Repairman Jack [07]-Gateways (51 page)

Tom was winded, with a dull ache squeezing his chest by the time they reached the bank. He hunched over, hands on knees, panting while Jack inspected the clan’s boats. He pointed to a water-filled flat-bottom dinghy at the edge of the lagoon with
Chicken-ship
across its stern.

“This one’s got a bigger motor than the canoe. We’ll make better time. Help me tip it up to get rid of this water.” He stared at him. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” Tom said. “Just not conditioned for this.”

Tipping a boat was the last thing Tom felt like doing right now, but he didn’t think Jack could handle it alone. Jack pulled off his poncho and positioned himself at the aft end of the starboard side. As Tom moved to join him, something splashed near Jack’s foot. Tom saw him jump and scramble away from the water.

Tom too backed away when he saw what was crawling up the bank. He’d heard mention of a two-headed snapping turtle, and hadn’t quite believed it, but here it was—and much larger than he would have imagined. The shell had to be at least four feet long. It’s gaping hooked jaws closed with loud clacks and they snapped at Jack.

Jack yanked a grenade from his belt, pulled the pin, and popped the clip.

“This is for Carl,” he said, and lobbed it toward the creature.

Tom stood paralyzed for a moment. Carl…dear God, he’d all but forgotten about poor Carl…

He saw the right head snatch the grenade on the fly and swallow it, then Jack was rushing him, pushing him to the ground.

“Down!”

Tom hit the mud and covered his head with his hands. The explosion was muffled but he could still feel the impact through the ground. And then bloody turtle meat and bits of shell began to rain around them.

When it stopped, Jack helped him to his feet, then stepped back to the boat. The remains of the snapper were sinking into the water, trailing a red cloud. Jack froze, then hurried to the stern.

“Christ! Can’t we get a break here?”

“What’s wrong?”

“The explosion sheared off the propeller!” He kicked the side of the boat. “Damn! Okay. Looks like it’s the canoe.”

They hurried along the bank to where they’d left it. Jack slipped into the rear and started yanking on the little motor’s pull cord. After a couple of dozen quick pulls, he spewed a string of curses and gave up. The motor hadn’t even coughed.

“Won’t start. Who knows what was blown or washed into it during the storm. We’ll have to power it ourselves.”

“Jack…” Tom hated to admit it, but he was all in. “I don’t know if I can.”

Jack stared at him a moment, then said, “It’s okay, Dad. I’ll handle it. You take the rear, maybe use the outboard as a rudder while I paddle us out of here.”

Feeling unsteady, Tom stepped into the canoe and dropped into the rear seat. His chest felt funny, as if his heart was flailing wildly against his sternum. The chaotic rhythm left him drained. But not too drained to grab the tiller of the motor as Jack began paddling.

The canoe nosed out of the lagoon and soon they were gliding along the swollen channel. They hadn’t gone too far before the light began to die as the clouds closed in again. Then the wind and rain returned with a vengeance.

Tom still wore his poncho but Jack had shed his a while back. His T-shirt was plastered to his skin and Tom watched the play of muscles across his son’s back as he worked the paddle. Not bulky steroidal clumps, but sleek efficient bands, close to the skin. He hadn’t noticed Jack’s muscles till now. Where had they come from? He’d been such a skinny kid, even in college. Now…well, he reminded Tom of a few guys he’d known in the service, lean, quiet types who didn’t look like much until someone tried to push them around. He’d seen a guy built like Jack take down someone twice his size.

He’d been angry with Jack all these years for disappearing, and never more angry than when he didn’t show up for Kate’s funeral. But all that seemed ancient history now. Despite Jack’s secretiveness, his reclusiveness, his quirky behavior, Tom realized he loved, even admired the strange, enigmatic man his son had grown into. He sensed a strength, a resolve, a simple decency about him. He’d worried for so long that he must have made terrible mistakes raising Jack—why else would he turn his back on his family the way he had?—but now he sensed that maybe he’d done all right. Not that anyone should take full credit or full blame for how another person turns out; everyone makes their own choices. But as a parent he had to think he’d had
some
input.

More than anything he wanted Jack to survive this storm. He didn’t care about himself so much, though of course he wasn’t looking to die, but he sensed somehow that it was important for Jack to live—not simply important to his father, but for other, larger reasons. He couldn’t pinpoint what those were; they hovered just out of reach, but they were there. Somewhere along the way, Jack was going to
matter
.

Tom’s heart had resumed a more sedate rhythm but it jumped again as a lightning bolt speared the saw grass ahead of them. He looked around in the near-night darkness. They were out in the open, begging to be struck by lightning; but staying among the trees of the hummock, especially with this wind and tornadoes, seemed even riskier.

They rounded a bend in the channel and the canoe kicked ahead as the wind roared from behind. Tom spread his flapping poncho to give the wind something more to blow against. It worked. The canoe picked up speed.

He was feeling pretty proud of himself until another bolt of lightning lit up a funnel cloud reaching for the ground a few hundred yards to his left. It hadn’t touched down, which meant it wasn’t—

Another flash showed it on the ground, kicking up mud and grass and water. It was now officially a tornado.

He leaned forward and tapped Jack on the shoulder. “Look left!”

Jack did so, and of course the lightning chose just that moment to hold off; but then a double flash lit up the funnel, whiter than before, and closer. It was coming this way.

“Fuck!” Jack shouted and started paddling even harder.

Fuck…Tom had rarely if ever used the word since leaving the Marines. He didn’t believe it belonged within the walls of a family home, and certainly not in mixed company. But looking at that swirling, swaying mass of wind and debris heading their way…fuck.

Yes, fuck indeed.

During storms on trips to the Keys, he’d witness an occasional waterspout—long, pale, wispy, short-lived things more beautiful than threatening. Even though there was plenty of water about, this thing to the left wasn’t a waterspout, nor was it one of those quarter-mile-wide monsters the Weather Channel liked to show. Its base seemed to be only fifty feet or so across—

Only?
Tom thought. What am I thinking? That thing is plenty big enough to kill us both.

He tried to gauge its intensity. He knew about the Fujita scale—he’d learned a few things during all those hours in front of the Weather Channel—and hoped this one didn’t clock in at more than an F2. They wouldn’t survive a direct hit by an F2, but they might handle a close encounter. If they wound up near anything higher up the scale, that would be it.

No matter what its scale, Tom prayed it would head in the other direction.

He pulled a paddle from the sloshing bottom of the canoe and did what he could to speed the boat along. He kept glancing to his left. He could hear a growing roar—that was the damn tornado getting closer, running on an erratic diagonal that was sure to intersect their course. At least that was how it looked. The way it was weaving back and forth made avoidance a crap shoot.

The big question: Stay in the boat or get out? In the boat seemed worse than being in a trailer. They were too exposed; if that funnel came even close, flying debris could cut them to shreds. But to get out…

Jack was looking around too.

“Let’s dump the boat!” he shouted over the growing roar.

“And go where?”

He pointed to the right. “I saw something over there.”

Tom squinted through the rain and darkness. A flash revealed the dark splotch of a willow thicket sitting like an island in the saw grass sea. The willows tended to be small in these thickets, little more than a dozen feet tall. They’d provide some shelter, something to hold on to without worrying it would crush them if it toppled over.

A glance in the opposite direction showed the tornado even closer.

“Let’s do it!” Tom shouted.

“What about gators?”

“If they’re smart they’re on the bottom of the deepest channel they can find.”

He didn’t mention snakes. He had no idea what snakes did in weather like this. He hoped they didn’t head for higher ground…like hummocks and thickets…

Jack jumped out of the canoe, Tom followed. The water was thigh high in the channel. Tom slipped only once climbing the slope to the saw grass where the water was only ankle deep. Jack pulled the canoe up behind him and left it on its side in the grass.

Lightning lit their way as they sloshed toward the thicket, Jack in the lead, while the roar of the twister grew behind them…no, not behind them…to the left…

A flash revealed the swaying, writhing funnel less than a hundred yards away, flanking them. Tom gasped for breath as his heart writhed like the twister. How had it caught up so fast? Another flash showed it veering this way. Almost seemed as if it was chasing them, homing in on them. But that was ridiculous.

Then again, after all he’d seen today…

“Crawl in here!” Jack shouted as they reached the thicket. His voice was barely audible over the roar of the onrushing funnel. Tom saw that he was holding aside a patch of underbrush. “Find a trunk and hang on!”

Tom dropped to his hands and knees as he ducked into the leafy mesh, feeling ahead of him in the dark until he found a sturdy-feeling trunk maybe six inches across.

“You take this one!” he shouted to Jack who was close behind. “I’ll take the next.”

He heard a garbled protest from Jack but kept moving. Half a dozen feet farther on he found another, more slender trunk, maybe half the size of the first. He dropped prone and wrapped his arms around it. His lungs struggled for air. God, it was good to lie still. He felt his heart ramming at his chest wall as he lay in the mud.

“You okay, Jack?” he shouted. He could barely hear himself above the tornado’s roar. “Jack?”

That roar…it had to be at least an F2…any higher, they were goners.

Frantic, he looked around for Jack and saw nothing but darkness. And then the tree began to shake and the ground to tremble; he ducked his head against the wind and the saw grass blades whistling through the underbrush like knives.

Thank God they weren’t trying to weather this back at the lagoon. The flying debris from the boats and the huts would be lethal. Here it was only grass and mud and water. Not that any of that would matter if the funnel passed directly over them.

The wind scythed at him from all angles as he clung to the trunk. He could hear the twister grinding through the saw grass on the far edge of the thicket, roaring like a freight train—he’d always heard tornado survivors describe the sound that way, and now he knew it was true…like a train…in a tunnel…

Tom felt the underbrush around him being twisted and yanked from the mud. And then his tree started to tilt, first to the left, then the right, then—

Dear God, it was coming out of the ground, ripping free of the mud, rising into the air!

Tom had to let go or rise with it. As he released his grip the willow ripped free with an agonized
crunch
and sailed off. He tried to cling to the rootlets left in the hole but the deluge of water made them slick and they slipped through his fingers. Then he felt his legs lift as he was pulled backward. He clutched for grass or weeds or ferns—anything!—but they came free in his grasp. His body angled off the ground and he clawed at mud that had no more consistency than beef stew. He was losing his last contact with the ground when he felt a hand grab his right ankle and yank him down.

Jack!

Another set of fingers wound around his left ankle and started hauling him backward. He heard Jack’s enraged voice shouting above the storm.

“You got away with this once, but not again. No fucking way!”

Who was he talking to? The twister? But he’d said “again.” Tom doubted Jack had ever even seen a twister, let alone dealt with one. Who, then?

He’d worry about that later. Right now he wanted to know how Jack was hanging on. If both hands were holding Tom, who was holding Jack?

He felt one of Jack’s hands grab his belt and haul him farther back. Tom craned his neck to look over his shoulder and saw that Jack had locked his legs around a willow trunk. He kept dragging Tom back until he could wrap his arms around the larger tree.

And with that…the roaring began to fade. After brushing the thicket, the twister was moving on, probably carving a new channel through the saw grass as it traveled.

Jack rolled away from the tree and lay on his back.

“Thought I was going to lose you there, Dad.”

As his heart regained a normal rhythm, Tom watched Jack lie there with closed eyes as rain pounded his face.