Cruz glanced up at gathering clouds in the distance. Weird clouds. They were like a massive smoke ring miles across and miles in the air, towering over them.
One of the crewmen shouted up to him and pointed at the gathered clouds. “Benigno!”
He nodded back. “Let me worry about the weather. Just get those fish in the holds.” He knew there was no severe weather predicted for this region of ocean—and nothing had been on the satellite images this morning.
Cruz stepped back into the control house as his taciturn second mate, Matapang, entered from the far hatchway. “Mat, where’ve you been? I sent for you fifteen minutes ago.”
“Can’t just stop what I’m doing every time you call.”
“What’s going on with the port engine?”
The second mate frowned. “It’s gonna give us problems—connecting rod, I think. But it’ll hold for now.” He pointed through the windows. “Are you keeping an eye on that?”
Cruz followed his gaze toward the horizon where the clouds had suddenly turned nearly black. What appeared to be a major squall line had materialized a couple of miles away in the last few seconds. “Heavenly Father!”
The men on deck were now shouting and pointing at the looming clouds.
Cruz had never seen anything like it. It wasn’t behaving like a storm. It was behaving like a… like some sort of mini-typhoon—although there didn’t even appear to be heavy seas. It was all in the sky, as if a massive hammer were coming down onto an anvil of sea. He could actually watch the clouds circling in real time, reaching up into the stratosphere and turning blacker by the second. “What is that?”
Lightning coursed through the clouds ominously. Followed by rumbling thunder.
Matapang walked over to the far side of the bridge and looked down. “We need to release that net and get under way.”
“The hell we do! There’s four million pesos of tuna in that net.”
“Then tie it off with buoys.”
Cruz couldn’t help himself. He got right up in his second mate’s face—the man was half a head shorter than him and thinner. “Shut your mouth! We lose that net and those fish in rough seas, and I might as well not bother to make it back.”
“Your debts aren’t my debts, Benigno. You’re not going to kill us all because—”
Cruz raised his fist. “Shut your mouth, or I will shut it for you.”
The sailors on deck were all shouting now.
Cruz and Matapang glanced forward, reluctant to take their eyes off each other.
But what they saw beyond the bow made them forget everything. Somehow something colossal was rising up out of the ocean. No, that wasn’t even the way to describe it—it was as though the ocean were rising up into a vast hill, lifting up like a single great wave. And yet this wave didn’t move anywhere but up, rising into the sky as the hill began to grow into a looming cone.
Cruz crossed himself as the shadow of it fell across them all.
Matapang dropped a wrench that he’d been secretly holding behind his back, and then he ran out to the railing, where he shouted down at the crew. “Release the net! Get ready to make way!”
The sailors awoke from their stupor—staring at the impossible sight a mile off their bow—and they began scurrying around to set loose their only good net. Cruz watched their preparations with almost as much horror as what he saw unfolding in the sea ahead of them. Almost. For if truth be told, the rising mountain of ocean put the very fear of God into him. He started whispering as he clutched and kissed his crucifix.
“Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done…”
Matapang ran back into the control house. “Stop praying and start closing hatchways!”
Cruz shot a glance forward as a deep roar came to all their ears, and he immediately thought the mountain of water had started to come tumbling down onto them. But instead, the sea was starting to rush into a reverse vortex, pulling them sideways—and upward into the sky.
Lightning flashed again. Thunder boomed.
Cruz kept praying as his gaze kept following the sea up, up into the clouds. It wasn’t cresting. No, instead, it was still rising, like a volcanic cone of ocean a quarter mile across lifting upward, spinning around its center. The entire crew had stopped what they were doing again, most of them collapsing onto their knees, crossing themselves. Praying.
What was it? Cruz had never heard of anything like this in all the centuries of seafaring lore. There was a thousand-foot-tall tower of solid water, the black, swirling clouds parting to accept it.
The ocean was pouring into the sky.
And now the outer edge of that slope finally reached the San Miguel itself. The trawler started listing backward onto its stern as the angle of sea beneath it rose.
Cruz gripped the wheel. “We need to turn about! Start the engines!”
Matapang clawed his way to the windows. “They’re still trying to cut away the net!”
Cruz was past caring about his financial ruin. A bizarre tsunami unlike anything he’d ever heard of loomed in front of them, and if they didn’t turn, they’d be swamped. They’d never crest this titanic monster. They were going to slip down-wave by their stern, and Cruz knew all too well the leaks and weaknesses there. The bilge pumps would themselves be drowned, along with the engines, as the rusted stern hull caved in.
But something even stranger was happening. Rather than feeling himself falling backward, Cruz felt both himself and the ship falling forward, upward—as though he stood upside down at the edge of a great hole. A hole in the sky.
“Dear God! What’s happening?” He looked to Matapang, who was silently moving his mouth, unable to find words.
And then the San Miguel starting moving forward, “up” the face of the wave that now reached high into the sky. It was a five-thousand-foot mountain of water roaring up, into, and past the clouds.
Cruz willed his knotted hands off the tiller and clawed on handholds to reach the bridge hatchway.
Cruz looked out the hatchway behind them and could see that they were already hundreds of feet above sea level. They’d apparently been falling upward into the sky for some minutes already. He pulled the hatchway closed and rammed the bolt home. A glance to port. “Mat!”
Matapang awoke from his daze, pulled the port doorway closed.
Outside, on deck, he could see that a rising gale was rolling over them. And yet there was no wake or bow wave around the boat. They were moving along with the water at a speed of at least twenty knots—far faster than this old boat had ever gone. Winches and nets flailed about as the men gave up on cutting the net free and instead tried crawling in through the nearest hatchway. The net as well seemed to move alongside them. They weren’t moving relative to the water but with it.
The steep slope of ocean now filled his forward view. Wind was howling around them as they moved faster and faster.
And then Cruz felt his body grow lighter and lighter until finally he was in free fall, along with everything else in the cabin. “Dear God, what’s happening?”
Matapang stared as if comatose at a void that spread before their boat, and sailors, fish, and equipment fell skyward, the roar of water filling their ears. The sea itself began to come apart into a turbulent mass of white water, and the temperature dropped rapidly. Their breath condensed into fog as they panted in fear.