Category five, p.23
Category Five, page 23
She wasn’t even sure if she would fit through that door. She never had gone up into the attic through the closet. You’ll make yourself fit. Hurry.
Chapter 20
Dr. Robert Sheets, former director of the National Hurricane Center, characterized the damage in the path of Andrew’s eye wall in southern Florida as that of a twenty-mile-wide tornado.
Maybe fatigue was playing with his perceptions, Sheppard thought, but it seemed that the winds had picked up, that rain whipped the metal trapdoor, that everything inside the cellar echoed, sang, trembled.
Ignore it. Eat.
He looked down at the food in front of him. Okay, so Dillard wasn’t a culinary wizard. The soup was barely lukewarm, the sandwich was just plain tuna—no celery, radishes, pepper, cucumbers, just a bit of mayo. But to Sheppard, it tasted like a feast. He hadn’t eaten anything since—when? Breakfast before dawn? He couldn’t remember.
The radio continued to sputter with static, voices, unofficial reports on Danielle. Now and then it went silent, the signal lost. Sheppard moved the radio to the stairs, closer to the hatch. Nothing more came from Ralph. Emison moaned and the lights flickered, reminding Sheppard that the generator wouldn’t last indefinitely. And when it went, he thought, the air would heat up quickly and a few flashlights weren’t going to ease his foreboding that the cellar could become their tomb.
Sheppard finally pushed away from the table, poured the remainder of the soup into a cup, stuck a straw into it, and went over to Emison. Goot got up to help but Dillard, naturally, stayed on his skinny ass, stuffing his face.
“Doug, wake up,” Sheppard said. “I’ve got some soup.” Sheppard touched his cheek. Not as hot now. “Can you open your eyes?”
Tiny slits appeared in his cheeks, a grotesque parody of consciousness. Goot slid his hand under Emison’s head, lifting it, and Sheppard coaxed the straw between his lips. “Suck on it, Doug.”
But Emison suddenly struggled up on his elbows and puked on himself. “My God,” Dillard muttered, hurrying over with a wet towel that he tossed at Sheppard. “He’s getting worse.”
“Keep him upright, Goot.” Sheppard wiped the vomit off of Emison’s face and shirt. Some of it got onto his hands and he envisioned bacteria crawling along his skin, seeking tiny cuts and pores into which they would dig, infecting him with whatever ailed Emison.
Granted, the slice in his leg was bad and infection had set in, but Emison seemed to be suffering from something else as well. Was the Augmentin outdated? Was Emison allergic to it? But if that were true, wouldn’t he have reacted sooner?
“Lower his head, Goot. I’m going to roll him onto his side. Leo, can you grab a clean sheet out of the supplies? And roll it up so we can elevate Doug’s head a little more.”
Dillard tossed a rolled-up sheet their way and Goot slid it under Emison’s head. Sheppard turned him onto his side and realized that Emison’s bedding and clothes were wet, that he’d soiled himself again. A putrid stink emanated from him also. Goot smelled it and made a face.
“What is that?” Goot whispered.
Dismay washed through Sheppard. He knew exactly what it was. Once you’d smelled this odor, he thought, you never forgot it. Years ago in college, he’d owned a cat whose fur had smelled like this after the animal had gone into renal failure.
“His kidneys are going.”
“Why?”
Sheppard shrugged. “I don’t know.”
He got up, went over to the sink to wash his hands, and put on the last pair of latex gloves. Even forty feet down, with the cellar door buried by debris, he heard the intensity of the storm and knew he wasn’t imagining it. As if to underscore the tightening in his chest, the lights winked off—then on again.
“We’re running low on gas in that generator,” Dillard said.
“Then you better make sure we have fresh batteries in all the lanterns and flashlights.”
“Yeah, good idea.”
To Sheppard’s surprise, Dillard proceeded to do exactly what he’d suggested. Then again, batteries didn’t moan, piss, bleed, or puke. Compared to dealing with Emison, batteries and flashlights were clean.
Sheppard stripped off Emison’s soiled clothes, spread several dry towels under him, covered him with a fresh sheet. He stuck the soiled sheets, clothing, and gloves into a pillowcase and tossed it under the stairs with another pillowcase filled with soiled linens and clothing. Goot hurried over to him, his swollen eye now almost black. It seemed to Sheppard that Goot looked worse than he had earlier.
“We’ve got enough juice in the cell phone for one call, Shep.”
“Who’re we going to call?” What organization would brave category four or five winds to come out here? “There’s a Red Cross chapter on Tango, but will they risk coming out here?”
“I don’t know. Let’s start with nine-one-one.” Goot disconnected the cell phone from his homemade battery and went halfway up the stairs. He moved the cell phone in one direction and then another, seeking a signal. “Shep, look at this.”
Sheppard, washing his hands at the sink, turned and Goot held the cell phone up so he could see the window. A text message: situation critical am going 2 annie luv u
The screen went black before Sheppard could respond. Fighting despair, terror, and frustration, he stifled the urge to snatch the cell from Goot and hurl it across the cellar. “Can you get us more power?”
“I’ll try. How the hell is Mira going to Annie?”
Sheppard shook his head. “I don’t know.”
The radio crackled and the voice of ham radio Ralph came through. “Hello, this is Ralph. Anyone there? You copy?”
Sheppard shot toward the stairs before Dillard could grab the mike. “This is Shep, Ralph. What’ve you got? “
“I passed on your message about the escaped cons to the Tango PD, but I don’t know what kind of response there’ll be. They’ve been flooded with calls and the winds are holding steady at a high four, or at least that’s the estimate. I doubt if anyone is venturing anywhere. How’re you holding up?”
“The garage collapsed and there’s debris over the cellar door now. The sheriff has taken a turn for the worst. Is there any—”
Dillard snatched the mike out of Sheppard’s hand and shoved him roughly to the side. “This is Leo Dillard, assistant director of the Southeast division of the FBI, and you’d better listen very closely, Ralph. It’s essential that the escaped cons now at Doubloon Drive be brought in as soon as—”
Sheppard grabbed the back of Dillard’s shirt and pushed him away. Dillard tumbled into a stack of boxes at the foot of the stairs. Then Goot was on him, straddling him like a cowboy on a bucking bronco, and Sheppard scooped up the fallen mike. “Forgive my colleague’s bullshit, Ralph. We’re having a few problems here.”
“I hear you, Shep. Stay tuned to this frequency. Over and out.”
Sheppard dug rope and electrical tape out of one of the boxes and within minutes, Dillard was bound up, flat on his stomach, hands secured to his taped feet. When he thrashed, he resembled a human cradle.
“You’re fired, both of you are fired, and I’m filing assault charges as soon as we’re outta here,” he shouted. Veins stood out at his temples, throbbing hard and fast.
“Yada yada” Goot murmured.
“Relax, Leo. You look like you’re about to have a stroke and if that happens, there’s no one here to help. In fact, I think you’re better off not talking at all.”
“My thoughts exactly.” Goot snapped up a dish towel and gagged Dillard.
He shrieked into the gag, writhed on the floor, and his face got redder and redder. They decided to move him into the corner and as they hoisted him, the gag slipped out of his mouth. He hollered obscenities and threats like some schoolyard bully who’d realized that the jig was up.
They set him down on a sleeping bag several feet from Emison. When Sheppard attempted to wedge the gag back into Dillard’s mouth, he snapped at him with all the ferocity of a rabid dog and bit down so hard on Sheppard’s hand that he drew blood. Sheppard grabbed him around the neck, forced his head back, and squeezed at his cheeks until he was forced to open his mouth. Goot jammed the dish towel into his mouth, then wrapped electrical tape all the way around to the back of his head.
“You’d better wash that off,” Goot said, looking at Sheppard’s hand. “No telling what sort of shit is swimming in Leo’s mouth. Rabies. Ebola. AIDS.”
As Sheppard stood at the sink, rinsing and scrubbing the bite with soap, the radio sputtered and crackled again and a new voice came through. “Shep, hello, you there? Shep?”
“I know that voice,” Goot exclaimed.
Sheppard realized he knew that voice, too, and strode quickly up the stairs and to the radio. “Ace? Hey, man, is that you?”
“Shep, yeah, Ace and Luke here. In the hills. We’ve been monitoring you. Had some trouble with the radio so we couldn’t send until now. We may be able to get to you when the eye moves onshore. Don’t know when. Last we heard, the storm had stalled offshore.”
“It’s more important that someone gets to Mira’s. The cons are there. Over.”
“I’ve been calling her place, but no one answers. Her cell isn’t responding. You okay?”
“We’re maintaining,” Sheppard replied, glancing at Dillard.
“How’s the sheriff doing?”
“Not good. Is your place holding up?”
“We’ve lost trees, our storage unit collapsed, we’ve had some flooding, but basically we’re safe. National Hurricane Center isn’t transmitting. We aren’t sure what that means. Or we’re not receiving if they are. We’re going to try to get our own readings. Be back in touch shortly.”
“How far are they from Mira’s?” Goot asked.
“I don’t know. I’m not sure where they live. But if it’s possible for them to get out, they’ll do it.”
The generator coughed, wheezed, and the lights went off again, on again. Was air piped into the cellar by the generator? He didn’t know. But when it cut out, how long would they have before the air ran out? An hour? Two hours? Thirty minutes? Most Florida homes were far more porous than their northern counterparts, but he didn’t know if that applied to cellars.
In all of Sheppard’s years here, he’d seen exactly three cellars—one at a horse ranch outside of hilly Ocala and two here on hilly Tango. The Ocala cellar originally had been built as an underground bomb shelter shortly before the Cuban missile crisis. The other on Tango was a wine cellar. Neither compared to this cellar.
According to the real estate records that Dillard had shown Sheppard, Jerome Carver—aka Billy Joe Franklin—had owned the cabin for about six months. Unlikely that he’d built the cellar. It didn’t look as if it had been built recently and besides, construction of this magnitude would require contractors, tractors, engineers, activity that would draw attention, the last thing Franklin would have wanted. Sheppard guessed the cellar might be as old as the cabin.
The original cabin had gone up just prior to the Civil War, when the property had included fifteen acres tilled for cotton. It even had included slaves’ quarters. In 1890, the cabin and five acres was deeded to a liberated slave and his family and his descendants had owned the property until Franklin had bought it. For some reason, this information seemed important to Sheppard. He tried to reason through it, but fatigue had turned his brain to slush.
“Shep, you hear that?” Goot asked.
“You mean the silence from Dillard?”
Goot snickered and scooped a sliced hard-boiled egg onto a piece of bread. “No, something else.”
Sheppard listened. He heard it also, something that struck him as grossly out of place, like hearing a scream on a hot, still night. Even though this wasn’t as obvious as a scream, it nagged at him. It didn’t fit.
He wrapped a towel around his hand and hurried over to the stairs. The stairwell magnified the noise of the storm. The metal door trembled and clattered, but the broomstick that Goot had shoved through the handle held fast. So whatever they heard wasn’t the wind, trying to get in. He doubted if the wind could even get through the pile of debris that covered the hatch.
But water could get through.
He climbed to the top of the steps and the tight space immediately triggered his body’s usual responses—something clutching at the inside of his chest, his heartbeat accelerating, a knot in the pit of his stomach. He ran his fingers around the edges of the door, but didn’t feel any moisture.
“We got a leak?” Goot called.
“Not here.”
Sheppard hastened down the steps—and realized where the noise was coming from. He took his flashlight out of his back pocket and ducked under the stairs, into a space thick with shadows. His bare feet met water.
He tipped the flashlight down. The beam struck a drain in the floor where water bubbled up and spilled over. Not a lot of water, not a river, not even a stream. But the water itself triggered so many internal alarms for Sheppard that he just stood there staring at it, as if the act of staring could make it reverse directions and vanish down the drain.
The drain puzzled him. Why was it here in the first place? In South America, drains were fairly common in the kitchens, courtyards, and bathrooms of older homes, where hoses—not brooms—were taken to the floors at the end of the day to wash away crumbs, dust, whatever. Maybe it originally was intended as a place to piss.
He finally dropped into a crouch and leaned forward, sniffing at the water. It didn’t smell like sewage. It smelled like earth, redolent with greenery—weeds, grass, flowers, the stuff that came uprooted and washed away in deluges. He ran his fingers through it. Gritty. It looked discolored.
How many pipes lay under this cellar? Or close to it? Were they backed up or busted? As he squatted there thinking the unthinkable, the grate over the drain suddenly flew loose and water erupted from it, a miniature geyser. The metal grate skittered this way and through the water; then chunks of mud and weeds spewed up and squeezed through the opening like pus from a boil.
Sheppard slapped his hands over the open drain. Water squished up between his fingers, ran over the backs of his hands. His horror lent itself to instantaneous worst case scenarios, of water rising steadily, rapidly, and turning the cellar into a death trap. Death by drowning.
His thoughts flew into hyperdrive, scrambling for solutions that would buy them time. But the bottom line was simple. They were trapped in a cellar forty feet underground, their only exit blocked with debris, had a dead cell phone, a ham radio that provided voice contact and information but little else. The hurricane was stalled offshore, their power source was running dry, Emison desperately needed medical attention, and Dillard had turned into the maniac who had lurked for years beneath his coiffed veneer. Could it get any worse?
It might take hours for the water to buildup enough to become life-threatening, but it could take days for anyone to dig them out of here.
In short, they were fucked.
Chapter 21
… you never forget something like Andrew. We’re all different because of it.
Sun-Sentinel.com
With the utility room door shut, the terrible howls of the storm seemed muted and distant, Franklin thought, almost like manufactured sounds in a movie. They had cleared space for themselves on the floor by moving boxes of books into the living room. They had brought in the cooler, quilts, pillows, a first-aid kit. They had replenished the water in the utility room. They were ready.
“We need a toilet,” the Amazon said.
“We just use the bathroom,” Crystal said.
“The idea of a safe room, babe, is that you don’t go into it until you absolutely have to and that once you go in, you don’t come out.” To the Amazon, he said: “A garbage can and some garbage bags would do it.”
“I’ll see what I can fix up.” She weaved out of the room. Even though her arm was now in a sling that Crystal had made for her, she kept it pressed tightly to her side, immobilized. He could tell she was still in pain.
“Billy, there isn’t enough room in here for Nadine and Mira. There’s hardly enough room in here for the three of us. Let’s just keep them where they are.”
“They’re our tickets off the island. Go get the old lady. I’ll get Mira.”
“We’re all going to crowd in there now?”
“Uh, yeah, that’s the idea.” What the hell was wrong with her, anyway? “Go, Crystal.”
She frowned, the crease jutting down between her eyes, and regarded him as though she were seeing something that deeply disturbed her. He had the distinct impression that she suspected his true motive for sending her off to get the old woman while he fetched Mira. But then she rocked forward, gave him a quick kiss, and hurried out.
Franklin rubbed his hand across his mouth, wiping away the taste of the kiss. It repulsed him. Now that he’d encountered the purest essence of water, it was obvious to him that Crystal was no longer water. Jail had turned her into something else, into air, yes, that was it. She was air, infinitely changeable, as mutable as a chameleon. One instant she agreed with whatever he said the next instant she agreed with whatever the Amazon said. He couldn’t love air.
Franklin fled down the hall, through the chaotic hammering of rain against the skylight in the living room. His eagerness to see Mira, touch her, talk to her about his revelation nearly overwhelmed him. It now seemed so apparent that a series of signs had led him here, to her, and that both Crystal and the Amazon were just catalysts in that journey. He would convince Mira of the rightness of their union and she, the paragon of water, would flow into him and understand his sincerity. They would merge. Creeks flowed into streams and streams flowed into rivers and rivers ran onward toward seas, oceans, each merging more powerful, more perfect, until water covered most of the earth’s surface. That was how it would be with them. Together, they would be stronger than they could ever be separately. She would see it as clearly as he did.
He reached the bedroom—and the door was locked. The lock must have engaged when Crystal shut the door, he thought. The knob had a flimsy grooved button in it; he turned it with his fingernail, pushed it open. The door snapped back and nearly struck him in the face.
Chapter 20
Dr. Robert Sheets, former director of the National Hurricane Center, characterized the damage in the path of Andrew’s eye wall in southern Florida as that of a twenty-mile-wide tornado.
Maybe fatigue was playing with his perceptions, Sheppard thought, but it seemed that the winds had picked up, that rain whipped the metal trapdoor, that everything inside the cellar echoed, sang, trembled.
Ignore it. Eat.
He looked down at the food in front of him. Okay, so Dillard wasn’t a culinary wizard. The soup was barely lukewarm, the sandwich was just plain tuna—no celery, radishes, pepper, cucumbers, just a bit of mayo. But to Sheppard, it tasted like a feast. He hadn’t eaten anything since—when? Breakfast before dawn? He couldn’t remember.
The radio continued to sputter with static, voices, unofficial reports on Danielle. Now and then it went silent, the signal lost. Sheppard moved the radio to the stairs, closer to the hatch. Nothing more came from Ralph. Emison moaned and the lights flickered, reminding Sheppard that the generator wouldn’t last indefinitely. And when it went, he thought, the air would heat up quickly and a few flashlights weren’t going to ease his foreboding that the cellar could become their tomb.
Sheppard finally pushed away from the table, poured the remainder of the soup into a cup, stuck a straw into it, and went over to Emison. Goot got up to help but Dillard, naturally, stayed on his skinny ass, stuffing his face.
“Doug, wake up,” Sheppard said. “I’ve got some soup.” Sheppard touched his cheek. Not as hot now. “Can you open your eyes?”
Tiny slits appeared in his cheeks, a grotesque parody of consciousness. Goot slid his hand under Emison’s head, lifting it, and Sheppard coaxed the straw between his lips. “Suck on it, Doug.”
But Emison suddenly struggled up on his elbows and puked on himself. “My God,” Dillard muttered, hurrying over with a wet towel that he tossed at Sheppard. “He’s getting worse.”
“Keep him upright, Goot.” Sheppard wiped the vomit off of Emison’s face and shirt. Some of it got onto his hands and he envisioned bacteria crawling along his skin, seeking tiny cuts and pores into which they would dig, infecting him with whatever ailed Emison.
Granted, the slice in his leg was bad and infection had set in, but Emison seemed to be suffering from something else as well. Was the Augmentin outdated? Was Emison allergic to it? But if that were true, wouldn’t he have reacted sooner?
“Lower his head, Goot. I’m going to roll him onto his side. Leo, can you grab a clean sheet out of the supplies? And roll it up so we can elevate Doug’s head a little more.”
Dillard tossed a rolled-up sheet their way and Goot slid it under Emison’s head. Sheppard turned him onto his side and realized that Emison’s bedding and clothes were wet, that he’d soiled himself again. A putrid stink emanated from him also. Goot smelled it and made a face.
“What is that?” Goot whispered.
Dismay washed through Sheppard. He knew exactly what it was. Once you’d smelled this odor, he thought, you never forgot it. Years ago in college, he’d owned a cat whose fur had smelled like this after the animal had gone into renal failure.
“His kidneys are going.”
“Why?”
Sheppard shrugged. “I don’t know.”
He got up, went over to the sink to wash his hands, and put on the last pair of latex gloves. Even forty feet down, with the cellar door buried by debris, he heard the intensity of the storm and knew he wasn’t imagining it. As if to underscore the tightening in his chest, the lights winked off—then on again.
“We’re running low on gas in that generator,” Dillard said.
“Then you better make sure we have fresh batteries in all the lanterns and flashlights.”
“Yeah, good idea.”
To Sheppard’s surprise, Dillard proceeded to do exactly what he’d suggested. Then again, batteries didn’t moan, piss, bleed, or puke. Compared to dealing with Emison, batteries and flashlights were clean.
Sheppard stripped off Emison’s soiled clothes, spread several dry towels under him, covered him with a fresh sheet. He stuck the soiled sheets, clothing, and gloves into a pillowcase and tossed it under the stairs with another pillowcase filled with soiled linens and clothing. Goot hurried over to him, his swollen eye now almost black. It seemed to Sheppard that Goot looked worse than he had earlier.
“We’ve got enough juice in the cell phone for one call, Shep.”
“Who’re we going to call?” What organization would brave category four or five winds to come out here? “There’s a Red Cross chapter on Tango, but will they risk coming out here?”
“I don’t know. Let’s start with nine-one-one.” Goot disconnected the cell phone from his homemade battery and went halfway up the stairs. He moved the cell phone in one direction and then another, seeking a signal. “Shep, look at this.”
Sheppard, washing his hands at the sink, turned and Goot held the cell phone up so he could see the window. A text message: situation critical am going 2 annie luv u
The screen went black before Sheppard could respond. Fighting despair, terror, and frustration, he stifled the urge to snatch the cell from Goot and hurl it across the cellar. “Can you get us more power?”
“I’ll try. How the hell is Mira going to Annie?”
Sheppard shook his head. “I don’t know.”
The radio crackled and the voice of ham radio Ralph came through. “Hello, this is Ralph. Anyone there? You copy?”
Sheppard shot toward the stairs before Dillard could grab the mike. “This is Shep, Ralph. What’ve you got? “
“I passed on your message about the escaped cons to the Tango PD, but I don’t know what kind of response there’ll be. They’ve been flooded with calls and the winds are holding steady at a high four, or at least that’s the estimate. I doubt if anyone is venturing anywhere. How’re you holding up?”
“The garage collapsed and there’s debris over the cellar door now. The sheriff has taken a turn for the worst. Is there any—”
Dillard snatched the mike out of Sheppard’s hand and shoved him roughly to the side. “This is Leo Dillard, assistant director of the Southeast division of the FBI, and you’d better listen very closely, Ralph. It’s essential that the escaped cons now at Doubloon Drive be brought in as soon as—”
Sheppard grabbed the back of Dillard’s shirt and pushed him away. Dillard tumbled into a stack of boxes at the foot of the stairs. Then Goot was on him, straddling him like a cowboy on a bucking bronco, and Sheppard scooped up the fallen mike. “Forgive my colleague’s bullshit, Ralph. We’re having a few problems here.”
“I hear you, Shep. Stay tuned to this frequency. Over and out.”
Sheppard dug rope and electrical tape out of one of the boxes and within minutes, Dillard was bound up, flat on his stomach, hands secured to his taped feet. When he thrashed, he resembled a human cradle.
“You’re fired, both of you are fired, and I’m filing assault charges as soon as we’re outta here,” he shouted. Veins stood out at his temples, throbbing hard and fast.
“Yada yada” Goot murmured.
“Relax, Leo. You look like you’re about to have a stroke and if that happens, there’s no one here to help. In fact, I think you’re better off not talking at all.”
“My thoughts exactly.” Goot snapped up a dish towel and gagged Dillard.
He shrieked into the gag, writhed on the floor, and his face got redder and redder. They decided to move him into the corner and as they hoisted him, the gag slipped out of his mouth. He hollered obscenities and threats like some schoolyard bully who’d realized that the jig was up.
They set him down on a sleeping bag several feet from Emison. When Sheppard attempted to wedge the gag back into Dillard’s mouth, he snapped at him with all the ferocity of a rabid dog and bit down so hard on Sheppard’s hand that he drew blood. Sheppard grabbed him around the neck, forced his head back, and squeezed at his cheeks until he was forced to open his mouth. Goot jammed the dish towel into his mouth, then wrapped electrical tape all the way around to the back of his head.
“You’d better wash that off,” Goot said, looking at Sheppard’s hand. “No telling what sort of shit is swimming in Leo’s mouth. Rabies. Ebola. AIDS.”
As Sheppard stood at the sink, rinsing and scrubbing the bite with soap, the radio sputtered and crackled again and a new voice came through. “Shep, hello, you there? Shep?”
“I know that voice,” Goot exclaimed.
Sheppard realized he knew that voice, too, and strode quickly up the stairs and to the radio. “Ace? Hey, man, is that you?”
“Shep, yeah, Ace and Luke here. In the hills. We’ve been monitoring you. Had some trouble with the radio so we couldn’t send until now. We may be able to get to you when the eye moves onshore. Don’t know when. Last we heard, the storm had stalled offshore.”
“It’s more important that someone gets to Mira’s. The cons are there. Over.”
“I’ve been calling her place, but no one answers. Her cell isn’t responding. You okay?”
“We’re maintaining,” Sheppard replied, glancing at Dillard.
“How’s the sheriff doing?”
“Not good. Is your place holding up?”
“We’ve lost trees, our storage unit collapsed, we’ve had some flooding, but basically we’re safe. National Hurricane Center isn’t transmitting. We aren’t sure what that means. Or we’re not receiving if they are. We’re going to try to get our own readings. Be back in touch shortly.”
“How far are they from Mira’s?” Goot asked.
“I don’t know. I’m not sure where they live. But if it’s possible for them to get out, they’ll do it.”
The generator coughed, wheezed, and the lights went off again, on again. Was air piped into the cellar by the generator? He didn’t know. But when it cut out, how long would they have before the air ran out? An hour? Two hours? Thirty minutes? Most Florida homes were far more porous than their northern counterparts, but he didn’t know if that applied to cellars.
In all of Sheppard’s years here, he’d seen exactly three cellars—one at a horse ranch outside of hilly Ocala and two here on hilly Tango. The Ocala cellar originally had been built as an underground bomb shelter shortly before the Cuban missile crisis. The other on Tango was a wine cellar. Neither compared to this cellar.
According to the real estate records that Dillard had shown Sheppard, Jerome Carver—aka Billy Joe Franklin—had owned the cabin for about six months. Unlikely that he’d built the cellar. It didn’t look as if it had been built recently and besides, construction of this magnitude would require contractors, tractors, engineers, activity that would draw attention, the last thing Franklin would have wanted. Sheppard guessed the cellar might be as old as the cabin.
The original cabin had gone up just prior to the Civil War, when the property had included fifteen acres tilled for cotton. It even had included slaves’ quarters. In 1890, the cabin and five acres was deeded to a liberated slave and his family and his descendants had owned the property until Franklin had bought it. For some reason, this information seemed important to Sheppard. He tried to reason through it, but fatigue had turned his brain to slush.
“Shep, you hear that?” Goot asked.
“You mean the silence from Dillard?”
Goot snickered and scooped a sliced hard-boiled egg onto a piece of bread. “No, something else.”
Sheppard listened. He heard it also, something that struck him as grossly out of place, like hearing a scream on a hot, still night. Even though this wasn’t as obvious as a scream, it nagged at him. It didn’t fit.
He wrapped a towel around his hand and hurried over to the stairs. The stairwell magnified the noise of the storm. The metal door trembled and clattered, but the broomstick that Goot had shoved through the handle held fast. So whatever they heard wasn’t the wind, trying to get in. He doubted if the wind could even get through the pile of debris that covered the hatch.
But water could get through.
He climbed to the top of the steps and the tight space immediately triggered his body’s usual responses—something clutching at the inside of his chest, his heartbeat accelerating, a knot in the pit of his stomach. He ran his fingers around the edges of the door, but didn’t feel any moisture.
“We got a leak?” Goot called.
“Not here.”
Sheppard hastened down the steps—and realized where the noise was coming from. He took his flashlight out of his back pocket and ducked under the stairs, into a space thick with shadows. His bare feet met water.
He tipped the flashlight down. The beam struck a drain in the floor where water bubbled up and spilled over. Not a lot of water, not a river, not even a stream. But the water itself triggered so many internal alarms for Sheppard that he just stood there staring at it, as if the act of staring could make it reverse directions and vanish down the drain.
The drain puzzled him. Why was it here in the first place? In South America, drains were fairly common in the kitchens, courtyards, and bathrooms of older homes, where hoses—not brooms—were taken to the floors at the end of the day to wash away crumbs, dust, whatever. Maybe it originally was intended as a place to piss.
He finally dropped into a crouch and leaned forward, sniffing at the water. It didn’t smell like sewage. It smelled like earth, redolent with greenery—weeds, grass, flowers, the stuff that came uprooted and washed away in deluges. He ran his fingers through it. Gritty. It looked discolored.
How many pipes lay under this cellar? Or close to it? Were they backed up or busted? As he squatted there thinking the unthinkable, the grate over the drain suddenly flew loose and water erupted from it, a miniature geyser. The metal grate skittered this way and through the water; then chunks of mud and weeds spewed up and squeezed through the opening like pus from a boil.
Sheppard slapped his hands over the open drain. Water squished up between his fingers, ran over the backs of his hands. His horror lent itself to instantaneous worst case scenarios, of water rising steadily, rapidly, and turning the cellar into a death trap. Death by drowning.
His thoughts flew into hyperdrive, scrambling for solutions that would buy them time. But the bottom line was simple. They were trapped in a cellar forty feet underground, their only exit blocked with debris, had a dead cell phone, a ham radio that provided voice contact and information but little else. The hurricane was stalled offshore, their power source was running dry, Emison desperately needed medical attention, and Dillard had turned into the maniac who had lurked for years beneath his coiffed veneer. Could it get any worse?
It might take hours for the water to buildup enough to become life-threatening, but it could take days for anyone to dig them out of here.
In short, they were fucked.
Chapter 21
… you never forget something like Andrew. We’re all different because of it.
Sun-Sentinel.com
With the utility room door shut, the terrible howls of the storm seemed muted and distant, Franklin thought, almost like manufactured sounds in a movie. They had cleared space for themselves on the floor by moving boxes of books into the living room. They had brought in the cooler, quilts, pillows, a first-aid kit. They had replenished the water in the utility room. They were ready.
“We need a toilet,” the Amazon said.
“We just use the bathroom,” Crystal said.
“The idea of a safe room, babe, is that you don’t go into it until you absolutely have to and that once you go in, you don’t come out.” To the Amazon, he said: “A garbage can and some garbage bags would do it.”
“I’ll see what I can fix up.” She weaved out of the room. Even though her arm was now in a sling that Crystal had made for her, she kept it pressed tightly to her side, immobilized. He could tell she was still in pain.
“Billy, there isn’t enough room in here for Nadine and Mira. There’s hardly enough room in here for the three of us. Let’s just keep them where they are.”
“They’re our tickets off the island. Go get the old lady. I’ll get Mira.”
“We’re all going to crowd in there now?”
“Uh, yeah, that’s the idea.” What the hell was wrong with her, anyway? “Go, Crystal.”
She frowned, the crease jutting down between her eyes, and regarded him as though she were seeing something that deeply disturbed her. He had the distinct impression that she suspected his true motive for sending her off to get the old woman while he fetched Mira. But then she rocked forward, gave him a quick kiss, and hurried out.
Franklin rubbed his hand across his mouth, wiping away the taste of the kiss. It repulsed him. Now that he’d encountered the purest essence of water, it was obvious to him that Crystal was no longer water. Jail had turned her into something else, into air, yes, that was it. She was air, infinitely changeable, as mutable as a chameleon. One instant she agreed with whatever he said the next instant she agreed with whatever the Amazon said. He couldn’t love air.
Franklin fled down the hall, through the chaotic hammering of rain against the skylight in the living room. His eagerness to see Mira, touch her, talk to her about his revelation nearly overwhelmed him. It now seemed so apparent that a series of signs had led him here, to her, and that both Crystal and the Amazon were just catalysts in that journey. He would convince Mira of the rightness of their union and she, the paragon of water, would flow into him and understand his sincerity. They would merge. Creeks flowed into streams and streams flowed into rivers and rivers ran onward toward seas, oceans, each merging more powerful, more perfect, until water covered most of the earth’s surface. That was how it would be with them. Together, they would be stronger than they could ever be separately. She would see it as clearly as he did.
He reached the bedroom—and the door was locked. The lock must have engaged when Crystal shut the door, he thought. The knob had a flimsy grooved button in it; he turned it with his fingernail, pushed it open. The door snapped back and nearly struck him in the face.
