chapter four

Every part of André ached.

He lay on his back, his hands resting over his bare chest. A middle-aged woman was hovering over him, long blond hair hanging down in springy curls, a crease between her brows expressing her concern. "Are you sure you're alright?" She asked worriedly, her Australian accent prominent. Her and her husband, along with their twelve year old boy, had spotted André in the chaos as he clung to a tree and helped pull him to safety before the second wave came. The three of them had ultimately saved his life.

They were on the second floor of the Khao Lak Resort on the outdoor walkway that led to his room just a little ways down. Tori and Robbie were also there; he could hear their voices as they spoke frantically on their cellphones, but he didn't pay attention to what they were saying. Probably reassuring their families that they were safe.

"I'm okay," he said, though his voice sounded raspy in his throat and unconvincing. He pushed himself up, hissing through his teeth, and he felt her hands moving to his shoulder to help steady him. As far as he was concerned, he was okay. Nothing felt broken, at least. André's body felt like it'd been through the mill and back, with a couple bumps and bruises and cuts, but other than that, he just needed a minute to catch his bearings again. "Thank you."

"Just take it easy, mate," the woman's husband said, frowning. He was tan skinned, maybe of Indian descent, but André didn't want to assume.

André nodded, but didn't verbally answer. Instead, he stared out ahead of him, through the bars of the walkways railing. The area was completely unrecognizable, with broken down buildings and trees, the wreckage piled around and scattered. The ocean water lingered still, muddy and obscure, though it was no longer as strong or as violent as before - André could tell it would pull back into the ocean soon, leaving the mass destruction in it's wake. It was hard to believe this had been the paradise he was just in minutes ago.

Three of his friends were still out there.

God only knew if they were okay, or even alive.

The thought hit him like a ton of bricks, and his chest felt suddenly very heavy. With some reassurance to the two skeptical adults beside him that he was alright enough to stand, they reluctantly turned their attentions elsewhere and André eventually rose to his feet, albeit a little unsteadily. He held onto the railing, his knuckles tight around the wood, his eyes scanning over the devastation incredulity. He could only imagine how the locals felt. Up above, a helicopter was flying overhead. Probably the news, or search and rescue.

Someone's hand pressed gently over his arm, and he turned his head to see Tori's tearstained face. She hasn't stopped crying since he first saw her.

"I-" Tori began, looking as if she struggled for her words. André couldn't blame her. "We saw it all happen. God, we saw all of you get hit," she said, referring to Robbie and herself. Her words shook on her tongue, eyes glistening. She spoke hesitantly next, fingers tightening over his skin. "Do you think...do you think they made it?"

André debated whether or not he should lie before deciding against it. "I don't know, Tor," he said earnestly, shaking his head. Her lower lip trembled.

Robbie came up beside her, looking no better. "Should we call their parents?" He asked quietly, and then, before anyone could answer, he continued. "What the hell do we do?"

"There's nothing we can do right now," André said. It was clear Tori was too distressed to be the voice of reason or leadership, and although André felt it too, he knew he had to step up and say something. He gestured around them, to the water. In the distance, they could hear someone wailing for their mother. It sounded like a young child. "We have to wait until it's calmer, until it's safe. And then we look for them."

And so they waited. Sitting close together with their backs pressed up against the wall, saying nothing. Occasionally, someone would rush past them, and not far away from them a group of survivors were hovering over a severely injured woman, who was biting down on a towel and screaming in pain. André did his best to block it out, his jaw clenched and his hands balled into fists, and tried not to think about his friends out there, maybe in the same kind of situation, or worse.

He considered himself extremely lucky. André was in pain - his bones ached with every movement and his dirty skin was bruising quickly, as if he'd been hit by a car. But he was alive, and he was well off, considering everything.

He couldn't help but wonder if he would have been any worse off if that second wave would have hit him.

Maybe he'd even be dead.

But he wasn't. He was here, with two of his other friends who were luckily high up enough to not have been hit. Tori had explained with a trembling voice that the entire building shook when the water hit, that some of it had lurched over the side of the railings on the balconies, but they had ultimately been out of harm's way. Robbie was staying eerily silent. And in turn, André explained daringly that when the wave hit him, he'd never experienced anything more terrifying in his entire eighteen years of living.

He couldn't breathe. He couldn't see. All control had been taken from him. It was completely disorientating. André truly believed then that he was going to die; that he'd drown before his life had even really started.

Eventually, the water settled. More and more groups of people started setting out to help others still trapped in the wreckage and look for their loved ones. André could not believe the devastation that he was seeing; it seemed surreal, the stuff made of more realistic feeling nightmares. And by Tori's vice grip on his hand, he figured she was thinking something very similar.

"I have to ask," Robbie began hesitantly as they made way to the stairwell, and when André glanced over his gaze was pointed intently on his feet. He rubbed at the back of his neck. "What if we find - what if we find one of them, you know...dead?"

Beside him, Tori flinched, but said in a remarkably steady voice: "We'll cross that bridge if we come to it."

"Let's hope not, though," André added. "We can't afford to think so negatively."

Robbie kept his eyes on his sandaled feet. "I'm just trying to be realistic. And...prepared." He swallowed thickly, and glanced up, his glasses askew on his ashen face. "Come on."

They followed him down the stairs and past a rush of survivors. Some were hanging around on the wooden floors, passing around food and sitting at the doors of their hotel rooms. More often than not, most of them he saw were injured, or sullen and beaten up like he was - some young children (they past a child that couldn't have been older than five years old, his leg purple and swollen and blood on his face) and some very old. He noticed that Tori was doing everything she could to not look at them. Whether out of guilt or what, he didn't know.

Deciding to split up to cover more ground, although staying in each other's sights, André ventured on his own around the pool area. And when the afternoon was beginning to fall into evening, the sky a yellow-ish orange, he managed to spot, through the wreckage, something very round and familiar beneath beams of wood.

Their volleyball.

André grabbed the pieces of wood and chucked them to the side hastily, his feet buried in brownish sludge from the aftermath of the tidal wave. He knocked everything out of his way, his hands tentatively reaching for the volleyball and straightening himself up, glancing down at it with creased brows. The last time he had seen her, Cat had been holding it. André's eyes danced around the surrounding area, looking for any sign of familiar synthetically red hair.

"Cat!" He bellowed out, loud enough to hear his voice echo. Relative silence answered him; but he could hear the others calling out for their lost friends somewhere in the distance as well. "CAT!"

Nothing.

He swore under his breath. "Jade!" He tried, spinning around. "Beck! Cat!"

There was a rustle behind him: the sound of legs pulling through the muck around them and beams of wood being knocked out of the way, and a very guttural sounding cough. André turned sharply, the volleyball still pressed between his palms, and squinted through the growing shadows of the night to see who it was, and the person groaned and hissed through their teeth. With her ink black hair and pale skin sullied with dirt and littered with cuts, Jade stepped into his view and glanced over at him, one of her eyes swollen black and blue.

"Jade?" He called out in disbelief, taking a few hesitant steps forward - what he was reluctant for, he couldn't tell. Just a nagging feeling hooked into his chest that told him to be cautious. "Holy chizz."

Her split lips pulled up into her signature smirk. He noticed she was cradling her left arm to her chest. "You called?" She asked weakly, voice hoarse.

And then her knees gave out from underneath her, and André rushed forward in one swooping moment to catch her in his arms only seconds before she collapsed.

kind of short chapter this time, but what can I say. I love to keep people in suspense.

as always, tell me your thoughts and/or predictions! do you guys think that Jade will be alright - or if Beck and Cat are alive? let me know what you think. ;)