Thicker Than Blood - The Complete Andrew Z. Thomas Trilogy (65 page)

I leaned over and puked.

Then came the sharpest stab of dread I’d ever known.

It whispered,
Welcome to eternity
.

Panic eclipsed the pain, my mind beginning to splinter, when I tripped and fell into a staircase.

My frenzy abating.

Gazing up into darkness.

Still no sign of light.

I crawled up the steps, rotten and doddering beneath me.

My head collided with a wall of wood.

I groped for a doorknob.

The door squeaked open and I tumbled into the foyer of the House of Kite, draped in the sulky gray silence of early morning.

Struggling to my feet, I moved on through the narrow hallway into the kitchen, the dead quietude of the house convincing me they’d fled, taken Violet with them.

I glanced at my forearms in the weak
dawnlight
that spilled through the kitchen window, the undersides blistering and striated with electrical burns. My calves and the crown of my head had been similarly ravaged, all scorched where the electricity had entered and left my body.

There wasn’t a phone in the kitchen and a search of the library and living room turned up nothing.

Through the living room’s gothic windows I saw a gray Impala parked in the front yard.

Limping back into the kitchen, wreathed in a miasma of spoiled flounder, I found the lopsided ceramic bowl on the breakfast table, filled with keys.

I grabbed them all, and disowning the pain, started for the front door, for Violet.

66

I moved like a wavering drunk through the bending beach grass, crumpling finally across the hood of the rusting Impala, winded, stonewalling the pain.
 

The day had dawned cloudy and freezing, pellets of sleet tinkling on the metal, the
sootcolored
sound writhing in chop beyond the house of stone.

I climbed behind the wheel of the car, started shoving keys into the ignition. The fourth one turned and the engine hiccupped and revived to a stammering idle.

Shifting into
drive,
I stepped on the accelerator, the back tires slinging weeds and sand as the car surged between the elegiac live oaks and sped down the dirt road into thicket gloom.

Curtains of dying Spanish moss swept across the windshield, the Impala bumping along through puddles, over washboards that threatened to rattle the car apart.

When I reached the pavement of Kill Devil Road, I followed it east toward the ocean, past slumbering beach houses nestled among live oaks and yaupon.

I stopped at the intersection of Old Beach Road and Highway 12.

My insides quivered with nausea.

Night thawing in the eastern sky.

I knew the Kites were leaving Ocracoke by ferry.

That left me two choices.

They could either take the one departing from Silver Lake Harbor, or the ferry that embarked from the north end of the island. The ferries that left Silver Lake for Swan Quarter and Cedar Island ran less frequently and required reservations to insure passage. The ferry from Ocracoke to Hatteras was free and ran on the hour, beginning at 5:00
a.m.
    

The dashboard clock showed 4:49.

I scoped Highway 12, vacant at this hour, lights from the Pony Island Motel twinkling nearby.

Hatteras.

I punched the gas, accelerating through the northern outskirts of Ocracoke Village, past Jason’s Restaurant, the post office, Café Atlantic, and Howard’s Pub.

It was twelve lonely miles to the north end of Ocracoke and the ferry to Hatteras. I had eleven minutes to get there, in a shitty car, on the verge of losing consciousness.

The speedometer passed eighty, the engine screaming as the Ocracoke Light waned in the rearview mirror.

Gray
dawnsky
, dunes, and marsh blurring by.

The wild dog sea rabid and foaming.
 

Sleet ticking dryly on the windshield.
 

Pavement streamed under the car, the road reaching north into the
dullblue
nothingness of daybreak.

4:56.

I pushed the engine past eighty-five, the stench of hot metal seeping through the floorboards.

4:57.

For the first time I noticed my clothes—the fleece pants melted, my undershirt pocked with quarter-size, black-rimmed holes where the electricity had eaten the polyester.

4:58.

The world dimmed.

My head went light.

I slumped into the steering wheel, swerved into the other lane, tires dipping over the shoulder.

My vision sharpened.

I swung back into the road.

It ended.

Taillights ahead.

I stomped the brake, tires screeching.

In the immediate distance five cars waited in the boarding lane at one of the docks. As I steered the Impala to the back of the line, a crewman started waving vehicles onto a ferry vessel called the
Kinnakeet
.

First to board was a dilapidated old pickup truck, its puttering engine expelling gouts of smoke into the
stonegray
dawn.

67

THE
Kinnakeet
is a long barge, broad enough for four cars to park abreast. From the
centerdeck
rises a narrow three-story galley—restrooms on the first level, an observation lounge on the second, and crowned by a small pilothouse. North Carolina and United States flags hang regal from the mast.

The six vehicles on the 5:00
a.m.
ferry were directed into two
singlefile
lines—three cars starboard, three portside.

I was parked in the back of my line, the Kites in the front of theirs, separated by the galley so that we couldn’t see each other.

As I turned back the ignition, the ferry’s engines went to work and the
Kinnakeet
wended slowly between the pylon bundles and away from the Ocracoke docks.

We chugged out into open water. The wind picked up, gusting now, shaking the car, sleet bouncing off the concrete deck, seagulls swarming the vacant stern, crying for a breakfast they would not receive at this hour.

The tip of Ocracoke dwindled into a smudge on the horizon, and suddenly there was nothing but mile upon mile of
mercurycolored
swells, the eastern sky flushing now with a tincture of purple.

Several passengers abandoned their cars and ascended the steps to the lounge—departing vacationers, workers making the long watery commute from Ocracoke to Hatteras. The gentleman in the Chevy Blazer directly in front of me crawled into the back seat and laid down.

I sat listening to the sleet.

My burns killing me.

There was no movement on my side of the deck.

I opened the door, stepped out into the cold, motes of ice needling my face.

I walked back to the
sternside
of the galley, crouched by the steps that rose to the lounge and pilothouse. Portside, three cars were parked along the railing—a Honda, a Cadillac, and an old Dodge pickup truck the color of a zinc penny save for its rusting blue doors.

The Kites had left the truck.

I peered around the steps.

They stood at the bow, their backs to me, gazing north across Hatteras Inlet. Rufus, his white hair twisting like albino snakes in the wind, was pointing west at an inconsequential
landcrumb
, dry and visible only for moments at the nadir of
lowtide
.

The Kites and I were the sole passengers on deck.

I made my furtive way to the navy Honda at the rear of the Kites’ three-car line and ducked under the backend. Through the side mirror I glimpsed the reflection of its driver, sleeping, his head resting against the window. I crawled between the Honda and the railing amid a brief spate of sleet, finally reaching the next car in line, a Cadillac, its passengers having retired to the lounge.

I leaned against the back bumper to regain my breath. Glancing under the sedan, I saw the three pairs of legs still standing by the canvas-lattice gate at the bow.

I crept on.

My scorched clothing did little to shield me from the piercing cold, and I was shivering violently by the time I arrived at the back of the Kites’ truck.

The tailgate was closed, the
truckbed
covered by a bright blue tarp.

The seagulls had discovered the Kites and besieged the bow of the ferry, their lamentations cut and diminished by the gale. I crawled to the driver side door, peered through the glass. The cab was empty. Violet had to be in the
truckbed
.

I noticed a pistol and a
pumpaction
shotgun in the floorboard, tried the door but it was locked.

I sensed movement, looked up.

Rufus walked quickly toward me, just three steps from the passenger door.

I hit the ground, rolled under the truck as he pulled it open.

Staring at the corroded innards of its underbelly, warm motor oil dripping on my throat, I heard Rufus shout, "You want the whole loaf, Beautiful?"

Then the door slammed and I watched his legs propel him back to the bow, a bag of squashed bread dangling at his side.

Get Violet to the Impala before you do anything.

As the gulls regressed into a ravenous frenzy I wriggled out from under the truck. Their squawks and the engines and the moan of the wind masked the grating squeak as I lifted the handle and lowered the tailgate.

Still fettered with duct tape, Violet lay unconscious on the rusty
truckbed
in a smattering of damp
pineneedles
and splinters of bark—remnants from a load of firewood.

While the Kites fed the seagulls—three
breadbearing
hands thrust into the sky—I climbed into the
truckbed
, took Violet by the ankles, and pulled her onto the tailgate. Breathless, on the verge of blacking out, I lifted her from the bed and set her gently on the concrete deck beside the railing. She stirred but did not wake. I closed the tailgate and proceeded to drag Violet by the shoulders toward the end of the line.

Exhaustion stopped me beneath the driver side window of the navy Honda. Fighting pain, I stared at the dozing driver, his face still pressed against the window, drool sliding down the glass. I willed his eyes to stay shut.

At the Honda’s back bumper I glanced up to the bow, saw the Kites’ attention still engaged with the feasting birds.

I slung Violet over my shoulder, struggled to my feet, praying no one in the observation lounge would see us.

A dozen tenuous steps and we’d reached the Impala.

I stowed Violet in the back seat and climbed behind the steering wheel.

Sleet pouring faster than it could melt, ticking madly on the roof.

It stopped.

In the east, bits of early morning indigo showed through, the clouds cracking like ancient paint.

As the sky aged through warming shades of purple into oxblood, a wire of land materialized to the south and east.

Now emerging on the horizon—the silhouette of the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, at two hundred and eight feet, the tallest in America, its beam still sweeping over Diamond Shoals, graveyard of the Atlantic.

I ached to drive off this ferry with Violet, get her safe, get myself something for this terrible fucking pain.

Drawing the keys from the ignition, I climbed into the backseat and sawed the longest key through the duct tape binding the young woman’s wrists. Then I ripped away the strip across her mouth.