Broken Tide | Book 4 | Backflow

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Broken Tide | Book 4 | Backflow Page 19

by Richardson, Marcus


  John peered through the bushes toward the encampment. "I think you're right,” he said, panting for breath. “Ready as I'll ever be."

  Cami nodded and held a branch back for them to pass. "Okay, let's go!"

  All four of them rushed across the road at the same time and jumped into the bushes over a small ditch on the far side of the road. Cami pushed the other three forward and paused just inside the tree line to check on the raiders.

  "I don’t think anybody noticed—let's go," Cami said as she turned back to John, Amber, and Rufus. The four of them made a stealthier retreat from that point on. Cami led the way, followed by Amber and Rufus, then John followed and guarded their rear. Cami checked over her shoulder and every minute or so, John would pause, turn around and sweep the forest behind them, before a short jog to catch up. Cami led them through a new trail and admonished everyone to step in the same spot she did, to avoid snapping twigs and making noise.

  After a few minutes, when the sounds from the raider camp had faded to a few noises barely on the edge of hearing, Cami pulled them behind a thicket of spruces, and asked for the radio from John. She put it to her lips and pressed the transmit button. "We’re clear. Get your people out of there. We'll give you a head start, then follow."

  "Don't gotta tell me twice,” Flynt replied. “We got some injuries, and two dead."

  Cami pressed the transmit button, then released it. She lowered her head and pressed the radio into her forehead. "I knew there was a chance that someone might not make it back..." she muttered through clenched teeth.

  "It's not your fault," John said as he put a hand on Cami’s shoulder. "The raiders brought this on themselves. And our people volunteered, Cami. Every one of us knew what we were doing today," he said as he looked at Amber, whose eyes had filled with tears.

  Cami nodded, but John's words didn't mean the knowledge that people had lost their lives trying to rescue her daughter hurt any less. She pressed the transmit button again. "Understood,” she said, her voice thick. “There's nothing we can do for them now. We'll have to come back...after..."

  "Already on our way..." Flynt said, his voice punctuated by the sound of snapping branches and shouting men all around him.

  Cami was about to give the radio back to John when she noticed his backpack was missing. "Where'd your pack go?"

  John grinned. “I ran over to that big armored truck—they left the doors unlocked, so I figured...it was designed to withstand bombs on the outside, they wouldn't have armor on the inside." He shrugged. "Tossed the bag up there behind the driver’s seat so it looked like it belonged, set the timer, and ran. That's when I came back to find you."

  Cami frowned. "I wish I’d known about it before...” She shook her head. “Doesn’t matter—when was the—"

  An earsplitting explosion ripped the air to shreds around them, and knocked Cami, Amber, Rufus, and John to the ground. Leaves fell all around them as the trees swayed in an overpressure wave that shot out from the raiders’ camp.

  The world went silent, except for a painful ringing in Cami's ears. She blinked, and the sun seemed far too bright before her eyes adjusted. She found herself on her back, being covered with leaves that fell from the sky. She rolled her head to the left and saw Amber laying face down in the detritus on the forest floor. A small branch dropped out of the sky and landed on Amber's back, but her daughter didn't move.

  Cami tried to yell, but her lungs weren't working. Her mind, now painfully aware of the fact that no oxygen was coming into the respiratory system, panicked. Cami sat up and her vision twinkled as her unbound hair, lanky and wet with sweat, fell in front of her face.

  Cami blinked, then coughed and sucked in a lungful of smoke-tinted air. As more leaves dropped down out of the sky and landed on them like a green snow, Cami reached over to Amber with aching hands and pulled her daughter over.

  Amber coughed in silence, then opened her mouth as if to yell. She looked around, then sucked in a deep breath and closed her eyes before sitting up.

  The ringing in Cami's ears began to fade, so when John sat up a few feet away and said something, the words sounded like they came from down at the end of a long tunnel.

  "What?" Cami yelled.

  "I said," John yelled as he crawled across the forest floor to retrieve his rifle. "That was bigger than I expected!"

  “That’s what she said,” Rufus said as he coughed. They all lay there for a moment and laughed as leaves continued to drop down from the canopy above.

  “We should probably get going,” Cami yelled as she pulled herself to her hands and knees. “Feels like I’ve been in a car accident,” she muttered.

  Amber was the first to find her feet and stand. “I do not want to do that again...”

  Chapter 23

  Sailing Vessel Intrepid

  Cape Henlopen, Delaware

  Reese smiled as he looked down from the cockpit at Jo, asleep on the bench and snoring. After their breakfast off the coast of Cape Henlopen, Reese and Byron took the sailboats due south. Heeding the Coast Guard's warning, they angled their course to take them a mile or so offshore.

  Byron had wanted to stay closer to shore, arguing that the navy wouldn't bring big warships within a mile of the coast because there just wasn't any good reason.

  Reese wanted to avoid confrontation at all costs, as any encounter would inevitably slow them down. Yet he saw the wisdom of staying closer to shore—larger naval vessels, the ones with the big guns and possibly itchy trigger fingers, would more than likely stay offshore.

  The trick was to find a happy medium, somewhere close enough to shore that if Tiberia began leaking again, they could easily get to safety. On the other hand, they had to stay far enough out not to draw attention from people on the shore.

  Reese shook his head as the wind ruffled his hair and dried the salt spray on his skin. "At the end of the day, I guess it doesn't really matter..." he muttered to himself.

  "What doesn’t matter?" Jo asked in a sleep-thick voice.

  "Sorry,” Reese apologized, “I didn't mean to wake you..."

  Jo yawned and stretched. "Water under the bridge," she said with a sigh. "I can't get good sleep on a boat unless I know it's parked and there ain't no storm coming." She sat up and grumbled to herself about the vagaries of tide and ocean travel. “Listen to me, sound like a dadgum yankee sailor.”

  "Are you kidding me? Sleeping on a boat in a hammock is probably the most comfortable night's rest I've ever had my entire life!"

  Jo looked up at him and squinted with one eye. "Well, it sounds nice, and I imagine you’d be rocked to sleep pretty quick...but we don't have any hammocks on this boat, now do we? I gotta fit my wide butt on this narrow bench, or sleep on the floor like you salty dogs."

  Reese laughed as they rode over a wave. "Hey, you get the bunk every other night, just like me."

  Jo swung her stiff, injured leg over the bench and gingerly touched her heel to the deck. "Yeah, but your leg ain’t been shot like mine.”

  “I got a knife wound, remember?” Reese asked, as he lifted his right arm and winced. It was better every day, and the more he worked it while sailing Intrepid, the better it felt, but it was still sore, the scar tissue had barely healed in the past two weeks.

  “Yeah, well...” Jo muttered, refusing to look at him. “That bunk ain't nearly so comfortable as it looks."

  Reese inclined his head in agreement. "No argument there, I'll take that fancy foam bed Cami's got for us back at the house any day."

  Jo grew silent for a moment, and they sailed on without speaking. Reese looked up and checked the rigging, satisfied that everything was shipshape. The mainsail was taut, the boat sliced forward through the water at a respectable 3 to 4 knots—not anywhere near as fast as he’d like to go, nor even near as fast as she could go...

  He glanced to starboard and watched Byron on Tiberia, just 20 yards away. Reese wanted to keep the injured sailboat closer to shore, even though he knew 20 yards wouldn’t make
much of a difference if it came to Tiberia taking on water again, but 20 yards was 20 yards, he supposed.

  "Penny for your thoughts?" Jo asked.

  Reese sighed as he held the wheel with one hand and felt the subtle vibrations that traveled through the boat from the rudder as it cut through the water. "What’s going through my head right now? I suppose I'm mostly worried about Tiberia."

  "Whether she'll sink?" Jo asked as she turned to look over the railing.

  Reese grunted. "Whether she's gonna slow us down too much..."

  "I'm just fine with the speed, thank you very much. I like my floor to be flat, not constantly trying to pull me off my seat and into the ocean."

  Reese laughed. "That's all well and good, but at some point we’re going to run into bad weather—if not before we reach the Chesapeake, then after we part ways."

  “You think he’ll give us this boat?"

  Reese shrugged. "Honestly, I have no idea. But how’s Byron going to get both boats up to Baltimore? The only thing they can do is tow Intrepid, or tow Tiberia with Intrepid. Either way," he said with a gesture toward the other sailboat, "it'll put an awful lot of strain on an already damaged hull over there. I don't think he wants to risk losing Tiberia that way.

  "Okay, I'll play devil’s advocate here...” Jo said as she leaned back against the railing with Intrepid’s movement over the water. “Let's assume that he doesn't give us this boat." She looked up at him and adjusted her park ranger campaign hat, ensuring the strap was securely tied under her chin. "Then what?"

  Reese took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. "Well, it's going to add a lot more time to my plan, that's for sure.”

  “How much?”

  Reese shrugged. “At this speed, I was figuring on us making it home in about a week.”

  “How do you figure that?” asked Jo.

  Reese grunted. “Another day to get to the Chesapeake," he explained, "another four days—maybe five because of the weather—to get to Charleston, and then a day or so from there overland to get home." He shrugged. "If we’re forced to take the sailboat out of the equation, then when we hit the Chesapeake, we’ll have to land somewhere over near Norfork. Because that's the naval base..."

  "Yeah, I don't want to go anywhere near there," Jo said quickly.

  "Agreed," Reese said somberly. "So, we’ll have to make a wide swing either north or south around Norfork. Byron won’t want to go south, then have to double back past the danger zone, so I'm willing to bet he's gonna say we have to go north.” Reese sighed. “If that's the case, then we’ll have to not only find some way to get through the mess that is coastal Virginia, but also all of North and half of South Carolina. That is a huge chunk of land..."

  "It makes my leg sore just thinking about it..." Jo said. She looked down and tapped the bandage on her thigh. "And that's assuming I can even use this drumstick in a few days."

  Reese nodded and adjusted their course slightly as the wind coming off the ocean tried to push Intrepid toward the beach. "Right. So that means we gotta find a car. And if your leg is still gimpy when we land, we’ll have to find a car immediately—in whatever mess we find on the coast. That's just not a situation I'm looking forward to."

  Jo nodded. "I see your point. But hoping that he gives us the boat isn't much of a plan either. Have you talked to him about it?"

  “Ahhh....” Reese looked across at Tiberia as she cut through the waves. Every now and then her bow rose up, and the dark patch on the hull broke the surface, displaying the football in its socket. "Not exactly...but Byron and I are going to have to have a talk, to sort things out. Soon."

  Jo was quiet for a moment. "When do you figure we’ll reach the Chesapeake?"

  Reese glanced up at the clouds on the southern horizon. There were more of them than there had been the day before. He wondered if they were close enough to actually see the leading edge of the hurricane. A powerful storm—he knew from previous experience—could stretch hundreds of miles across, sometimes over a thousand.

  "I figure we’ll make the entrance to the bay by tonight, maybe early tomorrow morning if we’re not slowed down too much. Remember, it's a long way to go, but we don't have to stop at red lights or follow roads. If we get far enough offshore, we can just make a straight line and head due south."

  “Ain’t run into any traffic jams, have we?" Jo said with a grin.

  "Yeah, I just wonder how long our luck will hold?"

  "Well," Jo said as she shifted position to let the sun warm her back. "I don't suppose there's that many people that are down by the coast. Even though the tsunami hit two weeks ago, I mean...lookit," she said with a casual wave at the desolate shoreline.

  Reese nodded. "I know...it looks like a bomb went off, all the way down the entire coastline. It'll probably be another week or two before people pick through the rubble and make it to the coast...and then they have to deal with all the stuff floating in the water."

  "Speaking of stuff floating in the water, what the heck is that?" Jo asked as she pointed over the port railing.

  Reese turned and looked where she pointed and shook his head. "That's something I hope doesn't happen to us..."

  About a hundred yards away, the front quarter of a sailboat bobbed soulfully up and down in the water, pointed straight at the sky. Somewhere in the past two weeks the sailboat had taken enough damage to sink but had not been heavy enough for the air pocket trapped in the bow to slip below the waves. As a result, the doomed boat hung suspended at the surface in limbo, the bow bobbing up and down like a buoy, while the rest of it lurked beneath the waves like an iceberg.

  "I wonder if there was anybody on that thing?" Jo asked in a quiet voice.

  "I hope there wasn't...hopefully she just got ripped out of a marina somewhere and drifted out here.” A tingle of fear crept down the back of Reese's leg. "Feels like we’re sailing by a graveyard, doesn't it?"

  Jo untied the strap on her chin and removed the hat from her head, placing it across her chest. "That it does..."

  They observed a moment of silence for the dead sailboat as they drifted by and only turned away when the abandoned hull slipped far behind them in Intrepid's wake. The ghost ship set a dark mood over the conversation, and they both fell silent for a while.

  Reese listened to the wind whistle through the rigging and the groaning and popping of the mast as the mainsail strained the metal. He listened to the water as it hissed along Intrepid's hull, and he watched the spray of water kicked up by the bow as it turned into a million sparkling gems flying through the air.

  In the quiet they shared as they sailed south, Reese's memory came back to him like watching a movie. Everything was crystal clear and vivid. He remembered the day they brought Amber home from the hospital. He remembered the moment Amber took her first steps, when she learned to ride her bike, and the first time he took her out on his own sailboat.

  He smiled as he stared at the endless ocean that stretched before them. Cami would hate the boredom—almost as much as Jo. He remembered the last overnight sailing trip they took, and how he and his wife had snuggled under the blanket at the front of his own boat. He remembered the warmth of her skin as they lay next to each other in the chilly darkness before dawn, and the sweet rocking motion of the boat at anchor as they were serenaded by the tides.

  And most curiously of all, he remembered the rhythmic clink of a straight line tapping against the mast from that night long ago. He’d listened to it all that night, while his wife lay sleeping safe and secure against his chest.

  Clink...creeeeek, clink...creeeeek, clink...

  Reese smiled and resisted the urge to untie the reefs they’d put into the mainsail, raise it to its full glory, throw up the jib, and fly the spinnaker. He longed to stretch every square inch of canvas across the mast and race south with all possible speed. He wanted to put Intrepid through her paces and see just how fast the sleek boat could go.

  Reese glanced down at the canvas-covered machine gun mounted to the forede
ck. He wondered idly how much more speed they might pick up if he managed to unbolt that thing and throw it overboard.

  It was Jo who broke the silence first. "What's that?"

  Reese blinked and pulled himself back from the distant horizon and thoughts of home. "What's what? Where are you looking?"

  "Over there, to the right...way over there."

  Reese looked off the starboard bow. At first, he didn't see anything, then they went over a particularly large swell, and he got a hint of a gray smudge to the south.

  Jo opened up the first aid satchel she kept by her side and pulled out their binoculars. She leaned against the railing and pulled them to her face.

  "What is it?" Reese asked.

  "Looks like smoke...whole heck of a lot of it."

  An uneasy feeling settled in Reese's stomach. "Whatever it is, we’re going to know soon enough."

  The radio chirped and Reese picked it up from its home on the clip next to the steering column. "Intrepid, Tiberia. You seein’ that off the starboard bow?"

  Reese nodded and brought the mic to his mouth. "We do. What do you make of it?"

  "I think that's Ocean City, Maryland. We’re coming up on it pretty quick, but we’re too far offshore for me to see for sure. Having some trouble with the GPS satellites today."

  Reese looked up into the achingly clear blue sky. "I wonder what's causing that?" He replied.

  "No idea, but near as I can tell, the next major city we approach will be Ocean City."

  "At this speed we should be coming in sight soon." Reese glanced down into the companionway. "How's the hull doing? We’re still dry over here."

  A moment later, Byron returned to the radio. "Tony's checking it out now, but so far just a trickle. Nothing I'm overly concerned about. Everything is holding about as well as we could expect."

  "That's a relief," Reese said. "You want to open up one of the reefs?"

  He watched as Byron considered the question and looked up at the shortened sail on Tiberia. His small figure turned and looked back at Reese, but they were too far away to see facial expressions. "Yeah, I think we might want to. If nothing else, it would give us a good trial run. The water in the Chesapeake can be a little rough this time of year, so I'd like to spread her wings a little now, while the water’s calm."

 

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