Glass shrouded my legs, and I could see the blood. I was hanging upside down, over the balcony wall. A creaking sound moaned as the house seemed to lean into the drowning town. My waist was clipped by the weight of a wooden wardrobe that had fallen on me and dragged me out the balcony glass doors, against the fourth-story balcony wall that had already been burst by the grandfather clock that a moment earlier had crashed through it. I thought the sky was red, but from my position, it was actually the blood in the water, the water moving with white foam that looked like storm clouds. And the bodies, all dissolving like cotton dolls in that thick cruel sea, were drifting through the blue, souls rising to the sky.
Jack, I thought. "Jack," I said. "JACK!" I screamed. Until my breath was caught, and a burst of venom spewed from my throat and last night's alcohol splashed like a water fall from my teeth, and rained down to the flood zone below, splashing in a four-story descent.
I could hear the bay house moaning again, this time I felt it shift in the brutal current. I heard no voices, and I couldn't move myself, stuck in the ribs by the splintered, heavy wooden wardrobe.
Where was Jack? Where were Brett and Travis? Craig and George? I heard nothing but the voice of the rushing sea below, and the ominous moans of the house's structure. It seemed so quiet. And I was growing numb from the pain in my ribs. The sounds of the sea below was like the current of a river. Like running water in a sink. It was like I was getting ready for a bath.
I thought I heard something. Anything. Somebody's voice? But no. There was no peep. Just the blur in my ears, the silence underneath the water. I was going to scream, but somehow didn't. I was looking. All around. The blood rushing to my head, my long hair surrounding my field of view like an umbrella curtain, I shifted my cut-up hands, and drew my hair away with my fingers. . . and that moment, I wish I hadn't. My eyes opened wide, and there, there was the road of floating cars, and a floating white cross, torn from the steeple of my mother's church, as it sank under the blackening surface of the waves, and snapped loudly crossing between a dismembered metal fence. But in the cars floating, upside down behind the cross, was water filled to the windows, and the screaming, silent faces, of mothers and children, frozen in death.
All around, I twisted my neck, and saw that what were supposed to be four blocks of beach houses leading toward the water, were merely black and red seas of debris, washed in by the saliva of the world.
I screamed now.
YOU ARE READING
SWIM Book 1 (Complete three-hundred pages)
Teen Fiction***EDITOR'S CHOICE AWARD*** What would you do if you only had three months to live? When a tsunami traps a girl, her boyfriend, and four other boys in a bay house, starvation, sexual competition, and territorial war tear them apart. Entangled in a h...
