“Vanilla sway!” I continued yelling the password while I frantically searched the built-in compartments of the raft for a weapon. I located a telescopic oar, flashlight, binoculars, a first-aid kit, and a pack of handheld flares. I quickly wrapped my bleeding feet in gauze, bound the mess with Ace bandages, then screwed together the four-foot aluminum paddle as a brown-haired creature dove in on the raft, its talons reaching for me—

Whack! Wielding the oar like a tennis racket, I bashed the bat’s claws, the impact chasing it away. I managed to strike a second animal as it swooped by, and then the swarm was upon me, the sky disappearing beneath a blizzard of bleating brown fur and animal musk—the pile suddenly dispersing as the sea erupted in a vertical ballet of silvery-gray streamlined bodies of coiled muscle. They were mako sharks—ten- to twelve-footers, only these mako sharks possessed caudal fins twice the size of any crescent moon–shaped tail I had ever seen—tails that propelled the predators high into the air like marlin hooked on reels. Launching straight out of the water in pairs and trios, the sharks bit the giant bats and held on, their combined weight dragging the flapping creatures into the ocean’s heaving swells and retreating valleys where they were ripped into bloody froths by a dozen more of the sharks’ converging brethren.

It was over in seconds, the makos forcing the surviving bats to the higher altitudes, the submerged bats torn into morsels, the remains picked clean by the school of gilled spiked porpoise fish whose presence initiated the choreographed feeding frenzy in the first place.

The world quieted, leaving the ocean to rise and fall in dizzying, stomach-churning heaves.

My eyes rolled up in my head and I passed out.

*   *   *

Sound, deep and powerful, bludgeoned me into consciousness.

Awash in my own personal kiddie pool of vomit, blood, and three inches of salt water, I sat up, greeted by a hangover perpetuated by a pounding surf that echoed across the surrounding sea like gunshot.

I smelled land before I saw it.

Using the binoculars, I spotted the rolling trough of ocean before me—a river of shallows retreating from a beach that was birthing a towering curl—the wave cresting so high it obliterated the horizon.

With a rolling, peppered explosion of white noise, the two-hundred-foot wave pummeled sand and surf, its swollen tide rushing inland several miles at tsunami speed.

Minutes passed, my fragile heart pounding in terror as I watched the ocean inhale the tide back whence it came, the reversing undertow building into another incoming swell—the swell my raft now floated upon!

“Oh, God! Vanilla sway! Vanilla sway! Vanilla—”

The forming trough pulled the raft onto its rising hump of sea as if I were climbing the first hill of a roller coaster, the sea curling beneath me, levitating the swell to its twenty-story height …

“—swahhhhhhhh!”