The roof exploded.
It was there; then it was gone. Tiles and timber and mortar and plaster crumbled down, the tearing, rending, crashing sounds mingling with our screams and shouts.
The wind rolled back that section of roof as neatly as a key curls the lid of a sardine can. Water that had collected on the rooftop sloshed down. That was the first cold, abrupt shock. Then came the needle-sharp rain. It stung every exposed piece of flesh. The wind pulled and tugged and pummeled, butting us like invisible goats.
Survival meant clinging to the furniture, a wall, any solid stationary object.
I tried to crawl across the floor toward the mattresses.
I could not move.
I don't know how long that lasted. Five minutes? Ten? It seemed an eternity. Life came down to wetness and cold and pressure, hanging on, clinging, surviving with the tenacity of an amoeba and just about as much control, knowing that there was no hope, that either the floor would give way, plunging us into the raging waters that surrounded the house, or hypothermia would cradle us in its" deadly chill.
If anyone cried or shouted or called out now, no one heard.
Then, without warning, the storm ended.
One instant we were besieged. The next the rain stopped.
Stopped.
The wind dropped from more than a hundred miles an hour-down, down, down-to sixty, fifty,
forty, then to intermittent and unpredictable gusts, still strong, still gusty, but bearable.
We could stand, shakily, uncertainly, but we could stand.
Even more remarkable to minds and spirits overwhelmed by the seemingly never-ending force and intensity of the storm was the sunlight.
Watery, greenish, weak. But it was sunlight.
I heard the exclamations of the others -
"My God, where's the island?" Lyle stood next to the east wall that was sheared in a diagonal from top right to bottom left. "We're all that's left. We're all that's left!"
"It's over, it's over!" Valerie sounded dazed. The rain or the water from the roof had loosened her hair. The scrappy wind tugged at the wet tendrils.
"Look at the water! It's almost up to the second story." Roger hung perilously over the side.
Trevor pointed at the china cabinet. "God!" The winds had dumped it forward. Only the piano had kept it from crushing him.
- and I understood their fascination, but my own gaze was riveted on the far horizon and the thick black clouds that climbed skyward to the west. I turned slowly. The sky was clear to the east, but I didn't doubt what lay beyond our sight: more thick black wall clouds, clouds climbing thousands of feet, clouds encircling us in the eye of the hurricane.
14
Only a special few ever see
the eye of a hurricane and live to tell it: adrenaline-fueled pilots of weather planes, sailors in seaworthy -and lucky-ships, and some thrill-seekers who chase hurricanes with video cameras.
Most do not live to tell it.
One of the pluses of a long life in the news business is a brain packed with odds and ends of information, sometimes useful, sometimes entertaining, sometimes devastating.
Covering Camiile taught me a lot about hurricanes.
The eye of a hurricane can be as much as twenty miles across. The more severe the storm, the smaller the eye.
It could take as long as two hours to pass if we were, say, at the western edge of the eye even with
the center of the circumference. Or it could take, depending upon our position, as little as fifteen minutes.
So where the hell was the mobile phone!
Like a commentator viewing destruction from a helicopter, Roger's voice continued. "… drowned animals everywhere, deer, field rats, wild turkeys, squirrels… oh" -his voice dropped -"a raccoon. And there's…"
I was turning toward the door to the central hall -that wall was still standing, despite the partial removal of the roof-when the commentary paused, then Roger said in a puzzled tone, "Something's moving under the eaves. I can't exactly tell- Oh, my God!"
He jumped back and looked wildly around. "Quick, quick. Lyle, get me a two-by-four!"
I saw the snake.
"No, Roger," I yelled. "Back away, back away slowly. Stay still the rest of you. Absolutely still."
We had one piece of good luck. The snake was oozing calmly over the broken masonry. The reptile wasn't poised to attack. It was seeking safety.
We had one piece of bad luck. This was a huge diamondback rattlesnake, one of the most venomous and dangerous reptiles in America.
The rattler paused, lifted its head.
"Don't move, Roger! Stay absolutely still. Listen to me, the snake isn't attacking. It will only bite if it feels threatened. Do not move."
I didn't tell him that snakes can jump more than half their body length to attack. Our wisest course was to wait, leave the diamondback alone, stay still.
Above all, we must not frighten the rattler.
The light breeze fluttered the drapes near the window. The snake turned its head. It felt the vibration.
It was big, six feet in length at least, the dark diamonds distinct on the amber back. The rattlers were darkish coils at its end.
Finally the snake lowered its head and began to move, pushing itself forward, gripping with its scales, pull-push, pull-push.
We all stood like statues.
The rattler oozed down the wall, moved forward, passing within inches of Roger's shoes.
Every eye watched its progress.
The diamondback moved toward the piano and the wreckage of the china cabinet. It swarmed up onto broken pieces of the furniture, then disappeared, slithering into the wreckage.
I held up a warning hand. We had to move, we had to go, but where? I looked around. The roof to the north appeared to be in place. "We can climb up on the roof. Everyone move quietly and slowly toward the wall." I gestured behind me. "There may be more snakes. But they'll likely stpp here, once they feel safe from the flood."
I pulled the piano bench to the wall, placed a chair on it, and clambered up.
I'd not given any thought to the construction of the island house. Now I realized that tile eaves projected from the sides. The roof itself was flat and covered with a gritty tar surface. A chimney had toppled and bricks were strewn in irregular clumps.
Shards of tile, tree limbs, and clumps of tennis
netting littered the rooftop. The wind, sharp and gusty, rippled standing water from the deluge.
But this portion of the central roof seemed to be intact.
If it had weak spots, I couldn't see them.
And I didn't see any snakes. At the moment. But others would come, some poisonous, some not. But even the nonpoisonous, if frightened, will bite, and some, like the brown water snake, will bite and keep on biting.
I tho
ught about it for a moment, then slowly grinned. We were saved by the eaves. The snakes obviously sought the first secure area, the dry, protected space beneath the eaves. The reason the rattler had swarmed into the music room was because the roof above it had been peeled back and it had lost its retreat.
So, atop the roof, we might not be faced with slithery wanderers seeking sanctuary.
I pointed at the roof and yelled, "No snakes."
That got me instant cooperation.
Trevor was on his way up to the roof before I finished speaking.
I caught his arm as he climbed over. "Stay right here. We'll need you to help. When we bring Burton and Miranda."
I was a little surprised, but the lawyer meekly did as he was told, though when his eyes kept sliding past us to the music room, he shuddered.
Roger and Lyle helped me. We moved both Burton and Miranda up to the roof, and Trevor lifted them over. Roger and Lyle climbed down, intending to retrieve a mattress.
The standing-water was draining-thank God for excellent architecture-and I was able to find a relatively dry spot in the middle of the roof for our injured charges. I asked Rosalia and Betty to guard them. I told Trevor to patrol the perimeter of the building, "Watch for snakes," I ordered.
I went back to the edge of the roof where Valerie stood. "Go back down and see if you can find any thermoses. And didn't Rosalia and Betty bring up some big bottles of bottled water to the music room?"
Valerie pushed back a lank lock of hair. "God, you don't mind asking, do you? You know something, you would have made a wonderful nun."
But after a wary look below, she eased back onto the chair and dropped to the music-room floor. She was back atop the chair in a flash, passing up a pair of thermoses, "The rest are smashed. The food's gone. But there are three big bottles of water. I'll have Enrique get them."
She called to Enrique, and he nodded.
I reached down, grabbed her hand, and helped her scramble onto the roof.
Enrique retrieved the bottles and handed them
up-
Valerie and I hauled them over.
Valerie rolled them, one at a time, to our little storehouse of goods near the chimney. "Next time I'm resting I'll try out for a stevedore job. God, it feels good to use muscles." She followed me back to the roof edge.
I swung my leg over the broken wall.
Valerie reached out, caught my arm. "Don't go back down. You've done your part." Her fingers
tightened spasmodically. "Oh, Lord, look" She pointed, and it seemed odd that the polish on her fingernail was still a brilliant crimson, as perfect as if fresh from the beauty salon. "There's a cottonmouth that got by Roger. Roger, Roger, careful, behind youl"
Roger froze.
Lyle wheeled around, but Roger was between him and the coiled muddy-brown snake. White mouth open wide, tail shimmying, the alarmed cottonmouth was poised to strike.
I almost pulled out the gun, but a shot that took out the snake would also have struck Roger. I had only one possible chance. I reached down, grabbed a broken half of brick, and threw it fast and hard.
The brick smacked into the snake in mid-lunge.
And Lyle plunged past Roger and brought down a plank, crushing the cottonmouth's head.
Valerie turned an astonished face toward me. "How the hell did you do that?"
"Softball. A long time ago. I played catcher." I was rather proud of my percentage of outs at second. And I could already feel a twinge in my elbow.
"When you weren't riding a broomstick," she muttered.
I climbed back down into the music room, watching where I stepped.
Lyle called out, "Get anything you want to take up there. When you're finished, we'll all go up."
I stayed away from the broken-up china cabinet. That territory belonged to a particular diamondback. But I looked diligently elsewhere. The mobile phone was gone.
Lyle helped me hunt.
"I put it on the table by the fireplace." He used the two-by-four to flip over cushions.
Roger and Lyle tossed some cushions up to the roof. I found another unbroken thermos. Enrique pulled some two-by-fours free from what was left of the windows. We even managed to drag out the middle mattress and shove it up onto the roof to provide a dry, soft resting place for Burton and Miranda.
That was our last^task.
Finally on the roof to stay, I took a deep breath and looked around.
The sun seemed far, far away.
That was haze.
I looked to the west. I no longer saw that ominous wall of blackness. But I knew it wasn't time to break out the champagne. It merely meant the eye was moving. Closer at hand, the sky was hazy with a greenish cast and as far as the eye could see there was nothing but muddy, foam-flecked, roiling water.
I looked to the east. It was awesome to realize that I could see all the way to the ocean. It was as if a giant hand had reached down and snatched up the pine trees. The floodwaters swirled over the dunes and the forest and only an occasional wind-peeled branch stuck up from the angry brownish-gray water.
Nothing remained of the storage building with the generator and the room-size freezer where Chase's body had been taken. The tennis courts, of course, were long gone.
This central portion of the house, which had been built on the island's highest ridge, was the only man-
made structure still standing. Floodwaters lapped above the first-floor windows. The current looked swift. The water would pull and tug at this remnant, eroding the ground beneath it, pushing on weakened walls.
When the eye passed, when the storm began again in all its ferocity, how long could this battered structure last? As for us - I looked around the roof at the band of survivors-we now had no place to hide, no protection from two-hundred-mile-an-hour winds, from cold, stiletto-sharp rain that could drive all living warmth from our bodies.
But we had survived to this point. The air was balmy. I could feel my cold, wet clothes beginning to dry.
Roger, Enrique, and Lyle patrolled the roof edge. Trevor knelt by the broken chimney. He was stacking fragments of bricks into a mound. Should it come down to a struggle for the last space, we had two-by-fours and bricks; the snakes had fangs and agility.
Valerie sat with her back against the foot or so of chimney still in place, her face lifted to the sun, her eyes closed. Her shining golden hair, beginning to dry, sprung in wiry curls around her face. She might have been sixteen.
I realized suddenly how tired I was, how very tired. The explosion - God, that seemed a lifetime ago. I looked at my watch. It was like trying to decipher foreign script. I could see the numerals, of course, but they didn't make sense. Not against the enormity of what we had endured.
Could it possibly be just eleven-forty-one?
The Miranda B. had exploded at half-past three, eight hours ago.
Cha
se had died at just after seven A.M.
We had found Burton at shortly after ten.
I wanted desperately to drop down on the roof, rest against one of the cushions.
But I turned and forced my leaden legs to cross to the center of the roof and our invalids.
Perhaps our other piece of luck-at least for Burton and Miranda-was the fact that only half of the music-room roof had been peeled back by the winds, so the mattresses and their human occupants had remained at least partially sheltered. They had been damp when we lifted them to the roof but not drenched-and not suffering from hypothermia.
Dead Man's Island Page 28