“Closed? It’s a heliport, you just touch down.”
“No, I mean—” Chad tapped the windshield in front of them. “We can’t get in there.”
Frannie and the rest peered forward. “All I see is a sea of people.”
“Exactly,” Chad called. He looked at his partner. “What do you want to do, Joe? Go back? Maybe go to the next resort?”
“No!” Frannie insisted. “We need to get to the Hilton Village.” She taped Emmett’s mouth again and continued, “We need to get there, and we’ll never get there from a road from another resort.”
“Well, miss, I’d like to know what you suggest,” Chad said.
Frannie looked out the window at the busy grounds, and then her eyes drifted past the surfboards out to sea. Hm. Then she made up her mind.
“Take us two hundred yards out. Me and Newp can get out there.”
“What?” Newp asked.
“Now, look,” Chad continued. “You can’t just swim in; we’ll head south and come back when it’s clear.”
“You look,” Frannie said. Saul was silent, watching her with something like marvel as she told Chad, “we have a plan. To save those people from something awful. And all I need from you right now is an open door and… well, and these two bitchin' surfboards.”
Joe and Chad both looked to Saul.
Saul shrugged. “I trust her.”
Minutes later the doors were open and Frannie and Newp had moved to the edge, each holding one of the surfboards borrowed from the helicopter’s pilots. Frannie took the shorter one but it wasn’t shorter by much—each board was over ten feet long, monstrous to lug around inside a helicopter. Heavy too. “What is this, balsa wood?” she asked Chad.
“It’s oa wood,” he said.
“There’s no fins,” Newp said, looking up and down his board.
“You use your back foot for a fin,” Chad said. “Look, if you can’t use this kind of board, this idea isn’t going to…”
“People were using these for thousands of years,” Frannie said. “Anything else?”
“Yeah,” Chad called over the noise. “Coral. You watch it, because if you wipe out fifty yards from shore, you’ll shred that pretty dress and the skin of your back right off.”
“So don’t fall.”
Chad nodded. “Don’t fall. Absolutely god damn right.”
Frannie exhaled, blinked, looking at the rolling waves heading into the beach at Waikiki. It would be deep where they jumped. Provided she could find her board fast, she’d be okay. “How big are these waves?” She waved her hand and looked beyond the water below them to the waves out at shore.
“Ten feet,” Newp said. “Are you sure…”
“Don’t even ask me that right now.” Frannie took off her shoes and grabbed the backpack next to Emmett, putting it on. At the last minute she reached down and tore the hem of her dress clear up to her waist. “Let’s go.”
Chapter 49
She was prepared for the violence of the water, but it still caught her like a massive kick to the solar plexus. Frannie and Newp hit the waves and their surfboards immediately danced out of their hands. Frannie plunged deep into the ocean and fought her way to the surface in hopes of finding the 10-foot oa board. Her head burst through the surface and she breathed as she instantly scanned for Newp and the boards. She spotted her own and swam for it. The board bobbed on the water, nearly invisible, but within a few seconds she had reached it and climbed on top. She looked around and saw behind her where Newp was paddling up on his own borrowed chariot.
So far, so good.
As she floated for a minute, the helicopter hovered not far away and she and Newp waved at them.
It was hotter than home by about ten degrees and the sun beat down directly, so that it felt even hotter than LA. From their vantage point as she bobbed up and down, Frannie could see a man-inhabited paradise of beaches, bungalows, highways, and the towers of the downtown in the distance, and closer, just across the highway, the white-blanketed dome of the Hawaiian Village Hotel.
She and Newp touched feet for a second, drawing strength from one another, and then the they began to look back for a wave.
Suddenly the emergency left her and she shouted with a sudden, unexpected joy. “Newp! Can you believe this? That we get to experience this place this way?”
“What’s that?”
“Surfing was born here. That’s what Hooky was so on about. If you’re a soul surfer, this is where you come home.” Soul surfer—that was the surf nation word for those whose bones ached to surf and couldn’t care less what the world thought.
When a wave came, they paddled and rose, and soon they were surfing.
These were not California waves. They were high and hard and Frannie had to catch herself.
Let the waves come. They were just waves. Feet forward, mind your balance, focus on the sound of the board sliding over the water. Water is water is water.
They were surfing in flippin’ Hawaii.
They left the boards embedded in the sand and headed straight for the hotel. At the outer swimming pool of the hotel, they found an open gate and a plethora of beach towels, no one swimming in the enormous circular split-level pool. As soon as they reached the pool, Frannie noticed something else.
“Do you feel it?” she caught her breath as she leaned against the bar under its grass thatched roof, a place like Tarzan would build.
“Feel what—oh,” Newp said. They craned their heads around the end of the bar and looked to great dome. The voice came hissing, sounding both around them and inside their brains, distinct in Frannie’s ear like someone whispering over her shoulder: come… and see the future.
“I gotta admit, I know this guy and even I feel the need to listen,” Frannie said.
“It must be stronger the closer you get, like over there at the hotel.”
“Think of the power,” Frannie said, pointing and running her finger along the shape of the dome in the air. “the fact that he can control all of those birds. He must have built them from the Blanks somehow. Like he sucks in the potentiality and he spits out the birds.” She looked back towards the hotel. “We gotta find my parents before we do anything else. Or at least I need to.”
Newp took her hands in his and kissed her. Then he held her hands for a moment. “Of course.”
They headed over to the hotel and found that contrary to Frannie’s expectations, it was not deserted.
All around the lobby, people stood idle, waiting as though at a bus stop. She saw one family of four, the children sitting and trying to play a card game on a little lobby table while the mother hissed at them. The children seemed distracted by the game and from it as well. The mom would hiss at them to be quiet, them lose interest, and the children would lose their place in their game, and all of them would look up silently towards the dome, which whispered on.
“Here,” the mother said as she brought cotton balls out of her purse. She went to the little boy and girl and stuffed the cotton in their ears, which took some time, then stuffed some in her own ears. Then she offered some to her husband, who sat in his suit on the lobby loveseat appearing agitated and nervous, and he shook his head no.