"Whatever the reason, I'll take it," Reese said with a sigh. They stood in front of what remained of the gas station and picked through the debris. "Look for anything useful. Food, maps, rope—anything," Reese said as they spent several minutes poking around.
"I kid you not, if I find a snake, I’m gonna lose it…” Jo announced.
Reese looked over at her out of the corner of his eye. "I don't think anyone would hold it against you, but I have to say, I kind of expected more from a Texan.”
"Keep talking smack," Jo said, adjusting the still wet first-aid pack over her shoulder. "When you start getting blisters, I'm not giving you any Band-Aids."
After a fruitless 20 minutes picking through the debris in and around the gas station, they came away with a few bags of chips and five bottles of water, all buried in the back of the building under a heavy desk and a foot of mud.
Two bags of chips had been punctured and reduced to a soggy mess. The other three bags they opened and ate.
"Boys, we’re going to have to be real careful with the water," Jo said as they continued their progress inland. "Whenever we find a source of water, we need to all stop, rest, and drink our fill."
"Look around," Ben said, hopping in a circle on his crutch. "You see any buildings or houses? Everything got washed away! We’re on our own, guys," he warned.
"Come on, now," Reese soothed, “let's keep it together, guys. We literally just got here. I'm sure it’ll get better the further inland we go."
"But how much further inland do we have to go?" asked Ben.
Reese shrugged. "How should I know? Let's just keep moving. We'll see what we see when we see it."
"Nothing gets past this guy," Jo said, jerking a thumb at Reese.
They walked on in silence, stumbling over bits of trash and debris in the road, helping Ben pick himself up from the ground after tripping over his crutch several times. After an hour of walking in near silence, they came to a pileup of cars.
Reese called a halt, and everybody took a break, sitting on tree trunks crossing the road at an intersection. The water had piled up cars three and four high in a jumbled mess that roughly ran northwest to southeast. Most of the cars had bits of trash plastered to their sides as the water receded, and several had long strands of slimy seaweed hanging over side view mirrors.
Almost every single one suffered broken windows. Reese cleared his throat. "Should we check them?”
Jo sighed, resting her elbows on her knees. She removed her hat and swished it in front of her face, squinting up at the sun. "I suppose we have to, just to see if there's anything in there we can use—but I sure don't want to."
Reese stood. "I'll do it.”
Feeling like a man walking to his own execution, Reese purposely took one step after another, his shoes crunching on the gravel until he drew even with the first car in the pileup. Before he could even reach the door handle, a strong smell, carried on the slight breeze, overpowered him. It wasn't the rotten smell of petrifying death that he expected—the odor that hit his nose was sweet and light. Like…
Reese frowned, concentrating.
"Baby lotion." Reese leaned forward and peered through a broken window to see several sodden boxes ruptured in the back of a little four-door sedan. Bottles of baby lotion floated in foot deep water in the back seat. A diaper bag lay crumpled in the front seat next to a large car seat that had been adorned with a cloth screen, printed with cartoons of elephants and giraffes.
Reese turned, his stomach roiling at the thought of what he'd find if he opened the door. He fell to his knees and dry heaved in the mud and gravel.
After a moment to collect himself, he stood, wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, cast one last look inside the car, then turned and staggered back to the group. He collapsed on the trunk next to Jo, defeated.
No one said a word.
"Yeah…” Ben muttered after a long moment of silence. "I'm good on water. I say we just keep pushing inland. What do you guys think?"
Crows cawed in the distance, a few dozen of them flapping through the air on black wings as they headed toward the coast. Reese looked up at the birds cackling to each other, and back at the pile of cars. He shook his head.
"We’re not gonna find anything here. Let's go." They walked in silence by the Hancock County Bar Harbor Airport. The entire length of the little regional airport had been stripped bare, down to gravel and tarmac. Not a single structure remained. The breeze whistled across the still, open space, tarmac steaming in the afternoon sun. To the east, almost half a mile away, Reese spotted a jumble of shining metal glinting in the sunlight. Pieces of planes, wings, and propellers had been piled up at the edge of the far runway where the airport property ended and the short slope down to the coast began. He shook his head and continued moving forward.
"Not gonna find anything here, either."
They walked on in sullen silence. Following Bar Harbor Road, they moved slowly past the remains of house after house, all set back tasteful distances from the road. Every now and then they found one that had more than three walls standing, but in only one instance did they see a house along the road that still had its roof.
It was an hour after they left the remains of the airport when they saw their first body.
Ben had spotted the lumpy shape in the middle of the road, some distance off. Reese suspected what it was long before they reached the corpse, but that knowledge didn't prepare him at all for seeing a woman in her 30s laying face down on the ground. Her skin was a sickly pale blue, creased with dark spider veins which covered her exposed arms and most of her back. Her clothes had been shredded—whether as a result of her drowning or as her body was tumbled by the retreating waters—and mercifully she lay face down, her head shrouded in a soggy mess of curly hair. One foot still wore a fancy high heel shoe, the other lay bare in the dirt.
The three refugees drew close and stood a respectful distance away, staring at the body. "What do we do?" muttered Ben.
"Do we dig a grave or something?" asked Reese.
"With what?" demanded Jo. "I plum forgot to bring a shovel. You remember one?" she asked Reese.
Reese’s mouth compressed into a thin line. He shook his head, then scratched at the stubble on his chin. "There's nothing we can do for her. I have a feeling she's not going to be the last…one…we find,” he said, unable to say ‘body.’
"So, you're saying we just keep moving, walk around her?" asked Ben.
“Unless you got any other suggestions?” said Jo. “Yeah…pretty much. Like he said, she's dead. Ain’t nothing we can do for her. We can’t even bury her."
“It just doesn’t seem right," Ben muttered.
Reese sighed. “It's not right. This is about the most horrible thing I think I've ever seen. But there's nothing anybody can do about any of this now. The only thing we can do is make sure we survive. And I aim to do that. I hope whatever god she believed in shows mercy on her soul, and—I’ll pray for her family and loved ones—but I'm sure she'd understand if we just keep moving on our way."
"You keep telling yourself that, buddy," Ben muttered as they shuffled past.
By mid-afternoon, they’d rounded a curve and waded across the new creek, created when the Jordan River overflowed its banks during the tsunami and washed out most of Route 3. As the road turned northwest, they came across a cluster of buildings with one jagged sign sticking up out of the rubble pile, proclaiming it to be the Trenton Health Center.
Jo insisted they stop and look for supplies. Hot, sweaty, and quickly reaching his exhaustion point after being awake most of the night, Reese was all too ready to agree. The three of them shuffled their way through the debris and climbed in through a hole in the front wall of the health center. Inside, wires and lights hung from the ceiling, and the humidity level rose to intolerable conditions, but it was out of the direct sun.
"What an interesting smell you've discovered," Ben groused, wrinkling his nose as he leaned on his crutch. "That's got t
o be the worst thing I've ever smelled in my life!”
"Better get used to it," Reese said, trying not to cough. "It's only been a day since this thing hit. In the next few days, things are going to get pretty ripe around here."
Jo picked her way cautiously through the rubble, past overturned chairs, tables and exam beds. She coughed. "All the more reason to try to find what we can and skedaddle." She gave a little cry, and bent to pick up a red satchel, emblazoned with a white cross on the cover. "Like this! First aid kit!” She turned it over in her hands and water dribbled out one pocket. "A little wet, but could be useful." She turned and tossed the bag to Reese, who barely caught it.
"Little heads up next time, yeah?” Reese grumbled as he examined the wet satchel in his hands.
“Settle down, Francis,” Jo quipped. “Time to put your big boy pants on," Jo said, picking through the debris. She peered into the darkness leading down one corridor. "I don't much fancy the idea of heading down there in the dark. Anybody got a flashlight?"
"Nobody's got anything, Jo," Ben said, slapping the wet jeans on his legs. "We’re not exactly running the most well-equipped expedition in the world, you know?"
“Ahyup,” Jo muttered, bending over to examine something at her feet.
"Now who's sounding like a local?" Ben said with a laugh. He grunted, and overturned a reception desk, revealing a pile of boxes. “Lookit—anybody need some face masks?" he asked, holding up a box of N95 masks. The cardboard, saturated for more than 24 hours, separated at the seams and spilled individually wrapped masks all over the ground.
"Actually," Reese said, "grab those. They might come in handy.” He opened the red satchel, flinging water drops aside, and spread the main pouch for Ben to drop a handful of the plastic wrapped masks inside.
"Look for bandages or water—any kind of sealed medicine. Preferably some antibiotic stuff," Jo advised. "I've got a feeling we’re all going to have our share of cuts and scrapes—ain't no good anybody getting an infection.”
"How long we gonna stay here?" Ben asked, leaning on his crutch by the hole in the wall they’d used as an entrance. "I'm not gonna be much good on one leg, I’ll tell you that right now. This place is givin’ me the creeps."
“That’s fair,” Jo said, turning and putting her hands on her hips. She looked at Reese. "What say you, fearless leader?"
"Fearless leader?" Reese parroted. "Now wait a minute—”
“Oh no," Jo said, pointing at him. "This was your harebrained idea. You're the one that got us off that island, you're the one that saved our keisters with that little switcheroo out on the water—in my mind, you're the one in charge."
"She's right, you know," Ben said, tilting his head toward Jo.
"So, the question is, do we stay here for the night or do we keep moving?" Jo asked. She looked up at the ceiling, missing more than half of the acoustic tiles. "I mean, this place is trashed, but it's a roof over our heads."
Reese shook his head. "I don't want to stay here. It's only…” He looked at his watch. “It’s only 5 o'clock—we still have a few hours of sunlight left. I say we push on."
Ben pulled his phone out and looked at the map again. "According to this, we should be hittin’ the outskirts of a little town called Ellsworth…about 3 miles northwest of here."
Reese picked his way through the debris to stand next to Ben. "How far have we come? We've been walking for almost four hours now…”
"About four miles. Mile an hour—that's not exactly a quick pace, is it?"
Reese squinted as he stared out into the sunlight toward the north. "That puts us in Ellsworth at about…8 o'clock if we leave right now." He turned and looked at the others. Ben leaned on his crutch, waiting.
Jo continued picking through the rubble, grunting to herself and throwing odds and ends in her backpack. "Don't look at me," she said, not looking up. "You make a decision. I'll go along with whatever you want to do, but in the meantime, I'm going to keep looking for everything I can find.”
Reese looked at the map on Ben's phone again. Three miles. It wasn't very far. Back before the tsunami, he wouldn't have hesitated to walk three miles. It might take an hour to get there at a good pace, but with Ben hobbling along on a crutch with a busted leg, and all the debris and destruction scattered around them? They’d be lucky to make it to Ellsworth by midnight.
But then again…every mile down the road was a mile closer to home. A mile closer to Cami and Amber. Reese clenched his hands into fists.
"Let's get moving. We’re burning daylight."
Chapter 16
Lavelle Homestead
Northwest of Charleston, South Carolina
Cami was in the master bedroom closet, wrapping up her inventory of the gun safe, reaching for her favorite 9mm Glock when she heard a car door. The master bedroom was adjacent to the garage, and the closet she was in happened to be the closest livable area inside the house to the driveway. It had always been one of her pet peeves that she could be in the closet and hear someone pull up in the driveway.
With absolutely no other sounds in the house—no background noise of air-conditioners or TVs or radios—she heard very clearly the muffled whoomp. Holding the empty Glock in her hand, Cami selected a loaded magazine from the shelf in the gun safe and rammed it home. She pulled the slide back, checked that she had a round in the pipe, and let it go. Pulling out her favorite concealed carry paddle holster, she slipped the firearm in the small of her back and dropped her t-shirt over it, then scurried from the room after locking the safe.
"Amber! Mitch! Either of you two out front?" she called as quietly as possible.
"No mom, we’re both in the kitchen setting up the radio—what's up?" Amber called from the other side of the house.
Cami rushed down the hallway toward the kitchen, keeping a wary eye on the front door. "Somebody just pulled up in our driveway. You two stay here."
Without waiting to hear arguments, Cami turned and walked confidently toward the front door. A shadow passed in front of the frosted window that covered part of the door before Cami heard a soft knock.
She approached the door, took a deep breath, then unlocked it and opened it, one hand behind her back, resting on the Glock’s grip. “Hello?”
Mia Stevens, a neighbor—more of an acquaintance, really—from the newer, more crowded side of the neighborhood, stood on Cami’s doorstep, her face a mask of worry. A little younger than Cami, Mia had a couple of kids just getting into their teenage years. Cami had seen them playing outside several times on her occasional walks through the neighborhood.
"Mia?" Cami asked, lowering her hand to her side. She opened the door. "Is everything okay? Come on in," Cami said, looking over Mia's shoulder to make sure the woman was alone.
"Hi Cami, I'm so sorry to bother you…” Mia said, stepping inside the cool interior of the Lavelle household.
"My goodness, how do you keep your house so cool? You still have power?"
"Oh—no," Cami stuttered. "We just open the windows. It's such a nice day and there's a lovely breeze…”
Mia nodded, understanding. "Of course—I should do that. But don't you worry that the power’s going to come back on? Running air conditioning with windows open…”
Cami shut the door behind them and directed Mia toward the kitchen. "Oh, I'm not too worried. I'd rather have the house aired out, anyway. Too much air-conditioning irritates my allergies, you know? Hey, you want something to drink?” Cami asked, desperate to change the subject. “Let's go in the kitchen and sit down."
Cami led Mia through the house and after, introducing Amber and Mitch, she went to the fridge and got everyone a bottle of cold water.
Mia drank half of hers before realizing it was refrigerated. "You have cold water!"
Cami shrugged, making eye signals at Amber and Mitch to stay quiet. "Oh, we don't open the fridge very much—turns out it will stay cold a lot longer than people think if you just leave it shut. You haven't lived here very long, have you? N
ot gone through many hurricanes?"
Even in the dim, natural light in the kitchen, Cami easily saw Mia blush as she looked down. "No, Jimmy and I have only been here for a year and a half. We haven’t been through a hurricane yet.”
Cami nodded and sat down to join the others. "Don't worry, you’ll get the hang of it. If you have any questions or need help with anything, don't be a stranger, okay?"
Mia held the water bottle with two slightly trembling hands. "You think it's going to last a long time? The power outage, I mean?”
Cami took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. "Honestly? Yeah. I do. I don't have anything to back it up. Just a gut reaction, I guess," Cami said, as neutral as she could.
"All I wanted to do was go to the store and get some bottled water and toilet paper—we’re almost out and…” Mia, put a hand over her eyes and choked back a sob.
Cami moved her chair closer and put a comforting arm around Mia, while giving the kids a confused look. "Mia, honey, what's wrong? What happened? Are you okay? Are the kids…?”
"Oh, no—the kids are fine. They’re at home—our neighbor, Stacy, she's their babysitter. She's watching them for me,” Mia said.
Amber shot Mitch a look.
"Haven’t started school yet?” Mitch asked, conversationally.
Cami handed Mia some tissues and waited while she blew her nose. "Yeah, everybody's home for another two weeks, so we’re going through all of our stuff that much faster. I had the kids drink up all the milk last night because with the power out, everything is getting warm."
She looked at Cami's fridge, then back to the table top. "We never thought to keep the fridge closed. I bet the kids have been opening it every five minutes just to see if anything’s changed. It's a habit, you know?"
Cami chuckled, sympathetically. "Don't I know it. The first couple hurricanes that came through and knocked out power back in the day…oh, I guess Amber was only about eight years old. We lost so much food," Cami laughed. "Had to refill the fridge and freezer several times before we figured out to keep everything closed."
Broken Tide | Book 1 | Overfall Page 17
