Acts of Nature

TWENTY

With stale air tumbling down on me, I pushed the hatch door up and heard it clank on its hinges like a submarine portal. I aimed the flashlight up into blackness and could only see the white circle of my beam on a plain ceiling. I had to reach up and put the light over the edge and then do a pull-up on the hatchway until my face cleared the opening. The scene made me think of that famous World War II and Korean War cartoon with the eyes and big floppy nose just visible above a bullet-pocked wall. “Kilroy was here.”
From this vantage point my flashlight was now drawing a circle around some kind of metal cabinet or panel with knobs showing in shadowed relief. I hoisted myself the rest of the way up, swung my hips onto the ledge, and sat there with my legs hanging through the porthole, pant legs and shoes dripping a patter of droplets into the glades below. I moved the light beam in a slow sweep, illuminating unblinking eyes of yellow and blue and red all around me. The single room was an electronic bat cave. Monitor lights, all dead from the lack of electricity, were in rows on the fronts of panels that had to house computers, sensors, calibrators of a kind I would not be familiar with. I thought of Billy, the lawyer and brains of our partnership, who would be able to make at least a knowledgeable guess at what I’d found. I could hear him saying: “My, my, Max. What do we have here out in the middle of godforsaken swampland and what the hell is it out here for?”
I had the same question, but more immediate problems. First I climbed up out of the hole and started working the walls. The stacks of electronics seemed to bunch on the western side, rising to just above eye level and shining in a metallic sheen like brushed steel. On the northern wall stood a low desk and countertop, two roll-away chairs, and room for spreading out paperwork or diagrams or something. In one corner was some kind of a printer but it was loaded with graph paper and had one of those wire styluses you’d see on old lie detectors. I was thinking seismic sensors, the kind that measure Richter scales. But earthquakes don’t happen in Florida. I was thinking measurements in the earth under the Glades, but to what purpose? I was thinking too damn much. The eastern wall was empty but for the door that led to the rest of the cabin and a punch-code lock that matched the one on the other side.
On the south wall was what I took to be the generator, housed in a floor-to-ceiling booth with air vents at top and bottom and a power lever that was pulled down in the OFF position. There was a keyed handle to the cabinet door that gave access to the inside. When I inspected the sides near the floor I could see the cable—the same color as the one feeding the refrigerator in the other room—running from the generator down into a hole in the floorboards. I was thinking of the crowbar, if it might be sufficient to pry the cabinet open, get some electricity flowing, toss a wet towel in the fridge, chill it and then wrap Sherry’s head, bring down the fever, do something to help her.
I swept next along a table on the wall. Three-plug jacks for some kind of electronics and three corresponding connectors for phones or Internet. And near the end, an empty power recharge plug for three handheld mobile phones. On the end of the table was a Bose five-disc CD changer with the speakers built in. A real home-away-from-home for some trio of computer nerd hackers or pirate radio stoners or who the hell knows what, and I realized I was getting increasingly pissed at the uselessness of it all until my light caught the red cross of another first aid kit on the wall and the twin of the other refrigerator in the corner.
First I checked the kit and saw that the plastic tie that acted as a seal was unbroken, which meant it must be full. Then I crouched to the refrigerator door and as I went to pull the handle my hand was stopped by the growing sound of an airboat engine. The noise was coming up through the open hatch, the only way it seemed to be able to penetrate the walls, and I scrambled over to listen and make sure I wasn’t just delirious. No, the thrumming sound revved and then cut back, the throttle of the engine in someone’s hand. Rescue. Civilization had arrived.
I scrambled over to the hole and plunged my legs through, landing waist-deep in the water. I yanked my boots out of the bottom mud and then, forgetting the hatch and leaving it wide open, I bumped my head three times before making it out from under the camp foundation. Out in the open I twisted around in the direction of the motor noise. Sherry, I thought. Got to let her know what’s happening.
Her eyes were at half-mast when I got to her side. I put my palm on her brow, still hot, but hotter than before? I couldn’t guess. She turned her head to me.
“Swimming, Max?”
She still had some strength.
“We’ve got company,” I said. “An airboat just pulled up nearby. We’re on our way out, girl.”
She let out a sigh of relief, or maybe just loosening that built-in determination of hers, that reservoir of strength she was holding in abeyance for what was to come.
“Who, Max?”
“I don’t know yet. I just heard the engine outside. They’ve got to be coming to check on the place.” I put the half-filled bottle of water I’d recovered from the dead refrigerator to her lips. “Here. I’m going to go lead them in.”
“OK”
Maybe she was thinking more clearly than I. Maybe she was just more of a cynic, still being a working cop. Maybe she was just more intuitive. As I got up and started out the door she said: “Max. Be careful.” And I did not give the warning a second thought until I got out on the deck and saw a kid standing on the trunk of a downed tree, staring at me from twenty yards away.