The Presence by John Saul

made it worse. Damn! How long had it been since he’d actually seen Michael?
    Josh twisted frantically in the water now, searching for a glimpse of Michael. What the hell had he been thinking of, bringing Michael out here in the middle of the night? Just because Michael had managed to pull him out of the reef didn’t make him an expert diver! He should have known better. And he sure shouldn’t have let Michael out of his sight, even for a second.
    He switched on his flashlight and shined it around.
    Nothing.
    Now he aimed the beam downward, raking it back and forth across the bottom, silently praying that when the light picked Michael out of the darkness, he would be moving, not just—
    Before the words could form in Josh’s mind, he saw him.
    Michael was twenty to twenty-five feet off to the left, and ten or twelve feet below. And he was moving.
    Josh’s panic subsiding now that he’d located Michael, he automatically sucked in a breath of air in preparation for the dive down to make sure his friend was all right.
    But the familiar pressure from the regulator had disappeared, as if the tank had run out of air. That didn’t make any sense—they’d only been in the water for maybe forty minutes, and the tank should have held enough air for an hour.
    Unless it hadn’t been full when they’d started.
    But he’d checked it! He could distinctly remember checking the tank he was wearing, as well as Michael’s and Jeff Kina’s.
    He looked down again. Was Michael really moving?
    Suddenly he couldn’t tell.
    What if Michael had run out of air, too?
    What if he’d forgotten what to do, and panicked?
    His fear for Michael flooding back, Josh reached back and jerked the lever over to the reserve position, then frantically dived down toward Michael. He was just coming into the murky part of the water when he saw Michael drop his weights and pull the cord that activated the CO2 cartridge on his life vest. The vest instantly inflated, and Michael popped to the surface, shooting past Josh. Not bothering with his own emergency cord, Josh swam quickly to the surface, pulling the regulator out of his mouth the second his head popped out of the water.
    “You okay?” he asked. But even in the dim light he could see that something had happened to Michael.
    “I—I think so,” Michael stammered. “I just—I don’t know—all of a sudden I couldn’t breathe!”
    “Damn it!” Josh Malani exclaimed. “Let me see yourgauge.” He maneuvered himself around behind Michael, switched on the flashlight, and shined it on the gauge. “It’s the damned tanks,” he told Michael. “Mine’s running out, too! I was going down to get you when you pulled the cord. Let’s get back to the beach and make sure the other guys are okay.”
    Inflating his own vest to make swimming on the surface easier, Josh started toward the beach, keeping pace with Michael. It wasn’t until they were scrambling out of the water onto the beach that they saw Jeff Kina trying to get a small pile of kiawe burning in a makeshift fire pit.
    “What happened?” Josh asked. “How come you’re out already? You’re always down till you start breathing water.”
    “And that wasn’t very long ago,” Jeff replied. “The gauge said the tank was full when I went in, but I ran out of air ten minutes ago.” He scowled in the moonlight, then glared at the offending tank. “And we can’t even complain to Ken about it, since he didn’t exactly rent this stuff to us!” He struck another match. The small pile of kindling under the kiawe branches sputtered, then burst into flame.
    A few minutes later, as the fire crept up through the kiawe, which burned brighter every minute, Rick and Kioki emerged from the water, too. “What happened to you guys?” they asked.
    Josh shrugged. “Tanks weren’t full.”
    Kioki frowned. “Yours, too? I figured it was only mine.”
    Rick Pieper glanced at his buddy. “What are you talking about? You had trouble, too?”
    Kioki