ATM:

He came to in a silent world that looked like the dark side of the moon. He wanted to move but his body didn’t. Bewildered he lay crumpled, uncomprehending, in a mess of dirt and filth. Above him a sagging mattress hung in a tree and snow was falling. He felt the flakes, warm on his upturned face. Wasn’t snow meant to be cold? Bemused he lay under the strange sky; charcoals, indigo and inky blacks and low, low, down where the sun lay trapped, peach and slivers of gold. It was beautiful. He tried to hear but his head was an echo chamber, the only sound a plaintive whistling, high and reedy. He needed to move. He tried again. Slowly, like a drunkard, rolling over. He felt crunching beneath him and saw glass gleam in the mud. Feebly turning his head he could see flames; like small campfires flickering amidst blackened scrub, smoke rising from a dozen pyres into the still evening sky. Why weren’t the birds singing in the falling snow? It was so beautiful.

Then the mental fog cleared, the whistling died away and the pain came. Abrupt, excruciating, ripping through the left side of his chest and he screamed. Clarity cut like a knife. It wasn’t snow falling softly into his face. It was burnt ash. It wasn’t a mattress in a tree. It was a roller shuttered door; planks of scorch-welded aluminium, thirty feet up in the mangled remains of an old gasometer. And there were bodies; men, four or five, maybe more, scattered, motionless in mud and filth and the carcasses of burnt out vehicles; charred, still smoking, two on their sides, one incongruously still upright on blackened metal rims. And beyond the vehicles, where the buildings should have been, just smoking rubble pierced with stumps of blackened brick, sheared stone and twisted scorched rebar. And sounds were coming now; men calling out in pain, the spit and crackle of flames, the faint beating blades of a helicopter and in the distance, sirens, multitudes of them, getting closer. He was going to die here in the dirt and the chaos. He knew it. Then pain ripped again and he dropped into darkness.

 

POINT ECHO:

Mohamed hadn’t stopped smiling since the fish’s last flurry at a tired jump. He knew surrender when he saw it. Bending low over the shallow gunwale he followed the tight line down, grasping the long bony spike of the fish’s elongated upper jaw in his left glove, pulling up its long dorsal fin with his right. Up close it was a beautiful creature; the fastest in the sea, all streamlined muscle and cutting edge aerodynamics. Opened up like a Chinese fan its fin-sail, running the length of its sinuous body, was almost translucent. Jakes checked the camera settings, composing the miniature image on the back view-screen; four smiling eyes, two wide grins, the top three-feet of a two-hundred pound sailfish and white-flecked blue sea stretching to the horizon. More than good enough.

“Ok Jason,” he waved a hand, “in towards Mo and keep the smile.”

He didn’t get to press the shutter button.

The shark, 500lb of lunging teeth and muscle, took the sailfish from below, ripping it from Mo’s grasp, both prey and predator erupting above the kneeling photo group in an explosion of white water. Jason half-dived, half-fell, left. Mo’, right, bouncing hard off the twin outboard engine cowls. Jakes, dropping the camera, fell backwards under the bimini, the camera smashing on to the moulded deck a moment before the shark and the severed upper body of the sailfish.  Shuddering, the Whaler’s stern dipped, biting into the sea, water spilling over the transom.  On his knees, scrabbling in six inches of bloodied water, Jason stared at the head of the decapitated sailfish. One large bright iridescent eye looked back at him. He looked at the shark. Two thirds of its grey wet bulk cantilevered over the smashed gunwale, the meaty triangle of its dorsal quivering, powerful tail thrashing air. He looked for Mo’. The Malay was six feet away, on his back under the Yamahas, one leg awkwardly bent against the transom. He wasn’t moving. The boat settled further into the water, the bow lifting, the pale white underbelly of the shark sliding further across the deck in a soup of watery blood. Already its left pectoral was across Mo’s good leg, its brutish head casting about left and right, jaws snapping, biting at the air in convulsing spasmodic gulps. Mo’ stirred, groaning, his eyes opening. He felt the weight, saw the black lidless eyes, the rows of razored teeth, he screamed.