Without traffic, and with no one to enforce speed limits, Matt had them down the side of Cadillac Mountain in only a few minutes. At the base, where the access road connected with the bridge to the mainland, Matt cursed and stood on the brakes. Before the SUV had even stopped, Reese had the passenger door open and was scrambling to gain his footing on the sloped roadway.
Before him, hope died.
Floodwaters, choked with debris and dead trees, surged and roiled at the base of the mountain to the background of splintering, groaning wood. The roof of a house floated by, crossing right where the bridge to Maine would've been, had it not been for the historic tsunami. As far as he could see, stretching straight back to the hazy coastline of Maine, the ocean had reclaimed what man had built.
"Where's the bridge?" Matt muttered weakly.
Reese shook his head, his vision blurring at the corners as his hands clenched into fists. He'd known, before he even left the ranger station, that he would face the tsunami’s wrath, but there was a difference in imagining something and seeing it in person.
Any hope he had of getting on the road right away had been smashed to pieces by the tsunami, as easily as it had destroyed the bridge to the mainland. Reese looked down and kicked at a loose rock. The irony of it all twisted in his stomach like a knot of worms.
Reese was a sailor, just as comfortable standing on the deck of a boat and facing storms at sea as he was sitting behind the wheel of a car driving 80 miles an hour on the interstate. And here he was, stranded on an island hundreds of miles from home, surrounded by raging waters.
“And me without a boat…” he muttered.
Staring across the churning channel that used to be a peninsula, Reese smirked ruefully. Finding a boat wasn’t the problem, he supposed. Everywhere he looked, there were dozens of them—and pieces of them, as well. Sailboats mostly, some drifted past, their masts and rigging sticking above the surface like the ribs of some long dead animal. Power yachts, capsized rowboats, all likely ripped free of their moorings near the marina in Bar Harbor and scattered across Maine's coastline like discarded children's toys.
On the backside of the island, the tsunami didn't even look that menacing. Where it had first made landfall, destruction, smoke, fire, and death lay in its wake. On the leeward side of the island, as the waters flowed on their destructive path toward the mainland, the surface seemed rather calm. Boats and debris drifted by in lazy eddies, caught in new current patterns that would hopefully soon recede back into the ocean from whence they came.
Reese clenched his teeth. He couldn't stand by for the untold hours it might take—how many waves had come through so far? Three, four…six? How many more were coming? Without access to meteorological services, he had no idea if this event was almost over or just beginning.
"Well, I guess that settles it," Matt said, defeat in his voice. "No one’s getting off this island without a boat. Not anytime soon, that's for sure," he said, punching the dusty hood of his vehicle in frustration.
"And we’re not getting any of those boats out there unless we…” Reese said slowly, lost in thought while staring at the twisted hull of a power yacht as it drifted bow-deep in the water, the shining blades of its props just breaking the surface. The boat appeared abandoned. For a moment, Reese thought about stripping down and diving into the murky waters to swim out the 50 yards or so and claim it. But the idea died in his head almost as soon as he’d imagined it. The boat was listing and partially sunk. With the stern lifted out of the water that high, there would be no way he could get it operable again without a dry dock and a crew of maintenance professionals.
Reese narrowed his eyes, watching the boat—named Excelsior—twist in an eddy and bump into something submerged beneath the water. It’s tender, a black zodiac, followed behind like a duckling. The boat shuddered to a stop, water piling up at the stern. Fiberglass crunched, like snapping celery, surprisingly loud given how far out it was. Reese shook his head. It was all wasted. There was nothing out there that he could use.
A sailboat drifted around the bend of the island next, flowing with the current and trapped between the root balls of several trees that had been ripped out of the ground when the tsunami hit. At first, Reese thought the boat might've had a chance of being seaworthy, but as the current turned the little barge of trees and trash, he spotted the gaping hole in the hull. The ship was only remaining afloat because it had been tumbled together with trees.
"What are you smiling at?" Matt asked. "Nothing out there looks good to me."
Reese pointed. “See that sailboat?”
"You mean the one that's got the tree sticking out its side?”
"Yeah," Reese said, an idea forming in his head. "But that's not what I'm looking at. Look behind it."
“What, that dinky little rowboat? Yeah, I see it—what good’s that gonna do us? It's at least a hundred yards offshore…"
Reese shook his head. "Not that particular one. But there could be another one somewhere around here that's got a dinghy attached. If the boat itself is damaged, maybe we can use the tender.”
Matt gestured with an open palm at the mile-wide debris field. "You’re suggesting finding a rowboat to go across that? You're insane."
Reese carefully picked his way closer to the water's edge. Holding onto a tree that
