He turned and watched redoubt crew lift the last log into place with grunts and strains. They braced the other logs with vertical 2x4 supports driven into the dirt and nailed into the back of the walls. The last one rocked into place, and a ragged cheer went up as the man inside the triangle hammered away and secured the final piece of the fortification.
"Those men out there, they would grab a gun and follow me off into the woods. Do you doubt that?"
Amber shook her head.
Darien nodded. "And they’d do it gladly. I don't know if they’d die with a smile on their lips, but they know the risk, and they wouldn't flinch at going after Cisco to get your mom back. But say we lose that fight out in the woods...say Cisco's got more men than we thought. If we get outflanked or outnumbered and wiped out, who's left here," he said with his arms partially spread "to protect everybody that stayed behind? You got some injured people here. You got some exhausted people, like…what's his face...Orchard."
"Merle? He's not a hundred percent yet…" Amber agreed reluctantly.
"Right, he looked more like death warmed over the last time I saw him out in the woods. My point is, if we take the fighters off to go hunt Cisco and he either knocks us out or gives us the slip—keep in mind we don't have night vision or GPS or any of that stuff. It’d be real easy for us to go one way and him to go another and no one knows who went where. If we’re out there bumbling around looking for his camp, and his guys stumble on this house? Who's gonna fight them off? You? The old man in there?"
"We would," the girl said with a fierceness that made Darien nod in agreement. "I don't doubt that you would. I also don't doubt that if your lines broke, or somehow, he got into this house, every one of you would suffer a long time before you died. Then what?" he asked as he leaned in, his nose just inches from hers.
"Answer me!” he snapped.
“I...” Amber said, taking a half step back, her lip trembling.
Darien pushed ahead. “If Cisco traps those who stay behind, well...game over. He'll torture you, use you as he will, kill you, and either set up shop in this neighborhood and desecrate everything you hold sacred, or he'd take everything he wanted and burn this place to the ground leaving any survivors to starve to death in the coming weeks." He crossed his thick arms across his chest and waited. The girl looked down and shuffled her feet, then crossed her own arms and huffed, but refused to speak.
“Look," Darien said gently. “I’m not trying to be mean about this, just realistic. The most important thing in the world to your mom right now is knowing that you're safe. You know that, right? I heard John Douglass tell you that was what she said before she sent you guys on ahead."
The girl sniffed and wiped at her face, but she nodded.
"Okay then. How do you think she would feel if she knew that me and the people she entrusted to protect you, ran off to go fight Cisco and left you defenseless—"
"I'm not defenseless,” she pouted. “I can take care of myself, there’re others here with me, and you don't have to be a man to shoot a gun!" the girl snapped with a vehemence that made Darien take a step back. "There's sandbags all over the house, and you got this big fort thing going up over here at the corner," she said as she pointed toward the edge of the deck and the redoubt. "We’ll be plenty safe—"
“No, you won’t!” Darien barked. “You know it, and so does your mother. The quicker you realize that, the quicker you'll understand what we’re trying to do. What everyone is trying to do is keep. You. Safe. And by doing so, we can protect the entire neighborhood!"
"But all we’re doing is making my house safe," she complained in a borderline whiny voice.
"I'm gonna tell you something that Marty told me," Darien said confidentially in a low voice. "Cisco knows where this place is, he knows this is where you are, and he's gonna come after you and me, as punishment for helping you. He knows that losing this house would demoralize your mother. If she’s still alive," he said and continued before the girl could object, "he's going to use everything he has against her, including you.” He paused to let that sink in.
“If we make a stand here,” Darien continued, “if we stop him and protect you and this house, then whatever fighting that occurs stays here and doesn't spread through the neighborhood.” He turned away from her for a moment. “All those people out here helping with the sandbags, and the plywood on the windows, and gathering weapons and ammunition, and building the fort here," he said with a jerk of his thumb over his shoulder at the noisy carpenters, “are doing so because they believe that turning this place into a fort will focus Cisco's attention here. They can work here, secure in the knowledge that their families will be protected if the fighting starts, because we’ll be able to stop it here.”
She was silent for a long moment. Then: “What if we can't stop him?"
"If we can't stop him here," Darien said, "then there's nothing more to worry about and he’ll overrun the whole neighborhood…do whatever he wants. But if we stand together and make the fight happen here, then at least we'll have a chance."
Amber turned toward the forest. "You think we can do it?" she asked after a long moment of staring into the darkening woods. Her voice was quiet, so quiet Darien almost didn't hear her speak.
He shrugged, a meaningless gesture since she didn't see it. "I don't know."
She turned back toward him, and the whites of her eyes flashed and reflected light from a lightning strike several miles away. She waited for the thunder to echo overhead and dissipate before she spoke. "We stopped them a couple days ago when they attacked the main entrances. What's different now?"
Darien grunted. "The weather. We’re fixing to get hammered, either a squall line or the hurricane itself bearing down on us. I don't know about you, but I don’t want to be outside shooting at somebody in the dark, not with a hurricane crawling up my back. For another thing, it's nighttime—I'm no soldier, but even I know trying to fight somebody at night is gonna be a hot mess. We’re more likely to shoot each other. Everybody here is either exhausted, hasn't had enough to eat recently, or injured. None of those factors make for good chances at fighting off a determined enemy. At night…in a hurricane.”
Amber grinned. Her teeth flashed briefly in the fading light. "Now you sound like Marty."
"And you sound like you're on better terms with the decision…are we cool?"
She sniffed, wiped at her face, and crossed her arms again, but in the end nodded brusquely. "Yeah. I'll go talk to Gary…and Marty."
Darien relaxed, the weight on his shoulders lessened considerably. "Thank you for trusting me," he said.
She turned, and her eyes flashed. "I never said I trusted you.”
“Ouch,” Darien muttered.
“I don't have much of a choice but to work with you, given the situation,” she added. “But I don't not trust you." She winked, turned, and walked away before he could answer.
Darien waited until her footsteps disappeared into the darkening gloom and she was silhouetted briefly in the doorway as candle lights and flashlights inside the house illuminated her form.
The screen door squealed and slammed shut. Darien winced. It’d be better if they just took the stupid thing off its hinges for the night. The last thing they needed was to give away their position if Cisco attacked in the wee hours of the morning.
Darien thought about her parting words. I don't not trust you. "I guess that'll have to be good enough…" he muttered to himself.
"All right, I think the redoubt’s as good as we can make it," the leader of the construction gang at the corner of the house announced. "What's next?"
Darien grinned to himself. "We need more sandbags," he announced. Groans of complaint went up from the crew. "I know you guys don't want to be shoveling out there in the ditch, but you'll like being inside that little shooting range a lot better if we've got a foot of dirt stacked in front of it, know what I mean?" He looked at Marty’s house, a black shape in the distance. “And we’re gonna need volunteers
to head over there and haul out any supplies you find.”
The men grumbled some more, but they grabbed flashlights and got to work.
“Hey, careful over there,” he yelled to the crew heading to Marty’s house. “I think the old man set some booby traps or something. He said some stuff over there don’t like to be touched…”
Darien turned and stared into the dark forest at the edge of the yard. “I know you're out there somewhere, you sick freak…" he muttered. “I’m gonna do what I should've done the moment I laid eyes on you."
Gentle hands touched his shoulders. “And what might that be?" Harriet purred as she slid her hands over his shoulders and wrapped her arms around him from behind. She rested her head against one of his sweaty shoulders, though the comforting touch did little to soothe the anger that coursed through his body.
"I'm going to kill him."
Chapter 9
Sailing Vessel Intrepid
Five Miles North of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina
For hours, Reese and Jo struggled against the rising waves and rising wind. Reese maintained his position at the boat’s wheel and fought the recalcitrant steering assembly as every wave rocked the boat and threatened to toss him overboard. The wind steadily rose in pitch from whistling through the rigging to howling in his ears. As the next line of storms approached, a growing sense of dread filled Reese's stomach.
Lightning flickered and danced across the skies, and Reese glanced up from time to time to watch the clouds race by. They were low, seemingly just out of reach overhead. The unending wind continued to push them ever faster toward the coast.
The hurricane had found them.
While Reese cursed the wind and struggled against the wheel, Jo sloshed about in the main cabin attempting to dismantle the attachment points for the machine gun on the forward deck. It took her the better part of an hour, but at last she emerged from the storm-tossed interior and shouted up at him from the companionway.
"I feel like a long tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs, but I think we got ‘er done!"
Over the noise of the wind rushing past his ears, and the rain that pelted his head like hail, Reese barely heard her. "Well, what are you waiting for? Get it overboard! I can't hold us on this course much longer—the storm is going to drive us right into the shore!"
Reese glanced at the flickering GPS screen mounted to the steering column. Their rate of speed had continued to increase. Even with the mainsail almost all the way down, the wind and storm surge pushed forward from the heart of the hurricane and drove them faster and faster toward land.
Every hour they spent out on the water brought them increasingly closer to Charleston. As Intrepid rode up the back of one wave and powered down into the trough of the next, Reese worried he wouldn't be able to control their arrival—they might find themselves washed up on a beach somewhere dozens of miles away from Charleston.
Jo yelled something derogatory about Reese's boat handling skills and disappeared into the gloomy interior. Despite himself, he laughed.
Lightning lit up the surrounding sky, and thunder rattled his rib cage. Reese hunched his shoulders and flinched at the sound. It was like the air ripped itself apart right over his head. The boat shuddered and the wheel in his hands kicked like a living thing.
He’d been fighting the wheel since sunset, and the muscles of his arms and back quickly approached exhaustion. He didn't know how much more he had to give. At some point, they'd have to lower the sail completely and deploy the sea anchor—essentially a parachute streamed out by the boat. Using friction as it filled with water, it slowed the progress of a sailboat at sea.
Ideally, the sea anchor would keep them in one position, but Reese had never encountered conditions such as what they faced—he wasn’t sure the sea anchor could handle a hurricane. Reese shrugged against the wind and rain. There was only one way to find out...
A wave slammed into them broadside, and Reese swore the boat shifted sideways like a horse shying away from a snake. Foam and spray splashed into his face, warm and drenching. His hand slipped from the wheel, and the rudder turned sharply, which propelled him across the cockpit into the port side bench.
Reese muttered a curse, got to his hands and knees, sloughing off water as he rose, and eyed the boat’s wheel as it spun lazily to starboard. The bow drifted dangerously toward a broadside impact with the next wave.
Reese lurched forward and threw his shoulder in between two handles to stop the wheel as it spun back to port. He cried out as the handle slammed down on his arm, but it was the only way to quickly stop the spinning wheel. He latched on with both hands and clenched his jaw, then thrust himself upright and forced the wheel back around, which in turn brought the rudder amidships. The bow slowly leveled out, and instead of slamming sideways into the wave that crested before them, Intrepid gracefully slipped over the wave and down into the next trough.
Panting with exertion, but confident that he’d regained control once more, Reese relaxed. He exhaled and extracted his shoulder from between the two spokes on the wheel, just in time for the boat to lurch under him again. This time a yell of surprise from below accompanied the worst sound a sailor could hear on the open water—wood and fiberglass cracking and splintering, snapping like cannon fire.
Something thudded against the starboard hull, and a great gout of water splashed up and landed in his face, carried by the impenetrable wall of wind they sailed through. A second later, Jo emerged in the new gaping hole in the foredeck.
Her body rocked back and forth as the heavily unbalanced boat threatened to capsize. Reese turned hard to starboard, and instead of fighting the roll of the boat, he moved with it, which gave Jo the precious time to unstrap the last few restraining bolts. With a cheer that was drowned by the wind almost as soon as she opened her mouth, a long black glistening shadow slipped free of the boat, scraped against the hull one last time, and splashed into the water.
Instantly, the bow rose a bit, and the boat righted itself. The rudder became more responsive, and Reese grinned to himself despite the howling wind as he pulled hard to port and aligned Intrepid back on course. Jo immediately set to reattaching the tarp they'd wrapped around the machine gun, only now she could stretch it taut across the forward deck.
Reese did his best to keep Intrepid's bow out of the waves and avoided several surprise broadside attacks, deftly pulling them down troughs, continually spinning the boat’s wheel back and forth. Compared to the slow, clumsy feeling she'd had after leaving Long Island, with the loss of the extra weight up front and balance restored, Intrepid danced through the waves like a bucking bronco, nimble and powerful.
It took the better part of an hour to remove the last vestiges of the machine gun from the forward deck, refasten the tarp, tighten everything down, and commence removing the water from the inside of the boat. Jo kept her head down and plowed through all the work while Reese strained and pulled at the helm.
At last, she emerged from the companionway, drenched in sweat or saltwater, but smiling from ear to ear. In the pink light of nearby lightning flashes, she appeared beatific as she emerged occasionally from the companionway to toss a bucket of water overboard.
Reese knew it was impossible to tell, but he convinced himself that every bucket she flipped overboard gave him a little better control over the boat, even with the chaotic seascape around them. It brought a smile to his face, despite the burn in his shoulders and the bone-weary exhaustion that gripped his arms.
Sometime after the ejection of the machine gun, the winds increased to a point that Reese worried the sail—reefed down to only one quarter of its full size—might shred itself and become more of a liability than anything. After piloting them down the smooth surface of one long roller, Reese loosened the proper winch, and the halyard dropped completely.
He groaned. When the tension was released from the mainsail, instead of collapsing under its own weight—which it should've done, soaked as it was—the sail billowed out
under the pressure of the steady hurricane strength wind that hammered them from astern. Seeing a clear patch of water ahead of them as the lightning flashed overhead, Reese slipped a looped rope from either side of the wheel over the handles at the 10 and 2 positions, then scrambled forward.
Unwilling to spend more than a few seconds at the mast trying to hold down the misbehaving mainsail, Reese drew his boat knife and slashed the line attached to the sail. Under his well-honed knife, the line parted neatly, and the sail went slack and flapped uselessly in the wind instead of filling with air.
Another flash of lightning illuminated a rising wall of water ahead of them. Reese sucked air between his teeth, sheathed the knife, and scrambled aft, slipping on the deck and crashing painfully into the starboard bench again. He reached the boat’s wheel just in time to cast off the line that held it in place and spun it hard to starboard.
Intrepid's bow spun sharply under his command and instead of taking water in the face, the plucky sailboat, now without a means of guiding its own propulsion, raced straight up the face of the 15-foot wave.
Jo appeared in the companionway, her eyes wide and reflecting the light of lightning strikes. Her mouth opened, but Reese couldn't hear any sound over his own shout of warning. “Hold on!”
The bow lifted up and Intrepid plowed straight up the towering cliff of water. They shot out the top of the crest in a spray of foam that slapped him full on the face, and for a split second, Reese's stomach flip-flopped as they achieved airborne flight. The boat dropped ten feet down and slammed hard into the water. Reese was savagely thrown to the deck. The wind knocked out of him, Reese found himself half in the companionway, unable to breathe.
Jo had disappeared forward into the boat, but he knew by the cursing and thrashing about in the darkness that she’d survived the acrobatic maneuver. Reese clambered back to his feet, caught his breath, and grabbed the wheel once more. His arms quivered, his back ached, and his tortured muscles screamed for relief, but he clamped his jaw shut and leaned into the helm. There was no time to let up—relaxing for even a moment meant death.
Broken Tide | Book 5 | Storm Surge Page 7