Storm

"It's all right. Everything will be fine," Juri answered breathily. Aside from the oddly nasal quality of the words, Juri was the perfect picture of calm. The strange thing was that she felt calm.

Suddenly she felt as calm as if she were taking a walk around the neighborhood instead of standing in the middle of the ocean in the face of what promised to be a truly terrifying storm.

She repeated the words, but this time in her mind and not out loud where Selene might have heard her. Everything would be alright because everything had to be alright. There was simply no other way.

The will of the human being was to survive. If achieving that goal meant lying to herself, so be it. She would continue to tell herself that everything would be all right until the moment when it became devastatingly clear that it was not.

In this case, that moment came far too quickly for comfort. Another flash of lightning lit up the sky, and as if this were the last straw, the cloud cover broke. Juri and Selene were immediately caught in freezing rain. The drops hit so hard that they hurt as if thousands of thick needles were pricking the top layer of their skin.

Selene let out a strangled scream, and Juri began to shiver all over. Not only did the rain hurt, but the air felt as if it had suddenly turned thirty degrees cold. The little sundresses the two girls wore could not protect them from the change.

In the time it took to snap their fingers, they had gone from dry to soaked to the bone, and as if that was not enough, hail was pelting the deck. Some of the balls were the size of marbles, while others looked like they could easily be used for a game of golf.

One of them struck Juri in the shoulder, and she yelped in pain. Still, she and Selene stood frozen in place, both staring at the strange storm in disbelief. There was no reason that they should be so afraid, Juri thought.

Still with that false calm, that sense of unease persisted. They were so afraid that when warm, strong hands closed around both of their upper arms, they let out identical cries of terror.

"Ladies, what the hell do you think you're doing? You can't just stand here! You'll get your brains bashed in!" Adam shouted in their faces.

Juri's first, useless thought was that it was strange to feel Adam's fingers on her, the same fingers that had so voraciously explored her friend. The second thing she thought was that he might not be as handsome as she'd first thought, after all.

There was a kind of naked neediness in him now, and while it didn't make her like him any less, it did make Juri pity him a little. It was challenging to be hot for a man you pitied. It might even be impossible.

"It's hailing, Adam," Selene said stupidly, "why is it hailing? What is this?"

"It's a storm, god damn it! I need to be in my quarters navigating it, not out here with two idiots that don't even have the common sense to seek shelter. Ladies, please get yourselves inside now. Go downstairs. Get to your room and stay there. Don't come out until I announce on the intercom that it's okay," Adam shouted into Selene's face.

Whatever feelings he had for her on a good day were absent now. If there was any doubt about that in Juri's mind, he shook her violently, shook her so that she looked like a rag doll. Juri cried out in protest and wrenched Selene's arm free of Adam's grasp.

"Stop it, Adam, you're going to hurt her!" She said loudly enough to get the attention of the ship's other employees, many of whom had crept out onto the deck behind her and Selene. Adam saw the attention and did as he was told, although not without a snarl of anger.

"Fine, you got it. Just do what I tell you to, will you? I need everyone below deck, as far below as they can get!" Adam shouted the last part of his parting sentence over one shoulder as he ran from them and towards the ship's bridge.

That run was all it took to start a full-blown panic on the deck. As Adam faded from view, crewmembers scattered, many of them crying, a handful of them screaming.

Juri watched with fascination, oddly detached from it all. Even as things deteriorated, she was still trying to make what she saw match up with her expectations. The crew members were people who had lived on ships for months and months and had the most experience at sea.

When all of their accolades as crew members seemed to have forgotten passengers as they panicked. They contributed the most to rising hysteria, deeming this storm to be the worst of the century.

Of all the people on the boat, this crew should have been the calmest they were not. Juri tried to imagine how the other passengers must have behaved with no one to guide them and then decided she didn't want to.

Things were bad enough where she was without bringing blame or insult to injury into the mix. But then, of course, there was more. There was always more in times like these.

This was like a scene straight out of one of her nightmares. Had all those dreams been a preparation or just foreshadowed what was to come? She had no time to ponder this.

"Juri, we have to go! We have to go right now!" Selene shouted into her face.