F3 Wave!

(Author's note: This story is an entry into the third Friendly Anonymous Writing Challenge (FAWC). The true author of this story will be kept secret until Wednesday, November 20, 2013, when the author will be revealed in the comments section following this story. There are no prizes awarded during FAWC; this is simply a friendly competition.)

(Inspiration for this and all FAWC 3 stories was taken from a single picture, which can be found here)

(The tags for this story are romance, loving wife, honeymoon, danger, tsunami, Martinique, beach, bitchiness, horror.)

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"Just let it go, Jan. We're on our honeymoon now. Everything worked out just fine with the wedding. The minister said the important words. The license was signed."

"No, it didn't work out 'just fine,' Tim. I distinctly told the florist the accent flowers were to be magenta—not red. And I even provided them with a swatch of the bridesmaid's dress. And what color were they?"

Tim didn't answer. He was busy moving the beach bag next to him because he could see the man coming across the deck around the curve of the glass wall of the resort restaurant weaving back and forward. He had a crutch on one side and a toddler hanging on to him on the other side. Tim nodded to them in passing. Struggling behind them was a young woman with a baby in a stroller. Jan gave the family a disgusted look. Tim had already heard her rant on families coming to what they thought was a honeymooners' only resort on the east coast of Martinique.

The other couple that had set her off in this vein was on the other end of the spectrum. An elderly couple was out in a kayak type of boat in the small cove the resort sat on—and extended over. In fact, some of the hotel rooms were deceptively fashioned to look like grass shacks on pylons and extended out into the cove, connected by a boardwalk. Tim and Jan had been given one of these rooms over the water, a honeymoon suite that was quite luxurious inside, and Tim was patiently waiting for Jan to finish complaining about the other guests and to get around to complaining about the resort Tim had booked them into for the honeymoon.

She wasn't usually like this, he thought—or hadn't been before the wedding. He was hoping this was just wedding jitters and that she'd come down out of the stratosphere and loosen up soon. She'd even said that the sex last night wasn't as good as they'd had before they got married.

Her principal problem with the elderly couple was that the wife, Maryanne, was too friendly—Jan said "nosy"—and the husband, Ralph, was too grumpy and loud. He was loud because he was hard of hearing and obviously thought that a vacation was a time to dispense with such things as hearing aids. Tim couldn't remember if he'd actually seen the man's face, because it seemed always to be hidden behind a snapping camera.

"We can have the photographer tint the flowers in the photos any color you want, sweetheart. In time you'll forget they even were the wrong color. I don't think anyone noticed." Or wouldn't have noticed, he thought, if Jan hadn't made such an open stink about it.

Most other guys would have second thoughts about this marriage business when the wife on the morning after the wedding seemed an entirely different person from the one the day before, he mused. But he knew that Jan was just uptight about the whole wedding bit. By the end of the week he'd have his old Jan back, he was sure.

"You always are so reasonable," Jan said as she turned on her back and handed Tim a tube of suntan lotion. She made it sound like it was unreasonable for him to be reasonable. He had no trouble understanding what he was supposed to do with the lotion, and started rubbing it on her back, moving from there to massaging her shoulders and neck, working on rubbing the tension out of her—and, he hoped, some of the anger too. He rubbed down her spine, letting his hands go under the material of her bikini bottoms and flared out over her buttocks. He was rewarded with a slight shudder and moan.

"You know what Sara said to me at the wedding when I told her you were a jerk for not backing me up on my argument with the florist?"

"You told Sara I was a jerk?"

"She told me that I didn't deserve you. That you were too good for me, because you were always so even tempered and practical and helpful and don't let problems get to you." Jan made these traits seem like indictments by the inflection of her voice.

The toddler from the family group had come up to them and was proudly showing Jan that she had a sand form in the shape of a starfish. Jan scowled and waved her away dismissively.

"I think we're going to be just great," Tim said. "We're away from all of that wedding stuff now. You must have worked on that full time for three months. We're about as far away from anywhere as we could be. Let's just enjoy ourselves."

"I forgot my paperback. It's boring out here. I should have brought out the paperback book—or the Kindle."

"Boring out here?" Tim asked. He tried not to sound wounded. "Look around you. Nearly transparent water, a white sandy seabed underneath. You can actually see schools of bright-colored fish swimming about. And it's just neat having those rooms like that out over the water. The sky is blue. All's right with the world."

"Except for the earthquake out in the Atlantic."

"What earthquake?"

"You know, the earthquake we heard about on the radio before coming out here from the room."

"It was just a small one—and out to sea."

"Yeah, but they said they thought there'd be a larger one following it."

"We came here to get away from bad news for a while, Jan."

"Well, I wish I'd brought my paperback out—or my Kindle."

"I can go get one of them for you. Which one do you want?"

"Yes."

"Both of them?"

"I said yes."

While Tim was off getting the book and the Kindle, Jomo, one of the hotel's casual-style island waiters, came around asking if anyone wanted drinks. He and Jan had been flirting off and on since the previous afternoon when Jan and Tim had checked in. It was all quite innocent, of course, but bantering with Jomo, who was a berry-brown hunk and a half and who was barely dressed, had resulted in the only smiles Jan had invested in the honeymoon as yet. She particularly like his dreadlocks, which extended down to his shoulders—and thought the shoulders, and the biceps, and the pecs, looked just fine too.

Jan had done some swinging before she'd started dating Tim and then it had just been Tim. He was straight laced about cruising about, but he was really good in bed—or had been when they were still single. There was a time when she would have jumped the bones of a hunk like Jomo, not even waiting for him to make the moves. And Jomo was reacting like he'd like to have his bones jumped, and Jan didn't think it was all about getting bigger tips.

Sure, she was a married lady now, but there was no reason she had to stop looking—or flirting a bit.

Tim had trouble finding the Kindle and was gone for several minutes. Jomo made the best use of every one of those minutes, obviously finding Jan the best looking woman at the resort at the moment. But he broke away to offer drinks to the family of four when he spied Tim returning.

"Here is your reading material, princess," Tim said, with a smile, as he reached the large red mat the resort had set out to separate the deck sections that extended out over the water of the cove.

"Princess? Are you criticizing me for not getting the book and Kindle myself?"

"No, Jan. You're my princess. I wasn't being sarcastic." And he hadn't meant for it to be taken as sarcasm either. He went back to rubbing in suntan lotion and trying to massage the knots away—and to work on pulling another enticing moan or two from her.

The massage was helping. Jan seemed to be relaxing and had started to hum. Tim recognized where the humming was leading—and this was his concept of what they'd be doing on the honeymoon rather than a never-ending critique of everything that had gone wrong at the wedding ceremony and interminable reception afterward.

He leaned down and whispered in her ear, "Getting hot out here. Don't want to burn on our first afternoon under the sun. Interested in going back to the room for a bit?"

"Umm, um," Jan answered in a dreamy voice.

Yes, she was ready, Tim thought, starting to go hard just at the thought of what they'd be doing soon.

Jan was lying on her back at the foot of the bed, her legs hooked on Tim's shoulders and her fingers buried in the wavy blond hair on his head, as he had his face buried in her muff. He was alternating between sucking on her clit and her labia and running his tongue between the folds while she huffed and puffed her way to her first orgasm.

This was the Tim she'd fought other women off to possess. He always took his time in taking her to heaven at least once before he fucked her. She was always open and sloppy wet and moaning for it before he slid inside her. And this afternoon was no exception.

She had already exploded once and was arching her back and working her nipples with the fingers of both hands as he worked her clit with the thumb of one hand and pulled her pelvis up to his groin with his other arm under her and ran the bulb of his cock up and down between her labia until she begged for the fuck, when he thrust inside her, causing her to lift up off the surface of the bed and cry out in passion. This too was what she'd fought other women off for. He was thick and knew how to use his cock to the best advantage.

As her cry subsided and Tim began to pump, though, another cry was being taken up outside on the boardwalk.

It was the voice of Jomo, and he sounded frightened. He was pounding the back of his drinks tray with a spoon and running up and down the boardwalk and across the deck curving around the glass wall of the hotel dining room. His cry was a single word, "Wave!" repeated over and over again.

"Shit," Tim called out as he pulled away from Jan and grabbed for his shorts.

"What?" Jan asked, her voice perturbed, not appreciating the break in her pleasure.

"The earthquake," Tim answered. "Here, put your shorts and T back on. We have to get out of here."

"What about the earthquake?"

"A tidal wave. A tsunami. The drinks guy is warning that a big wave is coming. We have to get out of here. We're sitting ducks out here on the water."

He struggled to get Jan dressed. She had withdrawn into nonaction and denial. They stumbled out of the hut on the pylons, and once again Tim chimed out with a "Shit!"

"What?" Jan screamed. "What's so fucking serious here?"

"Look at the cove, Jan. The water's pulling out. The seabed is exposed."

"So fucking what?"

"When it comes back in it's going to be one fucking big wave. Come on. We've got to get to higher ground."

As they got to where the boardwalk over the water met dry land at the corner of the hotel dining room, Tim looked off to the right over the deck curving around the dining room's glass wall.

"Shit. Fuck." he called out again.

"What?" Jan repeated in her own litany.

"Here. Here are the keys to the rental Jeep. Get in it and head to higher ground. Drive as fast as you safely can and don't stop until you are well inland."

"Where are you going?" Jan demanded. But Tim was already racing across the deck curving around the dining room.

When she got almost to the Jeep, she ran into Maryanne. Ralph was running ahead of them toward the four-story hotel section behind the main reception and dining room building, his camera bouncing around against his chest on a strap.

"Isn't this exciting?" Maryanne turned and called out to Jan. Her eyes were gleaming and the vermillion red-lip stick slash of her mouth was open in a full grin. "Ralph says this is an opportunity of a lifetime. The safest place is on the roof of the hotel. Come on with us. He's got his camera. he says we'll be on TV. We'll have the best seat in the house to view this."

Yeah, Jan thought, I don't have to drive the Jeep like a bat of hell to get to high ground. The top of the hotel is high ground. She followed Maryanne up the stairs of the hotel to the roof garden. Ralph was well ahead of them.

"Holy shit!" Jan exclaimed as she came out onto the roof. Ralph and Maryanne were already standing at the parapet on the sea side of building. Ralph was firing off photos. The source of the "holy shit" exclamation, though, was the height of the wave Jan could see standing off shore.

And that's what it looked like, like it was just standing out there, and that they all were suspended in time.

"Ain't it glorious?" Maryanne cried out, as she spread her arms and arched her back in a "come to momma" pose.

Within seconds, though, "glorious" was a wall of water coming at them with the sound of a freight train. It peeled the huts on the boardwalk over the water of the cove up like a curling rug and hurled them into the side of the hotel building. The building shuddered, and Jan had the presence of mind to hit the deck as the bodies of Ralph and Maryanne were carried up and over and past her by the mass of wood from the huts and the boardwalk that now fronted a wall of water.

She heard a rumbling and the hotel crumbling under her feet and then the impact of the water, lifting her up and up and over the land, knocking the wind out her, making her swallow choking water, and slamming her hard into something stationary. She blacked out on impact.

When she came to, she was tangled in the branches of a tall tree that had nearly been stripped but that had been porous enough to let the worst force of the water slide through its branches. She ached all over and there were scratches and blood, but she didn't feel like anything was broken. She just was wedged into the twisted branches and foliage enough that she couldn't move.

She could see through the entombing branches though. But there was little to see. The cove looked peaceful enough, except that the white sand had been scooped up and carried inland and the water was too muddy to see what lay beneath it. What were bodies, however, could clearly be seen floating on the surface of the water. There also were a few small boats out on the cove and men were pulling what must be bodies out of the water. It deceptively looked to Jan like a quiet, innocent fishing scene, and she had difficulty in her half-glazed state connecting it to the horror it really represented.

Mud was pretty much the relevant word overall. The hotel was completely gone. The tree she was in was set well back from where the hotel once stood. The rental Jeep, or what seemed to be it in a mashed state, was wedged up against a rock cliff further inland from the tree, entwined with the materials from the huts on the piers that had included the honeymoon suite, so recently occupied, and sheltering what honeymooners did.

Here and there against the surface of the cliff and at its base, she could see the color of material, and she tried not to think about the crumpled bodies the mud-caked material must cover. Again, there was living human activity there—living people searching among the dead. But almost languidly, realizing that there was no need to expect to find life. The minds of the living not much less blank from the shock of what had happened than those of the dead.

She called out, both toward the boats in the cove and the searchers at the base of the cliff. But she was either too far away for them to hear or her voice wasn't strong enough. They moved on in their grizzly activity with no realization that all in this wasteland between the cliff and the sea were not dead.

Now that she was able to get her bearings, she saw that the cliff pretty much encircled the resort area. Higher rocks were close to the edge of the hotel area to the north. It was quite possible that she could have reached higher ground in the Jeep in time.

In time. If she had done what Tim told her she needed to do.

Tim.

For the first time her thoughts went to Tim. He couldn't have made it out in time. He was gone. Suddenly life took on a whole new look to her. The wedding and all that crap seemed so silly now. In the wink of an eye it all had changed. And she felt totally bereft.

She was given plenty of time to worry these thoughts. All was quiet through the night and well into the next day. It was like she was the only person left on earth. Very few of the searchers and scavengers of the first evening had bothered to return today, evidently recognizing how total the destruction of the tsunami had been. They, the survivors, were already looking ahead—to the lives that had been spared them, at least for this day.

There was a false sense of total nothingless. In the first hours she had been conscious, she tried calling out for help. But there was no reply beyond the cawing of the sea birds, still upset at something that happened that was completely beyond their grasp, as they wheeled about overhead. Some landed on the tree above her. She had to fight to free an arm enough to wave them off from pecking at her head. She almost gave up trying to fend off the birds, but she felt that somehow she must continue, that she needed to continue fighting for life.

She had gone hoarse by nightfall and decided that it was useless even to try calling out in the dark. She needed to recover her voice. She tried to sleep and managed to doze from time to time.

Her mind kept making her think about the probability that she'd die here in the tree. She'd survived the tsunami only to starve to death in the tree. Her limbs went numb and she had to work hard to keep them moving to keep the blood flowing through them. Almost in a delirium she thought again of Tim and, for the first time in her life, entertained the thought that, if he was dead—and he most certainly was—there really was no reason for her to live. That, in fact, she had landed the one man in a million. For the first time she thought that Sara might have been spot on—that she hadn't deserved Tim. And that maybe God had decided that as well.

She sank deeper in a delirium as the sun rose high in the sky the next day. So out of it was she that she didn't even realize that she had commenced calling out for help again—or that another voice was suddenly added to the sound. A familiar voice. Her eyes shot open. Tim?

But it wasn't Tim. It was the berry-brown hunk, Jomo, climbing up the tree, hacking twisted branches away with a machete, freeing her.

But could she ever be free now that she'd let Tim slip out of her life? She had been such a bitch the last day of their lives together. Could she ever forgive herself?

"How? How did you know?" she managed in a weak voice as Jomo climbed toward her.

"The birds. They were disturbed. Kept trying to land in the top of the tree and then reeling away. I figured something was disturbing them—something that was still alive."

And then he was there, beside her, pulling branches away from her body.

"I've got you, love," Jomo was saying. "I'll get you down from here."

And get her down he did. She threw her arms around him and hugged his waist tightly with her thighs as he brought her down from the tree. They were both breathing heavily as they got down to the layer of mud and sand under the tree. And the breathing wasn't from physical exertion. It was from physical contact and the thrill of being alive and of being two beautiful people seemingly all alone in the world.

Jomo started kissing Jan and she was kissing him back. They were groping each other. He had his shorts unzipped and his cock out and was unbuttoning her shorts, when she gripped his hand and stopped him.

"Not here. I can't do it here. Take me someplace where I can clean up."