The Killing Sea Read Online Free Page A

dizzy with fear, but she had to help her dad.
    Her mother slapped her on the cheek. Hard. Through her smarting tears, Sarah could see the implacable coldness of her mother’s face. “You will obey me. Take Peter and run. Now!”
    Sarah snatched Peter’s hand. He resisted at first, crying incoherently. She gave him a vicious yank. They ran. She looked back once, when they reached the beach, and saw her mother helping her father hobble across the coral. Foamy water surged up around their waists, and they began to swim with its flow.
    Sarah and Peter plunged through the wall of jungle. A vine’s nasty needles tore the skin of her arms, but she felt no pain. Once behind the initial screen of vines and drooping branches, the jungle stretched spaciously uphill, with enormous trees scattered about like pillars supporting the high canopy. She ran up the steep slope, several times falling to her hands and knees. The ground wasslippery with a thick layer of decaying leaves and mulch. With her longer arms and legs, she sometimes had to pull or push Peter along. Her heart pounded so hard she became afraid it would literally burst. Sweat poured off her.
    How high were they? Were they safe? She paused, her chest heaving as she tried to catch her breath, and looked down the hill. Fifty feet below her, a tide of frothy brown water rose up the slope with hardly any noise. She seized Peter’s arm and scrambled higher. The water caught up to them and floated them off the ground with a surprisingly tender touch. They soared on the surface of the upwelling, up through the trees, until Sarah’s shoulder finally smashed into a branch. She clung to the branch in a daze. The water rose a few feet higher and then stopped. Sarah swung onto the branch and tucked herself against the main trunk. Peter’s head bobbed among the drowned branches of the outer canopy. He swam toward Sarah as the water began to recede, slowly at first, and then with increasing speed, sucking him down with it.
    â€œSwim harder!” Sarah shouted at him.
    He put his head down into the mucky water and stroked furiously. She stretched out on the branch and reached out a hand. He grabbed it just as the water gurgled away from him, leaving her holdingon to his dangling weight. She tried to haul him up onto the branch beside her, but his wet hand slipped away from hers and he fell back into the draining water five feet below. He looked up at her, his brown eyes wide with fright and shock.
    â€œGrab something,” Sarah shouted. “Anything!”
    He managed to clutch a sapling, but the increasing violence of the receding water ripped it out by the roots. A growing whirlpool carried him down and out of her sight. Now the water had a voice, a full-throated roar filled with the grinding of stone and wood. Lower on the hill Sarah could see big trees toppling with great swishes of their branches as the earth was scoured away from beneath them.
    She had no thoughts, only the sounds and the images, as if her mind were a video camera recording everything. No fear or pain or anguish. Just the detached certainty that her father and mother and brother were dead and she was still alive, being bitten all over her dirty, scraped-up body by a swarm of red ants.

Chapter 5
    Ruslan rushed out of the house, his unbuttoned yellow shirt flapping, and abruptly halted on the front steps.
    Far down the lane, men, women, and children shrieked as they ran in front of a surge of blackish brown water clogged with chunks of wood and plastic garbage. Several people gunned up the narrow track on motorbikes. A young man took a running jump onto the empty back of a scooter driven by a woman, sending both of them sprawling to the asphalt.
    But what had frozen Ruslan on the porch was what he saw beyond the point of Ujung Karang. On all three sides of the peninsula, the whole oceanhad lifted up and was racing landward. The sea was so tall that its face was visible above the