The stress on the metal is so powerful that you can feel it beneath your feet before you even hear it. Not vibrating, not a rickety noise. *Stress.* Stress that bends, that flexes the metal right beneath your insignificant weight. The warping metal moans like the bride of titan, so loud and so low that your ears perceive it as rumbling just like the rest of your body.

I'm on the upper deck and it's dark. It's too dark to see and there's so much noise in my bones that I can't think straight. The rain is coming down in small beads of ice slicked with below freezing salt-water. The deck beneath my feet is pregnant with damage, bulging like something out of an *M.C. Escher*.

Suddenly I'm gripping the railing. Maybe I have been gripping the railing for sometime now, maybe I'm just coming around, I need to pay attention. *Jesus Christ* I need to pay attention. There's a fantastic popping under my feet followed by an unreal silence that draws around my body, suffocating the very idea of sound right out of existence. I'm falling at the same speed as the rain, and I'm pretty sure I'm deaf. Me and the rain drops, we share a moment. An exhilarating silent film of falling and spinning. The ocean is rushing me at a million miles an hour. I'm spinning out of control - it's so dark - the only way I can tell which way I'm facing is by guessing whether I am looking at stars or reflections of stars. I know the ocean is gaining on me - flying straight up like a cork out of champagne bottle. And then it hits.

It feels like being shot broadside with a sheet of ice cold glass the size of a queen bed. The water is so cold that it feels hot at first, and then my nerves start blinking out like forward observers in a full frontal assault. I think that my arms are moving, and I think that my legs are moving - but I can't prove it. my teeth are chattering violently. I'm right side up, my head out of the water, and I'm slowly rotating to bring the ship back into my field of vision. The world spins dark and silent around me like the inside of a huge black marble. There it is. *The Horizon*, her hull pitched into the black at 90 degrees.

Hundreds of tiny figures swarm away from her, as if she were a blinding light and all of her passengers are roaches. I've never seen something so big disappear so fast. I'm mesmerized. Huge swells of ocean, and bubbles bigger than cars are wrapping around her cold steel and sucking her into nothing. I can't help but imagine a huge ant lion down there, grasping *The Horizon* with its huge jaws and convulsing backwards into its sandy death trap.

There's a break in the reflection of the sky and it's moving right towards me. Fast. It's not even 10 yards out. My heart flutters audibly and my gut is wrong enough to feel something like hope for a fraction of a second. Whatever it was disappears beneath the surface. Something hits my leg like a rubber bullet the size of dog. *The Horizon* spins out of view. I realize now that I have been screaming - I still can't hear anything. I force my mouth closed. Just in case anyone else can hear I don't want to scare 'em. I need to get myself under control.

*Bam!* The dog bullet again - this time there was something sharp on it. I run my hand down my thigh groping for information. There's a deep rut in my flesh a foot above my knee. Thank god I can't feel a thing. Something glides right into my back, jarring me a bit. It's floating. There's that false hope again, alive for just a moment before the reality of my situation systemically extracts it, surgically almost, like a tumor. In its wake an oppressive swamp of despair floods in through my pores. Even if I somehow avoid being shark food, I'm still in the middle of the ocean.

While I've been wallowing in self pity my hands, apparently, have been working. I've got a hold of whatever it is that has been floating about in my vicinity. A shark slams into my lower back at what must be a million miles an hour. I don't feel anything sharp and I assume I'm not in two pieces. It feels like getting hit with a compact car. Fear helps. A half a second of scrambling and I'm out of the water and floating on what now appears to be a door.

It's really,really cold. So cold it hurts. I take this as a good sign, at least I'm feeling something.