blurry lights, and he told himself they were delusions. But as the night wore on, with the terrible rhythm of the sea never ceasing, he began to see a face — a devil’s face, mouth opening wide, wider, like a snake, vomiting blood.
Hallucinations. He closed his eyes but the shapes only grew worse, crowding in. He quickly opened his eyes, tried to slap his own face to give himself a taste of reality. Hours had gone by and he hadn’t spoken a word to Amy. Was she even there? But, looking over, he could see her pale face. He sought out her cold hand, gave it a squeeze, and felt the faintest pressure in return.
Another wave buried them; another spluttering rise. He realized that, even with the water at around eighty-five degrees, he might be suffering from hypothermia. Or salt poisoning — God knew he’d swallowed enough seawater. And now, in the roaring, hissing, and boiling of the water, he could hear voices: whispering voices, cackling voices. Devil’s voices.
He squeezed his eyes tight shut, waited, and opened them again. But the Devil was still there: the vomiting Devil, mouth opening, showing its hideous pink cavernous interior, the rotting teeth, the sudden eruption of blood and bile…
“No! Stop!”
Had he spoken? He thought he heard Amy say something. His head was spinning.
“. . . fight against it…fight…”
Fight what? And then he saw it, out in the water. A light. A real light. Glinn’s rescue mission.
“Amy!” he cried. “Look!”
But she didn’t seem to respond.
“Help!” he screamed. “We’re over here!”
He felt a terrible desperation. How could they be seen in this darkness, this howling watery wilderness?
“Amy, a ship! Over there!”
He felt her hand gripping his arm, cold and hard. “Gideon. There’s nothing. No ship.”
“There is, there is! For God’s sake, look!”
Now he could see it clearly, and by God it was as large as the Titanic, a huge cruise ship, lit up like a Christmas tree, all sparkling yellow, rows of windows, black shapes of people on deck silhouetted against the warmth. It was amazing what Glinn had done.
“Amy! Can’t you see?”
“Fight it, Gideon.” The hand tightened.
The ship let out a long, booming steam whistle, then another.
“You hear that? Oh, my God, they’re going to miss us. Over here—!”
A wave came over them, burying them, pushing them down into roaring blackness. Gideon struggled without air, clawing up, having sucked in water with his shouting. It felt like he was under forever. And then they broke the surface, coughing, spluttering. He looked around wildly.
“It’s gone!”
“It was never there.”
“Come back!” Gideon screamed in the extremity of desperation.
“Gideon!” He felt fingers tightening around his own. “There was no ship. But if you’ll just shut up for a moment, there is something out there. Something real.”
Gideon stopped shouting and listened. All he could hear was the sound of wind and sea.
“What?” he asked.
“Surf.”
Gideon strained to listen, to ignore the odd shapes shifting in front of his eyes. And then he did hear it: a faint susurrus of thunder below the howl of the sea. The wind and waves were pushing them steadily toward the sound.
“An island?”
“Don’t know. Could be brutal.”
“What can we do?”
“Nothing to do but hold on and ride it in.” A pause. “We’d better untie ourselves, or we could get all tangled up.”
Gideon fumbled with the knot, but his hands were not working.
“Knife,” Amy gasped. “In the bag.”
Now the roar was getting louder. They were being driven toward it at a tremendous rate. The seas were growing steeper, the breaking tops more violent. Gideon fumbled with the latches on one of the drysacks, finally got them open, reached in, pulled out a knife. He could barely hold on to it, but somehow managed to slice himself free of the rope. He passed the knife to Amy.