"Dean Wesley Smith - VOR 03 - Island of Power" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Dean Wesley)

Then, almost as quickly as the storm had begun, the lightning slowed down. A few more strikes on the
waves, and it stopped completely. The rumbling thunder, too.

Hank felt like a weight had been lifted from his chest. His entire body was vibrating.

With one last rumbling crack, the air returned to being a simple ocean breeze, now thick with the smell
of ozone mixed with brine and fish.

Then the white light faded, as if sucked out over the ocean to a point where the black shape had been.

The point of light remained there for a few long seconds, like a very short sunset of pure white energy.

Then it was dark again.

Pitch-dark.

Hank couldn’t see a thing.

Not even Stephanie just centimeters in front of his face. His eyes had adjusted to the bright light, and it
was going to take some time for them to adjust back to the dark, starless night.

They both lay still for a time, as if expecting the wild storm to come back. But there was only darkness
and the normal sounds of the ocean waves on the beach.

Hank sat up out of the sand and fumbled in his jacket pocket. He managed to pull out his flashlight at the
same moment Stephanie turned hers on. The beams seemed almost pitiful in the darkness compared to
the white light of a few moments before. They both shone their flashlights out over the ocean, but could
see nothing. The beams were swallowed by the blackness.

The log where Hank had sat down to empty the sand from his boots was a smoking hunk of splintered
wood. He didn’t want to think about what he’d look like if he’d still been sitting there.

“Amazing,” was all he could think to say as they stood up. He brushed the sand out of his hair and off his
pants.
Stephanie just kept staring out over the ocean.

Quickly he bent and tied his boots, then said, “Quite a lightshow, wasn’t it?”

“We’ve got to get off this beach,” she said suddenly, her face still turned toward the ocean. “If that black
thing we saw was something hitting the ocean out there, we’ve got a tsunami coming.”

He knew instantly that she was right. Even before the Earth had been sucked into the Maelstrom,
tsunamis regularly struck the West Coast of North America. Most were small, generated by earthquakes
inJapan orAlaska . But some had been large, killing dozens of people. This beach was the last place
anyone wanted to be when even a small tsunami arrived.

They’d been briefed on earthquakes and tsunamis shortly after arriving at the facility because a major
fault line ran just a few kilometers off the coast. The memory of the hour-long session on tsunami survival
came rushing back to him. At the time he thought it almost a waste of time. The subject had been