The Killing Sea by Richard Lewis

eyes seemed to register nothing. He pedaled hard on the bicycle-style gears in catatonic determination, heading not for shore but down the coast. The paddle wheel behind him churned a wide wake.
    â€œHello, excuse me,” Sarah called out to him as she spilled air out of the sail.
    He jerked his head up in surprise and stopped pedaling.
    â€œMeulaboh. Which way is Meulaboh?”
    He pointed in the direction he was heading. “Sixty kilometer.”
    â€œGod, that far? I need to find a doctor for my brother.”
    He pointed behind him to the coastal hills. “Calang has military doctor. You go there.” He bent his head and resumed his determined pedaling.
    Sarah glanced back at the Calang hills. What, about fifteen miles away? And upwind, too. She tried tacking back and forth but didn’t seem to get any closer. The breeze stiffened, furring the sea with small whitecaps. After an hour she figured that it would be easier just to land the boat on the beach and start walking.
    Sarah set the sail again and steered for a gap in the head-high surf. The contrary wind, though, pushed the boat to where the waves were the biggest, thumping onto the sand. The woman cried out in alarm. “Hang on!” Sarah yelled as a wave built up behind them. The boat surfed down the face. The nose dug underwater, and the stern flipped high into the air, throwing Sarah overboard. The last thing she saw before she hit the water was Peter’s head bobbing on the foam, and the hull of the boat falling upside down on top of him.

Chapter 15
    When he reached the top of the beach, Ruslan stopped screaming. He forced himself to turn around. The wave that had frightened him swished a few feet up the sand. Just a normal wave, the kind he used to enjoy playing in.
    Nonetheless, as he trudged toward Calang, he stayed on the landward side of sandy ridges as much as he could to keep the unsettling ocean from sight. He wondered if he’d ever be able to trust the sea again.
    The land was silent. No birds whistled, no goats bleated, no children shouted, no horns honked, not a single mosque summoned the faithful to prayer. Caught in a leafless thornbush on one ridge was asheet of yellowed newspaper. A corner of the sheet fluttered in the breeze, the crackle of paper unnaturally loud in the silence of this dead land. Ruslan picked it up. It was the front page of a Banda Aceh newspaper, dated December 25. He calculated on his fingers—it was the day before the flood. He scanned the headlines, which spoke of corruption in high places. How angry his father would get when reading such things. Ruslan, he’d say, don’t you ever forget, a poor man with honesty is richer than a thief with gold. But the headlines’ events were now meaningless to Ruslan, and he fashioned a hat out of the sheet. In the shade of its brim, he drank half the water in the remaining bottle.
    He was trying not to look at the sea, but a curious sight caught his attention. In the distance ahead of him, a hundred yards offshore, a man pedaled a strange-looking boat, its sunshiny colors vibrant against the mottled water. One of those fiberglass stern-wheeler paddleboats from the Calang water park, where his father had taken him several times as a boy. It seemed an odd form of transport, but then again, why not? Probably easier than plodding through soft sand.
    He lowered his head and kept walking, picking a path behind a wall of flattened weed that bordered drowned rice fields, newly planted greenshoots turning brown. He came to another flattened village. For several minutes he studied the area from behind a stout tree that had survived the wave. When he saw no rebels foraging through the rubble, he moved forward. He forded several streams and had to swim partway across a wide estuary. When had he eaten last? The tangerines, and before that, Ibu Ramly’s banana fritters. How delicious those fritters had been. How he’d love to have some now. Just