Everyone looked up expectantly when we burst in. I stood framed in the doorway, glancing from face to face, seeing anxiety in some, questions in others. I had a lot to tell them.
None of it would ease the worry. Nothing I had to say would generate happy thoughts either.
Chapter VII- The Station
The storm raged all through the afternoon. The century old station trembled and shuddered, but held strong against the howling wind and the driving rain. Time after time, I stood near rain-streaked windows, sipped at coffee, and watched the storm-tossed waves crash into the island. Visibility ran no more than a mile or so. Beyond that, the clouds and ocean merged into one solid gray-black wall.
They had taken the news of Zachary’s death as well as could be expected. Tyler slumped over at the long, low table where he had been sitting, burying his head in his hands. Kelly sat with him, speaking in low tones until he finally straightened up.
The tall blonde with Joshua’s group gasped and put her hand to her mouth. The rest sat in silence while I relayed the news.
Elsie rocked in her chair, her gray eyes peering at me over her wire-rimmed glasses, and then glanced at Daniel. I stared at him too, thinking about the odd remark he had made earlier when he said Zachary made him think of bats. Something about those words hung just at the edge of comprehension, like I had a puzzle piece in my hand that didn’t fit, but should.
When I looked up, Elsie’s gaze had turned into a frown. She reached down and pulled him closer, the move so obviously protective that it left me with more questions than answers. Barely twenty-four hours earlier, I‘d protested her plan to ride across with me, noting that she hardly knew me. The sudden chill in her demeanor had me wondering what I knew about her, or better, what I didn’t know.
The life-saving station had been laid out in such a way that the entrance way opened into a huge room that ran half the length of the building. From walls paneled with rough-sawn pine to oak floors, the building imparted a solid sense of strength as if the men who built it had understood that it didn’t need to withstand a storm, but centuries of them. The main room contained little in the way of furniture. The few items that did exist looked to have been strategically placed by the Park Service in an attempt to recreate an atmosphere of square-rigged ships and swaggering sailors. A pair of rocking chairs sat near the soot-blackened iron stove, matching those out on the porch in shape and design. A handful of stools occupied the far wall where a long, low bar divided the living space from the kitchen. A rough wooden table surrounded by another half-dozen ladder-backed chairs graced the center of the room.
The walls bore equally sparse furnishings. A picture of an old woman sewing by candlelight hung near the stove. A wide oil-on-canvas painting hung over the bar, the scene depicting Christ with his hands outstretched to calm rough seas. Glass lamps had been spaced apart throughout the room, their globes still dark from whale oil burned in a past when the world still accepted the commercial killing of the earth’s largest mammals.
Big picture windows ran across the front. With the storm raging outside, the weak light filtering through them faded before it reached the bar, leaving the kitchen area dark and gloomy.
The rain came hard for two hours or better. Bright streaks of lightning blazed through the clouds and arced toward the earth with such frequency and intensity it felt like God had turned on a strobe light and cranked it to the crazy setting. The wind also went insane for a while. Twice gusts hit the station so hard that dust puffed from the walls.
News of Zachary’s death left them somber. I let that sit until the worst of the storm had passed and then told them about the president declaring martial law. I don’t think I could have elicited a stronger response if I’d poured gasoline on them and struck a match.
Joshua stood up. The movement sent his bushy hair sprawling across his face. The beard forming below stood out dark and thick. I couldn’t decide if he looked more like a terrorist, or one of those kooky, doomsday fanatics who wandered around with wooden signs draped down both sides of their body.
“Are you kidding me? They announce a ban on travel then basically say, if you try, we’ll shoot you?”
“What do they expect us to do?” Jessie cried out. “Stay here?”
I shrugged at them both. “I’d say that’s exactly what they expect. In fact, it sounds like they’re going to see that we do.”
Even jittery Devon joined the chorus of voices rising in protest.
“They can’t just leave us here. We’ll starve.”
I raised my hands. “Whoa, slow down. We’re not going to starve. I’ve got food.”
“For how long?” he demanded, “Enough to feed us all until spring?”
“Nooo,” I said slowly, drawing the word out deliberately.
He rolled his eyes.
“That’s what I thought. Then unless you’ve got some kind of plan, we’ll all be hurting in a few days. You know, like starving.”
“Not unless you’re an idiot.” I told him. “For the next few weeks, that ocean out there will be brimming with about any type of seafood you can imagine. People wait months for the fish to start migrating. Starving should be the least of your worries.”
His face turned red.
“I suppose you’re going to tell me what I need to worry about?”
I ran my hand across my face. I was tired, irritable and had no desire to babysit the lot of them.
“You have two specific worries. The first is the Fever. Odds are you won’t survive it. Just like the rest of us, you’re living on borrowed time. Before you die of that, you could die of thirst.”
He looked incredulous. “Dude, this place has a cistern. We got plenty of water. I drunk some of it when we first got here. It’s good.”
Even I heard the flat tones in my voice when I responded.
“So tell me, how does the water get in the cistern?”
“Oh wow,” he said mockingly, looking around the room for support. “It’s like, from the sky, man. Every time it rains we get water, and lots of it. Maybe you should look up the word “cistern” some time. You know, in one of those big books called a Dict-shun-ary.”
“Yes, cisterns fill with rainwater that flows down from a roof into some type of collection system, and then into a big holding tank,” I said quietly. “This same roof, by the way, is one that seagulls shit all over day after day after day. Mosquitoes and a whole host of microorganisms love standing water.”
I took a deep breath.
“Want to be a badass? Go right ahead. After all, slurping up a little fecal matter never hurt anyone, right?”
I let the question hang before I continued. “If that water isn’t treated, in a week you could be spouting fluid from both ends of your body compliments of another entry in the Dict-shun-ary. You’ll find that one in the G section. Look for the word Giardia.”
The red on his face deepened.
“And that’s just the bugs. Is the roof made of asphalt? If so, then that water will have trace amounts of petroleum, mold, and a wide range of bacteria. Is it tin? If that’s the case, you’re looking at metals and chemicals used in the paint. Maybe even lead if the paint is old enough.”
I shot a look at Elsie. “Ask her. She grew up here.”
Heads swiveled in her direction.
“People used to drink the water,” she said, and then paused. “They used to get sick too. He’s right. I grew up here. I wouldn’t drink it without boiling it or treating it some way.”
“You made coffee and tea out of it,” he protested.
She grinned. “Yes I did. The tea boiled. Coffee pots heat water close to 205 degrees, even that old percolator type. While that isn’t boiling, the stove top keeps it hot enough for it to pasteurize.”
He seemed lost for a moment. When he looked back at me, his eyes had a calculating look.
“You said you came here to stay. What are you going to do for water? Does that boat of yours have some kind of filtration system on it?”<
br />
Truth was, I didn’t have much of an answer for him. Equally true however, I knew I could survive on the water the island had to offer if I had nothing else available.
“No,” I said. “Angel does not have a filtration system. My brain, however, does.”
He looked confused. That seemed like a good place to leave him. I worked my way through the rest of them. The station had rooms upstairs. Checking out the second level would be more productive than arguing with him.
The old wooden door to the stairs had been locked shut at some point. A rusty hasp stretched from just above the handle to the door jamb. A heavy lock looped through the retaining ring, firmly securing the door. I studied the setup for a moment, and then pulled out a pocket knife and pried the brass pins out of the door’s hinges on the opposite side. The door came loose as soon as I had the last of them free. After a few seconds of tugging and prying, it fell to one side, still locked. I left it that way and walked up dusty steps that creaked and groaned in protest.
H.G. Wells had his time machine. Captain Kirk had the Enterprise and its warp drive. All I had to do to visit the past was walk a flight of stairs.
The upper level had been used as sleeping quarters with more than half of the floor devoted to rows of bunks arranged in a dormitory-style configuration. I counted six beds on each side, none larger than twin size, all arranged in such a way that the head faced the center of the room while the foot of the bunk sat under the sloped roof line. The setup seemed odd until I imagined jumping out of one in the middle of the night to race off to a watery rescue. Then I understood. Placing the beds that way probably kept a lot of heads from banging into the ceiling.
The bedding, I supposed, had long been gone, but the bunk frames, thin mattresses yellowed with age, and much of the furniture still stood in the open space. All of the items looked bulky and heavy, simple in design and perhaps some of them even handmade. Stacked between the beds were pieces that had most likely graced the bottom floor when the station had been actively manned. A pair of long, low tables, half a dozen pictures, more chairs, and piles of life-saving equipment at least a century old had been stored among the bunks.
An antiques dealer would have drooled over the sight.
Three dormer windows provided an uninterrupted view of the ocean. I walked across floorboards made from unfinished planks and gazed out the one in the center. The wind had dropped a good bit by then. The sea still heaved, and the rain still fell, but the violence had dissipated.
The stairs creaked behind me. I turned as Elsie materialized out of the dim staircase. She gave the room an appraising glance.
“I’ve never been up here. When I was little, the men who ran this place would let kids play downstairs, but they shooed us away from the stairs.”
I looked back out the window.
“You can’t do this, Hill William,” she said.
“Can’t do what?” I asked without looking back.
“You can’t be part of that group. Every one of them is looking to you for guidance.”
I turned and shot her an irritated glance.
“I have no desire to guide anyone.”
She shrugged. “It doesn’t matter what you want. Perception is half the battle. You’re older. You know what you’re doing. More than anything, you’re a doer, not a talker.”
Her face split into a humorless grin. “They might have thought that before, but the instant you took that boat out to look for that boy, you drove that point home. Someone has to make decisions. Like it or not, that’s you.”
Elsie walked over beside me and looked out the window.
“The storm is passing. Tomorrow, we’ll wake up to a bright and sunny day. If you want to know the difference between them and you, they’ll get up and start planning.”
She looked at me with her gray eyes.
“You already know what you’ll do.”
“You’re right, I do,” I agreed. “I’ll take you and Daniel home. I haven’t seen any patrol boats out here enforcing the ban. I just need to avoid Sheriff Little.”
She pursed her lips. “Maybe,” she said quietly.
I opened my mouth to tell her there was no maybe about it when she abruptly turned and headed for the stairwell.
“I brought a radio out of your boat. It’s about news time.”
She shot me a sour look. “It must have been your father’s. It don’t look like something a person your age would buy. It’s got character.”
I needed to ask her about that, why one moment she spoke perfect English and the next sounded like a lowland girl who’d never left the farm. Maybe I would, someday when I had the energy and cared about the answer.
I stood in the deepening twilight for a long time, staring out the windows, watching the restless ocean toss and turn through rain-streaked windows. Thunder still rumbled occasionally, and lightning flared in the distance, but the worst of the storm had slipped up the coast. Elsie was right. We would wake to a new dawn, one filled with light and warmth.
“You need to come down now,” a voice said behind me.
I jerked around, startled.
A figure stood near the top of the stairs in a pool of darkness. Weak yellow light outlined the body like a faint and flickering halo. I craned my neck to one side.
“Daniel? How did you get up here?”
The question sounded stupid the instant it left my mouth. But I’d heard nothing, not one creak out of the whining stairs.
He moved slightly to his right, into the dim light slipping through the window. His eyes looked black and endlessly deep, like holes cut in his skin.
“It’s about to start.”
“What is?” I asked, confused.
He stood motionless for a long moment, then turned and started down the steps, ghosting along without even the tiniest sound. His voice floated up the staircase, so soft I barely heard it.
“The bad things.”
I stared at the spot where he had stood seconds before. The stairwell loomed in the faint light like an empty pit, a tall and rectangular slab of darkness two shades blacker than the shadows surrounding it. My first thought when I turned had been that someone below had lit a lamp, a candle, some type of flame-driven light source too feeble to wash away the coming night, but instead illuminate it. That proved not to be the case. The pale light disappeared with him. The thought left the hair on my arms standing on end.
I took off after him. The kid was turning out to be scary with his talk of bats and bad things. By the time I reached the bottom, Daniel had crossed the room and sidled up close to Elsie. She saw me looking at him and frowned. The woman had a mind as sharp as a well-honed knife and a tongue that could cut just as easily. I’d watched her stand toe to toe with an armed man twice her size. Even so, I’d just about reached my limit. If she wanted to go a couple of rounds, I didn’t mind. I wanted some answers. The boy sitting next to her with his empty eyes had them.
Elsie had put the radio in the center of the old wooden table. A pair of Coleman lanterns lit the room, no doubt brought in by the campers. Both of them hung over the bar, situated about ten feet apart and illuminated both the kitchen area and the living area. Soft strains of big band music came from the radio, lending a depression-era atmosphere to the place.
Everyone had gathered around the table. Some sat in the wooden chairs, other in stools pulled over from the bar. I made my way through them, focused on Daniel, ignoring the babble of voices rising around me. The old woman saw me coming and stiffened.
Tyler stepped in front of me so suddenly that I almost ran him over.
“When you go down to get Zack, I want to come with you.”
I tore my gaze away from Elsie and the boy. Tyler looked despondent. Guilt and sorrow played across his face.
“I feel, you know, like responsible for what happened. When I saw how much the wind had picked up, I went back to bed and left Kelly to talk him out of going.”
I blinked, trying to switch gears mentally.
<
br /> “We’ll go first thing in the morning. I’d go tonight but we don’t have anywhere to put the,” I said, then hesitated, “you know, put him.”
The music died away, ending with trumpets and rolling drums that reminded me of movies rife with flappers in wide-brimmed hats and smoky speakeasies. A soft-spoken man’s voice filled the sudden silence.
“And that was the great Satchmo, otherwise known as Louis Armstrong, with ‘Basin Street Blues.’ We have the news up next and a lot of it. I’ll be right here with more hits of yesteryear when we return.”
I put a hand on Tyler’s shoulder. “Come on, let’s get a seat and listen to the news.” He nodded and climbed atop one of the stools. I made for a chair near Elsie.
The same woman who had relayed the news earlier came on the air. She wasted no time.
The CDC today released figures that officials are calling alarming and of epidemic proportions. A spokesperson indicated that reports are pouring into the agency and that at least a 100,000 new cases of the Fever have been reported in the last 24 hours, with an estimated 10,000 deaths from advanced cases. Hospitals in the worst-hit areas have closed their doors to new Fever cases, citing limited resources and the danger to staff. At least thirty people were killed today while seeking medical attention by authorities enforcing the national travel ban that took effect at noon. Troubling reports of aggressive behavior also increased dramatically, this time with a twist. The disease appears to be attacking not only the areas of the brain that govern emotions, but also our perceptions. We have a report from Charles Ritchfield at our ABC affiliate in Raleigh with more on that story.
A faint hiss poured out of the radio, replaced seconds later by a man whose voice carried that same Midwestern lack of accent common to news casters.
Reports have flooded in today from at least a dozen states describing shocking and violent episodes with patients in late stages of the Fever. In Texas, a man broke free from his restraints and used the cord from the blinds in his room to strangle a passing security officer. He then seized the guard’s sidearm and went on a rampage, killing two nurses on his floor before being shot by security.
The Island - Part 2 (Fallen Earth) Page 5