"It's about time," groused Jo. "We’ll just start some physical therapy to get that shoulder moving. Come on," she commanded and pointed at the deck next to her.
"Yes ma'am," Reese said, all too happy to get away from the marital dispute at the helm.
Jo and Reese moved to the bow where the ship at sail was more exuberant but afforded them a bit more privacy than amidships.
"Good thinking," Reese said under his breath when they regrouped on the front half of the boat.
“Of course, it's good thinking," Jo snapped. "Any woman who's been married would know that Byron's in for a tongue lashing. That’s something that should stay in the family—ain’t no business of ours."
"How long you think he’s gonna be mad at me?" Reese asked, as he tried to sneak a glance at the arguing couple back by the helm.
"Hey, eyes up front," Jo demanded with a snap of her fingers. "There's no telling, but I have a feeling Libby will get him sorted out quicker than we think," she said with a lopsided smile. "We've been talking, she and I, and that gal’s got her head on straight. She may look soft and innocent, like somebody's grandma, but she's got a Texan streak a mile wide."
Reese looked at Jo and whistled. "Poor Byron."
Jo nodded. "Exactly—wait, what's that supposed to mean?" she demanded, going from gratitude to mock-suspicion in the blink of an eye.
Reese laughed, the first time in a long time. In a second, Jo joined in, and they both sat down on the forward bench. "Seriously though, lean over here,” Jo said eventually. “I meant to take that filthy thing off you yesterday, but lost track of time dealing with everything else."
Reese waited patiently as she undid the sling and removed the salt-crusted rag from around his neck and arm. The fresh air felt luxurious on the exposed skin of his arm. He smiled as he cradled his right hand in his lap.
"Now,” Jo asked as she gave a critical eye to the half-healed wound over his deltoids. “How high can you raise your arm?”
“A bit, I guess," Reese admitted. He raised the limb in question about halfway and winced when the skin and muscles tightened to the point of pain.
Jo pursed her lips and nodded. "Not bad. It's only been about a week and a half—or is it two?—whatever, we have to keep working on it. Don’t want that scar tissue to limit your mobility. I have a feeling you're going to need both arms before long."
Reese grunted as he massaged the tender skin of his shoulder. "Ain't that the truth. I'm sick of doing things like a one-armed pirate."
"Better that than a one-eyed pirate, I guess," Jo replied with a snort.
Heavy footfalls on the deck approached from behind. They turned to see Byron, with a look on his face that came close to someone about to throw up. He cleared his throat and planted his feet firmly on the deck, put his hands behind his back as if he were at ease, and looked a foot over Reese's head, out to sea. "I just wanted to say I'm sorry," he said in a gruff voice.
Reese stood and waved off the apology with his left hand. "Seriously, Byron, there's no need to apologize. Things are rough for everybody right now."
Byron shifted his gaze and looked at Reese for the first time without a frown. "I appreciate you saying that. It's not easy for me to give up control over anything—especially my boat. And I just…” He cleared his throat. "I guess I just wanted to say thank you. For everything." He turned and walked away without another word.
Jo stood next to Reese, and they looked at each other. She grinned. "Well ain't that something?”
"Yeah, and I just learned a valuable lesson,” Reese said as he watched Byron move back to the wheel. Libby patted him on the arm and sat, one had on her hat as she smiled at the ocean.
"Oh?" asked Jo.
“Yeah,” Reese said as he looked at the little old lady that had cowed the grumpy sailor. “Don't make Libby mad."
Chapter 2
Lavelle Homestead
Bee’s Landing Subdivision
Northwest of Charleston, South Carolina
Cami Lavelle stepped back from the plywood she’d just placed over Marty’s kitchen window and admired her handiwork. The screws didn't line up perfectly, but the window was secure from the elements. They'd wrapped the scrap of plywood in a heavy tarp before she’d attached it to the charred frame. At the very least, it would keep moisture and critters from getting inside Marty Price’s fire-damaged house.
Someone let out a shrill whistle and all repair work on the house stopped. A collective sigh went up from the dozen workers who scrambled over the old man's half-charred house. A shout went up for chow time and Cami gratefully removed the work gloves from her hand before she used a bandanna in her back pocket to wipe the sweat from her brow. Barely noon, and the day was already one of the hottest she could remember—certainly the hottest day since the tsunami had changed the world and made air conditioning nothing but a dream.
She walked across the side yard shared with her house and up to the back deck where a pavilion had been borrowed and erected for the work crew. It'd been a couple days since the ill-fated assault on Cami's house—which had spread to Marty’s—by unknown attackers. But in that short amount of time, the neighborhood—at least those people who lived on the same street as Marty—had pitched in and helped as best they could.
A handful of people became the work crew that, along with Cami, toiled to board up broken windows, cut out burned sections of the roof, and attempted to seal the house up from the elements. The goal wasn’t perfection, but according to Marty, it only needed to be “good enough.”
No one had air conditioning or electricity, not for almost a full week since the tsunami, so sealing the house wasn't necessary or needed. What was necessary, Cami realized as she accepted a bottle of lukewarm water from her daughter, Amber, was a simple barrier between the old man and the elements. As long as he could stay dry and free of pests, he’d be fine.
For his part, Marty took everything in stride. He sat in the shade on the porch under a ridiculous wide-brimmed hat and sipped sun tea while Kirk, the cheeky vizsla that had become the neighborhood’s unofficial mascot, napped at his feet. He smiled genially at the workers and offered his thanks and support whenever anyone passed near him. Word had spread of how the confrontation at Cami's house would have gone completely different if Marty hadn’t joined the fight with his .50 caliber rifle. Where the old man had gotten such a beast of a weapon no one knew, and he refused to talk about it.
Cami grinned as she picked up a sandwich made from bread baked by one of the women in the neighborhood in a rustic oven. Rumor had it that her husband had cobbled together the oven from bricks found in their garage. The bread was crusty—overly so for Cami's likes—but it was bread, it was fresh, and the inside was chewy and delicious. She closed her eyes in bliss savored the taste of the fresh bread.
Cami stepped away from the buffet table and took her bread and sun tea to the corner of the deck where Amber stood with Mia Stevens and her two boys. Cami and Amber both knew the amount of supplies in the Lavelle household, including flour, salt, and yeast, would last them well into the next year. They had easily stored up a year’s worth of baking supplies. But that wasn't something she wanted to advertise to the neighborhood—as everyone enjoyed the lukewarm water and sun tea, no one knew that just on the other side of the kitchen wall Cami's fridge functioned normally thanks to the solar set up hidden in her backyard.
She grimaced as she thought of the extra work required to keep the source of their electricity secret from the rest of the neighborhood. She and Amber felt more than a little shame in doing so, but the life of her daughter—and those of the people that she had promised to protect—came before anyone else. She wouldn't put them at jeopardy for any reason, even one as egalitarian as providing ice to the neighborhood. It would only be a matter of time before people in the neighborhood demanded more than Cami could make in a day. With tempers already on short food fuses, Cami wasn't about to risk another blow up at her house.
Cami grimaced as she
chewed the crusty bread. One epic gunfight was enough, thank you very much.
The fact that they had to pull down the solar cells and hide them in the shed before repairs began on Marty's house a couple days ago had been uppermost in Cami's mind. The batteries in the shed could only power the fridge—now the only appliance that used electricity—for another day or so before they need to be fully recharged. Cami had already talked to Marty, and the two of them had pushed the volunteer workers at a breakneck pace to get as much accomplished as possible before she called a general hiatus for 24 or 48 hours to recharge the batteries. Marty, ever the practical one, had agreed readily. He wanted to reap the benefits of the secret electricity and was in no mood to share with anyone.
And so, Cami had pushed everyone to their limits. A few people had already quit, but the ones who'd stayed had done so out of pride and stubbornness. Those were exactly the traits that Cami needed to get the house put back into shape in such record time. Now, two days after the attack, they neared completion on the majority of the work that needed to be done. It would be a long time before Marty would be able to use the front door, or even the front rooms, but they were at least secured from the elements, curious animals, and anyone who attempted to loot the place. Cami had already offered Marty a place to stay at her house, but the old man had stubbornly refused.
"I had this house built, I lived here with my wife through our retirement, and I’ve lived here since her death. Just because some fools tried to set fire to it don't mean much to me. I'm gonna die in this house one day, and that's just the way I want it,” the old man had said earlier in the day.
"Well, I for one, don't want you dying anytime soon, so if we do get a storm and you start seeing leaks, don't hesitate to come over to my place for goodness’ sake," Cami had replied.
She looked over at Amber and Marty, and Mia, all focused on their meager food.
"Sure will be glad when all these people clear on outta here," Marty grumbled.
"Well, that's some gratitude for you," Amber replied with a smile.
"Oh, don't get me wrong—I appreciate what they're doin’ more than I can say," Marty replied quickly. He glanced around, leaned in conspiratorially, and winked. "I just miss my iced tea."
The little group of survivors shared a quiet laugh as their friends and neighbors gathered food and drinks and spread out into Cami's yard to seek the cool shade under the trees that lined her property. Cami smiled as she looked out over her yard and saw people laugh and socialize. It was the first sense of normalcy anyone had experienced since the tsunami had struck Charleston. Cami frowned. Since the tsunami had struck the entire coast.
She closed her eyes and looked down. It was impossible not to think of her husband, out on a boat off the coast of Maine when the tsunami struck. It was miracle enough that he’d gotten a text message through to her from a little town in Maine called Ellsworth. She knew that he’d survived the tsunami and that he’d made it to shore and planned to walk to Boston. All he had to do once he left Boston was cross a thousand miles of devastation, scorched earth, and utter chaos to come home.
She smiled. If anyone out there could do it, Reese could. Amber pulled her phone out to show one of Mia’s kids a funny picture that made them laugh, and Cami frowned anew. She’d have to talk with her daughter—they had to remember not to display fully-charged cell phones in front of people whose own phones had been dead for almost a week with no way to recharge them. It would be an easy giveaway that they had a source of electricity where the rest of the neighborhood did not.
Everywhere Cami turned, she found more security issues that she had to stay on top of, more threats to overcome, more challenges to face. After ten—or was it eleven?—days of attempting to keep the house from falling apart by herself, Cami had long since approached the point of exhaustion. She took a drink of tea and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. There was always something to do—she was easily busier after the tsunami than she ever had been before the end of the world as she knew it.
As Cami pondered that paradox and chewed bread, Marty stood from his perch on the edge of the deck and faced Amber, Mia, and Cami. "I think it's about time we had a talk," he said.
"Boys, want to go play in the garden?” Mia suggested.
"Can we see if we can find any zucchini?" asked Junior.
Cami laughed. "Of course," she said. "If you find any, I'll be sure to fry ‘em up for dinner tonight!"
Caleb looked at his older brother with a wide-open mouth and they broke into laughter. The boys cheered and scampered off straight for the garden. They shoved at each other as they tore through the entrance.
The smile on Cami's face faded as soon as she saw the serious look on Marty's. "What is it?" she asked warily. Her hand immediately went to the pistol at her side, and so did Amber's. They both looked around, alert for trouble.
"Nothing like that," Marty said quickly with an arthritic hand in the air. When they relaxed, he continued. "Though it makes this old fart happy to see you two react like that.” The wrinkled smile left his face. “Only took the end of the world for y'all to get some situational awareness, but I suppose we’ll have to take what we can get.” He chuckled to himself, then cleared his throat and spat noisily off the deck. "No, what I want to talk with y’all about is contingency plans."
"Contingency plans for what?" Amber asked. “We’ve already survived a gunfight at our freakin’ house…”
"In case them fools come back for round two," Marty snapped. "We ran them off once, sure—but we didn't get their leader. They came here with six or seven guys, I figure, and we only took down three, including the one Sheriff McIntyre bagged.”
Amber frowned, and a little furrow appeared between her eyebrows. “But didn’t he say that they all ran off?”
Marty nodded. “He did indeed, but he also said this morning on the radio he can't be coming by as he was. There's some trouble brewing in the northern half of the county. Startin’ to get serious, and he's pullin’ most of his men to deal with that, now that we're handled…”
“Why you worried about that? Didn’t he say he wasn’t coming around here—specifically—anymore, just that he’d have to reduce patrols in general…” asked Cami.
“Because it occurs to me," Marty said as he leaned forward and rested his weight on his cane, “that we don't know who was harboring the scumbags what hit us. They couldn't have been hiding out this neighborhood without help.” He looked at Cami, Amber, and Mia in the eye. “Someone would've noticed, and word would've spread."
Cami nodded. "I was thinking Harriet…but I just can't see her associating with riffraff. She's too…”
"Hoity-toity?" suggested Mia, even as she blushed.
Amber snorted. "I was gonna say uptight, but yeah. That fits.”
"Problem is,” Marty mused, ”I haven't seen her do anything…have y’all?”
Cami sighed. "Nope. But I still have this feeling that she's behind it…”
Marty nodded. "So that means anybody could be helping these boys out." His eyes shifted askance, and he took in the rest of the group. "Could be anybody here that's working on my house, as a matter fact."
"Okay, that's a little paranoid," Amber muttered.
"But it does make sense…” added Mia. "I mean, it would kinda be the perfect cover, right?"
Cami turned and narrowed her eyes at the group of neighbors as they chatted in the shade. She shook her head. "No, I can't believe that it's anybody here. That just…it would just be too much."
"Well,” Marty said, “it stands to reason that it's somebody else in the neighborhood. Somebody that's watching us right now, maybe."
"So, what are we supposed to do?" asked Amber. "In case you haven't noticed, we’re getting a little thin on manpower."
Marty cocked an eyebrow at Cami. "Heard anything from that young man that was here before?"
Cami sighed. "Nope. Although I'm not sure Gary and Mitch have a radio." Cami said. “We have to prepare for them
not coming back…”
Her words hung in the air for a moment, and they listened to the cicadas in the trees. Then Amber spoke up. “If they have a working car, I would hope they'd bring ours back.” She crossed her arms. "And I did suggest that they come and visit…”
"I think Mitch will be back at some point," Mia said with a crooked smile.
Amber scoffed. "Maybe, maybe not…”
Mia laughed. "I've seen the way he looked at you! It's obvious—he likes you."
Amber blushed, and it was enough to take Cami's mind off the grim reality that they might indeed have to face whatever the future held with two fewer people to help. It wasn't something that she found exciting in the least. "We’re going to have to assume they're not coming back anytime soon, though. We can’t count on the cavalry arriving when we need help.” She watched the boys play in the garden for a moment. “We need to plan accordingly and make sure we come up with a guard rotation.”
Mia frowned. “Guards?”
Cami nodded. “We need to keep watch over our places at night.”
“Yep,” Marty agreed as he poked at a clump of grass with his cane. "Just because the people who did this aren't around right now doesn't mean they won't come back.”
One of the guys who'd been working on the roof shot Cami a questioning glance. She nodded, and he stood, the unspoken signal to get back to work. The others gathered around him, as they put on their tool belts. Reluctantly, Cami put her glass of sun tea on the deck next to Marty and helped Amber to her feet. "Okay guys, break’s over. We need to finish getting Marty's house fixed up."
Marty grimaced and glanced at the sky. "I got a bad feeling…”
"What? About the thugs?” Cami asked. "We'll take care of them if they come back…”
Marty shook his head. "No, my knees ache. Every time that happens, we get bad weather. But I ain't felt them hurt like this in a good long time. Been several years as a matter of fact…” he muttered as he stared off into the middle distance of his memories.
Broken Tide | Book 3 | Maelstrom Page 2
