5 Days to Landfall Page 5

  Jack had filed his story for the day, written about Bill Leaderman, the preparations on Topsail Island and how most residents had left. He would update it with whatever news he could include by deadline. There was nothing to do but wait.

  Jack didn’t feel ready for the danger they were about to face. Gert might weaken unexpectedly. She might turn and go out to sea. She might pound Charleston and dispatch only remnant puffs of hurricane-force winds this far north. Or she might strengthen unexpectedly and pummel Topsail Island with a vengeance nobody expected. Jack knew anything was possible. He couldn’t stand to leave the topic untouched. Nobody was that brave.

  “Hope we guessed right,” he said.

  Amanda squinted in the wind, her eyes watering, the rain streaking her hair flat against her head. She pulled her arms in, still faced the wind. “We’re stuck here now. Bridge is closed to all traffic, so it doesn’t much matter.”

  “It’s a fucking island,” Jack said. He was soaked now. Wet clothes clinging. “I hate islands.”

  Amanda turned and faced Jack. Water ran down her face. She might’ve just stepped out of a shower. At the lower edge of his vision he could see the Lycra top was not designed to work alone when wet. He was afraid to look down overtly, feeling privy to a look many men would treasure but few probably got.

  “It’s a barrier island,” Amanda said.

  “Sorry. What’s the difference?”

  “Barrier doesn’t sound so fucking crude.”

  They exchanged a smile. Jack would have to work on his language. Hanging around Juan Rico too much. New York street talk wasn’t going to win over Amanda Cole. Though she made it clear she could dish it out, too.

  “We’ll be OK,” Amanda said. “Just a little wind and a little water.”

  “A little wind,” Jack mumbled under his breath. Then he said, “You know, we’re an egotistical bunch, us humans. We pave a road and build all these houses and we think we own the island.”

  “Humans always take risks for beauty,” she said. “It’s our nature.”

  “Bill Leaderman thinks he owns this island,” Jack said. “Thinks a few hurricane straps and some sticky foam is going to save him.”

  “Save us, you mean.”

  “What?” The wind made it hard to hear from just a few feet away.

  “Save us,” she said louder.

  “Fuc … Damn hurricane straps. What are we doing here, anyway?”

  “You wanted to come here, Jack. You wanted to see nature at its most beautiful. You’re scared. It’s OK. That’s a healthy emotion right now.”

  Jack felt pulled in two directions. He had wanted to come here, but now he wished he wasn’t here. For the first time all day, Amanda’s brown eyes—usually flitting and curious—settled, and they settled on Jack. It calmed him.

  “Damn right I’m scared,” he admitted. “Barrier fucking island. Hurricane straps. What if the sea just decides to swallow us tonight? What good are those straps then?”

  “The sea owns this island,” Amanda said calmly. “She can claim it whenever she wants. Doesn’t think about you or me. Never has cared that humans dared to live on her island. She goes where she wants to, when she needs to. That’s part of the beauty. But this isn’t the storm that’s going to take the island.”

  “But you admit that it’s a helluva risk,” Jack said. He let his eyes drift down. The Lycra top was soaked, clung to her breasts and hid little. He looked too long, and she noticed.

  She smiled, no anger in the eyes that still stared into his. She moved a step forward, touched his elbow. Jack remembered 1992, wished she would curl her fingers into his again. She lowered her voice: “Humans always take risks for beauty.”

  Her smile caused her to squint, narrow lines racing back from the corners of her eyes. It was a smile he recognized from long ago. For a moment, Jack forgot about the storm. She moved her hand slowly from his elbow, down his arm to his hand, squeezed lightly and let go. She nodded her head toward Bill Leaderman’s house, ran off like a little girl heading to a picnic. Amanda Cole had other things on her mind.

  Jack turned to watch the surfer, trying to draw some courage from him. He scanned the waves and saw nothing but dark water and brown and white froth, wondered if the sea had swallowed the surfer. Just as he was about to turn away, he saw him, pushing forward on his board atop a towering wave, seeming—from this distance—to have no fear. Jack mucked through the sand toward the house. Amanda still ran, fighting the wind and proving she was in as good a shape as she looked.

  ***

  In the waning hours of daylight, the sea became a raging animal, throwing wave upon growing wave against the shore and rising almost visibly by the moment, as if pushed up from underneath. Amanda, Jack and Juan Rico sat with Bill Leaderman in his living room flipping back and forth between CNN and the Weather Channel. Both gave near-continuous coverage of the storm and had just reported the latest information from the Hurricane Center. The dog had grown progressively more nervous and was barking at the gusts of wind that shook the house. The wind chimes clanged together rapidly, making an insanely frantic ting-ting-ting.

  “Forgot to take them down,” Leaderman said.

  The center of the storm was a hundred miles offshore, but Amanda didn’t need the CNN reporter to tell her Gert was heading this way. She needed only peer through the impact-resistant window at the darkening sky and the violent sea to know that hurricane-force winds had arrived. The storm had turned north, veering away from Charleston and bearing down on Topsail Island. Just as Amanda had expected. But what she hadn’t expected was for Gert to gain strength and pick up speed.

  Amanda fired up her laptop, downloaded the latest readings.

  “Central pressure at 948,” she said. “Eye is still shrinking—she’s organizing herself even more, like an army preparing for an offensive. Sustained winds of 115, same as Fran at landfall.”

  Amanda typed a command to access the current GFDL forecast, the Hurricane Center’s primary forecasting tool. The message that appeared on her screen stunned her.

  Document contains no data.

  “Holy—”

  “What?” Jack asked.

  Amanda ignored him. Something was wrong. She went back to the data page, then tried again to access the forecast and got the same message. Never in her ten years as a hurricane specialist had she seen that message. It was not a message served up by her computer. It would have to have been delivered by the main computer where the GFDL program ran, and it was delivered because the computer could not find the crunched data it was looking for to return a graphic representation of the current forecast. It meant the GFDL program was down. She didn’t want to think of the consequences, nor did she want to mention the problem to a reporter.

  She returned to the data page and continued discussing the storm. “Gert’s moving north-northwest at twenty. That’s fast for this latitude. We’re kinda screwed, guys.”

  “Same strength as Fran,” Leaderman said. “Nothing this house can’t handle.”

  “Fran’s forward speed was sixteen miles an hour,” Amanda said. “Gert’s blazing along at twenty. That makes the winds on the right side another four miles an hour stronger. And it’s obvious the models missed this strengthening.” She looked at Jack. “All the models. Thing is, it’s still over warm water, could get even stronger.”

  Amanda looked back at her computer screen. One more time she tried to pull up the GFDL forecast. This time her request returned the document, and the green line was pointing right at them.

  What the hell was that blip? Amanda couldn’t answer that question from where she sat. She’d ask Frank Delaney about it in the morning. For now, the GFDL was running and the Hurricane Center would know where the storm was going. She let out a small sigh of tension and sat back in her chair.

  The dog was restless, yipping at intervals. Rico sat quiet in a chair, fiddling with his camera. Amanda watched Jack pace the room and run the fingers of one hand through his hair. She loved
the hair. She loved a lot about Jack Corbin. She’d caught herself staring at him several times already. She loved that he was a tough reporter, passionate about hurricanes and fiery in his desire to tell a story, but he still maintained an awkward politeness, a respect for others. A respect for Amanda and her abilities as a scientist. Maybe that was part of the attraction. And, unlike a lot of men, Jack didn’t try to hide his fear. She liked that, too. Amanda imagined running her own fingers through his hair. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath.

  The sounds outside snapped her mind back to the problem at hand. She looked across the living room and out the window, her arms folded as though she were cold. “It’s not the wind I’m worried about. It’s that ocean right there.” She pointed with her head. “If Gert gets any stronger and we get hit by the right-side eyewall, the surge is going to be like nothing you’ve ever seen. Like nothing you want to see.”

  The four of them wandered over to the large window facing east to take a last look at the waves before darkness enveloped them. A steady rain pounded the glass at an angle. The sun would be just setting, but Amanda could see her reflection in the window, undulating with the wind and looking like a funhouse mirror. She refocused her eyes on the tall waves, which were rushed and unfocused—like Sarah when she’s full of energy—wasting no time or power on grace, crashing straight down with a force that drove them into the sand, carving away at the beach and pulling it out to sea. They were ugly waves.

  “Not exactly like Hawaii Five-0, is it?” Rico said.

  A strong gust buffeted the house. Amanda’s ears popped. The dog barked. The sky lit up as though with a thousand stadium lights and the outlines of the clouds were illuminated and a wave appeared to hang frozen at its apex. The light was gone, replaced by a dull gray. The wave thundered into the sand.

  “Let’s hope she doesn’t want the whole island tonight,” Amanda said.

  She glanced at Jack. She was angry with herself for getting him into this mess. She was feeling like a love-struck teenager again and she wanted to tell him so right now. He was looking at her, too. Time seemed to hang in the air like the wave that had been frozen by the flash of lightning.

  Jack spoke first: “You’re scared, too.”

  “Damn right I’m scared,” Amanda said.

  “It’s OK,” Jack said. “That’s a healthy emotion right now.”

  ***

  At a quarter past ten the first wave crawled up and tickled the pilings under Bill Leaderman’s house. Amanda knew what it was because the vibration was different, more subtle and steady than that produced by the wind. They were sitting at a table in a corner of living room, near the kitchen. Rico and Leaderman were playing a game of gin rummy. Jack had just filed a few descriptive paragraphs to add to his story. It was past deadline now, he’d said, except for the metro editions, and there wasn’t much left for him to do.

  “Fuckin’ things always have to hit at night,” Rico said. He’d finally given up taking pictures. His Nikon, which had hung around his neck since early morning, was on the counter between the kitchen and living room.

  “When’s high tide?” Amanda asked.

  “Pretty soon…” Leaderman said.

  “I know. But exactly when?”

  Leaderman got a tide book from a drawer in the kitchen and studied it. “11:25,” he said.

  Amanda shook her head. “The worst of Gert gets here between eleven and midnight. Jeez.”

  Another wave hit the pilings, this time with more of a crash. The house shook. “This is how it felt during Fran,” Leaderman said. “The house shakes because the pilings are so tall. They actually absorb the waves’ energy.”

  “Oh, that makes me feel better,” Rico said.

  Amanda and Jack said nothing. Even Leaderman was looking less sure. They sat in near-silence for twenty minutes as the waves rushed under the house with increasing frequency and pockets of lightning came and went in violent spurts.

  Another thunderstorm was upon them, appearing suddenly out of the darkness. The flashes were close and frequent, the squall coming and ending quickly, followed moments later by another charged cell carried landward on the flailing octopus arms of the rotating storm.

  She walked cautiously to the window, wanting to take advantage of the light to gauge the height of the sea, just beyond Bill Leaderman’s deck. A white bolt zagged into the waves. The clap of thunder was instant and piercing, base drums and cymbals and a thousand creepy, out-of-harmony violins. Amanda jumped reflexively from the window. But in the instant of that flash she saw it, just offshore, heading dead toward them. The long thin straw that danced from the mouth of the clouds was unmistakable.

  “Jesus fuck,” said Rico. “Tornado?”

  “Water spout,” Amanda said.

  “What’s the difference?” Jack asked.

  “Not much if it hits us,” She said. “Except that instead of pelting us with bricks and other debris like a tornado, we’ll probably be slapped with fish. Either way the wind can rip the roof off a place.”

  The four of them stood and stared, like deer in the headlights as back-to-back lightning acted as floodlights. The funnel danced and pulsed and jerked like a lithe and wriggling woman in a long thin dress, her hidden feet sliding smoothly left and right, the tapered dress sinuously keeping an unexpected beat at the hips, a mushrooming torso with a curvaceous, roiling bust anchoring her to the clouds. She was full of water, Amanda knew, drawing it from the sea and feeding it into her mother storm. It was an intoxicating dance that coaxed the surface of the sea upward.

  The sky glowed a phosphorescent green. The wind picked up in advance of the waterspout, blew from every direction, even from underneath the groaning house. Rainwater ran upward on the window, then made a 90-degree turn and skidded sideways. Amanda shifted her focus from the raindrops back to the waterspout, stood motionless as if under the spell of the dance.

  The dog’s bark had turned to a hoarse yip and was steady and rhythmic. It was Rico that broke the trance with the simple but obvious question. “Whatta we do?”

  Amanda blinked. She’d forgotten to look at the sea itself. The tops of the waves appeared nearly level with the deck. They weren’t supposed to be this high. But that was not the immediate problem.

  “Away from the window.” She said it calmly. There was beauty in the power of the storm, a power that exceeded her ability to comprehend, a power that was pure and raw, that painted the sky green, controlled the movements of the sea, danced with it. The beauty awed her, transported her emotions beyond the mere fight-or-flight sensation and somehow settled raw nerves.

  “There’s no window in the bathroom,” Leaderman said, running the words together in a barely intelligible jumble and seeming to question, for the first time, the sturdiness of his home’s construction.

  The lights went out. “Go,” Amanda shouted, guiding the other three with her hands toward the bathroom.

  “The dog!” Leaderman said. She was running in circles, whining, jumping into the air and making half turns, bark-bark-bark, but she would not follow them into the bathroom.

  “Screw the dog!” Amanda said, shoving the three men through the hallway.

  “Jesus fuck,” Rico said. “My Nikon.” He turned back toward the living room. “No!” shouted Amanda. She lunged for him and her fingers brushed the back of his shirt. Juan Rico was around the corner and into the living room. Amanda, knowing she had only seconds, herded Bill Leaderman and Jack Corbin into the bathroom. “The bathtub!”

  Leaderman pulled a flashlight from his pocket, pointed it at the tub “It’s sturdy, in case the roof falls in,” Amanda cried. “Now!”

  A roar approached. She couldn’t go after Rico now. She closed the bathroom door. Leaderman climbed into the tub. Jack and Amanda curled up on the floor next to it.

  Jack lay behind Amanda, put an arm over her shoulder. She allowed the shiver of delight to run through her for an instant, then lost the sensation to the increasing hiss of the approaching waterspo
ut. She rested her hot cheek on the cool tile, curled one arm over her head, and closed her eyes. She saw the image of the waterspout in her mind, then she saw her fingers reaching for Juan Rico. Damn him. Damn damn damn.

  Then Amanda pulled images of Sarah into her mind and could see nothing else. There was nothing she could do now, and a different kind of shiver, a frigid fear, swept through her. Ear pressed to the floor, Amanda could hear the waves underneath as they slashed against the pilings.

  “Over the sea,” she said out loud. “Over water. Middle of the storm. Water. Tornado is coming. Over the sea. Over the sea. I’m not as scared as I should be.” She smiled in the darkness at the rhyme, and began repeating it, held the image of Sarah’s face. She imagined herself telling Sarah about this night, about the rhyme and how calming it was, how peaceful.

  It might as well have been a tin roof. Amanda heard the ripping shingles, the splintering of wood, the giant whumpf as roof and air and God knows what else was sucked upward. The sounds came together as, with one horrendous motion, the waterspout ignored the StormSeal 2000 and the hurricane straps, and lifted shingles, plywood sheathing, trusses, beams and struts into the clouds.

  Amanda couldn’t hear her own screams. She rolled over on her back and looked in the total darkness toward the door. In an instant it flashed through her mind that if she could not see the destruction … then the portion of the roof directly above her had remained intact. She heard the rain pounding down now on the carpet just outside the bathroom.

  A second later the bathroom door was sucked off its hinges and out into the living room and up into the sky. Amanda was pulled across the tile floor. In the constant flashes she could see into the living room and out into the whirling curtain of water and debris. Her feet hit the doorjambs and the wind pulled her upright. She grabbed the molding across the top of the opening, a stretch, and braced herself with all her strength. Something crashed into her from behind, forcing her chest out into the hallway. She could see Juan Rico’s face in her mind’s eye, superimposed on the wall of the tornado, then it whirled quickly into a disappearing blur. “No!” she screamed at Gert. “Noooooo!”