Rooms - James L. Rubart [95]
Securing his hood, Micah watched a mixture of sand, water, and foam swirl around his ankles. The waves moved slightly north to south, so he planned to paddle out to the north end of the bay and work his way back in, letting the waves push him to the center of the cove.
Nice plan.
He sliced through the first attack of surf as if it was whipped cream, and a rhythm built in his arms and paddle, but Micah struggled with the second set of waves. They were stronger and fought to push his craft sideways. But he pushed through as his breaths deepened and his eyes went steely.
The rain picked up again, and the winds were in concert. The soft kiss of the earlier mist became stinging needles on his face and forearms. But he was caught now in a web of determination, and he ignored the distractions.
The final set of breakers loomed, and the salesperson’s words blistered his mind. “Just don’t want people to be caught off guard.”
Part of Micah wanted to make the intelligent decision, but a louder voice drew him deeper into the sea. He ached to recapture a life of living on the edge, with high risk and high reward. Like when he’d started RimSoft. He’d tasted it in the skydiving room, yes. But this wasn’t an alternate reality God had taken him into. This was here, now, in vivid living color. He wanted it. Needed it. It flicked at the edges of his heart and stirred something inside larger than himself.
A wave raced down. Above him. On top of him. Not one of the benign four-foot swells he had imagined, but the eight-foot wall he’d seen from shore but ignored. Micah strained to turn his kayak directly into it but was a few precious degrees off. Just a fraction, but it was enough, and the full weight of the water crashed down on him.
He sucked in a breath just before the ocean surged against his nose and mouth, pushing for a way in. Then a kaleidoscope of tumbling, shoving, and pulling as the wave ripped him from his kayak and shoved him to the bottom of the ocean.
Five seconds felt like fifty. He searched for sunlight—his only clue as to which way was up. The most powerful part of the wave moved over the top of him, and Micah fought to surface.
He was running out of air.
He broke the water ceiling and gasped.
Another wave broke, and he was plunged under the torrent again, somersaulting to the bottom where his foot ripped across a jagged rock. The thought of sharks leaped into his mind, then instantly took a backseat to simply surviving long enough to take another breath.
He surfaced again and swam hard toward shore. His hope was to keep breathing long enough to reach the smaller waves and bodysurf them to the beach.
Micah went under again but with less intensity. Hope rose.
He was going to make it.
Except for the rocks.
A jagged cliff lined the south side of the bay, and the wave pattern pushed him toward it, much faster than he’d anticipated from shore.
The beach was only fifty yards ahead, but the rocky crest was only ten yards away, the waves still five-foot swells—quite capable of depositing him wherever they liked. He’d been caught in an unrelenting progression that would end in bone quickly meeting rock.
Panic grabbed his gut, the mental battle now as fierce as the physical one. If he panicked, he’d have little chance of surviving. A voice screamed, Give up!
“No!” he raged back. “Lord, hel—!” Micah cried out, but the words were smothered as another wave shoved him under and closer to the rocks.
Suddenly the miraculous struck. The next wave drove him north instead of south. On his right a slick, jagged, black rock slipped by his face, inches away. It didn’t make sense. Then another wave pushed him north, away from the cliff and into shore. Peace washed over Micah more powerful than any of the waves that had vowed to take his life. From deep inside a different Voice said, Look up.
At the back edge of the beach, just in front of the tree line, stood a figure in an olive raincoat. Micah couldn’t make out the face within the shadows of its hood. He couldn’t