Dragonfly

by Farris, John

  At the first shotJoe's head disappeared as he slipped back down into the forward cabin. Thomason lowered his aim and began firing into the hull. When the slide locked open, he dumped the automatic and reached for Walter Lee's revolver. He was about to empty that as well; then it occurred to him that the revolver might not have the punch to carry through the Wayfarer's mahogany planking. He replaced the revolver. The water, still surging, was above his waist now; his stomach muscles cringed at the coldness.

  He had observed that only the wide veranda doors and some framing stonework had been taken out when the Wayfarer slammed into the house. The Barony had absorbed the best Honey could throw its way, and would stand. The water, not wind, was the real threat. Four feet high, and rising. Time to get back upstairs. He would wait for Joe Bryce there.

  Joe came up again through the companionway hatch, in darkness, not wanting to use the flashlight he had taken from a nay-station compartment. It would light up the cockpit bubble, which was still in place, like a crystal ball.

  Instead he felt for the port-side sliding door and eased it open. The cockpit was flooded, and the cabin below was filling rapidly. He crawled out onto the side deck against the incoming tide. It was painful work. He was bruised all over from being thrown around the cabin as the Wayfarer rode the storm surge from Pandora's Bay to the house. And now he was inside the house, half-drowned but functioning. And, possibly as a result of the jolting and the cold bath, his hemianopsia had vanished.

  He lay still in inches of water on the flooded deck. The lamp had disappeared from the dining room. By

  Thomason wasn't lurking there like a hunter in a blind for the rising water to wash Joe out of concealment. He had counted two shots, and heard a few more thudding against the hull. Which didn't mean anything. He didn't know how well Thomason was armed. He only knew the man intended to kill him.

  But he had to get moving, while he still could. The water was lapping halfway up the cockpit bubble now, and he was on all fours with his head in the air in order to breathe.

  Holding the waterproof flashlight in his left hand, he sloshed around the deck to starboard and lowered himself slowly over the side. With his feet on the floor of the dining room, the water was chest-high. Something clammy brushed against hin in the dark, under water. He took a nervous step away, turned and flicked the light, which he shielded with one hand, toward the pulpit of the boat. Saw the hanging body of Mr. Phipps moving slowly, but from the inflow of the water, not as if he were alive. He aimed the light into the water and saw Mr. Phipps's head, an empty broken vessel half the size it had been. The top of his skull had been sheared off to within an inch of his eyebrows, and he had no brains. But one eye, of glass, was still in its socket, appraising him.

  Joe shuddered and turned away from the body, gave himself to the wind-driven flow of the water. He kept a tight grip on the flashlight as he was carried, flailing on his back, through the doorway to the kitchen.

  His ears popped after a ducking; he caught the edge of a countertop with his free hand and held on. He thought he heard Thomason's voice above the jet-whine of the wind. And Lizzie, almost hysterically shrill. So Thomason wasn't waiting for him outside, nearby in the dark, hanging on for a point-blank shot to Joe's head. He might be on the second floor by now.

  There was household flotsam all around him. He held the flashlight high, trying to get his bearings. He saw a cottonmouth water moccasin as thick as his own forearm crawling up through the latticework of a floor-to-ceiling wine rack in an opened pantry. How many more like that one had been flushed into the house with the tidal surge? He hoped other snakes would be too busy surviving to bother him.

  Once more he went with the flood, as if through a nearly full storm drain, toward the front of the house and the gallery. He heard Bruiser barking.

  At the top of the semicircular stairs a hurricane lamp glowed. Halfway up the stairs, three or four feet above the lapping water line, Walter Lee, his face burned and swollen, sat with Lillian, who did what she could for him with cloths rinsed in a basin of fresh water she'd taken from the supply stored in upstairs bathtubs. Walter Lee's chest was heaving as he breathed. Bruiser lay on the step below his feet, soaked and shivering. Lillian looked away as the beam of Joe's flashlight paused on her face.

  Joe pulled himself out of the water by the banister rail and sank down next to Walter Lee. Lillian nodded to the second floor.

  "He's in Miss Abby's room." He didn't hear her the first time. Lillian leaned over, placing her mouth close to his ear. "He have Walter Lee's pistol!"

  "What happened?" Joe asked Walter Lee, pointing to his face.

  "Threw a lamp on me."

  Joe took a closer look at the puffed blistering flesh on Walter Lee's cheeks and forehead. His eyebrows and lashes were gone, the eyelids swollen. Liquid oozed from the slits that were left.

  "Can you see anything?"

  "Naw! Not much. It's the same as when they they whip you with the laces in the ring, try to cut you blind!"

  "Why did he do it?"

  "He's a guilty man! Done killed my little gal. He is going to burn in hell for that."

  "A man named Phipps killed Frosty. It probably wasn't the first murder he committed for Thomason. But Phipps is dead now."

  Walter Lee slumped a little more, grimacing. He put a hand on Bruiser's head.

  "Then there ain't no way to prove it!"

  "What is it they say—confession's good for soul? I need to get to Thomason. He's been injecting Abby with a dangerous paralytic drug! Any more of it, she could stop breathing in a heartbeat."

  Walter Lee tried to peel open a sticky eye. "Then Frosty, she was right!" He dropped his hand. "I ain't no good like this. Can you take him, Dr. Joe?"

  "I'm going to try, Walter Lee."

  "He'll shoot you," Lillian warned. "He don't care. I seen that in his eyes, he come past us on the stair like we wasn't here no more." She thought about Thomason's mental state "He's locked up in that room with all the life left to him. God help Abby, and little Miss Lizzie! God help them."

  Joe looked at the upstairs hail, where rich paintings hung askew on the walls.

  He glanced down, at the still-rising, dank water, and a big marsh rabbit with laid-back, drenched velvet ears, swimming, an arrow of current behind its head, through the gallery into the parlor that had been Charly Thomason's pride.

  "Abby's in the corner room? Who's next to her?"

  "Lizzie, on this end of the hall. Other end is Charlene, then Dr. Luke. Lizzie's room connected to Abby's by a bath."

  "Okay. Lillian, what I need for you to do is go bang and holler at Abby's door. Make as much noise as you can! Keep Thomason occupied. Tell him Walter Lee had a heart attack! Anything."

  "All right, Dr. Joe."

  Joe put a hand on her shoulder, nothing but skin-covered bone. There was no trace of anxiety in her webbed face, only an ingrained acceptance of pitiless nature wrecking everything, and human beings who persisted in bringing this manifestation of God's displeasure down on their heads. Lillian's body was frail and her swollen blocky feet nearly useless, but her eyes were as unbreakable as a family curse.

  Lillian rose slowly. He helped her up the remaining steps and down the hall as far as Lizzie's room. Lillian glanced at him, then went on. Joe tried the knob of Lizzie's door. Like other doors in the house, this one was sticking in the jamb. He had to lunge against the solid panels to pop it open.

  Lizzie's room was dark and hot. He turned on his flashlight and angled the beam past the four-poster bed to a Wall in which there were two .doors separated by posters of sullenly posed, snitty, in-your-face rock groups. One door stood open a couple of inches and his light caught curves and angles of misted chrome fixtures, a trapeze bar trembling as the house shook from the force of the hurricane.

  During a change in the pitch of the wind, Joe heard Lucas Thomason rambling on in Abby's room. Then Lillian's voice, a contralto tremolo, from the hallway.

  "Dr. Luke! Dr. Luke! Walter
Lee's in terrible pain from his eyes! You got to help him!"

  Joe went quickly into the bathroom, where all the fixtures looked strange to him, either higher or lower than normal, partly enclosed in shiny steel tubing. A prison of sorts, but her sentence was about to be commuted. He clicked off the flashlight after making sure of the location of the opposite, extra-wide door. His hand touched the easy-opening latch handle, and he paused.

  "Lillian I'm looking after Abby now! There's nothing I can do for Walter Lee, the infirmary's flooded!"

  "Please open the door, Dr. Luke!"

  "You just do what you can. I'll see to him in few minutes."

  Joe depressed the handle of the door to Abby's room. He put his shoulder against it, expecting the door to be warped in the jamb. Instead it opened easily, and he went stumbling inside, one hand going to the floor in an attempt to maintain his balance.

  He had a glimpse of Lizzie kneeling at the foot of Abby's bed, Abby on her right side facing the shuttered windows and with a sheet over her. There was a hurricane lamp on a little table beside her bed, the gleam of a syringe on a tray.

  Ten feet away Lucas Thomason turned from the unopened door to the hall, peered at Joe with a look of mild consternation and then, swiftly, annoyance. He pulled Walter Lee's old revolver from his belt. Lizzie cried out at the sight of blue steel, the proposition for violence it represented. Abby looked back awkwardly over her raised right shoulder.

  Joe shouted at Thomason, "What are you going to do, kill everybody in this room? That's what you're up against now!"

  "Joe!" Abby yelled. And Lizzie yelled his name too, and then Thomason said, with annoyance scraped aside by something as stark as a surgeon's knife, leaving him with no more expression than still water, "Just you."

  The door to the hall was smashed off its hinges; the weight of the solid oak door, with Walter Lee on top of it, rode Thomason down and pinned him to the floor.

  "Oh, God, oh my God!" Abby cried. "What are you doing to him?"

  Joe picked up the revolver from the floor, glanced at Lillian in the hall. Lillian nodded and edged inside, around the door and Thomason with an arm pinned under him and trying to breathe. Lillian smiled at Abby.

  "Everything gonna be all right with you now, lamb. You'll see."

  "Let him up! Walter Lee, what are you—you're hurting Luke!"

  "He has something to say to you," Joe said. "Walter Lee, just sit tight."

  "He was gonna shootJoe," Lizzie said. "He was just about to shoot him!"

  "What is going on here?"

  Joe picked up the ampule and the filled syringe from the tray.

  "Did he give you any of this?" he asked Abby.

  "No! He was about to. Those are my steroids, Joe!"

  Joe said to Thomason, who had turned his head and, still helpless beneath Walter Lee's weight, was staring up at him, "Are they steroids, Dr. Thomason?" Thomason said nothing. His jaw was working. He coughed and winced from pain. A froth of blood appeared on his lower lip.

  Joe kneeled down and placed the tip of the syringe in the hollow of Thomason's jaw, below the left ear. "If it's nothing but steroids, then it can't do any harm if I inject a little of this into the muscle here. Can it, Doctor?"

  Thomason's jaw went on working; his throat muscles were tense, his visible eye bright with pain and hatred. "How're you doing, Walter Lee?" Joe asked.

  "No problem," Walter Lee said, reclining on the door. "I'm comfortable."

  "Broken ribs," Thomason said. "Let me... up, I can't breathe."

  Joe's thumb came down slowly on the plunger of the syringe.

  "Do you see what I'm about to do here, Doctor?"

  "…Don't!''

  "Why not?"

  "… Kill me."

  "What? The steroids you've been giving Abby all these years? How could those hurt you, if they're suposed to be beneficial?"

  Thomason's lips moved, soundlessly.

  "Okay," Joe sighed, "an autopsy should determine why what was good for Abby turned out to be lethal for you."

  "Son of a bitch. Fucking son of a bitch."

  "What's in the syringe, Dr. Thomason?"

  "Parahydratoxamin. "

  "Analogue of what?"

  "You know, you son of a bitch."

  "Abby doesn't know, "Joe said, and, while maintaining light pressure with the point of the syringe under Thomason's jaw, he looked up at Abby. Lillian and Lizzie had helped her to sit up in bed. She was staring at Joe and pinned-down Luke, her, bluish lips apart, blankness creeping into her eyes.

  "Oh, Luke."

  "Tell her!"

  "Analogue of—be careful, don't penetrate the skin with that syringe, one drop is enough to—analogue of Tetrodotoxin. Blowfish poison. Used in—complicated spinal surgeries. Paralytic. Complete block from the site of the injury down. Just let me up from here, I'll walk away. No harm done. For our sake, Abby. I only did it—for us."

  "Oh, Jesus," Abby moaned; a sound so filled with excoriating pain Joe couldn't bring himself to look at her.

  "Don't blame me. I've loved you since... you were ten years old. I didn't want… for you to ever... leave me."

  "GOD, NO, DON'T MAKE HIM SAY ANY MORE."

  "Just let me go," Thomason said to Joe, as if he'd heard his cue to press a winning argument. "She'll walk again. That's the important thing… wouldn't you say? I'll never come back. I swear it."

  "You got Frosty to answer for," Walter Lee said.

  "And Paul Huskisson," Joe added. "Go ahead, Thomason, finish this."

  "My ribs are broken," he pleaded. "Lung is punctured. Let me up, I'm… smothering."

  Joe said, "Did you pay Mr. Phipps to kill Paul Huskisson and Frosty Clemons?"

  Thomason's face clenched furiously, the skin drizzly with an evil sweat.

  "Leave me… with nothing, is that it?" he said, as if it was just sinking in that he had been disinherited by an unkind Fate. "Abby."He tried to move his head enough to catch a glimpse of her face. "Abby! I've always taken care of you… the best I knew how. You can't believe what he's saying! You don't believe it, do you?"

  Abby sobbed in Lillian's arms. Lizzie sat recklessly gnawing on a thumbnail with a look of protected vacancy, as if the horrors of the moment were sliding off her psyche like drops of mercury on a mirror.

  "Let me up!" Thomason demanded. "Let me go to her."

  "You're never going to touch her again," Joe said.

  Abby began to scream.

  Thomason's face stiffened at the sound of her anguish. He coughed again, and fresh blood spotted the floor. Joe saw it, and decided Thomason was probably right about the punctured lung.

  Still holding the syringe in his right hand, Joe looked around at Walter Lee. He was drained to the marrow, unnerved by the demon released but unexorcised in the stifling air of the room.

  "He's had it. He won't hurt anybody else."

  Thomason, his body compressed and immobile beneath the door, flexed the fingers of his right hand and suddenly jerked his head up, toward Joe's hand and the syringe he was holding. The needle slipped into soft tissue, meeting no resistance until it penetrated the tough casing of the carotid artery. The sudden movement put pressure against Joe's thumb, and most of the Parahydratoxamin, intended for the reservoir in Abby's lower back, rushed into Thomason's bloodstream.

  His life was over in seconds. Unfortunately for those who had to watch it, the spasms that snapped his bones and joints and turned his skin a glowing red went on much longer.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  The small hospital in Nimrod's Chapel was crowded in the early hours of the day that followed the passage of Hurricane Honey to the north and east Honey left behind devastated barrier islands, wetlands, maritime forests, and old coastal towns. A lot of "developed" beachfront land got undeveloped in a hurry, as rows of houses simply disappeared in the violent winds and tidal surges. Solid concrete piers were torn up by wave action or crumbled by wind-driven rain, bridges inundated or swept away. Homes and buildings of
all types of construction were left roofless or totally collapsed. So many cardinals, robins and blue jays were stuffed into the spaces of chain-link fences that the downed and twisted fences looked like carnival bunting. But a species of parrot native to the Canary Islands, having flown more than two thousand miles within the eye of the hurricane, was spotted by a birdwatcher unharmed but cranky in the belfry of a country church sixty miles northwest of Nimrod's Chapel. Farmers who staked down chickens to keep them from being blown away found their birds intact but completely naked, without a feather between them. A live porpoise, six feet long, was discovered in the living room of a house on Pandora's Bay after the tidal surge swept through it. Power was out, up and down the coast, and would be out for more than a week. The habitats of red-cockaded woodpeckers, wild turkeys, red wolves, three already-endangered species of turtles, numerous shore birds, marsh rabbits and fox squirrels were severely disrupted. So were the lives of all the people in the hurricane path. A few were missing, a few were dead, others were hospitalized for treatment of everything from heart attacks to snakebite to accidental electrocution. Damages, when the various authorities got around to adding them up, would be in the billions of dollars. Yet Honey was not the strongest hurricane to hit the Carolina coast. Hugo, with winds of up to 168 miles an hour, had been even more punishing.

  At Joe's insistence, what was left of the Parahydratoxamin in Abby's implanted reservoir was drained by a doctor named McClard, who didn't have time for all of the questions he promised to ask later. He initialed the ampule in which he saved the anesthetic and locked it up in the hospital's safe. They made room for Abby in the nurses' lounge of the new pediatric wing of the hospital, to which she had contributed nearly two hundred thousand dollars a couple of years ago.

  Lillian sat in a chair beside the bed on which Abby had been strapped down, dozing and soaking her crippled feet in a pan of Epsom salts. Abby was restrained because of episodes of spasticity in both legs; the involuntary activity of the muscles was strong enough to throw her to the floor. She had not closed her eyes nor uttered a sound for at least ten hours.