The Day We Lost the World

Thinking about that day, I always get the shivers. And I think about it a lot, since it marked the beginning of a new era that caused me to be currently sitting in a dark and lonely room, unable to see the night sky from one hundred feet underground. Here and now, I’m thinking about it again, unable to stop my mind from going back in time to when the wave came out of nowhere.

It was December 26, 2004, in Thailand, and I was just leaving my hotel to go to the beach when I heard the rumbling. Just as I turned around, the ocean was charging right towards me. I didn’t have time to scream before it swallowed me up.

The water thrashed me around, my belongings slipping out of my grip. I didn’t care to grab them; I just flailed around, searching for something to grab onto. I felt myself being carried away, though I couldn’t see a thing and the water stung my eyes whenever I opened them. All I could see when I looked was hazy water, the water that was pushing me along.

I bumped into a stray branch all of a sudden, feeling it tumble along my side. I grabbed it with both hands and used it as a paddle, desperately swinging it in a circular form to try to fight against the current. It was then knocked out of my hands when I collided with the side of a car, and so I scrambled to get a good grip on the car. Unfortunately, the water pushed me up and over it and I continued to flow away in the rushing current. My chest started to ache and I grew dizzy, unable to breathe. My body began to grow numb and I could feel something inside of me start to slip away…

Just then, I crashed into a tree trunk and quickly wrapped my arms around it. The water beat at me, trying to pry me off, but I held onto the tree tighter than I had ever held onto anything before. I kicked my legs and slid my arms up against the jagged bark of the trunk, my skin scraping painfully against the wood. To eager to breathe to care about the pain in my arms, I climbed up and up the tree until my head finally poked out of the water and I gasped for air.

I took a moment to catch my breath as I clung to the tree and the wave weakened the slightest bit. I continued to climb up the tree after my lungs were filled with the air I never thought I’d miss so much, soon reaching the branches above. I climbed up through the branches to get as far away from the water as possible, and when I was among the highest ones, I stopped and looked down.

The water rushed around the tree, carrying pieces of debris with it. It looked strong, but the tree I was perched in had a thick trunk and I hoped I had a good chance that the tree wouldn’t be pushed down.

I laid back against a branch with a heavy sigh. What was that? Was that a tsunami? An actual, real-life tsunami? I had to be dreaming. This was a nightmare. It had to be. But when I squeezed my eyes shut tightly, made my mind alert (more alert than it already was), and opened my eyes, I was still in the tree with the tsunami swallowing the land below.

Panic threatening to burst my heart open, I took some deep breaths and rested my hands on the sides of my face in an effort to calm myself. When my vision became blurry with the tears sneaking in, I closed my eyes to try to trap them inside my tear ducts. I kept telling myself it was all going to be okay, that I was going to be okay -

A quiet slosh of water that I just barely heard over the white noise of rushing waves interrupted my thoughts. I opened my eyes again and looked back down to see a flicker of movement underneath the water’s surface. Was that a person? Were they okay?

“Hey!” I called, waving my arms around. When I almost toppled off of the branch I sat on, I stopped waving and held onto it with a death grip. “Is someone down there? Are you okay?”

Something moved under the water again, from the same spot. Was whoever was there caught on something? Were they drowning? I had to help.

“Hang on, I’m coming!” I told them. I moved to climb down the tree, but then I hesitated. This didn’t seem like the best idea. I could get swept away in the wave again and drown, meaning whoever was there would drown, too, since I was unable to save them. Then again, if I did nothing at all, they definitely would drown. I would live, but I would have to live with my decision to let them die. I didn’t really enjoy the thought of feeling guilt like that for the rest of my life, so I continued to climb down the tree.

On my way down, I lost my footing for a moment and nearly fell into the water, but I caught myself by grabbing onto another branch. I turned around to look for the person and make sure they were still hanging in there, spotting the movement once more.

But then something popped up out of the water, just for a second before disappearing back under the raging surface. I froze. That did NOT look like the body part of a human.

“Hello?” I called down at the source of movement, whatever it was. “You’re not, like, a shark, are you?”

The movement thrashed around, and something popped out of the water again. This time I got a better glance at it, and I almost fell from the tree. It was a tentacle.

“Are you an octopus?” I asked. I was shivering in fear of what was down there, but also because I was sopping wet and freezing.

The tentacle flicked out of the water yet again and then vanished.

“If you’re an octopus, you shouldn’t drown, right?” I mused. I hoped I could ignore it and climb back up the tree to the safe, high branches. Though, if it was hurt, it might still need help, I figured.

I sighed and climbed down the tree more, my heart hammering in my chest. I inched closer and closer to the water, soon shuddering once my feet touched it. The current wasn’t as strong now, hopefully meaning that the worst of the tsunami was over. I continued to inch further into the water until my whole body except for my head and arms was underwater. I stopped, still holding onto the tree trunk for dear life.

I turned back to the movement, where the tentacle was sticking out of the water. It was dark blue, and the scales that made it up looked rough to touch. It also didn’t seem too big, which I could only hope meant that the octopus wasn’t big enough to eat me - if octopuses could eat people, anyway.

I examined the tentacle for another moment before realizing that it was close enough to grab. So, keeping one arm around the trunk, I reached for it. “What am I doing?” I muttered to myself as my hand slowly got closer to the tentacle. It was motionless now, as if waiting for me to touch it. When my hand was only an inch away, it twitched before gently wrapping itself around my hand. Its scales were rough, just as I thought, and they even hurt my hand a little, despite how gently the tentacle was holding it.

Then, all of a sudden, the tentacle tugged very hard. I was about to lose my grip on the tree when a dark blue shape attached to the tentacle came shooting out of the water towards the tree, dragging me with it. I yelped and kicked my legs around frantically as it scurried up the tree and pulled me along after it. I was pulled back up to the highest branches of the tree, then the tentacle let go of my hand. I flailed around to grab onto a branch before I could plunge down into the water and once I safely settled myself on the same branch as before, I looked at the creature in front of me and screamed.

The creature recoiled from me, its eight or nine or maybe even ten eyes blinking at me in curiosity. This was certainly not an octopus. It had tentacles, but only four, two on each side of its body. It also had large flippers. Its body was the size of a bowling ball, mostly oval-shaped but narrowing into a long, thin tail on the end. At the end of its tail were fins, giving it the look of a miniature mermaid tail. Its head was on the other end, of course, round and scaly. It had spikes on the back of its head, small holes in the sides of its head as ears, I assumed, two slits on the front that were most likely its nose, and many beady little eyes. I did not see a mouth at first, but then it seemed to grin and reveal an opening underneath its nose slits with small but sharp teeth past it.

“Go away!” I shrieked, backing away. Of course, I couldn’t back away very much.

The creature tilted its head, blinking at me more. Now I was sure that it had eight eyes. A soft purr-growl sound came from deep inside its throat. Did it even have a throat? There was barely a neck between its body and head.

“Help!” I shouted, my eyes darting around the tree we sat in. “Somebody help me! Monster! Sea monster!”

“Groo!” the creature protested. One of its four tentacles reached over and slapped my foot, which hurt a surprising amount.

“OW!” I bellowed while I grabbed my foot. I tried backing away up the branch further, but I couldn’t. “HELP!”

The creature slithered back on its own branch, its mouth twisting into a… frown? Was this creature frowning at me?

“Don’t you dare eat me!” I yelled at it sternly. “Go back in the water! Leave me alone! Go on, go! Go!”

Wiggling like it was trying to burrow into the tree, the creature wrapped its tentacles around itself. The scales on its face gradually turned from dark blue to light pink. All eight of its eyes closed and it sat there, motionless.

“Fine,” I muttered, rolling my eyes. “Stay here, then. But try to eat me, and I will chuck you off this tree in a heartbeat.”

Many hours went by, the creature continually still the entire time. I wondered if it was sleeping or just pretending to sleep so I would let my guard down, but I stayed awake and alert in case it tried anything.

Finally, after an excruciatingly long time, I drowsily looked down and noticed that the water level had gone down quite a lot. At the same time I noticed that, I heard voices from not too far away.

“HELP!” I shouted, startling the creature awake (apparently, it really had been sleeping). “OVER HERE!”

And then people came. I couldn’t understand a word they were saying since they were speaking Thai and I was just an American visitor, but they beckoned to me to come down the tree. I climbed down and found that the water only went up to my waist now, and there was barely any current at all. Relief flooded through me like a tsunami - but a pleasant tsunami, not like the one I had just been through. I was saved.

“Come,” one of my rescuers said in broken English as he took my hand. “Come safe.”

I just nodded and followed them away from the tree. After a few steps, however, I looked back at the tree. The odd creature was slowly slithering down the trunk, its eyes on me. I felt grateful that it hadn’t eaten me, so I decided to give it a friendly wave goodbye as a thank you. To my ultimate surprise, the creature raised a tentacle and waved back.

I laughed and turned back around, nearly running into the man in front of me. The three rescuers had stopped, eyeballing the area around us.

“What is it?” I asked them. I nervously glanced around with them, spotting what they were looking at and shuddering with the chills sent down my spine.

All around us, clinging to the trees and bushes that stuck out of the endless pool, floating in the water, and hanging from high branches, were hundreds of creatures like the one I had met. They all stared at us with the eight eyes on their weird little bodies that came in a variety of colors. I saw shades of red and orange and purple and green, even some pink and yellow. Some other colors flickered through a few scales on most of them, too, like how the creature in my safe tree had turned its face pink.

Some of them started making noises: purrs and growls and yips and barks. They shifted around and flapped their tentacles and flippers at each other. Were they talking to each other? What were they saying?

Static sounded from in front of me, making me jump. I watched as the man before me pulled out a small, old transistor radio. A voice came through the static before cutting out. “There’s -”

“What?” I breathed, confused and scared.

The voice kept coming and breaking up. “From the sea - everyone - cover -”

I looked back at the creatures, my eyes wide. They kept chatting amongst themselves, but their eyes remained on my rescuers and me. I turned back to my tree to see my treemate creature watching me, too.

“Invasion!” the voice from the radio said, clear as day.

And that’s when the takeover began. All because of a tsunami that pushed out-of-this-world sea creatures onto land, which caused the creatures to realize that they could dwell on land as well as in the ocean. The creatures found this land - our land - as a new home, so they took over and forced us all underground, where we now live in hiding.

Since then, I always think about December 26, 2004: the day of the deadly tsunami… and the day we lost the world.