This is the Chapter 1 excerpt of The Ocean Above Me, available now in paperback.
It was longlisted by The Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize, Finalist for The Hawthorne Prize and American Legacy Book Awards Winner for Best Fiction Thriller and Best Psychological Thriller.
“At the helm Captain Clarita Esteban allowed herself to glance back, momentarily, wary of the next monster that would crash across the bow.
In the loose flapping of the outriggers she saw the skeletal wings of a flightless, heavy-bottomed bird. All velocity, no lift.”
. . .
CH A P T E R 1
STORM
Philomena rose on the swell of an early-winter sea. A humble, cupped-hand offering to angry gods, 110 gross tons lifted like a 110-pound ballerina. The mid-Atlantic water turning gunmetal gray as it stretched and then clipped into windblown froth. Her outrigger arms, shaken loose from their bindings, struck hard against the deck, hammer to gong, sending a bass current resonating through the ship. At the helm Captain Clarita Esteban allowed herself to glance back, momentarily, wary of the next monster that would crash across the bow. In the loose flapping of the outriggers she saw the skeletal wings of a flightless, heavy-bottomed bird. All velocity, no lift.
“Shrimping 101, Junior,” she shouted above the noise of the storm. “Secure the damn outriggers.”
She shook her head in disgust, but knew it was no time to school her crew. Junior, the deckhand, ducked away among the five others gathered in the wheelhouse, all dressed in boots and rain slickers, summoned in the middle of the night by the unexpected ferocity of the storm.
They struggled to keep their footing when the arms soared skyward again, slapping against each other as the water disappeared beneath the ship after a moment of zero gravity at the wave’s crest. Philomena’s bulk, unstoppable on the downward stroke, displaced its weight and more on splashdown, sucking in torrents over the gunwales before washing back out again on the next lift.
“And where the hell’s the reporter?” Esteban demanded, once confident they’d all stuck their last dismount without injury.
LUKAS LANDON HAD slept through stormy prelude, woken only now by his nausea. The hot lavender tea the cook had given him, mixed with a teaspoon of a peculiar white powder, had indeed helped him sleep. Too well, it seemed. He climbed down from his top bunk, sloth-like, timing his movements with the ship’s rise and fall. Pushing himself against the back wall, in a lean-to squat he threaded one leg through his jeans, then the other. He was wearing a mil-spec T-shirt the color of cocoa powder, bought from the mall-size post exchange in Bagram, his thick, green wool sweater pulled over it. The sweater was an ugly pragmatic thing of ropy Celtic weave, a gift from Vanessa, handed to him blank-faced on their last Christmas together. Even in his fuzzy state, Landon noticed that the two bunks below his were empty. Junior and Chuy were above deck already, no doubt, tying things down, battening the hatches or whatever it was deckhands did in rough seas.
Landon looked at his feet and made a tactical decision to peel off the dirty socks he’d worn to bed. Bare feet, he figured, were better for gripping Philomena’s lower deck as she pitched and rolled. Plus, if he had to swim tonight, he’d rather his feet be unencumbered by socks or shoes. He shuddered at the thought, considered another almost as scary: the possibility of his MacBook Air falling to the floor and getting smashed to pieces. He reached to the top of his bunk, found it inside his sleep- ing bag, and stuffed it back into the waterproof black polypropylene shoulder bag where it normally lived on the ship when he wasn’t abusing its keyboard. Then he rolled his sleeping bag around it like a taco and stuffed it all into his duffel bag. He was about to pinch the bag’s loops together and clip it shut when he remembered his smartphone. He might need it to grab photos of the crew in action topside. He dug his hand deep into the duffel, retrieving it with just a few sweeps of his hand. He’d doubled-wrapped it with resealable sandwich bags before they left Port Royal, just in case of a night like this.
He slid the bagged smartphone into the back pocket of his jeans, closed up his duffel again, and rehung it on the bunk’s foot-rail, content that the expensive gear inside was safely insulated from harm. His in- sides were a different story. His stomach was becoming queasier by the second. Before climbing up to the deck he’d first need to make a pit stop to expel the ornery remnants of what little he’d eaten earlier that evening. It had been choppy when he finally went to bed past midnight after filing his last dispatch, but nothing like this. Landon’s innards sloshed from side to side.
The marine toilet was a dark mole hole tucked into the curve of Philomena’s bow at the bottom of the ship. To reach it Landon would have to descend a small staircase that led from the closet-size staterooms. While he hated the idea of going deeper into the guts of the ship, better to purge in private, he thought, than embarrass himself in front of the captain and crew. Once done, it would be another short trip up the double-stacked tower with the galley at its base and wheelhouse at its crown.
The distance to the head was a diagonal downward journey of just eight feet. So why did he feel like one of the Flying Wallendas about to cross a tightrope hundreds of feet in the air between skyscrapers? When the sea leveled out, he took a breath and went. He reached the handle of the head’s oval metal door in two steps and a shuffle. But as he pushed in against it, he felt a new dread in his stomach. Philomena being scooped into the air yet again. Reproach for himself when he realized his feet were too close together. Regret when they were both swept out from under him. He had only a fraction of a second to tuck his chin and brace with his forearms. His body rotated, pig on a spit, exposing his back to the steel jut of steps, and a sudden torque of the ship hammered his spine against them. Even with the discordant storm sounds echoing in that space, Landon could hear the crunchy snap of his number-six rib, and with it an oscillating short-circuit of pain and shock. He would’ve dwelt there, but he sensed Philomena beginning to rise yet again. He scrambled to his knees, pushed open the door to the head, and shut himself inside. This drop was more forgiving than the last, with the ship caught in the slough of a following wave, a gap long enough for him to register the ripping pain in his back and his nausea reaching its peak.
He crab-scrabbled to the lidless bowl of the marine toilet and emptied his guts in a deep, hollowing retch. While that cleared his useless ballast, the muscle contraction around his broken rib ignited a stabbing pain so fierce his eyes watered, forcing him to check the panicked intake of his breath to avoid repeating the torture in reverse. Instead he drew air in wisps, short, shallow, cautiously. He wiped his mouth with the back of his right hand, releasing it from its death squeeze around the rim, adrenaline, fear, and pain still surging across his synapses.
“The glory that was Greece,” he whimpered, “and the grandeur that was Rome.” Repeated the mantra until it calmed him, but also, unintentionally, distracted himself from the ship’s next rising cycle. When it reached its apex, the hangman’s trapdoor opened. The downward force folded Landon’s left arm. His unsupported weight dropped in a half-meter free fall, his face leading the charge, slamming into the back of the bowl. A flash-bang grenade of white exploded inside his head, then petered out in an ephemera of gray mist and stars. He ran his tongue against his uppers, found both incisors relocated as enamel arrows pointed toward his tonsils. Landon wondered if the next battering would simply finish him off. Oh, that would be merciful. He could see now how people in life-or-death situations decided to just give up. It was manifestly easier to choose less suffering than more. In the lull, he swallowed the blood accumulating in his mouth. It tasted of iron, salt, and defeat. Would he choke on his own teeth with the next gulp of blood? The thought still inchoate, he reached up with his right hand and wiggled them free of their sockets. New pain surged through his septum, but then a moment of pride as he looked at the bloody Chiclets he’d delivered. Pitiful as it was, he upended the cycle of doom by taking action, tucking the teeth into the front pocket of his jeans while his tongue now probed the bloody gap. Maybe a dentist could replant them after it was all over. But that consideration was wiped away by Philomena’s latest ascent.
Landon rolled onto his right side and uncoiled his six-foot frame, pressing his bare feet against the toilet base and his back against the metal curve of the wall. With the tight wedge and his right shoulder to the ground, he hoped his body mass would muffle the shock wave before it reached his broken left rib. He had a million digital magazine descriptions, and he’d read in some lad mag a similar tip on the right body position to survive a sudden elevator drop. Probably nonsense, but he clung to the concept nonetheless. It was that or wait for the ship and the sea to finish him off, a fate he was still fighting against, at least for now. Historically, his optimism had been weak. Any dark prognosis consumed him, rolled him over quickly, conclusively, repeatedly.
The drop never came. At least not the way he expected. He braced, waited for the climb to slow and for the inevitable elevator plunge. But at the peak, the trawler seemed to hover for a moment, and the rumble of the engine went silent, its vibrations still. He felt the hot flash of a new fear. Philomena had lost power. Landon raised his head, spat out the stream of blood that had been pooling in his mouth, and returned to his defensive crouch. Then came a massive slam against the ship’s starboard flank. The wave’s energy raced through the hull, concussing through his back and the contours of his body. His feet slipped as Philomena tipped low to port. He pushed harder against the base of the toilet bowl, exerted so much force he’d thought he might displace it from the rivets that held it fast. As the ship’s port side swung back up, now dipping to starboard like the low end of a cradle, he relaxed slightly.
Anticipating the next cycle, Landon pushed with his feet again as the boat rocked hard, back to port. But it would make no difference. A bulldozer of water pushed Philomena into her portside momentum and did what seemed impossible; it flipped the ship keel up. The momentum pinned his body to the highest point in the room, as if at the top of a roller-coaster loop. But just as quickly as it had spun, the ship’s spiraling keel came to a stop. The inverted wheelhouse had found friction like a surfer’s hand raking the inside of a wave. With the centrifugal force suddenly cut off, Landon plunged, left side down. This time the pain had color and texture, a searing campfire of orange cracking through every nerve ending. And then . . . nothing. The overloaded machine of Landon’s brain shut down.
GIVEN THE CHOICE, he might’ve preferred that to experiencing what came next. With no forward thrust, the nearly three-ton weight of Philomena’s Caterpillar D343 diesel engine became an enormous anchor at the ship’s midline. The imbalance of the weight and position dipped the tapered edge of the starboard gunwales like a knife into the surface of the water. The angle of the slice drove the ship downward with such force that it was entirely submerged in seconds. Giant bubbles of air burped out toward the highest point of every opening. The high, shrill whip of the forty-five-knot Force 9 winds that had buffeted it just seconds before vanished. Seawater squeezed through every crevice in the ship’s deck, flooding forward from stern to bow. First filled was Philomena’s freezer-plate hold, with a six-hundred-box capacity but only two-thirds full of white shrimp. Next the water climbed to the engine room, rising at a steep angle toward the bow and the ship’s head, where Landon lay unconscious. With its firehose pressure, the sea penetrated nearly every hollow cavity, purging it of air and creating a cacophony of sounds, the screaks and clicks of metal and wood pushed to near-failure points. Then Philomena shuddered. Was finally silent, before it began its fluttering descent to the sandy bottom below.
-END-
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If you liked what you just read and want more, order Kevin Sites’s award-winning, debut novel The Ocean Above Me, available at the link below.
As the locals here would say, that's a cracker of a first chapter. I'd call it captivating.