And suddenly he realized that the bottom seemed to have fallen away. No moonlight penetrated the water from above. The darkness had returned. The sea itself was pressing in on him. It was getting harder to breathe.
It felt as if metal bands were fastened around his chest, squeezing him. He struggled against the tightening bonds, but it didn’t help.
Panicking, he struggled harder.
Breathe. Breathe!
But he couldn’t!
No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t get any air into his lungs.
The tanks!
Something had gone wrong with the tanks! He sucked at his regulator, trying to pull air from the tank on his back into his lungs, but nothing happened.
Empty!
The tank was empty!
But there was a reserve supply! All he had to do was reach back and turn the lever and he would have ten more minutes of air.
He started to reach back; his arms wouldn’t move.
He was sinking now, dropping into the darkness, into the great yawning void below—
He fought to reach the emergency valve, struggled to suck more air out of the tank, but now his lungs began to feel as if they were filling with water.
The surface. He had to get to the surface!
Drop the weight belt! Drop the weight belt, and pull the cord on the CO2 canister. His vest would inflate: he would pop to the surface.
But he couldn’t move!
He couldn’t even feel his fingers anymore.
Terrified, he struggled again, dislodging the regulator from his mouth.
He had to get it back in!
But his hands wouldn’t obey him. The regulator dangled from the air hoses, just out of reach.
If he could just get his mouth close enough …
He struggled to move his head, but even that was useless.
Now he could feel water seeping in through his nose. He tried to exhale, but there was nothing left in his lungs to expel.
His mouth opened and he tried to breathe.
Water flooded into his mouth, down his throat, into his already choking lungs.
He was going to die.
Die here, alone, deep under the surface of the sea.
No!
Loose! He had to get loose!
Even as he felt his lungs flooding and the blackness of death begin to close around him, Michael thrashed against the milky shroud that was still tightening around him, and a great scream built in his throat.
Frantic, he kicked out, twisting his body in a futile struggle to escape, struggling to gather enough energy for one last effort before the blackness closed around him forever.
Then, suddenly, the shriek in his throat erupted.
Michael jerked awake.
He was tangled in the bedding; the panic still clutched him. He could barely move, barely breathe.
Then, slowly, he began to understand.
A dream.
It had been nothing but a terrible dream.
The light in the middle of the ceiling flashed on, blinding him.
“Michael?” he heard his mother say. “Honey, are you okay?”
His chest still felt as if it were constricted by the bands that had tightened on him in the dream, and Michael wasn’t sure if he could speak. When he finally formed the words, his voice was barely audible. “A nightmare,” he said. “It was terrible. I—” He cut his words short as he realized where the dream had come from, what had triggered it.
“You were having trouble breathing,” Katharine said, coming over to the bed to gaze anxiously at her son’s face. “I was afraid you were having an attack—”
“I’m not,” Michael told her, working himself loose from the sheets and sitting up, sucking the fresh night air so deep into his lungs that he started coughing. A moment later, though, he got through the coughing fit and flopped back against the pillow. “It’s okay, Mom,” he insisted as she started to speak. “It was just a bad dream, that’s all.”
Katharine leaned over and kissed his forehead. “You’re sure?” she asked, her eyes still worried. “I know you thought you were all over it, but—”
“But nothing,” Michael told her. “I’m fine.” He glanced over at the clock on the nightstand; it was nearly five, and outside the window it was almost as dark as it had been at the end of the nightmare. “Let’s just go back to sleep, okay?”
“Maybe you shouldn’t have stayed out quite so late last night,” Katharine suggested, but laid a hand on Michael’s cheek to keep the words from stinging.
Michael sank lower in the bed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I guess when I knew I was going to be late I should have found a phone. Okay?”
“And I’m sorry I overreacted,” Katharine told him. “And congratulations on making the team. I’m really proud of you.” For the first time since he’d come home, a smile came to his lips. “Sleep tight.” She kissed him once more, and turned the light off as she left the room. But as she went back to her own room, the worry stayed with her. Had it really been only a bad dream that awakened him? Or was it the beginning of yet another siege of the disease they both had thought he’d conquered?
She got back into bed, but for a long time didn’t sleep. Instead, she listened, silently praying not to hear the rasping sound of asthmatic lungs struggling to fill themselves with air.
In his room, Michael was no longer in his bed.
Instead he was sitting beside the open window, breathing deeply of the fresh night air, trying to rid himself of the terrible choking feeling he’d had in the dream.
Yet even now that he was wide-awake, he still couldn’t quite get rid of it, couldn’t quite catch his breath.
CHAPTER 9
Alice Santoya slid the stack of pancakes onto her son’s plate, put the plate on the table, then called out for the fourth time, “If you don’t get up right now, Kioki, you’re never gonna get the bus, and I’m not gonna drive you!” When she still got no answer, she went to her son’s door, rapped loudly on it, then shoved it open. “Kioki, I’m tell—”
The words died on her lips as she saw the empty bed and realized that he hadn’t come home at all last night.
But Kioki always came home! He was a good boy, not like that Josh Malani he hung around with sometimes. And when he’d called, he promised to be home early. He was just going to a movie with Rick Pieper and Josh and—
Josh!
She’d bet every penny she had that Josh Malani had gotten hold of some beer and talked Kioki into going out to a beach somewhere and getting drunk. And then he’d been scared to come home.
