Island Fire by Toby Neal

Author:Toby Neal [Neal, Toby]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Toby Neal
Published: 2014-12-10T06:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fifteen

Bea woke up before dawn in the girls’ room. Her sleeping bag on a futon on the floor had been comfortable, and she’d slept with the total blackness of the exhausted. Beside her was a bunk bed containing seventeen-year-old Jasmine, and Jenna, aged eleven, Jeremy’s twin. Sam slept in the boys’ room on the bottom of two bunks housing Jaden, Jeremy, and Joseph, and she knew Nick was in the living room.

Bea looked up at the old-fashioned lath-and-plaster ceiling, which muffled the drum of rain on the tin roof. It would not have been fun to be trapped in the cave, or even down on the beach in that leaky fishing shack, while a summer downpour soaked the thirsty island and snuffed out the last of the fires.

It felt strange to be so surrounded and absorbed by the family. She wasn’t sure how she felt about it. But she was clean, her belly was full, and for the first time in months, she felt safe.

Guilt followed that realization. Her dad was missing, and in spite of the disaster, she felt safer in the Apucans’ house than she had at home. It made her realize that, disaster or not, things had reached a breaking point with Dad.

Jasmine had told her last night that the first thing the Apucans had done when the town’s water system failed after the disaster was build a rooftop catchment system. Bea could hear water rolling off the tin roof into gutters, siphoning through a screen into big plastic barrels around the house.

The rain couldn’t have come at a better time. She wondered about the plane people—according to Mr. Apucan, they’d ended up at the Lodge with the other hotel guests—but the townspeople were helping them, bringing up all the food and water that they could spare on a rotating basis. Plans were being made to convert the hotel grounds to food gardens, but everything took time, and they were all still hoping for some sort of rescue.

Lanai City wasn’t the lawless free-for-all Bea had feared. Her dad had been wrong about the town, and she wondered what else he’d been wrong about. She closed her eyes, remembering the talk with the police chief at the Apucans’ dining room table after the younger children had gone to bed.

“We don’t have the manpower to get the LCBoyz out of your house.” Chief Roberts’s uniform was filthy, streaked with mud and soot. He’d taken his hat off, and thinning brown hair was plastered to his head. “Some of the Neighborhood Watch people, like Mr. Apucan here, are now deputies. Our priorities are keeping order, keeping the looting down, getting first aid to people hurt in the disaster or the aftermath. Frankly, we’re glad the Boyz are out of town, but I’m sorry that it was your house they moved into.”

Bea had folded her lips tight and shot a glance at Nick, who was frowning. “They shot someone from the plane,” Bea said. “They have guns.”

“All the more reason that we have to leave them alone for the moment.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.