by Billy Kring
Shaping his fingers like a cup, Dessaline lifted his left hand up as if he was moving in slow motion. When he touched the lower jaw, he continued the upward pressure. The alligator’s jaws closed.
Marc clamped his hands around the beast’s mouth, preventing it from opening. He spun in a fast circle above the alligator’s head so his legs straddled the front legs as he continued holding shut the jaws. Then he twisted the jaws and neck of the thousand-pound animal. Using every ounce of his strength, Marc slowly rolled it onto its back. He rubbed its stomach for a moment, then looked up as he heard the airboat engine roar to life.
Ariel hopped into the airboat as John ran to it, grasping the flat bow and shoving it hard for the water behind it. The force of his push almost toppled Ariel into the water, but she hung onto the engine strut.
John hopped into the boat, climbed into the seat and found the keys in the ignition. He turned them and, like a blessed prayer, the large propeller turned over and the engine caught. He gunned it and pulled the boat into the water, cut it in a backwards spin, and roared away into the deepening gloom of wind and rain.
Ariel looked back, hoping to see Pansy, but the sheets of rain were like a curtain. She asked John, “Where are we going?”
“Back toward town, if I can figure out where to go in all this.”
She moved beside him and touched something hard to his arm. John looked down at a cell phone. She said, “I took if off one of them you put down. Can you call for help?”
John said, “I can try.” He had to pay close attention to what was in front of them, which meant he couldn’t go very fast. He punched in Randall’s number, but got no answer. When he looked at the phone he saw there was no coverage. He said to Ariel, “I’ll have to try when we’re closer.” She nodded.
The rain continued increasing, as did the wind. The gray-black clouds were almost on the deck and looking as swollen as black widows. Living things were moving in the swamp, hunting for shelter. Snakes and alligators were everywhere, and John ran over several that he didn’t see in time. The snakes weren’t too bad, except the occasional pythons, but hitting the alligators was like slamming into a black log. Ariel bounced into the air and almost missed landing in the boat on the first one. Since then she kept a strong grip.
The airboat sometimes fought for forward motion as the winds coming off the hurricane gusted so hard they stopped its momentum. John learned not to fight it, and wait for the wind to die before starting forward again.
As they stalled with another hard wind in their faces, Ariel screamed and stomped the floor of the boat.
John looked down and saw a snake crawling into the boat, a very long snake. It hissed at Ariel and moved from her as the rest of the coils slapped into the bottom. It was a python, and John estimated it at seventeen or eighteen feet. The largest snake he had ever seen.
It didn’t want out of the boat, either, and curled up in the bow. John told Ariel, “Stay back here with me. Maybe he’ll stay on his side.”
John tried the phone again and got a static-filled ring. He heard Randall’s voice for a second, then lost the connection. He said, “We’re getting closer. I heard Randall for a second before I lost him.”
Ariel nodded, but her thoughts were with Pansy Brown, and she felt a foreboding.
The Haitians realized they couldn’t catch John and Ariel on the airboat, so they returned to the cabin carrying Denson and pushing Pansy ahead of them.
They stopped when they saw Dessaline stroking the unconscious alligator’s large, creamy white stomach. Ringo took a sharp-pointed machete from one of the men and carried it forward. He said, “Do you want me to kill it?”
Marc touched a place near the bottom of its throat. “Here,” he said, “Straight down to the brain.”
Ringo used both hands to send the point home, going completely through the animal and burying the point an inch deep in the wooden floor. The reptile’s legs stiffened, then slowly relaxed until they were limp. Marc rose and said to the others, “Now we can continue.”
Another huge gust of wind hammered the building, and the rest of the roof somersaulted away into the swamp. There was no more protection from the storm. The rain fell so heavily everyone felt like they were breathing water.
Marc pulled the machete from the alligator and walked to Denson. The wounded man was conscious but in great pain. His leg was hanging by a thread. Marc leaned down and sliced his jugular with the tip of the machete. Blood washed away so fast in the deluge that it seemed to disappear.
Pansy stood facing Marc. He touched her face, saying, “Darling Pansy, so loyal and true. I admire you.” She was surprised, expecting to be killed. She relaxed as he turned away from her.
In a fast move, Marc spun completely around and cut off Pansy’s head.
When her body hit the ground, Marc told Rosalie, “Harvest the skulls, plus any organs you need, and we will reconnect after the incoming boats deliver.”
“And after the storm,” Rosalie said.
“Yes. Young and Jean Claude will go with Ringo and me. You take those you need to meet the boats at Homestead. It will be more protected there because of the bay.”
“We will not be long here. Do you want us to burn it when we leave?”
“Yes, if it will.”
“I have something special that might work.” She smiled as she said it.
Marc said, “I can always depend on you.” He turned to the others that would go with him, “Load up, we need to hurry.” He glanced one more time in the direction where John fled in the airboat, then turned back to business.
~*~
John tried the phone again. It rang, and Randall answered, “Hello?”
“Randall, its me, John.”
“Where the hell are you?”
“Somewhere in the everglades near Big Cypress, but coming your way.”
“What’s that noise? Sounds like you’re standing beside an piper cub.”
“We’re in an airboat, coming across the sawgrass.”
“Look, let us come pick you up.”
“You can’t, we don’t know where we are exactly. But we’ll find a landmark soon, I think.”
“What is going on?”
The line went dead. John redialed, but it did not go through.”
Ariel said, “The storm’s getting stronger.”
John redialed once more and Randall answered. John said, “Before I lose you again, here’s what’s coming your way.” He told Randall, but couldn’t tell if his friend heard all of it or not, because the service crashed somewhere in the middle of his talk. He pushed the phone in his pocket and increased the airboat’s speed.
Chapter 10
Randall called Hunter first, then everyone he could think of about the situation with John and Ariel, and about the boats coming in at Dania Beach and Homestead. Half his calls didn’t complete as Hurricane Kyle intensified to a mid-level Category 3 and jumped its path north to put crosshairs on the area between Dania Beach and Hollywood, with Dania to the north. If the path stayed true, Dania Beach would be slammed by the right side of the storm. The most deadly side.
The winds increased, reaching and then surpassing the minimum hurricane strength of seventy-four miles per hour, with shrieking gusts even higher.
The rain came in a sideways deluge with no letup, and the wind drove drops to a flesh-stinging velocity. The tide and building storm surge pushed higher on the beaches, and in the lower spots the waves passed across the sand to begin the systematic destructive battering of structures. In areas close to the beach, sea foam blew everywhere, sometimes in clumps and other times disintegrating into snowflake-sized pieces.
Sand became pinhead-sized shrapnel, and debris of every kind slid and skidded and rolled down streets. When it was caught by gusts, even large things sailed into the air like oversized kites. There were many aluminum sheets loose in the wind that hit with the force of a six-foot knife, wreaking bloody havoc on any person reckless enough to be out in the storm.
The sound was relentless, a rising and lowering moan that never ceased, as if the storm was alive.
Randall picked up Hunter at her Fort Lauderdale hotel. The wind gusted while she hurried across the grass, so hard that it blew her off her feet.
“You okay?” Randall asked. The wind was so strong he almost had to yell.
“Yeah, just a little grass stain on my jeans. How many are responding?”
“I’ve got no idea. Phone service is out. There may be some landlines still working, but I don’t know which ones.” Randall’s pickup rocked sideways as another hard gust hit them.
“This thing’s getting stronger.”
“We’re going into the worst of it now, and we’ll be there for a good while.”
Hunter said, “I tried to contact Andre, but my phone was in and out, so I’m not sure he heard where to meet.”
“I guess we’ll find out when we get there.”
Hunter asked, “What about John?”
Randall said, “One part I caught when we were talking, before I lost it, was that he’s heading for Dania, which is smart. There’s no way on earth any of us this far north can make it down to Homestead in time to help.”
“Who do you think will?”
“The Coast Guard, for one. They’re the best in these situations. There’s a guy I know, Joe Mackey, he’ll be in the middle of the action. Maybe I can reach him when phone service comes back, and get us an update.”
“We can only do what we can do.”
“You got it, hot stuff.” Randall drove away from the beach and the storm to US 1, and turned south toward Dania.
The rain was so heavy that Randall couldn’t see the road in places, and any low spots were like shallow ponds.
Hunter said, “You’ve got this in four-wheel, right?”
“Wouldn’t try it any other way.” A long piece of corrugated tin sailed through the air and the front edge sailed down like a kamikaze plane, slamming into the pickup’s windshield, where it crumpled on impact and slid off the windshield with shrieking sounds like fingernails on a chalkboard.
A fresh crack ran across the windshield from side to side. Hunter said, “That made me suck in my breath. Being in this, my stomach feels the same as it does when I go off the top of a roller coaster and I’m in the front seat.”
Randall said, “You can pull your fingers out of the dash now.”
“Har har.”
He made a left onto A1A and felt the wind’s impact as soon as he turned. It came right at them. The truck fought to go forward, but struggled, shuddering and slipping on the rain covered pavement. Randall gave it more gas, then even more.
Wind-whipped water was everywhere, over the road, in the mangroves, in the canals, and the rain came down at a wind-canted angle like the clouds had burst.
Everything was joined in the wind: the clouds and land and water, all a gray, swirling, blowing, howling monster throwing palm fronds, small bushes, metal, plastic, trash cans, paper, and anything else not anchored to the ground. Trees were down, others canted at impossible angles. Only the Queen palms seemed able to remain upright in the onslaught.
When Randall followed the A1A circle around and turned to go to the Dania Pier, they got their first good look at the ocean. Hunter felt her heart speed up, and imagined it was what a mouse felt when it saw a cat coming at it. The water was a mass of blowing foam, frothy whitecaps, choppy gray waves interspersed by larger breaking waves and all of it coming high up on the sand.
She saw a half-submerged sailboat several hundred yards offshore, bobbing in the gray water like an odd-shaped cork. Farther out she saw a long, dark shape barely visible in the rain and clouds. It was a large freighter in distress, with its port side facing the storm. It seemed to wallow with every large wave.
Randall said, “We need to get on the pier.”
Hunter said, “So we can high point them. Then we’ll charge like John Wick, right?”
“Right. Let’s just hope the cavalry shows up to go with us.”
They could see the pier ahead, and Hunter said, “Could John and Ariel be there?”
“No. I’m just hoping they’re still alive at this point. Being on an airboat in a Cat 3 is so scary I don’t want to think about it.”
~*~
The gust of wind caught under the front and lifted the airboat high into the air. Ariel screamed as it started to go over backward and the big python slid to the back of the boat and bumped its coils against her feet. Another swirling gust turned the boat to the side and it glided sideways down through the air. The port side hit an open patch of water hard enough to send a fan of liquid ten feet in the air, and the python slid across the metal floor to shoot out of the boat and disappear under the water.
The airboat resettled upright. The wind blew it backwards until John worked the throttle and pushed into the storm once more. Ariel touched his arm, “We’re still okay?”
“We are still okay. I feel better now that the python’s gone, too.”
Ariel said, “So do I.” Suddenly, a band of clarity in the air magically formed about six feet from the ground, and then the rain and clouds closed it again. She said, “I think a saw a road.”
“Where?”
Ariel made a motion with her hand indicating a line right across their path.
“How far?” John asked.
“Maybe a half mile? I only saw it for a moment.”
John patted her shoulder and forced the airboat into the teeth of the storm.
Twenty minutes later they touched the bow of the airboat to the shoulder of the paved road. There was no rope to anchor the boat, and the constant force of the wind pushed it back into the everglades, away from the road.
John said, “Hold on, I’m going to drive it up there.” He pointed at the pavement. Ariel nodded, and grabbed the chair struts with both hands. John pushed the throttle and the airboat shot forward, tilting to go up the shoulder and roaring forward where it slid to a stop on pavement.
Ariel and John got out of the boat and stood on the road. It was hard to stand in the wind, and Ariel staggered several times. There had been a little protection in the sawgrass, but on the asphalt there was nothing to stop the hurricane’s full force from beating them down.
John brought Ariel close and hugged her to him to help the woman keep her balance. He said, “I think this is twenty-seven, the road that runs up by Belle Glade, but I don’t know where we are on it.”
The airboat caught a staggering blast of wind and went sliding off the road, sailing across the water like a sailboat, finally coming to rest against sawgrass and cattails a hundred yards distant.
Ariel said, “Don’t go after it.” The wind suddenly knocked her several feet to the side, and only John’s fast grab to catch her wrist kept her from going in the water. She said, “I feel it, something in the water is watching us. If you go in, you won’t come out.”
As if on cue two black heads rose twenty feet away so the eyes were above the water. Alligators, large ones.
John said, “Ten footers. Thanks, Ariel.”
“What do we do now?”
John looked both directions on the road as he leaned into the hard wind and peppering raindrops to keep his balance. “I think we need to go to the right. That should be south.”
“And if you’re wrong?”
“We’ll at least be on land instead of water.”
Ariel took his hand to remain steady and said, “Don’t let go or I might fly away.”
They started down the road, which they saw was one side of a four lane divided road. As the wind increased even more, they staggered like drunks.
John said, “Keep a lookout for anything out there that sticks up above the ground. Like a palm tree, or if we’re lucky, a power pole. They could be where others are waiting this thing out.”
Two hours later they were still on the road, staggering ahead as the storm continued to increase to frightening levels. Ariel was battered and numb, almost incoher
ent when she talked.
John had to force himself to put one foot in front of the other. The relentless pounding of wind-propelled rain and, more and more often, ribbons and stalks of sawgrass whipping into them like writhing, angry razors was taking a heavy toll. Hundreds of tiny, burning cuts covered his arms and face, and Ariel fared no better. The constant push of the wind against them was like having a hundred pound wall leaning on you while you walked, and it had been that way without respite for hours.
An hour later, in a two-second lull in the wind and rain, John saw two tall palms on the opposite side of the four-lane, maybe two hundred yards ahead. He pointed and said, “It’s something we can check.”
It was the Sawgrass Recreation Park, the popular tourist area that showcased everything about the everglades. John and Ariel pushed against the wind and crossed the roads, making it to the large, sand-colored one-story building that was the park’s center.
It was latched shut and all the windows were heavily shuttered, with no one on the premises. John and Ariel took shelter on the off-wind side of the building and rested. It felt so good to be out of the main force of the hurricane that Ariel almost cried.
John told her, “Stay here, I’ll scout around.” She didn’t argue.
He lowered his head and shoulders and fought the wind as soon as he rounded the corner. He could see twenty feet occasionally, but other times it was five feet. A half-submerged unpaved road branched away from the main area and John followed it. Several small alligators ran across the road, and almost every place that was above water housed snakes, especially rattlers, moving in one boiling mass as they huddled together. He had never seen so many at one time in the wild.
When he saw the outbuildings ahead, he hurried to them, splashing water with every step. They were metal sheds, with chains looped to hold the dual sliding doors closed, and locks holding the links together. He moved around the building, hoping to find something to help him break inside. There were discarded items, but nothing that would work. At the edge of the far corner, he found a loose edge of metal siding. It was slick with rain, and he searched for something to aid his grip, but there was nothing.