Chapter Four
The Vortex
"Sleep sweetly, tender heart, in peace...While the stars burn, the moons increase, and the great ages onward roll." --Alfred Tennyson
Everything happened in slow motion and in fast-forward at the same time after that.
Uncle grabbed the throttle and transmission lever with one big hand and put his whole weight into pulling them back. I heard the high-pitched shriek of protest from the agonized gears and I prayed the engine wouldn’t fly apart as the transmission jerked into reverse.
The lurching fear in my stomach told me it didn’t matter. It was already too late. Our boats were just too close. Even in reverse, our inertia kept us on a collision course with The Nauti-Boys. Uncle laid down on the horn.
Luke’s head jolted up and I saw the shock on his face. He dropped the handful of net he’d been tugging on, and lunged forward. He slammed Andrew to the deck to keep him from being slung overboard on impact.
I watched Luke and Andrew, so stunned I couldn’t move to save myself. Uncle’s huge arms slid around my waist. He tackled me, along with the stool I had been sitting on, to the deck.
The sickening clang and snap of metal and wood reached my ears a second before the teeth-jarring crunch of the two boats colliding could be felt. The collision slammed mine and Uncle’s heads together as we fell. Little yellow stars exploded behind my eyes, and I heard Uncle groan.
Despite the pain in my head, I heard the agonizing screeching of splintering gunwales. An explosion-like sound ripped through the air as the two boats careened away from each other.
The floor beneath me lurched drunkenly to starboard. Uncle, the stool, and I, all slid across the deck towards the engine box in a jumbled heap.
A leg of the stool slammed into my side. I felt the splintering crack of something giving way inside my ribcage. Hot, sharp pain made it difficult to breathe.
As quickly as it began, everything stopped. The boats settled down into the water, leaving the deafening sound of silence in its wake so loud I could hear waves slapping against the side of the boat. The rush of water beneath the deck filled the eerie quiet with foreboding. Not good.
Without warning, an umbilicus of tangled cables and booms stretching between The Nauti-Boys and Storm Runner wrenched the boat in the opposite direction. The cables attached to the booms that raised and lowered the shrimp nets into the water had become tangled in the melee. The possibility of sinking reared its ugly head to add to my fear.
I could see the snarl from where I lay on the deck. It danced above the waves, a ball of intertwined steel, stretching tighter with each rock of the two boats.
My heart pounding in my chest, I suddenly wondered if we would live as the boat began to tip up on its side. Unable to control our motion, Uncle, the stool, and I slid back to port, towards the splintered gunwales. One especially sharp-looking javelin-sized splinter stuck up from the deck. We were sliding straight towards it. Uncle grabbed the edge of the engine box with one hand, and me with the other to break our momentum.
“Hang on, Storm,” he yelled as he gritted his teeth against the stress on his extended arms.
The bear hug he had me in with his free arm, pressed painfully into my side. I couldn’t help crying out.
Relieved, I felt The boat falling backwards. It whooshed back onto its bottom like a leaping whale falling back into the sea. Though it jarred my teeth when the boat hit the water, Uncle and I stopped sliding, which brought a lessening of the the pain in my ribcage.
“Oh no,” I said aloud when I felt a new motion beneath me.
Unattended, the boats had spun around parallel to the wind and waves. Every time they dipped towards each other, water ran in over the sides. The tangled cables bucked and sawed against each other wildly as the waves snatched them up and down, as well as towards and away from each other.
Every time the cables did that, the booms, which had already lost their lashings, threatened to rip away from their braces. If one of the cables snapped free suddenly, it could whiplash back at any one of us. This would be a hell of a place for a serious injury of any kind, I thought.
Uncle pulled me up to the edge of the engine box. When I had a grip on it, he pushed himself away from me and stood up on the rolling deck.
Already Storm Runner had the sloshy feel of a boat carrying too much water. The impact must have punctured a hole somewhere beneath the water line.
“You boys all right?” Uncle hollered over to The Nauti-Boys.
I don’t how Luke and Andrew heard Uncle above the creaking and groaning of stressed cables and bending metal, but they did.
“I think Luke’s broke his leg, but I’m OK.” I heard Andrew’s shaky reply and felt a weight lifted off me.
“I haven’t broken my leg, you idiot,” Luke snarled irritably at Andrew. “Just help me get this engine box off of it.”
Relief flooded me when I heard Luke’s voice, as well. Both my brothers were alive.
“How about you two?” Luke hollered back at us. His disembodied voice sounded as if it echoed off the clouds.
“Help me up, Uncle,” I groaned.
“I think Storm’s cracked a rib or two.” Uncle tossed the stool aside and pulled me into a sitting position. I bit down on my lip when a sharp fresh pain tore across my midriff. I struggled to stand. “I reckon she’ll live, though.”
Clutching my side, I looked up at the tangled booms. “How in the world are we ever going to get this mess untangled?”
Luke picked up a pair of bolt cutters. “With these,” he announced.
“Careful, Luke,” Uncle cautioned across the distance separating our two boats. “Only cut when the cables are slack. You don’t want them recoiling and take your head off.”
Luke nodded to Uncle then placed his left foot against the side of the boat and braced his right foot against the heaving deck. I held my breath as he extended the heavy bolt cutters out towards the snarled mess of moving cables dancing above the waves between our boats.
Movement in the peripheral of my vision caused me to suck in my breath in disbelief. “Oh. . . My. . . God. . . ” I breathed.
"What the hell!" Uncle burst out when he turned and saw the waterspout. “Everybody get on your lifejackets! Now!”
He yelled loud enough they could hear it on the Nauti-Boys.
Bearing down on us like the rage of Neptune in all his thunderous anger barreled a water spout so gigantic, I doubt even a Storm Chaser had seen one to compare with it. Even the fog fled away from it so that we had an unobstructed view of its approach.
The roar of a freight train’s engine muffled the diesel hearts of our own boats. I could feel a heavy pressure vibrating in my chest as I watched the waterspout approach. I stood frozen, while the specter of death, tail slashing and swirling across the waves, came for us. I barely noticed Uncle shoving a life jacket over my head.
Then the evil-looking vortex hovered directly over us. It sucked the air from my lungs and I felt my hair being sucked straight up as if a giant vacuum cleaner had been aimed at me.
“May Day! May Day!” I heard Uncle bark into the radio. The dead radio, I thought, and turned towards him, more terrified than I had ever been in my life.
Uncle flung down the microphone, grabbed a wrench and started climbing up onto Storm Runner’s roof, headed for our EPIRB—the Emergency Position-Indicating Radio Beacon--attached to the roof of Storm Runner; a ploy often used by boaters to signal help before their boat went down.
If Uncle could get the EPIRB into the water, it’s beacon would send out a distress signal to the Coast Guard--which it would do automatically if the boat sank. That might be too late to help us, however. It might be too late now.
The wind swirled around us like a frantic demon on a rampage. A whirlwind of white shreds of paper filled the cabin as the tempest found Uncle’s dash full of shrimp receipts, fuel records, and parts orders. It tore at our clothes, and threatened to tear the life jacket off of me. I hadn’t fastened it, so the plastic buckle kept whacking me on the head like an malicious imp.
I looked back towards my brothers. Had either of them tried to reach The Nauti-Boys EPIRB? Thankfully they’d been too busy dealing with other problems. The wind seemed intent on stripping them. Both Luke and Andrew had wrapped their arms around the steel braces holding up the roof of the Nauti Boys’ cabin, as much to keep their clothes on their backs as to keep from being snatched up into the waterspout themselves.
I followed their example and grabbed one of the posts on the Storm Runner. I turned behind me in time to see that Uncle had reached the EPIRB. He balanced on the catwalk with one hand on the railing; the other held the wrench. Uncle reached out with the wrench when. . . Uncle just vanished!
I stared, stunned, at where he had been. I blinked several times unable to believe my eyes. It took me a moment to comprehend what had actually happened. Had the waterspout sucked him up into it?
"U-n—c-l-e," I heard myself screaming even as I wondered how could Uncle be just gone? Where did he go?
The wind roared around my ears now. My hair lashed at my face, stinging and blinding me. As I turned back to my brothers, I screamed louder. They had disappeared, too.
“NO!” I wailed into the wind. But the wind snatched away the sound of my words, denying me even the echo of my own grief.
I felt a loud popping noise in my ears, and then bam! I was staring dazedly around me from the inside of that churning vortex; my arms clutching empty air.
***
Storm Runner’s solid deck had disappeared. Instead of a deck, I found myself floating, weightless, with nothing beneath me as I stared around me, incredulous.
The most majestic, terrifyingly-beautiful, alien world I would never have imagined exited–not in a million years--lay sprawled before me. So much to see. I hardly knew what to look at first.
Around the edge of a distant horizon, roiling, multicolored clouds tumbled in slow motion like some humongous alien clothes dryer on a slow spin. A supernatural fireworks display of rainbow-colored lightning lit up the sky--at least it looked like a sky.
Utter quietness surrounded me. I could hear the rush of blood moving through my heart. The absolute silence added an incalculable X-factor to the other-worldly, truly extra-terrestrial, impressions my brain rushed to sort into some kind of order.
Then Andrew floated by me, recalling me to the horror of our situation. It fell heavily onto my shoulders as I reached out towards my brother. Andrew clutched at empty air, trying to stay upright, as he tumbled bonelessly too far away to touch.
As he drifted past me, I wondered again, how could we be weightless? Yet, somehow we both drifted along on an invisible current of air that flowed inexplicably towards a tiny black hole at the other end of what looked like a very long tunnel.
Tunnel? Did that equate to being Dead? I didn’t feel dead. No lights up ahead, either. Shouldn’t there be lights at the end of the tunnel? Nothing but a black hole waited for us there. Not good. Not good at all!
Yet, looking towards the end of that tunnel, I did spot Luke. Arms and legs splayed, he turned in a spiral that carried him towards that black hole. Uncle must be somewhere ahead of all of us, I reasoned, even though I didn’t see him because of all the lightning flashes.
Lightning zigzagged around us continually now. Making it harder to see clearly. The friction of our turning seemed to be triggering it. I expected it to zap one of us at any moment.
None of this should even be happening. I felt terror grip me; lost for words to describe a fear beyond any dread I had ever imagined I could feel!
Is this what happened to all those lost souls who disappeared into the Bermuda Triangle? Is this what had happened to us? Or, had we all died. How could I be dead? Sharp pain gnawed at inside of my ribcage. I couldn’t take a deep breath without being stabbed from the inside. More importantly, if we had died, what happened next?
It only took the merest second of time to evaluate all of these thoughts. Time seemed to be different here inside the vortex. Slower. As if I had hours to think each thought.
Then abruptly, I quit thinking as I began the slow spin I’d seen happen to Andrew and Luke caught me in its grip, too. I clutched my side when the tumbling motion turned the pain in my side into fiery-hot agony.
I opened my mouth in a soundless shriek. Then the roar of the vortex caught up to me. That was the last thing I heard.