Dream Thing

But was there anybody belowdecks? They had all been on deck when the crash came, right? The commanders had said they might—just might—have a helicopter rescue en route. Considering the circumstances, everyone had stayed abovedecks in the vain hope of making a quick exit.

So where were the others?

Lagrasse’s eyes focused better now. He crawled over the rail, dangled and dropped. He landed on someone.

One of his shipmates, but he would never know who. He turned away from the mess and circled the Reliant.

His mind didn’t like what his eyes were seeing and attempted to shut it out, but Lagrasse shook his head clear.

What he had seen during the crash was all true, all still there. The crushed Reliant was on an island of black, hard stone, and the hard current rushed at the shore—then flowed, under the lip of stone, disappearing somewhere underneath.

How could that be? Was there a gigantic sinkhole down there, draining the ocean?

They had been pulled in from kilometers away.

The speed of the water movement, the water depth, the diameter of the vortex—Lagrasse tried to compute how much water was being sucked down every minute and his head pounded.

The island—what was it? It looked man-made. Even the shore looked as if it were chiseled, long ago. How did the island cause the vortex? Was the vortex man-made?

Lagrasse felt his mind become light and his limbs. stopped working. His eyes rolled into his skull involuntarily, and he collapsed on his face. He knew his face hit hard, but he didn’t feel it.

When he opened his eyes again, the place looked just the same. The twilight gray was no darker or lighter than before, but the crusted blood in his hair told him he had been out long enough for his split face to bleed, clot and dry up. A few hours at least.

The vortex looked unchanged, and it was eerie how quiet it was. Millions of gallons of seawater were getting sucked away with only an unending hush.

Lagrasse had to get inland. He had to find out who was doing this and why. He turned away from the vortex and what he saw hit him like a sucker punch.

Ships. There were ships all over. Where had they come from? When he had passed out, he could swear there were just two wrecks within view—the Reliant and the smoldering ash that had been the pleasure yacht. Now the shore was dotted with wrecks, piled up together, bodies strewed everywhere. Lagrasse ran to a nearby fishing boat and found the bodies of the fishermen spilled out of the gashed hull with a few tons of the catch—so fresh that neither the men nor the fish were starting to rot.

He went next to a nearby pile of burning wreckage. There was a rotor blade poking out. A helicopter had crashed here, only to be plowed down by a fishing charter and at least two other small craft. It looked as if one man had survived the series of crashes, but not for long. The bloody trail ended where the body lay in a fetal ball.

Lagrasse heard the scream then. Not a human scream, but the shriek of steel. It started and didn’t stop. Lagrasse knew that sound. It was engraved on his brain.

Then he saw the ship, careening over the rock surface as fast as a car, and the friction of the hull made it red-hot. The heat swept onto the deck, which became engulfed in a ball of flame. Human figures moved in the flash-fire and tossed themselves over the side. It was suicide. Their flaming bodies flopped and rolled and crumpled until they finally stopped.

The ship lost momentum quickly, but it was completely ablaze and Lagrasse was forced to run away from the intensity that threatened to burn him, even at twenty meters.

With this many wrecks, there had to be other survivors. He was going to find them. And together, they were going to find out who was responsible for all this horror.

Henry Lagrasse put his mind to work gathering whatever data was possible to gather. He counted his steps. It was 723 paces from the edge of the basalt lip at the waterline to the low barrier of eroded blocks that designated the limits of the ruined city. He committed the number to memory. The rocky shelf was shaped, above the waterline, like a beach, but Lagrasse couldn’t bring himself to call it a beach. Its purpose was to catch ships before they were dragged into the vortex. The Catch, as he decided to call it, was about a third of a mile wide based on his thirty-inch stride.

He got a little dizzy and sat down on one of the low rocks. It was slimy and wet, and it soaked into his slacks. Reality abandoned him for a few more hours.

When he was finally able to think straight again, he pushed against the ground. He was flat on his face. He didn’t remember falling.

He had to get himself to work. His intention was to march across the shore and count his steps. Figure out the dimensions of the rock ledge. The Catch. He had already named it the Catch, because it caught boats. Wait—he had already counted it. Now he remembered 723 steps. That’s why he was already at the edge of the city.