Second Wind Part 13

Weakness went on, however, encouraging me to lie still.

On the other hand, I was halfway up a low cliff, lying among roots that the constant rain was loosening, and as if on cue, some of the bushes slid out of their anchorage and sent me 11 f l tumbling and slithering with a lot of scratches down and down until I reached the hard surface of the dock itself.

By good luck the dock, though now smashed, had originally been built for the mooring of merchant ships, which meant the surface of the dock itself was above the turgid water. Brown rough waves sped threateningly along beside its length now, but only a few slapped heavily over its surface, as if searching for things to suck back into their grasp. The height and vigor of the waves that had managed my arrival had died down by nearly half. Seas of the present weight couldn't have ripped up something as heavy as the dock.

So I lay a bit longer in the rain and thought of Kris and the eye of Odin, and the whole day seemed unreal.

The whole day... The light was gray... but it wasn't night, and it had been night when I'd been on the edge of drowning.

Yesterday, I thought with incredulity... Kris and I had come here yesterday... and I'd spent all night in the black water, and I'd seen the shape of the cliff I'd crashed onto because the tired old world was spinning slowly towards the return of gray morning.

Turning over again on the shattered dock, I realized that it hadn't been so much damaged on the day before. There hadn't been any damage at all. I simply hadn't the energy to do more than conclude that the destructive winds of Odin had crossed the island since we'd left. Soon, I told myself, soon I would go back up the hill to the little village. Soon I would get on with living. I had actually never before felt so weak.

As if to prod my flagging spirits, the heavy rain abruptly stopped.

To make some sort of start, I fiddled with the clips fastening the life jacket and managed only to tie the tapes into more difficult knots. Undoing them took ages. It was stupid how much my arms ached.

I still had no impression of hours. Day was light, night was dark. When day began fading again I finally put some resolution into things and with more effort than normal struggled to my bare feet and very slowly trudged up from sea level to the village, which sat on the cliff top at a height of roughly two hundred feet. Storm surge waves might not wash away whole communities at such a height, but hurricane winds came with no such inhibitions. The little village of the day gone by, the houses, the church and the mushroom sheds, all had been blown to destruction.

I stood stock still, the life jacket dangling from my hand.

The concrete rectangles where the houses had stood were still in place, the roofs had vanished and the timbers of their walls were heaped and scattered with broken window frames twisted, gla.s.s gone. The water-catching cisterns were full of debris and mud, with no buckets to be seen.

The church had no roof. The spire and two walls had collapsed.

All the mushroom sheds had vanished, though on the ground in outline one could see where they had been.

The only structures still standing were the two ultra-thick walled concrete huts, and even they showed marks of battery from other flying debris.

Without shoes--and with socks sea-lost also--I found the village area made for even more uncomfortable progress than the hill, but I trod my way gingerly to the nearest of the thick-walled huts, the one that had contained the bunk beds, and went inside.

The doorway--with no door--led through the four-foot thick wall into deepening gloom, where my eyes took time to adjust. The entrance, I reckoned at length, had been almost face-on to the wind, in view of the chaotic results. A good quant.i.ty of wood was still inside the hut, even though no longer neatly organized into bunks. Hefty planks seemed to have been hurtled across the interior s.p.a.ce to crash like battering rams into the walls. The force needed for the holes they had dug in the plastered walls gave me the thankful shivers, Kris and I might have thought we would find safe shelter in there if the storm had caught us on land.

Shelter... It occurred to me that the roof hadn't blown off, as it had off everything else, except perhaps off the other hut.

The tangled planks, and the concrete floor, were mostly dry.

Outside it was still not raining, though the light was fading against a heavy sky.

No one would come now before night. No one could have seen little Trox earlier in blinding rain. Accept it, I thought with tiredness, in twelve hours, but not before, someone would come.

Believe it.

Someone will come.

In the remains of light I laid several planks side by side on the dank inhospitable concrete, and with the flotation collar for a pillow I lay down on my back... and couldn't sleep.

Thirst had pa.s.sed, but hunger burrowed like a screw in my stomach. I'd eaten nothing since the barbecue dinner in the ,ej Ford house, and I hadn't wanted breakfast in the run up to the Odin hunt. The uneaten Danish pastries of Owen Roberts airfield tantalized my emptiness until I could almost smell them. In the morning I'd find food and drink, I told myself, but without shoes I wasn't going foraging in the dark.

The island air, at least, was sweetly warm, and if it rained again, I would be dry. Hurricanes, particularly those like Odin, that formed and gained their strength in the Caribbean, not the Atlantic, were notoriously unpredictable in their travel, but they seldom turned right round one hundred and eighty degrees and retraced their former path. If it had happened, the occurrences had been so rare that it wasn't worth worrying about.

I closed my eyes, but after its sluggish day my brain accelerated and relentlessly reviewed, remembered and relived all the steps to my present troubles. There were still whole prairies of unanswered questions defeating the simplest speculations, like why grow mushrooms on a tiny island in the Caribbean Sea? Like why send two meteorologists to race a hurricane to see what state the mushrooms were in? But surely Robin Darcy wouldn't have bought an airplane just for that... and he'd bought it for Nicky, not Odin.

I supposed that someone, somewhere, might make sense of it. Robin had to know... didn't he?

I spent a long time imagining Kris in the orange dinghy, his face looking back at me in horror as the screaming elements seized his future. If he managed to stay in the dinghy he would whirl across the face of the waters faster than racing speedboats.

According to the instructions I'd followed too carelessly about how to open the dinghy (I should have climbed in to start with) there were a rudder and two paddles to steer with, but the calm sea they needed lay long hours ahead.

I switched off at the possibility that the gales had sucked the dinghy airborne. I balked at the probability that the canvas inflated sh.e.l.l had gone somersaulting over and over across the seas until Kris fell out into the water and met no Trox cliffs to scoop him to land.

I shifted restlessly on my hard plank bed, and long before dawn went outside to sit with my back against the hut's exterior wall, my sight filled unexpectedly with stars.

The hurricane had gone over. The night was cloudless and still. Only the waves, heavily hurrying along the ruined mooring stage with a distant slap and hiss, spoke of the terrible force unleashed a day earlier on the little wrecked hamlet.

Hunger set me moving as soon as I could see where I was treading, but I already knew all the cupboards were bare, even if any were still standing. When the people of Trox Island had left they'd packed their lives to go with them. I looked in vain for a container that would hold liquids, and ended by sucking up spoonfuls of rainwater from any sort of hollow I came across.

There was nothing to eat except muddy gra.s.s.

I navigated carefully over to the second thick-walled hut, which had been empty anyway on our first visit, and stood inside looking in puzzlement at the change high winds had wrought.

For a start, the inner surface of two of the walls had been peeled away, leaving bare cinderblocks in view. The two huts, , though appearing the same from outside, were constructed differently within. The hut I'd pa.s.sed the night in had been built of solid concrete with a plaster facing. The second hut's thick walls had been lined with prefabricated panels of plaster like walling, and it was several of these that had been torn off their fastenings and broken in pieces.

Because I was expecting to see nothing but destruction, it took me a while to notice that there were differences in these ripped-off walls, and that, in particular, one panel, dangling half off its fixings, was half-hiding a door of sorts underneath.

I went over for a closer look and found that the inner door, behind the loose bit of walling, was fastened shut by a combination lock and was the front, in fact, of a safe.

If the thoroughness of the rest of the exodus was anything to go by, that safe too would be as bare as Mother Hubbard's.

I tried to pull it open, on the basis that the wind had weakened or destroyed everything it reached, but this one barrier stood obstinately fast and, giving it up, I returned to my hunt for food.

The big blue birds with brown legs looked tantalizing, but without shoes I couldn't catch one, and without fire I'd have to eat one raw, and I wasn't yet desperate enough to try it. I could perhaps catch one of the larger iguanas, which moved more slowly than the little ones, but again the lack of cooking deterred me.

But where were the cows?

Cows gave milk, and milk was food. There had been a large free-roaming herd of cattle on the island two days ago, and surely some of them had had calves, and calves needed milk..

I.

As long as the whole herd hadn't been blasted into the sea, as long as I could get a cow to stand still, as long as I could find any decent container such as an empty Coca-Cola can to drink from, my worst and most immediate predicament would be solved.

Problem, I couldn't see the herd.

Trox was a mile long, with the village at one end and the consolidated gra.s.s airstrip extending from it to the other. I carefully walked to the beginning of the strip, from where we'd raced to get off in the airplane, but search as I could for cows, I saw not so much as a tail swishing.

What I did find, though, to my delight, was my dropped camera. Second thoughts cooled the enthusiasm somewhat as although it was supposed to be waterproof and was still in its protective leather slipcover, it had been lying deep in mud as if I'd also stamped on it when I'd dropped it. I picked it up sadly and held it dangling with its straps entwined in the tapes of the life jacket.

With hunger still a priority I set off along one side of the runway, seeing a rocky fringe of land sloping down between the flat gra.s.s and the tossing sea. There was room for a herd there, but not a cow in sight. Depressed, I left that side of the runway and crossed over it to the other, and on the way thought that although that landing strip had been fabricated of earth and gra.s.s, it had been quite a feat of engineering, as its dimensions were wide and long enough to accommodate full-sized cargo and pa.s.senger aircraft, not just small twin engined toys.