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Chapter 5

5

“W

hat … the hell was that?” Malimokuru whispered. “Sound like da whole world just inhaled.”

“No.” Kenyatta leaned over the front of the small rowboat, staring in horror at his beloved home.”

“What’s your problem?” Malimokuru asked, following Kenyatta’s gaze. “I don’t see nothin’ …” he trailed off, his mouth hanging open, at the sight of the ocean rising between them and the island.

“Not again,” Kita said.

“Dis what happen before?” Malimokuru breathed.

“No,” Kenyatta said, watching as the wave continued to rise, casting a shadow over the little rowboat and its insignificant burden. “Nothing like dis.”

“Impossible,” Malimokuru said. “No act of nature work like dis. No wave just rise up out the ocean like that.”

“Demons,” Kenyatta breathed.

Malimokuru frowned. “What?”

Kenyatta didn’t answer, but stared in helplessness as the enormous wave rose and leaned toward Jamaica.

“By the Gods,” Kita said. “Not everyone would have gotten to high ground by now.

Is

there a high enough ground?”

Kenyatta barely heard the question as he watched the hand of the ocean slap down on his beloved home. Even from their distant position, he heard the crash of the huge wave. Unbidden images of screaming people being washed away into the ocean flooded his mind. Trees snatched out of the ground like weeds. Collapsing houses, exploding walls, mudslides, endless destruction. A chill shot down his spine despite the heat of the cloudless day, on the cruelly placid water upon which they floated.

Then it ended. The giant wave slid back into the ocean and disappeared as if it had never been. In the space where Rocky Point and the rest of Jamaica had been, was bare ocean.

Malimokuru leaned forward and squinted into the distance. “There’s nothing left. The land, people, trees, everything.”

The veins in Kita’s arms bulged under his tight grip on the oar. “It’s just … gone. Everything … gone.” He looked at Kenyatta, who sat staring at the place Jamaica had been. He gave his best friend’s shoulder a squeeze. “We need to get back. Pray to the Gods there are survivors.”

Kenyatta silently picked up his oar, and he and Kita rowed on.

None of them were ready for what they found. Backs to their destination, Kenyatta and Kita followed the nature reader’s directions as they made for home. Or rather, where home had been. When they heard Malimokuru swear an oath under his breath, they stopped.

The entire island hadn’t been swallowed by the ocean, but a large part of it had. Kenyatta peered into the distance and saw only the highest mountains, and the hills at their base, remained. “How, in the name of the Daunyans, someting like dis happen?”

Kita glanced at his friend. It was a rhetorical question, of course, for he knew Kenyatta had already made up his mind. It could be nothing other than a powerful demon, or many of them. Kita wasn’t so sure. In all their battles two years ago, not once had they seen a demon wield such a force. Perhaps a more powerful demon had escaped the abyss to this dimension?

They rowed on, and soon the rowboat bumped aside bits of flotsam from moored ships, wooden debris from destroyed homes, snapped trees. And more.

Kenyatta clenched his jaw as the first body floated by, face down in the water. Then another, and another. After he lost count of how many they passed among the wreckage, tears welled in his eyes to provide a blurry curtain of relief.

Malimokuru looked over the side of the boat. Soil and debris churned up by the catastrophe made it difficult to make out the remains of buildings and structures which would be sitting below the surface like an oceanic tomb.

Shouting pierced their collective sorrow, and Malimokuru pointed in the direction of the voices. “Survivors,” he said.

Dozens of people sat on floating debris in an endless carpet of destruction, some frantically waving at the trio, while others sat despondent, not even bothering to look up.

“Dem can’t be all that’s left,” Kenyatta said in disbelief. They turned the boat toward the survivors, and Malimokuru guided them through the maze of wreckage.

“If there’s survivors here,” Kita said, “there may be more on the other side. It’s a big island and many people lived in the hills and mountains. Word had already spread to get to high ground after the first wave hit.”

“Oh ho!” Malimokuru called out to four people sitting astride the long trunk of a coconut tree. “Our tiny boat can’t hold many. We’ll take the youngest and eldest aboard. There’s more that survived. All of us will get to land together.”

“Thank you,” one of the survivors said. “She looked into Kenyatta’s eyes with a mixture of gratitude and shock. “The ocean raise up and come for us. It just pound down on everyting. What could we have done to bring such wrath of the Gods down on us?”

“Not the Gods,” Kenyatta said under his breath.

They continued on, and though their craft couldn’t begin to hold a fraction of the survivors they encountered, they used the tough giant leaves from floating tropical trees to form ropes. Anything flat and strong enough was used as makeshift oars. The strongest of the survivors rowed toward land while others aboard flat planks and tree trunks held onto the ropes to stay linked together.

Kenyatta took heart at the sight of the floating city trailing in their wake as they accumulated more and more survivors along the way. It didn’t make the sight of the floating human and animal bodies any easier to bear, but people had survived.

One of the three men they’d brought aboard along with the woman who’d thanked them earlier, insisted on taking a shift, and Kenyatta and Kita rested at the back of the boat.

Kita looked out at the endless destruction and shook his head in disbelief. He opened his mouth several times to speak, but not words came.

“Yeah, man,” Kenyatta said.

Kita watched his best friend staring out at the surrounding devastation, his hand clenching his oar. Kenyatta’s life had been one major loss after another since he was old enough to remember. One of those losses, his grandfather, was the reason he and Kita had grown up together as brothers. Kita thought about how Kenyatta’s feisty grandfather had died at the hands of a group of thugs.

Mateo Sepata, Kita’s father, had heard the gunshot. Like a crack of thunder, it was a sound from another time, another era. Guns were from the Age of Technology. A relic revered by some as proof of humanity’s former greatness and ingenuity, reviled by others as a symbol of why the Gods had cast them down, destroyed their technology and all knowledge of how to create it.

Kita’s father had gone to help, despite his mother’s insistence he stay with the family. Mateo had returned with a silently weeping boy Kita’s own age. Over the years, Kenyatta would sometimes open up about the vague memories he’d had of his parents before they’d died. They had entrusted Kenyatta’s care to his grandfather who, at the end of his own life, had entrusted the boy to a stranger with a good heart.

“Me grampa good at seeing a person’s soul,” Kenyatta had once said.

Kita sighed. Both parents and a grandfather, lost to him before his eighth birthday. Kenyatta’s older sister, Taliah was his only surviving blood relative.

Kita leaned over. “I…I think we need to talk to your sister as soon as we can.”

Eyes downcast, Kenyatta nodded absently. His twisted locks fell over his face, obscuring his despair.

After several more hours and more than a hundred survivors collected, they reached land with a gentle enough slope to climb. All but Malimokuru climbed out of the boat. Kenyatta and Kita each offered a hand to help the older man, who waved them off.

As soon as the nature reader’s feet touched the water, he screamed and fell into a fit of convulsions as though being electrocuted.

One of the survivors closest to the nature reader grabbed him when he collapsed. Kita sloshed over to them and helped pull Malimokuru’s limp body out of the water.

Kenyatta climbed out of the water and helped pull Malimokuru onto dry land.

The man who’d helped Kita placed his ear over Malimokuru’s mouth. “He’s breathing.”

There was a collective sigh of relief.

The woman who’d ridden aboard their boat knelt beside the unconscious man, her light brown eyes going from Malimokuru to the others. “I’m startin’ to think it’s the ocean itself, want to kill us.” She ran her hand over the nature reader’s bald head.

Malimokuru groaned, and his eyes slowly creaked open. He looked at the woman leaning over him and offered a strained smile. “Dis what an old man gotta do to get attention from tha ladies, ya?”

The woman snorted, but still held his head in her hands. “Dirty old man.”

“What happened?” Kita asked when Malimokuru looked up.

He groaned again, but didn’t try to sit up. Kenyatta glanced from him to the woman cradling his old head in her hands and hid his smirk.

“Angry,” Malimokuru said in a cracked voice. “It’s very angry.”

“What?” Kenyatta looked at Kita, who shrugged. “What’s angry?”

Malimokuru mumbled incoherently, then fell unconscious.

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