Micah's Island Read Free Page B

of milk.  I hate milk, but I drank it anyway.  I felt like
I had to keep my strength up.
    I wanted to take a shower, but with no
electricity to power the pumps below, I couldn’t. I got just enough water out
of the lines in the shower to scrub Dolph off, thank God.   I threw my ripped
tank top away and wrapped a towel around me. Hey, it was better than nothing.
    My brain bounced off the walls of the
cabin for the next several hours as it got hotter and hotter. I was sweating
like crazy.  I had no water.  I tried to open the window, but of course, they
don’t want you to do that on a ship.  Now I know how a dog left in a hot car
feels.  I started to see and hear things that weren’t there. I had a fight with
my mom about Calvin.
    Finally, I lay down on the floor trying
to keep myself as cool as possible, but I just knew I wasn’t going to survive
this.  It was too hot.  I was going to die alone, cooked to death on a ship
with no air conditioning miles and miles from home, while Calvin drank margaritas
made with Cabo Wabo tequila on my beach.  It was my last thought for a while.
    ~***~
    I heard the screeching groan from deep
in the belly of the ship just about the time I felt the blast of icy cold air
come through the vents over me.  I honestly didn’t even know where I was for a
few minutes. When I revived enough to have a coherent thought, I was shocked as
hell to be alive.  The floor around me was wet.  I think I might literally have
been melting on the floor of the cabin. 
    The cold air puffed just once for two or
three seconds, but it was enough to cool the room off considerably.  I heard
the noise from deep inside the ship again, and it gave me chills. This sounds
overly dramatic, but it sounded like dragons from hell raking their talons over
a metallic blackboard. I can’t think of any other way to describe it.  The ship
sort of shuddered underneath me. That was what brought me to my feet.
    I went across the bed on my knees and
looked out the window.  The night was inky blackness, but the moon was blood
red, shining across the ripples on the water.  The moon looked weird to me,
really large and close.  Half in, half out of the horizon.  I could see clouds
roiling around it, like a storm was blowing up, but these clouds were moving
really fast.  An oily, black tendril slid its way across the blood red moon,
twisting like a tornado.
    And that’s when the blue and purple
lightning started to flash across the sky.
    Let me stop here and say this:  I‘ve lived
in the Bermuda Triangle since I was a kid, and I’ve never seen anything out of
the ordinary. Never talked to anyone who ever said they saw anything weird.  At
that point, I just thought a really bad storm was brewing.
     I think I was so terrorized by then
that I wasn’t willing to face the truth.   Nothing about that night was
normal.
    Another puff of icy air, and I mean
icy.  I reached up and touched the vent. It had a thick layer of frost around
the edges. I heard the deep metallic grinding sound again, like a steel girder being
twisted into a pretzel.  The ship quivered and groaned.
    Then the most amazing thing happened.  It
felt like a giant hand picked the ship up, turned it a perfect 180 degrees, and
dropped it back into the water from a great height!
    The sense of vertigo was unlike anything
I’ve ever experienced. It felt like the drop on the biggest roller coaster I’ve
ever been on.  I crashed to the floor; my head bounced off the coffee table as
it slid over the top of me.  The drawers of the built in chests in the cabin
all slid out into the middle of the room.  I scrambled up onto the bed,
breathless and bruised, my heart in my freaking throat.
    ~***~
    I don’t want to sound like a drama
queen, but when I think about the way the ship felt as it was being tossed
around...well...I think maybe I’ve watched too many Syfy movies. It really felt
as though something was playing with the ship.  One end would tip up in