The Big Surge

(submitted for Blog Action Day 2009)
The sunlight woke James up. He did not hear anything and that bothered him.
"Where is everybody?" he wondered.
He was hungry and the hunger made him get up on his feet and look for some food but he could not find any, and he started to wander around. Suddenly he saw the sea in front. Then everything came back to him. He remembered how he tried to convince the other village people to climb the mountain with him before the sea level rises instead of sleeping on the beach where they had landed with their boats.
"The boats," he asked himself "Where are the boats?"
He checked the sea in front of him and finally succeeded to see three boats at some distance from the coast. He knew that there is some food on the boats. He remembered how they had loaded food onto the boats the night before they were forced to leave the island because of the rising sea level. Did they leave all the food in the boats? he wondered. It made sense to him. If they were too tired to climb the mountain with me, he decided, they must have been too tired to unload the food from the boats and they went to sleep hungry. But where are they? After trying for a while to make up his mind, his hunger convinced him that his only chance was to swim to the nearest boat and get his food there.
He began to go down the mountain toward the coast, all the way looking around, hoping to see some of his buddies but he did not see anything except a few birds and squirrels. When he reached the coast he was hot and sweating and without hesitation he jumped into the water and began swimming towards the boat. Suddenly he saw an object in the water in front of him. He did not recognize what it was until he approached it and when he did he was shocked - it was a human body. It took him some time to recover from his shock. Now he finally understood what happened to the other village people and he was determined not to let this happen to him. He continued to swim and on his way saw some other human bodies floating in the water. Only after he was convinced that there was no energy left in his body did he reach the boat and with his last forces succeeded to mount it. There was indeed some food in the boat and he just swallowed everything he could lay his hands on, and then fell asleep.
When he woke up he saw a white wall in front of him. He yawned and then fell asleep again.
He was waken up by some human voices who spoke a language which he did not understand. They were happy and shook his hand. A few minutes later another guy wearing a white gown, evidently a doctor, came in.
"Here you are," he said. "How are you?"
"I'm ok," said James. "Where am I?"
"You are here," said the doctor "on board of the White Angel. We are a rescue ship sent by the Red Cross to save the survivors of the Big Surge, but so far you are the only one."
"The Big Surge?" asked James.
"Yes," said the doctor "This is similar to the Tsunami but it is caused by an unexpected stream of water from the North Pole due to the global warming."
"Really?" asked James and fell asleep again.