Net Force--Kill Chain by Jerome Preisler (e book reader txt) 📕

time. And the NOAA bulletins said this was just the leading edge of the surge. That its peak was still oncoming.

It was incomprehensible. He’d been through hurricanes and monsoons. He’d never experienced anything as wild and raw as this storm.

He crossed the mud as quickly as possible, his waders sucking in and squishing out, floodwater lapping around them. Then he was finally above it and onto higher ground.

As he neared the crest of the ridge, there was a booming rumble behind him. He turned to look out across the beach below, water splashing his face and eyes. The rumble went on and on. The rain and wind and darkness seemed melded together. They were like one monstrous thing.

The small hairs at the back of his neck prickling, Tai spun back around and strode inland through the ridgeline brush.

Short minutes later, he emerged on the path Mori and her boyfriend had taken their first time coming off the beach. Probably the second too. It would have been directly above them when he’d fired off his shots. It was a clear way into the forest. He didn’t pretend to be a tracker like his brother. But he thought they might stick to it initially.

He turned on his flashlight and tramped inland between the swaying maples.

Tai was about ten yards along the path when he heard a second boom from the water. The sound was so loud it was tangible. It was like a bomb going off behind him. He hurried forward, casting his flashlight down at the path. It got drier and firmer as he went along, the interwoven maple branches above him forming a roof that screened out some of the rain.

He walked another few yards, turned a slight bend. Then walked some more.

Fifteen or twenty yards in from the ridge, he halted. Suddenly immobile. His flash aimed at the ground ahead of him. The outer rim of its beam had fallen on something to his left. A hulking form. On the ground.

He angled the light onto it and blinked twice. His mouth dropped open, and a low groan escaped it.

He knew immediately what it was. Who it was.

“Kai,” he said in a low voice.

He stared down at his brother’s body in anguish. He saw the bloody destruction above the shoulders, groaned again, then clamped his teeth together hard and released a very different sound. A kind of feral growl. Between his teeth.

Time passed. Tai stood there thinking of Mori and the boyfriend. Thinking of revenge. Thinking he would find and kill them. More time passed. He stood there in a daze of horror and anger.

Then he noticed something.

The rain had let up. The wind wasn’t blowing. The air was calm and still. How could it all have stopped? All at once? The silence was unearthly. Unreal. How was it possible? He wondered how long he’d stood there without being aware of it.

Then he noticed another thing.

The air seemed thick. Heavy. He was breathing hard. Maybe it was his agitated state. He supposed it might be. He was badly shaken up. They had killed Kai. His twin. Seeing his body on the ground, what they did to his head...he couldn’t scrub the image from his eyes.

Still, he was practically panting. He just couldn’t seem to fill his lungs.

He told himself he needed to get a grip. He couldn’t let himself come apart. He inhaled and exhaled and walked on. He had almost reached the towering wired-up spruce tree where he and his brother split up. Where Kai had first found traces of their marks. The thought filled him with renewed grief and rage. He continued toward the giant tree, looking for fresh signs of their whereabouts, and then there was another boom from over the water. The loudest yet.

Tai jolted rigidly erect. His ears popped. He spun around, and his eyes widened in bewilderment.

The light atop the Big Dipper’s cabin was beaming through the trees. Blazing over him like a spotlight. Directly through the trees in a wide, solid shaft. Once again, a disconcerting sense of unreality washed over him. It made no sense. The ridge was easily thirty feet above the beach. Above the boat. The mast light couldn’t be shining straight at him.

He stared into it. The light shifted choppily. It swayed and swiveled, swung up and down, rolled left and right. He squinted...and then saw the lobster boat in its glare. Or the shadow of the boat.

It had risen up to the level of the ridge. Like it was being lifted by a humped, liquid mountain. Tai’s mouth dropped open as the wave reared up and up, mounting, the boat riding and rocking on its crest. And then the top of the wave curled in, and Big Dipper slewed down its face in the run-up, and the breaking wave crashed over it, and the herky-jerky light went out, and the roar...

It filled Tai’s ears as he turned to escape. But there was no time to go anywhere before the flood overtook him.

They held each other close and watched the wave sweep in. It smashed over the top of the ridgeline, unleashing all its riotous energy, engulfing and uprooting saplings and shrubs, instantly turning them into flotsam.

One moment, the man from the boat was running toward them on the path below, and then he wasn’t. The water ate him up as it barreled through the forest. It rushed forward and wiped out the margins of the path, lifting dirt and rocks and fallen branches and carrying them off inland. It eddied around the trees, foaming and crackling and lapping at their trunks. It rose and brewed and swirled in arterial streams, overflowing everything on the ground.

In the fork of Rhea, the mother tree, Natasha and Bryan took what refuge they could, clinging together as the flood claimed Chacagua Island.

Chapter Thirteen

Chacagua Island,

April 16, 2024

“Bry? You with me?”

“Yeah.”

Natasha waited as he slowly came out of his doze. She was stiff and cold and sore. The coarse bark had