Landfall (17 page)

“Sir, the bridge isn’t passable. You’ll need to turn around.”

The guy was young, maybe in his early twenties, with white blond hair and dimples his mother probably doted on.

“Not passable, or not advisable?” Wyatt asked, as he lifted his butt enough to fish out his ID.

“Sir, the bridge isn’t safe at this time and we’re not allowing anyone to pass.”

“Well, I can understand that, but I’m the sheriff of this county and I’m heading into Apalach,” Wyatt said as he flipped open his badge case.

The soldier looked at Wyatt’s ID and looked back up at him. “I see, sir. However, the bridge isn’t safe to travel.”

“Is it washed out?”

“Not necessarily, no, but it’s got some surge damage,” the soldier answered. “We’ve got trucks on the way with sandbags to shore up the retaining walls, but it’s basically underwater at the Apalachicola end, there where it meets that little island.”

“The fill,” Wyatt said.

“The what, sir?”

“The fill. We call that little piece of land there ‘the fill’ because they used dirt from the landfill to make it.”

“I see. Yeah, well, it’s currently underwater.”

“How much water?”

The young soldier thought about that for a moment. “I can’t say exactly, sir, but enough that your car’s unlikely to make it off the bridge. I don’t advise you attempt it.”

“Well, while I appreciate your advice, I’m going to have to ignore it,” Wyatt said politely. “Now, are you authorized to shoot me or anything if I just keep going?”

“Well, no sir, just to detain.”

“Are you going to attempt to detain the Sheriff of Franklin County for responding to a state of emergency?”

“Uh…” The soldier looked around, probably hoping to find someone more enthused about answering that question.

“I need you to move that barrier for me, okay?”

“Sir, I really need to speak with someone—”

“You’re speaking with me, son, and I’d prefer that you move that barrier for me
before
I proceed. But I am proceeding.”

“Uh…yes, sir.”

Wyatt felt a little sorry for the kid as he watched him run over and pull one of the barriers aside. He was probably just trying to earn some college tuition, and he was unlikely to be having a great deal of fun out here in the storm. Nevertheless, Wyatt needed to get to town.

He put the car back in drive and pulled through the barriers, then slowly eased onto the bridge. Normally, there was quite a nice view of the bay from the roughly five-mile crossing, but today visibility was minimal. Although the rain had calmed somewhat, it was still there, and all Wyatt could see was choppy water on either side.

A strong gust made the rental car shimmy, and Wyatt slowed from twenty miles an hour down to fifteen. He sighed. He could be relaxing in a nice dry hotel bed, watching ESPN and ordering room service cheeseburgers.

Instead, he was driving through a hurricane across a screwed up bridge, and doing it in a freaking Ford Focus, no less.

Sky had eventually had to come in out of the storm. The wind and rain were too much, and the occasional debris was a hazard. Before she did go in, she grabbed the cordless drill from the toolbox and removed the plywood from one of the living room windows. Mom would be pissed if the window broke, but Sky could deal with pissed. What she couldn’t deal with was watching for her mother from the deck.

After she dragged Coco out onto the deck and finally convinced her to pee there, Sky and Kyle both changed into dry clothes and took up a post on the window seat, where they had a fairly good vantage point to watch for their mother’s safe return.

Stoopid was on the kitchen floor, talking to himself while he tucked into a plate of what Kyle called “cantaloupe intestines.” If Stoopid’s enthusiasm was any indication, these were apparently God’s greatest invention since the hen.

The power was still out, so the stove clock was no help, but Sky figured they’d been sitting there for almost an hour.

“What if the truck went into the river?’ Kyle asked after several minutes of silence.

“It didn’t.”

“How do you know?”

“Because there’s too much crap between here and there,” Sky said quietly. “Something stopped it eventually.”

“What if it didn’t?”

“It did,” Sky said, unable to stop the annoyance from creeping into her voice.

She glanced over at Kyle and felt badly; he was a kid and he was scared, and he’d been given plenty of reasons to
be
scared.

“Look, dude,” she said more kindly. “In a couple of days, everything will go back to sucking in a more general way. You’ll be over at Thing 2’s house killing your brain cells with Minecraft and I’ll be nodding politely at Mom while she suggests that I might try listening to Clint Black or some kind of crap, and everything’ll be cool. Okay?”

Kyle looked at her and sighed, then gave her a nod.

“Okay,” Sky answered herself.

Maggie’s legs were already trembling with exhaustion, and she hadn’t made as much progress as she thought she should have, given the effort she’d expended. She was also incredibly thirsty, but she’d thrown up the few mouthfuls of rain she’d tried to take in, and she figured that this, along with some dizziness and confusion, pretty much confirmed her suspicion that she had a decent concussion. Either that, or she no longer cared for rain.

The water was definitely moving more slowly, which was helpful, but it was still waist deep, which was less so. Maggie was grateful, though, that the wind had died down a bit and the rain wasn’t quite so torrential. Even so, she was fairly well convinced that she would never be dry or warm again.

She slogged over to a spindly pine and grabbed on, then leaned against it and took a few slow breaths. She thought then that if a bed had floated by, she’d have climbed on and pulled the wet covers over her head. The last time she was this tired, she’d been in the maternity ward at the hospital, listening to Kyle’s first wails.

She waited a few minutes, then forced herself to push away from the tree and continue making her way toward the house. She’d gone about fifty feet when she stopped to grab onto another small tree, and glanced over at a pile of junk that had collected about fifty yards to her left.

Something too bright caught her eye, and she squinted at it through the rain, then wiped her eyes and looked again. White. It was Boudreaux’s white shirt, though what she could see of the lower portion of it was red. His back, arm and head were on the junk pile and out of the water, but the rest of him was submerged. He wasn’t moving, but she hadn’t expected him to be moving the next time she saw him.

She changed direction, and started working her way diagonally toward him.

A
s Maggie neared the pile of debris, Boudreaux’s eyes fluttered open, much to her amazement. He blinked up at the sky for a moment, then looked over at her. He seemed a little surprised to see her, too.

She waded over to the pile as he watched her come toward him, his normally deeply-tanned face alarmingly pale.

“Mr. Boudreaux,” she said when she’d gotten there, like she’d just run into him at the library.

He nodded at her once. “Maggie,” he answered, like he’d asked her to meet him at the library.

The water wanted to force Maggie back the way she’d worked so hard to come, so she pushed over to the pile of debris and let the water pin her there. She grabbed on to the pallet Boudreaux was leaning on, and looked at him.

Her face was only about ten inches from his, and she thought about the only other time she’d been that close to him physically, the night early on in their odd relationship when she had danced with him at the Cajun Festival. He’d looked great then; he didn’t look so hot now.

“What are you doing out here?” he asked her weakly.

“I was checking out your truck,” she said, trying to smile but primarily failing.

He blinked at her a few times. “What did you think?”

“It’s a little rough,” she answered.

He tried to smile too, and he too pretty much failed at it. Then he looked at her for a moment. “Where are your children?”

“In the house,” she said. “I didn’t quite make it.”

“How far are we from the house?”

Maggie blew out a breath and looked off in the general direction she’d been heading. “Not that far, if we were out for a walk. Maybe three or four hundred yards past that clump of old cypress over there. My property line is just past them.”

He looked where she was pointing, at a stand of trees and stumps about fifty yards away, then looked back at her. “It’s amazing how weighty water is when it’s moving against you, isn’t it?”

She looked down at the water in front of him, saw tendrils of red slipping away from his midsection beneath the surface. When she looked up again, he was watching her.

“Please excuse me for saying it, but you don’t look much better,” he said.

She nodded and looked back down at his midsection.

“Did he hit you?”

Maggie thought it was an odd question, given that Boudreaux had burst in while Alessi was strangling her. ”No, I fell on the stairs.”

“Who was he?”

Maggie looked back up at him. “Richard Alessi’s father.”

Boudreaux nodded and his eyes drifted closed.

“Why did you come here, Mr. Boudreaux?”

He opened his eyes again and stared at her for a moment. “Your father was worried about you.”

“But why would he call you?”

He seemed to consider his words before he answered. “Everybody knows I never evacuate.”

Maggie was about to tell him that she didn’t think he’d actually answered her question, but she felt a sudden lurching in her stomach, and she turned her back to him. She leaned over, but nothing came up. There was just an overwhelming nausea that rippled outward from her stomach to her follicles, and the fine hairs on her arms stood up in protest.

She closed her eyes and waited a moment until it subsided a bit, then she turned and laid her face against the rough wood of the pallet. When she opened her eyes, Boudreaux’s were right there, staring back at her. Those impossibly blue eyes.

“What was the name of that song we danced to at the festival?” she asked him. “The one you said was your favorite?”

He frowned at her for a second, seeming surprised by the question. “
La Chanson de Mardi Gras
,” he said. “The dance of Mardi Gras.”

“It sticks with you.”

“Yes.”

Maggie felt her eyes drifting closed. “My mother wasn’t too happy about me dancing with you that night,” she said softly, and one corner of her mouth turned up in a smile.

“I can imagine,” she heard him say after a moment.