Knockdown (14 page)

Cole leaned on the bedroom door frame. “Dad told us to wait at least a
day before opening the hatch.”

Dylan pulled back the
hatch cover. “It’s been over eight hours. We can’t sit here and let ourselves get bashed to pieces.”

The whoosh of fresh air
startled me. I stood still and breathed it in. I didn’t realized how stale the air in the cabin had become.

Dylan scrambled on deck. “Oh
no!” I could hear his footsteps running back and forth across the boat.

“What?” I waited
for my turn to climb up. “What’s happening?”

“
No!” Dylan kept saying.

I stood on the stern of
the boat, my mouth open as my head swiveled from side to side.

The sea around us was covered in floating debris. Broken roof tops, parts of docks, plastic garbage cans, storage bins, and uprooted trees surrounded us. The wreckage seemed to go for miles, although I could see open water to the west. We were in the midst of a swirling current that was taking the
refuse from the tsunamis back to shore.

I moved to the starboard
side of the boat and held onto the rail. Directly below a man’s flip-flop barely skimmed the surface. A stained-glass window and broken carved front door bashed into the hull. The glass shattered and the frame disappeared into the sea. I thought I saw a piano floating a ways away, but then it was gone. I tried to identify objects in the water, but the wreckage was mostly broken pieces of what had once been.

Dylan and Nick
were busy checking out our boat. The mast stood intact, but despite the tape, the lines were terribly tangled. The cockpit cover was bent. Two of the clear plastic windows were ripped and flapping in the breeze.

The jib appeared okay, the duct tape intact, but the line we used to pull it open with had come loose and dangled off the boat.
I found where the line entered the water and pulled it. It was caught on something.

Takumi joined me
and we tugged together. I loosened my grip and studied the shadows his eyelashes made on his cheeks. He groaned with the effort he was making and I forced myself to concentrate. Whatever was caught on the line was heavy.

“T
akumi, wait. It might be caught on the propeller.”

The line went slack. I leaned over the rail for a closer look.
A cow’s head popped up, dead eyes staring. I screamed and stumbled back from the rail.

Takumi dropped the line. The cow disappeared under the sea.
Takumi put his arm around me and drew me close. I closed my eyes and lost myself in the moment.

Dylan and Nick joined us and leaned over the rail
, staring at the submerged cow. I could feel Dylan’s eyes on us.

“You hurt?” Dylan asked.

I stepped away from Takumi. “It just, just, startled me.”

Jervis
called out from below deck, “What’s going on?”

I took a deep breath and moved
toward the cockpit opening. “We’re floating in a debris field. Keep Makala below.”

I picked
the jib line off the deck and looked at Takumi. “Sorry, but we need this line free if we’re ever going to pull out the jib.”

He took the line from me and yanked again. This time I di
dn’t scream when the cow surfaced. The line was wrapped around and around its neck and body.

Dylan
went below, flipped the instrument panel on, and came back up. The navigation screen was cracked. The depth finder wouldn’t turn on.

“They’re
shorted out. Ruined. What do we do now?” Dylan paced back and forth across the cockpit, hitting buttons and slapping screens. “What are we going to do without instruments? What are we going to do?”

I had no answer for him.
“We’ll take care of this.” I pointed to the cow. “Why don’t you work on the sails?”

He shook his head.
“I can’t believe this.” He pulled Nick over to the main and they began peeling off duct tape. The freed lines were a mess. Whenever anyone tugged on one, it clanged against the metal mast and made a ringing sound.

Jervis
and Zoë appeared on deck. Zoë held her hand to her mouth as she surveyed the scene.

I glanced back at the cockpit opening. “Wher
e’s Makala?”

“Angelina’s
with her.” Jervis made a face when he saw the cow.

“I’ll get
the boat hook.” I scrambled to the cockpit, scraped duct tape off a hatch cover, and dug out a long expandable pole with a rubber hook on the end. It was Mom’s favorite tool.

I handed the boat hook to Takumi.
“Will this help?”

He
pushed the cow and Jervis yanked on the line. The cow began to spin, the line unwound and the cow disappeared into the sea.

The mast rang out
again, sounding a chime for the lost cow.

Dylan and Nick moved from the main sail to the
jib sail. They cursed as the tape came off in tiny pieces. I left Takumi and Jervis winding up the line that had been around the cow and went below to get scissors.

Cole sat on a cockpit bench, shaking his head.

“You promised to stay in bed.” I scolded him.

He glared at me. I shrugged and climbed down to the cabin below.

Makala and Angelina stood on Jervis’ couch. Makala jumped up and down to see out the windows.

“What’s going on?” Angelina’s eyes were red and swollen.

“Nothing to worry about. Junk from the tsunami. Some of it is kinda gross. We’ll be far out to sea soon. It’ll be better there.”

Angelina
nodded and hugged Makala.

“
Did you get some breakfast?” I gestured to the food on the chart table and found a pair of scissors in a kitchen drawer.

“I want to go up with ‘ervis.” Makala rubbed her eyes.

Angelina rolled a pancake around a sausage link and told Makala to wait.

Makala
threw herself on Jervis’s bed.

Angelina grabbed another sausage and picked her sister up.

“No-o-o-o.” Makala kicked and sobbed.

“Makala!” I found the nail polish I’d left on the chart table and waved it in the air. “I bet your sister’s good at painting nails
, too.”

Makala
stopped wailing and sniffed. “She is.”

Angelina
mouthed thanks and sat Makala on her lap.

I took the scissors
on deck. Dylan pulled the edges of the jib out. I sliced through the tape, careful not to cut the sail. We moved to the main sail and freed it too. When we had more time, we could get all the tape off, but for now we just needed the sails free.

More and more floating debris surrounded and bashed into us. It was almost as if we attracted it. I
couldn’t take my eyes off the water. It was the small things that drew my attention. A plastic flower. A dog ball. A shoe.

How were we going to sail through all this stuff?
Wherever we went, there was bound to be more and more. And as bodies decayed, they would float, and…

I gulped in air.

The engine roared to life. Cole stood behind the wheel. “The engine still works.”

Dylan raced back to the helm
. “Cole, what the…”

“
We have to go. There’s only twelve days left. And we have to get out of this mess. There’s too much. If it gets caught in our prop or damages the hull… Tell the guys to push stuff away with the boat hook as we go. I’ll motor slowly.”

I passed
the expandable pole to Dylan. He shoved an uprooted tree away. A raccoon in the branches snarled.

“I
s Cole okay to drive?” Dylan asked.

Takumi was standing
behind me. “I’ll sit with him.”

Nick watched the tree with the raccoon. “Is ther
e anything else we can use to push debris and keep critters off the boat?”

I thought for a moment. “I’ll get the dinghy oars. They won’t extend out as far as the boat hook, but th
ey’ll work better than nothing.” I took the oars out of the stern locker and handed them to Nick and Jervis.

Dylan, Nick, and
Jervis leaned far out over the bow, and shoved wreckage away from the boat as we made our way. Zoë ran from side to side, pointing and exclaiming as she spotted floating objects.

Takum
i glanced at the dead instruments. All we had was the compass on the wheel. “Need help?” he asked Cole.

“My eyes are still blurry.
Make sure we are heading south.” Cole leaned on the wheel.

I began pulling
bits of tape off the storage lockers and lines. Takumi gently guided Cole. A squirrel climbed to the top limb of an evergreen and scolded us as we passed by. For the animal’s sake, I hoped the trees would float ashore soon.

We were making progress toward open water,
but slowly. I checked out the coastline. Although it was still a long ways away, I could tell buildings and trees had been wiped away.

Was my house still
standing, or was it debris too? Where were my parents? Were they safe? I shivered and glanced at the sea behind us. We were almost clear of the mess.

“No!” I
screamed and ran to the stern rail. Two broken and unraveling lines trailed in the water.

Our dinghy was gone.

Chapter
Sixteen

Twelve Days to Go

Both the sky and the sea were gray. If not for the chop of the water, it would have been hard to see where one ended and the other began. I hugged myself and shivered. It felt more like October than August.

I scanned the ocean
searching for our lost dinghy. It was rubber and would float. But we had no way of knowing when it had torn away. It could be anywhere.

“Dam
n it.” Dylan stared at the dangling lines. “I should’ve let the air out. I should’ve stowed it. I should’ve…”

“It’s nobody’s fault.
Whistler
held up pretty well. We were knock-downed at least four times.” Cole sat on the stern, scanning the water. “It could be lots worse.”

The
plastic window panes in the dodger still flapped. I gave up the search for the dinghy and worked at duct-taping the windows back in place. It made the cockpit warmer, although in a few places it was hard to see out.

“How will we get off the boat without the dinghy?”
Zoë asked. “How will we get to shore? There won’t be any docks we can tie up to.”

“Guess we’ll have to swim.”
Jervis leaned way over the side and tried to grab a soccer ball that was floating close to the boat.

“
I guess when we get back to Seattle, there’ll be someone to help us.” Zoë glanced back the way we’d come.

Dylan, Cole, and I stared at
each other. Did she really think we were headed back to Seattle?

Dylan wrapped his
arm around her shoulders. “Zoë, we told you from the beginning, we weren’t going back.”

“But you meant until after the tsunami. That’s all over
now and we can go home.”

Nick hung his head. “Maybe we should go back. Maybe Seattle survived.”

Dylan put his hands on his hips. “No. We have to keep going south. Can’t you feel the chill? My Dad said…”

“Dylan,” I interrupted
. “Let’s try the radio and see if we can get an update. Maybe we can find someone who can tell us what Seattle is like now.”

Cole gestured at the debris
-strewn water. “First, we have to get the sails up. We’re wasting gas.” He moaned with pain and grabbed his head.

“Cole, you need
to lie down.” A shiver ran down my spine. He needed a hospital.

“I’m fine,” Cole insisted.

Zoë, Dylan, and Nick made their way forward to work on the jib. Zoë continued arguing with Dylan. “You can’t mean it. We
are
going back.”

“No
, Zoë––there’s nothing to go back to.”

“How do you know that?”
Zoë threw Dylan’s arm off her shoulder.

Of course
Zoë wanted to go home. We all did. And maybe she was right. In most disaster news stories, one area gets wiped out, while another just next door remains untouched.

I stood at the rail. “Maybe Seattle is
okay? It’s far from the open ocean. Maybe…”

Cole shook his head and winced with the pain. “Seattle is gone and an ice age is coming.
Dad’s counting on us. We can’t go back.”

“But?
” I glanced at Takumi. He bit his lip.

The boat roll
ed to the side. Makala yelped from the cabin below. Jervis went to check on the girls.