Storm Surge (30 page)

The house
seemed to lift a few feet then crashed back down. Wood and metal shrieked in
agony. A giant crack appeared in the wall behind Blake, exposing the studs and
insulation. Then that shredded and blew away, and Mercer was looking directly
at the storm outside. The wind was inside now, but incredibly it seemed to be
blowing
out
of the room, pulling them towards the hole. Another great
rending
noise,
and the wall split open further. Blake
turned away from Mercer’s gun for the first time, screaming as he saw a wall of
blackness just outside blot out the fury of the storm.

“CAN YOU HEAR
HIM, BLAKE!?” Mercer screamed. Blake was still screaming as well, a sound of
stark terror and despair. He stumbled toward the hole, lost his footing,
then
he was flying, tumbling head over heels, and was gone,
out of the hole. Mercer grabbed onto the edge of the heavy desk, but it too was
being drawn towards the hole. Papers and books filled the air. Something heavy
stuck Mercer in the back of the head and he went to his knees, still clutching
the edge of the sliding desk. He saw Montrose’s body like a rag doll flying
past him and into the blackness beyond.

“Laugh, you
motherfucker,” he muttered, and the world exploded.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-FIVE

They ran
heedlessly, stumbling, sometimes falling into the knee deep water, then
scrambling to their feet and running blindly away from the horror behind them.
The sound of the tornado filled the world, driving all thought or reason out of
their minds. The roaring was
apocalyptic,
as if sound
itself would never exist after this. The wind clawed at them, trying to drag
them back, as if the monster cloud had extended invisible fingers to gather
them into its maw along with everything around them. Water and mud flew into
their faces, propelled by the wind. Glory coughed, choked,
then
went down. The water here was only ankle deep, but so thick with silt it was
almost solid. Sharon grabbed at Glory, trying to haul her up. Glory rolled over
onto her back, looked behind Sharon, and screamed. Instinctively, Sharon looked
back, knowing as she did it that it was a mistake.

The black
tower of the tornado loomed over them, rising into the sky, darker than night,
but speckled here and there with lighter bits of debris. Sharon looked up at
it,
saw the top disappearing into the lowering gray of the
cloud cover. She looked back down to the Buchan house and moaned in fear.

The house was
disintegrating. The roof came off first, bursting into a million pieces before
being drawn up into the blackness. Bits and pieces of the walls were coming
loose like scraps of paper.

“Kyle!” Glory
screamed. The sound drew Sharon’s attention back to earth, to her daughter. She
grabbed Glory’s hand and pulled the girl to her feet. “Kyle,” Glory sobbed.

“He’s gone,
baby.” Sharon was crying, too. Nothing could survive that. “We’ve got to go,”
she said. They turned and ran, dodging fallen branches and pieces of houses.

***

Bohler
stood up, rocking unsteadily on his
feet as he looked down at his enemy. Phillips lay on his back, only half
conscious, moaning in pain.
Bohler
raised the gun he
had taken and pointed it at the center of Phillips’ forehead.

“No,” he
muttered. He reached down and grabbed Phillips by the shoulder. Before, his
strength had come from desperation; now it was pure rage. He yanked Phillips to
his feet. The man screamed again as he tried to take weight on his destroyed
knee. He slumped in
Bohler’s
grasp.
Bohler
felt his anger redouble. He slammed Phillips against
the railing of the catwalk, pushing him up and nearly over. “So you’re going to
throw me over the fucking railing, you fucking Limey bastard!?” he screamed
over the wind.

Philips shook
his head to clear it. He looked down at the ground below. Then he looked at
Bohler
and smiled. The son of a bitch,
Bohler
seethed, was actually grinning at him.

Phillips’
voice, when he spoke, was a slurred travesty of his former calm drawl. But his
words stopped
Bohler
cold.

“You’re not
going to throw me over,” he said.
“Law man.”

He pronounced
the words with amusement, as if it were something ridiculous. But
Bohler
thought back to the helicopter, when the crew hadn’t
known what call sign to give him on the intercom. He remembered Alvarez’ grin
when he’d come back with “Lawman, swimmer.” There hadn’t been any mockery then,
just an acknowledgment and recognition. That,
Bohler
realized, is what he was
. The law went out to sea when that storm hit,
Mercer
had said. But
Bohler
wouldn’t believe it. He wouldn’t
live like that. He had lived his life as an officer of the law and that, for
better or worse, what he was.

He yanked
Phillips back from the brink. And, he figured, himself as well. “You have the
right to remain silent…” he began.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-SIX

By the time
they reached the door of the lighthouse, they were staggering with fatigue,
emotionally as well as physically drained. Sharon stopped in front of the
wooden door so quickly that Glory almost ran into her from behind.

“What?” she
said. “What is it?”

“Listen,”
Sharon replied. She put her ear to the door. Glory did the same.

Behind the
door, they could hear a rustling sound, every now and then mixed with a
scratching noise against of the wood. Sharon drew the pistol from her
waistband, a grim look on her face. She yanked the door open.

The floor of
the lower level was alive with rats, scurrying to and fro in panic, squealing
horribly. One or two sat up and sniffed at the intruders. Others tried to flee
the sudden burst of wind and rain coming through the open door, but ran into
the sheer mass of their fellows, backing up against the bottom of the stairs
until the formed a solid, panicked mass. The way to the stairs was blocked by
what looked like a furry brown carpet. Glory screamed in revulsion.

“Oh, God
damn
it,” Sharon groaned. It was the last straw. She leveled the gun and fired.
There was an explosion of blood and viscera in the center of the mass of rats
and the terrified squealing doubled in volume and urgency. Sharon fired again.
“Get out of my
way
!” she shouted.

Someone
shouted something unintelligible from the top of the spiral stairs and Sharon
heard a clatter of feet on the wooden risers. There was a sudden smell of
burning in the air and a red, demonic glow filled the center of the narrow
cylinder. Len
Bohler
came into view, holding a
sputtering, bright red flare in one hand. The squeals rose to screams as the
rats panicked. “Step back!” he yelled to Sharon and Glory. “Give them somewhere
to run!” Sharon stepped away to the side of the door, drawing Glory with her,
just as the rats charged. They flowed out into the rain like a dirty brown
river, spreading out into a wedge before they vanished in the tangled masses of
downed vegetation that now surrounded the lighthouse on its landward side.
When the last of the vermin had fled,
Bohler
stepped out, the flare hissing and steaming in the rain.
“Come on,” he
urged them. “They’re gone now, but they’ll be back when they get over being
scared.”

Once inside,
Sharon sat down on the bottom step, winded. Glory sat down on the floor in
front of her, her head down with exhaustion.

“Where’s
Mercer?’
Bohler
asked.

“He was…” she
struggled to catch her breath, “He was in the house.
When the
tornado hit.
You saw?”

Bohler
nodded.

“I don’t get
it,” Glory whispered. “Why didn’t he come with us? He could have just shot that
guy. He could have…”

“He knew
Deputy
Bohler
here would try to take him in when this
is over.” Sharon was looking at him steadily. “Right, Deputy?”

Bohler
nodded.

“I don’t think
he saw that as an option,” Sharon went on. “And since I’d made him promise not
to kill you…” she trailed off. There were tears in her eyes.

“I guess I
should thank you for that,”
Bohler
said quietly.

“Yeah,” Sharon
said. “You should.” She stood up and started climbing the stairs. Glory stood
up and gave him an inscrutable look before she turned and trudged after her.
After a moment,
Bohler
followed.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-SEVEN

The storm
finally ended shortly after three in the afternoon.
Bohler
,
Glory, and Sharon stepped out onto the catwalk of the lantern room. Phillips
was still inside, lashed securely to a metal support. He had not spoken since
Sharon and Glory returned, expect for a quiet, pained “Thank you,” when
Bohler
had splinted his leg, immobilizing the ruined knee
with scraps of wood scrounged by Glory from just outside the lighthouse door.

There were
still bands of cloud scudding across the sky, and to landward they could see
the thunderheads and lightning flashes where the storm was expending its slowly
diminishing fury. Robbed of the sustenance of heat and open water, the great
storm began to die as soon as her eye came onto dry land. Her death throes
would certainly cause more major damage, and it was likely more would die, but
the monster was doomed.

They looked
out onto a scene of complete devastation. The water was everywhere, glittering
in deceptive calm in the bright sunlight. Not a single house stood intact from
what they could see. The clubhouse was no more than a pile of rubble. What
looked like hundreds of trees were down, many of them stripped of leaves and
branches.
They were scattered haphazardly across the
landscape like pick-up sticks.

“One thing’s
for sure,” Sharon said. “I’m going to need to find a new job.”

“Well,” Glory
said, “I never wanted to go to that school anyway.”

“Look,”
Bohler
was pointing back toward the mainland. A sleek
deep-hulled blue speedboat was bouncing across the chop that remained in the
sound, throwing up a spray of water behind it in its haste. It slowed as it
approached the island, moving along the shoreline. They could make out a single
figure at the controls.

“I think Mr.
Phillips’ ride is here,”
Bohler
said. The speedboat
suddenly accelerated and sped away. They watched it silently until the sound of
its engines faded over the water.

It wasn’t
until hours later, when the waters had
begin
to
recede, that they spotted another, larger boat headed toward the island. This
one was painted white, with a single orange stripe on the side. “That one’s our
ride,”
Bohler
said. “Come on. They’ll probably put
small boats in at the marina.”

 It was a
slow walk to the marina, with Phillips, still glum and silent, hobbling with
support from
Bohler
. On the ground, in the sunlight,
the total ruination of the island was even more apparent. They picked their way
through the tumbled and shattered landscape like visitors to an alien planet.

Halfway there,
they heard the sound of rotor blades. A few moments later, a blue and white
helicopter, obviously a civilian craft, buzzed overhead. By the time they
reached the marina, the chopper had landed in the open space nearby.

As
Bohler
had predicted, a small boat had tied up at the
emptied docks. The place was a wreck. The office building where they had tried
to use the radio was missing its roof, the longest of the docks was torn off
halfway up its length, the splintered boards jutting in multiple directions
like bone fragments from a compound fracture. A skiff that had been lashed to
the dock sat atop the paint shed.

A knot of
uniformed men was standing near the office. A man in an expensively cut suit
was conducting a loud argument with someone who appeared to be the leader of
the Coast Guardsmen. One of them noticed the group of people approaching and
pointed. In a moment, the four survivors were surrounded by young, earnest men
who looked impossibly well-scrubbed and shiny to Sharon. She became acutely
conscious of how she must look, covered with caked-on mud, her hair in tangles.
More Coast Guardsmen trotted up with a stretcher, upon which Phillips was
promptly and efficiently loaded.

“This man’s my
prisoner,”
Bohler
insisted. “He’s under arrest.”

“Yes sir,” the
man who appeared to be in charge of the medical team sad, “But we need to…”
Sharon tuned that argument out in favor of the one going on between the man in
the suit and the commander, because she’d caught a familiar name at the edge of
her hearing. She walked over, Glory following a few steps behind.

“There are
valuable papers in that house,” the man in the suit was insisting. “Which I
need to try and…”