They had heard gulls, shrieking and crying, all the way from Manhattan Island, sounding like demented souls condemned to fly the skies for eternity. Now the birds started to come closer, gathering above the raft, begin-ning to swoop toward the six friends.
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It was Lori Quint who noticed them first. “The birds is coming,” she cried.
Doc glanced at her, as though he were about to correct her grammar, as he sometimes did. But she shouted again, “The birds is coming.” His face wrinkled, as though he were trying to recall something half-forgotten, but he shook his head and let it pass.
The threatening gulls had fifteen-foot wingspans and nine-inch beaks like hooked brass. But Jak pulled out his trusty .357 and blasted off at them. The boom of the handgun was flat and menacing in the open sea and loud enough to scare the birds away. One of their number was left behind, flapping its broken wing, bleeding, in the water fifty yards off. As the six watched its death throes, something came up from beneath it, with jaws as big as a dragline excavator, and sucked the gull down.
Krysty stood up, mopping sweat from her forehead. “Gaia! I’m starting to stink like a Texas gaudy whore at three in the morning. Gotta face it, Ryan, we’re stuck here. We have to start paddling this clumsy mother to that beach.”
She shaded her eyes with her hand, irritably pushing back the long hair that seemed to want to press against her face. Far ahead, just a blur on the horizon, her keen sight could make out something strange. It looked as if the land were creeping in, almost meeting in the middle. She couldn’t make out whether there was a gap there or not. Krysty called to Doc, drawing his attention to it.
“Should be the plainest of sailing out yonder. Nothing beyond the Narrows. If there’d been an offshore wind, I feared a little that we might be carried the whole way to France.”
By now they were all standing together in the center of the raft. During the time they’d been on their makeshift
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craft, they’d all learned caution, finding that a sudden movement to one side or the other would make it appall-ingly unstable.
“Lift me, lover,” Krysty said.
“What? Why do… ? Ah, I get it. Give you height to look ahead.”
“Right. Bend down.”
Ryan stooped, dipping his head. Krysty, helped by J.B., swung a leg over his back and settled herself astride his neck, tightening her thighs. She tucked her legs under his arms, locking her boots in the middle of his back.
“Now,” she said.
Though the girl weighed in at a muscular 150 pounds, Ryan lifted her in the air without any noticeable effort. He steadied her with his hands on her legs and balanced himself against the pitching of the raft.
“Try and… Yeah, that’s…” Krysty then fell silent. Eventually she tapped Ryan on the head as a sign to let her down again.
“What d’you see?” he asked her.
There was a worried expression on the girl’s face. “Not good, friends,” she said. “Looks like there’s been some bastard great upheaval that’s blocked off most the water. Brought up the floor of the ocean, back in the long win-ter. This isn’t open sea no more, Doc.”
“What? You mean it’s a kind of lake? No way past for us?”
“Can’t see it. Look at the water around us now. It hardly moves and has a kind of skin on top, like a sort of scum.”
It was true.
Though the sea still rocked with an oily swell, they had totally lost any feeling of forward momentum. They were becalmed.
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krysty was singing quietly to herself, her pure voice the only sound in the stillness.
“A maid again, I ne’er will be, Till peaches grow on a cherry tree.”
Doc smiled across at her. “I haven’t heard that tune in… I guess a coupla hundred years. There’s a damned odd thought. It’s lovely. You learn that from your kin back in… What was the ville called?”
“Harmony. Herb Lanning the blacksmith knew lots of real old songs. Way prechill. It was his son, Carl, who plucked my cherry. That’s when I learned the words.”