Chapter 62

Time: Sunday, March 3, 2019 12:24 PM

Carla estimated they had come almost a kilometer into the deep forest, with perhaps two kilometers to go before reaching their intended rendezvous point at the river. Parni was leading her spear team at the point of the party, followed by Amy and Margaret who were on either side of Sandra and helping her with the breakneck pace of the travel. Behind these three was Thara, who in her former life played softball at the University and was their best team member for throwing rocks. Carla and Tom walked on the left and right sides of the main group. They were the group’s armed escort and primary defense against an attack from the side or rear.

In normal times, Carla would never dream of fast-walking through the forest like this. But the area seemed preternaturally quiet. Even the trees seemed to be bracing for what has about to happen. Carla scanned the high branches ahead of them, her mind super alert from her adrenaline. They were traveling much too fast to give the canopy adequate inspection before passing under it. Carla prayed that Tom’s and her intuitions were correct and that the cats were hunkering down somewhere else.

“Two minutes,” Tom called out from the other side of the party. “Carla, Sandra, how about over there?” He pointed to a small alcove that was fortuitously sheltered by thick brush and several large trees. Carla nodded and began steering the group without even bothering to check with Sandra. This shelter looked far better than anything they had seen so far. Carla felt a strong sense of relief for the find, that is until she and Tom led the way into the alcove. To their left perhaps ten meters away a boar and sow were lying huddled close together.

Both animals grunted warning sounds but amazingly they neither fled nor charged. Carla stared at the beasts with Tom by her side as the rest of their party filed into the alcove and moved to the right opposite side.

“I don’t believe it,” whispered Sachi. She had held her spear out as a warning to the animals, and was amazed to see them ignoring her.

Tom nodded and whispered back, “Peaceful co-existence. I’ve heard of things like this happening before on Earth, animals putting aside their differences when disasters strike.”

The group was soon sitting at the opposite end of the alcove. Suvarna, Tom, Tajana, Sachi, Carla, and Parni sat in a semicircle facing the pigs, and the remaining four women were behind them.

“How long do we have?” whispered Suvarna.

Tom looked at his watch. “Less than a minute I think. Why don’t we follow the critters’ advice and get down low to the ground?”

The group got very low to the ground. The moment was so quiet they could hear themselves breathing. Their companions in the alcove would occasionally give deep grunts, but they continued not to move.

“Tom?” whispered Tajana as she nudged his ribs with her left elbow.

“Hmmm?”

“Back on Earth, how long did the treaty last?”

“What?”

“I heard you mention to Sachi, about predators and prey calling a treaty when there’s a forest fire or something. But how long does the treaty last once the fire is out?”

Tom was staring into the boar’s eyes as Tajana spoke, and the boar was glaring right back at him. “Uh, yeah...” he mumbled. Before he could speak further, the time turned to a few seconds after 12:27 PM, and the storm broke with shattering explosions of thunder.

At the central island.

As expected, all was quiet inside the upper level of the boathouse. Jada had noticed the effect the afternoon of her arrival. Once all the doors were closed, absolutely all outside noise was blocked. But light could still pass freely though the transparent partition wall that separated the upper and lower levels of the boathouse, and what Jada saw now make her gasp.

The sky had gone crazy! Dozens of well-defined spirals contracted into tornados, dropping from above, fast spinning vortexes of dark gray smoke that thinned and elongated as they descending from the sky. And a mountain of water was rising from the river, incredibly fast! Within seconds the lower level of the boathouse was inundated with a deep swirling mass of what Jada assumed to be near freezing water. The water quickly filled the lower chamber and then began to rise against their partition wall.

“So fast!” thought Madison in amazement. The water was soon reaching the top of their wall. The river surface was now at least four meters above their heads. Madison had an insane flashback of a trip to Asia her family had taken when Madison was eight years old. They had visited the Churaumi aquarium on the western edge of Okinawa, and Madison remembered staring in disbelief at giant whale sharks swimming on the other side of a vast underground viewing wall.

And now it was happening again! Several very large fish had entered the lower level area of the boathouse, including one beast that looked like ... Madison gasped in astonishment. The creature whipped its elongated neck and pressed its head against the partition, staring eye-to-eye with a frozen Madison for a moment. It tried to bite her with a jaw filled with wickedly sharp looking teeth, and then in frustration it left the boathouse with one great twist of its body and swish of its tail and flippers. Madison semi-shouted in a hoarse whisper, “A Loch Ness monster?! Did I really see that?!”

“Our island!” Abit exclaimed, momentarily forgetting the sea monster. “It must be under water!” She ran to the back windows of the boathouse and looked out. “No, my gosh, no it’s not! How is this possible?!”

The five women ran to the side windows. For a long moment they stared in silence, trying to make sense out of what their eyes were telling them. Jada finally decided the scene reminded her of the parting of the Red Sea in the old “Ten Commandments” movie. The water was up four to five meters above the surface of the island, but it was frothy and not coming over the land area, as if it were held back or repelled by some invisible wall.

Mandy moved to a control and turned the ceiling to 100% transparency, and then her jaw dropped. The sky above them was a crazy mix of spinning yellow spirals and dark gray funnels. The women gasped and stared at each other. The scene outside was beyond comprehension.

Time: Sunday, March 3, 2019 1 PM

A gentle but persistent hand was shaking Mark’s shoulder near his neck. Mark opened his eyes and saw his wife Toshi standing in front of him requesting eye contact. He linked immediately. Toshi’s mind was in an unusual state, genuine fears and concerns mingled with a surface veneer of amusement.

With their advanced linking abilities, Toshi shared her visual cortex with her husband. Mark saw himself through Toshi’s eyes. Toshi was grinning because Mark’s hand had come up and cupped the underside of Hannah’s breast after they had both fallen asleep on the recliner.

Toshi smiled as Mark hastily withdrew his hand. “I was only teasing! And besides, you are not my child, and Hannah is not a cookie jar!”

“Uh, yeah...”

Toshi finished the playful thought. “Seriously, Mark. Hannah is a beautiful person, inside and out, and I can see how pretty you think she is. I have no objections if you want to hold her.”

Mark grinned and thought back. “She is lovely, but I was just trying to console her.”

“I know. It looks as if you did a good job too. I’m glad.” Toshi gave a mental sigh and switched gears. “Can you untangle yourself? Fatima asked me to find you. The census counter just dropped again. It’s now 009:081.”

“Oh hell ... Yes, of course.”

Mark tried to rise without disturbing Hannah but was unsuccessful. Toshi delinked and then explained verbally to her what was going on. “And the storm Charles and Lynn were expecting broke about forty minutes ago. It’s massive. The underworld is filled with tornados right now, perhaps a hundred of them.”

Hannah nodded and needed no further explanation. She stood up and smoothed out her skirt that was bunched near her waist, and then noticed both she and Mark were barefoot. Hannah looked at Toshi sheepishly and linked.

“Mark was a perfect gentleman with me!”

“I know. Hannah, relax!”

“This is the first time I’ve fallen asleep with a man!”

Toshi grinned. “Did you enjoy it?”

“Yes! But...” Hannah grinned back as she saw the playfulness in Toshi’s mind. There was no jealousy at all. “Thank you,” she thought quietly right before she delinked. The three of them then headed to the library.

Mark sat the console and began typing as Hannah entered a conference call already in progress. Everyone except Jada’s team was on the bridge, including Charles and Lynn and Aggie’s and Emily’s teams out searching Red Mall. After a moment Mark announced, “It’s the same as early this morning, another two IDs from Party #1, IDs 138 and 139. They’re not longer in the job file.”

There were several sad sighs of relief over the bridge. Fatima summed up their feelings. “So it appears Jada’s team and the remaining members of Party #2 are successfully surviving the storm.”

“Perhaps Party #2 is not even in the underground world,” replied Frida who was with Emily in The Wilderness. “We never had any clear evidence they ever went down there.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” replied Lynn. “Madison thought some of the kitchenware and some other supplies might have been missing from the entrance rooms here. The problem was the place is so loaded with supplies, it was difficult to be certain. Wow!”

Mark’s voice, “Wow what?”

“I think a tornado just ran across the window right in front of me and Charles. It was impressive!”

Fatima asked, “Can anything survive out there? Is the world being destroyed?”

Charles locked eyes with Lynn for a moment and then he answered, “We’re both hoping the world is okay, but it’s tough to tell now with all the debris in the air. The highlands are getting blasted, at least here they are. But the forest, we don’t know. Jada might be okay if she’s hunkered down somewhere near the river.”

“For all we know,” replied Frida, “perhaps Jada is not in the underworld now either.”

Aggie switched topics and commented on Mark’s original report. “Another pair of deaths! What could these Red Mall people be doing that’s so dangerous?”

Mark knew it was a rhetorical question. “Any progress, Aggie?”

“Some. It’s in the mission log. There are several paths that need investigating, but the portal types are suggestive of one-way passages. We’re mapping them for Emily’s team to check out tomorrow.”

Emily replied from her position in The Wilderness. “The rate that these people are dying, tomorrow might be too late. The previous pair died what, ten hours ago? And now there are only six people left. Fatima, can I pull a double shift and keep searching after sundown? I’d like to ask for volunteers.”

Fatima felt stricken with a conflict of interest. She was still hopeful her dear friend Husna was among the six remaining survivors, and yet her first duty was to balance the value of the search and rescue with the safety of the away teams. She would not have them searching while exhausted and more likely to make a fatal mistake. “Emily,” Fatima answered, “let me consider that for a while. For now plan on returning home as scheduled.”

Emily acknowledged over the phone. “Well, okay. But that’ll only give us about another two hours of search time before we have to start heading back.”

“I know.”

Aggie spoke up. “Fatima? A compromise might be to let us all camp out at Water Hole #1 for the night. I’m asking for a show of hands ... Everybody here is willing.”

“For my group too,” Emily added hopefully.

The proposal seemed reasonable and Fatima accepted the idea. “All right, agreed. Emily, Aggie, use your judgment. You can search into the evening, but make sure everyone gets a good night’s sleep before starting out tomorrow. And be sure not to deviate from mission standards. We’ve spent a lot of time assessing the risks. I believe our current rules are correct.”

“Yeah, agreed,” replied Emily. “I don’t want to be responsible for anyone getting hurt either. Thanks for letting us camp out tonight.”

The call ended a moment later. Hannah decided to return to work at the Hilton, and Mark got into a long chat with Charles and Lynn. Lynn made a comment that the outside reminded her a bit of the Wizard of Oz movie. In brief moments of partial clearing, she could swear she could see large trees being uprooted from the land and sucked up into the sky.