Mark had obligingly slathered sun screen all over her, mostly, she thought, as an excuse to feel her up—not that she cared as long as it prevented her skin from turning lobster red. Since it had evolved into an erotic sort of massage, though, and had warmed her even as it relaxed her aching muscles, she gave him another plus in the good column.
Unfortunately, that made the scales more or less even since he’d accumulated almost as many minuses throughout the day as pluses. She was drowsing, debating whether or not she was interested in taking the next step and ‘test driving’ him that night when he suddenly sat back and stiffened.
“Hey! Look at that!”
Cassie didn’t even lift her head, despite the excitement she heard in his voice.
Whatever it was, she wasn’t interested.
“Carl! Do you see that?” he persisted, coming to his feet.
As she heard the rest of the diving party moving in their direction, curiosity finally penetrated her stupor of exhaustion and Cassie lifted her head to look around. She couldn’t see anything from her position and was tempted to dismiss it again until she realized that everyone was craning to look into the distance. It was the look on their faces that finally sent a shaft of alarm through her. Pushing herself up onto her knees, she followed the direction of their gazes, more than half expecting so see a ship flying a pirate flag.
She thought, at first, that the glaring sun had dazzled her and it was just a trick of the eyes. Blinking, she slowly got to her feet. The mirage didn’t disappear, though.
After staring at the thick bank of clouds rolling toward them, she swiveled her head and scanned the horizon all the way around. Her heart began to thud dully in her chest.
“What would cause that?” she asked of no one in particular. “Is it a storm?”
Several moments passed while first one and then another speculated as to the cause of the phenomenon and then it finally dawned on Cassie that no one was looking at the same thing she was. Everyone was staring at the water. Turning, she peered at the water again and realized that a huge patch of ocean was glowing a strange, eerie blue.
“What is that?” she gasped.
Something in her voice must have finally penetrated Mark’s absorption. He glanced at her, his expression questioning. “I don’t know. Never seen anything like it.”
“You think, maybe, it’s just … like sunlight reflecting off the clouds?” Cassie speculated hopefully Mark frowned at her and then lifted his head to glance around as she had. “Shit!” he exclaimed abruptly, drawing everyone’s attention to the bank of clouds that had ringed them. “What the hell!”
For several moments everyone babbled excitedly. Abruptly, Carl plowed his way through the group and headed for the controls. “Everyone get everything tied down.
NOW! Get your life vests on! We’ve got a freak storm rolling in!”
Cassie bent over and scooped up the life vest she’d been cuddling and began to struggle into it. She had no idea what else might need doing, but she wasn’t going anywhere until she had that on. She was still struggling with figuring out which loops went with which straps when Carl began to cuss loud and long. “The damned radio’s dead! I can’t get a call in to the coast guard!”
That announcement made everyone freeze.
“What do you mean the radio’s dead?” Ben, one of the group demanded, anger edging his voice. “Didn’t you check it out?”
“Of course I checked it out!” Carl yelled angrily. “What do you take me for? It was working fine when we left!”
“Maybe we’re just out of range?” Shelley, one of the women, suggested uneasily.
“It’s not picking up anything but static! Somebody should be close enough to pick up a mayday!”
“Why do we need to send out a mayday?” Cassie asked, trying to keep the hysteria out of her voice.
She didn’t think she succeeded very well. As low as she’d pitched her voice, mostly because she was too breathless with sudden fear to manage much more than a whisper, the question brought everyone’s attention to her.
“Just in case,” Mark muttered after a moment.
“In case of what?” Cassie demanded.
“The instruments have gone haywire,” Carl announced, dragging everyone’s attention to him.
“Electrical storm?” Jimmy, another diver, suggested.
Cassie was about to dispute that when she noticed a jagged streak of light threading through the clouds advancing on them. Her heart seemed to leap into her throat to strangle her as she turned slowly to survey the cloud bank and saw similar streaks forking down to the water all the way around them.
“Let’s just get the hell out of here!” Mark yelled.
“And go where?” Ben demanded. “You heard him. The instruments aren’t working.”
“So? We get clear of the storm, they’ll work, and probably the radio, too, and we can call for help,” Jimmy yelled back at him, seconding Mark’s motion.
“We don’t have enough fuel to wander around the gulf!” Carl, the doomsayer, announced. “We’ll be dead in the water if we aren’t careful. And what if the radio still doesn’t work? We don’t have enough food or water on board for more than a day.
Unless one of you has a really good idea of which direction to go, I say we drop anchor and try to ride this out. Any direction we take, we’ll be heading into the storm.”
“But it’s coming right toward us! We’re not going to avoid it.”
“Exactly my point—there doesn’t seem to be any possibility of avoiding it. I’d rather not take the chance of getting lost. If we stay put, when it passes over us, we should at least be able to get our bearings and then, even if the radio and the instruments still don’t work, we’ll have a better chance of making landfall.”
“How far are we from land?” Cassie asked.
Instead of ignoring her as they had before, several of the divers glanced at her and then turned to look at Carl questioningly. He shrugged. “The last time I checked about two hundred and fifty nautical miles.”
Cassie felt anger surge through her. She hadn’t liked the idea of sailing so far out they couldn’t see land in any direction to begin with, but now it seemed even more insane to her. She, at least, hadn’t known the potential for disaster. They had known and they’d still struck off for deep water as if it hadn’t occurred to any of them that they were land dwellers.
With an effort, she tamped her anger. Everyone was already on edge. Arguing wasn’t going to help anything. Apparently everyone else arrived at the same conclusion.
After glaring with angry accusation at one another for a few moments, everyone found a spot to settle and watch the clouds. After a while, although her nerves were still stretched tauter than a barbed wire fence, Cassie noticed something else strange about the glowing water and the bank of clouds.
“Is it just me, or does it seem to anyone else that the clouds aren’t moving?” The strange light was becoming more and more pervasive, as well, and her skin was prickling, as if static electricity was rippling over her.
“I think she’s right,” Mark announced after studying the clouds for several minutes. “They don’t look any closer to me either.”
Carl shook his head. “I can’t tell. It could just be a slow moving storm.”
“It doesn’t look like a storm, though,” Cassie disputed. “I mean—I’ve never seen a storm when I was at sea. Maybe they look differently than they do on land, but—shouldn’t they be dark? They’re so white and fluffy they don’t even look like storm clouds. The lightening looks weird, too. It’s coming straight down.”
“The sea,” Mark said succinctly. “Water draws lightning.”
Lovely! Why hadn’t she thought about that? “Maybe it would be better to get inside?” she suggested uneasily.
Mark stared at her a long moment. A look passed between him and the others that she didn’t like—at all. “If the lightning strikes get close, we will,” he said finally.
Cassie st
udied his face and then the faces of the other divers. After a few moments it sank in that they preferred chancing the lightning to the possibility of being trapped inside if the boat sank.
An hour passed. Cassie was still on edge, but she discovered she couldn’t maintain her fear. It was wearing her down. “This is so bizarre,” she finally muttered.
“I almost feel like time has stopped.”
Linda, a woman who looked to be around thirty five, who should have had more sense than to consider going off on such a harebrained adventure, sent her a commiserating look. “It’s the waiting.”
Cassie shrugged. “Maybe, but I’m more inclined to think it’s the ‘nothing’ that’s happening. I guess my sense of depth perception could be off, but I don’t think those clouds are moving any closer. I feel like I’m in a … jar, or something.”
The comment didn’t pass unnoticed. The men exchanged that ‘look’ the one men always shared whenever they consider a woman had said something ‘womanish’—which translated to farfetched and hysterical. Shelly and Linda, the only women in the group besides her, looked thoughtful, though.
“She’s right,” Linda finally seconded. “The clouds are … boiling, but they don’t look any closer—nor further away. Even if it’s a slow moving storm it’s been an hour and half. We should be able to discern some difference.”
“So maybe it’s just stalled,” Carl said pointedly.
“Well, why is it that everything looks bluer? And why is it that I can feel my skin prickling if the storm isn’t any closer?” Shelly put in.
Mark surged to his feet. “I’m going down to see if I can find out what’s causing that glow.”
“Don’t be stupid!” Carl snapped. “What if the storm hits while you’re down there?”
“I’ll follow the anchor line!” Mark said angrily. “It’s not going to take more than a few minutes to have a look. I’ll come right back up.”
“It’s too risky,” Carl pointed out.
“He’s right, man,” Ben and Jimmy agreed almost in the same breath.
“I’ll spot you,” David, the other man in the group, offered.
“You’re both crazy!” Carl said angrily.
David shrugged. “Maybe, but this just sitting around is getting on my nerves.
And I want to see what’s causing the glow myself.”
“What if it’s like—gas?” Cassie asked, an edge of anger in her own voice. “I saw this special one time where they were speculating that the disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle were caused by a rise of methane gases that made the ships loose buoyancy.
That’s where we are, isn’t it? In the Triangle?”
Mark gave her a look that she didn’t like. “The boat isn’t sinking,” he said pointedly. “I think that blows that theory.”
Carl shrugged. “We could be in the Triangle, but I don’t believe in that crap.”
The comment redirected Cassie’s anger in his direction. “So how do you explain this weird phenomenon?”
“Yeah,” Shelley agreed. “I mean, I’ve heard of freak storms, but this is seriously weirding me out!”
“All the more reason to check it out,” Mark pointed out with a mixture of amusement and excitement. “Don’t you think it would be cool as hell to be able to go back and explain the mystery?”
“No!” Cassie and Linda said almost in unison.
He gave them both a look that was a mixture of irritation and disgust. “Well, I do.”
He reminded Cassie of a sullen little boy as he stalked off and began to put his gear on. Right up until that point, Cassie had given him a good many points for looks and intelligence. Not that he was even close to an Adonis, but he was above average in looks and built pretty good—now she knew why. It was from all the swimming. And he’d seemed to be pretty smart and to have a sense of humor that was somewhat compatible with her own.
Staring at him, she was pretty sure, now, this was going to prove to be a bust all the way around. The scales were way against him now. Even if they made it back to the dock without disaster overtaking them, she didn’t think she wanted to go any further in pursuit of a relationship with him. She wasn’t going to give him any points at all for brazen stupidity and, in her book, the threat of the storm was enough to cancel out any pluses he might have gotten for bravery. As improbable as it seemed that he could actually protect her if the storm struck, he should consider keeping her safe as top priority, not going off on an adventure in the teeth of death!
“Idiots!” Carl muttered as Mark and David went over the side and disappeared.
From the expressions of the other divers, it looked like most of them were in agreement. Jimmy looked a little torn, as if he wanted to join them but just couldn’t get up the nerve.
Strike scuba diving enthusiasts, Cassie thought angrily—sky divers, mountain climbers, racing---If she met any other guys who ‘loved’ flirting with death she wasn’t going to give them the time of day.
Too nervous to sit still any longer, Cassie got up to pace around the deck, staring at the clouds, glancing at her watch from time to time—which was how she finally realized time actually had stood still—as in, her watch had stopped. About fifteen minutes later, David emerged beside the boat.
“You’ve got to see this!” he announced in a voice edged with hysterical excitement. “There’s a whole city below us—honest to god! I think we’ve found Atlantis!”
Chapter Two
David’s excitement was contagious.
Cassie didn’t catch it.
The others did, however. When Mark surfaced a few moments later and added his description of the ruins they’d found below, there was a mad scramble to get their gear on. Even Carl, the eldest of the group, whom Cassie had considered the most reliable and sensible up until then, looked like a child who’d been promised a treat and feared it would be snatched away. He looked on as, one by one, the other divers leapt over the side and disappeared. Finally, he caved and began to put his own gear on.
“Hey!” Cassie exclaimed. “You’re not going down, too?”
He sent her a look that was sheepish and at the same time determined. “You said yourself the storm was stalled. I won’t be gone long.”
“You’re going to leave me here by myself?” she demanded incredulously.
He glared at her. “You’ll be fine. I’m just going down for a quick look. The instruments are shot. We can’t even be sure of the location—there won’t be any coming back later for a look.”
Cassie was still trying to reason with him when he leapt out of the boat and disappeared. Fear stole over her as she stared down at the water in dismay, watching until he completely disappeared from sight. How long she stood staring down into the water, muttering curses under her breath, she had no idea, but when she finally realized it wasn’t doing anything for her sense of desertion, she eased away from the side of the boat and looked around worriedly.
It seemed the strange blue haze had become notably more pronounced.
Shivering, Cassie looked around uneasily and finally went to get her wet suit, pulling it on again. “Idiots!” she grumbled, unnerved at the sound of her own voice even though she’d thought it would comfort her, make her feel less alone.
What was she going to do if they didn’t come back? She didn’t know the first thing about driving a boat! Not that it had looked all that difficult. She thought she could figure it out, but she had far less confidence that she could find land.
When she’d managed to get her wet suit on, she paced, gnawing at a finger nail, stopping every few moments to peer over the side in the hopes that at least one of the divers would surface. The longer she paced, the darker it grew. She stopped to stare at the strange clouds. Were they getting closer? Or did it just seem like they were?
Finally, she grabbed her tanks and put them on, struggling to remember Carl’s instructions about the gauges. She didn’t realize she’d come to the decision to go after them until she found herself standing o
n the diving platform.
They’d had plenty of damned time to look, though, she thought angrily! Surely she could convince someone to come back up?
She wasn’t convinced that she could and she had no real desire to go down, but she realized she was more afraid of being alone than going down. Finally, she leapt into the water, adjusted her mask, and dipped below the surface.
She couldn’t see a sign of anyone, but that was hardly surprising since she couldn’t see the bottom and they were undoubtedly on the bottom. After a moment, when it seemed terror was going to completely consume her, she finally decided she would use the anchor line as a guide. She would go down, look for the others and if she didn’t see anybody, she was going to come right back up. She wasn’t going to take a chance on getting lost. She couldn’t lose the boat if she stayed within reach of the anchor chain.
Fear dogged her all the way down. She considered turning back several times, but each time she did the fear of being alone on the boat superseded her fear of the ocean.
She kept glancing at her gauges, carefully monitoring the amount of air in her tanks. She not only had no desire to cut it close and wait until she had just enough air to get back, she wasn’t going to cut it close!
She’d reached the point where the fear of going deeper had begun to swing the balance when she saw something below her, regular shapes—like manmade structures—and irregular shapes that looked vaguely like people. Pausing, she peered toward them.
The water was hazy and dark besides, but she decided that the shapes she’d caught a glimpse of must be the others. Feeling a tingling of relief, and still reluctant to let go of the chain she’d been following, she propelled herself deeper, glancing at the figures every few moments.
She’d just decided that what she’d seen wasn’t the other divers when it finally dawned on her that the trembling she’d been dimly aware of for sometime wasn’t actually her trembling.
Alien Penetration Page 31
