Savages

24: Certitude

"Gaen! What's happening?"

The boat lurched just after Sannah stepped into the wheelhouse, sending her spinning into the back wall. Her elbow and head smashed painfully against the wood. Deera squeaked behind her, and there was an unidentifiable crash.

Sannah turned as soon as she could steady herself, but Deera was gone, the force of the movement obviously sending her back out of the swinging door.

Sannah gasped, fighting her way onto the rain-slick deck. Deera had been thrown into the corner of the stern, the rain slashing down on her crumpled figure.

"Is alright," Deera said breathlessly, looking up from her pile on the floor, her eyes wide. "Just surprise."

"Let's get back inside, quickly," Sannah annunciated urgently over the roar of the wind. She took Deera's shaky hand to pull her up, and the two girls made it into the wheelhouse just as another lurch lifted the floor up to a forty-five degree angle. They were semi-prepared for it this time, and although it was impossible to stay upright, they remained inside and neither was hurt.

As soon as the boat righted itself sufficently to allow movement, Deera threw herself at the door and bolted it firmly, and Sannah lunged forwards, towards Gaen.

"What do we do?" Sannah couldn't hide her panic, clinging onto the little desk that mounted the steering-wheel as the floor dipped violently back down beneath her.

Gaen had strapped himself tightly into the seat in front of the steering dock, which was the only way he could keep a hold on the wheel as the sea fell and rose around them. He didn't answer Sannah's question, his jaw set with concentration, squinting through the window.

The rain was now beating down heavily, the windscreen wipers going fast and noisy on the glass, yet still unable to clear any gap suitable for vision in the roiling, beating water.

Sannah could barely see anything outside. The sky seemed to have gathered darkness to its breast in the course of only a few minutes, and it was hard to make out what was going on around them, the boat's paltry lights sometimes catching on water confusingly high, so Sannah no longer knew which way was up and which was down. Her breath came in quick, painful bursts, and she had a stitch in her side.

The small room rattled and creaked as it heaved, papers, torches and other equipent sliding off shelves and rolling along the floor, the bulb intermittently flickering them into a callous darkness. Water poured down the windows like it was alive. Fat masses of it, white and foaming, like their little vessel was in a washing machine. The breaking white horses looked like ghosts.

Sannah's heart felt like it had stopped beating altogether, blanked out by a heavy, gut-clinging dread.

"Skit!" The floor suddenly dropped out from beneath her, and she staggered forward, pushing Deera inadvertently against the desk, her head rebounding off the glass of the window. A small framed sea-chart smashed down, and a shelf above their heads emptied itself of its contents in one smooth glide, everything crashing first to the wall, then the floor.

The world righted itself, but then the boat immediately dipped heavily to the right. Sannah lost her grip of the table and slid as if she were on a water-slide, right under Gaen's feet. Deera screamed as she careered along the same route, coming to rest on the right-hand wall for a moment as if it was the floor.

Then the world tipped violently left, and the girls went crashing back head-first. Through the side window, Sannah saw the sea where the sky should be, rushing up to meet her. She hit the wall with a bang, the wood shaking with the impact, of herself or the wave she couldn't tell. Pain buckled her muscles, her body feeling as torn-up as the groaning boat.

They straightened up, the hull hitting the water with a resounding slap that loosened Sannah's teeth.

Then before Sannah could gather herself or her limbs, they fell suddenly to the right again. Sannah spun into the wall, the impact winding her. She felt sick, her mind blinded by terror, the sheer, aching need for survival, the massive, obliterating certitude of powerlessness.

"Grab something!" Gaen shouted from his place by the steering wheel.

Sannah groped around the wall she'd been flung against, but there was nothing.

The boat was vaguely upright now, but Sannah's sense of gravity told her she was falling and she braced herself for impact. It came, knocking them forewards, white foam hitting the windowscreen with a bang. The boat screamed under the tension. The electrics failed and the lights flickered out, leaving them in an creaking, screaming inhuman black-hole of empty gloom. The waves outside were suddenly terrifyingly visible.

"Grab something Sannah!" Gaen yelled again, his form a dim sillhouette.

Deera moaned. As the boat dipped backwards, she'd scrabbled into the corner, and wedged herself between the wall and a vertical pole. Sounds were coming from her shadowy crevice very fast, as if she was speaking to herself. Gaen was talking too, but Sannah had been thrown against the door and she couldn't hear him. She needed to hear him, to know what he was saying. It must be important.

She righted herself, tried to cross the small room towards him. It was only a few steps forward, but it felt like an odyssey. She reached out like a baby taking its first steps and grabbed the back of his seat, clinging to it to avoid getting hurled away.

"What do we do?" she screamed at Gaen in the darkness, afraid he wouldn't hear her even though they were only centimetres apart.

"There's nothing we can do," Gaen shouted back. "Stay away from the coast, where there's rocks. Try and keep the boat upright. I've got to keep the bow pointing into the waves, stop us rolling." His voice was hollow, his eyes all white in the eerie darkness.

He dropped left, hanging nearly horizontal on the steering wheel, heaving it hard as the boat dipped to the left again, then the right, pulling Sannah away from the chair then throwing her back against it, her chin knocking painfully against the corner.

Looking up, Sannah thought she caught the impression of a smooth blue wave way, way above them, high in the sky, where solid water really shouldn't--couldn't--be. Fear rose in her mouth like bile.

"Oh skit," Gaen was screaming now. "Oh skit oh skit oh skit!" He was straining against the steering wheel with all his might. "Grab something Sannah, grab something!"

Sannah clung frozen to the chair, her eyes fixed on the windscreen.

The wave was no longer an impression. It was a sheer, towering wall of water and it was moving right towards them. Gaen was desperately trying to heave the bow of the boat towards it, but the force of water was as vertical as a skyscraper. There was no way their tiny vessel could mount that.

The boat began to tip impossibly backwards. Everything felt both muted and hyper-clear, as if it were in slow motion.

Sannah heard a terrified, animalistic cry from Deera and the screaming of wood as she slid to the back of the wheelhouse, papers, pens, plates and forks all falling around her. For a moment, there was no up, no down, no logic or sense or time or meaning in the world, just things hitting her and water roaring and wood screaming and the sheer, all-encompassing inescapable knowledge that they were about to be submerged. They were all about to die.

Then suddenly everything flipped, and nothing was moving and everying was moving and Sannah was watching this on TV and the world was roaring and she was flying and all was spinning and

BAM.

Only blackness.

Everything went quiet.