by Gabi Moore
“Todd! Wait!”
But he was long gone into the crowd, and when I heard the announcement coming again over the speakers, this time people were making too much noise for it to be heard.
Chapter 5 - Ellie
He grabbed my hand firmly and yanked me outside, and we both stood and stared in awe for a moment at the weird color the sky had turned.
It was all wrong. Panicked people streamed past us on all sides but I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the bizarre green and yellow swirls rolling quickly over the horizon. Bruise colored clouds. And something metallic and threatening hovered on the wind, which was now whipping in all directions. I had never seen anything like it. Little ribbons of blue sky remained but were rapidly skidding off to the east and disappearing.
Reflexively, I squeezed his hand. He looked at me, for once not smiling, and then pulled my hand to guide me through the maze of confused people.
“Todd! Todd wait, my room is in the other direction!”
He turned and scowled at me.
“Ellie, that storm is serious, and with this wind it’ll hit us in five minutes, if that. Where is your room?”
“On Deck B, just that way…” I said, pointing lamely.
“No, it’s too far. We need to get inside now.”
The crowd was already thinning around us, people disappearing quickly into doors, loose sarongs flapping in the wind. A towel came slinking by on the floor and wrapped around my feet. I untangled it and the wind carried it off again, slinking and twisting fast over the deck and off into the sea. Two hours before it had been a perfect, sunny blue day. How could this actually be happening? Surely this wasn’t right…
“Ellie! Are you listening? Come with me, my room is closer; it’s on this deck. We need to get indoors before the storm hits…”
“Your room?”
It suddenly felt more difficult to hold his hand. Just how much of an emergency was this, really? One moment I was enjoying a casual party and having a good time and the next the sky had churned into some vision of hell and I was standing here, and the wind was making it difficult to talk, and now he was inviting me to his room?
“Ellie, we’re wasting time. This is dangerous, standing out here.”
It was frightening how quickly people had cleared the deck. Only one or two people remained and were scrabbling to unlock doors and get inside as the wind seemed to whip up into a frenzy with every passing second. I didn’t know what to do. Anthony would still be in the room, and he’d be looking for me…
“Ellie!”
He had grabbed my hand more tightly now and was pulling me hard in the wrong direction. The moment slowed right down. It was all wrong. Leaving Anthony like that. Coming out here where I knew this guy would be there, and I knew Anthony would be devastated if he knew about any of it… I was unprepared for the sheer weight of remorse that hit me just then, even harder than the stinging wind thrashing our faces. I stood frozen.
“Hey, you two! You need to get off deck! Get off deck!”
I spun around to see a crew member gesturing at us wildly, his voice getting lost in the now screeching wind. One more moment of hesitation and the crew member grabbed both of us by the sleeve and yanked us nearer to the body of the ship, where he banged a card key to the door and opened a small storage room filled with deck chair cushions and lilos.
“Get inside!” he yelled, pushed us in and in a heartbeat the door slammed behind us.
The wind howled madly outside, and I watched in horror as thick, heavy raindrops then began to splatter the glass of the door window. I turned to look at Todd, but he was nowhere near as flustered as I was. He seemed to be distracted.
“That’s… that’s the scariest looking storm I think I’ve ever seen,” I said, breathless. I almost had to shout to be heard. Todd said nothing. Without wasting any time, he started to look around the room, turning over the piles of deck chair cushions like he was looking for something. The ship groaned and lurched, slowly to one side and then slowly, sickeningly, back to the other side again. I staggered a little on my feet.
“Todd… how bad do you think this is, really? This will all just pass, right? I need to get back to Anthony…”
Here he paused a little in his rummaging but didn’t look up at me.
“I don’t want to alarm you, but I don’t think this is just a storm, Ellie.”
“What? What else could it be?”
“Look, I’m not going to lie, I think we’re in for a rough time. But just listen to me and try to act quickly, OK? Can you do that for me?”
“But…”
“Can you just promise me you’ll try to stay calm?”
I nodded.
His words hit me hard. I suddenly realized how cold I was, and looked down at my flimsy dress, raindrops making dark speckles on the silk and my hard, icy-cold nipples poking shamelessly through the clinging fabric. Staying calm seemed utterly impossible right now.
I went to the door to peer out the window but as quickly as I did, Todd’s fist closed around my arm and he snatched me away again.
“Get away from there! It’s dangerous,” he said, his whole face seeming different now that he wasn’t smiling and joking anymore.
“But I have to get back to Anthony,” I said. “He’ll be wondering where I am, and what if he’s not OK?” I said. His mouth tightened and he stood to look at me.
“Anthony can look after himself. We need to stay out of the storm, and I think it’s going to get much worse. Come here and help me look for flotation devices.”
“Flotation devices?” I said and staggered towards him, starting to feel numb. “What do we need those for?”
He shot me another look.
“Did you see those big, tall clouds out there, on the horizon? That’s not a storm, Ellie, that’s a big ass hurricane. We’re in an El Nino year. The water’s just been too warm. Once the ship starts taking on water we’re going to need to be prepared…”
“Wait, what? A hurricane?”
“A cyclone, yes. A hurricane.”
“But California never gets--”
“Ellie, just help me look!” he barked, and I did as he told me, hot tears forming on my lashes.
Outside the rain was indeed getting heavier, so much so that the raindrops of the glass had turned into a solid, rippling sheet of water pelting down. The violence outside drummed against the steel of the door so loudly I could scarcely hear myself think as my hands turned over piles of chair cushions.
“Yes!” he cried and I turned to see him holding up some orange life jackets.
“Put this on,” he said and thrust it at me. I was still crying as I put it over myself, hands shaking, struggling to fasten the black plastic clips. The last thing I had done with Anthony was fight with him. I was angry he didn’t want to come out with me. Again. We were all going to die now and the last words I had spoken to him were in anger, and now I couldn’t bear the guilt. Nothing better was in store for me anyway, so why didn’t I just marry the guy and get it done with already? Why had I been so ungrateful to him, so difficult, when all he wanted to do was start a life with me? What the fuck was wrong with me?
At that moment, I can’t explain why, all I could think of was a documentary I had watched some years ago, about people who had gotten caught in some great fire, and they were interviewing the survivors afterwards, and an elderly lady had said, in a sad, defeated voice, “you never realize just how fragile life is until it’s too late”. And now those words were banging around in my head as I tried to close the other clasps, and the thought made my eyes burn and I couldn’t see and I couldn’t breathe.
“Ellie, hey Ellie, you need to calm down.”
Todd’s firm hands were squeezing my shoulders, and he was staring those pale blue eyes straight into me, looking more than a little frightened himself. His hands were the only warm thing in the world at that moment. Everything seemed to have dropped a few degrees in temperature.
“I… I need to get back to my room …I
can’t be out here with you… I’m engaged, I’m supposed to be married,” I said, unable to stop my words from melting into one another and becoming great big stupid sobs. He looked a little surprised, but didn’t loosen his grip on my shoulders.
“Ellie, listen to me. You can’t go back to your own room.”
To my horror, the ship started groaning again, and the bone-shuddering sound of metal against metal rang out from beneath us.
“You can’t go back to your room. The ship might …the ship might go down, and in that case--”
“Go down?!”
“Ellie, please calm down. Just listen. The ship might go down. But you need to stay with me, OK? You need to stay calm so we can figure out a way to leave if we need to,” he said, and he was suddenly checking over the fastenings on my life jacket.
“But where are we gonna leave to?” I said.
At that moment, two inches of tepid, foamy water came crawling in from under the crack in the door and sloshed easily around our feet as the ship lurched to one side. I staggered and he reached out to catch me. It was like my brain had stopped working. I saw the images in front of me. I heard the people screaming outside. But I just couldn’t process it all. It was too much.
The sound of creaking metal intensified and seemed to be right over our heads. We both looked up to see the exposed beams overhead kink and bend as the torrents of rain outside beat down on us. A crack appeared at the far end of the ceiling and in burst a blue-green spray of seawater. I turned to look at him in horror. The moment became surreal. I could make out tiny droplets clinging to his eyelashes as he stared back at me; a raw, fearful look on his face. Another groan pulled his attention upwards and he frowned at the buckling ceiling overhead.
“We need to get out of here,” he said, and tightened his own life jacket. He looked so pale.
“And then what?”
He caught my eye again.
“I don’t know. Maybe we won’t make it. But I think our best chance is to get out of here and soon,” he said.
I couldn’t believe the words coming out of his mouth. That maybe we wouldn’t make it. It was absurd. I wasn’t meant to die. I was meant to marry Anthony and settle down and have two children and be content and normal. I started crying again.
“Ellie, no more of that, seriously. Are you listening to me? When I say go, we’re gonna make a run for it, OK? I think I know where we need to go, but you have to hold onto my hand and run as fast as you can, OK? You won’t be able to see with the rain, but I know where we’re going, so just follow me, OK?”
Before he could finish his sentence I lunged forward and planted a deep, full kiss on his wet lips. My heart was pounding hard enough to rival the noise outside. He didn’t resist me. In fact, in the very next second, he grabbed the base of my neck and pulled me in hard for another kiss.
His tongue felt so warm and sweet and soft, like it was the last good thing left in this weird watery universe we had suddenly found ourselves in. Leaking water from the roof spattered down onto us but I pressed hard against him all the same, shivering in my life jacket. A loud bang made us both jump, breaking the spell of the moment. Another followed. The ship sounded like it was being torn apart.
“Let’s go!” he said and grabbed my hand, slippery with rain.
We waded through the water over to the door and he gingerly opened it, letting in a rush of water that splashed right up to my knees. The ship lurched again, and the water rose higher, nearly stopping my breath as it swirled right through my dress and up onto my thighs. I fell back but he grabbed me and pulled me out the door, where I could now see sheets of rain blasting down with such fearsomeness you could scarcely see two inches in front of you. I heard the crack of thunder grumbling somewhere out of sight.
“Ready?” he said and squeezed my hand so hard it hurt.
I nodded.
Beyond belief, we saw the grey blur of someone washing by, yelling and trying to catch their footing but being swallowed away by the vicious current of murky water. I heard an immense snap behind me and realized too late that something had struck me. On my head. My vision flickered out for a moment and a dull pain radiated out from the back of my skull. The last thing I saw before I blacked out was his beautiful, plump lips, yelling something I could no longer hear.
Chapter 6 - Todd
Something was wrong. Not the massive storm pummeling mercilessly over us. Not that, but something else. Had I inhaled some weird fumes? But then she would have been affected too. No, something else was going on.
Sometime just after we left the main auditorium and just before we were shunted into this storeroom, my head began to ache. I couldn’t be drunk, not from one beer, and even being the lightweight I was, I knew I couldn’t still be drunk from the night before.
So then why was I having such a hard time standing? Why did it feel like now, of all possible times, my muscles were liquefying inside me, just barely responding to anything? I tried to hide my panic from her. She was freaked out enough as it was, and I certainly didn’t need her losing her head on top of everything.
I remember standing with her in that weird storage room, the storm trying to beat its salty way inside, and her wide eyes as she looked up at me. Fuck, man, I’m not a cheater. I don’t make commitments, not because I don’t think they’re worth anything, but because I think they’re worth so much. Shit, I don’t know. Maybe we were all gonna die and getting a kiss in edgeways was just making the best of an increasingly shitty situation.
Her lips felt so cool on mine. So wet and slippery. It felt good, carving out that weird little moment between us. All the tension we had built since the day before seemed to come to one gooey point and just melt. She was a fucking amazing kisser. There was something so trusting about her, so open.
When the roof bust open and sent a metal beam smack into the back of her head, I was almost certain she was killed instantly. It sickened me to see it, the way her body went limp and just folded down with a sploosh into the water. I yanked her up again but she was a deadweight. I pressed my face to hers. Thankfully, she was still breathing. A thin black ooze appeared at the back of her head. Shit. She was hurt badly. But at least she was still alive.
The ship gave another heave and sent us both rolling and tumbling to the back of the room. We had only a few minutes in here until the water filled it entirely, and then who knows if we’d be able to get out. The water was already lapping aggressively at my waist.
I looked down.
Huh.
It was no question the most awkward boner I’d ever have in my life. I smiled wryly to myself as briefly I imagined telling this story around a beer later on. If there even was a later on.
Gravity suspended for a while as the weight of the water inside the room lifted us both off the ground. At least she was easier to hold onto and steer this way. I couldn’t tell if the water was icy cold or too warm, or if it was just my legs feeling heavy from shock. But something wasn’t right. She started to drift away from me and bang into the wall, but I clutched at her flimsy little dress and pulled her towards me, anchoring her against me and noticing in a daze that I had torn some of her dress, and now had a handful of weird lace in my hands.
Why did I feel so weird?
It took all my energy to steady us both against the brutal flood of water rushing into room, but I did it. I had been fucking trained for this. All my work had to have been for something, right? If I couldn’t put all of those hard-earned skills to work now, then I deserved to die. But I owed it to this woman, this sad-eyed, soft lipped, beautiful woman that had landed in my lap just 24 hours ago. She was still breathing, and as long as she was, I would find a way to get control of my sluggish muscles and haul us out of here before the entire ship went down. We were lucky to be on the upper decks – I had never been trained to manage this particular crisis situation, but even my foggy brain could see that the sheer suction force of a huge passenger liner like this dipping under water would be too much to escape
from. Especially too much for a knocked-out woman and a guy who for some reason couldn’t get his legs to work anymore.
Through a massive deluge of water, I managed to stick out my hand and hook it against the store room door. The water immediately picked up my feet and washed me out nearly horizontal. But it lifted her, too, and with so much effort I nearly screamed out loud, I pulled up and out, both our body weights levering on my beleaguered bicep. I eventually wrenched us out and into the rushing flow outside.
The change was swift. My head ducked under and I felt bubbles clattering in my ears. I clung to her for dear life, tumbled over myself until my feet found metal and I pushed up, breaking the surface of the water to bring me a merciful gulp of air. I wanted to throw up. All around the storm was dark, chaotic, and carrying disjointed screams and the sounds of sirens on its lashing winds, whipping up water all around. It was hard to even know which way was up.
The body of a large, heavy wave came lurching over us both and lifted our bodies a good few yards up, but our life jackets kept us buoyant and floating high above the weird debris I saw floating in the dim water beneath our feet. It was bizarre. The whole world was topsy turvy. I tried to call out to a clump of people clinging to a raft to our left, but they soon bounced out of sight behind a curtain of rain, and I realized with alarm that I couldn’t work my tongue, either.
Drugged. I’ve been drugged.
I wracked my brain as the waves and water pummeled us in a swirl, Ellie’s limp body locked against mine as her head lolled scarily from side to side.
I had had only one drink.
The beer.
From Charlie.
I felt a wretching sensation in my guts, but tried desperately to stay focused. To stay awake. I couldn’t leave Ellie like this.
Another wave came roaring over us and dipped me under again. I was slowly losing sensation in my arms, now. I couldn’t feel the water against my skin. Underneath, the world went quiet and slow and green, and I saw a million swirling faces frozen in screams under the water.
