Rachel writhed in my grip, trying to break free. “No!” she screamed.
I glanced back the way I’d come. The buzzing sounds were getting closer, but I still couldn’t see the source. That was good. It meant we still had time to hide.
“Hold your breath!”
“I don’t want—”
I jumped, and the water swallowed Rachel’s objections. It was dark below the surface, but blissfully warm. My jacket, boots, and clothes weighed us down as they soaked up water. Rachel’s arms locked around me, pinning one of my arms in place and making things even worse, but I was a good swimmer. I kicked hard and used my free hand to help. I broke the surface beside the docks a moment later. Waves tossed us around, smacking us into the wooden pillars and threatening to sweep us under the walkway.
Akron was already there, watching us from the shadows. “Get under here!” he hissed. Just because Screechers were heat-seeking didn’t mean they couldn’t see in the visible spectrum, too.
I grabbed the nearest pillar and helped Rachel swim under the docks before following myself. I almost smashed my head on the beams as a wave picked me up, but I pushed off the beams and drifted through in the trough behind the next wave.
Everyone else was already there. We trod water as quietly as we could, holding onto the pillars for support and struggling against the push and pull of the choppy water. Waves slapped the pillars and splashed up against the bottom of the docks with a clug-clugging sound that made me think of waves lapping the sides of Richard’s boat when we went fishing on Calaveras lake. Back then there’d been a dark cloud of impending doom hovering over my head, but now those seemed like happy memories.
A wave grabbed Rachel and ripped her away from her pillar. She cried out in alarm. I managed to grab her and pull her back. Akron shushed her with a dark look.
If it was this wavy inside a harbor on the lake, what was it like on the open ocean? I hoped Akron’s submarine wouldn’t be affected by the tidal waves, but I was getting ahead of myself. At this rate we might not even make it there before those waves arrived and drowned us like bugs in a toilet.
Explosions boomed in the distance, cutting off my thoughts in mid-stream.
“What was that?” Kate whispered.
I hoped that hadn’t been the sound of OneZero getting blasted out of the sky.
The buzzing sounds grew close enough that we could hear them through the slapping and clugging of waves against the docks.
Everyone watched the sky warily through the boards over our heads, but I watched the parallel lines of light shining between those boards as they danced across the water. A shadow flickered through those bars of light—followed by another, and then a third. The buzzing sounds stopped directly above us.
So much for hiding our heat signatures in the water. I cringed, and braced myself for a hail of bullets to come splintering through the docks.
Chapter 62
Something came roaring toward us with a sound like a jet fighter. The staccato roar of cannon fire tore through the air, followed by clattering debris thumping on the docks and splashing into the water around us. The next thing I heard was a streaking roar, followed by a titanic boom. A bright flash of light illuminated the underside of the docks, and I poked my head out to see one of the disc-shaped aircraft gushing fire as it tumbled into the harbor. A massive splash followed, and the flaming debris lay floating on the surface.
I deduced what must have happened. OneZero had seen that we were in trouble, and she’d come back to help. She’d shot down the smaller Screechers hovering above us only to get shot down herself.
The distant roaring of Screecher aircraft faded into the distance, and silence fell. Was it possible that the ones OneZero had shot down above our heads hadn’t communicated our location to any of the others?
We stayed where we were for a few more minutes, none of us daring to talk or come out of hiding. Water struck the docks, and flames crackled amidst the flotsam of OneZero’s aircraft.
How much longer did we have before real tidal waves came and swept us away?
I checked my watch, but the hands were frozen at 12:34. It wasn’t waterproof. For all we knew we only had a few minutes left. Maybe that was the real reason the Screechers had left. They knew we were goners anyway.
“They’re gone. We have to go!” I said to Akron. “Where’s your submarine?”
He nodded over my shoulder. “Down at the end of the docks. We should swim there to avoid detection.”
“I can’t!” Rachel said.
“I don’t think I can either,” Deborah said. “I’m too heavy with all of these clothes.”
“We’ll have to risk running down the docks,” I said.
Akron made an irritated noise in the back of his throat. “We’d better be fast!”
I helped Rachel duck out from under the docks, but I could see that she was struggling. “Get on my back,” I said. She wrapped her arms around my neck, and I pushed off from the pillar, swimming harder than I ever had in my life. I began to sink almost immediately, but thankfully we weren’t far from the edge of the harbor. The water was high. I waited for a wave to buoy us up, and then grabbed the bottom rung of a steel railing, but I was too tired and too heavy with Rachel on my back to pull us out.
“Grab on!” I said. My arms were shaking, and my water-logged gloves were slipping on the railing. Rachel grabbed it and pulled herself up easily. Alex and Harry reached the railings and pulled themselves out next. Akron and I followed. Kate and Deborah were still struggling to get out when Harry and I reached over to help them up.
We took a moment to catch our breath, shivering and dripping all over the sidewalk beside the railings.
Akron pulled his sweater off and dropped it at his feet with a wet slap. Then he clapped his hands together to get our attention. “Let’s go!” Not waiting for us to reply, he took off at a run, heading back to the docks.
I scooped Rachel up into my arms and ran after him with the others. Harry lagged behind, trying to help Deborah take off her water-logged jacket. The zipper was stuck.
Our feet sounded like thunder on the wooden boards, but we had to slow down, because waves were washing clear over the dock now. If one of us fell into the churning cauldron below, I had a bad feeling we wouldn’t make it out. I tightened my grip on Rachel, and she hugged my neck painfully tight.
A faint buzzing noise reached my ears through the splashing roar of the waves.
“They’re coming!” Rachel said.
My heart leapt and a surge of adrenaline stabbed through me. I glanced back to see three glinting discs racing after us. They were the smaller ones, but it didn’t matter. Even one of them would have been enough to take us all out.
“Run!” I screamed to Harry.
He turned to look over his shoulder. He and Deborah were still bringing up the rear.
Bullets whistled through the air, followed by the sound of faint explosions. Rachel whimpered, and I cringed, half expecting the dock to collapse under my feet as I ran. It shuddered violently with heavy footfalls. There was no way they belonged to Harry or Deborah. A silvery blur went racing by me, catching up with Akron in seconds. I heard the familiar babble of Spanish as the two of them spoke in rushed voices.
A grin curved my lips, and I pushed on, running faster to catch up. Somehow OneZero had made it out of that wreckage alive. That’s what those explosions had been. She’d taken care of the Screechers behind us.
I pulled alongside Kate, gasping for air. She glanced at me and flashed a tight smile. The end of the dock was just ahead of us. We were going to make it.
Just as I thought that, a dark shadow fell over us and cast everything in a dim, bloody red hue. The rogue had arrived.
Chapter 63
A dark circle rimmed with orange fire blotted out the sun. Akron and OneZero waved us over from a gangway at the end of the docks. It led to the top of what might have been a submarine, but it was hard to tell with the waves washing over the gangway. Ka
te and I were the first to arrive. I turned to see Alex and Celine lagging behind, waiting for her parents to catch up.
“Come on!” I waved to them, and then hurried down the gangway to Akron’s sub. He had the hatch open by the time we arrived. Waves sloshed over the sides and poured into the sub.
“Faster! We’re taking on water!” Akron said. OneZero was already inside. Kate climbed down first, then I passed Rachel to her and Akron, and hurried down the ladder myself.
“Is Alex there yet?” Kate called up to me.
I stopped with my head just above the hatch, scanning the docks. Alex and Celine were leaning over the side, and I couldn’t see either Harry or Deborah. I deduced that one or both of them must have fallen in. As I watched, a cresting wave took Alex and Celine over next. My heart leapt into my throat, and I started back up the ladder. Just as I did so, the hatch swung down over my head, forcing me to duck. It slammed shut with a resounding boom.
I rounded on Akron, expecting to find him sharing the ladder with me, but he wasn’t there. Trying to open the hatch, I found it locked. I banged on it and yelled down to him. “Open the fucking hatch, Akron!”
“Where is he?” Kate screamed.
“He got swept off the docks! We have to go back for him!”
The submarine’s engine thrummed to life. Water sloshed around below us, and the submarine rocked violently in the waves.
“Akron!” Kate screamed. I jumped down the ladder and landed with a splash beside her. Rachel stared at us with huge eyes.
Kate and I ran to the front of the submarine, racing past row upon row of seats. We emerged inside a bubble-shaped glass canopy. Akron stood there with OneZero, looking out into the murky depths of the harbor. Flat-screens with readouts and gauges cluttered the walls along with a scattering of analog gauges below them.
“They didn’t make it!” I said.
Akron turned to me, his expression grave. OneZero just looked at us, her dark eyes boring holes into my head.
“You have to go back!” Kate said.
Akron shook his head. “If we go back now, we’re all dead.”
Horror and anger warred inside of me. They’d been right there, just a dozen yards behind us! “We can’t leave them!”
Akron gave no reply. Instead, he walked silently over to one of the flat-screens on the wall, and spent a moment tapping options on the display.
“Are you listening?” Kate said, and began pounding on his back with her fists.
OneZero pulled her away, and Akron turned aside so that we could see the display. It showed the mouth of the harbor, dead ahead of us, and a wall of water rising swiftly beyond that, obscuring the horizon.
“That’s the view from the periscope,” Akron said.
The wave couldn’t have been more than a minute away.
“Turn the periscope around,” I demanded. “Show me the docks!”
Akron did so, and I saw that the dock was gone, completely submerged by the rising tide. I also saw a big Screecher disc hovering over the roiling harbor, trailing arms like tentacles. As I watched, the gloomy red hues of the rogue eclipse brightened to gold, and I saw the Screecher aircraft pulling small, dark human shapes out of the water. I counted four in all.
Akron breathed a sigh. “At least they’re safe.”
“They’re prisoners!” I snapped; then I noticed that two of them were sagging, rag-doll limp in the Screecher’s grasp. “And we don’t even know if they’re alive!” Would Screechers even be able to perform CPR? I wondered.
Akron tapped his screen again, and the wave appeared, curling as it reached the harbor. “They stand a better chance than we do,” he said. “Find something to hold onto!”
“Can’t this thing go any deeper?” I asked. “Rachel!” I spun around to look for her, and found her standing right behind me. The ‘something’ she found to hold onto was my legs.
“If we go too deep, the wave could slam us into the bottom and crack us open!”
Kate came over and made it a group hug. I spied handholds beside the door leading to the control room where we stood. Just as I reached for one of them, OneZero ran into us from behind and sent us sprawling through the door. She landed on top of us and held us down in the sloshing water on the deck. I heard the door slam shut behind us, and then the wave hit, and my stomach lurched into my throat. The sub tumbled dizzyingly and the water inside the sub pooled over our heads every couple of seconds, water-boarding us. In between the external roar of the crashing wave and the sound of water stuffing my ears like cotton, I heard loud thunking noises ringing against the hull. Debris pelted us. The door to the control room thumped with a particularly heavy impact. I hoped it wasn’t Akron being tossed around in there. Remembering the bubble-shaped glass canopy, I winced, thinking that it wouldn’t take much to break it open. Our submarine could end up stranded, bobbing like a cork in the middle of New Orleans.
Another thunk sounded against the hull, followed by the sound of water hissing in from somewhere nearby. We wouldn’t be bobbing like a cork for much longer.
Chapter 64
OneZero let us up. We sat coughing on the deck to get the water out of our lungs. I slapped Rachel on the back in an effort to help. She was sobbing between coughs. So was Kate, but I suspected they were crying for very different reasons. My thoughts went to Alex and the Hartfords, to the sight of their limp bodies being pulled from the harbor, and I fought back tears of my own.
Akron stumbled over from the row of seats behind us. Relief washed over me. At least he hadn’t been in the control room.
“Is it over?” I asked between coughs.
Akron shook his head. “The tide is going to keep coming in for at least another hour. He stepped over us, following the hissing sound to its source. A fine spray of mist was creeping in around one of the portholes.
“It should hold,” Akron said. “I set the algorithms to keep us near the surface.”
I pushed off the floor. Kate and Rachel joined me in standing and flopped down into water-logged seats to one side of the aisle. Kate cradled Rachel in her lap, and stared vacantly out of the porthole beside her.
OneZero stood in the aisle with Akron and I. She said something to Akron in Spanish, and he replied, shaking his head.
“What?” I asked, my eyes flicking between them.
Rather than answer me, Akron walked by us to the control room door. He tried the handle, then body-checked the door, but it didn’t budge. “It’s flooded,” he said.
“So we’re stranded.”
Akron held up a hand and placed a finger to his lips. “Listen.”
I heard the thrumming of the submarine’s engines, and felt their vibrations rippling through the deck.
“We’re still moving,” Akron said. He went to sit in one of the rows of seating.
“You’re not going to do anything?” I demanded.
“I don’t have to,” he replied. “If we’re moving, it means everything is still working. It’s self-skippering, remember? The sub knows where to go and how to get there with or without someone in the control room.”
“And what if it doesn’t?”
“If there were any major system failures, the engines would have shut off.”
OneZero sat across the aisle from Akron, and I did the same opposite my wife. I reached for her hand and gave it a reassuring squeeze. As the shock wore off, our wet clothes took their toll, and we began to shiver. I moved to Kate and Rachel’s side of the sub and the three of us held each other for warmth.
“We’re lucky the water is still warm,” Akron said. “We’re surrounded by it, so we should be okay.”
“How long before we reach Haven?” I asked.
“Five or six hours,” Akron said.
I blinked in shock. “That long?”
“Submarines are not fast. This one can’t make more than thirty knots, and that was before the control room was flooded. Haven is over a hundred and fifty miles away.”
“We just left him,”
Kate said slowly.
I glanced at her, and hugged her shoulders a little harder. “We’ll find him.”
“No, you won’t,” Akron said.
My gaze snapped to him. “What?”
“You got your wish. You’re on your way to Haven, but for the safety of everyone there, none of you can leave—especially not on some fool crusade to rescue prisoners from the Screechers.”
I scowled and jerked my chin at him. “What about you? You left.”
“That was during the Exodus. Now that the Screechers have established their border and mostly evacuated the South, there’s no chaos for us to get lost in. We can’t just blend in with the crowds. You saw what happened back at the harbor. They were all over us. As soon as OneZero took out one group, another one came. You’d be captured in seconds if you went back.”
“What does it matter? Alex and the Hartfords have already been captured.”
“Yes, but they’ve never been to Haven. And they can’t lead the Screechers to this submarine to show them how to use it to reach the colony. But if we’re lucky, the Screechers that picked the others up won’t know about Haven and won’t even bother to question them. They’ll probably just deport them. If you mysteriously appear days or weeks later in the middle of New Orleans, the same thing won’t be true. They’ll wonder how you got there.”
“We’re not leaving our son behind,” Kate said. “You can’t make us do that.”
“Why not?” Akron asked. “You made me leave my sons behind. And unlike your son, I don’t have the hope of maybe bumping into them ten years from now when we emerge from Haven. My kids will be on Mars, and I’ll have no way to reach them.”
Neither Kate nor I had anything to say to that. Silence fell but for the sound of water sloshing on the floor and hissing in around the porthole.
OneZero said something in a quiet voice, and Akron replied. They spoke at length for the next half an hour, and I listened with interest, watching Akron’s expression become increasingly awed.
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