Chapter 3

'The Little White Cloud That Cried'

The cyclone (named Imogen) struck them at two AM on the Saturday morning. After starting near Vanuatu, building up slowly for a week it grew in strength over the Solomon Islands and then New Guinea's, Port Moresby, almost completely rasing the place. Then it hit Thursday Island and The Torres Strait Islands, their worst in living memory, followed the coast then directly over us to the inland mainland. In house (volcano) were Helen, Rachael, Tilly and Bob, as snug as bugs in a rug. Power was on the wave generator that Bob had planted firmly on the lower cave wall, opposite the cave mouth. Bob had stolen that idea from an ABC TV science programme, which only gave the rudiments of the idea, but it was easy enough for him to read the invisible fine print.

Bob seriously pissed off Rachael, (he finds he's good at that, ) as he kept doing a coitus interruptus to check the operating amperage levels, which he had ran directly through the beer fridge as a control. The only reason they were screwing was because they were bored and they had been at it for over four hours. <Surely she's becoming sore>, he thought but did not voice. His final decision was, okay for a cyclone but seriously useless for normal weather, fixed on the lee side of the island anyway. He decided that he would go looking for a more permanent tidal current.

Next time he'll try placing it in the shallow-water current he thought, as it carries the stingers, and it never stops, although the distance from the island makes that a might impractical. Bob hadn't a clue how to make it hover in forty feet of water, always pointing in the one direction. Especially with it, and him positioning it, not being paralysed by the mass of stingers ten months of the year.

There's a thought, the current doesn't stop carrying the stingers those two months, as the current is forced offshore by the large influx of fresh water from the wet. If you had thought the sea channel, it's out, as it's too shallow but if the glass bottom boats to the reef hadn't needed to use it ... or just maybe the current is not on the dead top surface ... he'll call it a work in progress.

Bob had wound the long distance radio aerial down during the storm, so during the eye Helen and he wound it back up to operating height thinking they'd have at most two hours, and little Jocelyn Kershaw was desperately trying to reach him on a jury rigged aerial. He realised it could be a con to get him into her pants but it would be taking it a bit far, to kill your parents to make it appear legit. She was on the beach, there is nowhere for her to go and nowhere to hide, which is why Helen went with him, and if they were told with a true finality that they would be killed in the attempt, they would have run even faster to the boat. They're loyal to their friends to any extent that they must go and death held no mysteries or fears to them.

He knew it's why he and Helen were both riding the massive swell out of the cave, risking their lives to hit the nadir of the surge to get out through the cave mouth. The boat was moored in the centre of the cave riding up and down a sort of dragging anchor arrangement bolted to the walls which kept it away from the walls held by ropes on two sides. As soon as it was high enough on the storm surge they jumped in and undid the mooring ropes except for the one against the front wall near the opening and starting the motor kept the prow aimed at the cave mouth then let the remaining mooring line go and jumped like a horse at a starting gate through the mouth on the next out wave. They were out and in the clear; so far, so good.

They headed as directly to the beach and as quickly as this putt, putt, was physical capable. A speedboat, it's not. The wind driven tide is over the top of the wharf, the actual waves way over that again so he aimed it directly in to the middle of the now non-existent beach, surfing the incoming combers, once even in and out of a rolling pipeline. The waves are currently being driven way over the top of where Helen's café used to be, at the moment looking like deep water.

Bob saw a head or maybe a long haired coconut, move in the water, this is a great con if it was one, as she now seems to be also putting over that she is drowning. "Right there, blonde hair floating," Bob shouted. The roar of the storm and rush of the wind drowned out most of the words but he got his meaning across. A sudden calm let the two stroke motor and rudder have its way for a short time. Helen caught her hair and Bob turned the tiller to retreat on an incredible series of wave's backwashes, using the boat's hull shape to carom between the tops of palm trees which hadn't been uprooted. He couldn't have fought those patches of agitating wash if he had wanted to, all he was trying to do at that moment was stopping the boat going sideways and flipping.

The old tub had never gone this fast before and it resembled a ride on a jet boat Bob had once been a passenger on in New Zealand's South Island rapids. Now however, Bob damned near crapped himself and it was all he could do to stop the old tub from turning turtle, forget trying to help the girls (that was a loose metaphor for Helen, don't take it too seriously). The boat was almost back to the cave within fifteen minutes, usually most of an hour at best, and the wind was dramatically rising again to full force before he could even look left or right.

Helen still held a handful of Jocelyn's hair, now detached from Jocelyn, but the naked girl was lying along the length of the boat being almost drowned by the torrential influx wall of rain. Both of them appeared to have a very short shelf life remaining, if left unassisted. <Yeah, me too, I guess, me too, though I'm not as important as my friends>, Bob thought.

His mind went into survival mode in which he had been in any amount of times over the years. You stop thinking of yourself as you, and only think of the next movement, tactic, that has got to be made or the only other option is death. He has played chess and he seems to go into survival mode each time he plays. His mind isn't on what he has got to do next but what he has to do if a set series of circumstances occur. In learning to programme a computer in the 1970's as he did, the word IF was paramount. IF something happened, you have a series of events planned in your mind (your series of cards to be read) to happen. There are a thousand first IFS, and the first IF to occur might be number eight hundred and three in that line so he'd do a certain thing, where then there is another thousand IFS. Of course the next occurrence is always the thousand and first possibility Bob hadn't considered, so you do what you have to do next to survive.

His first priority for his whole life had been to his tribe, they are the people he had attached himself to. In his very young years he had walked into a hail of bullets to remove Mother Harrison from a piece of stupidity she had placed herself into. In his very young mind at the time, IF he was hit by a bullet was card number seventeen thousand in that thousand IF series of cards, being immortal as any ten year old is. Picking up baby Emmeline while her supposed father went apeshit with a Japanese war sword, after finding Mum in bed getting gang banged by eight strangers; the IF was Bob's own survival card number three thousand and saving his darling baby sister Emmeline was number one or two, swapping to the odds of her next IF survival card. The idiot was upset because Bob and Emmeline's Mum was doing what was her recognised hobby, and casual part time occupation, and Bob saving newly born Darling Emmeline, for doing what his Mum's doctors said she shouldn't do for another six weeks, left their Mum out of his computation altogether.

Bob left Darling Emmeline in some bushes in the back garden and at the age of seventeen, walked back into the house. He wasn't upset or concerned as the only important person was safe, so he took that war trophy sword off that idiot Pearson, who was systematically slicing and dicing Mum and two of the strangers, and cut him in two, through the waistline. He stepped back for a minute, calibrated the options, and then took Darling Emmeline to Mother's. Darla, who was the aging ex-prostitute in charge of the crèche, was put off by the blood covering him but looked him in the face and did exactly what she was told. He made Pearson's two parts disappear, and so another person wasn't suspected to have been on site, he left a blood trail a blind man could follow into a spot that he knew, if you didn't worry about leaches one can wash, and his then paternal namesake disappeared off the face of the earth. To confuse things even further Bob left a newborn baby's faeces filled nappy suburbs away, to confuse any followers.

IF, the racing water went that way, he would do this, number eighty. IF the disposable bloke on the tiller had to jump overboard and carry this tub on his back, that was IF number nine hundred and fifty two.

The cave mouth has suddenly become the problem again, and Bob had no time to think of anything else. The IF's ran out, and it was his brethren, his child lover and himself: either live or die.

Was it ever mentioned by anyone Bob doesn't gamble? No, not on anything. Mother Harrison once said, she thought humorously, that being a hard man in a mob like hers is a gamble; no it isn't, she was wrong. He could easily have gotten out of Viet Nam but it was Bob's safest option as Mother Harrison was being her more irrational self at the time. The Cong and facing another gentleman pointing a heavy gauge machine gun close quarters at him was the safest option. Bob saw it coming and he took the opportunity, dragging his closest thing to a friend along with him. IF they had both remained around the schizo homicidal bitch, now; that would have been a gamble.

He's about to gamble, which he's not very good at. The roof of the cave mouth was about a metre thick and the almost completely uncontrollable boat had to make it through at the nadir of the wave, which is currently bottoming out about three to four metres below that metre thickness, to reach the inside in the cave itself. And that's without hitting the roof of the cave mouth at the wave's incoming surge as the circulating tide forces them in, whether they wanted to go in or not, and then not to exacerbate the situation by colliding uncontrollably into the cave's opposite wall.

In the end run they were given no choice and it tore the complete aft of the boat off, propeller and all, and they were washed up onto the sloping wall of the inside top of the cave, all in one foul swoop almost like a helicopter rising. Helen and Bob grabbed an arm each of the girl and dove onto the usually half dry sea algae covered rock as what was left of the boat was sucked straight back down into the maelstrom. A minute later on the next incoming wave the boat returned; in very small, something like matchbox sized, pieces.

The wind had so loud a vortex that speech was not possible. A rope flew over the lip above us. Bob hadn't tried moving as there was absolutely no traction available anywhere on the thirty degree angled rock wall. He tied the rope around the unconscious naked girl while Helen stopped her falling, tugged twice on it and she was slowly dragged back up.

Bob looked at Helen and he/she was white in the face, way passed ashen, his/her shoulder looked ... wrong. He/she was very slowly sliding towards the surging water. Bob grabbed at his/her good arm and held on tight but then felt himself begin to lose traction along with his/her weight.

The rope flew towards them again and a tiny little sun bleached head peeked over the lip. Bob nodded to her, there aren't many words when you think the next will make you lose concentration. <he/she is out and a dead weight, don't think that you fool, not dead, not dead>.

The wind gust, which surged in front of the next incoming wave, had enough relieving wind pressure against their combined weight, it was like standing on a solid object, and Bob took the opportunity to slide the rope under his sibling's shoulders and he created an instant bowline knot. Bob's been trying to perfect that fucking knot for half his life and now he can do it without thinking? He's a little surprised maybe.

The next wave ran over his legs and Helen was slipping gradually in the opposite direction upwards. He who is hundred and twenty kilos heavy, they are only two miniscule bodyweight little girls. Bob suddenly found himself in an amusement park ride, dropping like a stone. It didn't drop him as far as the cave mouth so they are fully inside the cyclone again. It seemed to hesitate, <the bastard doesn't know what to do with me> the same amusement park ride back up and he could only see one of two ways out.

He was floating mid-air on the top of the water fountain and looking down at Tilly and Rachael, looking up at him in utter astonishment as he whooped like a Kookaburra as he flew through the air. They were still pulling on the rope holding Helen, with all of their tiny strengths, so Bob dived like one of those competition divers, only with nothing to push himself against he used the momentum of the water and, then flipped and landed in a neat shoulder roll, then into an uncontrolled tumble; which stung. Then into a very black room from which he couldn't see an out.

He has to say that he could remember everything about that half gainer with twist, a oncer of course and he had no wish to perform a second to earn the gold medal. He also remembered waking up with a headache that should have been on his worst enemy - please. He was also surrounded by three naked girls on his bed.

Jocelyn snores, whoa, loud, and Tilly was using his penis for a pillow, which hurt, being at just the wrong angle. Waking up with one girl on each shoulder and one on his crutch, may be a dream of perfection of others, but not Bob's, though he would concede it doesn't happen to him every day.

His head is splitting, and in a very specific spot so he recognises he's got some kind of damage. He's also busting for a leak and he doesn't want Tilly's head anywhere near his dick if he gets a piss-hard on. What do the kids say? Ewww, yuck! That's another of his least favourite things. If he could get Rachael to swap her places now with her enthusiasm for head jobs, that would be a totally different scenario.

Helen wandered in through the door and Bob whispered, "Need a piss!" He/she picked up the kid using his/her good arm, someone had practiced their Girl Guide sling making techniques on the other, and he slid his arms out from under the book stops and leapt over Jocelyn. Baaad mistake, as his head couldn't have been too firmly attached and it fell off.

He/she checked out his skull, as Bob lay pitifully moaning on the floor, like a wuss. "We're a good pair as I think we have both got concussion, so no painkillers for either of us." Helen started to laugh at his/her own disability but went ashen grey and onto the floor beside Bob, and moaned, under the misapprehension that Bob cared.

Bob went for his piss before he had to clean up a puddle though rising from the floor was problematical. Bob's invention of a self-flushing toilet is currently making a water spout with each exterior powered in-wave, so he also had a salt water, urine tainted, shower as an added bonus at the same time, to freshen him up. If you had sat on it would have been an effective bidet, though very likely dangerous on female doo-dads.