by E S Richards
The seven people—three members of staff based on their uniform and four guests—all looked up at Amy as she entered, James following slightly behind with his arms wrapped around one of Amy’s thighs.
“Hello,” one of the men in the country club uniform, a pale blue polo shirt and slacks pushed himself out of his chair as he spoke, taking a few paces towards where Amy stood. “About as all right as can be expected; can we help you?”
“We’ve just come from South Haven,” Amy replied, reaching around her leg and laying a hand on James’s head. “Our house…well we had to leave. Just looking for somewhere to rest for a bit if you don’t mind?”
“Of course,” the man spoke, beckoning the two of them forward. “I’m Giles. Feel free to make yourself at home here. For as long as you need.”
“Thank you,” Amy nodded to the man, shrugging off her backpack and placing it on the carpeted floor beside the door. “I’m Amy, and this is my son, James.”
“Welcome James,” Giles smiled as they approached, stepping aside so the two of them could sit down in the circle of chairs. Once seated, Giles returned to his place and took it upon himself to introduce the rest of the people.
Amy was right in suspecting three members of staff and four guests, each offering a polite nod as Amy was introduced to them. There was an elderly couple—Charles and Deborah—who apparently visited the country club twice a year. Both sat together in an armchair, the man’s arms wrapped around his wife. The two other members of staff—Alex and Lisa—were both fairly young girls, local residents who worked as waitresses during the holiday period. Lisa offered Amy a meek wave from beside the window, her hands shaking as she withdrew another cigarette from a packet in her hand. Finally a mother and her teenage daughter—Mel and Sue—completed the group, having traveled down from Wyoming for a week by the beach.
Giles provided the summary of each individual and Amy could see how he had come to take charge of the little group. She wondered why the two waitresses had stayed in the country club rather than choosing to travel home, both of them living nearby. She didn’t ask though, knowing how sensitive such a question could be.
“So,” Amy cleared her throat, finishing off the contents of her can of Coke before she continued. “What have things been like here?”
There was a silent pause in the room before Giles started to speak, no one else wanting to take up the baton. “Fairly quiet, compared to the rest of the country as far as we can gather. Obviously we’ve all seen the news reports and the power went out some time ago, but beyond that…” he paused for a moment, “and what happened on the beach, we’ve been getting by.”
Amy gasped quietly, “On the beach,” she started, “you mean…”
“Yes,” Giles cut in before Amy could say what she was thinking. “There were a lot of our guests down there when the boat…exploded.”
Amy could see Giles was struggling to choose his words as he confirmed Amy’s suspicions about some kind of boat accident. Describing what had happened on the beach to those tens of people wasn’t an easy task. It must be even harder for Giles, as it was clear that he knew several of the people who were electrocuted; guests within his country club.
“I’m so sorry,” Amy breathed, uncertain what else she could say. James was starting to fidget beside her and she didn’t want to talk about the gruesome scene with her son so close. It was bad enough he’d had to walk through it first-hand; she didn’t want to make him relive that moment.
“What about South Haven?” Giles changed the topic of conversation slightly, sensing the unease in the room as everyone thought of the dead bodies littering the beach just a few hundred meters away from where they sat. “What’s it like there?”
Amy opened her mouth to reply but realized she didn’t know where to begin. Visions of cars exploding and limbs being torn from people’s bodies filled her head. She pictured James being ripped from her grasp, chasing through the crowds in an attempt to find him again. She saw Zephyr plunging a knife into a man in her living room, herself hiding the body outside and then fleeing her own home. South Haven was a graveyard. An inferno burning through every last living thing.
“Bad,” was all Amy could think to say with a shake of her head. “I don’t think we’ll be—”
A loud crack cut Amy off mid-sentence, the sound reverberating from beneath the room where the nine of them sat.
“What was that?”
“I’m sure it was nothing,” Giles replied quickly, climbing to his feet and walking towards Lisa who had jumped slightly back from the window at the noise. “A tree falling down or something; I don’t think we need to worry.”
“That didn’t sound like a tree,” the other mother in the room—Mel—finally spoke up, as she climbed from her seat to walk towards the window.
“What is it, Mom?” Her daughter called after her, although still too reluctant to move from her seat.
“I’m sure it’s nothing,” Giles repeated. “This is an old building, strange noises often—”
Another crack cut Giles off, this one even louder than before and followed by a strange creaking sound. Amy found herself standing now, looking around the room to try and discern where the noise was coming from. A strange lump formed in her throat, an uneasy feeling working its way around her body.
Walking over to the bay windows that opened onto the balcony, Amy looked out over the beach. James followed her, but he kept his gaze on his hands rather than the beach where countless bodies lay. Staring across the balcony Amy noticed a thin spiral of smoke creeping up into the sky, almost invisible against the gray background of the lake water.
“Something’s on fire down there,” she murmured under her breath, but still loud enough for Lisa, the waitress, to hear.
“What?” came the shrill reply of the young girl, rushing back towards the window with the packet of cigarettes still clutched in her hand. “Oh my,” she pressed her empty hand to her chest, “Giles, look at this.”
The man was at her side in a second, his eyes squinting to see the wisps of smoke in the air. Just as he reached the window another crack sounded and Amy, Lisa, and Giles watched as the corner of the balcony in front of them dropped several feet, the orange flicker of flames peeking into view.
Lisa’s scream instantly filled the room, her hands flying to her face in shock as the balcony crumbled in front of them, several other loud cracks echoing through the air.
“Everyone, quick—”
Giles started to speak, but another ear-splitting crack stole his words for the second time and Lisa’s scream reached a crescendo as one side of the room started to tilt down toward the ground.
“The supports are giving way!” Charles, the elderly man, finally joined the discussion, helping his wife up from the chair as he moved. “We need to get out of here now.”
Amy didn’t need to be told twice, quickly pulling James back from the corner of the room that was now sloping down at an angle. Lisa was in a state of panic, the other waitress and Giles frantically trying to drag her back from the edge of the room, away from the windows that were starting to crack with the sudden movements of the room.
A horrible sound like metal scraping against metal filled the room, even louder than the screams coming from Lisa as the most offensive crack yet shook through the room and the floor started to splinter under foot. Amy pushed James as quickly as she could, trying to force him up the sudden incline that was now in the room.
The elderly couple were shuffling towards the door, Mel and Sue already there as they waited for the others to reach them. Amy couldn’t believe what was happening as she started scrambling, losing her footing beneath her as the room started to lean even more heavily towards the beach below.
“Lisa!”
Giles’s shout came from behind her and Amy turned to see the waitress hanging out of the side of the building, her hands clasped in Giles’s as he desperately tried to pull her up. The other waitress looked stunned, but reached down to try an
d grab hold of her friend. Then, suddenly, another support snapped beneath the room and the whole building shook. Amy watched in horror as Alex lost her footing, her center of balance off as she moved forward in an attempt to help her friend. Instead the young waitress went plummeting over the edge, the windows shattered so suddenly. Then nothing more than an empty hole remained the side of the building.
Alex’s scream rang through the room as she fell, the sound of a body hitting the ground insulting everyone’s ears as the scream instantly stopped.
“Giles!”
Lisa was still hanging from his grip, her body now writhing in panic after watching her friend plummet to her death beneath her. Amy could see Giles was struggling to hold the young girl, that part of the room cracking and breaking apart around him, soon to give way to the ground beneath it.
“Help me!”
Lisa’s voice was desperate and frightened, her grasp on Giles’s hand slowly slipping as orange flames started to dance around her feet. The wooden flooring was splintering more with every second, the section where Giles and Lisa were trapped slowly breaking away from the rest of the room.
Amy didn’t know what to do. Her basic instincts told her to go and help Giles, but James’s hands around her waist begged her not to. The decision was made for her before Amy could begin to move forward, Lisa’s scream suddenly silenced as she lost her grip on Giles and dropped to the ground below her, joining Alex in the mess of flames.
Amy leapt forward, pushing James back towards the elderly couple and mother and daughter who had made it to the door. She had to help Giles get across to the safe part of the room; she couldn’t let herself watch him fall to his death as well.
Leaping across the cracked floorboards, several of them now sticking up at a vertical angle and revealing a view of the fire below, Amy rushed toward the man, grabbing him by the arm as he stared down at the two bodies below. She forced Giles away from the scene, both of them fighting to scramble up the varnished floor. Amy’s feet kept slipping out from beneath her, as the floor offered no traction to help her push forward.
A scraping sound came from her left as the chairs each of them had been sitting on earlier started sliding towards the gaping hole at the end of the room. Looking ahead Amy could see Mel had opened the door and was pushing her daughter through, the elderly couple just behind them.
“Go, James!” Amy shouted, watching as her son stood hovering by the open door, watching as his mother desperately tried to get back to him.
Amy knew the rest of the room would start breaking apart soon. If the supports of the building had caught fire, the flames would consume each room one by one. She had to get out of there now or she was going to be trapped in a burning building, the country club falling down around her.
“Run, James!” Amy shouted again, her son still waiting by the door despite Charles trying to pull him through with him.
Giles yelped beside Amy as he slipped, his feet giving way and his face slamming into the wooden floor below. Blood immediately started pouring from his nose as he reached for Amy, desperately trying to pull himself up. Amy strained against the man’s weight. There were just a few more feet between them and the door, though the tilt of the room was becoming more severe every second. Their safety moved further and further from reach with each passing minute. She didn’t know if Giles’s weight would end their chances of survival.
“James!” Amy screamed once more as a bang sounded below them, the floor dropping several inches where she stood. Amy could feel the heat of the fire raging below her as she desperately reached up, trying to find anything to grab onto to hoist herself back up.
The varnished wooden floor dropped again, removing James from her line of sight and Amy became filled with desperation. Panic started to flood her veins and the idea that she might not escape threatened to enter her mind. She felt corners of the now-jagged floorboards scratching at her bare skin as she tried to find some sort of leverage, anything she could use to climb out of the pit she was sinking into. More cracks started to echo around the room, screams of other people filling the air along with her own.
Suddenly, Amy heard James’s scream. The frightened cry of her five-year-old boy. With a loud bang the whole country club shook and the floor beneath her completely gave way.
Chapter 7
“Cut!”
“Dude, what the hell? We can’t just cut out here, it could be hours before they come back to the surface!”
“Sorry Andy, the screen’s cut out. I don’t think the camera was even working then.”
“What? It’s fully charged, isn’t it?” Andy Garcia, three-time award-winning underwater cinematographer swam back towards the main boat and hoisted his DMSC H20 underwater camera up onto the decking before pulling himself up alongside it. He’d already had a long day in the water, chasing the perfect camera angles and once-in-a-lifetime shots that made him so famous in the underwater filming world. For the equipment to cut out just as he was filming what he’d waited all day for was heart-breaking.
“What’s wrong with it, Brett?” Andy tugged the cap of his wetsuit down, revealing blond hair that poked out from underneath the black, rubber fabric.
“I’m not sure,” Brett Matthews, Andy’s closest friend and lifetime partner in cinematography, was bent over the monitors, tapping each one on the side in an attempt to get a picture. “Even the cameras under the boat have cut out; we’re not getting a feed from any of them.”
“You sure it’s the cameras then?” Andy asked, “Looks like it could be a problem with this rig.”
“Yeah maybe,” Brett tapped on the side of the monitors again, “but either way you’re not getting back in the water until we’ve figured it out.”
Andy sighed and headed inside to change out of his wetsuit. He hated being kept out of the water, especially at a time like this when the whale sharks were feeding close to the surface and the sun was slowly setting over the horizon. It was a beautiful scene, the gentle giants of the sea inhaling hundreds of gallons of water with one gulp, filling their stomachs with tiny plankton before disappearing back down to the deep. Andy knew they might have to wait days until the boat was in the right place again for a feeding frenzy and he hated missing out on footage like that.
After spending most of his life at sea, Andy felt more comfortable in the water than he did on land. His wife and children didn’t like it, but he still spent eight months out of the year on his boat The Mako, tearing across the world’s oceans filming sharks, whales, dolphins, and anything else he could point his camera at.
This particular jaunt had him just off the continental shelf of the central west coast of Australia, in an area called Ningaloo Reef. It was a popular coral spawning ground so every year proved to be a great spot for the whale sharks, an abundant supply of plankton and small fish in the water. Andy, Brett, and the rest of their small team had been offshore for just over a month now, but Andy knew the sharks would be moving along soon enough, their migration patterns taking them north west through the Christmas Islands and along the coast of Singapore. It was a dangerous journey for the sharks, which Andy was aware of. Each year fewer and fewer of the gentle giants returned to Ningaloo Reef, the shark finning culture in Asia still a common and deadly trade.
He tried not to think about it too much while diving. He was happiest in the water and knew he needed to just focus on that feeling. Thinking about everything that was happening to the planet was a depressing hobby, the effects of the human population clearer every single day.
“What’s the verdict?”
As Andy emerged from inside The Mako, he could see Brett was still fiddling with the camera equipment. Pablo, one of the trainee guys they’d brought on this short voyage, was by his side, handing Brett various pieces of equipment when he asked for them.
“No luck,” Brett shook his head, “I’m going to have to reboot the whole system manually, I think. Might take a while.”
“Great,” Andy replied sarcastically,
“I’ll go ask Lucas to start on some food then.”
Making his way back inside and down to his boat’s small kitchen, Andy poked his head in at the other two members of his crew. Both Cory and Bryan were fast asleep, the two of them working the nightshift on the boat while the other four slept.
Like Pablo and Lucas, Cory was a trainee they’d brought on the short trip. This was a perfect opportunity for the young boys to learn the ropes, getting comfortable with everything from filming to fixing equipment to cleaning the boat and cooking the meals, much like Lucas was now. Bryan was another experienced member of the team though, a marine biologist who often accompanied Andy on his trips to carry out research and work out a way to protect the many animals of the oceans. It was a good group and Andy knew he would be sad when they had to return to shore.
“Lucas!” Andy called out the younger boy’s name, making him jump as he looked up from the book he was reading. “How’s it going in here? Time to make a start on those salmon, I reckon.”