as if he’d been hypnotized. Sliding across the front seat, he reached out and grabbed Jeff’s arm as the warning siren grew louder and the flashing lights of an approaching truck became visible through the miasma of smoke. Jeff was trying to pull away from him now, but he tightened his grip on the other boy’s arm. “Jesus, Jeff! Get back in the truck! The fire crew’s coming! What the hell’s wrong with you?”
The yellow truck slammed to a stop directly ahead of the pickup, and while one man jumped out of the passenger seat, two more leaped from its bed. As two of the men grabbed Jeff’s arm and began pulling him toward the yellow truck, the third one yelled at Josh.
“Are you kids crazy? Get this damned truck out of here before it blows up!”
Sliding back into the driver’s seat, Josh slammed the truck into reverse and began backing down the road. An ember flew through the window and seared his forehead, and as he momentarily lost his grip on the steering wheel, the pickup swerved sharply to the right. For a split second Josh tried to regain control, then he let the wheel spin. The truck slewed around, its rear end leaving the dirt road and skidding into the burning field, but even before it came to a stop, Josh had shoved the transmission into gear and smashed his foot against the gas pedal. The rear tires spun, then caught, and Josh shot forward, not slowing down until he reached the paved highway.
Jeff!
Where was Jeff!
Should he go back and try to find him?
A set of headlights flashed on in front of him, and for the first time Josh realized that there was a car parked across the road. Then, as the car’s engine roared to life and it shot down the road Josh had just emerged from, he saw another car racing toward him, this one coming from Kahului.
Blue lights were flashing on its roof.
Cops!
Shit! What was he supposed to do?
What could he do?
Taking a last look down the road, but seeing no trace of Jeff Kina, or the truck the two men had been dragging him toward, or the car that had been parked on the other side of the highway, Josh made up his mind.
Jeff would be all right. Those guys must have been a fire crew. They’d get Jeff out of there.
But it was time for him to get out of here. Slamming the truck into gear, he started down the highway. A few seconds later he passed the speeding car with the flashing blue lights, never noticing that it wasn’t a police car.
As soon as it passed, he looked in the rearview mirror, certain that the cops would turn around to chase him. But the car turned off the highway into the burning cane field.
CHAPTER 15
Katharine came totally awake in an instant, her motherly instincts on full alert, knowing without doubt what had awakened her.
After all, how many times before had she been jolted from sleep exactly this way, sound asleep one moment, wide awake the next?
More than she wanted to remember.
She lay in the darkness, praying that she was wrong, praying that it wasn’t happening again. And listening.
Then she heard it — the sound that must have awakened her.
It was coming from Michael’s room, and it was the terrible racking gasp of someone who is unable to fill his lungs with air.
Getting up from her bed and snatching a thin robe from the chair in the corner, she raced for her son’s room.
There was a silvery glow all around him, and he knew he was in the water again.
He also knew it was night.
And that he was alone.
Fear shot through him: you were never supposed to dive alone.
He turned in the water, trying to orient himself.
Where was the bottom? He gazed downward, peering into the depths, but the silvery glow seemed to go on forever. There were no fish, no heads of coral, no sandy bottom rippled by currents.
He rolled over, peering upward.
No glimpse of the surface. All he could perceive was the same silver-lit expanse spreading endlessly away.
He felt his heart start to beat faster, could even hear it in the silence of the deep.
How deep?
But how deep could he be? He wasn’t wearing a diver’s suit — not even a wet suit.
The pulse of terror pounding in his ears, he realized that not only were his friends not with him, but he wasn’t in the safe confines of the small pool at the end of the lava flow, either.
He was alone in the vastness of the ocean.
Except he wasn’t alone.
There was something else — some presence — nearby.
He could feel it, just out of his range of vision.
Panic reached for him with the grip of tentacles grasping their prey.
He twisted around in the water, searching for the unseen presence, catching just a flicker of it: a figure, ghostly pale in the water, gazing at him.
The tentacles wrapped themselves around him.
He felt the presence again, closer this time, and whirled in the water.
Again he caught just a flash of it before it vanished.
And then he saw another and another: Ghostly wraiths in the water, almost without shape or form, but starting to close in on him.
He had to get away from them.
He started swimming, but the water seemed to have turned to sludge, and he could barely move his arms and legs. Then he felt something clammy on his leg, felt one of the beings touch him, and he tried to jerk away.
They were all around him, surrounding him, wrapping themselves around his body so tightly that he couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe.
Air!
He was running out of air!
He redoubled his efforts to thrash out against the wraiths, but they were twisted around his chest now, squeezing tighter and tighter until he knew it no longer mattered if there was any air left in his tanks, for he no longer had the power to breathe.
He was going to die, drown alone in the sea!
He thrashed out once more, lunging this time with enough force to jerk himself out of the nightmare world in which he’d been entrapped.
Coming awake, he rolled off the bed and onto the floor, and lay still for a moment, struggling to catch his breath, wrestling against the wraiths that still constricted him.
His sheet!
He tore at it, finally pulling it loose and shucking it off, but still he couldn’t catch his breath.
It was as if the nightmare were still upon him, though he knew he was wide-awake.
Suddenly the darkness of the room was washed away by a blinding glare, and in the sudden whiteness he
