"So this epoxy stuff is going to be able to hold up better?" Tony asked as he leaned over the railing and aimed a flashlight for Reese to continue working as the light faded.
"Oh yeah,” Reese replied. “Epoxy and fiberglass make it almost as strong as the original hull.“ Reese snorted. “Way better than just a piece of sailcloth and a football.” He slipped the half-empty water bottle in a pouch on the tool belt he wore around his waist, then pulled his gloves on and got back to work adding another layer of fiberglass and nose-wrinkling epoxy.
Ideally, he would have liked to let the epoxy cure for 24 hours, but they had to settle for the time it took for the tide to rise. The package rated the epoxy for usage in water within three hours, so he hoped that was enough. The package also said that it wasn't designed for big holes, but rather small cracks.
“If nothing else, this stuff will be a nice backup—we already proved the football can hold its own in the ocean…” Reese reminded Tony.
The younger man nodded, but his face was still tight with anxiety. It was understandable, he’d grown up on a farm, he wasn't used to boats, nor the bluewater cruiser’s attitude of rolling with the punches.
Reese glanced askance at Tony. "You gotta try and not worry about the stuff we can't fix, man,” he said. "This epoxy is good for fixing holes, but not holes like this. It's either gonna hold, or it's not. But we can't worry about it now. We just have to do our best, slap it all together, and sail out of here tomorrow and see what happens."
"Tomorrow?" Tony asked. "We’re spending the night here?" he asked as he looked around the bleak, watery landscape as night caught up with them.
Reese grinned ruefully. "Trust me, nobody wants to get home faster than me." Reese grunted as he pushed his gloved thumb into the mixture of epoxy and fiberglass to smooth out a section that covered the jagged sailcloth. "But your uncle’s right—we’re getting into some really populated waters here, and we can't take any chances…especially with Tiberia and her beat up hull."
Tony turned to look at the other boat. “Doesn’t look like Intrepid’s that much better…”
"Yeah,” Reese agreed, “that's the other reason why we have to hurry with this. I need to get over there and check out Intrepid's hull. We got a little water to pump out, but not nearly as much as what's in Tiberia’s cabin. There must've been a weak spot here," he said as he thumped the hull with his knuckles, “that caused these bullet holes to fracture into a bigger hole like this."
"I personally think it was something we hit," Tony said.
"I can hear you!" Byron's muffled voice called from the other side of the hull. “Can you see this light?"
Reese squinted and leaned back away from the hull, checking all angles around the football. "Dang it," he muttered. "Yeah,” he called out louder. "Just a little lower from the last one—the rest of it looks good though, I think this is the last bit."
"Good!" Byron said from inside Tiberia.
Tony sniffed the air. "You smell that?"
Reese looked up at him with a weary expression on his face. "Tony, I'm elbows deep in fiberglass and epoxy. The only thing I smell here is chemicals….now hold that light steady.” He went back to work and nudged the final glop of epoxy into place, effectively sealing out the gap he’d discovered from the outside. Byron did the same on the inside. “I hope this will do the trick…” he muttered. “Just gotta last another week, baby,” he said as he gently patted the hull.
"Aunt Libby's making something with tuna…she said she found pasta on Intrepid and had boiled it. Gotta still have a couple cans of tuna left…”
"There," Reese said. "That oughtta do it. It's as good as we can make it, at least." He put the cap on the epoxy, stowed it in the tool belt, then grabbed the line and hauled himself up over the edge of the of Tiberia’s deck. With his feet firmly planted, he let the bosun’s chair drop and stretched his back. "Tell you what, that thing sure is handy…but it is not the most comfortable seat in the world."
Tony laughed. “Uncle Byron said he was gonna make me go up and change the mast light when it goes out. No thanks.”
On the spit of land that had risen up out of the water like a sandbar as the tide went out, the fire that Tony had built was attended by Libby and Jo as they prepared the evening's meal. Jo looked up from her folding camp stool, saw Reese, and waved. Reese waved back, then disentangled himself from the bosun’s chair. "Where does your uncle keep this thing anyway?"
"Here, I'll take it,” Tony said. “He's got a compartment down in the galley." Tony took the contraption, wrapped the line all around it, tucked it under his arm, then disappeared down below. Reese peered over the side and admired his handiwork.
The football, now encased in layers of fiberglass matting and gelled epoxy, looked more like a festering sore that had erupted through the side of Tiberia’s sleek bow. The black netting that Libby had fashioned earlier in the day draped over the bow and hung by several lengths of rope, waiting to be reinstalled as a failsafe.
Reese dusted his hands, then walked across the slanted deck over to Intrepid, where he set about repairing the individual bullet holes in his boat’s hull. He stopped and sniffed the air. As he’d moved away from the drying epoxy, he had to agree with Tony—the tuna dish Libby and Jo were cooking smelled incredible.
He sat up and looked around, searching for threats. Smells could travel a long way, especially at night. He wondered how close the next human being was? Had anybody survived the tsunami at Cape Henlopen? Had anyone from the mainland come out this far yet at all? Reese frowned. He wondered what the coastline of Delaware might look like once someone got around to mapping the post-tsunami world.
In half the time it took him to repair the hole in Tiberia’s hull, Reese patched all the bullet holes down the length of Intrepid’s starboard side. Only a few had come in from the port side, so he was able to clean up, and put the epoxy away all before Byron emerged from Tiberia’s cabin, wiping his own hands. "That about does it for Intrepid,” Reese reported. “How you doin’ over there?"
Byron nodded. "I think we've got it. I patched all the other holes from the inside, and Tony finished the pumping. It’s still damp as all get out down there, but the cabin’s secured."
“I think Aunt Libby's cooking tuna casserole…”
“Outstanding, I could eat a horse right about now…” Byron grumbled.
"Only thing I'm worried about is the smell traveling…” Reese said as he stared off into the glowering darkness. Gordon's Pond stretched far off into the distance, and the denuded new coastline that rose up on the other side—what used to be the middle of a state park—while barren of trees contained a few cars. Reese couldn't tell if they were parked there on purpose or had been dragged by the retreating tsunami two weeks earlier. But there was more debris far off over there than near the sandbar. "It's crazy how much the shoreline’s changed," he said with a nod toward the distant sand dunes.
Byron turned and agreed. "The maps show the coast should be out that way," he said as he pointed to the other side of the concrete fire control towers. The silent, doomed towers had become islands in their own right during the past two weeks.
"What do you think, the shoreline moved in about a mile, mile and a half?” Reese asked.
"Oh, easy,” Byron agreed. “But I'd say closer to two miles…maybe a little more."
“Well don’t look at me, I’m not going over there to measure it for you,” Tony said. “My days of wandering away from the boats are over.”
"You boys hungry?" Jo called from the sandbar. "This smells better than an armadillo at a barbecue."
"What?" Tony asked Reese.
Reese held up a hand. "Don't ask me. She's from Texas—doesn't make a lick of sense."
The three men laughed as they clambered across the decks, then down to the somewhat dry land at the base of Intrepid's hull. "I can't tell you how good it feels to stand on dry land again," Tony said with a sigh. “Sort of…I guess it’s more squishy than dry, but I�
��ll take it.”
"Well, don't get too excited," Byron warned. "This here's basically just a sandbar. At any moment, we could be finding ourselves swimming back to the boats." They walked the ten feet or so to join the women at the campfire Tony had started earlier. "That goes double for you two, as well,” Byron said as he found a spot near the fire and sat. "Soon as the tide starts coming in, we all need to be back aboard the boats."
"It's hard enough to stand on those things, when they're all tilted like that. I can’t hardly sit on ‘em either," Jo complained. “Don't mind me, I'm gonna sit here on this here bed of sand as long as possible." She patted the ground next to her for emphasis.
Reese accepted a bowl of steaming tuna chowder from Libby, then handed it to Jo and grabbed one for himself. He sat next to her and blew on the amazing smelling concoction. “Looks delicious, Libby. What all’s in here?"
“Oh, little bit of this, little bit of that," Libby said as she stirred the pot hung over the fire with an ingenious contraption made of three pieces of aluminum and a chain. "Only ever used this thing a few times—when we camped out in our younger days," she said as she looked up and smiled at Byron, her face illuminated by the soft glow of the fire.
“I didn’t even know we had that blasted thing aboard—never been able to get it to work right!” Byron complained.
Libby smiled. “When I found this pot floating around down there in the water, I knew we had to try again.”
“Well, I’ll be—this is delicious!” Jo exclaimed.
“Thank you, dear. It's really nothing complicated,” Libby said, “just a couple cans of tuna, some pasta, seasonings, and a little bit of reconstituted dehydrated milk for the sauce. Oh, and a little bit of flour."
"It's amazing what you can whip together, even in such austere circumstances," Byron replied. "I hit the wife jackpot when I married you," he added.
Libby laughed slightly, then pointed the serving spoon at him. "Flattery will get you everywhere, young man."
They ate in companionable silence. The only sound heard over the lapping of the ocean against the edge of the sandbar was the clink of spoons and forks against bowls. Tony and Byron had seconds, but Reese gave his second portion to Jo, claiming she needed it to heal. He rinsed out the bowl and took a short walk in the twilight. Hands in his pockets, he soon became lost in thought.
He needed to get away from the jovial laughter around the campfire as night settled on the fractured coast of Delaware. He needed to clear his thoughts and prepare himself for the last, grueling week at sea before landfall…and South Carolina. No matter where they landed, he’d have to make his way inland to the house.
He needed to reassure himself that he was doing the right thing, that going around the Delmarva Peninsula instead of trying to cut across the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal far to the north would, in the long run, get them home faster.
Reese glanced up at the first stars that winked into existence. As he stood there watching, dozens more appeared. The dome of the night sky—normally a pale, sickly gray thanks to light pollution from cities and towns all over the eastern seaboard—appeared velvety black. Reese had never before seen so many stars in his lifetime, except out in the middle of the Caribbean…and even there the islands were so numerous that one could almost never go so far away from land as to not see a single photon of light pollution from somewhere.
He sat at the water's edge and pulled up his knees. His bare feet remained just out of the water's reach. There was very little debris in the water, an oddity owing to the lack of buildings near Cape Henlopen State Park—there simply wasn't much for the tsunami to destroy and leave as wreckage along the coast, compared to the populated beaches along New Jersey's western shore, and all the way up to Maine.
Staring out to the eastern horizon over the endless ocean, Reese could almost forget the tsunami had even touched Cape Henlopen. The gentle sound of small waves as they sighed against the nascent sandbar threatened to lull him to sleep. Shortly, a commotion back at the fire drew his attention, and he stood and hastily brushed the sand off. The others had flashlights out, pointing at something 30 yards offshore. Byron yelled for Reese to return, and he sprinted along the sand.
"What? What is it?" he asked as he skidded to a stop near the fire.
"Libby spotted a body out there…”
Reese turned and followed the beams of light from their flashlights. Something kicked and splashed in the water. "They're alive?" Reese exclaimed. "Hey!" he shouted.
"Don't bother," Byron said. “They're not alive."
"It's sharks," Tony whispered.
Reese took an involuntary step back from the water's edge. As the flashlights converged on the thrashing, Reese spotted a sleek tail as it slapped the water’s surface, then a dorsal fin slipped by in the opposite direction. The white frothy water turned pink, and a bloated corpse popped to the surface. Another splash, and the tip of a shark’s snout appeared—gray and white—before the body disappeared beneath the surface once more. They all stared in horror at the grisly scene unfolding just offshore.
"I bet that's happening a lot right now, all up and down the coast…” Reese whispered.
"Can you imagine how many sharks there must be in the waters near the major cities?" Libby asked.
"Only going to get worse the further south we go," Byron muttered. “Going right into the Gulf Stream.”
Reese shivered, suddenly cold as he remembered the ghostly, huge shape that slid underneath him while he'd been patching Tiberia’s hull earlier in the day. It was enough to make a man give up sailing.
Almost.
"Well, fish have to eat, too," Libby said pragmatically.
Tony looked down at the tuna chowder in his bowl. "Makes me want to stick to canned tuna for a while…”
Reese laughed. "Yeah, I don't think I'm going to be looking for shark steaks anytime soon."
"We've got enough food to make it to Baltimore," Byron announced. "But I agree, I think I'll stick to freshwater for the time being for my fish dinners."
"Well, on that note," Reese said as he turned away, “I don’t know about the rest of you, but I'm ready to get back aboard the boat."
Byron grunted as he brushed the sand off his shorts. "I agree, the fire’s good for keeping bugs away, but the tide can't go out forever. Probably don't have too much longer before the water starts coming back in."
"May as well try to catch some sleep while we can,” Reese agreed.
"You guys ever see the stars like that?" Tony asked as he looked up.
Reese grinned. "I guess there's something nice that came out of all this mess…people will get to know the stars a lot better now.”
Libby looked up and gasped. “I imagine there's millions of people out there that have never even seen the Milky Way…”
“Let alone something like that,” Reese agreed. The sky glowed with the light of thousands upon thousands of twinkling gems, scattered across the velvety black firmament. Orange, yellow, red, white, and blue stars competed for his attention. The wide swath of the Milky Way draped over head and showered the world with splendor in a sight Reese imagined hadn't been equaled in hundreds of years, maybe thousands.
"I sure hope Cami gets the chance to look up and see this…”
Chapter 20
Haslet Forest Preserve,
Northwest of Charleston, South Carolina
Cami and John slowed to a stop and crouched behind a thin veneer of greenery on the edge of the abandoned county maintenance center. Sweat dripped off the tip of her nose, and she wiped the grime from her face. The paint John had applied had already smeared into a muddy swirl, but she couldn’t care less. They’d successfully tracked the kidnappers to Cisco's base and found more than they bargained for.
Over the last two hours, Cami, John, and Rufus had raced through the woods, hot on the trail of the kidnappers. The men who’d dragged her daughter toward Cisco's camp must have pushed forward at a breakneck pace to be able to outrun their p
ursuers.
She was nearly spent, having exhausted every ounce of her reserves in order to track down her daughter. Running through dense forest in long pants and long-sleeved shirts in the height of summer was a guaranteed recipe for dehydration. Cami leaned forward and rested her back by planting her hands on the ground.
Next to her, John, red-faced and sweating, panted as he tried to find a water bottle in his backpack.
Among them, only Rufus seemed largely unaffected by all the running through the forest. Though he was dressed in jeans and a short sleeved T-shirt and carried no backpack, the dreadlocks that hung from the back of his head had to weigh him down, as Cami observed sweat roll off of his neck and shoulders.
"So, there it is," Rufus muttered, his eyes intent on the encampment through the bushes in the clearing.
Cami looked up. "I don't see them, I don't see her...does anybody see Amber?"
John took a swig of water and spat on the ground. "There's only a couple places she can be.” He pointed. “See that tent over there, next to the big truck?"
Cami nodded. The encampment had a haphazard, random aspect to it. She could just see the edge of the old maintenance facility parking lot. The rough foundation, all that was left of the building that had stood in that spot since the 1950s, was overgrown with weeds, bushes, and a few gray, weathered cinderblocks stuck up to cause a tripping hazard.
In the middle of the lot, the two biggest trucks—the armored MRAP and the troop transport—had been backed carefully into place. Cami noticed with a certain amount of satisfaction that several of the windows on the MRAP had been shattered and cracked, and the big vehicle was riddled with dents and scorch marks from the fight at Bee’s Landing. The troop transport’s canvas top had likewise been turned into Swiss cheese by bullets.
That was the extent of the orderly corralling of Cisco's vehicles, however. A handful of pickup trucks—a few with machine guns mounted in the back—had been parked at odd angles, seemingly wherever the driver had decided to stop. Some faced the forest preserve, some faced the road out. Several sedans and even a school bus had also been gathered in the parking lot, all baking in the late afternoon sun.
Broken Tide | Book 4 | Backflow Page 16
