Desperation Reef by T. Jefferson Parker

Author:T. Jefferson Parker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tor Publishing Group

24

Todos Santos is thirty feet of chaos, and one hundred percent on.

The quake-driven waves march in fast and crowded together, like they’re in a race, partially blotting out the sky as Jen looks up from the cabin of the charter boat Magdalena. The impact zone is a mist-shrouded valley and looks as if it’s boiling.

Israel, the captain, has pulled up well away from the spectacle. Tells them in broken English he’s not going to die in there.

To Jen the waves look rideable, just barely. They’re rapid shape-changers, sections forming and closing out, towering A-frames offering lefts and rights that form, then suddenly collapse. Some gruesome wipeouts. Jen spots Jamie Mitchell and Jojo Roper and Greg Long out in the lineup, all expected to ride the Monsters in a few short weeks.

Casey and Brock have driven the jet skis across the deceptively glassy quarter mile from shore, and they’re waiting a hundred feet from Magdalena, skis belching white smoke and whining with pent-up horsepower.

Jen and Mahina plop overboard one at a time with the brothers’ boards, the water a cold shock on Jen’s face and down her neck and chest as it cuts under her wetsuit. She paddles hard through the chop to her idling ski, trades places with Casey, who has a smile on his face as he sits on his board and fastens the leash to one ankle. Her heart pounds like a dryer with a bowling ball in it.

“Gonna do this, Mom, gonna do this,” he says. “Thirty feet of God’s love, marching in to hold us!”

“The rights are better, Case,” she says, noting that the right-breaking waves are clean, but the lefts are sloppy. “Never seen waves this fast!”

She steers the jet ski in a wide semicircle, checking back to make sure Casey has the tow rope and his balance on the eight-four gun before she accelerates and pulls him into the lineup.

Waits now, bobbing on the heavy jet ski. High-fives Roper, who high-fives back. The BetUS Sportsbook has good odds and lines on him for the Monsters, she knows. Just behind Brock, who’s just behind Casey, are the big, big boys—Hawaiian and Australian—and that truly miraculous Tom Tyler out of Santa Cruz.

Anybody’s game, she thinks.

Will come down to wave choice, and luck.

Now Mahina cuts out front of a towering peak, towing Brock behind.

Jen watches as Mahina speeds along the forming shoulder and Brock swings high into the wave, well in front of the massive crest. Where he drops the handle, and Mahina, after looking behind at him, speeds up and over thirty feet of still-forming wave.

Brock drops into the deep blue wave as if his board were a gallows trapdoor.

The crest is thick and shifty, rudely cleaving a left and a right, but the right is where he is and Brock rockets across the face of it. Then a blast of speed into a carving bottom turn as he banks and lets the face have him, brakes against it with that reckless cool of his, letting the maw have him as if he’s daring it to.

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