The Killing Sea (4 page)

For as far
as Ruslan could see, Meulaboh had become a lake, clogged with floating debris. Rooftops dotted the foul water, many with people stranded on top of them. In the distance survivors packed the flat roof of an unfinished three-story shopping mall.

Cries of horror and desperate prayers filled the air.

Beside Ruslan, the fishmonger gabbled a mix of Qur'anic verses and nonsense words.

The lake began to drain, the water returning to the sea at a slow, triumphant pace. The fishmonger's wooden table drifted past him, this time upside down, two of the legs broken off at the base.
Another woman lay crumpled upon the overturned table, her hands clutching one of the remaining legs, her sarong partially torn from her body.

Ruslan had no idea how long it took for the water to subside. Time had become meaningless for him. There came a point, though, when the killing sea had departed, revealing a stilled and savaged town. Across the way, Ruslan could see dozens of bodies crumpled on the second-floor stairs of the shopping mall. Several of the survivors on the roof began nudging the dead off the stairs, their bodies spinning over the sides.

The street below Ruslan was filled with rubble and crushed cars and smashed furniture and a thousand other things big and small that had been torn from their proper places, all glued into place by greasy black mud.

Directly beneath him were at least a dozen bodies half-buried in the mud.

He thought of the way the oil tanker had charged out to sea. The captain must have known what was going to happen. Ruslan felt an enormous rush of gratitude to this unknown man for having saved his father's life.

Perhaps his father was already looking for him. He had to get down and make his way to the water-front. He lifted tiles off the roof to make a hole,
stacking them to the side so that the owner could replace them. Fortunately, this house had no insulation. He could climb straight down into the attic.

“I'll help you down,” he told the fishmonger.

She stared at the bodies below them and moaned again. She refused his hand.

There was nothing more Ruslan could do for her. At least she was alive.

Reaching the first floor of the shop house, Ruslan waded through knee-high sludge stinking of sewage. His feet stumbled against something soft. One of the shopkeeper's family. Beyond the doorway four of the bodies lay twisted with their faces exposed, their mouths filled with the black muck. One he recognized as a trishaw driver who sometimes took him to school. Long black hair covered a girl's face. There was something familiar to the cheeks. He brushed away the hair and rocked back on his heels as Tjut Sari, the beauty of the photocopy shop, stared up at him, her black eyes no longer flashing. He looked away for a moment, the horror of it almost too much to bear. He began to pull her out of the mud, to at least give her that dignity, but stopped tugging when he saw that she was nude, the water having stripped her of her clothes.

Finding his father. That's what he had to concentrate on. There'd be time enough for the dead
later on. First, though, he needed something for his feet to protect them from all the broken glass and ripped metal. One of the nearby corpses had a pair of sandals that looked like they would fit, but he shuddered at the thought of taking them. Instead, he waded into a nearby shoe shop and plucked a pair of running shoes out of the mud. They were already ruined, so he didn't think the shop owner would mind. In fact, the shop owner was probably dead. Ruslan hoped not. When all this was over, he'd make a point of finding out, so he could explain why he took the shoes.

A Batak building contractor whom Ruslan vaguely knew lay crumpled in the basin of a water fountain. The man held a small Christian cross in his outstretched hand.

Half an hour later Ruslan had picked his way past hundreds of bodies clumped together or scattered individually. So many of these dead he knew. Some with torn limbs and sheared heads, their bodies mutilated by the smashing and swirling of cement blocks and wooden planks and tin sheets and heavy vehicles.

Half an hour—that was all it took for his emotions and senses to numb, for a corpse to become just another obstacle to make his way around. Other survivors appeared, searching for family.
Here and there wails of grief rent the air. Ruslan saw one distraught father holding a limp toddler close, and then holding her out again to examine her face before pressing her to his chest, as though his own beating heart could give life back to hers.

How was it possible that the sea could tilt on itself to destroy the land and its life?

The peninsula of Ujung Karang looked as though houses and people and vegetation and lampposts and wires and cars had been dumped into a giant mixer, ground up, and poured back out. The ugly, mottled water of the harbor lapped against the twisted pier.

And on the curve of shore lay the hull of the big oil tanker, sunken on its side, its enormous brass propeller glinting in the sun. Five sailors floated in the water by the propeller. Even wearing life jackets, they had died.

One of the bodies had on a mechanic's overalls.

Ruslan's blood thinned to vapor, and all the colors around him faded to the gray of those overalls.

The giant tree
that held the
Dreamcatcher
grew beside one of the hill's rocky outcrops.

Sarah circled the base of the tree, trying to find a way to climb it. She saw that the earthquake had toppled a much smaller tree from high on the outcrop. The top of the smaller tree had caught in the bigger one.

She hiked up the outcrop, Peter behind her. She studied the fallen tree's horizontal trunk, which looked stout and sturdy enough, a bridge to the
Dreamcatcher
. She took a step onto it and then froze. All the open air around her. The long drop. No way could she cross it. She retreated and put a hand on Peter's shoulder.
“You do it. Try to radio for help. And get some food and water.”

He frowned.

“Come on, Peter, please. You know I'm scared of heights. And Dad might be on board.”

The frown vanished. “Here, take Surf Cat.”

He inched across the trunk, yelling out “Dad? Dad?” There was no answer, only the flapping of the clothes in the breeze. He swung aboard over the stern railing.

Sarah cupped a hand to her mouth. “Get those clothes!”

He yanked them off the line and threw them over the side. He also tossed a flat piece of paper and disappeared into the cabin.

Slow seconds passed. She was just about to call out to Peter when she heard his muffled shout, “Dad isn't here, and the radio's all wrecked—”

With a grinding of fiberglass, the boat tilted forward. Water poured out of the front cabin's hatch.

“Peter!” she screamed.

The swiveling keel snagged a branch no bigger than her arm, stopping the boat's forward slide. The
Dreamcatcher
tottered at a forty-five-degree angle. Peter bolted up onto the deck and over the stern railing.

“Phew,” he said when he reached her side. “That
was close.” He coughed and gave her an aggrieved look. “And Dad wasn't there.”

The pockets of his filthy shorts bulged. “What do you have there?” she asked.

He pulled out a can of cat food.

“God, Peter! Of all the things.
Cat
food?”

“Surf Cat's gonna need food too,” he snapped back. From his other pocket he pulled out two cans of tuna. “There. Happy?”

She rubbed his dirty hair. “Sorry. Let's go get those clothes.”

The paper that Peter had tossed was the last nautical chart their father had used, which had been clipped next to the helm. A pencil line traced the route the
Dreamcatcher
had taken to the bay's anchorage. The pencil line tracked past a small black square on the map that marked a village on the other side of the island. Sarah vaguely recalled the village as a bunch of tin-roofed houses on stilts.

“I thought we'd need that,” Peter said.

“Smart boy. Good thinking.”

Peter held up a sealed bottle of drinking water, which had washed out of the front hatch. “Hey, look.”

“Give that to me,” Sarah said, but Peter darted away. He opened the seal and cap with his teeth and gulped with his lips wrapped around the top.

“Peter Bedford, you'd better save me some.”

He lowered the bottle and eyed the remaining half. After pouring out a handful into his palm for Surf Cat, he handed the bottle to her.

The tepid water was the most delicious thing she'd ever drunk in her life. She sipped the last drop with reverence.

Some of the clothes he'd tossed had fallen into mud, but the rest had fallen onto rock. Sarah put on a pair of khaki shorts over her bikini bottom and changed her dirty T-shirt for a plain blue T-shirt, still smelling sweetly of detergent. Peter shucked off his shorts and put on blue jeans.

A plastic object beside a bush caught Sarah's eye. One of the stove's gas lighters, with a long blue handle. She clicked the trigger. To her delight, blue flame hissed out. They'd be able to make a fire. She glanced at the sun, lower yet to the horizon.

Peter followed her gaze. “We better find Dad before night.”

They didn't. With sunset on red broil, they stumbled across a ravine cut by a small stream. The same ravine where she'd seen the elephants. The standing water in the streambed was brackish from the tsunami. Sarah followed it a little ways uphill and came to a mossy face of rock that would have been a gushing waterfall after rain, but was pres
ently a trickle disappearing into pebbles. She tasted the water. Fresh.

To one side of the streambed, a big slab of rock tilted at an angle against a rock wall, forming an angular cave. A broad trail wound from the cave into the jungle. A well-used path, now partially covered with tsunami debris.

Sarah peered into the cave. About ten feet deep, five feet wide. Flat, sandy floor. Looked safe enough. Cozy, even. “We'll spend the night here and keep looking in the morning.”

She had brought the plastic bottle with her. Using a broad rolled leaf to funnel the trickle of water, she filled up the bottle. She and Peter drank, too thirsty to worry about germs.

She refilled the bottle several times to pour the water over her head, scrubbing her hair. Slow, but wonderful. She rinsed out Peter's hair for him as well, sand and dirt and dead ants flaking off his scalp.

Everything around was too wet from the tsunami to make a fire, and she didn't want to climb higher to find dry wood. Surprisingly, she was hungry. After the day's horrible events, she thought she would have no appetite at all. Her stomach was growling, though. There were the two cans of tuna. God, plain tuna never sounded so delicious. One little problem, though. She burst out laughing.

“What's so funny?” Peter said. He sat cross-legged on the cave floor, leaning against the rock. Surf Cat was curled up in his lap.

She held up a can. “Canned tuna fish is one of the modern world's staple foods,” she intoned, mimicking one of her most boring teachers. “Of course, a necessary ingredient of this staple food is the can opener.”

Peter shook his head. “I'm not hungry anyway. And Surf Cat just ate a dead fish.” Without warning, his face crumpled, and he began to cry. “Mom,” he sobbed. “Mom. I want Mom.”

The image of her mother dead in the fishing net came to Sarah's mind. She waited for the pain of her grief to come smashing through. Nothing. Maybe she was still too much in a state of shock to feel any grief.

But she was no longer hungry, that was for sure.

She put an arm around her brother. He wept into her T-shirt, coughing and sobbing. She let him cry for a minute and then said, “Think of Dad. Think how strong he is. It's okay to cry for Mom, but remember, we have to get through this. Let's be as strong as Dad.”

Peter's crying eased to a few sniffles and wheezes.

Twilight thickened into night. “Better try to get some sleep, little guy.”

Peter lay down on his side, his head on a pile of moss that Sarah had gathered for him. He cradled Surf Cat to his chest and shut his eyes.

Sarah used her sandals for a pillow. She was sore from feet to neck. What didn't ache, itched. The rising moon coated the ragged jungle and lonely streambed with silver light. Insects chirped and buzzed—all those scuttling feet and clacking jaws. It occurred to her this was the first night in her life without electricity of any kind. Not even a flashlight.

A bug crawled up her leg. She slapped it away with a shiver.

She thought of her father. Where was he? How was he spending the night?

She stood and slipped into her sandals, peering out to the nightscape. The fallen trees and torn branches floating in the bay looked like mutant creatures.

Peter coughed again.

He's going to need a doctor.

Her father's voice was taut with urgency. He spoke so distinctly that she jerked her head around. “Dad?”

That path should take you to the village.

“But what about you?”

Take care of Peter first. He's getting sick and needs a doctor. Go!

She shook Peter's shoulder. His skin felt hot, hotter than it would be from just the sun. Sarah expected him to protest about leaving their father, but he said nothing. In the bright moonlight they made their way around several fallen logs. They climbed over the last one. Before them stretched a clear path, the jungle pressing close on either side.

Sarah paused, her heart beating hard.

Tsunami or not, jungle creatures were still searching for prey to eat.

Sarah wanted to retreat to the relative safety of the cave, but she clicked the gas lighter. Waving the blue flame in warning, she started down the path, holding her brother's hand.