Undersea

Epilogue

Outside the walls the torpedo battery fired upon Sarah as she maneuvered the modified harvester on a circuitous route back towards the the Moon Pool. She had wanted to avoid identifying herself to the battery commanders, so she did not declare her position hoping to sneak past.

To no avail and a costly mistake it was. An explosion on her port side pounded into the harvester. Ballast tanks and drop weights were blown free as warning lights flashed, signalling the rapid decrease of interior pressure. Emergency oxygen flowed in offsetting what was lost, but without counter weight the harvester drifted. Soon it drifted up. Controls were unresponsive and as the ascent gained speed the dark ocean lightened. Something in Sarah's head began to hurt.

Throbbing spasms soon followed. Sarah could not understand these new pains, for they seemed ever increasing, rapid and ravinous, ascending in severity as if towards some unseen peak of dark anguish far beyond her vision. Then in a flash Sarah remembered the bends. There was nothing she could do. "Oh help!" she cried. The harvester, weakened, fractured violently and went to pieces. Torment tore at Sarah's head, followed by the cool slap of crystal clear water on her face.

- - -

Sarah awoke in the profound silence of a bright world. With her chin buried in grit and waves pounding at her legs everything hurt. From where she lay the air smelled of salt and when she opened her eyes she found herself staring at a small yellow crab. Sarah studied it cross-eyed as the crab reached up and gave her nose a hopeful poke. A fit of aching coughs hit Sarah and she spit up sand. The crab scurried off.

Sarah turned, heaving herself with a groan to her knees. She squinted and saw sea gulls wheeling far out above the waves. Above the waves and gulls, in the fierce blue of a cloudless sky, shown all the brilliance of the western sun. Sarah wept as she never had before.

Something was not right however and Sarah soon noticed; she looked up at the gulls but could not hear their cries. The wind blew in her face but it made no sound; waves tumbled to the shore before her but she heard them not. Sarah lifted a shaking hand to an ear and snapped her fingers. Silence. She snapped again; one side, then the other. Nothing.

The lack of sound was profound and Sarah felt as if it were swallowing her whole. She snapped her fingers frantically. She clapped her hands over and over again. In panic she tried to shout, but her dry throat could not be heard. The pressure. The deep aching in her ears. The bends. The bends had taken her hearing.

Sarah sat a long time on the beach and there she worshipped. "Bitterness was a choice" she thought through tears, but this? This was to hard. Much to hard to bare. How could she possibly live with this? She closed her eyes and felt the sun on her face and with a sigh was thankful. Her thoughts drifted to the people left behind who were now beyond reach and wondered if she would ever understand all the whys of life. Sarah wept again. Alone Sarah watched the sun set over a crimson sea, and then rising she turned her back to the ocean and walked inland.

In the next weeks Sarah hoped, and combing the beaches stacked piles of drift wood which she kept lit night and day. She ate whatever the ocean provided and often stopped to breathe in the clean sea air. She drank crystal water from a stream that trickled nearby. Then one day while sitting on the sand she cast her eyes upon the horizon and saw a sub emerge from the waves far down the beach. From it boats disembarked; so Sara rose and walked towards them.